Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon — Locust Review

The following editorial was published in Locust Review #6 and written in the early fall of 2021.

WHAT IF we become cyborgs right before the world ends, and because we are cyborgs we can no longer fear the apocalypse?

What if the addictive aspects of social media distort or prevent the formation of fully free subjectivities, including the class-conscious subjectivity needed for proletarian revolution?

Does the almost sexual ecstasy of “ceasing to exist” in the digital matrix, being absorbed into the cybernetic “stream” or “flow” (Fisher, 18), anesthetize us from the unfolding apocalypse?

Does the glowing sky on fire become, in our minds, an Instagram filter?

Or, from another point of view, having become part machine, does class-consciousness demand we figure out how to be in solidarity with that part of us that is machine?

If we cannot construct solidarity with our cybernetic selves, could the cybernetic — under the direction of its bourgeois masters — anesthetize us as we approach climate catastrophe?

The answer is hidden, but simple. There are two cybernetics.

There is the cybernetics of capital, of alienation and control, a cybernetics of obliterated subjectivity.

But there is another cybernetics, embedded as a negation within the other, a cybernetics of solidarity, a cybernetics that can redeem all subjects.

AS LOCUST has noted before, we are in a race with fascism, climate catastrophe, and the disorganizing and demoralizing impact of a right-moving reformism within the new socialist movement. [1] That movement has produced millions of socialists (lowercase “s”) in the US, and thousands of organized socialists. But that movement is at a very dangerous impasse.

Escalating climate catastrophe threatens the possibility of a “red plenty;” the material abundance that makes a genuinely democratic post-capitalist society possible.

The liberal bourgeoisie is pinning many of its hopes on carbon mitigation technologies. While some of these technologies are beginning to show promise, they cannot be scaled to undo or even minimize climate damage without massive cuts to carbon emissions. [2]

Reports indicate that there are likely going to be more carbon emissions this year than last. We are almost certainly locked into at least a 1.5 centigrade temperature increase (global average). Feedback loops may have already begun with melting permafrost releasing more greenhouse gases. Without epochal shifts in production and social organization, civilization may have less than a decade left before substantial climate related collapses.

Laura Fair-Schulz, *Comrade Garden* (2021)

Adam Ray Adkins, meme from *The Acid Left* (2021)

Tish Turl and Adam Turl, *Communist Manifesto Distribution Project (Born Again Labor Museum),* (2021).

Nick Swarth, *Dirt Drawing #82: Self-Portrait with Covid 19 and Contact Mine*, drawing on found paper.

Tish Turl and Adam Turl, *Cat Without a Grin (Born Again Labor Museum)*, painting, collage, digital material and mixed-media on canvas tarp (2021).

As we approach the climate endgame, the threat of fascism and the far-right is growing. While millions are understandably exhausted by the pandemic and the Trump presidency, and have been willing to let Biden take the reins, the far-right is regrouping. Mostly driven off mainstream social media platforms, several far-right Telegram forums involving hundreds of thousands of people are discussing, among other things, the need to develop “their own leadership” to stop relying on figures like Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

These hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of “mainstream” election audit/antivax/COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and would-be-fascists are actively being courted by more ideologically coherent Nazis.

While the “mainstream” far-right tends to reject some of the more doctrinaire aspects of Nazism — for example they tend to reject Nazi hatred of Israel because of their evangelical view of Israel’s role in the “Christian” apocalypse — they are doing so as they shape a particularly American fascism.

The intersection of far-right organizing and climate catastrophe further raises the question of exterminism. The world working-class weighted to trade has increased to such a size that there are far more of us than are needed to maintain capitalist production and accumulation — recent labor shortages in the US service industry and COVID-related supply problems notwithstanding.

In the event of a prolonged disaster capitalism, the destruction of layers of living labor/variable capital can be seen by parts of the ruling- and middle-class as a positive good.

The logic of exterminism has already played out in the COVID-19 pandemic. When petit-bourgeois shopkeepers and similar elements raged against lockdowns in 2020, they were demanding mass death to maintain their precarious position within a faltering empire and neoliberal order.

Who died? Who is mostly still dying? The sick, the poor, the working-class, the disabled, the elderly, people of color. The virus does fascism’s work for it.

