Brandon Marcus

How do we manage free expression within a charter that says it is open and free? It is the contradiction of our age.

“The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch”

Like Paul Kingsnorth, I fear a global monoculture: a flattening and mechanistic vision of human beings linked into society only by the twin inchoate energies of information and capital.

The Internet, particularly the algorithmic internet, is a city structured by the powerful, for the powerful, running not on steam or coal or electricity but rather cunningly harnessed desire. The more imagination, the more corruption of imagination. But, no less than in Babylon, or Gotham, it is still a city of human beings.

Politics is fandom — indeed, everything is fandom — because everything is mediated. Most of what we know, feel, and act on is almost exclusively delivered to us through screens, images, text. In practice, there is no clear break between “real life” and “media.” We experience reality the way we experience fiction. Fandom is the organizing principle... See more

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myth first emerged to help people cope with what he called “the absolutism of reality” — the overwhelming scale of the world and its fundamental indifference to human concerns.

Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more