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“This experience is much harder, and weirder, to explain than extreme fear or terror. Most people know what it is like to be seriously afraid. If they haven’t felt it themselves, they’ve at least seen a movie or read a book, or talked to a frightened friend–they can at least imagine it. But explaining what I’ve come to call “disorganization” is a different challenge altogether: Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One’s center gives way. The center cannot hold. The “me” becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what’s happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through which to see the world, to make judgments, and comprehend risk.”

— Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold

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degeneration theory/the concept of social degeneration was not invented and not even popularized by the nazis (and not even by max nordau as that post going around claims), and I do think it's misleading to focus on this particular use to justify why calling people degenerate is wrong. it rests on another instance of nazi exceptionalism, as if they represented the prime example of all those ideologies.

the concept of degeneration itself is indebted to evolution theories and discourses of race and origin in the eighteenth century - the construction of a racial taxonomy where each person's individual weakening meant a weakening of their entire race, and of entire populations being, biologically, weaker or predisposed to weakness. it is also tied to progressive urbanization which generated new discourses towards "urban crowds", notably along medical and hygienic lines. these ideas mostly found footing initially in 18th century france (through the works of lamarck and buffon for example) and germany. medical developments at the time - identification of the cause for syphillis, for example, or pasteur's work on vaccines, or works on fetal alcohol snydrome - are not separable from this idea of regenerating the national stock, especially in times of national crises as was experiencing france (military defeat to prussia, declining birth rates, communist activity) at the time.

even regarding nordau, the context of the french third republic is relevant to the rise of modern zionism; theodore herzl was working as a correspondent in paris during the dreyfus affair, and was receptive both to european antisemitism and to the possibilities exemplified by the european scramble for africa regarding resource extraction and settler colonialism. but nordau didn't come up with these theories himself, and many writers, politicians, or intellectuals that now enjoy a legacy of being enlightened, progressive, modern thinkers (emile zola, arthur conan doyle, jean-martin charcot, etc.) espoused similar ideas, and understood the world in those terms, though not all of them used the word degeneration specifically (not least of all due to privileging national-made concepts in a context of inter-european conflict).

degeneration theory found its first mainstream articulation in especially scientific and medical terms with benedict morel (born almost 50 years before morau), whose ideas proved itself very relevant in the framework of the french third republic regarding social hygiene policies. this is relevant because pinning eugenistic and exterminatory politics and theories onto national socialism serves to exempt liberal european democracies in which those ideas arose and cristallized. morel was a psychiatrist who developed his theories in asylums; degeneration theory cannot be separated from the rise in psychiatric power and the expanding nosology of psychiatric disorders. the mental deficiency act of 1913 in the united kingdom, the understanding of mental illness as biologically mediated and innate, alcohol prohibition in the united states, the concept of OCD itself, or modern criminology are no less linked and indebted to degeneration theory (and its associated concepts) than nazi policies. they are in fact a continuum!

as always, this is less a case of instructing people not to use the word degenerate specifically (though I don't think anyone should!) and more about familiarizing yourself with the rhetoric around a weakening of intellectual faculties, of modernity and modern technologies leading to an irrepressible decline, of an absence of willpower leading to swathes of population becoming lazy, fat, disabled, etc., a framework that expands much beyond the category of person that uses the word degenerate!

further reading:

Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918, by Daniel Pick

Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline, by Robert A. Nye

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Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound by Tara Rodgers

Get it from my Google Drive HERE

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.

Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.

Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)

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On Tyrants

ἔστιν ἄρα τῇ ἀληθείᾳ, κἂν εἰ μή τῳ δοκεῖ, ὁ τῷ ὄντι τύραννος τῷ ὄντι δοῦλος τὰς μεγίστας θωπείας καὶ δουλείας καὶ κόλαξ τῶν πονηροτάτων, καὶ τὰς ἐπιθυμίας οὐδ᾽ ὁπωστιοῦν ἀποπιμπλάς, ἀλλὰ πλείστων ἐπιδεέστατος καὶ πένης τῇ ἀληθείᾳ φαίνεται, ἐάν τις ὅλην ψυχὴν ἐπίστηται θεάσασθαι, καὶ φόβου γέμων διὰ παντὸς τοῦ βίου, σφαδᾳσμῶν τε καὶ ὀδυνῶν πλήρης, εἴπερ τῇ τῆς πόλεως διαθέσει ἧς ἄρ��ει ἔοικεν.