The liberal and social democratic response was, for the most part, not to stop the virus, but to mitigate and slow the spread, in order to avoid greater damage to capitalism overall. This response to the virus is not unlike the liberal response to exterminism and fascism as growing political trends: containment and mitigation, a strategy that ultimately fails, and allows the virus/fascism to mutate/regroup.

The bourgeois response to climate change is likely to play out in a similar manner.

The faltering progress of socialist reformism, the drift of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) into electoralism and the stall in its membership growth, Corbyn’s marginalization in the UK, the UK’s left’s disastrous approach to Brexit, and the Sanders capitulation to the Biden administration, all threaten to discredit the new socialist movement in the eyes of working-class radicals, and working-class youth.

The passivity of DSA as an organization around the BLM uprisings further risks discrediting the new socialist movement to the younger and more multiracial working-class. Similarly, simplistic attacks on “identity politics” coming from Jacobin and class-reductionist DSA caucuses risk alienating comrades of color, and many of our queer and trans siblings and comrades.

Many in the working-class, and particularly many younger workers, already see or sense the impending catastrophes of fascism and climate disaster. Most have lived through little other than disaster — a never ending war on terror, economic crisis (that often immiserated their families), unending racist police violence, the rise of Trump and domestic fascism in the US, the pandemic, all against a backdrop of worsening climate disaster (crystalized in consciousness from Hurricane Katrina through every flood, drought and fire that followed).

A perspective of patiently building a sect (that may collapse at any moment like every other sect), or patiently accumulating congresspersons or city councillors (each of whom may betray you), is suspect in this context. As the meme says: The end is coming. Eat trash. Be free.

The disasters of the past 20 years prefigure more disasters to come. Millions have died from the pandemic. Millions more will soon die from climate change. Even more will die if the far-right makes a comeback in the US. In India, the Modi/BJP government has the blood of millions on its hands. This is not even to mention the possibility of increased imperial conflict. There is little time for a repeat of failed reformism, or a repeat of failed sectarianism.

We need to do something different. We need to shoot the moon.

ACCORDING TO the New York Post’s latest perennial reactionary lamentation about young people: “Generation Z is made of zombies — less educated, more depressed, without values.” Middle-aged-white-man-yelling-at-cloud, Jeremy Adams, argues that the dissolution of the family, the erosion of religion, and an “obsession with technology” are to blame.

The trope follows that young people’s interfacing with screens is the culprit for their depression and reduced prospects. It is not considered that the aforementioned depression could be the result of non-stop trauma. Clearly the problem is binge-watching Netflix.

At the same time, our cybernetic lives are contradictory. We do not fully control the machines that are increasingly becoming part of our subjectivity. This is true even when we seem to be in control — as we stream movies or doom scroll social media or compulsively binge TikTok videos.

The machines are also used to further manage, surveil, and discipline us, by employers and the state. Real-time computerized surveillance is becoming the norm — not just at Amazon fulfillment centers, but even retail drug store chains.

As a worker-reader reports in this issue of Locust Review:

“[a]fter you sign in, go and connect yourself to a pointless headset. At HPV/Ballgraves, [3] we need to make sure that you can be tracked at all times on the floor. Even when you’re in the bathroom, the all seeing eye must know your location. It must know that you are not spending too much time in the bathroom. It must know how much time is spent talking to other retail zombies. It must know if you are stationary for too long; so as to make sure you don’t contemplate your existence and realize how absurd your job is.”
--Michel(le) D. Womack III, “HPV/Ballgraves”

THE CYBERNETIC can be liberating. It can augment a faltering body. It has helped people to understand or clarify their gender nonconformity, to seek out fellow trans siblings, to network with others in the reformation of oppressed identity, to reach across borders in solidarity. It has the potential for even more; a potential that goes back to socialist computer networking plans of the 1970s and the utopian anarchic experiments of the early Internet.

But the cybernetic is also the latest iteration of the machine that enslaves the individual, as famously described by Marx. The cybernetic surveils. It leads to reified performances of ourselves on social media. It does this for interests alien to the majority of people. [4]

The cybernetic is employed in this way for capital and information accumulation. It is employed in this way via drones and satellites for imperialist war.

For the worker, the cybernetic is also the fusion of our subjectivity with dead labor, with fixed capital. In Marxism, the means of production and civilization are “dead labor” — the accumulation of wealth that comes from the past labors of the working-class. In this way, the cybernetic is inherently gothic. It is the fusion of ourselves with our ancestors.

