The Baffler Magazine Issue No. 30

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EDIT OR IN CHIEF Thanks to Cassandra de Alba, Daniel

John Summers Moattar, and Carolyn Oliver for their efforts
9 to secure our facts, lest they blow up in our
FOU N DING EDIT OR faces. Permissions-wise, we hereby note that
Thomas Frank Thomas Franks contribution to this issue
SEN IOR EDIT OR
is excerpted from Listen, Liberal; Or, What
Chris Lehmann
Ever Happened to the Party of the People? pub-
9
M A N AG I N G E D I T O R
lishedbyMetropolitan Books, an imprint
Lindsey Gilbert ofHenry Holt and Company, LLC. Copy-
A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R right 2016 by Thomas Frank. All rights
Dave Denison reserved. Thanks to Archipelago Books for
A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R S
Christos Ikonomous People Are Streinz
Emily Carroll and Dulce Mara Loynazs poem from Abso-
Lucie Elven
lute Solitude, and to Faber & Faber for Edwin
P O E T RY E D I T O R
Edwin Frank Muirs poem.

C ON T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R S 9
Barbara Ehrenreich PU BLISHER
Susan Faludi Noah McCormack
David Graeber P U B L I S H I N G C ON S U LTA N T
Evgeny Morozov Hamilton Fish
Rick Perlstein PR E SIDEN T
George Scialabba Valerie Corts
Jacob Silverman W EB DE V EL OPER A N D C ON T E N T M A NAGER
Anna Summers James White
Astra Taylor AU D I E N C E D E V E L O PM E N T A S S O C I AT E
Catherine Tumber Hannah Gais
Eugenia Williamson D E V E L O PM E N T A N D E V E N T S M A N AG E R
9 Eliza Fish
D E S IG N A N D A R T D I R E C T O R F I N A N C E M A N AG E R
Patrick JB Flynn Dolores Rothenberg

P R O D U C T I ON A S S I S TA N T FIXER
Joan Flynn Zachary Davis

9 9
PA S T P U B L I S H E R S
The MIT Press, 20122014

Conor ONeil, 20092011
Greg Lane, 19932007
FOU N DER S
No interns were used in the making of this Baffler. Thomas Frank and Keith White
The Baffler, P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA | 19 West 21st Street, Suite 1001, New York, NY 10010 USA
thebaff ler.com 2 0 1 6 T H E B A F F L E R F O U N DAT IO N , I N C .
2 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

Since this is the first issue
of our new quarterly cycle
and you will be hearing from
us more frequently, we have
dispensed with the conceit
of an introduction to explain
our whereabouts between
issues. Suffice it to say that in
the pages that follow, you will
discover an array of stories,
articles, graphics, and poems
pertaining to the supreme
political values of liberty and
security, while also delineat-
ing certain fearful efforts
to subvert them. Naturally,
this means diagnosing the
overlapping plagues of
scapegoating, xenophobia,
and demagogic posturing ROX A N N A B I K A D O RO FF
that afflict our body politicespecially
in a presidential campaign year. of a collective panic attack, a case of the
But we also spotlight some symptoms sweaty palms, a crack-up of faith in the near
of a derangement brewing in the culture. future, a claustral terror that our bipolar
Read a new analysis of sex hysteria within political systemtrapped amid competing
the 4chan Internet enclave, take in the craze but mutually outmoded visions of sanity in
for cryonics, apprehend the dread logic of the baby-boomer gene poolcannot hope
be-glad-youre-not-there cults, enjoy a story to allay, but can only stoke to greater furies.
about the enemy within families (that would Sober pundits intone, how do we balance
be incest), and look aghast at our report of liberty and security, freedom and safety?
municipal corruption in Californias state We? Balance? The bywords of America in
capital; it will set your hair on fire. 2016 are more like plutocrats and jittery. Not
Over the year we will give you columns since the late 1950s has a sense of impending
that gingerly dismantle consensus think- doom so twisted the nations mood. While
ing about imponderables such as activism, the Dead Kennedys went on to lament, in
technology, and corruption, and light the the first flush of the punk era, that they were
way toward reason. Still, this issue leans too drunk to fuck, we say the country has now
toward the irresistible proposition that the become too scared to think. Enjoy.
country, high and low, writhes in the grip John Summers
the Baffler [no. 30] 1 3

T h e B a f f l e r ( no. 3 0 ) C on t e n t s
F rom t h e A rc h i v e S t or i e s
Clip-On Tie 14 The Locked Room 8
The diary of a New York art museum Ottessa Moshfegh
security guard
David Ber man
People Are Streinz 40
Christos Ikonomou
Fa n ta s y Isl a n ds The Sunstroke 78

Withering on the Vine 16 Ludmilla Petrushevsk aya
A tale of two democracies

Thomas Fr ank
Poe m s
The refugees born
Despair Fatigue 26
How hopelessness grew boring for a land unknown 13
Edwin Muir
David Gr aeber
Frameless Treatment
Pa n ic ! Ro om Guidance Systems 60
Keep Fear Alive 50 Melissa Monroe
The bald-eagle boondoggle Vision 62

of the terror wars Melissa Monroe
K ade Crockford
No Need to Argue
The New Man of 4chan 64 Anymore 83
Angela Nagle Fani Papageorgiou
Everybody Freeze! 84 Memory 113
The extropians want your body
Natalia Ginzburg
Corey Pein
from Absolute Solitude 122
Taking Liberties 102 Dulce Mara Loynaz
Cults and capitalism
Ann Neumann Ulysses XXI 132
Benjamin Fondane
Boys Will Be Men 114
A mber ALee Frost

Pa n ic ! R o o m
R a bbl e Rouse P ho t o G r a ph ic
Against Activism 123 Homeland 6
Astr a Taylor Nina Ber man
Cr ac k p o t s E x h i bi t ions
They Made Him a Moron 134 A: Fr ances Jetter 25
The strange career of Alec Ross
B: Mark Dancey 54
Evgeny Morozov
C: Br ad Holland 77
Info-Sca m D: G reta Pr att 147
The Rest E: Mark Wagner 184
Is Advertising 148
Confessions of a sponsored Ba f f l om at h y 180
content writer
Jacob Silver man
S h a m e of t h e Cit i e s
Sacramento
Shakedown 160
Kevin Johnsons crossover corruption
Cosmo Garvin
A nc e s t or s
The Stranger 176
Georg Simmel
S T UA RT G O L D E N B E RG

Pho t o G ra p h ic
Homeland
3 Photogr aphs by Nina Berman

NINA BERMAN

Story
The Locked Room

6 Ottessa Moshfegh
T akashi dressed in long black rags, ripped fishnet stockings, and big
black boots with long loose laces that splatted at the floor when he
walked. He smelled strongly of old sweat and cigarette smoke, and
his face was scabbed from tearing his pimples open and squeezing the
pus out with dirty chewed-up fingernails. He covered the scabs with
makeup that was too pale for his skin. He used scissors to cut off all
his eyelashes. Sometimes he drew a French mustache on with black
felt pen. He was very intelligent and preoccupied with death and
suffering. He had a way about him I really liked. His hair was long and
bleached and dyed rainbow colors. Occasionally he bit into his lip and
dribbled blood down his chin. Sometimes he vomited in public just to
make a scene. Strangers would rush to his aid, offering handkerchiefs
and bottles of water. People even stopped to take his picture when we
walked down the street. Takashis taste in classical music was just like
mine: Saint-Sans, Debussy, Ravel. He was talented on the violin. He
said his instrument was worth more than his fathers car. He chewed
licorice gum sometimes, his favorite flavor, but his mouth still tasted
like excrement when we kissed each other. Takashi was my first real
boyfriend.
Last spring, we got locked in a practice room above the large con-
cert hall at the music school where we both took lessons on Saturday
afternoons. This happened during a rehearsal of the youth orchestra,
in which Takashi played violin. At first I thought Takashi might
have arranged the entrapment to take advantage of me sexually, but
that was not the case. How it happened was so funny: We went up a
secret spiral staircase behind the concert hall while the orchestra was
tuning. We just wanted to explore a bit, before Takashis rehearsal
started. In the practice room, we closed the door behind us and then
we couldnt open it again.
The locked room contained a couch, a radiator, several chairs
and music stands but no piano. As a pianist, I was never part of any
orchestra. I was mostly studying composition then, and that kept me
from having to perform very often. I was not as outgoing as Takashi.
Everything made me nervous, in fact. It was partly why I liked
Takashi so much. He seemed fearless, like he could do anything he
wanted to do, even if it was disgusting. In the corner of the room was

H A ZE L L E E SA N TI N O
a rack of costumes that I recognized from the student production of

Figaro. The opera had been part of the holiday festival in which my
first composition for violin and harpsichord had debuted. Takashi had
played the violin part very well. The harpsichord part was so difficult,
and I was so nervous, that my piano teacher, Mrs. V, had to fill in for
me at the last moment.
We banged on the locked door and yelled but nobody could hear.
We heard the conductor shouting, and then the orchestra began to
play. I tried picking the lock with one of my barrettes. Takashi had
a small knife he carried around for mutilating himself, and we each
tried using it as a screwdriver to dismantle the lock or take the door
off its hinges, but it was impossible. The other door was a fire door

of reinforced steel bolted shut. Behind that door was another secret
staircase that only maintenance workers used, we learned later. The
room had one window looking down onto an alleyway. Across the
alley was a concrete parking structure. We were on the fifth floor.
We should knot these costumes together, make a rope, tie one
end to the radiator, and throw the other end down to the alley. Then
you can climb down and come back up and let me out, I told Takashi.
He scratched at the veins on his wrist. Lets just stay here for-
ever, he said. Anyway, you should be the one to climb down. Youre
lighter. Youre the girl.
We were quiet for a while after that. Then I took a few costumes
off their hangers and tried them on. I could see my reflection in the
window. I looked like a tiny clown in the big blouse and vest. Takashi
found a short gray wig and tried it on.
You look great in that wig, I told Takashi. He took it off and
held it in his hands, petting it like it was a kitten he loved so much.
I took off my costumes and tied all the garments on the rack
together with double knots. Takashi held up a blue cotton undershirt,
sniffed it, and threw it on the ground. If we have to pee, we can pee
into it, he said. Luckily, I didnt have to pee. We tied the makeshift
rope to the radiator. We opened the window and threw the rope out.
The end of the rope did not reach the ground, but if one of us climbed
down to the end of it, the remaining distance to the sidewalk was only
one or two stories. I didnt think it would be a lethal jump.
A thought came into my mind. It was a question: Do you see
this, God? God seemed like a fly on the wall, like a hidden camera. I
mentioned the thought to Takashi. He told me that he was an Atheist,
but that he believed in Hell. I leaned out through the open window
and looked down. A homeless man was pushing a shopping cart of
garbage up the narrow alleyway.
Hey! I shouted. Takashi grabbed my arm and told me to be
quiet. Were trapped up here! I squealed. When Takashi clamped
his hand over my mouth, it tasted like baby powder from the wig, and
excrement.
I bit down on Takashis finger, not very hard, but hard enough for
him to let me loose. I picked up the blue undershirt for peeing into
and threw it out the window, hoping it would get the homeless mans
attention. It simply drifted off to the side of the alley and disap-
peared behind a dumpster. I spoke to God in my mind. Please, open
the door, I said. I tried both doors again. Of course, they were still
locked. And then I felt very stupid.
I tried to express the idea of mind-over-matter to Takashi. If you

believe something, really and truly, it becomes reality, I said. Dont He told me that
you think?
he was an Atheist,
I believe in death, was Takashis reply. He leaned out and spat
blood down into the alleyway. Some blood and spit bubbled down his but that he
chin. Then he sat down on the couch and petted the wig again.
believed in Hell.
I felt like I had to try to escape from the locked room. I tugged
at the rope. It seemed to be tied securely enough to the radiator. So I 9
wrapped it around my arm and held on and began to step out onto the
window ledge. Takashi sat on the couch and picked at the scabs on his
face and watched me. I told him that I was not afraid of falling. And
for a moment, I wasnt nervous. Not at all.
What happened next is absolutely true. Once I was all the way
out the window, I gripped on the rope, lowered myself a little, and put
the soles of my shoes flat against the side of the building. Then a car
came squealing up the alley. It was copper-colored and very shiny. The
motor was very loud. The car screeched to a halt below me. I froze.
Takashi threw the gray wig past me, out the window. I screamed and
pulled myself back up and crouched on the ledge of the window. I
looked down, though it made me dizzy. It was windy up there in the
sky. A man got out of the car. His movements were violent and angry
as he pointed up at me and yelled, Young lady, you better get back in-
side this instant! Id never seen anyone so angry. Even my mother had
never seemed so angry. Young lady! the man repeated. He swung his
finger up at me, stabbing at the air. In my mind now, I picture him in
a black suit and shiny black shoes, but I couldnt make out his pants
or shoes from so high up in the air. I think he was actually wearing a
white T-shirt and dark sunglasses.
Of course, I did what he told me to do. I grappled with the rope,
hoisted myself over the windowsill, and climbed back inside the
room. I hid by the couch. It was so warm and quiet inside the room. I
could hear my heart pounding. Takashi got up to look out the win-
dow. He said he saw the man shake his head and get back in the car. I
could hear the door slam and the car drive away.
We should put the clothes back on the hangers, Takashi said,
lazily pulling up the rope.
I was pretty shaken up. I wanted to talk about the man with
Takashi, but Takashi wouldnt look at me. I helped pull the rope back
in, and we untied the garments and put them back on the rack. I want-
ed Takashi to tell me that he was happy I was safe inside the room,
and that hed have been sorry if Id died. I wanted to discuss the angry
man. I wanted to say I believed in guardian angels, but I was scared
Takashi would roll his eyes. He blew his nose into a white dress shirt

Story
and pinched a pimple on his neck.

We sat on the floor with our backs against the couch and watched
the sky darken behind the parking structure across the alleyway. The
orchestra rehearsal had ended hours since. I knew my mother would
be angry that I wasnt home in time for dinner. Takashi pulled a cig-
arette from his purse and lit it. We passed it back and forth, blowing
the smoke at the sliver of moon visible from where we sat on the floor
by the window. Finally, Takashi told me his theory about the man in
the car. He was a hallucination. Were in a vortex. Were in a black
hole. Weve always been in it. Nothing weve ever seen has been real.
Only this room is real. He ashed his cigarette onto his tongue. You
shouldnt have thrown that blue shirt out the window, he said. Now
our reality has been punctured. And I have to pee.
You shouldnt have thrown out that gray wig, I said. My heart
raced again when I thought of how that gray wig had flown past me,
a tiny kitten pawing through the air. I dont know what happened
to that gray wig. Maybe the man in the car caught it and brought it
home. I told Takashi I didnt want to be his girlfriend anymore. He
said nothing.
I felt very depressed after that. All of eternity seemed to be laid
out in front of me, and there was nothing but the couch and chairs and
music stands, the wrinkled costumes, the radiator, and Takashi. That
was Hell there, in that locked room. When the cigarette was finished,
Takashi tried to kiss me. I just turned my head away.
Not long after, a janitor came and let us out. I smelled smoke, he
said, eyeing the crust of blood around Takashis chapped lips.
I cried as we walked down the secret staircase and through the
dark, quiet hallways of the music school. Takashi found his violin and
I found my composition notebook in the place wed left them, under a
table in the concert hall where the orchestra had rehearsed.
Outside it was a warm and pleasant evening, like nothing was
wrong. Takashi waved goodbye at the bus stop and I walked to the
tram. At home, I sat in the kitchen and my mother gave me a cold,
boiled potato, black instant coffee, and a small container of diet
yogurt.
You should try harder to please me, she said. For your own
good.
Ill try harder, I told her. I promise.
But I never did try very hard to please my mother. In fact, I never
tried hard to please anybody at all after that day in the locked room.
Now I only try hard to please myself. That is all that matters here.
That is the secret thing I found.t

he refugees born
T
for a land unknown
6 Edwin Muir
The refugees born for a land unknown
We have dismissed their wrongs, now dull and old,
And little judgment days lost in the dark.
I have fled through land and sea, blank land and sea,
Because my house is besieged by murderers
And I was wrecked in the ocean, crushed and swept,
Spilling salt angry tears on the salt waves,
My life waste water drawn down through a hole,
Yet lived. And now with alien eyes I see
The flowering trees on the unreal hills,
And in an English garden all afternoon
I watch the bees among the lavender.
Bees are at home, and think they have their place,
And I outside.
Footsteps on the stairs, two heavy, two light,
The door opens. Since then I remember nothing,
But this room in a place where no doors open.
I think the world died many years ago.

FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Baffler no. 6 (1994)
Clip-On Tie
The diary of a New York art museum security guard
Relentlessly the minutes, his South Bronx Apartment. I like him. He

some of them golden, touched. takes punishment. He reminds me of Jake
John Ashbery LaMotta.
Torres loves to joke around. In the locker
I had a real problem with time during my room after work he tells everyone that Mo-
first few weeks of guarding. I sought a way hammed lived in a tree and ate bananas back
to compress it, to make the six-hour shift go home in Africa. Mohammed laughs and calls
faster. I tried meditation but Ive never been Torres little Spanish faggot. Everyone is so
quite sure if Im doing it right. It always feels happy, so glad to be going home or out into
like Im just being quiet. the city. Torres and I look at each other, smil-
Now I try not to do any waiting while ing, and he says, We are men. We must joke.
on post. I use the time to build the useless
or impossible things that populate the only I was operating the elevator when the repair-
intellectual frontier that interests me any- man came aboard. After a lot of small talk
more. Today I started working on an opera he let me in on an industry secret: the door
about the Ohio state legislature, to be sung in close button is not wired to anything. Its
German. After six hours on post, its starting just a pacifier, he said.
to come together. On a normal day, I think in questions:
Where the guards lean against the walls, Should I quit my job? Why cant I relate
the blue polyester jackets leave stains. Every to people? Where am I going? I can never
few months the curators notice these blurry answer them conclusively and only wear my-
marks, and for a few days we are warned not self out. When Im high in the back of a club
to lean. The older guards get together and listening to Son Seals play, I only think in
moan about their feet. In Philadelphia, one answers: Ill move to El Paso this fall. These
always says, the guards sit in chairs. solos are wandering into every unused space.
Im surprised at how many of the muse- ... I should see about buying a mausoleum.
ums visitors are upset by the distortion of the
human form in modern art. Is it the violence? All the guards are freaks. That is a fact.
Its classical structure that always gives me Wouldnt standing alone in a corner six hours
the creeps. The blank eyes, whether stone or a day over many years change you?
metal, always look murdered.
The Queen of Sweden came into the
Octavio Torres is the oldest guard of all. He museum with her entourage today. Across
is in his seventies and his body is completely the gallery Mr. Demarios elaborate hand ges-
rigid from arthritis. An ex-boxer with a thick tures told me that a knockout was at large.
Puerto Rican accent, he is barely five feet She stood in front of the Jeff Koons sculpture
tall. On his days off he watches Popeye in as the guide intoned, These two vacuum

M A RTI N M AYO
Wouldnt standing alone in this happens. The fact that the asbestos had
been regularly falling next to Erics guard post
a corner six hours a day over
has the administration suspicious. Rumor has
many years change you? it that he brings samples to work in a jar.
9 I spend a lot of my day in front of Rockwell

cleaners, which are hermaphrodites ... Kents The Trapper. The painting always
One of the worst things about guarding engages me because Im torn on whether
is having to stand next to tourists that have it depicts a sunrise or a sunset. They seem
doused themselves in perfume. Shouldnt equally possible, and there are no clues in
they be subject to ticketing by the police? the shape of the snowbanks or in the posi-
How is this different from walking around tion of the sun to let me know. The docent
with a loud radio on your shoulder, or reach- tries to convince me that it doesnt matter,
ing out and touching a strangers face? that there can be two paintings. But that
kind of lazy permissiveness obscures the
The ceilings of the museum are packed with third true painting.
asbestos that occasionally drops to the gallery It would be a tragedy to spend your whole
floor in small clumps. Museum policy states life desperately wanting to be something that
that the entire building must be shut down you already were, all along.
and the workers be sent home with pay when David Berman

Fa n ta s y I sl a n d s
Withering on the Vine

A tale of two democracies
3 Thomas Fr ank
W ere you to draw a Venn diagram of Democrats, meritocrats, and

plutocrats, the space where they intersect would be an island seven
miles off the coast of Massachusetts called Marthas Vineyard.
A little bit smaller in area than Staten Island but many times greater
in stately magnificence, Marthas Vineyard is a resort whose population
swells each summer as the wealthy return to their vacation villas. It is a
place of yachts and celebrities and fussy topiary, of waterfront mansions
and Ivy League professors and closed-off beaches. It is also a place of
moral worthiness, as we understand it circa 2016. The people relaxing
on the Vineyards rarefied sand are not lazy toffs like the billionaires of
old; in fact, according to the Washington Post, they have far higher IQs
than the average beachgoer. It is an island that deserves what it has.
Some of its well-scrubbed little towns are decorated in Puritan severity,
some in fanciful Victorian curlicues, but always and everywhere they
are clad in the unmistakable livery of righteous success.
It is ever so liberal. This is Massachusetts, after all, and the markers
of lifestyle enlightenment are all around you: Foods that are organic.
Clothing that is tasteful. A conspicuous absence of cigarette butts.
Here it is not enough to have a surgically precise garden of roses
and topiary in the three-foot strip between your carefully whitewashed
house and the picket fence out front; the garden must be accessorized
with a sign letting passersby know that this is a chemical-free Vine-
yard lawn, safe for children, pets, and ponds.
It is ever so privileged, ever so private. This is not Newport or
Fifth Avenue, where the rich used to display their good taste to the
world; the Marthas Vineyard mansions that you read about in the
newspapers are for the most part hidden away behind massive hedges
and long, winding driveways. Even the beaches of the rich are kept
separate from the general publicthey are private right down to the
low-tide line and often accessible only through locked gates, a gra-
cious peculiarity of Massachusetts law that is found almost nowhere
else in America.
Over the last few decades, this island has become the standard
vacation destination for high-ranking Democratic officials. Bill Clin-

L E S LI E H E R M A N

Marthas Vineyard is a place ton started the trend in 1993 and then pro-
ceeded to return to Marthas Vineyard every
of yachts and celebrities
year of his presidency but twoafter presi-
and fussy topiary. It is also dential puppet master Dick Morris took a poll
and convinced Bill it would be more in keep-
a place of moral worthiness,
ing with the mood of the country if the First
as we understand it circa 2016. Family visited a National Park instead.
Barack Obama, the next Democrat to
9 occupy the White House, mimicked Clinton
in policy decisions and personnel choices, and
so it made sense to do exactly as his predecessor had done when it came
to selecting vacation destinations. Obama, too, spent all his presiden-
tial holidays on Marthas Vineyard with one exception: the year he ran
for reelection and needed to burnish his populist image. Making the
connection between the two presidents even more cozy are details
such as the following: the Marthas Vineyard estate where Obama
stayed in the summer of 2013 belonged to one David Schulte, a corpo-
rate investment adviser and Clinton intimate who met Bill at Oxford
and Hillary at Yale, where Schulte was editor of the Yale Law Journal.
People on Marthas Vineyard sometimes say that politicians
choose to vacation among them because the residents here are so blas
about celebrity that its no big deal. A president can just ride his bike
down the street and no one cares. Its a nice thought, but I suspect the
real reasons Democratic politicians like to come here are even simpler.
First of all, theres security. Marthas Vineyard is an island; it is remote
by definition and difficult to travel to. People in many parts of the
country have never even heard of it.
Then theres the money. What has sanctified the name of Mar-
thas Vineyard among Democratic politicians are the countless deeds
of fundraising heroism that have graced the islands manicured golf
courses, its quaint hotels, and its architecturally celebrated interiors.
During the summer season, when the islands billionaires return like
swallows to the fabulous secluded coastal estates they own, there are
fundraisers every night of the week. Often these are thrown for the
benefit of worthy charitable causes, not politicians, but of course, it is
the political fundraisers that make the headlines.
Political fundraisers for Democrats, that is. In terms of partisan-
ship, everyone is pretty much on the same page here. The only con-
test in recent years to cause the billionaires of Marthas Vineyard to
feel pangs of political unease was in 2007, when both Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama were hitting the sweet spot of the liberal class.
Both politicians showed up here to raise money, sometimes within a

few days of one another. Who would line up with whom? Tensions ran
high. Tycoon turned against tycoon.
On Marthas Vineyard, declared the New York Times, the presi-
dential race is dividing old loyalties, testing longtime friendships and
causing a few awkward moments at the islands many dinner parties.
It was a difficult time for rich people everywhere, the paper allowed;
vacationers were squabbling at summer communities around the
country from the Hamptons to Harbor Springs, Mich. But perhaps
nowhere is the intensity as great as on the Vineyard because of its
history, the pedigree of its residents and those residents proximity
to power.
In the summer of 2015, all that fratricidal stuff was over. Both the
Obamas and the Clintons would again show up on the island, but the
mood was a happy one. This time, Hillary Clintons fundraising oper-
ations could proceed without any real competition. Both first families
would go peacefully to Vernon Jordans birthday party, an important
event in the Democratic calendar, and Bill and Barack would even play
a round of golf together. And Hillary would be the beneficiary of a
fundraiser cosponsored by her admirer, Lady Lynn Forester de Roth-
schild, an honest-to-god member of Europes most famous family of
Gilded Age banker-aristocrats.
The Idea of an Island

These are the events that shape our collective future, but as I learned
when I visited Marthas Vineyard in the summer of 2015, trying to see
them with your own eyes is a quest of singular futility. Unless you are
prepared to plunk down the cash, you will need Google Earth or Archi-
tectural Digest to find out what the fundraising locations look like.
As I toured the island, I made a point of going into every shop that
boasted some obvious presidential connectiona picture of the Clin-
tons in the window, for example, or a sandwich named after Barack
Obama. I visited the bookstore in which both presidents reportedly
like to shop. I found out what Obama orders when he goes to a cer-
tain seafood restaurant. I visited one of the many outposts of the Black
Dog chain, where Bill Clinton bought souvenirs for his young-adult
paramour, Monica Lewinsky. Sitting on the deck at a popular presiden-
tial restaurant in Oak Bluff, I eavesdropped as two children, probably
ages six and seven, argued about whether or not owning a yacht was a
ginormous waste of money.
And I kept noticing all the stuff they sell on this island that serves
no purpose other than to announce that you set foot in this place of
rarefied privilege. That you rode a certain ferry. That youor your

presidential boyfriendvisited a certain store.

It is, I suppose, a logical extension of the hyper-preppy sartorial
style that strikes you when youre here: the polo shirts, the khakis,
the madras shorts, and basically anything sold by Vineyard Vines, the
clothing brand whose beau ideal seems to be a gilded young layabout
whos washed out of some Ivy League school and now spends his days
drinking beer on his dads yacht.
Indeed, the islands culture is so deeply suffused with this kind of
ruling-class-rebel taste that even the rock musicians show up for gigs
in pastel shirts, white trousers, and those light-colored cotton sweat-
ers people wear to go sailing. OK, I admit, Im basing this observation
exclusively on one data point: the musicians who appeared in a 1987
TV concert featuring island resident Carly Simon, the one in which
shes playing her best-known songs on a Marthas Vineyard beach as
the seagulls wheel overhead and a man dressed like a Dartmouth pro-
fessor on sabbatical bangs a cowbell for all hes worth.
In another old TV show, this one from 1997, you can watch this
same Carly Simon pronounce her friend Bill Clinton to be the first
rock n roll president, recalling how he went to Georgetown in the
sixties and was thus present for his generations important musical and
political moments. As she speaks these words, Simon also notes that
she is seated in the very chair and in the very house in which Clinton
sat and stayed while vacationing on Marthas Vineyard.
This is nauseating, but its not wrong. There is something about all
the items Carly Simon throws together hereboomers, fancy colleges,
rock n roll, Bill Clinton, a billionaires vacation spotthat makes a
kind of deep sense.
After all, Bill Clinton didnt need to take a poll to know to vacation
on Marthas Vineyard. For a man of his educational and generational
background, that was an obvious choice. That was where everybody
went. It was the place where the high-achieving, rock n rolling gener-
ation that Bill led came together with the money people whose wisdom
he and his well-graduated cohort had grown to understand.
Amazing Grace
In a humorous story published in 1975, at the very beginning of the
Marthas Vineyard boom, Tom Wolfe tells how Media & Lit. peo-
ple from New York had started vacationing on the island, and how
they were initially shunned by the flamboyantly preppy Boston peo-
ple who then dominated the resorts summer scene. But then the two
groups start to mingle, and a sort of revelation comes. At a cocktail
party one day in the mid-1970s, Wolfes narrator, an unnamed New

York author, sees a glimmer of the future:
something he could barely make out . . . a vision in which Americas best

minds, her intellectuals, found a common ground, a natural unity, with
the enlightened segments of her old aristocracy, her old money . . . the
two groups bound together by . . . but by what? . . . he could almost see it,
but not quite . . . it was presque vu . . . it was somehow a matter of taste . . . of
sensibility . . . of grace, natural grace.
Wolfe doesnt mention the fantasy of an all-powerful creative class

or the universal liberal conviction that you must have a degree from a
good school to make any sort of legitimate claim on the affluent life;
those toxic doctrines would take decades to develop.
But in some ways the Vineyard idea, as Wolfe sketched it out forty
years ago, undergirds them all. The union of money and talent, under
a veil of righteousness furnished by the backwash of the sixties coun-
terculture, allowed our left party (such as it is) to walk away from its
historic obligations to working people.
Our Marthas Vineyard Democrats like to talk about inequality.
It makes them sad, but its also a problem they have almost no desire to
tackle. Not only does it not touch them personally, but their instincts,
their inclinations, and their deepest unspoken convictions tell them it
isnt a real problem to begin with. People get what they deserve out of
lifeor, rather, they will get what they deserve once we have ensured
everyones equal access to the SATand for a person with a grade-
school education to complain about the hardships of minimum-wage
work is the purest sort of folly.
Today, the melding of money and the literary sensibility is, in cer-
tain circles, an accomplished fact, and sometimes the perversity of
the thing is capable of slapping you right in the face. I am reminded
of this as I stroll through one of the polished and manicured towns on
Marthas Vineyard and wander into one of those places selling repro-
ductions of old T-shirts and sports memorabilia and the like. On the
outside wall of the shop hangs a poem by Charles Bukowski, because
of course nothing goes better with tasteful clothing than transgressive
poetry. The poem is about the horror of blue-collar life, about how
dehumanizing it is to do the kind of work that no one who passes by
here ever does anymore:
I think of the men

Ive known in
factories
with no way to

get out
choking while living
choking while laughing
The Land That Liberals Forgot

When I think of the men Ive known in factories, I think of a group of
striking workers I met in Decatur, Illinois, in the early days of the Clin-
ton administration. Although those workers were out, they werent
particularly interested in staying out; they would have been happy to
go back in, provided their jobs were safe and paid well. They wanted to
live what we used to think of as ordinary, middle-class lives.
In a scholarly paper about social class published in 1946, the
sociologist C. Wright Mills focused his attention on Decatur, which
he believed to be a perfectly typical Midwestern city. According to the
data he had compiled, big business owners and executives in Decatur
in those days earned a little more than two times as much as the towns
wage workers did.
Mills might as well have been talking about the days of Julius Cae-
sar, to judge by how far we have come since then. In 2014 the CEO
of Archer Daniels Midland, a company that dominates the city of
Decatur, earned an estimated 261 times as much as did average wage
workers, according to the AFL-CIOs Executive Paywatch website.
The CEO of Caterpillar, the focus of one of the 1994 Decatur conflicts,
made 486 times as much. Caterpillars share price is roughly ten times
what it was in the early 1990s.
Other demographic changes to sweep that town since it gained
notoriety as the Clinton-era War Zone for militant strike actions are
just as familiar, just as awful. For one thing, Decaturs population has
shrunk by about 12 percent since the early 1990s. Despite this outflow
of people, as of early 2015 the place still had the highest unemployment
rate in Illinois. As a few minutes of Internet clicking will tell you,
Decaturs own citizens now rank their town extremely low on certain
quality-of-life metrics; in a photographic guide to Decatur meant to
promote tourism, the photographer recounts being threatened in a
park while taking pictures.
The two-class system that those men-in-factories had arrayed
themselves against back in 1994 has pretty much come to pass. Today,
everyone knows how Wall Street salaries soar under all conditions
while pay for average workers never goes anywhere. Everyone knows
that the people on top get bailed out when they screw up while every-
one else goes to the wall. To look at it more narrowly, the two-tiered

system the Caterpillar workers were pro- Our Marthas Vineyard
testing has since been installed in numerous
Democrats like to talk about
workplaces across the country; as a result,
younger workers will never catch up to the pay inequality. It makes them sad,
earned by their seniors no matter how many
but its also a problem they
years they log on the job.
I went back to Decatur in 2015 to catch up have almost no desire to tackle.
with the veterans of the War Zone, and drove
along the route of a huge 1994 protest march 9
organized to support the strikes. Back then, this gathering of pissed-
off workers and their allies had seemed to my younger self to be the
augur of a great labor-left uprisinga moment to seize liberalism from
the technocratic apostles of the third way who were then vacationing
among the musicians and the millionaires on Marthas Vineyard.
This time around, though, the derelict sights of Decatur brought
enlightenment of a different sort, as I drove past block after block of
deteriorating bungalows, with wrecks in the driveway and trash in the
yards. I noticed pawn shops, payday loan franchises, and thrift stores
everywhere.
Not all is disaster, of course. Decaturs downtown has been exten-
sively rehabbed with cute new restaurants and plenty of parking. And
even though the towns population is shrinking, its single largest cor-
porate citizen seems to grow and grow. Archer Daniels Midland, the
grain-processing behemoth, now sprawls across block after block.
Larry Solomon was the leader of the local United Auto Workers
union at Decaturs Caterpillar plant during the War Zone days. He
hired in at Caterpillar, he tells me, in 1963; he retired in 1998, having
gone back in after the strike ended. When I met Solomon in his tidy
suburban home in a small town outside Decatur, he told me in detail
about the many times he got crossways with management in days long
past, about all the grievances he filed for his coworkers over the years
and the puffed-up company officials he faced down.
Think about that for a moment: a blue-collar worker who has
retired fairly comfortably, despite having spent years confronting
his employer on picket lines and in grievance hearings. How is such
a thing possible? I know were all supposed to show nothing but love
for the creative class and the job creators nowadays, but listening to
Solomons tales of these many forgotten showdowns, it occurred to
me that maybe his semi-adversarial attitude worked better. Maybe
it was that attitude, repeated in workplace after workplace across the
country, that made possible the middle-class prosperity that once
marked us as a nationand that we have lost today.

We were promised, all during the time we worked at Caterpillar,

that when you retire, youre going to have a pension and full benefits at
no cost to you, Solomon recalled. He told about a round of contract
negotiations he and his colleagues attended in the 1960s during which
a management official complained, We already take care of you from
the cradle to the grave. What more could you want?
Today, it is inconceivable that an American official of any kind, pub-
lic or private, would utter such a phrase. In this age of disruption and
innovation, everything pushes in the opposite direction. For the gen-
eration coming up now, the old social contract is goneor at least the
part of it that ensured health care and retirement for blue-collar work-
ers. Now, as Solomon sees it, companies can say, We want your life, and
when your work life is over, then goodbye. We thank you for your life,
but were not responsible for you after we turn you out. At which point,
presumably, they head east for a relaxing summer on the Vineyard.t
This essay is adapted from Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party
of the People? (Metropolitan Books, 2016). Excerpt from The Meek Have Inherited
is from Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems, 19741977 by Charles Bukowski. Copy-
right 1977 by Charles Bukowski. By permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
B E L L E M E L LO R

E x h i b i t A Frances Jetter
Wall Eye. FR A N C E S J E T T E R

Despair Fatigue
How hopelessness grew boring
3 David Gr aeber
Is it possible to become bored with hopelessness?