In truth, then -- even if it doesn't seem so to someone -- the real tyrant is really a slave with respect to the greatest fawnings and servitudes and a flatterer of the most wretched; he does not satisfy his desires in any way whatsoever, but he is most in want of the greatest number of things and seems in truth a poor man (if one knows how to examine the entire soul) -- groaning in fear his whole life long, full of convulsions and torments, if in fact he resembles the disposition of the city he rules.

--Plato, Republic IX.579d-e

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i feel silly asking but you mentioned “the fallacy of terra nullius” haunting minecraft and i had never heard of the term before! the first thing i thought of was an older video essay i watched once about how like, colonialism is incentivized in gameplay, if thats somewhere in the realm of what it refers to. have you talked on this before? because you’re really well spoken and i love love love the more meta stuff you talk about

disclaimer that i'm very unconfident in my like - post-colonialist studies and general critique of colonialism, but i think it's important i don't ignore it because of that. (wretched of the earth is one of those books i'm always starting to re-read and digesting the first twenty pages, like pedagogy of the oppressed etc.)

but yeah i bet you're thinking of the folding ideas (dan olsen) video on the topic, which was the first major critique of minecraft i encountered from that angle! i also recently read critiques of video game studies as critically failing to address the specter of militarization on all games, which i think is stronger if you narrow it to simulations specifically, which I'll count minecraft as one since it's a sandbox. i think all sandbox/sims are necessarily political, as to make a simulation is to describe or intentionally avoid describing the "real"/material/irl world.

terra nullius is a latin phrase with a specific history in legal realms as well as anti-colonial/imperial/etc. critique as the concept that if it is "nobody's land" (the latin's meaning) then it may as well be mine, might makes right etc etc.

i'm using it as shorthand because the fantasy of a sandbox world must rest on this idea of a domain which no other person but the player has right to. even in sandboxes/sims which have NPCs who may have some claim (story or coding-wise) to the space of the sandbox are always de-legitimized by the fact that they are not players, mechanically, and so don't count. we see this rhetoric reverse-engineered by far right and other adjacent conservative ideologies online; an NPC is not real, and therefore violence and subjugation of those who are NPCs is implied to be acceptable.

is minecraft fascist? it's far too vapid to truly qualify - as fun as lore crumbs may be, it is, by design, a true terra nullius occupied by no (real) body other than the player-agent's own, and therefore which you may disrupt or demolish or overwrite with impunity. there's not even an ecology to disrupt; all is exploitable, another line of colonialist relationship paradigm made implicitly true. so we, the player-character-avatar-embodiments in the world of minecraft aren't forced to be facists, but the entire concept of

and good lord all that to get to the point that is, with hermitcraft s7's mycelium resistance specifically, this concept of "should we care about the original biome before we terraformed and industrialized and converted it to our own purposes? does the act of player transformation qualify as 'destruction'?" are made toothless by. well it's a sandbox game the game says you have the right to do this and also hcs7's conflicts are contrived in good faith, contrarian to authority more than they are contrarian to ideology or aligned with any particular (in-game) ethics, etc.

i don't want the mycelium resistance to have a substantial ideology driving a coherent praxis of ecoterrorism! that would be genuinely insane! but one must consider that they do sidestep it due to the particulars of the simulation genre and the game that this conflict is taking place within, and being able to see through the cracks opened by collaborative gameplay in search of meaningful conflict does illuminate some of the assumptions baked into the game, genre, and perhaps even the entire medium of video games if you want to consider it.

and i am writing an international spy fic which is about as problematic of assumptive premises (goodness of law, international cooperation, existence of discernable & conquerable evils, etc.) that's set during this conflict so. yeah i'm thinking abt it. i don't want the fic to be About capital A about that but i do want to think through it when i'm writing the plot, you know?

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An Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad switchman demonstrating a signal with a fusee, which is used at twilight and dawn when visibility is poor. Photographed by Jack Delano in Calumet City in January 1943.