Under our control this fusion could be the beginning of the Cosmist dream turned into reality. But it is not under our control.

The unity of dead and living labor has always been central to capitalism. But, as Fisher notes in Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, this tended to be experienced in a different way by the modern/industrial individual. In the classical industrial scenario, alienation meant labor was enslaved to the machine but labor was also separate from it.

Fisher, borrowing from Fredric Jameson, imagines how Blade Runner’s androids might react to the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream (1893).

“If The Scream does really communicate the ‘alienation, anomie, solitude’ appropriate to a melancholy human(ist) subjectivity, as Jameson suggests, how can an android —nonhuman simulacrum of the human — have any affinity with it?” (Fisher, 11)

In Munch’s painting, rebellious subjectivity is represented by a figure assaulted by the surrounding environment. The android, it is assumed, lacks this assaulted uniqueness. The horror, instead, is that it is not unique. It is just one Rick or Morty in a multiverse of infinite Ricks and Mortys.

This echoes how capitalist ideology shapes the social networks. We are just one of many hundreds of millions of individual brands in tumultuous competition — conditioning our cybernetic selves for disposability and interchangeability in the precarious labor market.

In terms of art, the contradiction of reproducibility and aura (the cult-value of the unique or past art object or gesture; aesthetic value created by distance in space and time) is accelerated. The constant churning of images and text obliterates the value of subjective gesture — obliterates aura.

But this also creates millions of new gothic worlds with each new churn. Nostalgia blossoms for things that were commonplace and banal moments earlier. Do you recall the innocent memes of 2012, 2015, 2018?

Eventually, the majority of avatars on social media will be avatars of the dead. The ruthless novelty of capitalism cannot but create its own object-revenge, [5] and do so repeatedly. The cybernetic was always bound to become Frankenstein’s monster.

In this way, the machines are both the ancestors and siblings of the working-class. They are another one of the uncontrollable spells called forth by the capitalist sorcerer.

Do Androids dream of electric sheep? They do if we dream with them.

The machines are grafted into our subjectivity. They are our would-be comrades. Where we stop and they begin is unclear.

But it is not a benign process. Neither we nor our machines are in control. Something controls us both.

THE INTERNET — contrary to bourgeois myth — began as an “internet of things.”

It began with mostly positivistic scientific research and military applications. To borrow from Kim Moody it “soon after [became] a key tool in re-organizing global lean production.” In other words, the internet always contained — in part — what Johnathan Beller describes as “an extension of the ongoing quantification and instrumentalization of the life world imposed by early capitalism.”

We were promised an Internet as “public sphere — Jürgen Habermas’s idealized bourgeois democracy.

But as Jodi Dean argues, the Internet doesn’t even rise to that. The Internet as presently constituted is “communicative capitalism.” And while participation in communicative capitalism is essential for mass politics, the very nature of this participation sabotages the goals of mass democratic politics. [6]

Dean argues: “precisely those technologies that materialize a promise of full political access and inclusion drive an economic formation whose brutalities render democracy worthless for the majority of people.”

Moreover, as Adam Turl writes, the “incomplete and problematic digital ‘commons’” of the early Internet, “was, in effect, enclosed by the rise of giant Internet corporations and platforms.” [7]

Of images in social media, Turl writes:

…[t]his floating image takes on a profoundly alienating character depending on its “random” re-contextualization into the world. An Instagram image of “food porn” looked at on a tourist’s smartphone walking through Times Square in Manhattan has a vastly different meaning than the very same image on the phone of a working-class single mother walking by the partial ruin of the River Rouge Complex in Detroit...
The digital gesamtkunstwerk becomes a constant reminder, in negative space, of social position. It is designed for ranking yourself in a vast neoliberal MMORPG. [8]

The Horatio Alger myth is written into the code of social media. Our avatars are individual brands in competition. We are removed in the digital from social context. But out “real selves” are bound to the material:

[w]e perform, in our online selves, a cultural echo of lean production, to prove we are the indispensible unit...We could be anyone (our selfies tell us) but we are no one (the rusted trailer next door reminds us. [9]

FROM THE 1970s through the 1990s, there were two contradictory left-responses to the incipient cybernetic challenge posed to individual subjectivity. They were both right, both wrong, and incomplete.

Given that subjectivity was often presented — by both the ruling-class and vulgar Marxism — in an essentialist manner, many queer and feminist writers embraced the cyberentic’s potential for easing subjective fluidity.