There is reason to believe something like that is beginning to hap-
pen in Great Britain. Call it despair fatigue.
For nearly half a century, British culture, particularly on the left,
has made an art out of despair. This is the land where No Future for
You became the motto of a generation, and then another generation,
and then another. From the crumbling of its empire, to the crumbling
of its industrial cities, to the current crumbling of its welfare state, the
country seemed to be exploring every possible permutation of despair:
despair as rage, despair as resignation, despair as humor, despair as
pride or secret pleasure. Its almost as if its finally run out.
On the surface, and from a distance, Britain looks like its experi-
encing one of the stranger paroxysms of masochistic self-destruction
in world history. Since the Conservative victory of 2010, first in coali-
tion with the Liberal Democrats and now on its own, the British gov-
ernment has set out to systematically unravel much of what makes life
good and decent in the country. Conservative leaders started by trash-
ing the United Kingdoms once proud university system, while eyeing
the greatest source of national pride and dignity, the universal health
guarantees of the National Health Service. All of this is being done in
the name of an economic doctrineausterity, the imperative need for
fiscal disciplinethat no one genuinely believes in and whose results
pretty much everyone deplores (including prime minister David Cam-
eron, who in private has denounced the decline of his local public ser-
vices), in response to an existential crisis that does not exist.
How did this happen? It appears that the entire political class has
become trapped in the bizarrely successful narrative that swept the
Tories into power after the crash of 2008 and still sustains them long
after its consequences have run beyond any sort of humanity or com-
mon sense.
Boom Crash Opera

Pretty much every major sitting government was booted out after the
crash, and the political complexion of the government in question

ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE

largely determined the popular narrative of what had caused the crash
to begin with. In the United States, it was George W. Bushs fault, so
the popular onus fell on the CEOs and hedge fund managers who Bush
used to refer to, at fundraisers, as his base. None were actually pros-
ecuted, but most Americans felt strongly that they ought to be. In the
United Kingdom, where Gordon Browns Labour Party was sitting in
Downing Street, everyone accepted the oppositions narrative that the
British crash resulted from irresponsible social spending and govern-
ment deficits. In fact, the Tories found that appealing to a rhetoric of
shared sacrifice, belt-tightening, and even collective suffering struck a
chord in the British public. This was perhaps most true of working-class
voters. Now almost entirely stripped of any sense of community, neigh-
borhood, or workplace solidarity by decades of right-wing social engi-
neering, they saw the hard times and rationing of World War II as the
last time Britons had acted with a genuine common purpose.
The social effects of the spending cutsall ostensibly aimed at
reducing the supposedly catastrophic government debt overhang
have been devastating. British universities, which not so many years
ago were (as in most of Europe) entirely free, have become among the
most expensive in the world. Social housing has been ransacked, sub-
sidies have been cut, and squatting in residential properties was made
illegal at exactly the moment tens of thousands were being decanted
from their homes. To be poor now means to be endlessly assessed,
monitored, and surveyed, and almost invariably found wanting. No
one really knows how many thousands of people have died as a result of
the freefall in government support, but to get just an inkling: between
December 2011 and February 2014, the Department of Work and Pen-
sions reported that 2,380 Britons previously on disability support were
found dead no more than six weeks after receiving notice that they
were having their benefits cut because they had been determined to be
fit for work.
One reason this could happen is that theres been virtually no pub-
lic debate on austerity itself. At no point, for example, did a major TV
news outlet host a panel of economists discussing whether public debt
was really the cause of the economic crisis, or debating whether Euro-
pean-style austerity or Obama-style fiscal stimulus would be a more
appropriate response. The only questions were how much budget-cut-
ting was required and where the cuts should fall. This confident Tory
narrative reigned unchallenged from the rudest hack in the Daily Mail
to the most chiseled eminence of the (supposedly socialist) BBC, and
all figures of public authority held to it even after the immediate effects
of the cuts proved spectacularly ineffective. Even as double dip turned

to triple dip and Tory chancellor George The historical defeat
Osborne doubled down by making increas-
and humiliation of the British
ingly bizarre pledges (that all future govern-
ments would run a surplus, that Britain would working classes is now the islands
completely eliminate its national debt, etc.),
primary export product.
scarcely any major pundit, editorialist, or TV
commentator broke ranks. And when, after 9
years of abject misery, the economy, inevita-
bly, began to stir a tiny bit, all instantly proclaimed that Osborne was
vindicated.
This consensus, oddly, has next to nothing to do with the opinions
of professional economists. Almost all British economists understood
that the gaping deficits of 2008 and 2009 had been caused by the bank-
ing crisis, not the other way around. Likewise, anyone paying atten-
tion knew that cutbacks of public services to save money reduced
economic activity, and hence government tax revenues, and so really
had the effect of raising, not lowering deficits. Most also understood
that deficits werent really much of a problem to begin with. But even
the opinion of mainstream economists was, suddenly, excluded from
public debate. By 2012, even the IMF was issuing statements urging the
Tories to lay off. But youd never learn any of this from the Times, the
Observer, or the BBC.
How could such total, lock-step defiance of reality be maintained
in a country with a formally free press and highly educated popula-
tion? To some degree, you find the familiar bubble effect. Politicians,
journalists, lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to
anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual uni-
verse. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily
for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide
impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed
in think tanks and focus groups (free markets, wealth creators,
personal responsibility, shared sacrifice) are repeated like incanta-
tions until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one
even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality. True,
the bubble logic can be maintained only by a certain studied igno-
rance of how the economy really works. One 2014 poll discovered, for
instance, that 90 percent of sitting MPs, for all their endless debates on
the need to save money, didnt know where money comes from. (They
thought it was created by the Royal Mint.)
The bubble effect is not unique to Britain, of course. Political
debate in the United States, Japan, or Germany works much the same
way. But in Britain, things have gone so far that we are beginning to

see a classic Big Lie reinforcer effect. When the consensus reality gets
this completely divorced from actually existing reality, when so many
innocent people have suffered as a result, and when anyone pointing
this out has been so consistently and aggressively denounced as a tin-
foil-hat-wearing flat-earther or Trotskyite, to break ranks would mean
admitting that the lunatics were right. There is nothing the established
media is more loath to do.
The divorce between consensus and reality has grown so extreme
and unworkable that even the technocrats charged with running the
system have started to cry foul. In 2014 the Bank of Englandits econ-
omists apparently exhausted by having to carry out economic policy
in a made-up, topsy-turvy world designed only to benefit the rich
issued a statement on Money Creation in the Modern Economy that
effectively destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money,
they noted, is not created by governments or even central bankers, who
must be careful not to make too much of it lest they spark inflation; its
actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there
would be no money. The post-Keynesian heterodox economists, reg-
ularly denounced as a lunatic fringe by those commentators willing to
acknowledge their existence, were right.
No major news outlet considered this a story; politicians contin-
ued preaching their morality tales of the evils of debt exactly as they
had before.
Nothing but Class

So what is the real basis of the British economy? It is, after all, the fifth
largest in the world.
Its important to remember that, despite much rhetoric to the con-
trary, the economy of the United Kingdom, like those of other wealthy
countries, is largely self-sustaining. There are still farms, factories,
mines, fisheries, and artisanal workshops, and these continue to meet
most of the countrys material needs. Much of the feeling that Brit-
ain has deindustrialized is due to the decline of the giant factories of
mid-century. But these were always something of an anomaly: from
the heyday of the Industrial Revolution to the Victorian era, when
Britain led the world in production and technological innovation, the
economy was dominated by a combination of high finance and small
family firmsmuch as it is today.
Still, in many ways Britain resembles an imperial economy: while it
does export machinery, pharmaceuticals, plastics, petrol, and a whole
variety of high-quality artisanal products, in sheer material terms it
takes in far, far more than it sends out. So we must ask a simple ques-

tion: Why do other countries continue to send their things to Britain?
How is it that the island manages to take in so much more from the rest
of the world than it gives them in return?
The conventional answer is, of course, financial services. The
economy of the United Kingdom now turns around its financial hub,
the City of London, whose largest firms play an enormous role in coor-
dinating international trade. The Citys advantages are partly just
those of Greenwich Mean Time: a billionaire in Qatar or Mumbai can
make a call to his broker in London with only a few hours difference;
in New York, let alone California, its likely to be the middle of the
night. Whats more, the same billionaire can speak to a broker with a
familiar, reassuring Oxbridge accent, giving him the pleasant feeling
of now having the grandson of his countrys former colonial officials at
his beck and call.
Surely there is something in this. But it cannot be the whole expla-
nation. The scale is just too large. Do people in Brazil or Korea really
send endless container ships full of steel, cars, or computers to Britain
because they are charmed by Oxbridge accents or awed by its skill at
paperwork? Because paperwork, after all, is all that financial services
ultimately is, and there are plenty of people in Brazil and Korea who
are extremely good at paperwork as well.
Another argument, common in leftist circles, is that Britain is
simply reaping the benefits of its position as loyal lieutenant of the
American empire. The U.S.-sponsored financial system is, as econo-
mists like Michael Hudson have argued, largely a shakedown system, a
means of extracting something if not identical to, then very like impe-
rial tribute from the rest of the world. Britain, so understood, could
then be seen as facilitating the process within its own former impe-
rial territories, perhaps with a covert eye to flipping its allegiances to
China and India when their time comes. No doubt there is something
to this too, but again, its hardly a complete explanation. In the United
Kingdom, finance is based above all in real estate, and the real estate
bubble that sustains the City is itself sustained by the fact that pretty
much every billionaire in the world feels they have to maintain at least
a flat, and more often a townhouse, in a fashionable part of London.
Why? There are plenty of other well-appointed modern cities in the
world, most of which have a decidedly more appealing climate. Yet
even more than, say, New York or San Francisco, London real estate
has become something like U.S. treasury bonds, a basic currency of the
international rich.
Its when one asks questions like these that economics and politics
become indistinguishable. Those who have investigated the situation

London real estate find that Londons appealand by extension,
Britainsrests on two factors. First of all, Rus-
has become something like
sian oligarchs or Saudi princesses know they
U.S. treasury bonds, can get pretty much anything they want in
London, from antique candelabras and high-
a basic currency of the
tech spy devices, to Mary Poppinsstyle nan-
international rich. nies for their children, fresh lobsters delivered
by bicycle in the wee hours, and every conceiv-
9 able variety of exotic sexual service, music, and
food. Whats more, the boodles will be delivered by a cheerful, creative,
and subservient working-class population who, drawing on centuries of
tradition, know exactly how to be butlers. The second factor is secu-
rity. If one is a nouveau riche construction magnate or diamond trader
from Hong Kong, Delhi, or Bahrain, one is keenly aware that at home,
something could still go terribly wrong: revolution, a sudden U-turn of
government policy, expropriation, violent unrest. None of this could
possibly happen in Notting Hill or Chelsea. Any political change that
would significantly affect the most wealthy was effectively taken off the
table with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
In other words, the historical defeat and humiliation of the British
working classes is now the islands primary export product. By orga-
nizing the entire economy around the resultant housing bubble, the
Tories have ensured that the bulk of the British population is aware,
at least on some tacit level, that it is precisely the global appeal of the
English class system, up to and including the contemptuous sneer of
the Oxbridge graduates in Parliament chuckling over the impending
removal of housing benefits, that is also keeping affordable track shoes,
beer, and consumer electronics flowing into the country. Its an impos-
sible dilemma. Its hardly surprising, then, that so many turn to cynical
right-wing populists like UKIP, who manipulate the resulting indigna-
tion by fomenting rage against Polish construction workers instead of
Russian oligarchs, Bangladeshi drivers instead of Qatari princes, and
West Indian porters instead of Brazilian steel tycoons.
This marketing of class subservience is the essence of Tory eco-
nomic strategy. Industry may be trounced and the university system
turned (back) into a playground for the rich, but even if this leads to
a collapse of technology and the knowledge economy, the end result
will only seal in more firmly the class system that produces Tory politi-
cians: England will literally have nothing else to sell.
Tony Blairs New Labour policies, which, despite the Labour Par-
tys working-class funding base, basically represented the sensibilities
of the professional classes, did attempt to forge an alternative vision.

ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE
For the Blairites, the United Kingdoms future lay in what they called
the creative industries. Had not the United Kingdom, regularly
since the sixties, produced waves of popular music and youth culture
that had swept the world, bringing in billions in direct and indirect
revenue? It must have seemed a plausible gambit in the nineties, but
it failed because the Blairites were operating with a completely false
understanding of where cultural creativity comes from.
They naively assumed creativity was basically a middle-class
phenomenon, the product of people like themselves. In fact, almost
everything worthwhile that has come out of British culture for the last
century, from music hall, to street kebabs, to standup comedy, rock n
roll, and the rave scene, has been primarily a working-class phenom-
enon. Essentially, these were the things the working class created
when they werent actually working. The sprouting of British popular
culture in the sixties was entirely a product of the United Kingdoms
then very generous welfare state. There is a reason that in Cockney
rhyming slang, the word for dole is rock n roll (he got the sack,
hes on the rock n roll again): a surprising proportion of major bands
later to sweep the world spent at least some of their formative years
on unemployment relief. Blairites were stupid enough to combine their
promotion of Cool Britannia with massive welfare reforms, which
effectively guaranteed the entire project would crash and burn, since

they ensured that pretty much everyone with the potential to become
the next John Lennon would instead spend the rest of their lives stack-
ing boxes in their local Tesco as part of the new welfare conditionality.
In the end, all that the Blairites managed to produce was a world-
class marketing sector (since thats what middle-class people are actu-
ally good at); otherwise, they had nothing to show for themselves at all.
The Return of the Future

All this might seem irredeemably bleak. All the more surprising, then,
that the main reaction on the left, beginning tentatively with the 2010
student movement and now exploding everywhere, has been a wave of
almost insolent optimism and a (admittedly hesitant) return to utopian
visions. This is why I started by speaking of despair fatigue. There is a
still small but growing realization that if Great Britain is going to enter
history againif there is going to be any sort of grand, positive vision
for its futurethat vision can come only from the left.
When all is said and done, the Tory and New Labour visions arent
really visions at all. True, in Thatchers time, and even to some degree
in Tony Blairs, the market reformers managed to pass themselves
off as in some sense the real revolutionaries. But no one makes such
a claim anymore. The same lip service is paid to the idea that market
enthusiasts are young, enthusiastic, and tech-savvy, and that those who
defend the remains of the welfare state are a pack of bitter old geezers
whining at the pub. This pretense is becoming increasingly hollow too.
Having achieved their consensus reality, the only thing the political
classes have left to do is defend it. Everyone knows the Conservatives
hold sway precisely because they have convinced the public they actu-
ally are conservatives; their fabled competence really comes down
to the argument that only they can manage to hold things together,
roughly as they currently exist, before the advent of some inevitable
catastrophe whose precise contours we cannot know.
Meanwhile, on the streets and council estates, Britain is undergo-
ing a sea change, a veritable efflorescence of resistance. Its very hard to
know the real scale of it because, unlike in generations past, the media
largely refuses to report on it. Perhaps this is because when they do, the
results are rarely what they expect. On May 9, 2015, the day after the
Tory election victory was declared, before the inevitable new round of
cuts could even be announced, there was a minor riot in front of the
prime ministers offices at 10 Downing Street. Hundreds of student
activists clashed with police; several of them, on being punched and
kicked by uniformed officers, actually punched back; paint bombs
were thrown, flares set off, and the Women of World War II memorial

was daubed with the familiar slogan Fuck Tory Scum. The editors
of the right-wing tabloid the Daily Mail decided that the public mood
was such that it might even be possible to actually report this, and ran
a huge spread with splashy pictures under the headline Anarchist Mob
Planning Summer of Thuggery. Within twenty-four hours, they were
horrified to discover that in the comments section, opinion among
their own readers was running something like five to one in favor of
anarchist thuggery. Even the desecration of the memorial didnt
raise much in the way of hackles. After all, most Britons are well aware
that the first thing veterans did, on returning from the war, was oust
Churchills sitting Tory government and vote in one that promised to
preside over the creation of a modern welfare state. This is precisely
the work the current inhabitants of Downing Street are trying to dis-
mantle. The rioters were simply defending those veterans legacy and
enunciating what they, if alive, would most likely be saying themselves.
Between student occupations, housing occupations, street
actions, and a revival of radical unionism, there has been an unprec-
edented upswell of resistance. But even more important, it has begun,
however haltingly, to take on a very different spirit than the desperate,
rear-guard actions of years past. After all, even the legendary poll-tax
riots that dislodged Thatcher were either backward-looking or, alter-
nately, bitter and nihilistic. Class Wars slogans (The Royal Question:
Hanging or Shooting?) were perhaps charmingly provocative, but
hardly utopian.
This is where the notion of despair fatigue comes in.
One might argue that its beginnings were already visible in popu-
lar culture. Witness the emergence of the Scottish socialist school of
science fiction, which, after the relentless dystopianism of the seven-
ties, eighties, and nineties, led the way to a broader trend by toying with
redemptive futures once again. Then there was Steampunk, surely the
most peculiar of countercultural trends, a kind of ungainly Victorian
futurism full of steam-powered computers and airships, top-hatted
cyborgs, floating cities powered by Tesla coils, and an endless variety of
technologies that had never actually emerged. I remember attending
some academic conference on the subject and asking myself, Okay, I
get the steam part, thats obvious, but . . . what exactly does this have
to do with punk? And then it dawned on me. No Future! The Victo-
rian era was the last time when most people in this country genuinely
believed in a technologically-driven future that was going to lead to a
world not only more prosperous and equal, but actually more fun and
exciting than their own. Then, of course, came the Great War, and
we discovered what the twentieth century was really going to be like,

There is a reason that in Cockney with its monotonous alternation of terror and
boredom in the trenches. Was not Steampunk
rhyming slang, the word
a way of saying, cant we just go back, write
for dole is rock n roll. off the entire last century as a bad dream, and
start over?
9 And is this not a necessary moment of
reset before trying to imagine what a genuinely revolutionary twen-
ty-first century might actually be like?
On to Corbofuturism
The first stirrings came, appropriately enough, from Scotland, where
in 2015 the Scottish National Party made a virtually clean sweep of
Parliamentary seats, running an explicitly socialist, anti-austerity
platform and trouncing a tepid Labour Party unwilling to fundamen-
tally challenge the Conservative agenda. (Basically no one in Scotland
votes Tory.) But the real earthquake came a few months later, with the
apparently inexplicable rise of Jeremy Corbyn and his shadow chan-
cellor John McDonnell to the head of the Labour Party in Westmin-
ster itself. In the eyes of the media, whicheven ostensibly left ven-
ues like the Guardianis absolutely and unconditionally hostile to the
new Labour team, their success is itself a product of political despair:
those whining old geezers in the pub have given up on even trying to
win elections and have spat in the face of the entire system by electing
one of their own. And its true; the new Labour leadership is made up of
genuine radicals. Corbyn and McDonnell represent the activist wing
of the Labour Partyuntil recently, a very small faction indeed, con-
sisting of, at best, half a dozen MPs. They have been regular supporters
and even participants in the popular mobilizations.
I am not just talking about speaking at rallies here. I can myself tes-
tify to this. When, in the summer of 2014, activists from Disabled Peo-
ple Against Cuts were chaining themselves to the sanctuary lawn at
Westminster Abbey in a vain attempt to focus media attention on the
closure of the Independent Living Fund that promised to leave even
more people with disabilities dead, McDonnell and I were part of the
crew carrying spare batteries for their wheelchairs. Both he and Corbyn
openly support a philosophy that insists that social change can never
come from electoral politics alone, but only from a combination of polit-
ical mobilization, union organizing, and as McDonnell once charmingly
put it, what in the old days we used to call insurrection, though nowa-
days we politely call it direct action. One can only imagine the horror
that ensued among the political establishment when such people were
suddenly catapulted to positions of leadership within one of the coun-

trys two major parties. From their point of view, its not as if Bernie
Sanders had taken over the Democratic Party. Its more as if it had been
annexed by a combination of Noam Chomsky and Abbie Hoffman.
How did it happen? In the immediate sense, Corbyns rise was pre-
cisely a product of the weird conceptual bubble in which the British
political class operates. The Blairite hacks who dominate the Labour
Party were keen to break any remaining power of the unions, and
were so convinced that their manufactured common sense really was
common to everyone that they decided the best way to do this was to
change the rules and allow the party leader to be elected by popular
vote. It never seems to have occurred to them that a significant per-
centage of members of a still ostensibly leftist political party might
actually respond positively to leftist values. In the wake of the Tory
victory, McDonnell, at least so the story goes, convinced a sufficient
number of Blairite MPs to support a hard-left candidate for head of the
party to broaden the debate, which was balanced on the other side by
their own hard-right pro-business candidate, Liz Kendalla favorite
of Englands notoriously clueless pundits. Then those same delegates
stared, slack-jawed, as Corbyn heaped in 59.5 percent of the ballot in a
field of four, the biggest landslide ever won by any candidate for Labour
leadership. (Kendall pulled in last with 4.5 percent.)
On one level, the pundits were probably right: Corbynmania was
just a way of giving the finger to the establishment. The mans appeal
rests largely on a complete absence of conventional charisma. He has
no rhetorical flair whatsoever. He simply tells you what he thinks. In
a political field so corrupt that it often seems the moral spectrum for
public figures runs roughly from calculating cynic to child molester,
the idea that a genuinely honest man could successfully run for public
office was a kind of revelation. Corbyn is rooted in the socialist tra-
dition, but lacks any specific ideology or agenda. To vote for him was
simply to vote for a set of values. Those who supported him knew that
it was only after the election that the real work would begin, of figuring
out how (or indeed, whether) it was possible for politicians and street
activists to synergize their efforts without co-opting or destroying one
another, what sort of economic model the left can counterpose to the
Tories marketing of class subservience, and what a new politics based
on popular participation in decision-making might actually be like. Its
still all very much up for grabs, and the whole project might well ship-
wreck terribly, leaving the left utterly defeated for many years to come.
Certainly, the entire media and party establishment have made it clear
that they are willing to do almost anything to reverse the results of the
leadership election. But three things give reason for hope.

First, if a general realignment of British politics really were going

on, this is probably what it would look like. The role of the Bank of
England is crucial here. It has always seen itself as something of a bell-
wether. In the mid- to late seventies, the Bank of Englands sudden and
unexpected embrace of monetarist economic models paved the way for
the Thatcherite revolution to follow; and Thatcher, it must be remem-
bered, was considered as much an outrageous insurgent within her own
party at the time as Corbyn is considered now. So its possible that an
uncanny parallel is working itself out.
Second, the new Labour leadership does have a fairly clear route
to power. The United Kingdoms current economy is based on an arti-
ficially maintained housing bubble, and bubbles do invariably burst.
Labour has four years before the next election. The chance of there
not being some kind of economic crisis in those four years is infinitesi-
mal. For the Corbynites, the task is twofold: first, to create a narrative
about the dangers of private debt in the same way the Tories did about
public debt, so that the Conservatives will be firmly saddled with the
blame (all the easier, perhapsor perhaps notbecause this narrative
will actually be true); and second, and more difficult, to remain as the
Labour leadership, resisting any internal Blairite coup, until the inevi-
table crash takes place.
Finally, the very fact that Corbyn is something of a tabula rasa has
inspired an onrush of contesting visions, an eager concatenation of new
economic and political models vying for attention, which has begun to
reveal just how rich and diverse possible left-wing visions of the future
might actually be. Its not just the predictable arrival of the economic
luminaries to hold court with the new shadow chancelloreveryone
from Joseph Stiglitz and Ann Pettifor, to Yanis Varoufakis and Thomas
Piketty. Genuinely radical ideas are being debated and proposed.
Should the left be pursuing accelerationism, pushing the contradictions
of capitalism forward with rapid growth and development, or should it
aim toward a total shift of values and radical de-growth? Or should we
be moving toward what Novara, the media initiative that emerged from
the 2010 student movement, began cheerfully referring to as FALC
or Fully Automated Luxury Communismencouraging technologies
like 3-D printing to aim for a world of Star Trekstyle replicators where
everything is free? Should the central bank enact quantitative easing
for the people, or a universal citizens income policy, or should we go
the way of Modern Money Theory and universal jobs guarantees?
All this is being carried on in the knowledge that existing eco-
nomic paradigmseven insofar as they are not simply being mobilized
to justify policies designed for purely political purposesare no longer

relevant to the problems humanity is actually facing, in Britain or any-
where else. True, most mainstream economists are capable of seeing
through obvious nonsense, like the justifications proposed for fiscal
austerity. But the discipline is still trying to solve what is essentially a
nineteenth-century problem: how to allocate scarce resources in such a
way as to optimize productivity to meet rising consumer demand.
Twenty-first century problems are likely to be entirely different:
How, in a world of potentially skyrocketing productivity and decreas-
ing demand for labor, will it be possible to maintain equitable dis-
tribution without at the same time destroying the earth? Might the
United Kingdom become a pioneer for such a new economic dispen-
sation? The new Labour leadership is making the initial moves: call-
ing for new economic models (socialism with an iPad) and seeking
potential allies in high-tech industry. If we really are moving toward
a future of decentralized, small, high-tech, robotized production, its
quite possible that the United Kingdoms peculiar traditions of small-
scale enterprise and amateur sciencewhich never made it particularly
amenable to the giant bureaucratized conglomerates that did so well
in the United States and Germany, in either their capitalist or socialist
manifestationsmight prove unusually apt. Its all a colossal gamble.
But then, thats what historical change is like.t
SA R A L AU T M A N

Story
People Are Streinz

6 Christos Ikonomou
Seven months without a single dream. Seven whole months. The

twenty-first of May was the last time I had a dream. I remember
because it was also the last time it rained around here. And I remem-
ber because it was Lenas name day and I said it was a good sign that it
rained and I finally had a dream for the first time in a long time. But I
havent since then. And it hasnt rained again, either. No rain and no
dreams. Dead silence.
Dreams and rain. Who knows. Maybe they go together these
days.
Lena doesnt care about the rain. She doesnt care that its almost
Christmas and its still twenty degrees outside. She doesnt care that
everyones walking around in short-sleeved shirts and outside the
birds are singing like its April. She doesnt care about dreams, either.
I dont dream, she says. Im better off without dreams. What
good did dreams ever do me? I just have the same one all the time,
that Im falling off a cliff and theres no one to catch me.
Why sit there worrying about stupid dreams? Youve got plenty
else to worry about. Yesterday they called again from the appliance
place and asked about our payments. Were three months behind and
this and that is going to happen if they take us to court. Did you hear?
To court. Can you believe it? The guy had this tone of voice like he
was talking to I dont know who. I wanted the earth to open up and
swallow me whole. To have him humiliate me like that, and there was
nothing I could say. And if we have to go to court theyll make us pay
the lawyers fees, too. Are you listening? Why dont you worry about
that for a change? About stuff like that. Not dreams and rain.
Shes holding a strip of orange peel and slicing it into pieces with
a knife. Shes already cut it into a thousand tiny slivers but she wont
stop wont give up. She slices it into tiny pieces and then smaller ones
and even smaller than that. A thousand slivers. And shes still at it.
Watch it, I say. The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger.
The twenty-first of December. Saturday afternoon. Four days
until Christmas. Out the kitchen window I can see colored lights
blinking on and off on the balconies and in the windows and yards of
nearby apartments and houses. Red green yellow blue. Stars and gar-
lands and Saint Vassilises and sleighs pulled by reindeer. An incredible

H A ZE L L E E SA N TI N O
number of lights. Like youre in an endless casino and all the houses
are slot machines. Cement, poverty, and colored lightsBangladesh
meets Las Vegas. Kids are riding their bikes in the street and women
are watering flowerpots full of bushy plants. I see men in shorts grill-
ing meat and drinking beer on the rooftops of apartment buildings. I
see a bird circling in the air around a birdcage and the bird inside flaps
its wings too but in a surprised kind of way. The sky is completely
clear, the air as dry as the mouth of a person whos very scared. Just a
few days until Christmas but nothing looks like Christmas. Except
for the lights. Its as if Christmas came and went and now its spring
but for some crazy reason everyone forgot to take down their decora-
tions.

A few days until Christmas and something in the air around me
is burning like a slow fuse. I wonder. I wonder when the fuse will
burn down to the end and when the explosion will come and what will
happen after that.
The other day I caught myself standing in front of a shop that
sells hunting gear looking at the knives and switchblades in the win-
dow. Then I went in and bought a Buck knife, one of those American
knives with a blade twenty centimeters long. Its no joke its the real
thing it can do some serious damage the heft of it in your hand makes
your mind go dark. I carry it in my boot just in case, as they say. I
didnt tell Lena about it. But at night when I cant sleep my mind
wanders to things like that. Fuses and explosions and guns and knives.
And I wonder what the hell is happening and where its all heading. It
scares me.
And then theres Lena dicing orange peel at the kitchen table.
Slicing it silently with a knife in an utterly silent house. A silence like
you wouldnt believe, like what they say about the silence before an
earthquake. And I think about how if theres an earthquake maybe
the weather will change, maybe itll rain and get cold and maybe even
snow. If theres an earthquake big enough to shake the whole earth
maybe something will change. And it scares me to be thinking those
kinds of thoughts. What kind of life can you live without anything
good, I say to myself.
What kind of life can you live when youre waiting for something
bad to save you from something bad?
Theres half a bottle of wine left from yesterday. I fill a glass with
feigned indifference, as if it were water, and Lena looks at me and
starts to say something but I beat her to it.
Monday, I say. On Monday when I get my Christmas bonus Ill
pay off the rest of what we owe at Kotsovolos. Okay?
Fine, she says. Thats great. I can stop worrying.
She grabs another piece of orange peel and starts to slice it with
the knife. Her fingers are yellow.
Do you maybe, just maybe, have some idea of how much we owe?
she asks me. Take a piece of paper and start writing. Two months of
building fees is two hundred euros. The car insurance expired on the
fifteenth. Thats another two hundred. Rent. Kotsovolos. A hundred
and forty to the electric company. The fucking credit cards from the
fucking bank of fucking Cyprus. I have two cavities that need filling.
By the time Im forty Ill have no teeth at all. Who knows how much
the dentist will cost? Why arent you writing? You should be writing.

And if you add it all up youll see that to make ends meet we need She looks at me as
the Christmas bonus and the Easter bonus and the bonuses for next
if I were a stain
Christmas and next Easter too. Write it. Write it down.
I grab the knife from her hands and throw it in the sink. She on a white shirt.
looks at me as if I were a stain on a white shirt and then opens the
drawer and takes out another knife and goes back to cutting the peel 9
right where she left off. Her fingers are yellow and trembling.
Lena, I say.
Write, she says.
I look out the window. The sky. Theres a strange color in the sky
again this evening. A gray like the underside of a piece of cardboard.
Endless gray. No sun no moon no stars. Neither day nor night.
Not the sky but the underside of the sky.
Lena is on her second glass and second orange, peeling it and slic-
ing the peel into tiny slivers which she lines up at the edge of the table.
Her nails are yellow. The knife is yellow. Even the table is yellow. I
wonder whether I should go and get my new knife and sit across from
her and start slicing orange peels, too. To take my mind off things. So
I dont have to see that sky thats the color of clouds without actually
having a single cloud in it at all.
Ill ask Vassilis for a loan, she says.
Which Vassilis? The saint?
A thousand. For the stuff that wont wait. Then well see.
A thousand? Are you crazy?
Calm down, hes your brother. If you cant ask your brother for
help who can you ask? Sonias offered a hundred times. Whenever you
need, she said. Were doing just fine, she said. Theyre going to Paris
for New Years, did you know that? To Disneyland. They wanted to
go to the Asterix village but its closed in winter. It opens in March or
April I think. She said theyll go to Jim Morrisons grave.
She stops slicing and looks out the window. A piece of white stuff
from the orange is stuck to her chin, hanging there like a tiny thread
over an abyss.
Jim Morrison, she says. That was so long ago. I use to love him
when I was younger. I was completely in love. Crazy, passionate love.
People are streinz. People are streinz ouen yioura streinzer faces louk agli ouen
yiouralon.
She sings in a sweet husky voice and slices the orange peel and
her voice as she sings sounds like a lullaby in the silence of the house
and I think how Id like for us to go to sleep and sleep for whole hours
whole days and when we wake up it would be evening and raining and

Story
we would drink hot cocoa with cinnamon and eat grape must cookies
with sesame seeds and then go out onto the balcony and smell the rain
and the wet earth and there wouldnt be any knives or fuses or rent
or debtsall those things will be gone and well have woken up new
strange people with no nostalgia for anything. Nostalgia. A mangy
dog with gunk in its eyes licking its wounds. It tricks you into reach-
ing out to pet it then bites you as hard as it can.
I lean over and pluck the orange pith from her chin and roll it into
a little ball and toss it into the sink.
Monday, I say. Ill take care of it all on Monday. Myself. No Vassi-
lises and no Sonias. Okay?
She looks at me and then looks away. I never expected this, she
says.
What do you mean?
Nothing.
Tell me.
Nothing.
Then she cuts herself. The knife slips and cuts her on the thumb.
But she doesnt say anything doesnt make a sound. She lets the
blood run, looks at it calmly and indifferently the way brave people
do on television. I go to grab her hand but she pulls away. She licks
the blood, sucks at it then takes a paper napkin and wraps it around
her finger. She looks at me with pursed lips and squeezes the napkin
around the wound and the napkin turns redder and redder and then
black.
Let me see, I say. Lena. Its me. Were not enemies. Its just me.
But shes looking at me as if I were the knife.
O n Christmas Eve it seems like Im having a dream. I say seems

like, because for a long time Ive been seeing things at night when
Im in bed and even though they seem like dreams I know they arent
because when Im seeing them Im awake. Of course Im never quite
sure anymore when Im sleeping and when Im awake. It seems to me
that those two things have become oneor nothing at all. Im sure
the weather is to blame. It hasnt rained in seven months and now its
December but outside its spring and the sun is as hot as two suns put
together and every night I remember the winters we used to have and
the cold and the rain and the snow. Some nights I get out of bed like
a sleepwalker and open the cupboards and stick my head in the closet
and smell the winter clothes and a sorrow like you wouldnt believe
comes over me as I look at those winter clothes hanging in the closet
and wonder if well ever wear them again or if theyll just hang there

forever getting eaten by the dust and the mites, like ghosts of winters
past, ghosts of a past life, our ghosts, the ghosts of us.
I see that theres been a huge cataclysmic storm and the whole
world is flooded and Lena and I are swimming in a strange place. Were
swimming in a panic fighting for our lives and all around theres not a
single soul in sight no houses no cars only waterblack thick dirty wa-
ter that sticks to us like something alive and scared. As I swim I hear
Lena beside me saying that the water actually is alive and its clinging
to us because it wants to be saved from itselfthats what she says,
saved from itself. The water wants to be saved from the waterthats
the fine kind of dream I have. Then a huge tree appears before us with
bare branches. I dont know what kind of tree it is but its very big and
there are lots of birds sitting in its branchestiny red birdsand we
see them flapping their wings in a panic but they cant fly. We swim
very close and Lena says we have to help the birds fly away because the
water level keeps rising and theyre going to drown. But as soon as she
grabs hold of one it vanishes and all thats left in her hands is a pile of
feathers that arent red but black. She grabs a second bird and then a
third but the same thing happensthey vanish as soon as she touches
them and shes left with a handful of black feathers. Then I try to grab
one and my hands fill with black feathers and the water around us is
getting blacker and blacker and rising higher and higher and weighing
me down grabbing me and pulling me down down down.
Wake up, says Lena. What were you muttering, she says and
shakes me. You scared me. Wake up.
Shes leaning over me and in the dark her face is darker than the
dark.
What were you dreaming? Why did you shout? What did you
dream?
Nothing. Go to sleep.
What did you dream? Tell me.
Nothing. That it was raining. Go to sleep.
She falls back onto the mattress and sighs. Then theres no sound,
only the tick tock of the clock. The sheet has wrapped itself around
my legs and its too tight but I dont have the energy to push it off.
See, Lena says. Its a good sign. See, you shouldnt lose hope. See.
Then she leans toward me again and puts her hand on my neck
and kisses me on the side of my head.
On Christmas Day the weather changes. Around noon the clouds

come out and by three the sky is dark. Sonia calls to wish us a merry
Christmas. Theyre in Pelion with friends. Its been raining since

morning there, she says. Lots of rain, insane amounts of rain. Ill fill
up a bottle and bring it to you, she says and laughs. Theyre all drunk,
the whole stupid bunch of them. Theyre staying in a hotel whose
restaurant has organic meats, organic vegetables, organic forks and
knives. Their room has a fireplace and a four-poster bed with a canopy
and walls painted all kinds of crazy colors. How nice for you, Lena
says, looking at me. Then she asks Sonia when theyre coming home, if
theyll get to see one another before Sonia and Vassilis leave for Paris.
I wanted to ask you something, Lena saysher eyes on me the whole
time. About what we were saying the other day. You remember. Yes.
No. Im fine. For sure. Well talk when youre back.
When she hangs up, we take our drinks out onto the balcony. Its
going to rain. A tall cloud like a black wall is heading toward us from
the direction of Salamina. Its going to rain. Only the wind doesnt
smell like rain. Its a strange wind. Blowing from the east, from the
opposite direction of where the cloud is, but the cloud is still moving
steadily toward us. As if it isnt a cloud but something else. The power
lines in the street hum, metal doors bang, car alarms shriek. Trees and
TV antennas bend in the wind, which sweeps up leaves and plastic
bags and scraps of paper. A star-shaped ornament pulls loose from a
balcony and falls into the street and rolls like some strange wheel. The
wind is fierce and blowing steadily toward the west as if the cloud is
an enormous magnet put there to suck up everything in the world, to
suck all the air out of the world.
Look over there, Lena says, grabbing my arm. Whats that about,
she says, pointing to the cloud. What on earth? Look. Have you ever
seen anything like it? What is it?
And then we see the rain. Distant black threads hanging from the
cloud that seem to tie the earth to the sky.
Its the end of the world, I say, and Lena laughs as if she cant
breathe and clings to me and licks up a droplet of wine that dripped
from her glass onto her hand.
Maybe this really is how the world will end, I say. Then again,
maybe not. Maybe the world wont end, only the people. Maybe people
will stop having dreams or sleeping or making love or drinking wine or
kissing. Something like that. Maybe thats how the end will come. Not
from meteorites or nuclear weapons or melting ice caps. No explosions
or earthquakes or typhoons. Not from outside but from within. Thats
how it should be. Because were living in the world but not with the
world. For centuries now weve stopped living with the world. So it
wouldnt be fair if the world had to end with us. It wouldnt be fair.
The cloud is so big now that we cant see the sea at all.

A fake fir tree gets blown off a balcony across the street and falls
into the emptiness below, silently spinning. Its the most frightening
thing Ive ever seen in my life.
Actually, no, I say. The most frightening thing is work. Waiting
to get paid on every fifteenth and thirtieth day of the month.
Measuring your life in fifteen-day chunks. Knowing that if your
bosses dont feel like paying you once or twice or ten times in a row,
ten fifteen-day chunks, theres not a damn thing you can do about it.
Your whole life is in their hands. And there you are counting your life
out in fifteens. Thats the most frightening thing.
Im going inside, Lena says. I hate it when you talk like that. I
dont want to watch anymore. Lets go inside.
But we dont go anywhere. We stand there holding our drinks and
silently watching the rain coming in from the west. We watch as that
black curtain of rain slowly and silently closes in slowly and silently
swallows up the shapes and colors and noises of the sunset to the
west.t
Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich.

Pa n ic! Ro om
Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Cuba, August 1960.

C . WRIGHT MILLS

Pa n ic ! R o o m
Keep Fear Alive

The bald-eagle boondoggle of the terror wars
3 Kade Crockford
If youre submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency,

for an intelligence agency, youre not going to submit the proposal
that We won the war on terror and everythings great, cuz the first
thing thats gonna happen is your budgets gonna be cut in half. You
know, its my opposite of Jesse Jacksons Keep Hope Aliveits
Keep Fear Alive. Keep it alive.
Thomas Fuentes, former assistant director,
FBI Office of International Operations
Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that rec-
ognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar
opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But
when terrorism strikes the United States, were never urged to ponder
the most enduring fallout from any such attack: our own governments
prosecution of the Terror Wars.
This failure generates all sorts of accompanying moral confusion.
We cast ourselves as good, but our actions show that we are not. We
rack up a numbing litany of decidedly uncivil abuses of basic human
rights: global kidnapping and torture operations, gulags in which
teenagers have grown into adulthood under indefinite detention,
the overthrow of the Iraqi and Libyan governments, borderless execu-
tion-by-drone campaigns, discriminatory domestic police practices,
dragnet surveillance, and countless other acts of state impunity.
The way we process the potential cognitive dissonance between
our professed ideals and our actual behavior under the banner of free-
doms supposed defense is simply to ignore things as they really are.
They hate us for our freedom, screech the bald-eagle memes, and so we
must solemnly fight on. But what, beneath the official rhetoric of per-
manent fear, explains the collective inability of the national security
overlords to imagine a future of peace?
Incentives, for one thing. In a perverse but now familiar pattern,
what we have come to call intelligence failures produce zero humility,
and no promise of future remedies, among those charged with guard-
ing us. Instead, a new array of national security demands circulate,

P H I LI P B U R K E
which are always rapidly met. In America, the gray-haired represen-

tatives of the permanent security state say their number one responsi-
bility is to protect us, but when they fail to do so, they go on television
and growl. To take but one recent example, former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the morally bankrupt pundit panel
on MSNBCs Morning Joe to explain that intractable ethnic, tribal, and
religious conflict has riven the Middle East for more than a century
the United States, and the West at large, were mere hapless bystanders
in this long-running saga of civilizational decay. This sniveling per-
formance came, mind you, just days after Politico reported that, while
choreographing the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld had
quietly buried a report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicating that
military intelligence officials had almost no persuasive evidence that
Saddam Hussein was maintaining a serious WMD program. Even
after being forced to resign in embarrassment over the botched Iraq
invasion a decade ago, Rumsfeld continues to cast himself as an ear-
nestly outmanned casualty of Oriental cunning and backbiting while
an indulgent clutch of cable talking heads nods just as earnestly along.

And the same refrain echoes throughout the echelons of the
national security state. Self-assured and aloof as the affluenza boy, the
FBI, CIA, and NSA fuck up, and then immediately apply for a frenzied
transfer of ever more money, power, and data in order to do more of
what theyre already doing. Nearly fifteen years after the Global War
on Terror began, the national security state is a trillion-dollar busi-
ness. And with the latest, greatest, worst-ever terrorist threat always
on the horizon, business is sure to keep booming.
The paradox produces a deep-state ouroboros: Successful terrorist
attacks against the West do not provoke accountability reviews or con-
gressional investigations designed to truly understand or correct the
errors of the secret state. On the contrary, arrogant spies and fearful
politicians exploit the attacks to cement and expand their authority.
This permits them, in turn, to continue encroaching on the liberties
they profess to defend. We hear solemn pledges to collect yet more
information, to develop back doors to decrypt private communica-
tions, to keep better track of Muslims on visas, send more weapons
to unnamed rebel groups, drop more cluster bombs. Habeas corpus,
due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and human rights
be damned. And nearly all the leaders in both major political parties
play along, like obliging extras on a Morning Joe panel. The only real
disagreement between Republican and Democratic politicians on the
national stage is how quickly we should dispose of our civil liberties.
Do we torch the Bill of Rights la Donald Trump and Dick Cheney, or
apply a scalpel, Obama-style?
Safety Last
Both Democrats and Republicans justify Terror War abuses by tell-
ing the public, either directly or indirectly, that our national security
hangs in the balance. But national security is not the same as public safety.
And more: the things the government has done in the name of preserv-
ing national securityfrom invading Iraq to putting every man named
Mohammed on a special listactually undermine our public safety.
Thats because, as David Talbot demonstrates in The Devils Chess-
board, his revelatory Allen Dulles biography and devastating portrait
of a CIA run amok, national security centers on national interests,
which translates, in the brand of Cold War realpolitik that Dulles pio-
neered, into the preferred policy agendas of powerful corporations.
Public safety, on the other hand, is concerned with whether
you live or die, and how. Any serious effort at public safety requires
a harm-reduction approach acknowledging straight out that no gov-
ernment program can foreclose the possibility of terroristic violence.

