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Día de los muertos, Isaac Cordal

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/inside-the-world-of-racist-science-fiction.html

The books act as a kind of binding agent, a Bible-like codification of basic principles that underpin the various denominations. ... The point is not that there is a direct line between, say, “The Turner Diaries” and the Oval Office. Rather, it’s that the tropes that define the Trump administration’s rhetoric and policies — apocalyptic xenophobia, anti-Semitic conspiracies, racist fear-mongering — are also the tropes that define white-supremacist literature. To the hundreds of thousands of fans of Mr. Kendall, Ms. Williams and other writers, Mr. Trump must seem like a character out of racist central casting: a rule-breaking white knight who will stop at nothing to root out the conspiracies and take on their race’s enemies. No wonder the bond between Mr. Trump and the far right is so strong: Not only is he a hero out of their novels, but in supporting him, they have become heroes themselves

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The term means — turning to the entry on ‘Instauration Fantasy’ in the same volume — ‘restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation’, and the ‘instauration fantasies’ 

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How can books compete, for example, with platforms like Medium and Substack? 

BG: I think the simple answer is, they can’t. Douglas Rushkoff has written about this (although my recollection’s a bit dim, and the post’s hard to find). When he announced a book, he published a free essay. One million people or so read it, a few hundred thousand more listened to the audio version and it had brilliant reach on social media. He was invited to speak across the podcast circuit, appearing on a dozen shows or more. There was mainstream media interest in his themes and ideas, and he was asked to pundit on a few news shows. The book sold 15,000 copies. 

People do not buy or read books, the books they do buy or read are trash, and the industry is dominated by ghost-written celebrity garbage. The critical deference shown and awards given to indifferent literary fiction is not reflected in sales, people actually buy genre work, but genre writers get very little mainstream media presence unless their work is adapted for film or TV. 

Poetry is completely de-professionalised and has been for decades. Journalism will go the same way. The value of everything under late-stage capitalism is trending towards zero – and that’s before you factor in large language models, emergent AI, and the increasing dominance of video over text content. 

You can probably point to examples that contradict everything I’m saying, but they are mostly outliers, or were grandfathered into industries that no longer meaningfully exist. Books can’t compete, but I imagine they will always be written and made, just like poetry is. We’ll keep making them, people will keep not reading them.

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We decided that Cute was one of these intense points where human culture is interacting with, and being altered by, something that we don’t yet have a grasp of. And we saw how Cute was accelerating, intensifying all around us. It seems to be everywhere, infiltrating all aspects of our lives, sometimes in ways that are utterly incongruous, totally at odds with prior cultural norms. Where does it come from? What does it want? Is there even a singular ‘it’? Sure, to a certain extent cuteness is a prominent twenty-first century aesthetic and commercial tendency that is being exploited to sell commodities. Sure, our sensitivity to it seems to be the product of evolutionary imperatives. And yet, at its cutting (or cuting) edge, where humans are helplessly compelled to produce ever more acute forms of cuteness, even using their own bodies as materials for it, strange new mutations of desire are emerging, new forms of life that seem to serve neither Nature nor Capital