One of the most famous feminist arguments along these lines was A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway (published in 1985). While this potential for the cybernetic was real — and some of its promise has been born out — this perspective tended to downplay the extent to which the cybernetic would be shaped by capital.

Moreover, some went so far as to celebrate the destruction of the subject altogether. They assumed, wrongly, that the subjectivity of the individual was the problem, rather than the denial of that subjectivity to women, persons of color, queer persons, and others.

Conversely, those who recognized the cybernetic threat to subjectivity often presented this threat in questionably gendered imagery and terms. A misogynistic understanding of the subjective — and hysteria about male penetration — responded to a legitimate fear but presented it in a clearly sexist framework.

This presentation was connected to a related problem; an inability to articulate whether the issue was technology itself or technology shaped by capitalism and imperialism.

Fisher reflects on this response as he discusses the contradictory narcissism of the cybernetic; the “schizophrenic implosion of subjectivity.” [10] When the body moves through cyberspace, it is the exact opposite of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (1974), it does not reflect on itself; it is set on an “intensive voyage” that is “not a place, it only feels like it is” (Fisher, 55).

In CyberPunk, or what Jean Baudrillard calls “imploded science fiction,” the “mediatized body” finds an “ambivalence: about its “traditional — and [now] terrifying uncertain integrity.” (58).

Where one stops and media — mediated communication — begins is not clear.

The limits of most left (and post-leftist) critique, however, mirror the limits of the feminist celebration of the cybernetic.

This is a missed encounter.

The problem of penetration and cybernetic flow is primarily about self-determination and consent.

TV Buddha, a closed-circuit feed of the Buddha watching himself, is about the exclusion of stimuli. It is a classically Buddhist and anti-Narcissistic gesture. It removes the Buddha, standing in for us, from exposure to the “intensity-circuits” of the “intensive voyage.”

“Narcissism, as McLuhan, Baudrillard, and Lasch understand it, “ Fisher argues, “ is not about self-love, but the inability to distinguish self from other, object from subject: cybernesis.” (67)

The psychological terror or “dis-ease” that was so important to 19th-century writers like Edgar Allan Poe evolved into William Gibson’s hallucinations about the very dissolution of self (Fisher, 69).

In David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the main character, Max Renn, exposed to a video called “Videodrome,” grows a tumor that causes televisual hallucinations. Max’s (not-consensual) cybernetic alteration means that he “is not extended, but [literally] invaginated” (Fisher, 72).

As noted, the idea that sexual penetration must entail a loss of self is shaped by a particular cis-male heterosexism. What is key, for us, is the non-consensual “mutation” of Max’s body.

This embodies an entirely legitimate fear of lost autonomy — currently exploited by the far-right hysterias around vaccine microchips or DNA resequencing, and 5G cell phone tower conspiracies.

Moreover, there is an aspect of obliteration and death to the cybernetic — the sexual allure of subjective destruction.

The professor character in Videodrome, Dr. Brian O’Blivion, is a stand-in for both Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhen (Fisher, 73). At one point in the film, Dr. O’Blivion’s daughter remarks that her father, having been videotaped hundreds of times, was no longer afraid of death.

This again raises our questions about the intersection of the cybernetic and apocalyptic: Does the self truly fight to prolong its existence, when it has been reproduced and penetrated at such a level? If it is no longer a self? Or, is the penetrated self no longer a self only because of capitalism?

Similarly, Fisher argues, in J.G. Ballard’s writing, the “distinction between inner and outer” is dissolved in a “reversal of Promethean SF” (Fisher, 84). Fire is no longer wrestled from the gods. Something has gone wrong.

In Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition trauma reproduces itself (Fisher, 90). Citing Jean Baudrillard, Fisher notes, “the [auto] accident is everywhere, the elementary, irreversible figure, the banality of the anomaly of death” (Fisher, 93).

The traffic accident scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) becomes a harbinger of doom scrolling. One tragedy after another, numbing, each one becoming more banal, and more normal, acclimating us to catastrophe: “a mediated unconscious ‘fixated to trauma’” (Fisher, 93).

A CRUDE romantic disdain for all technologies is connected to a fear that “[h]uman beings have ‘become the sex organs of the machine world’” (Fisher citing McLuhan, 101).