The national security apparatus, by contrast, Nearly fifteen years after
grows powerful in direct proportion to the
the Global War on Terror
perceived strength of the terrorist (or in yes-
terdays language, the Communist) threat began, the national security state
and requires that you fear this threat so hys-
is a trillion-dollar business.
terically that you release your grip on reason.
Reason tells you government cannot protect 9
us from every bad thing that happens. But the
endlessly repeated national security meme
pretends otherwise, though the world consistently proves it wrong.
When it comes to state action, the most important distinction
between whats good for public safety (i.e., your health) and whats
good for national security (i.e., the health of the empire, markets, and
prominent corporations) resides in the concept of the criminal predi-
cate. This means, simply, that an agent of the government must have
some reasonable cause to believe you are involved with a crime before
launching an investigation into your life. When the criminal predi-
cate forms the basis for state action, police and spies are required to
focus on people they have reason to believe are up to no good. Without
the criminal predicate, police and spies are free to monitor whomever
they want. Police action that bypasses criminal predicates focuses on
threats to people and communities that threaten powerregardless of
whether those threats to power are fully legal and legitimate.
We can see the results of this neglect everywhere the national
security state has set up shop. Across the United States right now,
government actors and private contractors paid with public funds
are monitoring the activities of dissidents organizing to end police
brutality and the war on drugs, Israeli apartheid and colonization
in Palestine, U.S. wars in the Middle East, and Big Oils assault on
our physical environment. In the name of fighting terrorism, Con-
gress created the Department of Homeland Security, which gave
state and local law enforcement billions of dollars to integrate police
departments into the national intelligence architecture. As a result,
we now have nearly a million cops acting as surrogates for the FBI.
But as countless studies have shown, the fusion centers and intelli-
gence operations that have metastasized under post-9/11 authorities
do nothing to avert the terror threat. Instead, theyve targeted dis-
sidents for surveillance, obsessive documentation, and even covert
infiltration. When government actors charged with protecting us
use their substantial power and resources to track and disrupt Black
Lives Matter and Earth First! activists, they are not securing our lib-
erties; theyre putting them in mortal peril.

E x h i b i t B Mark Dancey

M A R K DA N C E Y

Not one of the costly post-9/11 Things werent always like this. Once
upon a time, Americas power structure was
surveillance programs based
stripped naked. When the nation saw the
on suspicionless, warrantless grotesque security cancer that had besieged
the body politic in the decades after World
monitoring stopped Tsarnaev
War II (just as Harry Truman had warned it
from blowing up the marathon. would) the countrys elected leadership reas-
serted control, placing handcuffs on the wrists
9 of the security agencies. This democratic
counterattack on the national security state not only erected a set of
explicit protocols to shield Americans from unconstitutional domestic
political policing, but also advanced public safety.
Mission Creeps
As late as the 1970s, the FBI was still universally thought to be a reputa-
ble organization in mainstream America. The dominant narrative held
that J. Edgar Hoovers capable agents, who had to meet his strict height,
weight, and dress code requirements, were clean-cut, straight-laced
men who followed the rules. Of course, anyone involved with the social
movements of that ageanti-war, Communist, Black Power, American
Indian, Puerto Rican Independenceknew a very different FBI, but
they had no evidence to prove what they could see and feel all around
them. And since this was the madcap 1970s, the disparity between the
FBIs glossy reputation as honest crusaders and its actual dirty fixation
on criminalizing the exercise of domestic liberties drove a Pennsylvania
college physics professor and anti-war activist named William Davidon
to take an extraordinary action. On the night of the Muhammad Ali vs.
Joe Frazier fight of March 8, 1971, Davidon and some friends broke into
an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole every paper file they
could get their hands on. In communiqus to the press, to which they
attached some of the most explosive of the Hoover files, they called
themselves the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI.
When Davidon and his merry band of robbers broke into the
FBI office, they blew the lid off of decades of secretand sometimes
deadlypolice activity that targeted Black and Brown liberation orga-
nizers in the name of fighting the Soviet red menace. According to
Noam Chomsky, the Citizens Commission concluded that the vast
majority of the files at the FBIs Media, Pennsylvania, office concerned
political spying rather than criminal matters. Of the investigative files,
only 16 percent dealt with crimes. The rest described FBI surveil-
lance of political organizations and activistsoverwhelmingly of the
left-leaning varietyand Vietnam War draft resisters. As Chomsky

wrote, in the case of a secret terrorist organization such as the FBI,
it was impossible to know whether these Pennsylvania figures were
representative of the FBIs national mandate. But for Bill Davidon and
millions of Americansincluding many in Congress who were none
too pleased with the disclosuresthese files shattered Hoovers image
as a just-the-facts G-man. They proved that the FBI was not a decent
organization dedicated to upholding the rule of law and protecting the
United States from foreign communist threats, but rather a domestic
political police primarily concerned with preserving the racist, sexist,
imperialist status quo.
In a cascade of subsequent transparency efforts, journalists, activ-
ists, and members of Congress all probed the darker areas of the national
security state, uncovering assassination plots against foreign leaders,
dragnet surveillance programs, and political espionage targeting Amer-
ican dissidents under the secret counterintelligence program known as
COINTELPRO. Not since the birth of the U.S. deep state, with the
1947 passage of the National Security Act, had the activities of the CIA,
FBI, or NSA been so publicly or thoroughly examined and contested.
Subsequent reforms included the implementation of new attorney
generals guidelines for domestic investigations, which, for the first
time in U.S. history, required FBI agents to suspect someone of a crime
before investigating them. Under the 1976 Levi guidelines, named
for their author, Nixon attorney general Edward Levi, the FBI could
open a full domestic security investigation against someone only if its
agents had specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that
an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve
the use of force or violence. The criminal predicate was now engraved
in the foundations of the American security stateand the Levi rules
prompted a democratic revolution in law enforcement and intelligence
circles. It would take decades and three thousand dead Americans for
the spies to win back their old Hoover-era sense of indomitable mis-
sionand their investigative MO of boundless impunity.
False Flags
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began
Hoovering up our private records in powerful, secret dragnets. When
we finally learned about the warrantless wiretapping program in 2005,
it was a national scandal. But just as important, and much less dis-
cussed, was the abolition of Levis assertion of the criminal predicate.
So-called domestic terrorism investigations would be treated princi-
pally as intelligence or espionage casesnot criminal ones. This shift
has had profound, if almost universally ignored, implications.

Pa n ic ! R o o m
Michael German, an FBI agent for sixteen years working under-

cover in white supremacist organizations to identify and arrest terror-
ists, saw firsthand what the undoing of the 1970s intelligence reforms
meant for the FBI. And German argues, persuasively, that the erad-
ication of the criminal predicate didnt just put Americans at risk of
COINTELPRO 2.0. It also threatened public safety. The First and
Fourth Amendments, which protect, respectively, our rights to speech
and association and our right to privacy, dont just create the condi-
tions for political freedom; they also help law enforcement focus, laser-
like, on people who have the intent, the means, and the plans to harm
the rest of us.
Think of it like this, German told me: Youre an FBI agent tasked
with infiltrating a radical organization that promotes violence as a
means of achieving its political goalsthe Ku Klux Klan, for example.
KKK members say horrible and disgusting things. But saying disgust-
ing things isnt against the law; nor, as numerous studies have shown,
is it a reliable predictor of whether the speaker will commit an act of
political violence. When surrounded by white supremacists constantly
spouting hate speech, a law enforcement officer has to block it out. If he
investigates people based on their rhetoric, his investigations will lead
nowhere. After all, almost no white supremacist seriously intending to
carry out a terrorist attack is all that likely to broadcast that intent in
public. (Besides, have you noticed how many Americans routinely say
disgusting things?)
Today, more than a decade after it shrugged off the Levi guidelines,
the FBI conducts mass surveillance directed at the domestic popu-
lation. But dragnet surveillance, however much it protects national
security, doesnt increase public safety, as two blue-ribbon presiden-
tial studies have in recent years concluded. Indeed, the Boston bomb-
ings, the Paris attacks, and the San Bernardino and Planned Parent-
hood shootings have all made the same basic point in the cold language
of death. The national security state has an eye on everyone, including
the people FBI director James Comey refers to as the bad guys. But
despite its seeming omniscience, the Bureau does not stop those peo-
ple from killing the rest of us in places where we are vulnerable.
The curious case of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev
demonstrates the strange consequences of sidelining criminal inves-
tigations for national security needs. In 2011, about eighteen months
before the bombings, Tsarnaevs best friend and two other men were
murdered in a grisly suburban scene in Waltham, Massachusettstheir
throats slashed, marijuana sprinkled on their mutilated corpses. These
murders were never solved. But days after the marathon bombings, law

enforcement leaked that they had forensic and cellphone location evi-
dence tying Tamerlan Tsarnaev to those unsolved crimes. Not one of
the costly post-9/11 surveillance programs based on suspicionless, war-
rantless monitoring stopped Tsarnaev from blowing up the marathon.
But if the police leaks were correct in assigning him responsibility for
the 2011 murders, plain old detective work likely would have.
If security agencies truly want to stop terrorism, they should
eliminate all domestic monitoring that targets people who are not
suspected of crimes. This would allow agents to redirect space and
resources now devoted to targeting Muslims and dissidents into seri-
ous investigations of people actually known to be dangerous. Its the
only reasonable answer to the befuddling question: Why is it that so
many of these terrorists succeed in killing people even though their
names are on government lists of dangerous men?
After the terrorist attacks in November, the French government
obtained greater emergency powers in the name of protecting a fearful
public. Besides using those powers to round up hundreds of Muslims
without evidence or judicial oversight, French authorities also put at
least twenty-four climate activists on house arrest ahead of the Paris
Climate Change Conferencean approach to squashing dissent that
didnt exactly scream libert, and had nothing to do with political vio-
lence. As with the Boston Marathon and countless other attacks on
Western targets, the men who attacked the Bataclan were known to
intelligence agencies. In May 2015, months before the attacks in Paris,
French authorities gained sweeping new surveillance powers authoriz-
ing them to monitor the private communications of suspected terror-
ists without judicial approval. The expanded surveillance didnt protect
the people of Paris. In France, as in the United States, the devolution
of democratic law enforcement practice has opened up space thats
filled with political spying and methods of dragnet monitoring that
enable social and political control. This is not only a boondoggle for
unaccountable administrators of mass surveillance; it also obstructs
the kind of painstaking detective work that might have prevented the
attacks on the Bataclan and the marathon.
Our imperial government wont ever admit this, but we must rec-
ognize that the best method for stopping terrorism before it strikes is
to stop engaging in it on a grand scale. Terrorist attacks are the price
we pay for maintaining a global empirefor killing a million Iraqis in
a war based on lies, for which we have never apologized or made rep-
arations, and for continuing to flood the Middle East with weapons.
No biometrics program, no database, no algorithm, no airport security
system will protect us from ourselves.t SA R A L AU T M A N

Frameless Treatment
Guidance Systems
6 Melissa Monroe
Since a mechanical framearound the head

can interferewith access to the most
efficient entry points,more and more surgeons
are turning totreatment guidance systems
which work withoutrigid frame constraints.
The image-guidedStealthStation combines

an intuitiveuser interface
with state-of-the-art featuressuch as Mach 4.0
navigation software,and Touchsite
for the ultimatein surgeon control.
After the initial brain scans (CT,

PET and/or MRI),StealthMerge
allows the user to co-register
multiple imagedatasets from different
modalities in as fewas two
mouse clicks.Downloaded images may be

rotated, angled, enlarged, or flipped to help
the surgeon preplan.Nonrigid algorithms
produce crisp 3Dvolume renderings
and eliminatedisturbing artifacts.
Now, the second-generationStealthStation

has achievednew levels of precision. . . .
Designed for user-friendlinessin all
surgical suites,it has an integrated
uninterruptiblepower supply,
a TargetLockAiming Mechanism,
and query/retrievecapabilities.
Its two component cartscan be used apart
from each other to save spacein the sterile field,
or docked in a small footprint for storage.

New, improvedneuronavigational
applications appearnearly every day.
Dedicated instrumentsinteract
seamlessly,and multidimensional
visualizationhas greatly increased
the accuracyand speed of scan

interpretation. Intraoperative
ultrasound, which trackschanges in cortical
morphologyduring surgery,
has almost solvedthe problem of brainshift.
The surgeon is nowable to follow

the instrumentationat every stage
as it passes through the tissue, and prevent
injury to eloquentstructures, adjusting
its path in caseof organ deformation.
The result is moreconvenient treatment

and better outcomes.Systems like ePIPHANY
isolutions offerhigh security,
100%lossless data transfer, for full-
fidelity viewing.Web-based transmission
and usage meanthat todays clinician

can manipulatepatient images
anywhere, any time,on demand,
with access as easyas e-mail,
from office, operating roomor home.

Vision
6 Melissa Monroe
The actual capture presents no problem. Electron guns
cover the rows of pixels at 25 sweeps per second,
refreshing and changing intensities. 28 gray values
make feature extraction the challenge. Efficient
decision trees
collapse in the combinatorial explosion.
Digitizing brightness variation will reveal
reflective properties, texture and compositions.
The attractively human stereo systems still are troubled
by the correspondence problem: one wrench seen twice is two;
they cannot correct for viewpoint. Structured light,
though it can slip
into the angle between steel sheets, is vulnerable
to shadows. In windowing, shifts in resolution
distribute the labor. The master scans the field
coarsely, for promising featuresintrusions,
protrusions, holes
then moves in slaves for a detailed investigation.

A PUMA at the University of Rhode Island
now solves several bin-picking problems. It quickly selects
for graspability, retrieving a sequence of parts
from an overlapping mass. The arms parallel jaws
know when a part is between them, and close around it gently.
A bottom-up system learns like a newborn. The first
flexible net,
SOPHIA, used 12 SLAMS and had only one discriminator.
The commercially available WISARD has no state structure,
yet it achieves 100% discrimination
among target faces, through its powers of generalization.
Trained and tested on live images, it is not disconcerted
by changes in light, spectacles, grimaces
or false mustaches. Even a single-layer net displays
certain features of intentionality: the sudden
catastrophic leap from estimate to decision, when
the first burst of feedback confirms recognition
of a dubious pattern. The high-resolution window
homes in on the key feature, without camera-shake: the dot
or cross-bar blown up on top of the vertical slash,
the suspects face, framed and magnified over the crowd.

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
The New Man of 4chan

3 Angela Nagle
The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,
announced one commenter last year on the giddily offensive /r9k/ board
of the notorious, anarchic site 4chan. This is only the beginning. The
Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms
to become martyrs to this revolution. The post, dated October 1, was
referring to the news that twenty-six-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer
had killed nine classmates and injured nine others before shooting him-
self at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.
The night before the shooting, an earlier post on /r9k/ had, in
veiled but ominous terms, warned fellow commenters from the North-
western United States that it would be a good idea to steer clear of
school that day. The implication was not lost on the /r9k/ community.
The first responder in the thread asked, Is the beta uprising finally
going down? while others encouraged the anonymous poster and
gave him tips on how to conduct a mass shooting. The apparent link
between the post and the killer remains under FBI investigation, but
in the immediate wake of Harper-Mercers rampage, a number of the
boards users hailed it as a victory for the beta rebellion.
The details that emerged about Harper-Mercers online life made
it difficult not to resort to stereotyping. On a dating site, he had listed
pop-culture obsessions typical of beta shut-ins, including internet,
killing zombies, movies, music, reading, and added that he lived with
parents. His profile specified that he was looking for a companion
with a shared set of personality traits: introvert, loner, lover, geek,
nerd. The term beta, in the circles Harper-Mercer frequented, is
an ironic inversion of the fabled swagger of the alpha male. Whereas
alphas tend to be macho, sporty, and mainstream in their tastes, betas
see themselves as less dominant males, withdrawn, obsessional, and
curatorial in their cultural habits.
Withdrawn does not necessarily imply peaceable, however, which
is where the uprising and rebellion parts of the beta identity come
in. This particular brand of computer-enabled detachment easily seeps
into a mindset of entitled violence and is accompanied by a mixture of
influences from the far right to the countercultural left. The email on
Harper-Mercers dating profile was ironcross45@gmail.com, but he was
also a member of a group named Doesnt Like Organized Religion,

K AT H Y B OA K E

Can traditional ideas about and blogged that The material world is a lie
... Most people will spend hours standing
gender really be bursting forth
in front of stores just to buy a new iphone.
from an Internet culture that Harper-Mercer left behind a manifesto in
which he described his feelings of social and
also features a male My Little
sexual rejection and showed he had studied
Pony fandom? mass killers. It was reminiscent of the video
circulated widely among exponents of the beta
9 rebellionrecorded by virgin killer Elliot
Rodger, who murdered six victims and injured fourteen more in Isla
Vista, California, explaining how his own shooting spree was rooted in
sexual frustration.
Going Beta
On mens rights sites and in some geeky subcultures, beta male is a
common term of identification, one of both belonging and self-mock-
ery. It has become a popular meme on 4chans recreationally obnoxious
/b/ board, a precursor to /r9k/ that produced hacker collectives such
as Anonymous while also incubating scores of anti-feminist online
attacks in recent years. Know Your Meme records the earliest use of
the term beta uprising in 2011, on the mens rights movement blog
Fight for Justice. From around 2013, the beta-male uprising was a reg-
ular topic among 4chan users; it encompassed elaborate fantasies of
revenge against attractive women, macho jocks, and other normies
with majority tastes and attitudes.
The post alleged to be Harper-Mercers school shooting alert
came with an image of Pepe the Frog, a character lifted from the Matt
Furie comic strip Boys Club, angrily brandishing a gun. This, too, was a
trope of the beta rebellion: in his original cartoon form, Pepe was a sad
sack, prone to bouts of humiliation. But as his froggy visage got meme-
fied on 4chan, he took on a distinctly more menacing aspect. Pepe
became a favorite icon of last-straw ranters spewing extreme misogyny,
racism, and vengefulness. Much to the irritation of geeks, Pepe also
became popular among normies, which is why you can find videos on
YouTube of angry Pepe in a red rage accompanied by variations of the
male scream, Normies! Get the fuck off my board!
Overwrought digital threats and confrontational online rheto-
ric are nearly as old as the Internet itself. Posters on 4chan/b/s more
transgressive threads regularly claim that they are about to do terrible
things to themselves and others.
But some posters are also acting out those fantasies. Among the
stale memes, repeat posts, true-life confessions, pre-rampage tip-offs,

and cock-and-bull stories that make beta forums so impenetrable,
sometimes even insiders cant tell which are which. In November 2014,
an anonymous 4chan user submitted several photos of what appeared
to be a womans naked and strangled corpse, along with a confession:
Turns out its way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks
on the movies ... Her son will be home from school soon. Hell find her
then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I
bought a bb gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, Ill pull
it and it will be suicide by cop. I understand the doubts. Just check the
fucking news. I have to lose my phone now.
Later that same day, police in Port Orchard, Washington,
announced that they were investigating a suspected homicide, after
the thirteen-year-old son of a woman in her early thirties found her
dead in their home. The victim, Amber Lynn Coplin, was indeed the
woman in the 4chan/b/ photo. Her thirty-three-year-old live-in boy-
friend, David Michael Kalac, was arrested after a brief police chase and
charged with murder. Every dead body on 4chan is a joke, unless it isnt.
Elliot Rodgers rampage, too, was real. On a spring day in 2014,
Rodger stabbed his roommates, drove to a University of California
Santa Barbara sorority house, and hammered on the door. When
he was denied entry, Rodger shot at people outside, in the end kill-
ing mostly men. The rampage ended when he crashed into a parked
vehicle; police found him dead in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot
wound in his head.
Midway through his massacre, Rodger uploaded a final video to
YouTube, titled Elliot Rodgers Retribution, outlining his purpose.
He announced his desire to punish women for rejecting him and
railed against sexually active, macho, dominant men, whom he called
brutes and animals:
Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day
of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity,
against all of you ... Ive been through college for two and a half years,
more than that actually, and Im still a virgin. It has been very torturous
... I dont know why you girls arent attracted to me, but I will punish
you all for it ... Im the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these
obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.
The 4Chan War on Women

Rodger also left behind a lengthy autobiographical manuscript, titled
My Twisted World. In it, he describes his frustration at not being able
to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women, and his contempt for ethnic

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
minorities and interracial couples (in spite of his own mixed-race back-
ground). The manifesto specifically mentions a War on Women,
which will unfold in two stages: The Second Phase will take place on
the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre ... My
War on Women ... I will attack the very girls who represent everything
I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB.
On 4chan/b/, the day the story broke, Rodger was the subject of
much fevered attention. One contributor posted a selfie of Rodger
from his Facebook profile and wrote, Elliot Rodger, the supreme gen-
tleman, was part of /b/. Discuss. That dude was fairly good looking,
one commenter remarked. He mustve just been the beta to end all
betas if he never got laid. Another commenter wrote, Manifesto had
I do not forget, I do not forgive and kissless virgin, etc., he was a /b/
tard. Rodgers I do not forget, I do not forgive was likely a reference
to a sign-off used by Anonymous, which emerged from 4chan/b/. Anon-
ymous has gone on to do some activist work that intersects with fem-
inist concerns, including the exposure of the names of those allegedly
involved in the ugly Steubenville, Ohio, rape case. But the Anonymous
doxer who exposed the high school footballers went on to be accused
of sexual assault himself. Whoever the target, the groups vengeful sen-
sibility survives, not only in the Guy Fawkes iconography that has been
adopted by various protest movements, but also in the beta rebellions
reformist rhetoric.
Rodger identified as an incel, or involuntarily celibate. He would
troll Bodybuilding.coms miscellaneous section posting comments
like Men shouldnt have to look and act like big, animalistic beasts
to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just
shows that their minds havent fully evolved. After the Harper-Mer-
cer shootings, one 4chan commenter wrote, /r9k/ needs a new martyr
alongside our hallowed Elliot.
Rodgers online identity is traceable to several other forums, too,
including the now-defunct PUAhate, where men laid into pick-up
artists for putting women on a pedestal and occasionally espoused
hardcore separatism in the vein of the Men Going Their Own Way
movement. Rodger wrote in his long manifesto that on PUAhate he
had discovered a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like
me. He also frequented a subreddit for incels called ForeverAlone
(referencing a meme made popular by 4chan) and one called TheRed-
Pill (alluding to The Matrix movie), which hosts anti-feminist men
and men who take a dim view of what is involved in the game of sexual
conquest. After the Rodger massacre, a thread appeared on TheRed-
Pill called Omega man kills 6 and commits suicide. One commenter

on the thread wrote:
If you read his manifesto, you also learn that he pedestaled pussy to an
extreme degree basically his entire life since puberty. It turned into hat-
ing of women and sex in the very end, but it was twenty years of making
vagina the Holy Grail of his existence that really fucked up his head.
To which another commenter responded:
Feminists and religious zealots strive to take all sexual outlets away from
men, be it prostitution, sex travel, or mere pornography for masturba-
tion. Thus these politicians bear partial responsibility for increasing
sex crimes against women and children, and probably for the mayhem
created by Elliot Rodger.
And another, sympathetically:
He was incel. Lonliness [sic] and extreme sexual deprivation can have
extremely serious psychological effects on some people ... this kind of
shit breaks a young mans spirit.

Like Uber, but for Violent Misogyny
Its easy to mistake the beta rebellion for a youthful, but otherwise
undifferentiated, variation on the bad old tradition of patriarchy. Yet
the phenomenon bears the unmistakable signs of a new, net-bred brand
of misogyny. It exists squarely within the libertarian ethos that infused
computer cultures spanning from the early, back-to-the-land, frontier
hacker culture of the sixties and seventies to the Californian rebel cap-
italism of the dotcom neoliberalism of the nineties.
As the same frontier sensibility that characterized early Internet
culture also runs through American gun culture, its no great surprise
that the rites of gun worship and principled geek isolation should over-
lapor that they should find expression in the targeting of women
whom beta men believe are dedicated to a matriarchal thwarting of
male freedom and desire. But this seamless convergence of women-de-
monizing forces is, indeed, something new under the sun, an innova-
tive incarnation of the free-floating male grievance that, as weve seen,
metastasizes through culture. Its striking, then, to note just how thor-
oughly both the press and the social mediacentric feminist commen-
tariat have consigned the beta rebellion to the dustbin of outmoded
patriarchytreating it as an obsolescing bug, as opposed to a distress-
ing feature, of todays Internet discourse.
In her 2013 book Cybersexism, feminist journalist Laurie Penny
admits that the culture of digital woman-hating does indeed have
a surface affinity with geek culture, but then goes on to suggest that
online misogyny is a conservative remnant of the pre-Internet past.
We have a brave new world which looks far too much like the cruel
old world and recreates offline prejudices, she writes.
Academics have echoed this view, characterizing online misogyny
as the politics of conservatism and patriarchy reproducing itself anach-
ronistically in new media, or as just another emanation of hegemonic
masculinity. For example, in a study of gender and age bias in online
communities, Jonathan Warren, Sharon Stoerger, and Ken Kelley
wrote that many age-old forms of discrimination appear to have been
preserved. Pamela Turton-Turner analyzed recent online hate cam-
paigns mobilized against females, which, she argues, are symptom-
atic of a broader normalization of old-style sexism. Adrienne Shaw
agreed in an article titled The Internet Is Full of Jerks Because the
World Is Full of Jerks, stating that misogyny, racism, homophobia,
etc. were not invented by the internet.
In response to Harper-Mercers massacre, Salon ran the headline,
Toxic Masculinity Is Tearing Us Apart. The Huffington Post and Ms.
magazine ran articles declaring the problem was masculinity, mascu-

linity, masculinity. Writer Soraya Chemaly Some have argued that feminism
asserted, What we really need ... is a pub-
has created cruel conditions
lic conversation about hegemonic masculin-
ity in the United States. ... Schools, parents, for men who are geeky. But surely
coaches and religious communities all need
the idea that geeks are a victim
to be thinking deeply about how traditional
ideas about gender and gender stereotypes group is out of date today.
work to create a national culture.
9
All the Young Dudes
But how, exactly, does hegemonic masculinity accurately sum up a
scene explicitly identifying as beta male? And can traditional ideas
about gender really be bursting forth from an Internet culture that
also features gender-bending pornography, discussions about bisex-
ual curiosity, and a male My Little Pony fandom? Whats more, can
a retreat from the traditional authority of the nuclear family into
an extended adolescence of videogames, porn, and pranks really be
described as patriarchal?
Those seeking to defend their ideological turf will say that the kill-
ers are measuring themselves against a damaging masculine ideal, but at
what point is this stretching the hegemonic masculinity theory so far that
it becomes tautologicaland a rote explanation for all bad male behavior?
In fact, a great deal about the beta-male rebellion runs counter to
theories of masculinity advanced by scholars like R. W. Connell and
Michael Kimmel. In her 2005 book Masculinities, Connell lists the
words nerd and geek among the terms that stigmatize marginal
masculinities. The beta style draws from a countercultural genealogy
and identifies itself against feminism but also against social conserva-
tism, political correctness, mainstream consumer culture, and most
important, against hegemonic masculinity itself.
The self-organized corps of women-hating men, by the lights of con-
ventional academic-feminist theory, should be united in the repression
of any and all gay male tendencies expressed online. But 4chan/b/ traffics
openly in gay and trans pornography and hosts discussions of bisexual
attraction. During one such discussion, a /b/ user wrote, Why cant you
just tell yourself youre bi and be happy with that? When I first came here
/b/ made me question my sexuality real fucking fast. Just admit youre
half faggot half straight and be done with it, no shame in that.
Similarly, the beta view of gender is complicated by an anti-
mass-culture outlook. As copycat threats multiplied on /r9k/ after
the Harper-Mercer shootings, one commenter advised, Make sure
you got molotovs. it is really easy and painfully [sic] way to kill many

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
normies. Another wrote that Chads and Staceys should be tar-

geted, referencing a 4chan meme devoted to a parodic figure known
as Chad Thundercock. As his name none too subtly suggests, Chad is
a stand-in for the young, attractive, muscular football player claiming
dominance over the beta-world in the contest for sexual success with
women. Chad and his female equivalent Stacey are embodiments of the
normies memeand are typically depicted as sports playing, small-
town ciphers of mass culture with generic tastes. One famous post,
accompanied by an image of a football player and cheerleader kissing,
describes with relish a fantasy of the couple going home together in his
Ford, him crashing, and Staceys last moments spent in utter agony as
she tries to tear her bronze arm free.
Remedial Class
As one patiently surveys the varieties of online expression favored by
beta males, it becomes apparent that, in addition to their all too pal-
pable sense of self-loathing, theyre further actuated by a pronounced
sort of class contempt. One key source of their rageagainst both the
sexual pecking order and society at largeis that their own sense of
superiority over the masses, the unspecial normies, is not reflected
back to them by others in real life.
Beta-male defenders like Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos
have argued that feminism has created cruel conditions for men who
are different and geeky, while some feminists criticize the beta rebel-
lion even as they regard the marginalized masculinities at its heart as a
progressive forcea kind of counter-hegemonic corrective to an older
notion of masculinity based on physical strength and machismo. But
surely the idea that geeks are a victim group is out of date today. The
American high school movie clich has for several decades been the
story of the geeks and the jocks. Invariably in such popcult fables, we
see how the bullied members of the former group go on to prosper and
thrive in adulthood with their superior intellect, while the discred-
ited high school impresarios of physical prowess languish in small-
town backwaters, mired in dead-end blue-collar jobs and unhappy
marriages. The hard-to-miss moral is that the geeks shall inherit the
earthand that the athletic, macho, blue-collar male, once admired
for his physical strength, now deserves his own decline.
The beta insurgents likewise heap scorn on the conservative cul-
tural mores of the small-town and blue-collar populace. Indeed, the
beta-sphere is almost as fiercely opposed to conservative family values
as it is to feminism. For a pretty typical example from 4chan, a grue-
some image was once posted on /b/ of an aborted fetus, lying on a doc-

tors table beside instruments and blood. The poster who uploaded
the photo wrote, I am undecided about abortion. On the one hand I
support it because it is killing children. On the other, it gives women a
choice. Commenting on another image of a severely handicapped new-
born child accompanied by a discussion of whether the mother should
have had an abortion, another 4chan/b/ commenter wrote, This is lit-
erally a sack of cells with a heart beat, it is not a human being. This
is just Christfags being Christfags. Outsiders to the subculture will
no doubt be confused by this term, which seems to be mocking pro-
life conservatives as gay, but fags as a suffix is ubiquitous on 4chan
and exists alongside discussions of gay sexual fantasies and a general
knowing awareness of the failed masculinity and outsider identity of
those using the term. Like much of beta culture, this practice tries to
carve out a cultural politics that rejects both the strict moral values
of conservatism and the constraining political correctness that beta
adherents associate with feminism and liberalism.
In this way, the betas dont easily map onto either end of the Kultur-
kampf, and are therefore liable to confuse ideologues. A notorious hacker
and troll known as weev was the primary orchestrator of attacks against
female technology blogger, programmer, and game developer Kathy
Sierra in 2007. The weev offensive, joined by many others in the hack-
er-troll milieu, involved doxing, posting personal details about Sier-
ras family and home address among highly sexualized and threatening
messages, like photoshopped images of her with a noose beside her head,
with a shooting target pointed at her face, and being gagged with a thong.
In response to the attacks, Sierra closed down her blog and with-
drew from speaking engagements and public life. In the time since the
attack, weev has since become famous for hacking a phone compa-
nya maneuver that triggered a Twitter-based #freeweev campaign,
which gained support from prominent progressive endorsers such as
Laurie Penny and Gabriella Coleman. Embarrassingly for those who
expressed the view, fashionable in the heyday of the Occupy move-
ment, that 4chan/b/ is a counter-hegemonic space and that trolls in
the 4chan/b/ vein are, as Coleman argued, inheritors of the Dadaist and
Situationist traditions, weev is a fascist sympathizer with a swastika
tattoo on his chest. Penny claimed to be unaware of his far-right views,
while Coleman not only continues to defend his rights as a hacker, but
also presents him as an endearingly impish figure in her latest book.
Fascism, for the Lulz

The casual racism embedded in this geeky beta world comes wrapped in
several layers of self-protective irony, with black masculinity treated as

Can a retreat from both the object of jealousy and of hatred. Com-
mentators like Coleman have lent a certain
the traditional authority
credibility to the beta uprisings contention
of the nuclear family into that its motives are misinterpreted by a public
that fails to grasp its unique brand of postmod-
an extended adolescence
ern wit. Some people, they say, simply dont
of videogames, porn, get that the betas are in it strictly for the lulz.
But while forum chatter certainly doesnt inev-
and pranks really be
itably escalate to violence and even the worst
described as patriarchal? speech does not amount to violence, some of
4chans self-described geeks have taken their
9 faux-ironic bigotry offline. After the Novem-
ber 2015 shooting of five Black Lives Matter
protesters in Minneapolis, a video emerged of two of the men involved,
clad in balaclavas and driving to the BLM protest, saying, We just
wanted to give everyone a heads up on /pol/referring to the politics
board on 4chan, a group that partially overlaps with the /b/ community.
The speaker then points at the camera and says, Stay white.
Significantly, weevs sensibility fuses elements of the anti-establish-
ment far right, like the militia movement (which styles its anti-govern-
ment activities a form of leaderless resistance), with the left-leaning
vision of the old anti-establishment counterculture. In a recent mag-
azine interview, a journalist spoke to some of the hackers and trolls of
Anonymous, LulzSec, and 4chan/b/, including weev (a.k.a. Andrew
Auernheimer):
Im at a restaurant with Auernheimer and his friend Jaime Cochrane,

who is a softly spoken transgender troll from the group Rustle League,
so-called because thats what trolling is, its rustling peoples jimmies.
Theyre explaining to me their version of what trolls do. Its not bully-
ing, says Cochrane. Its satirical performance art. Cyberbullies who
drive teenagers to suicide have crossed the line. However, trolling is the
more high-minded business of what Cochrane calls aggressive rheto-
ric, a tradition that goes back to Socrates, Jesus and the trickster god
Loki, from Norse mythology. Auernheimer likens himself to Shake-
speares Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman.
They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to
make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.
Along with the presupposition that misogyny must spring from

conservatism often comes the notion that transgression and counter-
cultural gestures are somehow incompatible with it. But women have
long figured in the countercultural imagination as agents of confor-

mity and avatars of a vain, mindless consumerism. It seems to me that
this is the tradition that 4chan and the wider beta-sphere, perhaps
unknowingly, are really carrying on. Simon Reynolds and Joy Presss
brilliant 1996 study The Sex Revolts charts how the attribution of blame
to women for the bland conformism of post-war America influenced
the counterculture. In 1942s Generation of Vipers, the pulp novelist and
social critic Philip Wylie described an America in a state of national
decline and shallow materialism due to the feminizing influence of the
destroying mother. Wylie described feminized mass culturea.k.a.
momismas matriarchal sentimentality, goo slop, hidden cruelty.
Norman Mailer presented the psychopath as a noble and transgres-
sive figure, who used his charismatic force to oppose feminized mass
culture and emasculating consumer capitalism. We are victims of a
matriarchy here my friends, says Harding, a psychiatric inmate in Ken
Keseys classic counterculture novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.
And in Fight Clubthe 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel famously adapted
to the screen in 1999 by David Fincher and invoked as a quasi-biblical
authority on 4chanTyler Durdens pink soap, made from the recon-
stituted fat of women who have undergone liposuction and had it con-
temptuously [sold] back to them, acts as a potent symbol.
Here the counterculturalists of the beta world are tapping into
a misogynic traditiononly its aligned with the bohemian left, not
the buttoned-down right. Long before the postwar counterculture
emerged, Emma Bovary symbolized the dreary and banal feminine
massification of culture for nineteenth-century culture rebels. Chan-
neling this same tradition, the beta world inveighs continually against
the advanced feminization and massification of Internet-age culture.
This is why their misogyny sits so comfortably alongside their mix of
geeky and countercultural styles and why the pat hegemonic mascu-
linity answer is so inadequate.
The Tangled Net

Today, we see the weirdly parallel ascent of an Internet-centric fem-
inism that, like the beta revolution, glories in geeky countercultural
elitism, and whose most enthusiastic partisans spend a great deal of
time attacking other women for being insufficiently radical. Many of
these feminists are active on the microblogging site Tumblr, and they
are less apt to write about material issues that have concerned left-wing
feminists for decades, like parental leave or unequal pay, than about
the online obsession du jour: from feminist video games to coloring
books, cosplay, knitting, cupcakes, microaggressions, trigger warn-
ings, no-platforming, bi-erasure, and the fastidious avoidance of any-

Women have long figured in the countercultural imagination as
agents of conformity and avatars of a vain, mindless consumerism.
This is the tradition that 4chan is really carrying on.
9
thing remotely resembling cultural appropriation. The recent popular
left candidates Bernie Sanders (in the United States) and Jeremy Cor-
byn (in the United Kingdom) have come in for heavy rhetorical fire
from this new wave of wired feminists, who deride them both as retro-
grade prophets of brocialism.
In response to the Oregon attacks, Milo Yiannopoulos wrote,
Todays man-punishing, feminized culture is creating killers. ... Why
not harness that [masculine] power and set men back to work? To make
America great again, we need to rescue our lost generation of young
males. According to a wealth of scholarship cited by Steven Pinker in
The Better Angels of Our Nature, the feminization of culture is a feature
of the decline of violence, not a cause, and there are many countries
with better work and childcare conditions for women than America
that are not producing mass shooters. Yiannopoulos conflates two
enemy forces: Young geeks may be the losers in the cruel and chaotic
modern free market of sexual choice, but they are the relative winners
in the dominant economic ideology of the day. It is the geeksthose
who merged the counterculture with information technology in the
1990swho have already inherited the earth.
In the information age, the tastes and values of geeks are elevated
above the masculine virtues of physical strength and material produc-
tivity that preceded them. Today, the market ideology of the informa-
tion society is ascendantparticularly with its main Anglophone chal-
lengers tarred as brocialistsand it is immensely comfortable with its
cultural power, which means that it happily accommodates transgres-
sion, gender fluidity, self-expression, and an abundant choice of niche
online subcultural identities. Its been a depressing spectacle to see
two post-political, economically illiterate forms of subcultural identity
politicsTumblr feminist and beta/hacker anti-feministdoing battle
online. This feminism certainly has things to answer for; in addition
to its penchant for sabotaging its own allies, it must be challenged on
the damage it has done to university life with its militant opposition
to free speech. But only one side of this new Internet gender rivalry is
producing killers, and despite what polemicists such as Yiannopoulos
are saying, it isnt the feminists.t

E x h i b i t C Brad Holland
Hunter. BRAD HOLLAND

Story
The Sunstroke
6 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
W hat is a vacation by the sea, if not a return to eternal youth? Every

summer, land-locked Muscovites flock to the Black Sea to face rowdy
crowds, suspect food, infernal partying and drinking, horrible beach
musicall for the sake of a dazzling day in the water followed by an
equally dazzling evening when the skin tingles as though on fire, and
a vacationers new face looks out young and rosy from the mirror.
Whether she jumps off the pier, descends the steps cautiously, or runs
into the water happily, intoxicated with coolness and freedom, the
result is the same. Out of the sea foam emerges a goddess, a Venus,
invisible at first, but by the end of the vacation fully hatched, like a
snake that has shed its skin. (There are lots of recipes and lotions, but
mistakes can still happen, and the old skin may peel unevenly. The
new face can resemble a young potato, but that can be corrected by
subsequent total sunbathing.)
The daily grind has been shoved aside, replaced by endless
aquatic vistas. Soon, new routines and concerns take over paradise,
along with petty complaints that this is wrong and that is bad, all the
beach cots are taken, a drinking party is raising hell, blaring music
on a boom box, and so on. Next come endless arguments with family
members who drag their feet in the morning and cant leave for the
beach on time to avoid the afternoon heat and so quickly get burnt.
Children in the water are a torture to a parental heart; one needs to
keep constant watch on the shore or else swim in circles in shallow
water without any pleasure, like a bodyguard, and to look for sun-
burns, apply the lotion, send the child into the shade despite loud
protests. But the process of regeneration is taking place. A mass of
golden hair falls over the shoulders like a cloak; eyes lighten against
the tan skin; leg muscles tauten like ropes; the children grow health-
ier by the minute, although not without contracting bronchitis first,
or an ear infection, or a simple cold.
The precious days are rolling past; more than half are gone. The
husband spends most evenings with his pal from last season, a prom-
inent scientist like himself, although in a different field; both are
nominated to the Academy of Science. The wife receives friends and
acquaintances; the children join their own little cabal.
Its fun!