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Trevor Paglen - They Watch the Moon (2010)

“This photograph depicts a classified ‘listening station’ deep in the forests of West Virginia.

The station is located at the center of the National Radio Quiet Zone, a region of approximately 34,000 square kilometers in West Virginia and parts of Maryland.

Within the Quiet Zone, radio transmissions are severely restricted: omnidirectional and high-powered transmissions (such as wireless internet devices and FM radio stations) are not permitted.

The listening station, which forms part of the global ECHELON system, was designed in part to take advantage of a phenomenon called moonbounce.

Moonbounce involves capturing communications and telemetry signals from around the world as they escape into space, hit the moon, and are reflected back towards Earth.

The photograph is a long exposure under the full moon light.”

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jean dubuffet, shadows cast in the pine forest, 1944   

ink on paper

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The Minsky Arm by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert (1970), MIT AI Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. In the late 1960s, Minsky and Papert proposed that AI research should focus on simplified situations known as micro-worlds. Much of this research focused on a so-called "blocks world," with stackable coloured blocks of various shapes and sizes. Terry Winograd's SHRDLU could communicate in ordinary English, plan operations and execute them in a virtual micro-world. However, Minsky and Papert built a robot arm with a camera, to stack real blocks, bringing the blocks world to life.

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Sheltered Life

Gal Siyuan

oil tempera on canvas, 2024

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The Musical Architecture of Iannis Xenakis, by George Grella, «Bandcamp Daily. Lists», bandcamp, August 14, 2025

(image: Iannis Xenakis, Polytope de Persépolis, 1971. Les Amis de Xenakis, Paris. © Iannis Xenakis)

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The line between sports and war has always been uncomfortably thin. It’s a cliché of aristocratic military lore that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton—but like many clichés, it contains more than a kernel of truth. In our frenetically digitized mass society, meanwhile, we casually understand that combat presented as harmless fun in the guise of sports, video games, and television probably goes a long way in softening the military’s image. But in plumbing the deeper nexus that connects our dizzying varieties of competitive leisure to the deadly serious business of combat, Lenoir and Caldwell do more than call out the clumsy PR initiatives of today’s Pentagon. While of course noting the crucial conflicts of interests in, say, the Pentagon’s notorious payoffs to the National Football League, Lenoir and Caldwell write that the real work of sanitizing Pentagon operations for public view resides in making the work of war seem mundane and familiar: “Routinizing war is important for a globalized capitalist empire,” they write, “and … implicit in this process is the understanding of war as a project with not only military but also ideological and political dimensions.” In particular, they observe, video games and television are indispensable to the challenge of “habituating civilians to perpetual war.” How this relationship between modern entertainment and war has developed over time and grown baroquely syncretized via the new economy of omni-digital gratification forms the fascinating nucleus of the book.

In stunningly short order, the Pentagon set about exploiting the obvious training implications offered by console gaming. In 1980 the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) set about appropriating the Atari game Battlezone and repurposing it as a revolutionary new training system called Bradley Trainer. That program’s success next prompted the engineers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create the Simulator Network project (SIMNET, in Pentagon-ese). The breakthrough concept in SIMNET was to sidestep the costs of building physically realistic simulators—which had initially proved more expensive than the vehicles they were meant to simulate—by scaling the program to console users.

Here was one of the first self-conscious iterations of the military-entertainment complex—and Lenoir and Caldwell highlight the recruiting gains encoded in the innocuous-seeming logic of the Pentagon’s new virtual gaming platform. SIMNET operated on “selective functional fidelity rather than full physical fidelity”—i.e., experientially simulating a cockpit rather than recreating a cockpit replica. And that was just the first-order breakthrough: “The vehicle simulator was viewed as a tool for the training of crews as a military unit, thus emphasizing collective rather than individual training.”

By 1990, the nascent personal gaming industry was working on a revolving-door basis with the engineers at DARPA. Talent, money, and (especially) ideas now moved promiscuously back and forth between a growing industry hungry for the attention of consumers and a Pentagon looking for renewed purpose in the waning days of the Cold War.