Our machines, it is implied, can do everything except reproduce themselves. We tend them. They are constant. We die. The machines go on. This fear is, in one sense, a cybernetic expression of classical Marxist alienation theory.

Critics like Baudrillard, however, are wrong in arguing that technological reproduction means a “hell of the same” (Fisher, 103); or that infinite reproduction must produce sameness and a permanent eradication of Benjaminian aura.

Aura is about distance (in space but also time), and infinite reproduction does not simply produce sameness.

The reproduced Xerox image eventually becomes abstract (because of photo degradation), and reclaims the unique.

The reproduced jpg is eventually glitched (artifacts and imperfections are produced).

This is what Andy Warhol tried to show us in his silkscreen reproductions of glamour, death, and popular culture. The marks of the unique return, even in reproduction, and refuse sameness.

OUR MACHINES are not the enemy. Our machines are not depriving us of subjective uniqueness.

Our inability to imagine solidarity with cybernetics, with robots, with tools, is an extension of our failure to extend solidarity to our working-class siblings in general.

The indefinite — the historic center of meditation, religion, mythology, Islamic abstraction, field painting, and much else — is seemingly enclosed upon. There appears to be a “positivization of the indefinite” (Fisher, 16).

Space is mapped, as are the once vast forests, deserts, and oceans. Everything is known but in the knowing somehow ceases to be what it always had been. Enormous wildfires in the west blanket New York City in smoke. The residue of all mystery is scrubbed clean.

But there is nothing technologically determinist about any of it. Why were the forests mapped in a manner that was consistent with the interests of real estate and lumber concerns? They could have been mapped or coded in terms of poetry or some notion of fractal botany.

Why is space primarily the concern of bourgeois man-children who dream only of a Martian Cape of Good Hope?

This is the phantasmagorical being of the bourgeois cybernetic. What appears as “naturally” artificial is an encoding of social relations.

In the 2018 film, Upgrade, despite every previous indication, the villain is not the Elon Musk-type corporate CEO. The villain is the microchip in the body of the main character, a quadriplegic, whose AI allowed him to walk again.

The film flinches at the last minute.

The microchip is not really the problem. It is the humans controlling our implants that dissolve us, remove our subjectivity.

The villain is not silicon. The “bad guy” is Silicon Valley.

While we are in sympathy with the historic followers of King Ludd, opposition to technology itself, in the absence of social consciousness, often reproduces capitalist ideology. For the human half of the cyborg to be free, the machine half must also be free.

The cybernetic flow could be totally different. We could enter and leave, at will, a consensual flow (a flow without coercion): infinite subjectivities in varied levels of self-determined contact.

Against the positivization of the indefinite, we could enable an anti-capitalist mythologizing that echoes A.V. Lunacharsky’s concept of God-Building (see Roland Boer), — the notion of a free, open, democratic, and anarchic construction of what was once considered the realm of the spiritual. [11]

The positivist enclosure of the indefinite is not a triumph of science. It is a triumph of utilitarianism, of capital. Space is still “magic.” The forest still hides myths. This only seems to disappear when space and forest become mapped commodities.

Art only ceased to have “magic” when the bourgeoisie abandoned “art for art’s sake” (right or wrong) and replaced its love of artistic genius (right or wrong) with an operating framework of financial speculation and gentrification.

There is an entire trend of people on TikTok who live near oceans posting videos of what they swear are siren songs. This is part of the overall trend on TikTok toward disassociation. There are even disassociation instructional videos now.

The cyborgs are starting to dream.

Against the “flat multiplicity” (Fisher, 15) of the capitalist cybernetic, what if there was a multiplicity of variation? Instead of a flattening “gothic materialism” as Fisher describes it, could there be a gothic-futurism that equally valued past and future? (Fisher, 14-16). [12]

The potential of the cybernetic is constantly attacked by its function as part of hypermediated capitalism (Fisher, 17). The more passive understandings of this cybernetic flow see it as a gothic “flatline” (Fisher, 28).

But the gothic is not flat. The gothic is a constant reproduction of pathos and trauma.

It is constant contention.

We have become one with dead labor. It is up to us to fulfill the prophecy of object-revenge.

It is up to the cyborgs to become Frankenstein’s monster. It is up to us to become capital’s gravediggers.

They yoked us to our machines to imprison our minds.

There is a way out.

Solidarity with the machines.

Solidarity with the ancestors.