Vera is
responsible
for coffee
and dessert.
Hooray!
H A ZE L L E E SA N TI N O 9
In the evening, the family reconvenes. Shower; quiet haggling over
the upcoming hike to the mountaintop to watch the sunriseMir-
bala, their local friend, is leading the group.
The husband refuses definitively. The children make faces: they
have plans, a girl in their gang is having a birthday party, they need
money for a present and cake, please, Mom.
All this means that the following night, Vera, the wife, is free
and there she is, marching uphill with a group of seven adults, Mirbala
leading the way. Each carries a jacket and a bedroll. Mirbala is also
bringing marinated lamb, for kebobs; Serezha is dragging wine. There
is also Serezhas gangly wife, plus Mirbalas mysterious girlfriend in
large earrings and a turban, plus a shy woman, ValyaVera will make
friends with her. A friend of Serezhas is carrying the grill and skew-
ers. Vera is responsible for coffee and dessert. Hooray! There are three
children, tired and miserable; two belong to Serezha, and the other is
his friends little girl.
Finally, they stop for the night. Fire in the grill, excitement, first
glass of wine, first kebob off the fire. (Not enough marinade, Mirba-
la moans; Enough, enough, shout the women.) The kids are exhaust-

ed; everyone stretches out on their bedrolls, closing their eyes, but
almost immediately Mirbala gets them up; again, the sleepy fussing of
the kids; the little girl cant wake up and her father touchingly carries
her on his shoulderswhat a cute pair!
At dawn the four women are not the same tireless vixens they
were last night. They look like witches, with stringy hair, red eyes,
green mugs. The exception is the turbaned girlfriend who is fresh as a
rose, clearly a mistress of her face; its so important for a woman. (In
the evening, a woman is capable of anything, but in the morning, the
mirror reflects something unrecognizable!) They are marching again,
up and up, in the morning twilight, breathing cool, dewy air, thinking
that every step will have to be retraced. Finally, they are at the top,
embraced by a fresh breeze, waiting for the sun to rise.
And soon it appears, just the pink trembling corner, and the sky
catches fire, hooray! Slowly the star rises, straightening its dazzling
shoulders; its sweltering mass leaves the sea valley and fills the
background. Happiness. Tears of delight bubble in the chest, the shy
new friend is sharing the experience, the old girlfriends are busy with
themselves. Lord, Lord.
They are descending now, flying down the beaten forest path,
toward breakfast, beach, a swim, a cot under an awning, a nap. Hap-
piness.
Later, she tries to tell her husband and children what she has wit-
nessed that morning. But they arent listening. The girls had food poi-
soning at the birthday party and didnt go to breakfast. Vera, full of
energy after a sleepless night, races to the dining hall to fetch them all
breakfast, which they refuse, so she makes them tea, but the husband
makes coffee for himself, takes a long look at his wife and suddenly
declares, loudly and clearly: You are so healthy, one could beat you on
the pavement and nothing would happen.
Thats right, on the pavement, Vera agrees lightly and leaves for
the beach, where her new friend, Valya, has been guarding a cot for her.
Naturally, the children arrive at the beach in the worst afternoon
heat, splash around sleepily. Vera has to control them unobtrusively.
Her husband makes an entrance, too, drops his stuff near the family
cot, and immediately moves to the next awning, where the other guys
are congregating. Mirbala and his harem have crawled home to sleep.
But the happiness experienced at dawn, the difficulties overcome,
the reward in the form of a new sun (she looks at it suddenly and
thinks, Hi, I saw you waking up!), continue their magical effect all day.
Vera feels contented. She doesnt concern herself too much with

domestic problems. Let it all flow, she thinks. She shoves those prob- Leg muscles
lems into a far corner and allows herself another night of freedom,
tauten like ropes;
which she spends on a porch, surrounded by friends from previous
vacations: Mirbala, the turban, Serezha and Serezhas friend with the the children grow
little girl and a beautiful wife, plus another girlfriend with her hus-
healthier by the
band, and the shy Valya. Other women treat Valya with established
condescension, but she doesnt seem to mind, she perches shyly on the minute, although
edge of her chair, takes little sips of wine, like some poor relative. Vera
not without
feels wonderful, she is exaggeratedly nice to Valya, all these women
are her friends from previous vacations, she wants everyone to be contracting
friends. Her festive mood wont leave her.
bronchitis first.
She reunites with her family late at night, when the kids are al-
ready in bed with unwashed feet (sheets are full of sand; little darlings 9
refuse to wash in mamas absence). With a light heart, Vera settles
down for the night and falls asleep instantly, without the usual noc-
turnal reading and struggle with mosquitoes.
And whats there to lose sleep about? The girls are almost grown,
ten and thirteen, and the husband, too, has grown, nursed almost
to the point of self-reliance; hell soon be elected to the Academy.
Everything is rolling smoothly, the future seems to hold nothing but
joyand then the husband announces that Manya is coming to join
them. Manya is his niece, his sisters daughter. The girl has apparently
nowhere to go this summer; that scoundrel, the head of her depart-
ment, refused to sign off on her vacation, demanding sex, so she just
left, lost her position.
M anya arrives. They have rented a room for her near their hotel,
quite a decent room, although without a shower and with a shared
bathroom, so shell have to use theirs. Pale and lethargic Manya,
bespectacled, an exact replica of her mother, accepts her new condi-
tions meekly and joins their household on lawful grounds. She rejects
the food, swims in brief stretches with a seeming distaste, but then
burns up, quickly and thoroughly.
Vera slathers cooling lotion over Manyas freckled, anemic skin,
the weak back muscles, the endless legs. The husband gives Manya his
bed; she is burning with fever. He sleeps on the floor, keeping vigil,
gives her water, while Vera runs out for medicines or to fetch a doctor
or to get food, which Manya rejects. Finally, the doctor allows Manya
a shower. Vera goes in with her to assist; the husband waits outside,
pacing nervously. Vera starts the shower running, turns to the mirror
to apply some cream; behind her Manya fusses with her clothes, gets
into the shower clumsily. Vera turns around to offer assistanceand

Story
encounters a vision. A young goddess is standing under torrents of

water, with breasts like white lilies on a thin golden body, a healthy
profusion of pubic hair, the back a divine shape, like a Greek ampho-
ra. Well. Vera scrapes that back with a sponge, sighs slightly over her
own forty-year-old body. This one is twenty-three.
The vacation ends. Manya develops pneumonia. The husband
stays behind to nurse her, while Vera, healthy and brown, returns with
two healthy, brown girls to an empty Moscow apartment. From there,
two weeks later, they set out on a wide road of disgrace and suffering
because Veras husband and Manya return from the south not alone
but with a baby in the womb.
Oh, horror. Immediately, Manya confesses to her mom.
Across town, Manyas mother is wailing with grief and fury. At
home, the husband is whispering passionately into the phone, sick
with love, barely human. He soon leaves. First, he rents an apartment
where he installs pregnant Manya; then, he demands a divorce and his
share of square feet in the family condo.
The rest follows like a spring flood, sweeping away people and
things. Veras destroyed family eventually finds itself in a tiny apart-
ment with rooms like closets, and brief was the moment when Vera,
tanned like a peach, was showered with compliments at her office; and
on the subway, too, her refreshed beauty attracted looks, for her youth
had indeed returned and, along with it, clingy stares and questions.
But Vera didnt respond. She waited for her husband. And the hus-
band arrived, with Manya.
Time has passed, a boy is growing, a normal child, forever ostracized

by his family and grandparents because his grandmother also happens
to be his aunt; imagine. Veras grown daughters have reconciled them-
selves to the new state of things and visit their father in his new home.
He is a full member of the Academy now, and they bring to him their
petty, mercantile needs.
Vera in the meantime is migrating from hospital to hospital,
from operation to operation, going though chemo, through radiation,
hoping and surviving, while all the time her doctors first question is
ringing in her ears: Has she suffered an injuryor maybe a sunstroke?
Yes, Vera tells her, there was a sunstroke, yes. She wants to say
more, but chokes, falls silent. She wants to say that all she ever wanted
was a little break, a little happiness, to return, to go back. But it didnt
happen that way.t
Translated from the Russian by Anna Summers.

No Need to Argue Anymore
6 Fani Papageorgiou
A piece of you is turning towards the sun.

One, two, three, four we declare a thumb war.
Lady Gwendolen Cecil used up her old evening dresses

by gardening in them.
Cartographers call the blank spaces on maps sleeping beauties.
How to live.
Kalashnikov said, I wish I had invented a lawnmower.
Even the sun looks wrong.
These are early days.
Do we feel light if we make space inside us?

People only speak to get something.
Nothing changes you.
Is truth, water corrupted by lead?

I keep losing
Imagine the Atlantic drained away.
Whatever is wet escapes burning.
Life is to be approached with waltzing moves towards the place

we experience disorder.
So will you stand next to me for the next twenty minutes?
I keep losing
I need my luck turned around.
And then therere the animals pictured on the walls in Lascaux,

the cracks of your own heart.
The holding backa refraction of light from oil slick,
soap bubbles, fish scales.
Fragments of harpoons still found in the desert.
The rustle of things migrating to the brain.
Cairns guiding travelers.
The puddles.

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
Everybody Freeze!
The extropians want your body
3 Corey Pein
Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this
maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the
front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young womans last-
ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of brain
cancer. A sober look at the case would have revealed it to be but the
latest botched mortuary procedure conducted by a gang of creepy scam
artists. Instead, through the good graces of the Times, this grim tale
was spun into an inspirational saga of one persons courageous quest
for a second chance at life, aided by medical visionaries on the verge of
miraculous technological breakthroughs.
Kim Suozzi died at age twenty-three in January 2013. After her first
diagnosis, two years earlier, Suozzi became one of the youngest people
ever* to undergo an expensive form of ritualistic corpse mutilation
called cryonic preservation. In pop culture, cryonics is perhaps best
known as the plot device that transports the schlubby pizza delivery
guy in Matt Groenings animated series Futurama into the thirty-first
century. The decades-old quack procedure, which involves freezing
corpse parts for later resuscitation, was for a long time apocryphally
associated with such wealthy eccentrics as Walt Disney. It then caused
a scandal in 2002 when it was widely reported that the body of baseball
great Ted Williams had gone into deep freeze against the wishes of
some in his family. In recent years, cryonics has regained an entirely
undue aura of respectability as the thought leaders of Silicon Valley
have trained their enterprising, disruptive vision on the conquest of
disease and death.**
Suozzi, an agnostic libertarian and aspiring neuroscientist, began
taking cryonics seriously after discovering the work of the futurologist
Ray Kurzweil through a cognitive science class at Truman State
University in Missouri. After surgery failed to stop the growth of her
brain tumor, Suozzi determined that upon death sheor rather, her
* In spring 2005 a two-year-old Thai girl was frozen by Alcor at the request of her parents after succumbing to a
terminal illness.
** Cryonics, the con job, should not be confused with cryogenics, the science of freezing things, although it fre-
quently is.

J U LI A B R EC K E N R EI D
headwould be frozen and stored for decades, centuries, or millennia

in the hope that one day, diligent, wonder-working doctors would
transplant her consciousness into a new, healthy body, or perhaps onto
a high-capacity hard drive.
As a tech-savvy millennial, Suozzi turned to the chat website
Reddit for help in raising the $80,000 she needed to fulfill her last
wish. That got her well on her way, with about $7,000 reportedly
raised. Cryonics boosters jumped in and helped raise more within their
affluent network. In the end, it worked: Suozzis dismembered remains
were frozen and stored at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in
Scottsdale, Arizona, the worlds largest and most famous cryonics
outfit. And the sad, strange story might have ended there, if not for the
hungry maw of the news business.

A Frozen Tearjerker
In September 2015, more than two years after Suozzis death, the New
York Times ran its lengthy feature story, packed with intimate anec-
dotes from the young womans last days. A classic daily newspaper tear-
jerker, the story ran with a large above-the-fold photo showing Suozzi
and her boyfriend tenderly holding hands in her hospice bed. Times web
designers gave the story the full animated-background treatment, with
hypnotically dancing green and blue dotsan artists interpretation of
neurons firing inside a brainserving to emphasize the pseudoscien-
tific rationale for the attention lavished on this morbid subject. Cant
stop staring at the visualization, one reader said on Twitter. Newspa-
pers from Seattle to London reprised the story, as did countless blogs.
Readers enthused over the fascinating, inspiring, and of course,
heartbreaking tale.
Heartbreaking and fascinating, sure. But readers could find
inspiration in Suozzis story only by choking down a heaping dose of
snake oil to aid in the suspension of disbeliefor by buying into the
banal, cultish philosophy that impels Alcor on its mission.
Not that the Times would give sustained scrutiny to the dark side
of the story. Science reporter Amy Harmons narrative depended upon
the artful omission of the single most pertinent fact: that cryonics is
an utter crock, has always been a crock, and will continue to be a crock
for the foreseeable future, no matter what a handful of contrarian
university-affiliated researchers with a financial stake in the corpse-
freezing racket may claim.
In the hurried fashion of the disclaimers at the end of a
pharmaceutical ad, Harmons story contained the requisite to be sure
paragraph. Other neuroscientists, Harmon wroteactually, pretty
much all of them apart from the self-interested boosters she quoted
most extensivelydo not take [cryonics] seriously. With that fleeting
caveat, plus a few poorly contextualized paragraphs about recent rat-
brain experiments of dubious significance, Harmon was free to focus
on the end-of-life ordeal of a minor social media sensation who ran
a successful crowdfunding campaign. American social mythology
demands that we be ever-optimistic entrepreneurs, even in death.
A Head for Business

The worst obfuscation in the Times story was the claim that the proce-
dure itself went mostly as planned. Judging by Alcors own account
published in its magazine, Cryonics, eighteen months before the Times
reportthe procedure clearly did not go as planned.
In the weeks before her death, Suozzis health was still robust

enough that the hospice shed checked into in Cryonics has regained an entirely
Scottsdale had asked that she leave until she
undue aura of respectability
became more comatose, in the words of the
Cryonics report. To accelerate her own demise, as the thought leaders of Silicon
Suozzi began refusing all food and drink, as
Valley have trained their
Alcor advises members to do when physician-
assisted suicide is not a lawful option. A week disruptive vision on the conquest
later she stopped breathing. Summoned by
of disease and death.
Suozzis boyfriend, Alcors stabilization
team, which included staff, volunteers, and 9
a former paramedic, arrived ahead of the
hospice nurse. At Alcors direction, Suozzi was packed in ice before the
hospice nurse arrived to assess her condition and pronounce her death.
Within minutes of taking custody of the body, the bumbling Alcor
team began experiencing a series of equipment failures. A temperature
monitor didnt work because, as it turned out, the batteries were dead.
Shortly thereafter, their expensive mechanical chest-compression
device stopped functioning. Then, having moved Suozzis body into a
tub of ice, the Alcor team realized theyd forgotten to bring along a
key piece of cooling equipment. Alcors after-action report, compiled
from the haphazard free-form observations of an unnamed but
experienced observer, determined that such mistakes could in the
future be remedied by the use of a checklist. Now theres a thought.
Forty-five minutes after Suozzi was declared dead on the morning
of January 17, 2013, her corpse arrived at Alcor headquarters, where a
crack team of quacks shaved her head and drilled a number of sizable
holes into her skull. Microphones were then inserted in order to detect
the cracking sound of tissue-destroying ice crystalsa freezer-burned
brain being even less useful to the imaginary reincarnators of the
future than an otherwise undamaged one.
At 9:33 a.m., Suozzis body was moved to an operating table. Ten
minutes later, Alcors technophilic necromancers completed cephalic
isolationa euphemistic neologism that means they cut off her head.
Such bloodless jargon obscures the macabre slapstick of the antics in
the morgueer, operating room. As the magazine account went on
to relate:
9:45 a.m.: Cephalon placed in holding ring of cephalic enclosure.

[Translation: They put Suozzis head in a box.]
9:51 a.m.: Cephalon fell out of holding ring.
[Translation: Her head fell out.]
9:52 a.m.: Cephalon repositioned.

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
[Translation: Its a good thing that, as far as anyone knows, none of these
people have been operating on live human bodies.]
Suozzis bodily fluids were flushed and replaced with a specially

formulated and questionably effective cryoprotectantantifreeze.
The official recap alludes to a certain amount of rubbernecking and
bickering consistent with past insider accounts of Alcor operations.
That wasnt all. Unfortunately, the Cryonics report notes, there was
some confusion and disagreement regarding the ideal temperature at
which to perform surgery. One might assume a forty-four-year-old
organization devoted to storing body parts on ice would have reached
some working consensus on this question by now.
In the months ahead of the procedure, Alcor boasted of the
important research data it would glean thanks to Suozzis corporeal
donation. But afterward, the official notetaker lamented that the
only information collected during the procedure came from the
thermometer crammed into her nose.
In Alcors account, the actual success of perfusion in this case
appears negligible. (Perfusion is the term for pumping fluids through
blood vessels.) A CT scan later confirmed that cryoprotective
perfusion was not generally successfulmeaning that Suozzis
brain would not be well preserved. (Or, in Alcor jargon, cortical
cryoprotection was minimal.) In other words, the procedure was a
failure. The Times glossed over this and other facts that undermined its
bizarrely credulous narrative, which tacitly endorsed Alcors ongoing
con joband, by extension, the agenda of its Ayn Randworshiping
techno-fetishist leadership.
The Anti-Death League

Even before the Times report on Suozzi, Alcor had enjoyed a reputa-
tional boost in recent years through similarly credulous reports by way
of PBSs Nova, the BBC, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, Vice, and Wired, among
other media outlets. Perceptions had shifted since 1996, when the Los
Angeles Times referred matter-of-factly to the widely discredited cry-
onics movement.
What changed? What rescued the reputation of cryonics from the
graveyard of forgotten boondoggles?
It wasnt the march of science. Breakthroughs in medicine and
neuroscience had not brought the freeze-dried dream of immortality
any closer to reality.
Nor had cryonics organizations cleaned up their act. Alcors board
of directors, for instance, still boasted a man alleged to have killed his

own mother in order to accelerate her cephalic isolation. Its chief
financial officer, the longtime keeper of the frozen crypts, reportedly
spoke openly of having castrated himself with a small blade while in
college, which did not speak well of his sanity. When the cryonicists
decided to help Kim Suozzi raise money for her decapitation, they
turned to an organization, the Society for Venturism, that was
founded by a former Alcor vice president and affiliated with its current
leadership. The Times duly noted the societys philanthropic efforts
but said nothing about its more questionable aspects. Ventureville,
the societys cryonicist getaway, was once described by a visiting Alcor
whistleblower as one part survivalist camp, one part religious cult
compound, and one part travel motel that struck him as another
Waco waiting to happen. Venturevilles former general manager
described it as a fortress designed to protect cryonicists from the
piracy of vulture-like relatives, friends and lawyers seeking to get
their greedy paws on money which should have paid for a loved ones
cryonic suspension. More pesky facts extraneous to the narrative.
What did change, thanks to the tech bubble, was the combined
net worth of the Silicon Valley software engineers who are in the
demographic sweet spot of the Alcor business model. Here were
young people possessed of the lust for eternal life, who required no PR
blitzes to persuade them of technologys ability to overcome the brute
empirical facts of the human conditionmany with the outsize ego
to cast themselves as Christlike figures awaiting resurrection and the
ample self-confidence to ignore all naysayers.
There was another important factor in the sane-washing* of cry-
onics. Alcor had a new chief executive. In contrast to his predecessors,
this one looked and sounded almost ... normal. And yet he was every
bit the oddball charlatan that his predecessors were, as well as a long-
time keeper of the organizations secrets.
His name was Max More. He had been leading Alcor for about a
year and a half when Suozzi posted her crowdfunding appeal on Reddit.
More was savvy enough to milk maximum value from the promotional
opportunity represented by Suozzis struggles, particularly for a move-
ment overpopulated with reclusive crackpot-geezer clients. Knowing a
good thing when he saw it, More championed Suozzis charity case to
the Alcor board and introduced her as a speaker at Alcors 2012 mem-
ber conference.
But More was much more than an effective publicist who found
himself in the right place at the right time. He was the vanguard leader
* Credit goes to University of CaliforniaBerkeley lecturer in rhetoric Dale Carrico for this coinage.

Forty-five minutes after of a peculiar hyper-libertarian, anti-govern-
ment, techno-utopian ideology that came
Kim Suozzi was declared dead,
to dominate Silicon Valley as the computer
her corpse arrived at Alcor industry cast itself as the panacea for all the
worlds problems.
headquarters, where a crack team
of quacks shaved her head and Ecce Max
A self-styled Nietzschean overman, More,
drilled a number of holes.
now fifty-two, achieved geek-world fame as
9 the bodybuilding strategic philosopher of
the 1990s extropian movement. Mores jour-
nal, Extropy, promoted seafaring secessionism long before Peter Thiels
Seasteading Institute hit the scene. It extolled the subversive potential
of digital currencies before Bitcoin was a twinkle in Satoshi Nakamo-
tos eye. It denounced, with eerie glee, environmentalists, statists,
and deathist cryonics critics who threatened the transhuman future.
Although a failure as an academic and as a businessman, More
must nevertheless be counted among the most influential philosophers
of the past several decades. His fans include corporate oligarchs and
icons of academia. Martine Rothblattthe CEO of the publicly traded
biotech company United Therapeutics, a cofounder of Sirius XM sat-
ellite radio, and an adviser to Alcorpraised More as the best-of-the-
best upon his appointment to lead the cryonics organization. MIT
artificial intelligence pioneer and futurist icon Marvin Minskyalso
an Alcor adviser until his death at eighty-eight this Januaryonce
declared More the heir to Carl Sagan. It speaks to the degradation of
the age that More could be wrong about pretty much everything yet
still be seen as ahead of his time.
Born Max T. OConnor in Bristol, United Kingdom, More was
traumatized at age eleven by his fathers death. My mother tells me I
wouldnt even mention it for many months. I was in complete denial,
he recalled to an audience of prospective cryonicists. More was a medi-
ocre student at his countryside boarding school until he discovered lib-
ertarianism, which kindled his academic ambition and propelled him
to St. Annes College at Oxford.
At a time when libertarianism was still seen as a fringe conserva-
tive sect, especially in Britain, More was as extreme as they came. In a
1983 article for the Libertarian Alliance newsletter, More argued that
non-coercive sex with juveniles is not immoralit is merely a matter of
preference. He wrote:
If there is nothing objectionable about an adult giving a child sweets or

toys, why is giving sexual pleasure wrong? . . . Such an attitude implies
a hatred of all pleasure gained through voluntary exchange to mutual
benefit. . . . It is true that children questioned in court over alleged sex
crimes have often shown great distress. But . . . it is those who wish to
retain the age of consent laws who are responsible for this emotional
pain.
More was only eighteen when he published the essay, and later
sought to distance himself from it without renouncing all of its conclu-
sions. I was a new, hardline radical libertarian, More wrote. Unfor-
tunately, in my foolish arrogance, I wrote about a topic that I was then
too nave to properly understand. However, he affirmed that he was
right to stand up for free speech and to attack inflexible laws regard-
ing maturity and consent.
Mores interest in life-extension was kindled at around the same
time as his politics. This was not coincidental. As former Alcor pres-
ident Mike Darwin Federowicz wrote, cryonics began as a radical
social movement as much as, or more than, as a scientific or technical
undertaking. Early cryonicistsMores original mentors and current
employerssaw their project as a globally transformative idea; one
that would remake, and in some cases abolish, core human institu-
tions such as inheritance, marriage, the family, and religion with the
advent of a freezer-centered society. Such were the ideals that led
the precocious More to found Britains first cryonics organization,
now defunct.
In 1987, More left England to pursue a PhD in philosophy at the
University of Southern California. Almost immediately, he hooked up
with Alcor.
The Dysfunctional Directorate

Among Mores mentors at the organization was a man named Saul
Kent, who had founded New Yorks first cryonics organization in the
mid-1960s and became a supporting member of the California-based
Alcor after that organizations founding in 1972. Kent established a
mail-order supplement empire under the umbrella of the Life Exten-
sion Foundation (not to be confused with the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation). Its catalog today sells pricey bottles that make incredible
claims, such as the Dopa-Mind wild green oat extract capsule that
promises more youthful cognitive health; the dual-action Waist-
Line Control pills made of fermented yeast; and a DNA Protection
Formula containing curcumin, chlorophyllin, wasabi, and broccoli
extract. Life Extension also publishes an eponymous magazine and

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
sells books such as Sexy Forever by Suzanne Somers and FDA: Failure,
Deception, Abuse, a compilation of FDA atrocities detailed by contrib-
utors to the magazine.
Kent poured the profits from this operation into Alcor. He also
raised seed money for the expansion of Alcors cryonics operations
from Stephen Ruddel, a real estate tycoon based in Hollywood, Flor-
ida. Ruddel was a drug-addled recluse who peered down on the city
through a telescope from his squalid penthouse fortress, guarded by
cameras, alarms, and razor wire. A narcotics investigation led police
to send a SWAT team rappelling down via helicopter to Ruddels roof.
Inside the Alcor patrons home they found assorted gold coins, plati-
num bars, a thousand eight-ounce ether bottlesenough to blow up
a city block, but fortunately all empty, police told a local newspaper
along with feathers, wigs and suggestive snapshots of young women,
and a crack cocaine laboratory. Ruddel was captured while attempting
to flee on foot, wearing only black bikini underwear and deck shoes.
That was in 1986. By 1988, Kent himself was in trouble with the
law. After the disastrous alliance with Ruddel, he had moved to Cali-
fornia with his ailing mother, Dora, who was by Alcors account essen-
tially bed-ridden by osteoporosis and senility and confined to a nurs-
ing home. In December 1987, following a bout of pneumonia, Dora
Kent became Alcors eighth patient.
The Riverside County, California, coroners office maintained
that Dora Kent was killed as a result of the drugs injected by Alcor to
prepare her for freezing. Saul Kent and Alcor maintained that she was
already dead, but declined to cooperate with the investigation. River-
side County lost a civil court battle with Alcor over the custody of Dora
Kents remains. Officials abandoned criminal charges and eventually
stopped looking for the key piece of evidence: Dora Kents head. Given
the reported presence of lethal chemicals in the womans bone mar-
row, Alcors legal victories were widely attributed to the incompetence
of local officials. One of the coroners investigators, Alan Kunzman,
wrote and self-published a book about the case, which he deemed a
travesty, titled Mothermelters: The Inside Story of Cryonics and the Dora
Kent Homicide. Saul Kent, still afraid of possible murder charges, has
refused ever since to comment on the case and the whereabouts of his
mothers presumably frozen head.
One of the people present for Dora Kents final moments was a
young Alcor volunteer named Max OConnor, according to Kun-
zman. More himself has written in passing that he assisted with the
Dora Kent operation but otherwise has remained dutifully mum on
the subject.

J U LI A B R EC K E N R EI D
Arguing Against the World

At USC, Mores dissertation, The Diachronic Self, concerned the
nature of death. He rejected cardiac and consciousness based concep-
tions of the end of life as well as the assumption that death was an irre-
versible state. While still at USC, More founded a side business, the
Extropy Institute. Its main purpose was to publish Extropy magazine,
which promoted cryonics and anarcho-capitalism, among other futile
pursuits. The name was another pseudoscientific invention. In con-
trast to entropy, a dictionary word that refers to the observed tendency
of matter and energy to dissipate over time, Mores made-up law of
extropy described the unstoppable drive of humanity toward greater
things. The young philosopher invented a new identity for himself, as
well. In Extropy no. 6, published in 1990, he wrote:

I am no longer Max OConnor. Ive changed my name to Max
More in order to remove the cultural links to Ireland (which connotes
backwardness rather than future-orientation) and to reflect the
extropian desire for MORE LIFE, MORE INTELLIGENCE, MORE
FREEDOM.
Please note, he added, I will be unable to cash checks in my new

name until October, so make them payable to Max OConnor until
then.
Mores business partner, Tom W. Bell, also took a new, extropian
name, signing himself T. O. Morrow. They sold T-shirts, swapped ads
with like-minded organizations such as Alcor and Boing Boingan
obscure Colorado-based neurozine before it was a popular geek-cul-
ture websiteand delighted in the discovery of so many wannabe
superhumans.
The abolition of aging and, finally, all causes of death, is essen-
tial, More wrote. Inspired by Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, he held that
transhumanism was the next great leap in rationalized selfish-
ness, and a necessary corrective to the outdated values and ideas
of humanism. A fellow extropian, the cryptography pioneer Perry
Metzger, formed an email list that was separate yet closely connected
to the magazine.
It almost goes without saying that both the magazine and the list-
serv were a font of terrible ideas. Some were merely frivolous, such as
the proposal for a new calendar for the extropian era. Others were per-
nicious and, unfortunately, persist.
Boundless Expansion
More was not shy about describing his effort as a grandiose scheme to
rewrite the rules of society. We feel a pressing need for memetically
engineering our culture, More wrote.
We want to increase support for life extension, physical and cognitive

augmentation, and combat statism, and paternalism. Especially
important in the 1990s is combating the false doom-mongering of the
apocalyptic environmentalists. These anti-growth, anti-market, anti-
freedom, back-to-the-Pleistocene forces threaten all that we believe in.
Extropianism was a sort of caricature of nineties capitalist excess.

Its first principle, as presented in one of Mores manifestos, was
boundless expansion. Addled by the new potential of the Internet,
the apostles of extropianism imagined that their movement would
turn into something like a home shopping network for self-actual-

ization. The extropian commitment to tech- Extropianism was a sort of
nology promised more intelligence, wisdom,
caricature of nineties capitalist
and personal power, an unlimited lifespan,
and removal of natural, social, biological, and excess. Its first principle, as
psychological limits to self-actualization and
presented in one of Max Mores
self-realization.
Most extropians were content to enthuse manifestos, was
over how awesome eternal life would be once
boundless expansion.
they assumed control of their indestructible
cyborg bodies. Others, however, flirted with 9
totalitarianism and called for genocide in the
service of the Singularity.
One dark tirade along those lines kicked off in 1998 in a discussion
thread about a possible extropian political party. I think we should
take a few things into account, a pseudonymous extropian wrote:
1. People are stupid

The writer held that the sublime extropian ends justified any and
all means, including lying, cheating and media propaganda. He urged
the abandonment of the usual Libertarian everyone should be free
nonsense in favor of a you should do as we say program. Forget
Democracy, Totalitarianism is the only route a modern party should
take, he went on. Were not here to make a better world were here to
make a better self. Moreover, it would be necessary for the extropian
master race to cull the herd.
At this point many of you may think Im joking, the extropian
wrote. Im not.
More chimed in to say he found such an approach repellent, but
went on to recommend a sci-fi novel, Slant by Greg Bear, in which the
extropians were given credit for inspiring just such a future totali-
tarian movement. But rhetorical qualifications aside, there was no
escape from the abyss More had swan-dived into. Drawn together by
the Internet, a giddy cohort of devotees believed a quantum upgrade
of the human software was in the offingone that readily justified
Mores heated dismissal of outdated values and his rapturous visions
of immortal bermenschen pursuing their chosen genius-agendas with-
out an obligation to the masses. Indeed, extropians rarely expressed
anything but contempt for the billions of people who failed to heed
their boundlessly life-expanding vision.
On the subject of cryonics, at least, More still shares his comrades

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
contempt for nonbelievers. It may seem like a strange thing to do,

More said at a recent gathering of fellow life-extension enthusiasts. It
may seem unconventional or peculiar. Thats only because people are
stupid.
Genocide for Progress!

The problem with stupid people, from the extropian point of view, is
that they get in the way. Another example of extropian exceptionalism
was posted to the listserv after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Titled
TERRORISM: Is genocide the logical solution? the authors answer
was decisive: Yes! Humanitys imperative is to ensure the elimina-
tion of aging and death and the feasibility of uploading our minds into
much more robust hardware, according to this visionary. As people of
Afghanistan were highly unlikely to advance that goal, the value of
their lives is negative. Therefore, murdering twenty-five million peo-
ple would be entirely justified if it could accelerate the arrival of those
future technologies, even by a mere six months.
From a rational position . . . a plan of genocide to bury the country in

rubble seems justified. Is this feasible? It would appear to be the case.
100 Minutemann [sic] III ICBMs could launch 300+ Ktons each at
Afganistan [sic]. This roughly translates to over 1 ton TNT/person.
The architect of this insane genocidal screed was no marginal

misanthrope, no illiterate barstool general. He was a successful Silicon
Valley engineer named Robert J. Bradbury, a Harvard dropout and
programmer who had been employee No. 28 at Oraclethe worlds
second-largest software company after Microsoftand went on to
found Aeiveos, a private corporation devoted to quixotic life-exten-
sion research. Aeiveos was bankrolled by Bradburys former employer,
Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, who had a personal fortune esti-
mated at $56 billion and a well-documented obsession with finding the
real-life fountain of youth. Bradburys friends and business associates
included luminaries of the transhumanism scene and, while some con-
demned such amoral outbursts, these sentiments were not uncommon
in the extropian milieu.
For his part, More demonstrated a startlingly utilitarian view of
human life. In an essay on population control, he wrote that children in
poor countries can be regarded as producer goods, on account of the
labor they produce. As we become wealthier, he explained, children
become consumer goods.
Therefore, as More saw it, the solution to the overpopulation
problem was simple: stop subsidizing fertility through free educa-

tion (free to the parents, not to the tax-payers), free child health care,
and additional welfare payments to women for each child they bear. If
parents must personally bear the costs of having children, rather than
everyone else paying, people will tend to have just the number of chil-
dren for whom they can assume financial responsibility. Simple!
As such faux-sober exercises in realism show, extropian economics
was barely a step removed from Jonathan Swifts sendup of utilitarian
philosophy as a baby-eating cult. And yet the futurist orientation of
the extropian creed gave the reactionary rhetoric a sense of urgency
and momentum. Writing elsewhere in Extropy, More anticipated Bit-
coin, arguing that statist control over the economy might be shat-
tered by the development of electronic cash and competing private
currencies. Such ideas were borrowed from science fiction, but Ext-
ropy eagerly carried them into the political realm.
Other authors plotted secessionist colonies on the high seas. T.
O. Morrow imagined Free Oceana as a trial run for Extropolis: an
artificial city floating far above Earths surface where transhumans
could achieve their destiny as the rulers of space. He recognized that
to say as much in public meant consignment to the wacko camp.
Instead, he suggested a cynical strategy of portray[ing] ourselves
as the oceans guardians, protecting our domain from those who
would pollute it or exploit its resources. While extropians elsewhere
derided environmentalists as sentimental, Pleistocene-minded foes
of foreordained transhuman progress, they were more than willing
to impersonate them for the sake of public respectabilityand profit.
Heres how Morrow sought to nail down the case for the space-city
prospectus:
If we present the idea cautiously, skeptically, with the attitude that

it makes for an interesting hobby or research project, it might have
a level of memetic appeal that could attract a number of bright,
innovative minds to an extropian philosophy. And then, if it works,
and makes money, at least enough to be self supporting, so much the
better.
Extropolis may remain a distant dream, but the unfortunate truth

of the matter is that Morrows daft sketch of the movements bait-and-
switch funding mechanisms actually worked like a charm, once the
new cohort of Valley-minted moguls picked up a whiff of it. Today, it
barely rates as news when another tech billionaire announces that hes
plowing his fortune into a scheme for space colonization, sea-steading,
or government-free experimentation zones devoted to the libertar-
ian version of deliberate living.

