I want to talk a bit about what I’ve been into lately. I try to engage with a diverse diet of media and so, as a way of fostering discussion and to keep myself accountable, I’m going to try and maintain a weekly series where I briefly share and talk about what I’m into.
Feel free to reach out and share what you’re listening to, reading, watching this week.
Listening: “Sister,” venturing
This week was Spotify Wrapped/Apple Music Replay week, and my top artist was Jane Remover. venturing is her alt-rock side project/ARG/band. They’re gearing up to release an album in February and single “Sister” has been running my life ever since it dropped.
I’ve loved Jane’s music for a minute now, and I’ve been fortunate to see her in concert twice (once as an opener for brakence and then on the Designated Dreams Tour, where I actually got to meet her!). Her music as venturing exists in the space between Frailty, which leaned towards emo and alt-rock but with a healthy bit of electronic flourish, and Census Designated, a more conventional shoegaze/noise rock album. The project has mostly existed in ephemera — SoundCloud posts since deleted, then reuploaded by others, user-made compilation albums of snippets — but it seems like now that Jane is again pivoting to new sounds for the main project, venturing is a good place for her rock songs. An honest-to-god venturing LP is slated for official release in February.
“Sister,” both lyrically and sonically, feels like it could have been on Census Designated. The song details the singer’s alienation and anhedonia. She’s afraid, she feels like she’s already dead, and getting fucked up and going to the club are no solace.
There are lyrical echoes to artists like Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell that I really love, even if unintentional, and I appreciate the emotion in Jane’s vocal performance. She’s grown markedly as a vocalist since Teen Week, and it shows here.
Reading: “Detransition, Baby” and “Imagined Communities”
This week, I finished one book and started another, and they couldn’t be more different. “Detransition, Baby,” the 87th best book of the 21st Century per the New York Times, is a poignant story of three people — a cis woman named Katrina, an out trans woman named Reese, and Ames, a man who detransitioned after facing violence and hardship as a woman — who become linked after Katrina falls pregnant with Ames’ child. Torrey Peters does a really great job of giving every character, especially Reese, a unique voice and viewpoint. The broader discussion of womanhood, motherhood, and identity is really well-done, and I appreciate that, at various points, Peters explicitly points out that the characters’ subject positions (these are upper-middle class white or white-passing people living in a cute, progressive enclave of New York City) are pretty limited to their experiences. The experiences of Black women, especially Black trans women, varies greatly from the experience of someone like Reese, who for all her hardship is still able to fall in with the rich wine moms and housewives.
Despite being perhaps the most high-profile fiction book about trans people out at the moment (and certainly the only one getting feted in the New York Times), the book doesn’t seek to be the definitive treatise on tranness or motherhood or womanhood. I exists entirely on its own terms.
After finishing “Detransition, Baby,” I picked up Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities.” This one is a bit of a long time coming for me: way back in 2017 a friend of mine recommended the book and I tried, and failed, to finish it. The prose is readable enough for a work of political science and the points are well-argued and salient. But I just couldn’t get through it.
In light of the current fascist moment that we’re facing, I feel compelled to give it another shot. Understanding nationalism as a system produced by cultural and historical conditions will be important in understanding our politics going forward. I’ll probably write a blog post about this book and some of the ideas in it in the future.
Watching: Video Essays about the Internet Sucking
As I noted in the inaugural post for this blog, the internet has become claustrophobic. The walled garden social networks are cesspools, search engines are poisoned with AI slop, and everything from streaming services to job posting websites are designed to steal one’s data and exploit it for profit. Cory Doctorow’s written about the “enshittification” of the internet, but one of the issues with a novel (and kind of juvenile) term like this is that it makes this issue seem like it’s new when it is just the latest in a long line of utopian projects corrupted by capitalism.
That’s why I appreciate these video essays by chriswaves (“The Internet Is Dying and That’s A Good Thing“) and Jessie Gender (“The Internet Was Stolen From Us“).
“The Internet Is Dying…” makes a pretty compelling argument that the capitalist exploitation of AI has the potential to expel human control from the internet, creating a stagnant, entropic hellscape where humans only exist to passively consume and make money for the billionaires who run everything. If the internet is driven by humans producing signs that take on and shape meaning, then this expulsion would functionally strip any real semiotic value from the internet. The signs produced by the corporations and bots would lose any tether to reality.
In “The Internet Was Stolen From Us,” Jessie Gender traces the radical history of the internet, linking the internet with the radical potential for expression and community evinced by hacker collectives, TV show fandom, and queer message boards. There was a time when the internet promised to melt away the boundaries between folks and offer an opportunity to shape one’s identity in whatever way one wanted. This promise fell away as technofeudalism took hold and everything became monetized, commodified, or radicalized. The internet, instead of a break from the horrors of the world, became a twisted mirror of it.
Both chriswaves and Jessie Gender lament the loss of the internet’s radical, utopian past and both call for us to use creativity as a means of connection. Art is one of the best tools we have to connect and build with other people, the inherent emotive quality of good art makes it especially potent. Despite it’s best efforts, AI and corporations will never truly get this. Anything produced to satisfy a four-corners algorithm or made with advertisers sensibility in mind has a hard cap on what it can do emotionally.
Both of these videos get at what will probably be a theme on this blog — the slow, horrible death of the internet and how the ghosts of the internet’s dead utopian moment haunt the present in weird and unsettling ways. Again, we’ll probably come back to this idea in a blog post (woo, hauntology!).
Thanks for reading. Again, let me know what you’re engaging with or if you’ve seen/read/watched any of this stuff.