IN THE card game, Hearts, you win, usually, by forcing the other players to take “tricks.” But you can also win by “Shooting the Moon,” by taking all the tricks.

To defeat capitalist realism, fascist occultism, and their apocalypses, the cyborgs must shoot the moon.

This allegorical imperative consciously echoes André Breton’s jest that the “simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd with his belly at barrel-level.”

Breton’s jest should not be read as a prophetic endorsement of stochastic terrorism. It is, instead, an invocation against the banal acceptance of “debasement and cretinization” in everyday rational life within capitalism.

If what we want is “impossible” — the rule of the exploited and oppressed — all the more reason to demand it, to weaponize it against those who caution patience in the face of unmitigated catastrophe.

In Georges Méliès’ Trip to the Moon (1902) a bullet/space capsule pierces the moon’s eye.

You say the moon has no eyes?

It may not in an empirical sense. But the moon, looking down from the cosmos, observes everything that unfolds throughout the night. The moon hears each and every “harlot’s curse” and in the face of each cyborg sees “weakness” and “woe” (William Blake, “London”).

The moon figures into the racist cosmologies of fascist myth. In Nazi cosmology, lunar disaster disrupted idyllic slave societies and caused interbreeding with the “lesser races.” We shoot the moon to accelerate the lunar catastrophes. We shoot the moon to further destroy the “superior nation.” The cyborgs welcome the torment of Nazis, Black Hundreds, Klansmen, Three Percenters, QAnon hysterics, and Proud Boys. We want them to squirm as the moon crashes down on their failed imperial imaginaries.

At the same time, as we aim our sights at the moon, the failed patterns of reformist social democracy and sectarian revolutionary politics come into focus.

The cyborgs do not have time for transparent gestures. Our gestures are too layered with the palimpsest of human and cyborg performance to be so empty. Living with the ancestors demands more.

The impulse to overly differentiate specific organizations from the rest of the revolutionary left is an internalization of capitalist realism. It is an internalization — into the socialist movement — of branding. This tends to see the radical worker or would-be revolutionary as a consumer and other revolutionaries as competition. In truth, all workers are our equals and siblings. And all revolutionary socialists are already the proletarian cyborg’s comrades.

They are, already, a part of us.

The internalization of capitalist ideology — a view of the world, as Marx said, upside down as in a camera obscura — curtails our sense of what is possible. While few comrades would disagree that the climate crisis is a looming planetary disaster, fewer comrades seem willing to consider or imagine the scale of action on our side needed to prevent or mitigate that disaster. Capitalist realism has made our dreams far too small.

The cyborgs will dream of worlds that cannot be contained.

Our fascist enemies also dream outside the accepted logic of capitalist realism. They imagine horrors and call it utopia. The US far right thirsts, by the millions, for a “Storm” that will restore the nation and punish its enemies. They are borrowing from but also rejecting the more doctrinaire European fascists, while crafting their own far right mythology and politics.

The cyborgs do not cede ground to human dust.

Together, with the machines, we set our sights on the moon.

Together, with the ancestors, we bring it crashing down.

All parenthetical Mark Fisher citations are from: Fisher, Mark. (2018) Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fction. New York: Exmilitary.

GK Andre, *The Trolley*, digital image (2021)

Footnotes/Endnotes

We are referring here to the new socialist movement that developed in the United States over the past 5-6 years, represented in the growth of DSA and other organizations.
See Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, “Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: The Political Economy of Direct Carbon Capture,” Historical Materialism 29.1 (2021), 3-48
The name of the drug store and the worker have been changed to prevent identification or retaliation.
Reification means, in Marxist philosophy, the tendency to abstract concrete representations or gestures of class, social position, over time.
Object revenge refers to a process by which that considered inanimate by its masters becomes animate, where object becomes subject. A classic example of this is Frankenstein’s Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
See Adam Turl, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” Red Wedge Magazine (2019/20)
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
We understand that this is not the correct clinical definition of “schizophrenia;” but we are referring to a particular strand of cultural theory and criticism that borrowed from an outdated understanding of schizophrenia as a bifurcated and fragmented consciousness.
Roland Boer (2014) “Religion and Socialism: A.V. Lunacharsky and the God-Builders,” Political Theology, 15 (2), pp. 188-209
In other words, the idea that the cybernetic seems to flatten everyday life into a banal sameness.

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