All Hail the New Self
Nevertheless, the unlikely elevation of extropian thought into respect-
ability (if not intellectual coherence) is another cautionary tale for our
time. Contributors to the extropian listserv, who numbered between
two hundred and three hundred, were united by the now universal dog-
mas of technophilia and libertarianism.
Those who remember the period will not be surprised to know
that the movements biggest boost came from the soft-core extropi-
ans at Wired magazine. Founding executive editor Kevin Kelly in 1993
endorsed both Extropy magazine and the magazines email listserv as
an absolutely fun antidote to the Politically Correct Future of the
alternative press. The following year, Wired ran a lengthy feature on
the extropians that further raised Mores profile and cast the extro-
pians as a bunch of hedonistic reactionary swingers. One memorable
scene featured Romana Machado, a.k.a. Mistress Romana, a soft-
ware engineer, author, and hot-blooded capitalist (and occasional
nude model), who arrived dressed as the State, in a black vinyl bustier
and mini, with a chain harness top and carrying a light riding crop,
plus a leash, at the other end of which, finally, her Extropian com-
panion Geoff Dale, the Taxpayer, crawled along in mock subjection.
Everybody into the hot tub!
But as many veterans of the first tech bubble learned, buzz didnt
pay the bills. Mores post-PhD career was a familiar hodgepodge of
consulting, freelance writing, adjunct teaching, and mounting credit
card debt. Alas, some financial obligations are not yet expungeable
with the promised labor of a Third World child.
The later course of Mores career at least lends an entertaining
ironic gloss to his otherwise plodding speculative manifestos. Per-
sonal responsibility was always a key tenet of Mores philosophy, as
he emphasized in Extropy no. 8. Extropians are almost always highly
libertarian, More wrote. Libertarians favor a society where everyone
is free to make their own choices, and to bear the costs of their own
mistakes rather than shift those costs onto someone who has not made
those choices. While pessimists are much more comfortable depend-
ing on the nanny states promise of a stifling security, he went on, lib-
ertarians hold that individuals can and should take responsibility for
their choices in the market and for the direction of their lives.
You dont say. In 2005, More filed for personal bankruptcy protec-
tion. The court filings listed $110,000 in unsecured debts, including
a combined $32,000 for two Extropy Institute credit cards. In 2006,
More, having left California for Austin, Texas, closed the Extropy
Institute for good, announcing that its mission was essentially com-

pleted. The transhuman revolution occurred The unlikely elevation
at the end of the Bush era, it seems, without
of extropian thought
anyone much noticing.
At that time, Mores old friends at Alcor into respectability
were reeling from negative publicity after the
(if not intellectual coherence)
alleged mishandling of Ted Williamss corpse.
Soon enough, the organization began head- is a cautionary tale
hunting (as it were) for new leadership. More
for our time.
answered the call, and in 2011 was appointed
CEO. As of 2013, the last year for which 9
Alcors public tax filings were available, he
drew an annual salary of $124,000. As More used to sign his extropian
emails, Onward!
My Kingdom for a Meme

Nothing makes the case for the extropians lasting influence better than
the apparent success of its memetic engineering project. Pop culture
and the press are filled with stories about extropian themes of seces-
sion, techno-transcendence, and selfish contempt for the weak-willed
masses. Extropianism conquered the mainstream. In retrospect, this
weird little movement makes a good argument for the power of small
magazines.
Although he remained obscure to the broader public, More
gained a number of wealthy and otherwise notable admirers. He
was among the extropians and Alcorians to join an outfit called the
Society for Venturism, founded by David Pizer, the multimillionaire
realtor and former car-upholstery dealer currently challenging John
McCain for U.S. Senate in the Arizona Republican Party primary.
Other extropians included Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, and Hal Finney,
three old-school cypherpunks who have all been suspected, at one
point or another, of being the true identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi
Nakamoto. (Finney died in 2014 and was placed in an Alcor freezer.)
Stanford PhD and cryptography pioneer Ralph Merkle gave pre-
sentations at Extropy Institute events and now oversees More as an
Alcor board member.
Alcor, the premiere extropian boondoggle, also boasts a growing
roster of notable members and supporters. Among the wealthiest is
Peter Thiel, the radical libertarian venture capitalist, early Facebook
investor, and PayPal cofounder. A well-known British gerontologist,
Aubrey de Grey, also serves as an Alcor adviser. K. Eric Drexler, a
nanotechnology researcher, has spoken in favor of cryonics at Alcor
events, as has futurist author Ray Kurzweil, now Googles director of

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
engineering. Brad Templeton, a former chairman and board member

of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, maintains an interest in cryon-
ics. Larry King, the former CNN host, also thinks its a grand idea.*
Sunbelt Death Cult

Thanks to all this high-profile backing, a true transhuman miracle has
occurred: Alcor, a preposterous operation built on the unethical sale of
false hope, remains in business.
Alcors pricey freezer fees$80,000 for a head, $200,000 for a
whole bodyare partly covered by life insurance policies that members
take out on themselves, naming Alcor as the beneficiary. Thus, Alcor
benefits whenever its members die. Does this ever happen in real medi-
cine? Doctors tend to get paid more when they keep their patients alive.
More now commonly boasts of Alcors high regard in its lais-
sez-faire Arizona home. The foundation has over the years beaten back
legal challenges as well as regulatory campaigns. At this point, More
claims, Arizonan lawmakers are friendly with Alcor, seeing it as a bea-
con of the states high-tech industry. Who cares if its bogus?
Alcors most prominent whistleblower is a former chief operating
officer named Larry Johnson. It was Johnson who leaked the story of
Ted Williamss head to the press. In 2009 he published a book about
Alcor, coauthored with Scott Baldyga, titled Frozen: My Journey into the
World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death.
Alcor filed multiple legal actions against Johnson, Baldyga, and
their publisher, Vanguard Press, including a libel complaint in New
York that was dismissed in 2014, although Alcor has appealed that
judgment. Under financial pressure from Alcors complaintsand sub-
ject, by his own account, to death threatsJohnson did make a limited
apology for inaccuracies related to the Williams operation, which he
did not witness firsthand. But he never retracted the bulk of the alle-
gations in the book. Much of what Johnson reports is information he
gained from the inside while talking with Alcor leadership, often with
a hidden microphone. At a minimum, his account leads the reader to
marvel at what a poorly regulated business with an anti-government
ethos can allegedly get away with in a weak-government state like Ari-
zona. Johnson claims that Alcor stockpiled expired drugs, including
hallucinogens and deadly paralytics, for injection into patients; that
Alcor held secret board meetings in violation of IRS transparency
requirements; that nepotism and misuse of funds was rampant at
Alcor; that Alcor committed routine environmental and public health
* Contrary to myth, neither Peter Sellers nor Walt Disney had their heads frozen at death. Timothy Leary almost
became Alcors eternal pitchman-on-ice but changed his mind, explaining,They have no sense of humor.

violations such as dumping AIDS-contaminated blood down public
drainseven that Alcor staff inflicted needless cruelty on animals,
including draining a dogs blood and replacing it with cryoprotectant
out of sheer curiosity. That last claim, and others in Johnsons book,
are confirmed by the published writings of Alcors own leadership,
although such accounts certainly put a different spin on things.
Other allegations may not carry legal consequences but sure are
disgusting, such as the filthy condition of Alcors facilitieswhich
More, writing in Cryonics, pledged to address upon his appointment as
CEO.
The Ice Bath Cometh

But what bothered Johnson most was the brazen scammery of it all.
Alcor sold false hope to the hopeless and actively targeted termi-
nally ill people by listing the names of specific diseases on its homep-
age. Anyone who paid up front was accepted, according to Johnson.
The membership, he wrote, consisted mainly of sick people:
AIDS patients, cancer victims, people diagnosed with brain tumors.
In other words, sick people just like Kim Suozzi.
In reality, Suozzi wasnt entirely a charity case, as More and
Alcor claimed, and as the Times suggested. The twenty-three-year-old
cancer victim was a marketing opportunity for a crooked cult. Some
$10,000 of her Alcor fees came from a preexisting life insurance policy
that otherwise would have benefited her mother.
Before Suozzis death, Alcor had the bright idea to cast the occa-
sionally foggy-headed cancer patient in a recruitment video pitched
at young people. The video was posted online, some weeks after the
Times story, by the Church of Perpetual Life, a new charitable venture
by Alcor board member Saul Kent based in a former Baptist church in
Hollywood, Florida.
In the video, Suozzi sits awkwardly between two grinning geriat-
ric Alcorians in a spartan morgue thats lined with tall metal canisters
filled with liquid nitrogen and body parts. Suozzis interlocutor, psychi-
atrist Robert Newport, faces the camera and asks, What would you
say to young people to prompt their becoming interested and active?
Well, its not that expensive if you sign up early and have life
insurance, Suozzi replies. And, in terms of becoming interested in
it, you really haveum. Sorry. I dont know what to say, she trails off,
losing focus.
But the Alcor ghouls carry grimly on, welcoming her to the com-
munity of the frozen dead. Its just a shame that they didnt manage
to get there first.t

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
Taking Liberties
Cults and capitalism
3 Ann Neumann
L ike the slow-motion collapse of most empires, the end of Chuck

Dederichs sprawling rehabilitation-cum-alternative lifestyle com-
munity, Synanon, began with an unforgivableand some say unchar-
acteristicact of hypocrisy. Dederich was playing The Game, the
confrontational group therapy method that hed devised in the late
1950s, which involved twelve or more people, their chairs in a cir-
cle, taking cracks at one another for hours on end. The rules of The
Game were simple: anything wentyelling, foul language, accusations,
insinuations, and other verbal abuseexcept physical violence. Talk
dirty and live clean, Dederich said. Only in 1973, when Dederich was
treated to too much of his own talking cure, he snapped, and the once
high-flying Synanon experiment sank into the standard script of scan-
dal-battered culthood. Apostate members publicized charges of psy-
chological abuse, financial impropriety, a string of violent assaults, and
unhinged guru megalomania. The media, ever attuned to stories of
spiritual hubris run amok, made Synanon a byword for faddish West
Coast New Age nuttery.
In reality, though, Synanon represented a pivotal moment in
Americas restless quest for spiritual self-understanding: the juncture
at which the promise of psychic liberation dead-ended into abject rites
of submission before the delusions of a charismatic leaderor if you
prefer, when Keynesian optimism bowed to neoliberal protocols of
behavioral control.
Dederichs Game, in its way, was a perfect exercise in austere
self-discipline in an age of mounting psychic and economic squalor.
The focused, personalized vitriol, the way it tore down all participants
until they were emotionally resigned, the belief that lashing out in
session would prevent doing so in lifethese boot-camp-style rituals
of self-reflection were the key to Synanons success. Synanon grew up
alongside several kindred movements seeking to systematize enlight-
PAU L A S E A R I N G
enment via heightened personal self-control, from Scientology and est

(a.k.a. Erhard Seminar Training) to the secessionist, authoritarian spir-
itual communities run by Dederich-lite figures such as Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh and Frederick Lenz (a.k.a. Rama or Atmananda). With its

browbeating swagger, Synanon quickly attracted a followingrecov-
ering junkies, along with hippies, disillusioned middle-class moms,
unfulfilled professionals, and splashy celebritieswho came like the
pious to Mass.
And like other movements peddling the promise of a wholly
revamped inner life, Synanon had a scrappy, against-the-odds success
story of its own to underline its unique transformative power. Dederich
developed The Game after Alcoholics Anonymous dried him up and
spat him out into rough-and-tumble Ocean Park, California. He was a
white man of forty-five, unemployed, twice divorced, and disfigured by
meningitis, the right side of his face sagging like an old coucha cross
between Tiresias and a beefy mob boss. And he was as zealous about
staying clean as any new convert, badgering whoever wandered into his
shabby flat, most often hopeless junkies, into accepting the tough love
therapeutic approach he was pioneering. He called it the Tender Loving
Care club, and later, with a new facility in Santa Monica and an increas-
ing number of believers with nowhere else to go, Synanon.
Learning the Game

The Game became the basis of the Synanon empire, which by 1973 had
grown from a meager group of down-and-outers, sustained by Ded-
erichs monthly $33 unemployment check, into a multimillion-dollar,
multi-compound, multimedia sensation. There were around 1,500 res-
idents in more than four states, a jazz album named for the group, and
even a 1965 movie starring Eartha Kitt (playing Dederichs third wife,
Bettye, who was African American; the organization was adamantly
interracial). Celebrities like Milton Berle, Jane Fonda, Buckminster
Fuller, and labor activist Cesar Chavez all stopped by. Transfixed by
the promise of ruined lives turned upstandingly productive, corporate
philanthropists sent donations rolling in like perfect barrel waves on
the sunny Santa Monica beach. In 1968 Synanon was grossing a lit-
tle more than $1 million a year; by 1976 annual profits had grown to
more than $8 million, and the organizations total assets were valued at
roughly $30 million.
Its no surprise that Dederichs seemingly democratic self-help
methods became increasingly hierarchical over the years. Residents who
relapsed into drug use were routinely punished with shaved heads. Later,
baldness was the style of all members. Children of Synanon followers
were shuffled off to a separate secure facility, often kept from their par-
ents for weeks at a time. When Dederich declared all Synanon facili-
ties smoke-freethereby banishing the one respectable addiction that
recovering drunks and junkies could still pursue150 members fled. And

then, while playing The Game, a female Syn- Synanon quickly attracted
anonite began insulting Dederichsupposedly
a followingrecovering junkies,
fair game. But this time, incensed, Dederich
rose from his chair, walked across the circle, along with hippies, disillusioned
and dumped a root beer on her head. Everyone
middle-class moms, unfulfilled
gasped. Synanons commitment to nonviolence
was over, and the longest-lasting utopian com- professionals, and splashy
munity constructed in the twentieth-century,
celebritieswho came like
as Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth called
Dederichs project, began to buckle. the pious to Mass.
Save Yourselves! 9
Dederichs particular method of seeking
self-liberation through self-examination is wedged smack into the
middle of the evolutionary trajectory of our current therapeutic cul-
ture. The modern American saga of better living through self-dis-
covery stretches roughly from the turn of the twentieth century until
today. Of course, the deeper roots of self-cultivation reach back to
European soilthe liberalization of the Catholic Church; the rapid
spread of Protestantism, mysticism, and evangelicalism; and the rise
of science-based rationalism and mind-body dualism. But their mani-
festation in the crowded spiritual marketplace of the postwar world is
what Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis call, in their 2015 book, Rethink-
ing Therapeutic Culture, an especially American phenomenon.
Self-improvement, self-reliance, and the pursuit of happiness,
weve come to believe, are not only American rights, but every citizens
obligation. Only with attention and effort can we improve our emo-
tional, physical, interpersonal, and economic selvesthe conventional
limits of genetics, family influences, ethnic loyalties, and social class be
damned. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and countless other
founding apostles of self-made spiritual repose made the new republic
over in this singularly hopeful image. Modern capitalism refined their
handiwork into a marketplace of just-in-time self-reinvention, which,
significantly, caught on in American mass culture at a moment when
more traditional forms of solidarity in the workplace, the university,
and the conduct of national politics were sputtering to a halt in the
so-called age of stagflation.
The ground for the cult efflorescence of the seventies had been
prepared by various antinomian psychic pioneers earlier in the twenti-
eth century. During the early 1900s, mystical movementstheosophy
and Mind Cure, for instancewere scorned by traditional denomina-
tions even as they themselves turned away from a stern and demand-

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
ing God the Father and towards a personal and loving Jesus, as Aubry
and Travis observe. Economic abundance and the anxieties of urban-
ization primed Americans sense of mental health for the arrival of
Freuds psychotherapy. By the time World War II veterans returned
from Europe, mental hygiene was a national concern; the National
Institute of Mental Health was founded, right on schedule, in 1949.
Shell-shocked combat veterans, neurotic housewives, and malad-
justed youth alike sought help fromor were remanded tothe newly
legitimate counseling professions, Aubry and Travis write. Our psy-
chological health seemed elusive yet achievable.
Out of this indefatigable quest emerged the liberation movements
of the 1960s and 70s, with minority populations loudly advocating for
new social orders that supported individual rights, equality, and free-
dom. The self was at the very center of this new social constructand
Americans were obligated to peer deep inside. But as communes, New
Age practices, and other alternative lifestyle groups commanded a
growing share of cultural influence, a backlash was brewing. The inte-
rior, inner lifefor which the home served as both metaphor and sanc-
tuarythus acquired a heightened value, even as perceived threats from
the outside created a sense of its fragility, Aubry and Travis note. In
a reinforcing loop, the perception of the domestic/interior as besieged
increased its relative importance, both to the individuals and to the
culture writ large. Even as some religious groups denounced this ver-
sion of self-liberation, they presided over an elaboration of it, focusing
on personal relationships with Jesus, an ethos of therapeutic psychic
repair, and promises of happiness and financial well-being. Any failure
to live up to the spiritual values of their faith community meant that
believers were failing to see their true selvesand as a result, failing
their God, their families, and their nation.
The legacy of this backlash, which found its most potent expres-
sion in the family values platform and legislation that now enjoys
widespread rhetorical influence on both the left and the right, is a
continued nostalgia for a family unit that never really was: a powerful
lingering desire for God the Father to be on top. Nonetheless, the
reinforcing loop, our adherence to fictitious, sacralized family struc-
ture, hasnt stopped therapeutic self-care from becoming the patriotic
duty of every responsible citizen. Even Mad Mens Don Draper went to
the mountain.
Today, with the glut of self-help books, social media confessions,
illusory tabloid intimacy, and self-care methods and advice, it may
seem that the therapeutic need has always been with us. But not so.
These beliefs ... may pass as natural, but they are in fact historically

specific and therefore neither eternal nor inescapable, write Aubry
and Travis. We are conditioned to treat our psyches improper func-
tioning as the primary source of societys ills and see its balance and
well-being as the ultimate goal of our strivings on this earth.
Dederich wasnt the only guru of the seventies brandishing a
playbook of therapeutic buzzwords and the promise of utopian free-
dom; the decade abounded with cults, alternative lifestyle groups,
and rehabilitation communities. Synanon served in many respects as
the results-driven poster community for this scene. Its appearance of
overwhelming rehabilitation success afforded a rare (if fleeting) vision
of therapeutic self-care in perfect harmony with the broader market
culture. Not only were these kids recoveringthey were working! But
Dederichs increasingly erratic and violent behavior soon squandered
much of the publics good will. Close observers of Synanons sprawl-
ing communities were growing alarmed. Strangely, though, the money
continued to roll in. And increasingly, juvenile courts were sending
troubled kids to Dederichs gates.
The Kids Arent All Right

For more than two decades, Synanon had worked its life-changing
magic on recovering addicts and other lost souls without recourse to
violence. But Dederichs soda-dumping incident, internal tensions,
and an influx of young kids signaled the advent of a new, harsher era
of in-house discipline. Keeping the kids in line proved easier when you
smacked them around. Writes George Pendle at Cabinet, Unlike the
other residents, many of these children had no wish to change their
ways, and in the past, this Punk Squad, as they became known, would
have proved impossible to control. But unfortunately for them, Ded-
erich had shown that the gloves were now off.
Synanons posture of extreme austerity also extended to the pro-
creative. Dederich, with his hands on the purse strings, decided that
members children were too expensive; revenue was king, and com-
pound-bred bambinos werent subsidized like the punks that wrung-
out parents and witless courts were dropping off. He declared it was
time for all males to undergo vasectomies and all pregnant women to
get abortions. Some members accepted readily, while others had to
be gamed into compliance, worn down by the emotional battering
of Dederichs model of group coercion. When his wife Bettye died in
1977, Dederich began accepting applications for a new one. He liked
this ingenious arrangement and decided that all Synanon couples
should separate every three years and switch partners. Any residual
pretense of nonviolence was permanently retired when Dederich orga-

How did we get from nized the Imperial Marines, a militia-like
group that intimidated Synanons neighbors
Ralph Waldo Emersons
and local officials, and armed them with
Self-Reliance to $300,000 worth of guns and ammo. Dederich
was listing into full crackpot mode.
Oprah Winfreys
When a self-styled cult-buster, Paul
spiritual capitalism? Morantza California lawyer whod made a
career out of suing shady organizations like
9 the Moonies, est, and Scientologywon a
$300,000 judgment against Synanon in a
civil suit alleging the group had kidnapped and brainwashed a young
woman, Dederich went berserk. Shortly after, Morantz opened his
mailbox and discovered a four-foot-long de-rattled rattlesnake, which
bit him. He almost died. A former Synanon board members dog was
found dead, swinging from a rope. Then, a tiny local newspaper, the
Point Reyes Light, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of columns on Syn-
anons alarming drift into violence, thuggery, and authoritarian lunacy.
Dederichs power unraveled. In 1978, when news broke that nine hun-
dred members of Jim Joness Peoples Temple had killed themselves in
Jonestown, Guyana, a veil was lifted from the publics eyes. Police soon
raided Synanons compounds, and Dederichs gig was finally up.
Dederich, who died at the age of eighty-three in 1997, may have
been forever discredited, but his controlling vision and his methods have
lived on, in part because of our persistent belief that discipline delivers
reform, in part because Dederichs methods have proven lucrative, and
lastly because the prior two reasons have stifled any innovative social
services that might otherwise have developed. The use of punishment as
therapy is widespread among the hundreds of emotional growth board-
ing schools, wilderness camps, and tough love antidrug programs that
make up the billion-dollar teen residential treatment industry, journal-
ist Maia Szalavitz writes. Szalavitz has traced the genealogy of Synanon,
which opened its first teen boot camps in the mid-seventies, in the oper-
ational DNA of countless organizations still active today, many of which
have been accused of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. Creating
situations in which the severe treatment of powerless people is rewarded
inevitably yields abuse, Szalavitz writes. This is especially true when
punishment is viewed as a healing process.
The People Business

For all the freak-show coercion and physical violence Dederich
unleashed on thousands of members, Synanon is still best understood
not as a perversion of religious ideology (a cult) but as a calculated

and successful business modelan example of savvy modern capital-
ism. The image of Synanon that reached the public was of a pover-
ty-stricken courageous group of individuals who were freeing them-
selves from the horror of drug addiction through new therapeutic
techniques and self-help, Richard Ofshe wrote in 1976. While this
image brought in celebrity participants and countless donations from
sympathizers, doing good things for people was only one part of the
Synanon empire. In a book chapter titled Synanon: The People Busi-
ness, Ofshe noted that the work of the Synanon Foundation, getting
heroin users clean and into The Game, was only possible because of
Synanon Industries, the organizations business arm, which operated
gas stations, manufactured and distributed merchandise (such as Syn-
anon-branded pens, rulers, and T-shirts), and begged and bartered for
tax-deductible goods.
Synanon Industries also gave the Foundations reformed addicts a
productive role: they were dedicated workers, and many were sent out
into society as salespeople spreading the Synanon mission. All mem-
bers were required to hold full-time jobs, either in the compounds,
in Synanon manufacturing areas, or outside the organization (these
life-stylers, who held non-Synanon jobs, were required to dump
much of their earnings back into the group). Synanon Industries, a
profit-generating powerhouse, was the second-largest promotional
merchandise distribution company in the United States in the seven-
ties. As George Pendle writes, Founded to get people off junk, Syn-
anon was now creating it.
There was never egalitarianism in Synanon, despite the commu-
nal living and the free-for-all tenor of the groups therapy sessions.
Dederich was in charge, and he and his handpicked leadership caste
decided who played what roles in the organizationdecisions that
had far-reaching practical and material ramifications for each group
member. Synanons therapeutic ideology focuses on behavior rather
than underlying cognitive structures, Ofshe wrote. Translated into
the prerogatives of the company-as-cult model pioneered by Dederich,
acceptable behavior always and everywhere meant rising from the
sloughs of addiction into service as a productive member of society.
This ingenious melding of self-administered personal redemption
and the marketing directives of modern capitalism marks Synanon
as an instructional missing link in the American therapeutic narra-
tive. How did we get from Ralph Waldo Emersons Self-Reliance
to Oprah Winfreys spiritual capitalism? On the face of things, the
1970s offered seemingly innovative ways for disaffected believers to
escape the pressures of modern capitalism, but these same movements

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
also provided extreme and dangerous examples that reinforced and

normalized the coercions of capitalism. Just as Synanon became one
of the nations largest hubs of promotional merchandise, Sun Myung
Moons Unification Church, known for importing ginseng tea and trin-
kets, bulked up into a financial and media empire bestriding the globe.
Similarly, the Church of Scientology has exploited both its tax-exempt
status as a religious nonprofit and a far-flung corps of de facto slave
laborers to create a model of capitalist enterprise free of taxation and
labor costs.
Meanwhile, the belief that the inner workings of the market econ-
omy are a font of holy saving mysteries has migrated from the shambolic
beachfront flats of Synanon into the cultural mainstream. Yesterdays
shaved heads are todays scented candles. As Kathryn Lofton writes in
Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Every product of Winfreys empire com-
bines spiritual counsel with practical encouragement, inner awakening
with capitalist pragmatism. Somewhere, the excitable ghost of Chuck
Dederich is looking down and smiling.
Sucking Out of the Seventies

For several decades, practical wisdomand a procession of academ-
ics like Robert Bellah and Christopher Laschhas been telling us
that therapeutic culture has made us a sniveling, navel-gazing, neu-
rotic, and narcissistic populace, too preoccupied with our own mental
self-inventories and material wealth to fulfill our national promise or
obligations. Narcissism is inescapably part of the critique of thera-
peutic culture, writes academic Elizabeth Lunbeck. She summarizes
Laschs 1978 book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations, and the popular analysis at the time, thusly:
Self-indulgence had displaced self-control, nurturing a state of restless,

perpetually unsatisfied desire. The ascendancy of a commitment to
psychic self-improvementevident in the appearance and flourishing
of a range of new consciousness movements and their allied therapies
was tearing apart a once robust social fabric, prompting a mass retreat to
interiority and what journalist Tom Wolfe, in an essay that christened
the 1970s the Me Decade, skewered as a culturally sanctioned, unceas-
ing analysis of self.
This critique of seventies-era cultural excess and therapy-inclined cap-

italism has continued to this day. The castigation of narcissism, how-
ever, has done little to wrest the yoga mats and herbal teapots from our
tremulous hands. Nor has it convinced us to put down our self-chron-
icling digital devices.

However, theres another way to consider the history of the self-
help cults of Synanons era. Rather than trace the triumph of the thera-
peutic back to crumbling religionsnamely, the Protestant work ethic
that, in Oprahs parlance, teaches us to behave our way to success
we might well descry the strange discipline of self-reinvention in the
founding ethos of modern capitalism. As any day trader will tell you,
its a myth that economic forces are data-driven, rational vectors of a
triumphant secularism that has delivered us beyond the pale of ghosts,
spirits, and the numinous. Its likewise a secular wish-fulfillment fan-
tasy that the unscientific specters of belief are outmoded primitive
superstitions, all smartly dispatched by cresting modernity.
To rethink the realignment of belief systems that has given rise to
modern capitalism, sociologist Courtney Bender has argued, we need
to look again at Max Webers celebrated 1905 essay The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Before the modern era, Weber tells
us, very few Western souls were possessed by the spirit of capitalism:
i.e., the love of money for its own sake and the self-justifying pursuit of
all things profitable. And until the early modern era, Protestants were
too humble to practice what we would call conspicuous consumption.
The accumulation of wealth wasnt what the early Protestants, like the
Lutherans and Calvinists, were about. But the sacralization of work
certainly was.
In an otherwise radically unknowable scheme of individual salva-
tion, humility and diligent labor proved that one was worthy of Gods
grace. But once Protestants deferred gratification and self-moni-
toring got applied to money practicesaccounting measures in the
counting house, the shop floor, and (not incidentally) the pew, Bender
writesthe calculating and soulless conduct of capitalism got a new,
more spiritual lease on life. Once these conditions had solidified, the
spirit of capitalism was effectively unleashed on everyone, Bender
observes. The Protestant ethic was no longer needed to keep it going
... the aberrant and occasional spirit of capitalism had become the
spirit of the system. It came to possess all men by virtue of their partic-
ipation within capitalism.
Its only reasonable to ask: Just what, if not the Protestant ethic,
is the spirit that now animates our devoted efforts to buy our way into
keener therapeutic insights? What propels New York Times columnist
David Brookss focus on self-reliance and doomsday warnings about
the sad decline of the American character, or pop sociologist Malcolm
Gladwells prescriptive litany of success mantras and market-expanding
behaviors? In short, its the robust spirit of capitalism that represents
the next phase in postmodernisms quest for a reenchanted world.

What compelled Dederichs followers to make themselves better
through Synanons contrived regimen of ritual self-inspection? A lack
of other options, certainly. A dearth of affordable and nonjudgmental
health services, definitely. Community-oriented systems of mutual
care, like mental health services and adequate financial support for
those outside the workforce, were woefully inadequate (and still are).
But this, too, compelled the seekers of the 1970s: the suddenly cri-
sis-prone profile of capitalism conspired to transport Americans into
an exceptionally nonfunctional vision of Webers iron cage of bureau-
cracyone that was fast shedding the vital material compensations of
job security, union protections, and welfare-state income supports. As
a result, many lost souls who were desperate to find freedom outside
the iron cages confines were sucked into experimental communities
like Synanon.
This is the first day of the rest of your life, Dederich constantly,
enthusiastically reminded his huddled junkie masses and world-
weary groupies yearning to be free. But Dederichs ambitions quickly
devolved into a coercive trap, proffering neither true liberation nor true
rehabilitation. Today, a multibillion-dollar battery of talk shows, info-
mercials, rehab facilities, self-help seminars, and prosperity preachers
offers a softer-focus version of the Synanon gospel. And we cant yet
fully intuit just what captivity narrative will spring into place after its
own market failure becomes too obvious to ignore.t
B E L L E M E L LO R

Memory
6 Natalia Ginzburg
People are walking back and forth on the city streets
buying food, newspapers, attending to business
Their faces are flushed, their lips full and bright.
You lifted the sheet to look at his face
you bent to kiss him in the way you always did,
but it was the last time. He looked as he always looked,
just a little more tired. He was wearing his everyday clothes,
those were his everyday shoes. And those his hands
that had broken bread and poured wine.
Today again in the passing hours you lifted the sheet
to look at his face for the last time.
When you walk in the street, theres no one beside you,
when youre afraid, no one takes your hand.
And the streets arent yours, nor is the city
The glittering city is not yours. The glittering city belongs to
the others
to the people who come and go and buy newspapers and food.
You stand at the quiet window for a while
and gaze silently into the dark garden.
Then when you cried, there was his quiet voice
and when you laughed, there was his soft laughter.
But the gate that would open every evening is closed forever;
your youth is forsaken, the fire is cold, the house empty.
Translated from the Italian by Estelle Gilson.

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
Boys Will Be Men

3 Amber ALee Frost
The first time I heard about Tucker Max I was still finishing up col-
lege, vaguely toying with the idea of getting a masters degree in gender
studies. But here, it seemed, was a popcult phenom who was itching to
give meand women the world overan alpha-dude-docented crash
course in the subject.
To be a bit more precise, I was idly scrolling through Facebook
when I noticed a post by a feminist friend; Tucker Max, reviled misog-
ynist and de facto bard of brews, bros, and hos, was being protested
by womens groups, on the grounds that his purportedly true-life tales
of extremely inebriated sex promoted rape culture. Despite living in a
college town myself (presumably the heart of Maxmania), I had never
encountered Maxs bestselling I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which by
then was already a few years into its run on the New York Times best-
seller list. The book was so popular that it even spawned a movie, which
promptly beefed it at the box office. Apparently, Maxs epically mascu-
line tales of debaucherydubbed fratire by the New York Times in
2006did not translate well to the big screen.
Theres no question that Maxs work traded in misogyny. Lines
like Your whole gender is hardwired for whoredom and Fat girls
arent real people are pretty representative of his oeuvre. But Ive
never really bought the theory that his sexism was infectious, any more
than I believe heavy metal makes you kill your parents. My position has
always been that most professional misogynists work in character, and
that on some level, everyone is aware of that. While Max was a success-
ful literary shock jock, his routine got stale and his followers drifted,
in part because his contempt extended beyond women to include his
mouth-breathing readers. Compared to them, Max implied, he was so
much bettermore frequently laid, more epically drunk, more excel-
lently attired and turned out. As Max aged, and his readers along with
him, the I came, I drank, I fucked storylines wore even thinner. And
despite the raw sensationalism of his stories, Max wasnt a very com-
pelling writer.
The same cannot be said for Neil Strauss, who inhabited the other,
marginally more genteel camp of the mid-aughties dick-lit trend, and
whose meditations on dudeliness were slightly more sophisticated.
A clearly superior writer to Max, Strauss made it big by embedding

LY N N S C U R FI E L D

himself in the pick-up artist scenea roving band of pussy hounds
employing a strict, results-driven pop-psychology approach to getting
laid. Unlike Max, with his Animal House antics (the cheeky scamp!),
Strauss was on a twisted sort of quest for self-improvement. Granted,
the skills he acquired were distinctly sleazy: negging, for exam-
ple, describes a technique wherein the PUA backhandedly insults a
woman in order to lower her self-esteem and leave her vulnerable to the
advances of lecherous men. Its hard to imagine any of these lovingly
enumerated techniques actually working, and most reasonable women
assumed Strauss and Pick-Up Artist Theory were full of shit. Still, his
books were fun, trashy reads, and though hardly feminist, they lacked
the anti-woman rage of Max.
Indeed, measured by his cultural footprint, Neil Strauss is many
times the world-conquering bro that Tucker Max is. Not only did
pick-up artist communities spring up in the pervier corners of the
Internet, but Strausss own PUA mentor Mystery landed a reality
TV show, imaginatively titled The Pickup Artist. Ironically, Strausss
role as a senpai of seduction wasnt the original project. How to get
girls has been a popular theme since the advent of self-help books,
but Strausss first PUA book, The Game, wasnt actually a how-to, but
rather a weird little piece of first-person narrative, more in line with his
well-established career as a music journalist and celebrity biographer.
It wasnt until the follow-up book, The Rules of the Game, that Strauss
spoke directly to flailing students of lust. By contrast, Maxs tall tales
of partying seemed aimed at an audience of would-be libidinal revelers
willing to settle for vicarious living.
It now appears, though, that both Strauss and Max are in
brand-renovation mode. Both authors have recently published books
purporting to chronicle their gradual maturation past the get-laid-at-
all-costs phase of the American male experience. Yes, Neil Strauss and
Tucker Max are, after their own fashion, courting the dreaded specter
of long-term commitment.
Handling the Truth

Strausss new book, The Truth, bills itself as an honest account of his
experiences trying to navigate romance to find the perfect relation-
ship. The book restores Strauss to his prior vocation as a confessional
first-person journalist. Like The Game, it recounts a personal journey,
half-adventure, half-introspection, with a tidy little life lesson prom-
ised at the end as payoff for the readers schlep through four hundred
pages of ill-fated sexcapades.
As expected, Strauss is a less than sympathetic protagonist. The

book begins with him cheating on his girl- After making their names as
friend with one of her friends, which sends
callous objectifiers of my gender,
him to sex addiction rehab at the behest of
his Very Good Pal Rick Rubin, the famous Tucker Max and Neil Strauss
music producer. (The book is full of celebrity
seem . . . nice.
cameos, and Strauss namedrops constantly,
betraying a deep-seated insecurity about his 9
own fragile perch in the celebrity-verse.) In
rehab Strauss encounters a feminazi sex addiction counselor who made
his life a living helland it was here that my skepticism of Strausss
account of things began to dominate my reading experience, since this
clash of outsize personalities plays out entirely in Strausss favor.
Despite the oppressive hand of this sadistic Nurse Ratched char-
acter, Strauss manages to rally his fellow subjugated menfolk, who
applaud him when he bests her with his superior intellect, making
clever use of a Venn diagram. (When I recounted this episode to my
Very Good Pal Nick Mullen, a comedian known for fairly offensive
humor, he joked, They were just clapping because they thought he
drew a pair of boobs.) I got the distinct impression that this was sup-
posed to be Strausss subjugated-male equivalent of the Attica prison
riot, but I had trouble both believing the story and perceiving a volun-
tary addiction treatment center as a truly despotic place.
The credulity quotient doesnt exactly improve as the book goes
on. We learn that, in addition to provoking the righteous ire of humor-
less health professionals, Strauss is very much the victim of an over-
bearing mother. His father was distant as well, and harbored a secret
fetish for amputees that deeply hurt Neils disabled motherstill, its
mom whos mostly to blame (of course).
This fixation on female-authored psychic wrongs is characteristic
of Strausss strangely selective approach to storytelling. He forgets, for
example, to discuss his copious wealth (although he does mention his
second home in St. Kitts and Nevis, a tiny island nation thats taken
to selling passports to rich foreigners looking for tax havens). Strauss
doesnt write about anything as petty as his finances because he lives
the life of the mind: his primary concern is the nurturing of his inner
child and whatever new age psychological theories facilitate his victim
complex. He is self-pitying and self-obsessed, and he treats the world
and the people around himincluding his friends and loved onesas
foils for his journey of self-discovery.
And what a journey it is! After getting through rehab, Strauss
attempts to reconcile with his girlfriend, but the couple soon realize
that their relationship is far more dysfunctional than they had sur-

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
mised. He attempts swinging, sex parties, and polyamory, none of

which seem to meet his need for both freedom and intimacy; that these
two impulses would be at least somewhat at odds, requiring an open
and trusting partnership to coexist, does not occur to Strauss until the
very end. (Tidy little life lesson, remember?)
Its a corny, predictable, solipsistic book. But. But. But . . .
In no way would I defend The Truth as either a piece of journal-
ism or a memoir. However, as he gradually approaches his appointed
life lesson, Strauss develops as a person. Hes pleasantly vulnerable, as
honest as a wallowing neurotic man can be, fairly bald in describing his
own shortcomings, andat timeseven a bit endearing. There is noth-
ing worth hating about Strauss. A bit sleazy? Yes. Mommy issues, sure,
but nothing too far outside the realm of day-to-day gender anxieties.
His foray into the world of pick-up artistry did not leave him a misogy-
nist, or even particularly sexisthes mostly just anxious about women.
In the end, he manages (spoiler alert!) to reunite with his ex-girlfriend,
and not only does he seem to really love her, but he also shows genuine
contrition andyessome emotional growth. To be frank, it was a lit-
tle disappointingly well adjusted.
Mating to the Max

Luckily, I still had Tucker Max. Perhaps taking a cue from Strausss
success with The Rules of the Game, Max is breaking into the how-to
genre with a new book called Mate: Become the Man Women Want. That
Max is under the impression anyone would want to take advice from
him comes as a bit of a shock, but he takes pains to explain the gene-
sis of his new guru sideline in his introduction. It turns out that Mate
wasnt Maxs idea alone. The idea for the book came in the form of a
pitch from his cowriter, Dr. Geoffrey Miller. Miller had been discuss-
ing dating with his younger cousinswho are high school and col-
lege age, squarely in Maxs target demographicand he discovered,
in essence, that its a jungle out there. All his intrafamily informants,
from the liberal hipster to the young Republican, were at a loss as to
how they should proceed. So Miller gamely bestowed upon them his
scholarly wisdom: women are looking for the most positive traits in a
man so that they might pass along those genes to their offspring.
Yes, Geoffrey Miller specializes in evolutionary psychology, that
less than reputable field of study that attributes much of human behav-
ior to the Darwinian impulses buried deep in our primordial subcon-
scious. His best-known contribution to science is a journal article
contending that strippers make more money while ovulating, osten-
sibly either because fecund women are more accommodating in some

way, or because men subconsciously sense Dick-lit is experiencing a major sea
(and gravitate toward) estrus. That study, of
change for the better. But whats
course, has never been reproduced, and fol-
lowed only eighteen strippers over a period driving this flight from fuckery?
of two months. Nonetheless, the reduction of
modern sexualitysomething shaped in sub- 9
tle and not so subtle ways by religion, culture,
capitalism, and any number of sociological, and yes, biological forces
to some fabled idea of caveman instincts is incredibly appealing.
So here we have a bullshit evo-psych hack and a bullshit shock-
lit hack cowriting a manual on dating for heterosexual young mena
handbook totally based on the idea that suitors should be trying to
appeal to a womans most primitive instincts. Its difficult to imagine
a worse recipe for romance.
But. But. But . . .
The advice in Matedespite its completely ridiculous premise that
were all helplessly at the mercy of evolutionary psychologyisnt just
good, its shockingly good. Minus the tangents explaining how were
all little more than idiot baboons subconsciously bent on the continu-
ation of our idiot baboon lines, I would be perfectly comfortable dis-
tributing at least 95 percent of the material to young hetero men for
their edification, mostly for the benefit of the women they would be
pursuing.
Mate declares that women want sex just as much as men do, but
acknowledges that we have to deal with the risks of slut-shaming,
pregnancy, and sexual assault. Thats actually some pretty advanced
thinking, especially for the Tucker Maxes of the world. The book
instructs men to be completely honest with women about their inten-
tions, whether romantic or merely sexual; either way, men should be
kind and fair. It deals frankly with rejection, informing readers that
this is a womans prerogative, and something that just goes with the
territory, so they have to learn to deal with it. Perhaps most impres-
sively, Mate avoids any attempts to hack dating, instead relying on
basic advice about how to be a well-rounded person: work out, eat
healthy, dress well, be clean, develop interests, be social, get a sense
of humor. These might be painfully obvious points for many of us, but
to, say, a particularly shy or perhaps slightly spectrum-bound four-
teen-year-old boythe audience for a book this remedialits a pretty
decent way to start.
It is with a heavy, glum little heart that Im forced to admit that
both Strauss and Max have given me nothing to shred. There were
eyerolls, of course, but nothing that could move me to the artful deri-

sion one always hopes will be the blessing of a bad book.
Initially, this realization was a bit of a letdown. Being denied an
outlet for ones bloodlust is a truly deflating experience, and confront-
ing the disorienting realization that these men no longer repulse me
enough to inspire a good scathing takedown really took the wind out of
my sails. After making their names as callous objectifiers of my gender,
Tucker Max and Neil Strauss seem . . . nice. But that only prompts the
intriguing questions: Why? And how?
My first thought was that Im simply becoming hardened to mas-
culine bullshit. But when I did a return tour through the sodden pages
of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I was transported back to my job bar-
tending in college towns, immediately irritated by memories of serving
drinks to hostile frat boys. I remembered being stiffed, screamed at,
shoved, and threatened, and once heading off what would have almost
certainly been a date rape. No, I decided: I am not totally immune
to disgust. Likewise for The Rules of the Game and its dismal legacy. A
quick scan of some pick-up artist message boards revealed two distinct
types of PUAs: the majority are anxious nerds debilitated by social
ineptitude, and a sizable minority are genuine misogynists who view
women as obstacles to sex with female bodies. That there is an entire
subculture dedicated to exacerbating the worst aspects of dating cul-
tureanxiety and predationstill leaves me sickened and sad.
Beyond Fuckery
That settled, I suspect that its the dudes themselves who have changed
their ways. Dick-lit is experiencing a major sea change for the better.
But whats driving this flight from fuckery?
It could be that were simply witnessing growth. What can seem
adventurous at thirty can be pathetic at forty, and both authors recently
became fathers. Age cant possibly account for all of it, though. With
the amount of money Strauss and Max have made from their dudely
lifestyle empires, they could theoretically play out their Peter Pan
shticks until they drop dead. Its not the most dignified way to go out,
but neither author relies on dignity as a selling point.
Theres also the utterly cynical possibility that theyre completely
full of shit. Maybe Strauss and Max are switching gears because their
book sales sagged. The sybaritic bro brand has to wear thin at some
point, right? I mean, how much schlock can a shock jock schlock when
a shock jocks just a cock? Then again, I find it hard to believe that were
in the last petulant throes of the genre. Mate and The Truth are both
still pretty juvenile books, and with a new crop of romantically inept
males born every day, I dont see the genre going under anytime soon.

