Background Radiation: The Role of the Environment in the Creative Process

Most newsletters worth reading that've commanded some amount of the cultural mindshare within about the last five years do so having charted the path our terminally online, "Christian Nationalist," tech-bro oligarchy has taken transforming everyday American life into the incomprehensible hellscape we're forced to confront every time we get out of bed in the morning. While I lack a similar degree of resources and at the risk of simply restating the obvious as to just how much quality of life has degraded for the vast majority of the working class within the developed US this decade, I more than make up for with a shared disdain for hegemony and an exorbitant amount of debt having received an advanced degree in English Literature from a privatized education system. Lucky day that personality driven work is having a moment. One of my hopes for Memory Leak is that in exploring my relationship to central tenants of the creative process, I can take a small lead to whatever extent I can in modeling the ways in which we can better create work that meets the needs of the moment. What better place to start than with the role material conditions play in the lives of those who make art?

"All We Are Is Dust" – Material & Social Climate Change

To loosely paraphrase Byung-Chul Han from The Crisis of Narration, the more that a certain topic circulates within a particular discourse tends to portray that topic's decline in influence throughout the wider culture as to capture any phenomena via language is to affix in place a symbolism, or the meaning of particular signifiers, around that event. While it can't be denied that there is also an amount of slippage to the meaning of the signifiers attached to said event which allows for a gradient of interpretations to exist, that is to say that within a lot of the academic & academic adjacent circles I tend to frequent have been discussing lately the grander, western, neoliberal project and how the contradictions between the engines of capital and a self-governing democratic base have accelerated to such a point that we have reached or are still reaching a historical inflection point.

Whether it's the AFD in Germany, the National Rally in France, Reform in the UK, or America's GOP -- the early 2020's have seen notable influence from an ascendent far right within government centers of "the west." This accents a social climate that was already hostile at the best of times towards the humanities with, at least in the US; the autocratic reassertion (under the speculative influence of a wide reaching cannibal, pedophilic elite) of the normative & prerogative state. That should you fit some arbitrary, performative standard of cultural hegemony, you're granted a median life until knowingly or unknowingly committing some transgression and suddenly you're caught in a Kafka-esque dragnet of policy and become the subject of juridical and stochastic violence for breaking the party line.

Theoretically, the implications here tend to veer off in two directions, one with a more naïve tone, the other more cynical – both though, with sufficient argument, could be seen as reasonable although we'll only know what sticks given enough time. The former says that due to this ur-fascist turn coinciding with the rise of silicon valley oligarchs pushing for the AI-based, cloud-computing, perpetual subscription model "enshittification" of digital infrastructure – what we're experiencing currently is a form of regression back into an earlier form of capitalism; a kind of "Techno-feudalism" ala Yannis Varoufakis or Cory Doctorow. The later insists that we have yet to see the kind of wide scale starvation, drought & unrest necessary of society wide regression at that scale (although instances of what's been happening with ICE raids in Minnesota for example serve as a 'case study' of sorts). That what we're seeing right now is late stage neoliberalism reaching it's apex, ruled by a "professional managerial class" having sufficiently stripped any semblance of a social safety net away from it's constituency and that those who care who care about preserving an egalitarian moral have been forced back into an early twentieth century starting point, i.e. Vivek Chibber or Catherine Liu.

"Some Kind of Plastic I Could Wrap Around You" – On Risk Aversion

While none of what's been previously mentioned is strictly related to the creative process, it does generate a particular atmosphere and tone that certainly does chill expression. Even if the consequences of publishing should be nothing new, especially to those who are familiar with the history of the trade (how, say, in the medieval era, one could get thrown in jail or exiled for writing something critical of the church) this hostility puts concentrations of capital within media on the backfoot because they don't want the hassle of having to deal with unwarranted government inquires (think of how much the Hays code effected what could or couldn't get made in Hollywood circa 1950). This is made even more unbearable when, again at least in the States, our establishment opposition party is largely filled with inept centrists blinded by the status quo and allergic to holding anyone accountable, as they also remain beholden to the funding offered by the same speculative, cannibalistic pedophile oligarchy.