The Great Simulation and Modern Memory As this civilian-military synergy hardened into the post-Cold War status quo, simulator software morphed from a savvy bit of cost-saving hackery into a virtual raison d’être. Presiding over this shift was the recalibration of Pentagon strategy known as the “Revolution in Military Affairs.” The RMA, like the simulation boom, was partially a response to shrinking budgets—it was, however, much more than a cost-containment tactic. RMA—which incidentally was rooted in the Cold War speculations of Soviet strategists such as Nikolai Ograkov—was a reorientation of American military force away from the giant land wars of the past and toward ever greater reliance on high-tech gadgetry. Not only are key tech innovations such as precision-guided missiles and laser-targeting software cheaper than carpet bombing, they’re also less wantonly destructive of human life, making them an easy sell to political leaders and civilian supporters. The lead thinkers behind RMA promised to cut down on the massive numbers of casualties entailed in fully industrialized “total wars.” But in order to close the sale, Pentagon officials needed to direct their resources to the real-world prototypes for a new generation of virtually engineered and executed warfare.

The new doctrine found its ideal test lab in the First Gulf War. In that long-ago conflict, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster—now better known as President Trump’s obsequious (but now dispatched) National Security Advisor—deployed a new battery of sophisticated digital gadgetry to disable Soviet-built Iraqi tanks in what came to be known as the Battle of 73 Easting. It was such a resounding success, Lenoir and Caldwell tell us, that “[a] few days after the battle the military decided to capitalize on the Battle of 73 Easting to bolster future SIMNET training.” That’s right: in a prophetic sort of positive feedback loop, digitally enabled battle was now furnishing the raw material for digitally simulated military training. Data was gathered on the battle. Participants were interviewed. The 2nd Cavalry helped DARPA recreate the battle vehicle by vehicle. SIMNET eventually turned the Battle of 73 Easting training simulation into a sort of inverse Kobayashi Maru—the fictional Starfleet simulation notorious for being impossible to defeat—in which, despite a series of different programmed outcomes, it’s almost impossible to lose.

It was, in short, a model of digital-age vertical integration: exactly what the military wanted. And to speed along this happy synergy, the strictures governing DoD procurement policies were relaxed. Here, too, an adjustment to financial procedure concealed a much broader, and far-reaching, cultural shift. “The shift in procurement policy led to a loosening—even erasure—of the boundaries between military contractors and the commercial sector,” Lenoir and Caldwell write. “As a result, many important technologies in the area of networking, simulation, virtual reality, and AI moved from behind the walls of military secrecy into the commercial sector; and, even more important, technology began to flow freely from the commercial sector, particularly the game industry, into the military.”

The conduit was now so wide open that by 2004 we had such games as Full Spectrum Warrior, “a successful product of a collaboration among the military and game and film industries,” and America’s Army, in which SIMNET founder Jack Thorpe “saw … the same potential offered by Ender’s Battle School and envisioned a perfect military Battleplex providing a lifelong learning environment for combat decision leaders guided by proactive pedagogy and combat simulators.”

-  Scott Beauchamp, “War Games.” The Baffler. No. 39, April 30, 2018.

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I absolutely forgot that I made this weird little micro game and posted it on itch a while back.

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Is there such thing as an anti-war film?

just as actual communism has never been tried, an actual anti-war film has never been tried.

flippancy aside - i honestly don't know. i don't watch enough films to be able to say definitively whether or not a good anti-war film that doesn't end up making a spectacle of war itself exists. i can tell you fairly confidently that it probably won't come from the imperial core or any country whose economy has a significant chunk dedicated to war machinery manufacture, where its citizenry has a limited understanding and framework of war, even amongst many of those who would consider themselves anti-war. it certainly won't come out of mainstream film industry like hollywood - and yes that also includes the cluster of independent film production companies situated within that milieu. they're too compromised from a history of making war and military propaganda to achieve that kind of independence either infrastructurally or creatively (think also abt how many imperial core citizens / people who have been exposed to significant amounts of imperial core media can actually visualise war as a genuinely horrifying thing that should absolutely never happen; many of us fail at this basic hurdle).

but like i said. i watch like maybe 3-4 films in a year. wrong person to ask here.

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You think “oh it would be useful to learn how to identify my thrifted yarn and clothing” and before you know it you’ve been recruited by fiber witches giving out their spells willy nilly, again