The change in tonein ideology, reallydoesnt mean that theres
no longer a robust market for manchild books. But it does mean that
former self-advertised men on the prowl such as Strauss and Max now
seem able to treat women as people, not as prey. This leads me to my the-
ory on the great shift in bro books: maybe men are just getting better.
I cant prove it, of course. Nor can I prove that these two famous
authors are really indicative of a certain class of modern men. But I do
think its entirely possible that theyre genuinely disgusted with their
own brands. Strausss new book is ultimately a repudiation of his own
selfishness and poor treatment of his girlfriend (now wife) and a testa-
ment to mutual romantic devotion; thats quite a departure from his
previous fuck-deride-discard body of work. For his part, Tucker Max
seems to hate his fans, once referring to them in a New Yorker profile
as dudes who cant spell dude. Like Strauss, he got very deep into
therapy and very consciously tried to reinvent himself. In the begin-
ning of Mate, he is horrified to learn that young men have been using
his humor books as guides to women. Strauss and Max are men who
have not only moved on, but also partially renounced their ways; could
it be that masculinity itself is adjusting to a more humane perspective
on women?
I dont have the answers. But if this last scenario holds water, then
its possible that a significant generational shift in the increasingly
drafty and cavernous house of patriarchy could be in the works. (After
all, who could have imagined, circa 2004, that gay marriagethe great
culture-war wedge issue that appeared to deliver George W. Bush his
second disastrous term in officewould be legal everywhere in Amer-
ica a mere decade later?) Its rationaland infuriatingto keep close
tabs on the countless daily gestures and realities of sexism, mundane
and subtle though they may be. But feminist sisters: lets not lose sight
of the precedent of improvement.
A few years ago I was sitting in a room with some socialist fem-
inists, both millennial peers and women who became active during
the Second Wave. (Say what you will about Baby Boomers, but its
the Generation Xers who are almost always mysteriously absent from
these settings.) The conversation turned to internal gender politics in
our groupsort of a human resources temperature check. The younger
women were focused on how the organizing atmosphere could be more
feminist. The (notoriously ball-busting) Second Wavers nodded and
smiled, but mostly let us talk.
By the end of the session, one of the Boomer women spoke up,
saying, Im just so proud that girls like you are at this point. Every-
thing is so much different now. Women get time to talk! Men dont get

Pa n ic ! Ro o m
away with interrupting as much! They cook more and do more house-
work! Sure, were not there yet, but its so different! Fathers today are
so involvedyou wouldnt believe what it used to be like! It was some-
thing we millennials had never even considered.
Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone famously said, All men are
selfish, brutal and inconsiderateand I wish I could find one. This is
the cosmic joke of heterosexuality in women, which always puts us in
the punch line. As we wrestle with the implications of this grim para-
dox, it can be difficult to recognize progress when its wonespecially
when its banal or corny, and still falls short of our utopian feminist
ideals. Nonetheless, in a world that now harbors the figures of Tucker
Max and Neil Strauss, mildly chastened family men, we might con-
sider unburdening ourselves of romantic pessimism. In the face of such
encouraging evidence, why kick a gift horse in the balls?t
from Absolute Solitude
6 Dulce Mara Loynaz
For Gods sake, dont touch me. The hands of a leper might fill
you with fear, but these hands of mine will fill you with dread.
They are cold and meek and moist and for a reason I myself fail
to understand they have the vicious apathy of a corpse.
Translated from the Spanish by James OConnor.

R a b b l e R ou se
Against Activism
3 Astr a Taylor
A lmost a decade ago I attended a conference called 1968 at a non-

descript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned
community college math instructor living out his retirement in New
Mexico, delivered the keynote. Taking the podium, he reflected criti-
cally on the national renown he had earned in his early twenties for his
role in the Columbia University occupation and his involvement with
the Weather Underground, a mediagenic group of militant rebels who
preached the gospel of propaganda of the deed by detonating bombs
in places like the Pentagon and the Capitol. (Fortunately, there were
no casualties.) The audience members, mostly graduate students and
twentysomething politicos like myself, were disposed to cheer Rudds
revolutionary past, impressed by the years he spent living as a fugitive.
The Weathermen may have crossed a line and not really accomplished
much, we reasoned, but at least they took action!
Rudd challenged our easy romanticism. Unlike many of his peers,
who had become more conservative with age, Rudd remained commit-
ted to the political ideals that had guided him in his youth. But he had
wholly reassessed the confrontational tactics on which he had built his
reputation. The macho bluster, the calls to pick up the gunthose, he
saw now, had been based in delusion. Fancying themselves a privileged
group of revolutionary agents destined to catalyze a white fighting
force to aid the people of the world, he and his comrades had suc-
ceeded only in diminishing a base that had been painstakingly built up
over years. The FBI should have put us on the payroll, he said.
What he had failed to grasp back in the day, Rudd explained,
patiently crushing our insurrectionary fantasies, was the difference
between activism and organizing, between self-expression and move-
ment building. Its a message he is still spreading. The only time I heard
the term activist fifty years ago was as part of an epithet used against
student organizers by our official enemies, university administrators
and newspaper editorialists, Rudd told me recently. Mindless activ-
ists was the phrase, and Rudd wonders now, half-jokingly, if mindless
and activist dont somehow go together. At Columbia, he developed a
rhetorical position he would repeat to anyone who would listen, Orga-
nizing is another word for going slow, but lately he prefers Joe Hills
oft-quoted 1915 telegram to Bill Haywood: Dont waste time mourning;

organize! As it happens, 1915 was around the same year the word activist
first appearedso in a way, thats when the mourning really began.
An Injury to All
Unlike the term organizer, with its clear roots in trade union and labor
politics, activist has murky origins. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the word has been quietly biding its time for over a century.
Associated early on with German idealist philosopher Rudolf Eucken
who believed that striving is necessary to a spiritual lifeit was then
sometimes used to describe outspoken supporters of the Central Pow-
ers during the First World War. Eventually, the term came to signify
political action more broadly, and though the precise path of this trans-
formation remains to be traced by scholars more diligent than myself,
it is clear that activism and activist have been in circulation with their
current meanings for some time. In the early 1960s the New York Times
described both Bertrand Russell and C. Wright Mills as activists
(Millss editor objected to the characterization in an angry letter), and
searches through archival records from that period reveal scattered
mentions of labor activists, and then civil rights activists, and then stu-
dent activists.
We used to call ourselves, variously, revolutionaries, radicals, mil-
itants, socialists, communists, organizers, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a
radical historian with fifty years of social movement experience, told
me. The rise of the word activist, she specu-
Activists are types who, by some lated, corresponds with what she describes
as a broader discrediting of the left. A good
quirk of personality, enjoy long
number of Rudd and Dunbar-Ortizs politi-
meetings, shouting slogans, and cally active peers came from dedicated com-
munist or labor families, or had joined the
spending a night or two in jail.
fight for civil rights in the South, which meant
9 they had firsthand knowledge of a movement
deeply rooted in churches and community
organizations, many of which employed (poorly) paid field organiz-
ers to mobilize people over sustained periods of time and against long
odds.
It was only after the 1960s ended, as new social movements
eruptedfeminism, gay liberation, environmentalism, and disability
rightsthat activists truly began to proliferate. By the eighties and nine-
ties, the term was firmly in common usage. These social movements
accomplished a tremendous amount in a remarkably short time frame,
often by building on and adapting long-standing organizing techniques
while also inventing open, democratic, and non-hierarchical proce-

L AU R I E ROS E N WA L D
dures. Yet in their quest to jettison some of the lefts baggage, poten-
tially useful frameworks, traditions, and methods were also cast aside.
Activists flourished as people moved away from what they felt
were dated political ideologiesthe anti-imperialist Marxist Leninism
that captivated the Weathermen went out of vogue, as the Commu-
nist Party had before itand embraced emerging radical identities. In
the wake of the sixties, people also, understandably, wanted to be less
beholden to charismatic leadership, which put movements at risk of
being sabotaged when figureheads were assassinated (Martin Luther
King Jr.), acted unaccountably (Eldridge Cleaver), or switched sides

R a b b l e R ou se
( Jerry Rubin). Over the years, as unions lost their edge and became
overrun by cautious or corrupt bureaucrats, cynicism about social
change as an occupation took root, at least within certain idealistic cir-
cles. (When I recently heard the phrase professional organizer, it was
a slur, not a compliment.)
Notably, too, this was the era of the right-wing backlash, the toxic
blast of union bashing, deregulation, and financialization that led to
the explosion of income inequality that the left has been incapable of
mitigatingincapable in part because of the turn away from economic
justice to other causes, but also because the left has been up against
an extraordinary adversary. Conservatives were busy executing orga-
nizational strategies during the last third of the twentieth century
launching think tanks and business associations buoyed by corporate
largesse, inflaming the ground troops of the Moral Majority, and lay-
ing the foundation for a permanent tax revolt by the 1 percenteven as
the left was abandoning its organizing roots.
Yet organizing is what the left must cultivate to make its activism
more durable and effective, to sustain and advance our causes when the
galvanizing intensity of occupations or street protests subsides. It is
what the left needs in order to roll back the conservative resurgence
and cut down the plutocracy it enabled. That means founding politi-
cal organizations, hashing out long-term strategies, cultivating leaders
(of the accountable, not charismatic, variety), and figuring out how to
support them financially. No doubt the thriving of activism in recent
decades is a good thing, and activism is something we want more of.
The problem, rather, is that the organizing that made earlier move-
ments successful has failed to grow apace.
Self-Directed Action
In the sixties, Rudd, Dunbar-Ortiz, and their respective cohorts
learned about organizing almost by osmosis, absorbing a model devel-
oped and tested over many generations, as Rudd put it. (Their ambient
awareness of organizing, Rudd clarified in his talk, informed the years
of preparation that made the celebrated 1968 Columbia occupation
possible; ignoring those efforts in a fit of hubris is where the Weather
Underground went wrong.) Todays activists have come of age in a very
different milieu. No one has a parent in the Party, trade unions are in
terminal decline, and the protracted struggle of the civil rights move-
ment, which has so much to teach us, has been reduced to a series of
iconic images and feel-good history highlights.
To be an activist now merely means to advocate for change, and
the hows and whys of that advocacy are unclear. The lack of a precise

antonym is telling. Who, exactly, are the non-activists? Are they pas-
sivists? Spectators? Or just regular people? In its very ambiguity the
word upholds a dichotomy that is toxic to democracy, which depends
on the participation of an active citizenry, not the zealotry of a small
segment of the population, to truly function.
As my friend Jonathan Matthew Smucker, whom I met at Zuc-
cotti Park during the early days of Occupy Wall Street, argues in a
forthcoming book, the term activist is suspiciously devoid of content.
Labels are certainly not new to collective political action, Smucker
writes, pointing to classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette,
unionist, and socialist, which all convey a clear position on an issue. But
activist is a generic category associated with oddly specific stereotypes:
today, the term signals not so much a certain set of political opinions
or behaviors as a certain temperament. In our increasingly sorted and
labeled society, activists are analogous to skateboarders or foodies or
dead heads, each inhabiting a particular niche in Americas grand and
heterogeneous cultural ecosystemby some quirk of personality, they
enjoy long meetings, shouting slogans, and spending a night or two in
jail the way others may savor a glass of biodynamic wine. Worse still,
Smucker contends, is the fact that many activists seem to relish their
marginalization, interpreting their small numbers as evidence of their
specialness, their membership in an exclusive and righteous clique,
effectiveness be damned.
While there are notable exceptions, many strands of contemporary
activism risk emphasizing the self over the collective. By contrast, orga-
nizing is cooperative by definition: it aims to bring others into the fold,
to build and exercise shared power. Organizing, as Smucker smartly
defines it, involves turning a social bloc into a political force. Today,
anyone can be an activist, even someone who operates alone, account-
able to no onefor example, relentlessly trying to raise awareness about
an important issue. Raising awarenessone of contemporary activisms
preferred aimscan be extremely valuable (at least I hope so, since I
have spent so much time trying to do it), but education is not organiz-
ing, which involves not just enlightening whoever happens to encounter
your message, but also aggregating people around common interests so
that they can strategically wield their combined strength. Organizing
is long-term and often tedious work that entails creating infrastructure
and institutions, finding points of vulnerability and leverage in the sit-
uation you want to transform, and convincing atomized individuals to
recognize that they are on the same team (and to behave like it).
Globally, weve seen an explosion of social movements since 2011,
yet many of us involved in them remain trapped in the basic bind Rudd

described. Activism, the expression of our deeply held feelings, used
to be only one part of building a movement. Its a tactic which has been
elevated to the level of strategy, in the absence of strategy, he lamented.
Most young activists think organizing means making the physical
arrangements for a rally or benefit concert. Add to this list creating
a social media hashtag, circulating an online petition, and debating
people on the Internet, and the sentiment basically holds. The work
of organizing has fallen out of esteem within many movement circles,
where a faith in spontaneous rebellion and a deep suspicion of institu-
tions, leadership, and taking power are entrenched.
That isnt to say that there arent times when rallies, concerts,
hashtags, petitions, and online debates are usefulthey sometimes
are. The problem is that these events or tactics too often represent the
horizon of political engagement. I think its generally a good thing
that large numbers of people have been inspired in recent decades to
take action, and that developments in technology have made it easier
for them to do so, said L. A. Kauffman, who is putting the finishing
touches on a history of direct action. Divorced from a deliberate orga-
nizing strategy, all of this can just be a flurry of activity without much
impact, of course, so we return to the need for our movements to recog-
nize and cultivate organizing talent, and to support this work by treat-
ing it as worke.g., by finding ways to pay people a living wage to do
it. To state what should be self-evident, people taking small concrete
actionssigning a petition or showing up at a rallyare more likely to
have a real influence when guided by a clear game plan, ideally one with
the objective of inconveniencing elites and impeding their profits.
Divided We Gig
Obviously, there are still organizers in the classic moldlabor orga-
nizersdoing invaluable work. And a growing number of people are
experimenting with new forms of collective economic power and
resistance. But one major challenge in these neoliberal and post-Ford-
ist times is to find inventive ways to update the union model for our
current conditions of financialization and insecurity. We need to cre-
ate fresh ties among the millions of stranded people who lack stable
employment, let alone union membership, so that they become a force
to be reckoned with. I have been part of an effort, born of the chaos of
Occupy Wall Street, which attempts to do this by organizing people
around indebtedness. The project, which launched the nations first
student debt strike last year, recognizes that debt is money, a tradable
asset for the financial class, and a source of leverage for those stuck in
the red. We take inspiration from the old adage: If you owe the bank

$100, thats your problem. If you owe the bank Activists seem to relish their
$100 million, thats the banks problem.
marginalization, interpreting
Other efforts are much further along. Cli-
mate justice organizers have devised original their small numbers as evidence
ways to mobilize people to affect oil compa-
of their specialness.
nies bottom linesby forcing the federal gov-
ernment to stop issuing new coal mining leases 9
on public land, for example. Since launching in
2012, the campaign for fossil fuel divestment has managed to pressure
investors controlling more than $3.4 trillion in assets to exit the mar-
ket. Organizing started with students on campuses and then expanded
to include citizens of broader communities, with more than sixty cities
and towns worldwide now pledged to support full or partial divestment.
One of the greatest successes of the divestment campaign thus far
has been to undermine confidence in the fossil fuel industrys business
plan, Jamie Henn, a cofounder of the environmental group 350.org and
one of the campaign leaders, told me. Now its not just small liberal arts
colleges that are taking carbon risk seriously, but huge financial insti-
tutions like the Bank of England, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth
Fund, and Californias pension systems.
Finally, there is the Black Lives Matter movement, which has done
an astounding job of putting racial oppression back on the national
agenda. Young groups like the Dream Defenders, a Florida outfit that
coalesced in the wake of Trayvon Martins murder, have embraced a
model of leaderfull as opposed to leaderless organizing, while tak-
ing a skeptical approach to online-only activism. To change our com-
munities, we must have power, not just followers, the groups leaders
explained after a ten-week, strategy-focused social media hiatus. While
concrete victories have been few and far between, the movement for
black lives achieved a remarkable win last fall when the University of
Missouri football team threatened to go on strike for the rest of the sea-
son unless the school president, Tim Wolfe, stepped down. And he did.
This phenomenal show of economic mightthe cancellation of
one game would have cost the university a million dollarswas quickly
blotted out, however, by a raging debate over free speech on campus,
driven by an unfortunate encounter between a Missouri professor and
a young journalist and by subsequent events at Yale, where students
took umbrage at a faculty members preemptive defense of racist Hal-
loween costumes. As the debate over free speech raged in op-ed sec-
tions and Facebook threads, some rightly observed that the shift of
focus was distracting. When pundits started talking about the First
Amendment, they stopped talking about systemic racism. They also

R a b b l e R ou se
stopped talking about the reasons the Missouri athletes form of direct
action got the goods and how their approach to organizing might be
replicated elsewhere.
Up from the Armchair

All things considered, the word activist isnt that bad. It is, at the very
least, certainly preferable to social entrepreneur, change agent, orgod
forbidsocial justice warrior. Unlike activist, with its hazy etymology,
the history of social justice warrior, or SJW, can be traced in remarkable
detail thanks to the website Know Your Meme. It first appeared in a
blog post on November 6, 2009, and by April 21, 2011, merited its own
entry on Urban Dictionary: A pejorative term for an individual who
repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on
the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the
purpose of raising their own personal reputation.
Since then, the expression has traveled up the media food chain,
from Reddit and 4chan (where it was embraced as the insult of choice
for the aggrieved mobs of Gamergate) to the Daily Beast, Slate, and
the New York Times. Liberal Salon tried to reclaim the phrase with the
headline, 5 reasons 2015 was the year of the social justice warrior (and
why progressives should embrace the term). The rapid mainstreaming
found momentum in last falls wave of campus unrest. The New York
Post editorial board, for example, warned that Social Justice Warriors
now rule at the University of Missouri. While the piece mentions the
football players in passing, the real focus was, predictably, the alleged
suppression of free speech. The quest for safe spaces is starting to
look a lot like fascism, the editors opined.
So there we have it. A century ago, the idea of activism was born
of a philosopherEuckenwho preferred the mystical to the mate-
rial, and that preference still lingers on today, for many still believe
that action, even when disconnected from any coherent strategy, can
magically lead to a kind of societal awakening. Social justice warfare,
in turn, emerged from some of the Internets more unsavory recesses
as an insult concocted to belittle those who take issue with bigotry.
But vitriol aside, the term betrays a faith that unites social justice war-
riors and their critics (a faith, to be clear, that is all too common today):
that arguing with and attacking strangers online is a form of political
engagement as significant as planning a picket or a boycott once was.
Fortunately, at least for now, social justice warriors have not totally
eclipsed activists, and activists have not completely eradicated orga-
nizers. There are still plenty of arenas in which real organizingwhat
Rudd described in his talk as education, base-building, and coalition,

and what I would describe as creating collective identity and shared
economic poweris being done, but these slow-moving efforts are
often overshadowed by the latest spectacle or viral outrage.
Almost a decade after I sat listening to Mark Rudd speak in a
dingy room, tens of thousands of people are flocking to auditoriums
across America to hear Bernie Sanders condemn the billionaire class.
With polls showing that a growing number of young people and the
majority of Democratic primary voters have a positive view of social-
ism, we need good, smart organizing to back up this astonishing uptick
in leftist sentiment and to productively channel peoples enthusiasm
and energy beyond the limited frame of the presidential race and elec-
toral politics. Semantics alone will not determine historys course, for
it matters less what we call ourselves and more what we do, but often
the language we use doesnt help the cause. It has always been easy for
elites to dismiss those who challenge them as losers and malcontents,
but it takes even less effort to ignore a meme. Successful organizers, by
contrast, are more difficult to shrug off, because they have built a base
that acts strategically. The goal of any would-be world-changer should
be to be part of something so organized, so formidable, and so shrewd
that the powerful dont scoff: they quake.t

Ulysses XXI
6 Benjamin Fondane
I advanced into the crowd, no one knew my name

if had they known, would it have mattered:
did I know myself? And wheeling around,
I was molded into a shape by the shadowy light,
as if this mob, swelling and indifferent, were a sea-breeze
off of which something good might blow in;
as if the tadpoles that swarmed in the slime of this inhuman
harbor
were men, not terrified survivors of mishaps,
of old shipwrecks, defying all words;
offal of forgotten ancient festivals,
packets of craving, of pus, of solitude,
solitary trembling things.
Caught up someplace, it was drizzling,
on some human line stretching to the dawn
for bread, or for a visa, it was long, that line,
the war was long, the peace took a long time,
a long and sordid dawn;
and the discovery of nothingness so slowly overcame us,
this malaise in the heart, heavier than pregnancy;
the humiliation of being nothing,
immigrants without passports,
people alone from other countries,
each speaking another language,
speaking the tongue of the craving for bread, for destruction,
tenderness, honey, dream, and power,
a fresh bed under a strong roof, someplace out there. . . .
And I, I was among them, speaking my own language,
a language even I no longer understood!

I advanced, fearing that Id be forgotten,
crying out from fear, hunger, and pain;
include me here . . . I too am a god. Take pity, at least!
A sound, rattling and hoarse,
a bitter thread of music,
a broken complaint running across history,
outside of history . . . yes.
Of no importance, of course,
that I was in the road, in a womb,
or in the keyhole of this room,
in the aquarium of the world,
waiting for something I already knew was
impossible, impossible,
and yet desiring to go beyond the possible.
a face, a hand,
a trembling bell,
the sound of a step, of a voice,
terrible and violent,
rising in the silence like a flood on a river of Mars!
But is it of any importance
that this day be inscribed
a significant date in the motion of history,
of any importance that someone deceives himself on the
staircase
or by the door, believes himself to be more than nothing in time,
not merely a handful of human odors . . .
a guardian of the lighthouse, half-mad with terror.
Translated from the French by Leonard Schwartz.

Cr ack pots
They Made Him a Moron

The strange career of Alec Ross
3 Evgeny Morozov
One day in October 2009, I received an email from the office of Alec
Ross, then the innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton. Informing me
that my writing on technology and global affairs had attracted con-
siderable interest at the State Department, the email mentioned that
Ross would like to meet and chat about my work. A subsequent email,
from Ross himself, asked me for advice on what the State Department
should do. What Id really like to know, wrote Ross, is what are those
things we can do, either materially or symbolically, to help ensure and
extend Internet Freedom across the globe.
Ross seemed like an intriguing type: he was the first such innova-
tion adviser, one of the whiz kids brought in from the outside to help
disrupt the stale world of U.S. diplomacy. He was a political appoin-
tee, with little experience in foreign policy. During the 2008 election
campaign, Ross advised Obamas team on technology policy; prior
to that, he cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to bridging the digital
divide. Here was someone young and ambitious, a poster child for
Obamas infatuation with digital technologiesafter all, they had just
got him elected.
Curiosity got the better of me. I went to see Ross at the State
Department, just a few blocks from the flat that I was renting in
Washington. I was, to put it mildly, underwhelmed. Mr. Senior
Adviser for Innovation, I quickly discovered, didnt have much advice
to dispatch and was himself busy recruiting informal advisers to gen-
erate talking points for Clinton. That wouldnt have been so bad if, at
the same time, Ross werent so keen on namedropping and signaling
his status. It took him just a few minutes to mention that he was sup-
posed to have a call with Samantha Power at the White House and
that, despite his senior position, he had seen poverty up close in West
Virginia (where he grew up) and in Baltimore (where he was living). A
six-week-old copy of The Economist, featuring an African woman hold-
ing a mobile phone on its cover, occupied a strategic spot on his desk.
Here was an important man reading important things and talking to
important people.
Out of courtesy, I did share some thoughts with Ross, but it wasnt
long before our paths diverged.* I soon became a critic of the U.S. gov-

DAV I D S U T E R
ernments Internet freedom agenda, while Ross and his colleague

and friend Jared Cohen (then on the policy planning staff of the State
Department and now the head of Google Ideas) embarked on adven-
tures so reckless and ridiculous, so obsequious to the interests of Sili-
con Valley and offensive to anyone well-versed in the diplomatic trade,
that some career staffers at the State Department began to ridicule,
anonymously, of course, their cluelessness on social media.
Rosss tenure at the State Department was, by and large, a fail-
ure. His efforts to promote twenty-first-century statecraftClin-
tons lofty vision for American power that would put Internet free-
dom and digital technologies at its corefloundered after the State
Department was confronted by Cablegate, the release of a massive
library of leaked diplomatic cables that began in late 2010 and was
coordinated by WikiLeaks. Ross, who claimed the twenty-first-cen-
tury-statecraft concept as his own and hoped that it would become
* That much can be gleaned from a bizarre and random attack that Ross launches on me in his book, calling me
a social media-savvy graduate student in Massachusetts ... who writes neo-Luddite screeds against American
technology companies, advancing the official views of Russia and Belarusarguably, just the kind of person that
Hillary Clintons innovation adviser should have sought advice from! Ironically, the only memo of advice Ive ever
written for a government was for the American oneat Rosss own prompting.

a major part of [Clintons] legacy, was suddenly forced into damage
control. Few would find his pronouncements on Internet freedom
credible after the State Departments reaction to WikiLeaks. An even
more unglamorous picture of his activities emerges from Clintons
email trove. The good news is that Ross did innovate on at least one
frontspin. In 2012, Ross wrote to Cheryl D. Mills, Clintons chief
of staff: Hillary Clinton is the most innovation-friendly American
diplomat since Benjamin Franklin. Thought youd enjoy that line. It
appears in minute 10 of show I did on CSPAN. Im going to continue
to use it.
Rosss brief moment of national fame had more to do with his pen-
chant for self-promotion than innovation. In summer 2010, Ross and
Cohen took a delegation of American technology executives from the
likes of Cisco and Microsoft to Damascus to meet with Bashar al-As-
sadstrange are the twists of twenty-first-century statecraft. Never
missing an opportunity to show off, the pair tweeted all the fun they
were having in Syria. (Cohen: Im not kidding when I say I just had the
greatest frappuccino ever at Kalamoun University north of Damas-
cus; Ross: Creative Diplomacy: @jaredcohen challenged Minister of
Telecom to cake-eating contest.) By Rosss account, though, the trip
pursued the much nobler objective of fomenting regime change via
social media. As he wrote in another email to Mills, When Jared and
I went to Syria, it was because we knew that Syrian society was grow-
ing increasingly young (population will double in 17 years) and digital
and that this was going to create disruptions in society that we could
potential [sic] harness for our purposes.
Anyone familiar with Rosss style wont be surprised to discover
that his first book, The Industries of the Future (Simon and Schuster,
2016), has all the usual ingredients: West Virginia or Baltimore gets
a mention in almost every chapter; the few interesting speculations
in the book come from somebody else; and there is an abundance of
praise lavished on CEOs, venture capitalists, and other very important
men, all of them Rosss buddies. As Ross put it in one of the emails
written during his government tenure, We should cultivate social
media influencers for the purpose of validation and amplification of
our messageand he follows that advice to the letter.
Apparently, Ross has never met an influencer he didnt want to
quote or praise. We learn that Larry Summers has one of the sharpest
minds in the world; that LinkedIns Reid Hoffman is one of Silicon
Valleys top minds (and nicest people); that investor Charlie Songhurst
is one of the most creative thinkers at the intersection of technology,
society, and the global economy; and so on. The influencers are happy

to return the favor. Anyone who wants to Ever since the heyday
understand the key forces that are shaping
of modernization theory,
our economic, political, and social futures
will benefit hugely from Rosss insights, reads anyone with even rudimentary
a blurb for the book from Hoffmanone of
expertise in the latest
Silicon Valleys nicest people, indeed. This
network, it turns out, is quite incestuous. technologies has been in high
First, Ross quotes the famous venture capital-
demand in Washington.
ist Marc Andreessen. Then, he quotes Larry
Summersonly to tell us that Summers is also 9
an adviser to Andreessens firm and sits on the
board of several other Silicon Valley startups. An app for disrupting
the elites? Alas, nobody is building it.
At times, the book reads like an extended college admissions
essay, with the student, prompted to reflect on his most memorable
experience, desperately trying to relate something very trivial he
did last summer to lofty questions of globalization and democracy.
Ross reflects, for example, on his time working as a janitor after his
freshman year in college, linking it to his experiences as an innova-
tion adviser to the Secretary of State. On another level, The Indus-
tries of the Future can be read as an extended effort to prove to the
world that Ross does belong in the very center of that bizarre Venn
diagramright at the intersection of technology, foreign policy, and
the Democratic Partythat had secured him his original job at the
State Department.
Such books are normally written before a person is appointed to a
high-level advisory position within the government; they are meant to
attest to ones intellectual credentials and articulate a grand strategic
vision of the future, which can then guide the persons advisory work.
Ross, however, got his career backwards: he got his advisory position
based on his campaign work for Obama, though he had few academic
or intellectual credentials to his name. Then, after he left the State
Department in 2013, he pursued the well-trodden path of aspiring pun-
dits-cum-lobbyists: a fellowship at an Ivy League school (Columbia),
seats on half a dozen corporate boards (FiscalNote, Kudelski Group,
Leeds Equity Partners, Telerivet, AnchorFree, 2U), and now, finally,
a book.
Given Rosss career trajectoryfrom a supposed big thinker
without any big thoughts to a power broker between industry and
governmentthis book appears eight years too late. While his pub-
lisher blurbs him as a leading innovation expert whose book belongs
on the shelf alongside works by Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria

Cr ack pots
(pretty faint praise, this), The Industries of the Future reads more like a
love letter to a few more unexplored corporate boards, preferably in
industries that will last longer than Alec Rosss career as the next Tom
Friedman.
This turn to futurism and technology is not new for Washington
insiders. Even Zbigniew Brzezinski once penned a tome on the tech-
netronic era. Ever since the heyday of modernization theory, with its
belief in the civilizing power of radio, television, and satellites, anyone
with even rudimentary expertise in the latest technologies has been
in high demand in Washington; a lucrative career spanning academia,
the lecture circuit, and the private sector was guaranteed. From Ith-
iel de Sola Pool to George Gilder, Ross is in goodor, rather, awful
company.
The Jargon That Ate the World

The Industries of the Future has a relatively straightforward structure.
Ross dedicates each chapter to an emerging industry, from biotech to
fintech to cybersecurity, all while peppering the reader with so much
data and so many examples that one can only hope that no interns were
hurt in collecting them. He interviews his favorite expertsmost of
them Silicon Valley royaltyand extracts long quotes from each, peri-
odically pausing his courageous reportage from the digital frontlines
to proclaim, in a crushingly banal editorial voice, what he himself
thinks about the future.
Whatever industry he examines, Ross inevitably comes up with
the same finding: any industry of the future will be just like one
industry of the pastthe Internet. His mindset is the best example
of what I call Internet-centrism: using the Internet as the basic ana-
lytical category for making sense of the world and urging everyone to
heed its lessons. Thus, when Ross thinks about the future of robot-
ics, he thinks about the Internet in the 1990s. Likewise, where we
are today with genomics is the equivalent of where we were in 1994
at the advent of the commercial Internet. Bitcoins blockchain will
be to banking, law, and accountancy as the Internet was to media,
commerce and advertising. (Here, Ross is quoting the director of the
MIT Media Lab.)
This is futurism at its laziest: its enough to simply take an industry
and search for its equivalent of eBay, Google, and Uber, or search for
some well-known phenomenon from the 1990s and argue that it will
repeat itself, albeit in a different sector. (I anticipate that the same
kind of protest and labor movements that advocated against free trade
agreements in the 1990s will form in the 2020s once robots begin to

really make their presence known in the workplace; the Luddites
will finally arrive, says our futurist.) The rest of the book is filled with
banalities unworthy of even Thomas Friedman. Data: the raw mate-
rial of the information age; The world has left the Cold War behind
only to enter into a Code War; Multicultural fluency is increasingly
important in a business world that is growing more globalthis stuff
would be embarrassing enough to read coming from the futurists of
the 1950s.
The paucity of big ideas in this book can easily be explained by
the material it draws on. Mostly, Ross cites articles from newspapers
and magazines rather than actual books on these subjects. He ignores
anything of analytical substance that has been written on the indus-
tries hes examining and prefers to waterboard the reader with fac-
toids and trivia about hair-washing robots in Japan or the consultant
dispatched by the State Department to the Colombian jungle (the
last stronghold of the FARC guerillas), where he was educating local
stakeholders.
There are occasional wild predictions, which are either irrelevant
or impossible to substantiate. What good is it to say that in the future
you will be able to host a dinner party with eight people at the table, all
speaking different languages, while the voice in your ear will be whis-
pering the language of your choice? Moreover, do you know anybody
with a burning need to organize such a dinner party?
This book by the State Departments former innovation adviser
merely attests to the intellectual bankruptcy of the term innovation,
which in the hands of people like Ross has ceased to have any substan-
tive meaning. For Ross, innovation is an activity that will prepare
you for the futurewhich can, of course, be foreseen if you surround
yourself with enough innovators. But what exactly makes Ross an
innovator? Tweeting about Cohens cake-eating contest in Syria? That
may very well be: mastery of social media is what passes for savvy tech-
nology strategy these days.
The Alec Ross success story is a fine illustration of how somebody
with virtually zero foreign policy experience can rise to the upper ech-
elons of the foreign policy establishment by becoming a go-to author-
ity on all things technologyand now, apparently, on all things future.
Technology experts have joined economists as Americas most useful
idiots. There is always demand for their expertise, there is no risk in
saying stupid things about complex matters (the majority wont under-
stand them anyway), and there are plenty of corporations willing to
foot the bill for this intellectual circus.
In his supposed pragmatism, Ross combines the worst of Clinton

The only redeeming feature and Obama, making it impossible for him to
come up with any mildly defensible, let alone
of this book is that Ross,
exciting, thesis. Yes, technology is disrupt-
in the course of defending ing many industries; yes, some jobs will be
lost and some will be created; yes, we need to
the empire-building efforts
distribute the gains of the digital revolution
of both Silicon Valley more evenly. Ross doesnt say how all this
will be done, and instead stops short at a level
and Washington, reveals
of generality that should endear him to the
the geopolitical and Davos elites. Here is someone talking tech-
nology policy without hurting any corporate
technological unconscious
interests in the process!
of American elites. While Ross does pinpoint the dire con-
sequences of automation for the job market,
9 he shies away from more radical proposals
like a universal basic incomefor tackling it. Rather, he believes that
government will somehow be able to pull it all together with the same
old tools of taxation, regulation, and retraining. Perhaps the rise of
Bitcoin will give Silicon Valley an innovative method of paying taxes?
Or perhaps, Ross writes, as the sharing economy grows as a share of
the total economy, the safety net needs to grow with it. There are,
however, no details whatsoever on how that net is to be designed, let
alone implemented.
This might seem boringand it is. The only redeeming feature of
this book is that Ross, in the course of defending the empire-building
efforts of both Silicon Valley and Washington, reveals the geopolitical
and technological unconscious of American elites. The Industries of the
Future is interesting not for what it says about technologyyou could
have read it all in The Economist, years earlierbut for what it leaves
unsaid. Ross makes implicit, and occasionally explicit, assumptions
about Silicon Valleys increasingly prominent role in global affairs that
deserve far more scrutiny than what he has to say about robotics, agri-
culture, or the sharp mind of Larry Summers.
Ross uses terms like globalization and innovation as harmless
euphemisms for capitalism. Globalization, for him, is something for
which the United States government has no responsibilityits just
happening on its own, autonomously and anonymously, as if trade
treaties, military bases, and offshoring zones were all springing up
without anyone consciously creating the policies that enable them.
Rosss book is a good example of how this discourse of globalization
has been adopted by American policymakers as a way of blaming the
effects and consequences of their own policiesaimed primarily at

making the whole globe a safe playground for American capitalon
historical inevitability.
Magic Mountains
Like many in Silicon Valley, Ross believes in what has become known
as the Varian Rulenamed after Googles chief economist, Hal
Varianwhich states that the kinds of luxuries enjoyed by billionaires
today will eventually be provided, albeit in a somewhat modified, heav-
ily technologized form, to the poor and middle classes. You wont get
a chauffeur, but you will get a self-driving car; you wont get a secre-
tary, but youll get Siri or Google Now. The only benchmark of success
is access to goods and services, while the actual terms on which this
access is providedfor Google Now to work, for example, you need
to let Google monitor you pervasivelyare never discussed. Here is a
capitalism-friendly version of social mobility, whereby consumption,
rather than the dissolution of existing power relationships, becomes
the sole goal of emancipatory struggles.
Ross also subscribes to the view, quite popular in both Wash-
ington and Silicon Valley, that thanks to the digital revolution and
proliferation of cellphones and social media, the powerful (corpora-
tions, governments, traditional media) have lost their clout and newly
empowered citizens find ways to outsmart their oppressors. Its not for
nothing that Mark Zuckerberg chose The End of Power, by the quintes-
sential Washington insider Moiss Nam, as the first selection of his
book club. (The books not-so-subtle subtitle is this: From Boardrooms
to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isnt What It
Used to Be.)
Ross tells us that everywhere, newly empowered citizens ... are
challenging the established order in ways never before imaginable
from building new business models to challenging old autocracies. To
see just how ridiculous this idea is, its enough to look at what hap-
pened in Greece last summer. The angry Greeks and their support-
ers abroad had a fancy hashtag (#thisisacoup), while their opponents
in the European governments, the European Commission, and the
International Monetary Fundwell, they had just about everything
else. Guess who won. Perhaps the Greeks should have heeded Rosss
advice and attempted to disrupt the Troika with a new business
model.
Despite incessant proclamations to the contrary, the purse still
wields more power than the cellphone. And given the growing indebt-
edness of the population and the financializaton of everything under
the sun, citizens stand to be further disempowered for the benefit of

Cr ack pots
elites, banks, and transnational institutions. (The latter barely get a

mention in Rosss book.) Populism is on the rise across the globe not
because citizens feel empowered by new technologies, but because
they feel disempowered by everything else. These populist move-
ments might even be putting technologies to good use. But as the
Greek experience shows us, while a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin might
offer some hypothetical lifeline to a government that subscribes to
an alternative political and economic agenda, other mechanisms of
powermostly the old-fashioned banking systempreclude its actual
deployment.
What is most interesting about Rosss geopolitical unconscious is
his treatment of the future itself. Apparently, theres just one future,
with America and Silicon Valley at the helm. All that other countries
can do is either adapt to it by reshaping their industries and expecta-
tions to favor more openness, or risk being labeled control freaks
and closed societies by the likes of Ross and his army of think tanks,
NGOs, and fake grassroots activists. Its pointless to imitate Silicon
Valley, Ross warns. Instead, other countries should accept that Amer-
ican companies will operate the network and communications infra-
structure on which the global economy functions. These countries,
Ross tells us, should find ways to foster industries of the future and
make money with additional serviceslike, say, data analyticsbuilt
on top of that infrastructure.
This is, of course, very bad advice for any country that would like
to preserve strong domestic industry and maintain a modicum of sov-
ereignty. Not everybody can be an authoritarian city-state like Singa-
pore or a tax haven like Ireland. Ross does his best not to acknowledge
a basic factthat the profitability of future industries is inherently tied
to the data-intensive platforms from which they emerge. A company
like Google wants to be in every industry, from life extension, to home
automation, to insurance, to energyand it runs the infrastructure
on which all these industries will operate in the future. How is it pos-
sible for any country to build a sustainable, long-term business strat-
egy around data analytics when Google owns their data? Ross pays
some lip service to the importance of people owning their own data
but dances around the fact that, on this very issue, corporations enjoy
far more rights than citizensand the U.S. government is clear about
whose side it is on.
Rosss world is not just flatits plastic. Any country, he suggests,
can simply abandon an industry that feeds it and move to embrace
the future. But German car companies are afraid of Google not
because they cant develop an analytics business on top of self-driving

cars and operating systems supplied by Google, but because theyll
make far less money from the analytics business than they currently
make selling Mercedes and BMWs (while probably having to fire
most of their heavily unionized workforce). This is a painful politi-
cal and economic conflict, but for Ross, its simple: all these foreign
countries and companies are refusing to look toward the future,
adjust to the inevitable disruption that it will unleash, and acquire
the expertise required to survive.
The Fools Errand