When the money dries up in this way, and people with the checkbooks at the head of publishing houses and production studios get so leery about what they can and cannot greenlight, people who've found even marginal success within these systems continue to regurgitate the same fetid parochialisms about art hero cliches toiling in decades of obscurity, covering up how diffuse and contingent any publishing deal can be while passing down the same brain worms to the next generation. It is not a failure of the will if your funding disappears mid development cycle, when your publisher gets acquired and subsequently dissolved by some faceless conglomerate you didn't even know existed because it's a shell company created by private equity to absorb the debt of an even bigger fish in an increasingly small pond. Middle class creatives used to exist and not even that long ago, highlighting how much of a cost-of-living crisis we're in right now.

Say you want to go DIY and follow the "underground." The method by which that was established as a viable option has been now been fully captured by technological interests. YouTube is owned by Alphabet (Google) which is one of the largest global tech corporations. While not every creator on the platform explicitly makes content with the algorithm in mind – it's no secret that the algorithm which drives what videos shows up in which viewers feeds rewards the most inflammatory content because it's what easily drives the most engagement – and the people who find the most success often employ teams of researchers to keep up with the fluctuations in how that algorithm functions. It's not 2005 anymore, and you shouldn't be content with the implicit demand to cater to the bottom line of inhuman freaks obsessed with avoiding death and who are actively destroying anything left of the social democratic project.

"It's Got To Come Find Us" – The Role of Agency

Now, in the face of these decaying institutions, what is an individual to do? Well, as someone who's largely pursued an academic career engaging with and studying the humanities, it doesn't leave one to do much. Largely, I find myself just as frozen and as risk averse as the holders of capital I've spent the last twelve hundred words or so criticizing. Generally speaking, I'm a big believer in not being able to make art when you're hungry. Suffering does not serve the artistic end product and those who try to claim differently in the name of fetishization are trying to sell you something. Sometimes, the pain we experience doesn't have some grandiose point – it is simply just pain. Sometimes, not every failure we encounter can be edified into some linear self-help program. So, I plan for contingencies. An employer based health care system, sucks and being uninsured, sucks. Often, I find have done a poor job, historically, of acting with self-preservation at the top of my mind.

At the same time, it's not much of a coincidence that a percentage of the zeitgeist has been returning to newsletters as a predominant way to sift through the morass of culture we're presented with every day we get out of bed in the morning. There is a desire to engage with work people know has been made by other humans who don't have a particular incentive to rely on artificial intelligence -- though that's not to say it's without it's own problems either. In one of the several podcasts I use to drown out uncomfortable thoughts I don't have the emotional bandwidth for in the moment, I heard an argument along the lines of, "As AI gets more incorporated into daily life, we're introducing an even more pronounced class divide between those who recognize AI generated work and don't care and those who have the education required to differentiate what has used AI and what hasn't." I think about that thesis statement a lot and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that young people on the whole aren't willingly seeking out what selection of newsletters to subscribe to in an effort to recreate their inbox in the image of their favorite RSS feed of yore. This is a medium predominantly for an aging, upper-middle class demographic and/or precocious, artsy college kids failing to repress a flare for the dramatic.

So, at the end of the day, you do what you can, with what you have, where you're at. It's important to understand that while art cannot save us in some material, culture-wide sense – it does rejuvenate the soul. Too many people jump head first into projects guided by some grand ambitious delusion that makes them absolutely insufferable to collaborate with but while there is value in exercising some foresight as to where you anticipate your work living in the larger milieu, all the planning in the world won't matter if you never put your pen to the page, pixels to the screen, notes to your instrument, or what have you. You're of no use to any worthwhile social project if you can't functionally take care of yourself, to some lesser or greater extent. Everyone has a different baseline as to what constitutes worthwhile work and it's up to you to figure what that looks like within the particulars of your inherited contexts.

For as dour as everything can feel, especially under Trump Two, there are some early signs that things could be changing for the better. For one, try as hard as he might, Trump is struggling to distract the public from the absolute trash fire that has been the Epstein files. ICE is profoundly unpopular and even though their roving hoards of fascist thugs mark a starkly violent development from the general incompetence of Trump One, neighborhood organizing has proven an effective counterbalance. Although, it is myopic in the grand scheme of things, the election of a mayor like Zohran Mamdani is something that was damn near impossible to imagine during the Obama administration. There is a cautious optimism around what an opposition could look like, but it's never been more apparent that in order to get to the end goal that most people authentically left of center want – there will be decades of neoliberal austerity that has to be burned through and it is the role of the commentariat to track the emotional paths we take to get there.