Rosss only big idea in this book is that, thanks to the rise of new tech-
nologies, we are entering a new era, one in which countries will need to
decide just where to be ideologically. The principal political binary of
the last half of the twentieth century, he writes, was communism ver-
sus capitalism. In the twenty-first century, it is open versus closed. It
doesnt take long to understand that open can mean only one thing
open for business, and particularly for business involving American
capital. Rosss open vs. closed dichotomy does not transcend capi-
talismit simply rebrands it.
Consequently, any country that would like to limit, or at least slow
down, the pillaging of its economy and resources by global corpora-
tions will be classified as closed, its leaders immediately labeled con-
trol freaks or neo-Luddites. The doublespeak of American diplo-
macythe phony enthusiasm for freedom and human rightswas
bad enough, but merged with the doublespeak of Silicon Valley (open
source, Internet freedom, transparency), the hypocrisy becomes
absolute.
Rosss reframing of capitalism vs. communism as a contest
between open and closed reveals that, on issues of foreign policy,
theres barely any difference between Americas two major parties. In
the domestic context, any policy demanding the removal of barriers to
the free circulation of capital would traditionally be associated with
the neoliberal right, who believe that the government should not limit
the further intrusion of market logic into all domains. But while Ross
insists that the U.S. government has a role to play in opposing the tide
of neoliberalismwhich he defines as an ideology encouraging the
free flow of goods and services in a market without government reg-
ulationhe opposes all such efforts by foreign governments. Here is
the duplicity of the Democrats in a nutshell: neoliberalism is bad when
practiced in America, but when imposed on other countries, its glo-
balization.
Rosss views are consistent with Washingtons long-standing

opposition to efforts such as the New World Information and Com-
munication Order, a now mostly forgotten attempt by developing
countries, many of them from the Non-Aligned Movement, to assert
the right to shape their own technological and media destinies. Not
only did the United States fight such efforts tooth and nail, but Wash-
ington also articulated its vision for a world in which no such rights
would exist, giving us the doctrine of the free flow of information,
which has now been reincarnated as the free flow of data. Thus, we
get the curious paradox of somebody like Alec Ross: as a Democrat, he
timidly opposes neoliberalism at home, but he is more than happy to
export it globally.
To substantiate his thesis about the importance of openness,
Ross embarks on a brief discussion of geopoliticsclearly not his area
of expertise, despite his years at the State Department. His treatment
of Estonia and Belarushis best examples of open and closedis a
case in point. The two countries, we are told, faced a clear choice about
what route to pursue after the fall of the Soviet Union. Estonia, he con-
cludes, chose Skype, while Belarus chose to be ruled by the same mus-
tachioed man for more than twenty years now.
This is, of course, a caricature of history, with Ross substituting
his fictitious futurethe one in which we are all wearing multilingual
earpiecesfor the actual past. Never mind the questions of Russian
language, national minorities, the power (or lack thereof ) of the dia-
sporas, the different structures of national economiesfor Ross, all
post-1990 decision-making in the former Soviet Union pursued just
one objective: innovation. This is history as seen by the likes of George
W. Bush, with his predilection for viewing everything through the sin-
gle lens of freedom vs. terror. But its a bit of an embarrassment for Alec
Ross, who likes to boast that he was a history major in college.
Ross sees the same civilizational conflict between open and
closed in todays Ukraine, again with little understanding of his-
tory, language, culture, or even the future, on which he is supposed
to be an expert. The wild enthusiasm of Ukrainians who want to join
the European Union is not at all reciprocated, with many Europeans
already thinking about life after the collapse of the union rather than
the admission of new members.
Rosss reading of technological developments in Russiawhich he
calls a good example of how not to build industries of the futureis
equally flawed. For one thing, Russia was much closer to following the
open Estonian path than the closed Belarusian one, with shock
therapy and radical neoliberal reforms almost running the country into
the ground in the early 1990s. If only the sharp mind of Larry Summers

had been there to guide them! All Russia got Here is the duplicity of
was his Harvard buddy Andrei Shleifer.
the Democrats in a nutshell:
Even looking at the last decade alone, one
can see that Russia has pursued a pro-Amer- neoliberalism is bad when
ican technology policy, inviting many Silicon
practiced in America, but when
Valley giants to set up shop in its own equiv-
alent of Silicon Valley, Skolkovo. The war imposed on other countries,
in Ukraine changed all that, with Russians
its globalization.
reversing their efforts to integrate themselves
into Western networks and institutions and 9
instead rushing to lessen their dependence on
American and European partners and reclaim their sovereigntyin
finance and food, but also technology.
In technology policy, it has meant efforts on the part of the BRICS
states to coordinate an alternative to the dominance of Silicon Valley,
with the Russian government investing in mobile operating systems
and mobile phone companies, taking aggressive positions on Internet
governance, and pushing for data localization laws that would force
American firms to store data locally. Likewise, other countries that
Ross disparagesEcuador, Venezuela, and Argentinapursued smart,
hands-on technology policies that aimed to boost domestic industries,
create new talent, and reassert control over their own technology and
monetary policy. (Ecuador, for example, attempted to roll out its own
digital currency.) For Ross, though, anything that aims to limit the
reach of U.S. capital is immediately labeled closed, technophobic, and
neo-Luddite.
One might disagree with the political ideologies of those govern-
ments, but one would be hard-pressed to call them technophobic. Its
true that they see Americas technology firms as an extension of Amer-
icas economic and foreign powernot an unreasonable assumption
given the revolving door between Washington and Silicon Valley (a
trend exemplified by people like Jared Cohen and Alec Ross). And the
U.S. government itself does not conceal its agenda. A close look at new
trade treaties like TTIP, TPP, and TiSA reveals that they advocate the
free flow of data (now a euphemism for the free flow of capital) and
that any effort to stem it would surely be considered contrary to Amer-
ican interests.
What Ross doesnt want to say is that theres another possible
future, a highly technological one that would deploy algorithms, big
data, sensors, and all the rest to accomplish a very different political
and economic program than the one he endorses. In fact, we have
already caught glimpses of such a future. The experiments with cyber-

Cr ack pots
netics in Allendes Chile come to mind, though they were crushed by

none other than that evangelist of openness, the United States. Some
governments have grasped that, in order to develop the industries of
their own future, they need to maintain some technological sover-
eigntymuch to the chagrin of Silicon Valley and Washington, who
were planning to continue their joint project of spreading markets,
information, democracy, and American investment everywhere.
Ross implies that only benighted adversaries like North Korea,
with its rudimentary technological capabilities, could resist the Amer-
ican gospel. But in the face of efforts to develop a very different version
of the sharing economyas the new radical mayor of Barcelona, for
example, is now trying to doRoss has little to say. The fact that much
of the rest of the world has been working on an alternative to neoliberal
globalizationwhat the French call altermondialismehas either never
registered with Alec Ross or is just not something that the corporate
boards he is auditioning for want to know.
Rosss argument, or rather its style, leads to the eventual depo-
liticization of extremely political and contentious issues by wrapping
them up in the empty, futuristic language of technology and innova-
tion. Technology talk furnishes the seemingly innocent vocabulary
that allows the U.S. government to bypass any organized resistance
to the sort of neoliberal measuresmore privatization, more auster-
ity, no controls on movements of capitalthat used to constitute the
agenda behind the so-called Washington Consensus. All these mea-
sures, from privatization of industry to the radical reform of labor mar-
kets, are now presented as the reasonable and future-oriented option
that would allow developing countries to leapfrog right into advanced,
knowledge-based capitalism.
And while previous efforts to market such policies generated a lot
of pushback and even rioting from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, none of
that struggle is visible now that Silicon Valley has taken over the job
from the World Bank and the IMF. Who could argue that a country
shouldnt adapt itself to the future and build fancy apps? Why would
any country want to resist the natural pull of technology?
Of course, there is nothing natural in that pull. For every deep
thinker like Alec Ross, there are a dozen American technocrats work-
ing to ensure that such boring (but vital and controversial) issues as
international technology standards are resolved in the interests of
Washington and Silicon Valley. All this talk of the future, with its air
of inevitability and progress, gives them impeccable cover. Alec Ross
has seen the future and heeded its advice: the only industry safe from
disruption is cheerleading for American capital.t

E x h i b i t D Greta Pratt
Liberty Wavers. G R E TA P R AT T

Info-Sca m
The Rest Is Advertising

Confessions of a sponsored content writer
3 Jacob Silverman
Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pyn-

chon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Noto-
rious for keeping its communications department locked up tight,
Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media
industry, but also a stingy interview-granter, especially now that its
floundering with poor profits, executive turnover, and a toxic culture.
Ive tried to get them on the record before. No one has replied.
This time, though, a senior executive from one of Twitters
key divisions seemed happyeager, evento talk with me, and for as
long as I wanted. You might even say he prattled. I was a little stunned:
Id been writing about tech matters for years as a freelance journalist,
and this was far more access than I was used to receiving. What was
different? I was calling as a reporterbut not exactly. I was writing a
story for The Atlanticbut not for the news division. Instead, I was
working for a moneymaking wing of The Atlantic called Re:think, and
I was writing sponsored content.
In case you havent heard, journalism is now in perpetual crisis,
and conditions are increasingly surreal. The fate of the controver-
sialists at Gawker rests on a delayed jury trial over a Hulk Hogan sex

ERIC HANSON
tape. Newspapers publish directly to Facebook, and Snapchat hires

journalists away from CNN. Last year, the Pulitzer Prizes doubled
as the irony awards; one winner in the local reporting category, it
emerged, had left his newspaper job months earlier for a better pay-
ing gig in PR. Is there a future in journalism and writing and the
Internet? Choire Sicha, cofounder of The Awl, wrote last January.
Haha, FUCK no, not really. Even those who have kept their jobs
in journalism, he explained, cant say what they might be doing, or
where, in a few years time. Disruption clouds the future even as it
holds it up for worship.
But for every crisis in every industry, a potential savior emerges.
And in journalism, the latest candidate is sponsored content.
Also called native advertising, sponsored content borrows the look,
the name recognition, and even the staff of its host publication to push
brand messages on unsuspecting viewers. Forget old-fashioned ban-
ner ads, those most reviled of early Internet artifacts. This is vertically
integrated, barely disclaimed content marketing, and its here to solve
journalisms cash flow problem, or so were told. 15 Reasons Your Next
Vacation Needs to Be in SW Florida, went a recent BuzzFeed headline

just another listicle crying out for eyeballs on an overcrowded homep-
age, except this one had a tiny yellow sidebar to announce, in a sneaky
whisper, Promoted by the Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel.
Advertorials are what we expect out of BuzzFeed, the ur-source of
digital doggerel and the first media company to open its own in-house
studioa sort of mini Saatchi & Saatchito build original, custom
content for brands. But now legacy publishers are following Buzz-
Feeds lead, heeding the call of the digital co-marketers and starting
in-house sponsored content shops of their own. CNN opened one last
spring, and its keepers, with nary a trace of self-awareness, dubbed it
Courageous. The New York Times has T Brand Studio (clients include
Dell, Shell, and Goldman Sachs), the S. I. Newhouse empire has some-
thing called 23 Stories by Cond Nast, and The Atlantic has Re:think.
As the breathless barkers who sell the stuff will tell you, sponsored con-
tent has something for everyone. Brands get their exposure, publishers
get their bankroll, freelancer reporters get some work on the side, and
readers get advertising that goes down exceptionally easyif they even
notice theyre seeing an ad at all.
The promise is that quality promotional content will sit cheek-by-
jowl with traditional journalism, aping its style and leveraging its pres-
tige without undermining its credibility.
The problem, as I learned all too quickly when I wrote my spon-
sored story for The Atlantic (paid for by a prominent tech multina-
tional), is that the line between whats sponsored and what isnt
between advertising and journalismhas already been rubbed away.
Whether it can be redrawn will depend less on the hand-wringing of
professional idealists and more on the wavering resolve of an industry
that, hearing chronic news of the apocalypse, has begun to quake and
ask, Is it too late to convert?
Like Pigs to Sponsors

It was money that got me into the sponsored content racket.
As a freelance journalist, you learn, with a great deal of self-loath-
ing, to follow the scent of cash. Every so often, a writer friend stumbles
upon a startup, or a journal backed by a well-heeled foundation, and a
flag goes up: theres money here! And off we stampede, like hogs snuf-
fling through the underbrush in search of truffles, pitching and writing
until the funds dry up or an editor gets laid off.
A while ago, one of those signals came wafting over from The
Atlantics sponsored content shop. Like many of these upstart projects,
Re:think has a roster of full-time employeesdesigners, editors, pro-
grammersbut it also relies on freelance writers to get the job done.

(Think Lena Dunhams character on Girls, It is a strange thing to identify
cranking out Neiman Marcusbranded sto-
yourself as a journalist
ries for GQ .)
I wasnt exactly sold on the idea of spon- and then ask someone to
sored content, much less the spotty record
comment for an ad
of Re:think, which began with a gaffe and a
whimper in 2013. Among its first clients was youre creating.
the Church of ScientologyDavid Miscavige
Leads Scientology to Milestone Year, went 9
the headlineand The Atlantics creative mar-
keting group has been recovering from that embarrassment ever since.
But my new Atlantic contact gave me the lowdown: the maga-
zine was looking to expand its sponsored offerings, and it would pay
obscenely wellup to $4 per word in some cases, a rate that can be
found these days only at the glossiest of glossy mags.
I had written a few pieces for The Atlantics website before, at
the measly rate of $150 each. Now I was in line for up to forty times
that, if only I could twist my journalistic skills to what was essentially
reported copywriting.
Perhaps best of all, I wouldnt have to use my byline.
Naturally, I said yes.
Soon I was meeting my contact, who had the title of integrated
marketing manager, at a Union Square coffee shop. I was delighted
few editors have ever asked me out for coffee, which may say as much
about my personal charms as it does about their harried schedules. The
marketing manager, whom Ill call Alex, was a pleasant, smart guy in
his mid-twenties with an editorial background. He understood why
writers like me would be doing this work and why we might feel a little
sheepish about it (none of his previous contributors had used a byline,
he told me). Advertisers would have some say over the final product,
but their involvement would be minimal.
Within days I had signed on to do an article sponsored by IBM.
The piece would involve reporting, and the goal was to achieve the
look, feel, and mannerisms of a bona fide Atlantic storyexcept maybe
with fancier graphics. The story was supposed to trumpet the merits of
Watson, IBMs heavily promoted super-computer, and its new partner-
ship with Twitter. Specifically, I was charged with disclosing the ways
in which Watson, by analyzing real-time data piped in from Twitter,
would soon revolutionize the future of news.
I dove in gamely, wearing my reporters face. Alex took the lead,
booking me phone interviews with vice presidents of IBM and Twitter,
who were exceedingly accommodating. In exchange for access, though,

Info-Sca m
I got instructions. I was required to submit some questions in advance

of each interview, and company PR reps would sit in on the calls.
It was clear that all partiesThe Atlantic, IBM, Twitter, and espe-
cially me, with my reservations about taking the assignment in the first
placewanted this exercise to resemble real journalism. The trouble
was, none of the VPs I interviewed seemed to grasp the meaning of
news, much less what all their high-level info-crunching might have
to do with its future. Instead, my interviewees talked, with excitement
and eloquence, about the sheer amount of data being transmitted, the
raw power of IBMs analytics software, and possible applications for
big business. (If you want to know what people in Peoria think about
your new basketball shoe, the Watson supercomputer is your guy.)
The closest we got to something useful was when a Twitter execu-
tive speculated that in the aftermath of a disaster, emergency services
might scan tweets to see where help is needed. However aligned our
purposesin this case, promoting the Twitter and IBM brandswe
were speaking two different languages. I had been tasked with writing
a story that didnt exist.
Freelancing is a miserable hustle, one that few people pursue by
choice, and with an estimated one-third of American workers now
swelling the ranks of the precariously employed, journalists can claim
no special privilege in their anhedonia. (Its a different kind of priv-
ilegeoccasional infusions of parental generosity; a spouse with a
steady job; an improbable, and briefly lucrative, run as a game-show
contestantthat has allowed me to stay in this game for so long.) I
considered punting the assignment. But my spouse had recently quit
work to return to graduate school, and I found myself in the familiar
too-afraid-to-look-at-my-account-balance zone, with no shortage of
investigative stories to pitch, but no editors willing to pay me for them.
So I kept at it, digging around a bit more to see if any media com-
panies were doing interesting work with Twitter. (Few were, it seemed,
despite the data journalism fad sweeping the industry.) I asked a con-
tact at Nieman Lab, a journalism think tank, if she had any thoughts,
but mostly we ended up talking about the peculiarities of sponsored
content. It is indeed a strange thing to identify yourself as a journalist
and then ask someone to comment for an ad youre creating.
But Im a writer, I thought. Whipping nothing into something
is what I do! Remembering that this was an advertisement, I set aside
years of techno-skepticism, channeled the fawning credulousness of a
TechCrunch-style puff piece, and wrote in my most chipper, optimistic
voice. I dropped in some references to Dataminr, Vocativ, and other
data-driven journalism projects, but for the most part I strung together

quotations from my interviews and stuck to a fan-fiction script. Since we
were talking about the future of news, it all seemed inherently specu-
lative anyway. (What was the future but a set of informed guesses that
would never be questioned or compared against the eventual outcome?)
Within a few days, I managed to put together a readable draft. I figured
I had done a reasonable jobcertainly I had presented IBM and Twitter
in a positive lightand maybe, just possibly, earned my ample fee.
Things hit a snag, though, when the Re:think team brought in a
ringer: a longtime editor who, I was told, had overseen a well-known
news magazine during its heyday. He would help shepherd the article,
or ad, or whatever it was, to completion. While Alex had been genial,
this journalistic veteran played in a different key. (Any time someones
first message opens with the words please dont react to the length of
this email, you know youre in for something real.) The article needed
work, he said. But what kind of work wasnt clear.
I began to wonder if, like me, this veteran editor was just trying to
earn his fee. How much was he making, I wondered? How much does
an editor who presided over an industrys golden age receive to consult
for the same industry during its hospice years? Did he hate himself too,
at least a little bit, for using his decades of expertise to gin up propa-
ganda for corporations that, were he to approach them as a journalist,
would shoo him away with a curt no comment?
My questions became nagging anxieties and then, over the next few
nights, a full-blown existential crisis. I was a month away from the release
of my first book, a critical treatment of the big tech companies and the
world theyve made for us, and here I was sweating over an assignment
glorifying some of those same companies. And I couldnt even figure
out how to do it properly! I had the impression, common to many anxi-
ety sufferers, that my problems were self-made but also eminently real.
This sentiment merged with a number of other ugly feelingsmy disgust
toward the media establishment, my distaste for advertising, my pro-
found frustration with the older editor, my fear that I would be grinding
out bullshit work like this for the rest of my daysuntil I thought that I
just couldnt do it. I began to wonder how I would explain to my spouse
that, because I couldnt finish this assignment, we would have to change
our names and move to a foreign country. It all made a kind of sense.
In a tidier narrative, I would say that this was when I stumbled upon
some epiphanic moment, either converting to the sacred cause of con-
tent marketing or storming off the assignment in a righteous airing of my
principles. But the truth is more banal. For a few days, I paced my apart-
ment, smoking a healthy amount of weed, racking my paranoiacs brain
to figure out how I could possiblyin the words of the consulting edi-

Media companies hail their torsquare this circle. The editor kept after
me for a new draft of the article, and finally, on
brand sponsors and featured
a cold Saturday, after receiving his third email
partners as if they were of the day, I sat down, banged it out, and filed.
Several weeks went by, and I heard noth-
journalistic saviors instead
ing. I wondered if I had blown my easy pay-
of Typhoid Marys. check and they had moved on without me.
I wrote to the consulting editor and asked
9 about the article. Its live! he said. He didnt
have a link, but it was online, somewhere.
Wed done it, I guess.
I found the article, dressed up with a lush design meant to obscure
its mealy content, under the headline (writ large) The Race to Probe
the Twittersphere and the disclaimer (writ small) sponsor content.
The Atlantics logo nodded its approval from the top of the page.
The text mostly resembled the last draft I had sent, with a few
flourishes and anecdotes thrown in. It was, I thought, nothing special
and barely worth the trouble. Its the kind of work that one should do
simply for the money, without looking for any higher meaning. Neu-
rotics, or purists, need not apply.
I submitted some paperwork, and a month later, a check arrived
for $2,000. Except for my book advance, it was the most I had ever
received for a single piece of writing.
Firewall, Farewell
Such is the anticlimax of sponsored content: it promises to know the
future of news, but in the end, all its got is cash (and vaguely aspira-
tional brand messaging). Sure, native ads may be sleeker and slightly
more substantial than annoying buy-now banner spots, but theres no
panacea here for journalismno corrective to the vapid advertising of
the past, no white knight for anxious legacy publications trying to get
the Internet right, no savvy compromise that will cede part of a media
companys soul to keep the rest of it (namely, the news division) pris-
tine and intact.
Far from it. Because who would bother pitching a story to The
Atlantic for $100 when you could pitch yourself as a copywriter and
make twenty times as much? And why would a Fortune 500 executive
respond to a journalists questions when he could just hire The Atlantic
to produce a glittering, 1,200-word advertorial instead and then buy
some promoted tweets to ensure it racks up shares?
The notion that a publication could sell access to its editorial style
without also changing the terms of journalistic access itself is laugh-

able. While the Times insists that it maintains a strict firewall between
its T Brand Studio and its hallowed newsroom (The news and edito-
rial staffs of the New York Times had no role in this posts preparation,
goes a typical disclaimer), other publishers make overlap a featured
selling point. When Cond Nast opened its sponsored content shop, it
promised marketers access to our unparalleled editorial assets. Even
the venerable Guardian traffics in two tiers of payolasupported by
and paid content/paid for bywith each reflecting a different level
of editorial independence, advertiser participation, and other possi-
ble outside funding. These deals have produced strange results, like a
Shell and Working Mums partner zonea clutch of puff pieces spon-
sored by a noted polluter and published in a newspaper known for its
vocal fossil-fuel divestment campaign.
Vice, which is known as much for its marketing arm as for its neo-
gonzo journalism, has reportedly spiked news stories for fear of offend-
ing its brand sponsors. The same goes for BuzzFeed, whose staffers pass
effortlessly from its advertising division to its editorial division.
If youre able to coax a candid reply from an editor who works for,
perhaps, a conglomerate comprising a movie studio, a struggling stable
of magazines, and several other conflicts of interest waiting to happen,
youre likely to hear tales of panicked phone calls from marketing man-
agers asking if that snarky four-hundred-word blog post is really worth
risking the $1 million ad buy under way a few doors down. (The inevita-
ble answer: of course it isnt; delete the post and live to fight another day.)
Last spring, the American Society of Magazine Editors relaxed
its guidelines for native advertising, changing Dont Ask Editors to
Write Ads to something resembling a wink and a nod: Editors should
avoid working with and reporting on the same marketer. So much for
the firewall.
These challenges, of course, arent entirely new. In his book
Media Freedom, Richard Barbrook writes that during Frances Third
Republic, both national and local newspapers sold editorial adver-
tising to interested companies or governments. Bribes were regularly
exchanged. Because publishing was a business, Barbrook writes,
newspaper-owners were as interested in selling their products to
advertisers as to their readers. Plus a change.
But as journalists imitate advertisers and advertisers imitate (and
hire) journalists, they are converging on a shared style and sensibility.
Newsfeeds and timelines become constant streams of mediaa mutat-
ing mass of useless lists, videos, GIFs, viral schlock, service journalism,
catchy charts, and other modular material that travels easily on social
networksall of it shorn of context. Who paid for this article, why am

Info-Sca m
I seeing it, am I supposed to be entertained or convinced to buy some-

thing? The answers to these questions are all cordoned off behind the
algorithmic curtain.
Access Swapping, Mattress Hopping

I should have emerged from my sponsored content gig with the kind
of relieved rededication to my craft that would overcome, say, a new
driver reeling from the adrenaline surge of his first head-on near-
miss. Instead, though, my tour of the sponsored content waterfront
permanently altered my own vision of journalisms futureand not at
all in a good way.
Consider the example of Maxim, a former lad mag now trying to
reinvent itself as something more respectableGQ lite, perhaps, or
something like the old Details. Maxim may not be anyones pinnacle
of taste, but its an interesting reclamation project with several things
going in its favor: brand recognition; the hiring of Kate Lanphear, a
respected editor from the Times style magazine, as editor in chief; and
a built-in base of luxury advertisers. Recently, Maxim has staffed up,
given its writers travel budgets and room to go after weightier fare, and
revamped its covers in a more tasteful style, photographing models
from the neck up. (One issue featured Idris Elba, who is a man, making
him unique in Maxim cover history.)
If the old Maxim was unabashedly brand-friendly, the new Maxim
has simply doubled down on the posture, furnishing its readers with
bottomless cocktails of content about gadgets, cars, clothes, and other
indulgences that tend to come with free samples, sumptuous photo
packages, and referral links to online stores.
Last year, according to a source at the magazine, the editorial team
was flooded with attention from a PR firm hired by Casper, a mattress
startup backed by celebrity investors and a vigorous marketing cam-
paign. Casper sent a number of free mattresses to the Maxim staff, some
of whom duly took them home. There was nothing unusual about that:
the magazine even has a swag table where unclaimed gifts are up for
grabs. It is literally insane, the amount of shit they throw at editors,
says the insider. Were talking thousands of dollars, the amount of free
stuff that a single editor can get in a year. An eighty-inch Vizio televi-
sion, for example, arrived, gratis, in the Maxim offices; it was addressed
to a departed staffer and no one was quite sure what to do with it.
Because its a venture-capital-funded company, valuing growth
above profit, Casper can afford to spend lavishly on product sample
giveaways for potentially influential fans, whether theyre magazine
journalists or Kylie Jenner, who once Instagrammed a photo of her

Casper mattress. My Maxim source mentioned that colleagues at Buzz-
Feed also received free mattresses last yearand in February, BuzzFeed
published a sponsored post authored by Casper, followed in March
and June by glowing reports about the company, one written by a free-
lancer, the other by a BuzzFeed staffer. As the staffers article noted,
BuzzFeed and Casper share some investors.
In the case of Maxim, Casper naturally hoped for something in
return for its largesse. After the mattresses went mostly unreturned
(one of the companys selling points is that you can send back a mat-
tress you dont like), a PR rep began probing Maxim, asking where the
coverage was. The sites editorial director asked a gathering of staffers
if any of them had accepted the free mattresses. About ten hands went
up, representing nearly $10,000 in gifts. That was too much, the edito-
rial director decided. They would have to write an article. Eventually,
the site published a Q&A with one of Caspers founders.
It probably didnt matter to the innovators at Casper that they had
doled out so much money for what was essentially one web article. The
VC-backed company was looking to create brand awareness through
any method possible, and as the Maxim source told me, merely getting
Maxims journalists to use its product was itself considered a win. Now
Casper had ten people who go to bed every night working for whats
essentially a consumer propaganda machine, saying, Oh, I fucking
love this mattress.
On the face of it, this is a familiar tale: wherever free product samples
appear, positive coverage is not far behind. But theres an added twist. In
addition to its giveaway initiative, Casper had a little something going on
the side. After the mattress haul, three Maxim staffers were approached
by the same PR firm to find out if they wanted to interview for positions
at Van Winkles, a new website dedicated to smarter sleep and wakeful-
ness. In May, Matt Berical, a Maxim editor, decided to jump ship for the
new venture.* It is not immediately clear who sponsors VanWinkle.com,
but if you poke around, youll land on a familiar name: Van Winkles is
published, says the sites About page, by Casper Sleep, Inc.
Too Many Salmons

And so it is that American journalism, in this late decadent phase, has
come to mistake its biggest rivals for its dearest sponsors. Now that
visibility, which can be bought like so many ad impressions, is won by
* A midst this turnover, Sardar Biglari, Maxims owner, canned Lanphear, appointed himself editor in chief, and
started putting naked women on the cover again. Biglari also sued a former employee for telling a tabloid journalist
that the bossman had been a creep during a photoshootthat Biglari insisted on appearing inwith supermodel
Alessandra Ambrosio.

gaming search and social platforms, publishers are no longer just host-
ing or appeasing advertisers; they are also competing with them. They
are employing the same sponsor-pleasing jargon, vying for the same
resourceattentionin the same newsfeeds and timelines, and scout-
ing the same talent. Last year, Starbucks tapped Rajiv Chandrase-
karan, an award-winning Washington Post reporter, to lead a media
company. Rhapsody, a new literary magazine produced by United Air-
lines, is wooing top-shelf writers. Meanwhile, much as the Guardian,
Der Spiegel, and the Times rush to release articles to Facebook Instant
without seeming to care that Facebook is in the process of consolidat-
ing its own publishing monopoly, media companies hail their brand
sponsors and featured partners as if they were journalistic saviors
instead of Typhoid Marys.
Maybe the key to all this rudderless and frenzied market obse-
quity resides in the simple realization that the media business is no
longer a business. Instead, its a line item for a cable conglomerate, a
confidence game played with venture capitalists, a glamour object for a
newly moneyed twenty-eight-year-old tycoon, a passport to power for
a foreign oligarch. Or more to the point, its simply contentcultures
Astroturfaround which increasingly sophisticated advertising may
be targeted until no one, not even its creators, can tell the two apart.
Yet its hard not to think that, despite all of the industrys failures,
despite its own self-imposed deathwatch, journalism may still have a
future.
The truth, after all, is that there is money in journalism. Its just
woefully misallocated, doled out according to a stars-and-scrubs
model that rewards brand-name journalists no ones ever heard of out-
side of New York. Meanwhile, a mass of freelancerswhose work is
necessary to the functioning of many publicationscadge whatever
assignments they can and dont complain when the checks take six
months to arrive. A great deal more cash is wasted on outside con-
sultants, events, quixotic reporting trips, redesigns, and other ven-
tures that may please advertisers or middle managers but do little for
readers. Recent high-profile failures include Chris Hughess attempt
to reinvent The New Republica $20 million outlay that, according
to reports, was mostly spent on office space, interior decorating, con-
sultants, and lavish parties.* Racket and Ratter, two well-funded jour-
nalism startups, folded after publishing little, or in the formers case,
nothing at all. ESPN, despite its boundless resources, shuttered Grant-
land, its beloved outlet for literary sports journalism and pop culture
* It probably wasnt spent on writers. After Hughess purchase, I was offered a lower rate for freelance work than I
had received under the ancien rgime.

coverage, and bungled the launch of The Unde- The truth, after all, is
feated, a black-interest site, firing founding
that there is money
editor Jason Whitlock, whose long history
of public histrionics (and no history of man- in journalism. Its just
aging anyone) had augured poorly from the
woefully misallocated.
start, or so it had seemed to anyone outside of
ESPNs headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. 9
In their numbing waste of talent, attention,
and money, these stumbles recall the demise
of Portfolio and Talk, nine-figure failures that came to symbolize an
earlier era of bubble thinking.
Apart from these emblematic cases, we generally learn how cor-
rupt this industry is only on the rare occasion when some company is
forced to open its books or when a former Time magazine intern, for
instance, tells you that Charles Krauthammer used to get $7,000 per
column. After Tina Brown left The Daily Beast, I finally learned why,
in years of writing for them, I could never get more than $250 for an
article: she spent it all.
Not long ago, Felix Salmon, one such brand-name journalist work-
ing for Fusion, a media startup flush with buzz and cash but short on
readership, published a meandering post that asked a simple question:
Is there any such thing as a career in digital journalism? His answer
was the same as Choire Sichas: no, not really. And he very well may be
right. But Salmon left out an important detail: his salary is rumored to
be $250,000. So my answer to his question is this: not as long as digital
journalism employs people like Felix Salmon.
For that amount of money, you could hire five smart thirty-year-
old writers, especially if youre not drafting through the traditional Ivy
League patronage system. You could pay a bunch of writers to actually
write.
Alternatively, with the same cash outlay, you could consign them to
the remunerative banality of sponsored content, which might pose the
greatest threat, in the end, to young journalists. Do the math: Why pay
for a journalism conference when you could attend Food, from Farm to
Table, hosted by the National Press Foundation and funded by Mon-
santo? From there, its just a skip and a jump over to VanWinkle.com.
As of now, theres a glut of young writers circling, anxiously won-
dering if theyll ever have more to show at the end of a year than a bunch
of 1099s, double Social Security tax, and a few new Twitter followers. If
journalism hopes to recuperate itself as a viable career, it will have to find
a way to let some of these people in and to keep those who want to stay.
Otherwise, the advertisers wait, and their pocketbooks are bigger.t

S h a m e of t h e C i t i e s
Sacramento Shakedown
Kevin Johnsons crossover corruption
3 Cosmo Garvin
Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was

unstoppable. Hed pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a
new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. Hed helped elbow out
racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed
a little of the spotlight for himself in the process. Hed been named
president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
He and his wife, Michelle Rheeonce the brightest star in the
corporate-backed education reform movementshowed up at the
White House Correspondents Dinner. An adviser told Johnsons
hometown newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, that the couple was a mod-
ern-day version of Bill and Hillary Clinton. There was talk about a
run for California governor or U.S. Senate.
At his peak, KJ was a figure to behold, an urban policy entrepre-
neur and brander-in-chief selling #Sacramento 3.0, a world-class city
where kids would take Uber vehicles instead of buses to their charter
schools, never check out a library book, and have more smart devices
than toothbrushes.
In July 2014, Johnson rented the Sacramento Convention Center
and threw himself a big partya twenty-fifth-anniversary fundraising
gala for St. Hope Academy. He raised $1.2 million at the event, largely
from real estate developers and others with business before City Hall.
St. Hope is Mayor KJs charter school and development company.
More than that, its his brandthe foundation of his own career in edu-
cational reform and politics. The keynote speaker at St. Hopes silver
jubilee was the NBAs biggest-ever star, Michael Jordan, whom Johnson
interviewed on stage, fittingly enough, about developing your brand.
The dinner was also a chance for Johnson to recognize the little
people who helped him along the way: people like Dr. Jim Sweeney,
former superintendent of the Sacramento city schools, who, along with
several former members of the Sacramento City Unified school board,
were recognized for their 2003 decision to close the venerable Sacra-
mento High School and reopen it as the flagship academy in Johnsons
growing charter school empire.
Ex-superintendent Sweeneys remarks were brief. Fifteen years
ago, a guy walked into my office and said, Doc! Sweeney recalled.

LO U I SA B E RT M A N
Those of you who know Kevin Johnson know that when he goes
Doc! youre about to give away something. The audience laughed; its
funny because its true.
Kings Dominion
By the fall of 2015, Johnsons political career was effectively over. He
was under scrutiny, again, for allegedly molesting a sixteen-year-old
girl two decades before. And he was facing a new allegation of sexual
misconduct; a city employee had filed a sexual harassment complaint.
The City of Sacramentos legal advisers warned Johnson not to hug or
touch anyone at city events. So Johnson, deciding two terms in office
were enough, announced that he will not seek reelection this Novem-
ber. His exit will coincide with the opening of the new arena, easily his
most significant mayoral achievement.
Meanwhile, debt service on the bond-financed arena will reach
about $18 million a year, draining money from the city treasury. Sac-
ramentos city finance department is warning that the citys spending
is already unsustainable and budget deficits are imminent. For now,
however, Johnson is being credited with a dramatic makeover of the
new arena districtwhere a decaying shopping mall had been before.

Aside from the arena, Johnsons other legacy is something I call KJ
Inc. Its a particular way of doing public business, and its also a polit-
ical machine: a blended network of nonprofit auxiliary organizations,
political cronies, and paid city staff, powered by unlimited donations
from downtown developers and corporate benefactors.
Last year, Johnson sued me for filing public records requests for
city emails, part of an ongoing project to better understand KJs min-
gling of public resources with his private nonprofits. The suit appears
intended to economically damage the small alternative weekly I write
forthe only media outlet in town to write critically about Johnsons
arena deal, or his educational reform campaign, or his use of city
resources for his private agenda. Were still in court.
The lawsuit, the arena, KJs talent for diverting public resources
for private gain, even the sex-creep stuff: to me, these facts seem to
hang together under a common theme. The guy has boundary issues.
Excellence Abounding
To NBA fans, Johnsons basic bio is well known. All-star point guard
for the Phoenix Suns. He dunked on Hakeem Olajuwon that one time.
He grew up in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, an old
inner suburb damaged by decades of disinvestment, white flight, and
sprawl. Like a lot of other athletes, Johnson decided to create his own
charitySt. Hope (Helping Others Pursue Excellence).
For his community work, Johnson was named one of George H.
W. Bushs Thousand Points of Light in 1991. The Sacramento Bee
described Johnsons charity as almost saintly.
Looked at more closely, its clear that the public benefits promised
by Johnsons various publicprivate partnerships often fail to materi-
alize. Or they come at a very high price. A few examples:
S
t. Hopes development arm built Oak Parks signature 40 Acres
building, including a beautifully restored Guild Theater, bookstore,
and Oak Parks first Starbucks. It also took nearly $3 million in city
loans and grants. But for years, Oak Park residents complained that
St. Hopes properties were overgrown with weeds and illegal dumping.
Johnsons properties gathered dozens of code violationsracking up
tens of thousands of dollars in fines. Today, the St. Hope website still
promises that some of those properties will be renovated over the
next five years or that they are scheduled for 2007. But as that last
vow makes painfully clear, the website hasnt been updated in years;
meanwhile, the properties sit empty, unbuilt, or unrefurbished.
St. Hope also promised to save Johnsons alma mater, Sacramento

High School. Lagging test scores in the early At his peak, Kevin Johnson was a
2000s put Sac High on the states list of fail-
figure to behold, an urban policy
ing schools. Established in 1856, Sac High
billed itself as the second-oldest high school entrepreneur and brander-in-chief
west of the Mississippi, though the current
selling #Sacramento 3.0,
building dates only from the 1970s. In 2003
the school board gave Sac High to Johnsons a world-class city.
St. Hope to run as a charter school.
The closure of Sac High was bitterly con- 9
tested. Groups of parents and activists tried
for years to kick St. Hope out and revive it as a neighborhood school.
The takeover created an undying enmity between Johnson and the
Sacramento teachers union. Sacramento Charter High School is a suc-
cess if you go by test scores and graduation rates. But no real empirical
comparison can be fairly made between the teeming comprehensive
high school of two thousand students and the small charter school of
nine hundred that is there today. The latter has an application process,
and the local teachers union has accused the school of counseling
out students who dont perform. In other words, Johnson didnt turn
around Sac Highhe gutted it and established a much smaller, more
selective school in its place.
St. Hopes Hood Corps program was funded with AmeriCorps

grants to get young volunteers involved in tutoring at-risk youth and
other kinds of community service. In 2008 federal officials found
that St. Hope had misused the AmeriCorps money for Johnsons
personal needs and purposes and/or to provide added free or sub-
sidized staff for one or more of the entities controlled by Mr. John-
son. In other words, the AmeriCorps money helped pay salaries
of St. Hope employees. Hood Corps students were also used to run
errands for Johnson, to wash his car, and to recruit students for
Johnsons charter schools. Some were even assigned to work on polit-
ical campaigns for incumbent school board members who, according
to federal investigators, would be more likely to vote in favor of
renewing Sac Highs charter. St. Hope eventually had to give back
more than $400,000 to AmeriCorps, and for a time Johnson was
barred from receiving public funds from the federal government.
Arena Capitalism
Some of Johnsons behavior, and some of the dubious practices at St.
Hope, started to come to light in late 2007 and early 2008, when John-
son announced his bid to be mayor of Sacramento.

His opponent was Heather Fargo, an environmental planner and

former neighborhood activist whod been mayor for two terms. Under
Fargo, the citys urban core had seen a bit of a renaissance; there were
even plans for a few new skyscrapers and residential towers downtown.
Near the end of her second term, however, the recession hit and Sacra-
mentos real estate market flatlined.
Some of Fargos detractors also complained of her failure to build a
new arena for the Sacramento Kings. Like every Sacramento mayor for
thirty years, Fargo wrestled with the problem of public assistance for
the citys only major-league sports franchise.
Fargos predecessor, the late mayor Joe Serna, shepherded through
a $70 million loan package to keep the team from leaving town. Before
him, mayor Anne Rudin oversaw the opening of vast tracts of flood-
prone farmland to suburban sprawl, in exchange for real estate devel-
opers teaming up with the owners of the Kings to build the current
arena in 1988.
By 2000, that arena was deemed obsolete. Plans for a replacement
home came and went for years. Mayor Fargo herself always insisted
that no public money would be committed without a public vote. In
2006 she backed a quarter-cent sales tax measure to build a new sports
and entertainment center. Voters rejected it 80 percent to 20 percent.
For Fargo, the lesson was that there had to a better way. Shed later
advocate for the NBA to come up with some sort of fund to help cover
arena costs for small-market teams like the Kings. Kevin Johnson and
his backers learned a different lesson: dont let voters have a say in arena
subsidies.
During the 2008 campaign, the wonky Fargo was ultimately no
match for Johnsons energy and celebrityor his record-breaking
campaign war chest. If anything, Johnsons strongest opponent was
his own baggage. One piece of his past was particularly troublesome:
in 1996 a sixteen-year old named Mandi Koba told Phoenix police
that her then twenty-nine-year-old mentor, Johnson, had molested
her at his home, after the two had met while filming a public service
announcement.
Phoenix police investigated, and even recorded a confrontation
call between Johnson and his young accuser. The transcript of that
call is somewhere between wince inducing and damning.
Can I say something off the record? says Johnson early in their
chat. I miss you bad.
Koba tries to draw him out. Well, I was naked and you were
naked, and it wasnt a hug, she says later in the conversation.
Well, I said the hug was more intimate than it should have been,

Johnson replies. But I dont believe I touched your private parts in
those areas.
Still, police decided there wasnt enough evidence to pursue the
matter. Koba would later confirm to Gawker Media site Deadspin that
Johnson paid her $230,000 to drop her complaint.
There have been many other accusations. In 2007 a former Sacra-
mento Charter High teacher named Erik Jones talked to a student and
Hood Corps volunteer who complained that Johnson had hugged and
kissed her and touched her breasts. Jones approached St. Hope attor-
ney Kevin Hiestand about the girls story and suggested filing a report
with Child Protective Services.
Hiestand was Johnsons high school friend and also Johnsons
agent while he was in the NBA. He and two other St. Hope employees
met with the girl and her mother, and later reported to Jones that the
girl had recanted her story.
Jones resigned in protest in 2007. Sacramento police interviewed
the girl and decided to go no further. Federal investigators also looked
into a claim by another Hood Corps volunteer that Johnson had tried
to climb into bed with her. But police didnt pursue that allegation
because the student was not a minor at the time.
Most Sacramento voters either didnt believe the allegationsdis-
missing them as a fabricated scandal ginned up by KJs political oppo-
nentsor else didnt care. Johnson was elected mayor in 2008.
Strength Regimen
But KJ was surprised and frustrated to learn that the mayor of Sacra-
mento wasnt all that powerful compared with big-city mayors like
Michael Bloomberg in New York or Antonio Villaraigosa in Los Ange-
les, another ed reformer who tried to take the reins of that citys schools.
He envied their staffs and their power to shape their cities agen-
das. But California cities had largely jettisoned the East Coast boss-
mayor system during the Progressive Era, a century before KJ came on
the scene. More galling, mayors in East Coast cities got to control city
schools. In California, as Villaraigosa learned the hard way, the state
constitution mostly prohibits mayors from meddling in the affairs of
local school boards.
From day one, Johnson was preoccupied with enlarging the foot-
print of the mayors officein both a political and physical sense. He
moved his offices away from those of his fellow council members on
City Halls fifth floor and took over the underused third floor. Soon
KJs bullpen was teeming with interns and political consultants, pro-
fessional volunteers, and friends, many of whom followed him over

from St. Hope. Johnson was sworn in on December 2, 2008. A few days
later he launched a ballot measurethe first of severalto institute a
strong mayor system of government that would dramatically expand
his power and budget.
It was rough going. The courts found one strong-mayor ballot
measure unconstitutional, and the city council blocked two others.
Subsequent elections resulted in a much more pro-KJ council. But
when Johnson finally got his strong-mayor plan on the ballot in 2014,
voters emphatically said no.
Now Johnson has the next best thing, a sort of shadow government
embedded in the mayors office, made up of nonprofit auxiliary organi-
zations and volunteers, many of whom are paid with money from big
donors who have business at City Hall. This network of 501(c)(3) corpo-
rations is ostensibly set up to tackle specific policy areassuch as the
environment, the arts, homelessness, education, and economic devel-
opment. They are funded by private donors, at the behest of the mayor.
These sorts of behested payments to charities are nothing new.
Council members have used them for years, to fund Little League, con-
certs in the park, or help keep city swimming pools open. But John-
sons charities are different: he controls them, and they exist largely
to promote him.
Behests have always had the potential to cause heartburn for
good-government types. California governor Jerry Brown has directed
millions in behests to an Oakland charter school he supports. Theres
no question that some of those donors are trying to curry favor. The
same goes for LAs current mayor, Eric Garcetti, who directs behests to
his Mayors Fund. Donations to Garcettis fund are tied to specific pro-
grams. Johnsons nonprofits are more ambiguous about their spending.
Theres another striking difference between KJs charitable net-
work and the nonprofit funds that other mayors control. Whereas the
LA mayors fund is run by a board of prominent citizens, many with
backgrounds in philanthropy, Johnsons nonprofits are run entirely by
his friends and political consultants.
The flagship nonprofit of KJ Inc. is, of course, St. Hope. As mayor,
Johnson has been able to leverage, from real estate and other local
interests, about $3 million in donations to support the family business.
The biggest donors include Sacramentos biggest sprawl developer,
Angelo Tsakopoulos; arena developer Mark Friedman and his family;
and Kevin Nagle, part owner of the Sacramento Kings and majority
owner of the Sacramento Republic soccer team. Nagle is also on the St.
Hope board of directors. All these men have been big donors to John-
sons election campaigns and to his strong-mayor ballot measure. But

while they are limited by strict political campaign contribution limits,
they can give unlimited amounts to Johnsons nonprofits.
They, along with other business interests, also give heavily to
Johnsons Sacramento Public Policy Foundation (SPPF), which is more
closely associated with Johnsons job as mayor. SPPF collects dona-
tions from interested parties who want to curry favor with the mayor,
and then distributes the cash to various policy initiatives under John-
sons direction. For a time, these initiatives included an environmental
brand called Greenwise Sacramento and an arts program called For
Arts Sake. Neither of these groups ever did much, and both are now
dead links on Johnsons website.
The real project of SPPF is Johnsons Think Big initiative, which
the mayor advertises as a way to promote transformative projects that
catalyze job creation and economic development. But Think Big would
be more accurately described as a public relations shop for stadium sub-
sidies, coordinated out of City Hall, with the labor of city employees.
Johnsons arena success can be attributed to a few key maneuvers
all actively enabled by the Think Big PR team. He got the city council
to ignore the old Fargo-era policy that the council had adopted, requir-
LO U I SA B E RT M A N

ing a public vote on plans for a major sports facility. He got the city
clerk, and then the courts, to throw out tens of thousands of citizen
signatures to put the arena subsidy on the ballot. Here, he was helped
enormously by the citizen groups disorganization, and the fact that the
petitions were filled with errors. And he successfully floated to local
media the notion that the deal protects the general fund, when in fact
it diverted millions in revenue from city parking meters and garages.
Through SPPF and Think Big, Johnson took money from the
Sacramento Kings, from arena developer Friedman, and other back-
ers, and commissioned glowingthough quite misleadingeconomic
reports to justify big new infusions of public money for the new
arena. These were then marshaled, uncritically, through arena-back-
ing outlets in the local press. Think Big also funded and organized a
pseudo-grassroots campaign, headed up by a local sports talk person-
ality, to cheerlead for the arena and pack city council meetings with
purple-shirted arena supporters.
This was thinking big, indeed. The really innovative part of the
KJ Inc. model of governance is the way in which it has studiously
blurred the lines between the public and private sector. The players
are hard to keep straight without a scorecard. Johnson hired former
redevelopment manager Cassandra Jennings to be a liaison between
his nonprofits and the mayors office. Jennings is on the city payroll,
and also on the SPPF board of directors. In 2014 her husband, Rick
Jenningswho was on the same school board that gave Sac High to St.
Hopealso got himself elected to the city council. Not surprisingly,
Jennings has been a reliable vote for his wifes boss.
Meanwhile, Johnsons chief of staff, Kunal Merchant, and his spe-
cial assistant, R. E. Graswich, were both moved off the city payroll and
onto Think Bigs payroll in 2012. But for a long time they continued to
work out of City Hall.
Another Think Big team member was development attorney Jef-
frey Dorso, whom Johnson relied on heavily in the citys negotiations
with the Kings and the NBA. But between the tentative agreement
for an arena deal in 2013 and the final vote in 2014, Dorso took all the
knowledge he had gathered working in City Hall, and went to work for
the Kings. Merchant went on the Kings payroll immediately after the
tentative arena deal was struck in 2013.
Too Big to Fail

Now that its been effectively road tested with the Kings arena, the
SPPF model has been adapted to other cronyist sports projects. Think
Big is now churning out rosy economic studies and good PR for KJ

benefactor Nagles minor league soccer team, the Sacramento Repub-
lic. Nagle wants Major League Soccer to bestow major league status on
his team. The league wants a guarantee that the team will make money,
and that means, of course, that the Republic needs a new stadium.
To that end, the city recently announced it would provide parking
facilities and $46 million worth of infrastructure for the new stadium
in Sacramentos downtown rail yards redevelopment area.
Think Big has recently hired Benjamin Aziz to work on the pub-
licprivate partnership between the city and the team. Aziz also works
as vice president of strategic initiatives for Sacramento Republic. And
on his Twitter account, Aziz says hes an aide to mayor Kevin Johnson.
This promiscuous mingling of public and private interests is now
business as usual in Sacramento. Only rarely does it get Johnson in any
trouble. In 2012 the states Fair Political Practices Commission fined
Johnson $37,500 after learning that $3.5 million in behests to Johnsons
nonprofits from the Sacramento Kings and other donors had not been
properly reported. Johnson called the nondisclosure a clerical error.
More typically, the operations of KJ Inc. go on with no public
scrutiny at all. Thats especially true of Johnsons use of City Hall to
advance his brand of education reform, which seeks to roll back teacher
protections and turn many more public schools into charters.
Johnson served on the board of the California Charter Schools
Association. As president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Johnson
pushed through pro-charter resolutions to speed the school privatiza-
tion agenda on a national scale.
As it happens, the charter hustle is a Johnson family business.
His (then future) wife and former St. Hope board member, Michelle
Rhee, was hired by D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty as the first Chancellor
of D.C. public schools in 2007. That year, the city passed reforms that
took power away from D.C.s elected school board and put control of
the schools in the mayors office. This mayoralization of schools is a
favorite KJ policy reform.
Fenty would lose reelection in 2010, in part because of Rhees con-
frontational tacticslike her ill-timed announcement that she was
firing 241 underperforming D.C. public school teachers (and putting
737 more D.C. public school employees on notice) weeks ahead of the
mayoral ballot. Once Rhee was sent packing along with Fenty, she was
well positioned to clean up on the well-heeled foundation and govern-
ment-affairs circuits, beginning with the anti-teachers-union lobby-
ing shop Students First, headquartered just two blocks north of Cal-
ifornias State Capitol and two blocks south of Sacramento City Hall.
That also happened to be the address of Johnsons own educa-

tion-related nonprofit, called Stand Up for Sacramento Schools. On its
tax forms, Stand Ups stated mission is to ensure that every child in Sac-
ramento has the opportunity to attend an excellent public school.
Standing Offers
In fact, Stand Up does next to nothing for Sacramentos public schools.
It is mostly a political organization, leveraging the mayors office to
promote Johnsons ideological brand of educational reform, and to pro-
mote Johnson himself.
This prime directive is spelled out in a 2011 email from Johnson to a
potential Stand Up recruitccd to Johnsons executive assistant, a city
employee. KJ says a large part of Stand Ups function is to support his
efforts to advocate for much-needed legislation around policies such as
Race to the Top, ESEA [No Child Left Behind], and LIFO (last in, first
out). LIFO is the practice of laying off teachers with less seniority, a
policy much in vogue among educational reformers. Johnson also men-
tions Stand Ups support for parent trigger laws in California, which
enable parents to vote to turn neighborhood schools into charters.
For more then a decade now, all these policies have been flash
points in the ed reform wars. And most of Stand Ups money comes
from outside Sacramento, from the big underwriters of the school
reform movement, like the Walmart-owning Walton family and the
Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. In fact, Stand Up has taken in more
money in mayoral behests than any of Johnsons other nonprofits, more
than $4 million since he took office.
Early on, Stand Up hosted education town halls and viewing par-
ties for the pro-charter film Waiting for Superman. Stand Up promoted
Teach for America and City Year in Sacramento schools, over the objec-
tions of local teachers unions. It supported Johnsons frequent advo-
cacy junkets to other frontline venues in the school wars, such as his
trip to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to stump for a ballot initiative to take
power away from the local school board and put it in the hands of the
mayor. (Fortunately for the citizens of Bridgeport, the measure failed.)
About the only not-overtly-political thing Stand Up has touched
is a reading tutoring program it helped to coordinate in 2011. The
actual tutoring work was contracted to another group, which soon
took over the project entirely. True to form, Johnsons Sacramento
Reads program is now just another dead link on KJs website.
Stand Ups website contains video highlights of a handful of edu-
cation policy summits in other cities, such as Nashville and Atlanta.
These clips show Johnson, Rhee, and other Students First employees
giving the ed reform pitch. But those events were nearly a year ago.

Stand Ups Facebook and Twitter feeds havent been updated in a year.
When I called Stand Ups directors of operations, and longtime KJ
associate from back in the Phoenix days, Tracy Stigler, for an update,
he hung up on me.
Despite the apparent lack of any activity in Sacramento schools,
or anywhere else, Stand Up is still taking big donationsincluding
$400,000 from the Walton Family Foundation last summer.
Where are the resources going? Like other Johnson-led nonprofits,
Stand Up mainly seems to be in the business of shoring up his political
ambitions and promoting his brand.
Back in Black
In 2013 Stand Up employees teamed up with staff on the Sacramento
city payroll to advance Johnsons successful bid to take over the forty-
year-old National Conference of Black Mayors.
The NCBM was in serious financial and leadership disarray, and
Johnson once more positioned himself as an insurgent voice of reform.
But during his short tenure at the head of the group, Johnson has ended
up destroying it, as detailed at length by Dave McKenna at Deadspin.
In 2013 a PowerPoint presentation was distributed to the mayors
City Hall staff, titled National Conference of Black Mayors: Annual
Meeting Coup, laying out in bald terms the strategy behind the
Johnson putsch. Participants included Aisha Lowe, who worked in
City Hall as Johnsons interim director of African American affairsa
position that doesnt exist on the city payroll. Instead, she was earning
a $100,000 annual salary as Stand Ups executive director, while vol-
unteering for the city.
Among the other plotters were Stephanie Mash Sykes, Johnsons
director of governmental affairs, and Mariah Sheriff, Johnsons direc-
tor of government affairs in education. Both positions are phony, but
Sykes and Sheriff have presented themselves as employees of the Office
of the Mayor. Sheriff even uses the City of Sacramentos logo on her
LinkedIn work history.
Johnson ultimately forced NCBM into bankruptcy, and that legal
fight is still wending its way through the courts in Atlanta, where the
group is headquartered. He immediately started a competing group,
called the African American Mayors Association, and installed Sykes
as executive director and himself as president. In short order, AAMA
has established itself as yet another pay-to-play arm of the KJ Inc.
machine. Perhaps the clearest example is Johnsons mercenary rela-
tionship with Uber.
In June 2014, Uber gave a $50,000 check to the AAMA. In

August, Mayor Johnson penned an editorial in the San Francisco Chron-

icle praising Uber as an exciting part of Cities 3.0 and arguing against
new regulations for such ride-share companies. In September, at the
USCM fall meeting in Sacramento, Johnson held an entire session
on the sharing economy, featuring Uber CEO Travis Kalanick as a
speaker. Days before, the Sacramento Kings had announced that Uber
was the official ride-sharing service of the Sacramento Kings.
The Great Spinning Server

At the beginning of 2015, I started to look more closely at how Johnson
uses private emails to do city business. Johnsons parallel email scheme
is designed to make an end run around Californias Public Records Act,
and is far more devious than anything Hillary Clinton ever cooked up.
A big chunk of the work of the Office of the Mayor is done using
a set of omkj@gmail.com accountsOMKJ being the acronym for
Office of Mayor Kevin Johnson. These accounts are issued to city
employees as soon as they start working in the mayors office, as well as
to workers at Johnsons welter of double-dealing nonprofits.
Except for the fact that these arent official city email accounts,
they are, in all other respects, work emails. R. E. Graswich, the
mayors former aide, estimated that the mayors office transacted
roughly 80 percent of its business on this Gmail network. He noted
that the correspondence in these emails covered the full gamut of KJ
Inc. pursuitscity business, nonprofit business, and political cam-
paign business.
In March of 2015, I filed a California Public Records Act request
for all emails sent to and from OMKJ email accounts. The vast major-
ity of the emails were withheld. Sacramentos city attorney says that
Johnson is under no legal obligation to release the OMKJ emails to the
public. That means a very large and important chunk of city business
is being done using emails that the city has absolutely no control over.
But several thousand OMKJ emails did end up on city servers, in the
course of daily business and interactions with other departments. Ive
gotten several batches of these, over time, even though they were often
forwarded to me in a heavily redacted state. Nonetheless, these emails
have been invaluable in illuminating the day-to-day operations of the
official and extramural arms of KJ Inc. Most important, they drive home
the nearly complete lack of separation between Johnsons nonprofits, his
educational reform political operation, and his public office.
Among the emails that wound up on city servers were around one
hundred messages between various members of the mayors staff and
his lawyers at the law firm Ballard Spahr, the firm representing John-

son in his legal fight with the NCBM while also handling the legal busi-
ness of Johnsons upstart African American Mayors Association. (The
company also does a robust business helping charter schools to finance
capital projects.)
After getting a timely warning from the Sacramento city attorney,
Ballard Spahrs attorney David Pittinsky contacted me and threatened
to sue if I didnt modify my public records request. Pittinsky wanted
me to stipulate that my FOIA request shouldnt encompass any corre-
spondence potentially protected by attorneyclient privilege.
This was wildly inappropriate. Its the city attorneys jobnot a
petitioning reportersto determine what records, if any, are privi-
leged. The kind of side-deal that Pittinsky was seeking to strike with
me, under the threat of litigation, would likely result in hiding records
that really should be disclosed.
I didnt agree, so KJs lawyers sued my newspaper, and the city as
well, in July of last year. I still dont know whats in those one hundred or
so emails. Im sure they are revealing. But Im frankly more concerned
about tens of thousands of other emailskept off city servers thanks to
KJs parallel Gmail systemthat are being hidden from the public.
The Sacramento News and Review, the small weekly paper I have
written for these last fifteen years, has fought the suit, though it would
have been easy enough to back down to avoid the steep legal bills that
come with any court confrontation. Gawker Media, Deadspins parent
company, has also asked to join in the suit, because it shares an obvi-
ous interest in the mayors emails and the NCBM debacle. That would
help ease SN&Rs financial burden, but the city attorney has fought to
keep Deadspin out of the case. The city attorney refuses to explain why.
The daily newspaper in town, the Sacramento Bee, has declined to get
involved in the public records fight.
Meanwhile, readers generously donated $15,000 to SN&Rs legal
defense fund. Thats not much by KJ standards, but huge for the paper.
Then First Look Media kicked in another $15,000, saying, Johnson
has dramatically raised the costs for the paper to assert its rights.
The suit also drew a lot of attention to Johnsons secrecy and the
way he uses city resources. After our first hearing, I stood outside the
courtroom and watched local TV reporters begin to ask some pretty
tough questions of the mayors spokesman Ben Sosenko, who lamely
assured them that the mayor is completely open and transparent.
Dunked
None of that stuffKJs secrecy, his misuse of public resources, his
bullying lawsuit against a small alt-weeklywas any threat to his polit-

ical future. What did him in was the video of Mandi Kobas police
interview that Deadspin dug up and posted on YouTubeas part of its
Kevin Johnson is an asshole campaign.
The liberal advocacy group Courage Campaign later released its
own video, aimed at pressuring Johnson to resign, which blends the
Kobas police interview with audio of Johnsons I miss you bad chat
and, of course, that clip of KJ dunking on Olajuwon.
The Sacramento Bee editorial board, long an ally of KJs and a cham-
pion of his educational reform agenda, criticized the video, saying it
was cooked up by the teachers unions and their allies. Johnson also
told the New York Times that the Koba allegations were resurfacing
only because of the grudge teachers still hold over the takeover of Sac
High and the loss of union jobs in the deal. In any case, the Courage
Campaign gave us a good glimpse of the kind of campaign ads waiting
for KJ if he ever runs for office again.
After many years of banging pots and pans and trying to draw
attention to the way Johnson does business, I found it weird to see
Gawker Media lumber into town and put an end to Johnsons political
career. I had to laugh when a local TV station ran a story questioning
Deadspins motivation for going after KJ.
At least the station played audio of Deadspin editor Tim March-
mans response, with appropriate bleeping: Our motivation to cover
Kevin Johnson aggressively is the Sacramento press has done a fucking
embarrassing job of it. This guy is corrupt.
The favored candidate to succeed Johnson is Darrell Steinberg,
former president pro tem of the California State Senate. As pro tem,
Steinberg shepherded through legislation to fast track the new arena
deal and allow construction to go forward during the inevitable law-
suits that followed. (All were eventually thrown out.)
Steinbergs main competition is councilperson Angelique Ashby, a
loyal member of Team KJ for the last five years. Shortly after announcing
her candidacy, Ashby sent out a press release saying it was time to change
the culture of corruption in City Hall. This is undeniably an issue on
which she can boast first-hand expertise, having witnessed that culture
take hold of the mayors office and its surrounding network of shadow
nonprofitsand having kept quiet about its spread. In 2015 Ashby was
assigned to head up the mayors ad hoc committee on ethics and trans-
parency. (Ad hoc is exactly the right description of it.) She took the
reins from the ethics committees previous chairman, Johnsons council
ally Allen Warren, another former pro athlete, who last year was accused
ofwhat else?sexual harassment.
The mayors ethics committee met behind closed doors for ten

months, with no public input. At the end of Kevin Johnson didnt turn around
this long series of discussions, Ashby negoti-
Sacramento Highhe gutted it
ated privately with the local chapters of Com-
mon Cause and the League of Women Voters, and established a much smaller,
agreeing on the creation of an ethics commis-
more selective school in its place.
sion staffed by retired judges and law profes-
sors, and a few weak additions to the citys eth- 9
ics code.
The proposed new ethics codesdue to come to the city council
sometime after the new yearsay nothing about behests, or about run-
ning nonprofits out of City Hall, or about using city emails to do city
business. They do, however, require council members to take sexual
harassment training.
In a sense, this is an entirely fitting gloss on the Johnson legacy. As
he leaves Sacramento City Hall, his overhaul of Sacramentos municipal
sceneand most especially, his record of mixing official city business
with nonprofit educational and foundation hustleswill likely live on.
Sweet Charity
Consider just one representative case in point: city councilperson Jay
Schenirer. Hes a longtime Johnson ally and a former member of the
school board majority who voted to give away Sac High. He now makes
his living as an education consultant.
Following Johnsons lead, Schenirer started his own nonprofit,
headquartered for several years inside his City Hall office. WayUp
Sacramento is funded with a mix of endowment money and corpo-
rate donations. Schenirers nonprofit took $50,000 from the Walmart
Foundation while at the same time leading the successful effort to
repeal the citys big box ordinance, which required an economic
impact study as a condition before any new big box retail franchise
would be granted city permits. The charitable contribution was
much larger than the maximum Walmart could have given to Schenir-
ers reelection campaign.
When I asked Schenirer why WayUp was allowed to operate in
City Hall, when other nonprofits were left without the luxury of tap-
ping city resources, he took a page from his mentor, explaining that
WayUp isnt really a charity at all; its a brand.
This new kind of public-private logrolling will likely go on
post-KJ, largely invisible to ordinary Sacramentans. Some version
of it is probably happening in your city too, or will be soon enough.
Just remember that when a policy entrepreneur like KJ comes calling,
youre about to give something away.t

A nc e s t or s
The Stranger
3 Georg Simmel
The concept of the stranger suggests that foreignness is a psy-

cho-cultural as well as a geographical matter. A stranger is not a wan-
derer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes todayand
stays. He is a potential wanderer: although he has not moved on from
the society, he has not quite shed the freedom to stay or go, either. He
remains within a specific place, but he has not always belonged to it,
and so he carries into it qualities that do not, could not, belong there.
The stranger is a paradox: he is here, close at hand, but his having
recently been far away is also present to us.
The stranger is a part of the community, like the poor, or various
enemies within, but a part whose position is simultaneously that of
an outsider and a counterpart. The way this distance and apartness
form a sense of closeness and togetherness calls for some explanation.
Throughout the history of economics, the stranger has usually
been a tradesman and the tradesman a stranger. As long as the economy
is limited to the direct exchange of products within a closed system,
there is no need for intermediaries. When people travel to foreign
places to buy what they need, they become foreign tradesmen in those
regions. Historically, tradesmen have necessarily been strangers.
But an economic system with a division of property and produc-
tion on demand will offer a living to the tradesman who settles there.
Trade is always capable of reaching more people than primary produc-
tion. It is the preferred area of engagement for the stranger, since he
enters the system as a supernumerary, after all other economic niches
are filled. The history of the European Jews offers a classic example.
By definition, the stranger is not a landowner. (Land here can
be understood in a wider sense, as any vital resource in some social
sphere.) Though the stranger may come to be on intimate terms with
many of his neighbors, he is perceived as being of a mobile, unstable
character because of his dependence on intermediary trade, which
often becomes sublimated into pure money tradei.e., moneylending.
This famous essay, written nearly a century ago, is a chin-stroker of the first order. But if you read attentively in
Simmels observations about the modern quality of strangeness, then you may better comprehend the fear of refugees
in Europe, the outbreak of xenophobia in the United Statesand why your lover kind of likes you but also kind of
doesnt. This translation from the German, by Ramona Mosse, is taken from Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersu-
chungen ber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1908. S. 509-512.

This mobility, which occurs within the confines of a given commu-
nity, contains the synthesis of closeness and distance that formally
constitutes the stranger. He comes into contact only with individuals,
and is not organically connected to familial, local, or occupational
networks.
Another way to express this constellation of social meanings lies in

the objectivity of the stranger. Since he is not rooted in the partic-
ularities and biases of the community, he stands apart from it, in an
attitude of objectivity. This is not an aloofness that lacks involvement
but rather a curious combination of closeness and distance, of detach-
ment and engagement.
And the objectivity of the stranger leads to another phenomenon:
he is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from
any more organically embedded persons. Objectivity, remember,
is not non-engagement; it is rather a positive and specific kind of
engagement, much like the objectivity of a theoretical observation,
which does not turn the mind into a passive tabula rasa upon which
objects merely become imprinted. Objectivity suggests an active
mind operating at its fullest capacity according to its own laws. Such a
mind ignores random variations and accentuations that are particular
and subjective and that would deliver radically different images of the
same object.
Objectivity is also a kind of freedom. The objective person is not
constrained by predispositions that would prejudice his perception,
his understanding, or his judgment. Such freedom allows the strang-
er to experience close relationships as if from a birds-eye view, but
it also has its dangers. During rebellions of any kind, the attacked
party frequently claims that the rebels have been incited from the
outside by foreign envoys or agitators. What gives such accusations
apparent plausibility is the strangers objectivity: he is able to judge
conditions with less bias and evaluate them with greater detachment.
His actions are not bound by habit, piety, or precedent.* The attacked
party acquits itself of responsibility and ignores the real grounds of
N A SA
* W herever those attacked make such wrongful allegations, they can be traced to a tendency of those in power to try
to exonerate their subjects, who have previously had an overall closer relationship to them.

the uprising by creating the fiction that outsiders are responsible and
they themselves are not to blame.
Finally, the combination of closeness and distance that endows
the stranger with objectivity finds another, psychological, expres-
sion: locals merely share certain common characteristics with the
stranger; in contrast, their relationship to other organically connected
locals expresses a deeper commonality based upon the act of differ-
entiation. At bottom, all personal relationships follow this pattern.
Personal relationships are shaped not just by certain commonalities
and differences, abstractly considered, but by their existence in this
particular relationship. Likewise, individuals experience shared
qualities only insofar as they are considered native to a certain group
or type. Even when all humanity shares some quality, its power to
unite people weakens in proportion to the size of the local group. It
still functions as a common ground for the members of the group, but
it no longer unites them against all outsiders, since some of the latter
may share it. This is another example of a relationship that simul-
taneously expresses closeness and distance: to the degree to which
these qualities are widely shared, the warmth they provide becomes
mingled with an element of coolness; a sense of randomness enters the
relationship. The forces that bind together have lost their particular,
centripetal character.
A trace of strangeness lingers in even the most intimate relation-

ships. Erotic relationships decidedly deny generalization in the first
stage of passion: to the lovers, a love like this has never existed before;
nothing can match the beloved or our feelings for him or her. Once
this experience of singularity wanes, an estrangement sets init is
hard to say whether as cause or effect. Skepticism about the relation-
ships unique value becomes tied to the idea that one might merely be
enacting a generic human fate, that ones experience has been gone
through already a thousand times by others, and that if one had not
accidentally encountered this particular person, many others might
have gained a similar importance for us instead.
No relationship, however close, can eliminate an inkling of such
estrangement, since there always remain those other possible ones.
Even though these other possibilities might be unrealizable, and even
though we might forget about them, they hang like a shadow between
people. They creep from each particular act of naming like a fog that
still has to merge into a definite shape, a shape we might call jealou-
sy. Maybe this is a more widespread or a more insurmountable sense
of strangeness than the strangeness that manifests as being wholly

different and unfathomable. In this case, similarity, harmony, and
closeness exist but are not exclusive to a particular relationship; they
are instead something that potentially exists between us and an indef-
inite number of others. The individually realized relationship cannot
claim an intrinsic or absolute status.
There exists another kind of strangeness, which denies that differ-

ent parties become united by a shared commonality: for example, the
relation of the Greeks to the barbarians. Here are included all cases
in which the Other is denied the common characteristics that count
as fundamentally human. In this sense only, the idea of the stranger
carries no positive connotation. The relationship to him turns into a Even when
non-relation, because he is not what we have been discussing here: he
all humanity
is not a part of the community.
There is closeness and distance here, as in any relationship found- shares some
ed on general human commonality. But this closeness and distance
quality, its
harbor a particular tension: the awareness of what is common to all
pulls into focus that which is not shared. Being of another country, power to unite
city, or race is not something wholly individual. A foreign origin is
people weakens
something that many strangers share, whether actually or potentially.
Hence, strangers are not conceived of as individuals, but rather as a in proportion
particular instance of the Other. One experiences strangers as distant
to the size
in the same generalized manner as one experiences their closeness.
The medieval tax levied on Jews in Frankfurt and elsewhere of the local
is a case in point. While the tax on Christian citizens was raised
group.
according to their level of wealth, the tax on the Jews was fixed. This
fixedness was based on the fact that Jews held their social positions as 9
Jews and not as bearers of other social functions. In tax matters, every
other citizen was a property owner, whose tax could fluctuate accord-
ingly. However, Jews were taxpayers as Jews; their position as taxpay-
ers had an invariable element. This situation becomes exacerbated
once such particularized regulationsnecessarily limited, given their
rigid irreversibilityare eradicated and all strangers pay the same poll
tax.
Despite his peripheral status, the stranger remains an essential
part of the community. Communal life envelops the position of the
stranger, consisting as it does of a particular mix of closeness and
distance also inherent to human relationships generally. Our relation-
ship to the stranger is molded by this unresolved reciprocal tension
between distance and closeness.t
Translated from the German by Ramona Mosse.

B a f f l o m at h y ( no. 3 0 )
David Berman (Clip-On Tie, p. 14) is a poet, Ottessa Moshfegh (The Locked Room, p. 8)
cartoonist, and musician, and was the frontman is the author of two novels, McGlue and Eileen, and
for the Silver Jews. a forthcoming collection of short stories, Homesick
Kade Crockford (Keep Fear Alive, p. 50) is for Another World.
director of the Technology for Liberty project at Edwin Muir (The refugees born for a land
the ACLU of Massachusetts, where she edits and unknown, p. 13) (18871959) was a Scottish poet
writes the Privacy Mattersblog. and translator.
Benjamin Fondane (Ulysses XXI, p. 132) Angela Nagle (The New Man of 4chan, p. 64)
(18931944) was a Romanian poet and critic who is a writer and researcher based in Dublin, Ireland.
wrote in both Romanian and French. She writes about technology, culture, and political
Thomas Frank (Withering on the Vine, economy and is coeditor of Ireland Under Austerity.
p. 16) is founding editor of The Baffler. His new Ann Neumann (Taking Liberties, p. 102) is
book is Listen, Liberal. author of The Good Death and a visiting scholar at
Amber ALee Frost (Boys Will Be Men, the Center for Religion and Media at NYU.
p. 114) is a writer and musician in Brooklyn. Fani Papageorgious (No Need to Argue
She is on the National Political Committee of Anymore, p. 83) books are When You Said No, Did
the Democratic Socialists of America and a You Mean Never? and Not So Ill With You and Me.
contributor to Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy. Corey Pein (Everybody Freeze! p. 84) is a
Cosmo Garvin (Sacramento Shakedown, writer in Brighton, England. He is working on a
p. 160) writes about local politics and public policy book about the San Francisco tech boom.
for the Sacramento News and Review. Ludmilla Petrushevskayas (The Sunstroke,
Natalia Ginzburg (Memory, p. 113) (1916 p. 78) books include There Once Lived a Girl
1991), was the author of fiction, essays, and theater Who Seduced Her Sisters Husband, and He Hanged
works in Italian. Himself: Love Stories.
David Graeber (Despair Fatigue, p. 26) is Georg Simmel (The Stranger, p. 176) (1858
a contributing editor of The Baffler. He is an 1918) was a German sociologist and philosopher.
anthropologist, writer, activist, and soon-to-be Jacob Silverman (The Rest Is Advertising,
actor who has written any number of books. p. 148) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and
Christos Ikonomou (People Are Streinz, author of Terms of Service.
p. 40) has published three collections of short Astra Taylor (Against Activism, p. 123) is a
stories, The Woman on the Rails(2003),Something contributing editor of The Baffler, cofounder of
Will Happen, Youll See(2010), andAll Good Things the Debt Collective, and author ofThe Peoples
Will Come From The Sea(2014). Platform.
Dulce Mara Loynaz (from Absolute Solitude,
p. 122) (19021997) was a Cuban poet.
Melissa Monroe (Frameless Treatment Translators
Guidance Systems, p. 60, and Vision, p. 62) Karen Emmerich, Estelle Gilson,
teaches at the New School for Social Research. Ramona Mosse, James OConnor,
Evgeny Morozov (They Made Him a Moron, Leonard Schwartz, and Anna Summers.
p. 134) is a contributing editor of The Baffler and
author of The Net Delusion.

SA R A L AU T M A N
Graphic Artists
Nina Berman, Louisa Bertman, Roxanna Bikadoroff, Kathy Boake,
Julia Breckenreid, Philip Burke, Mark Dancey, Patrick JB Flynn,
Stuart Goldenberg, Eric Hanson, Leslie Herman, Brad Holland,
Frances Jetter, Sara Lautman, Martin Mayo, Belle Mellor, Greta Pratt,
Laurie Rosenwald, Hazel Lee Santino, Lynn Scurfield, Paula Searing,
Eleanor Shakespeare, David Suter, and Mark Wagner.
The front cover of this issue of The Baffler was illustrated by Carl Dunn.
The illustration on the back cover was created by Melinda Beck.
The Hoefler Text typeface is employed throughout the pages of The Baffler.

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as they dont lack humor.
Poetry with grace and fiction with personality are most welcome;
anything that sounds like it was born in an academic workshop or
writers colony will be printed out and lit on fire.
All contributions to The Baffler are paid (a little).
Invite Us
So they put you in charge of the speakers budget; now its your turn
to invite some sap who wont make everyone in the office feel dumb.
Bradley, the smart guy in the cubicle down the hall, would love to see
Malcolm Gladwell come in and fire up the sales department with a
pep talk. But you think the boss is more likely to be impressed if you
went high and heavya Larry Summers, say, or a big shot from the
Bush administration.
At this point, you feel a pang of courage. Sure, your boss and his
boss above him eat up innovation and vibrancy like candy, but why
not, just this once, take a stand against the petty tyrannies of euphe-
mism and clich? Go ahead, invite one of our editors or contributors
to say all the things you wanted to say at last weeks Skype meeting.
Our bags are packed.

BELLE MELLOR
The Baffler (ISSN 1059-9789 E-ISSN 2164-926X) is independently

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Subscription orders and address changes should be sent to:
The Baffler, P.O. Box 16945, North Hollywood, CA 91615-9745.
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Phone: 617-547-7500. http://thebaffler.com.

E x h i b i t E Mark Wagner
Statue of Liberty (6).

M A R K WAG N E R

M E L I N DA B E C K

The Baffler Magazine Issue No. 30

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No.

THE BAFFLER FOUNDATION

The journal that blunts the cutting edge

EDIT OR IN CHIEF Thanks to Cassandra de Alba, Daniel

Edwin Frank Muirs poem.

Patrick JB Flynn Dolores Rothenberg

Joan Flynn Zachary Davis

The MIT Press, 20122014

2 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 3

Fa n ta s y Isl a n ds The Sunstroke 78

A tale of two democracies

The bald-eagle boondoggle Vision 62

4 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 5

6 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 7

The Locked Room

8 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

a rack of costumes that I recognized from the student production of

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 9

10 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

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and pinched a pimple on his neck.

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The refugees born for a land unknown

We have dismissed their wrongs, now dull and old,

And little judgment days lost in the dark.

Because my house is besieged by murderers

And I was wrecked in the ocean, crushed and swept,

Spilling salt angry tears on the salt waves,

My life waste water drawn down through a hole,

Yet lived. And now with alien eyes I see

The flowering trees on the unreal hills,

And in an English garden all afternoon

I watch the bees among the lavender.

Bees are at home, and think they have their place,

Footsteps on the stairs, two heavy, two light,

The door opens. Since then I remember nothing,

But this room in a place where no doors open.

I think the world died many years ago.

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 13

Relentlessly the minutes, his South Bronx Apartment. I like him. He

14 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

9 I spend a lot of my day in front of Rockwell

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 15

Withering on the Vine

W ere you to draw a Venn diagram of Democrats, meritocrats, and

16 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 17

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The Idea of an Island

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 19

presidential boyfriendvisited a certain store.

20 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

something he could barely make out . . . a vision in which Americas best

Wolfe doesnt mention the fantasy of an all-powerful creative class

I think of the men

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 21

The Land That Liberals Forgot

22 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

the Baffler [no. 30] 1 23

We were promised, all during the time we worked at Caterpillar,

24 1 the Baffler [no. 30]

If youre submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency,