Impressive Rubbish

Clear from the head the masses of impressive rubbish;

Rally the lost and trembling forces of the will,

Gather them up and let them loose upon the earth,

Till they construct at last a human justice

                                                                     -- Auden

Start with the question, are we really feeling nothing when we are in fact feeling nothing? Ok, yes, Science might have something to say about this, But that is not what this is about. Well, to be philosophically honest, I don't think nothingness is an absence of feeling or thinking. In fact, when you are feeling nothing, you are actively making nothing out of all the somethings in your life. For we try to appreciate the nothingness as if an absence actually existed within us. It is almost like the saying, "most people don't know love, they just know the absence." Despite this being counterintuitive, love should be understood as anything but absence, even if one feels different. This claim is again in line with what Richard Seymore wrote recently regarding how our philosophical claims about thought shouldn't be based on dreadful, impoverished philosophies of the mind. As it stands, nothingness of the thought, in essence, offers the mind more than we have given it credit for. Therefore it is imperative that we rethink our intellectual assumptions of nothingness.

Seen this way, Gilles Deleuze aptly wrote in 1985: "Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying." Only when you disengage, can you truly engage is what Deleuze is saying. But in truly disengaging, one is not absolutely free of engaging. This is worth looking at, since emptying our minds out for the world to witness, has become a baseline for the attention economy. 

Return to the 80s

An old Muslim cleric announces his misogynistic attitude towards women. A power crisis starts in Kerala during a heat wave. Both incidents drew a similar response on social media, where users condemned them as a regression to a dark past. The power cuts especially became fodder for memes sarcastically congratulating the new UDF government for taking Keralam back to the 80s.

Recently another AI trend started where people asked AI bots to reimagine them in the "fashionable aesthetics" of the 1980s and generate photos and videos. And now if we look at the three together, we see that the first two incidents took the figurative return to 80s as a regression, while the third one was literally going for the nostalgia of whatever that qualified to be a popular culture of the 80s. The underlying issue with all of these is the misunderstanding of History as linear progression. As Communists used to say, "One should strive to think in dialectical terms, not in mechanistic terms." Consider the power crisis here. Of course, the government and the KSEB are responsible for not identifying the inadequacies of a consumer state and planning ahead accordingly. But at the same time, power crises are widely assumed to be an issue of the past, of the 80s to be precise. The logic here is that humanity is on its natural course towards a utopia where power demands wouldn't be a concern at all. This is how unserious we are, as a society, about the ecological catastrophes ahead. The irony is that we coin new vocabulary for them, such as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's 'end times fascism,' faster than we act on them.

 Actually, it would make more sense if we saw our present inconveniences as a premonition offered by the disasters from the future. Only such an approach can rightly frame the relevant issues that we face today within the global scale. For example, consider 'night city' and the blackouts from Cyberpunk to be communicating to us through our minor crises (minor as in comparison to the complete structural collapse in our future night city).

Conversely, the AI 80s trend quite ironically became a positive note of the past. I mean the lie through the hype sells itself, and soon social media was flooded with AI generated images and videos. Again, this is one of the many ways through which AI market sustains its bubble. This ponzi scheme is aimed at the investors who are convinced that something magical is in the horizon everytime some AI trend gets popular. As Doctorow notes, "The tech platforms are desperate to convince Wall Street that you love AI, which is very different from convincing you that you love AI." 

Moreover, Ed Zitron notes in his 'The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble' from July 2025, "seven giant AI firms—Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla, and Amazon—account for 35 percent of the value of all U.S. stocks. Nvidia accounts for 19 percent of the value of these seven stocks. Nvidia’s entire valuation is based on the fact that the other six companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Nvidia’s GPU chips, which power their AI data center. Keeping the growth story alive isn’t about one company, or one sector. The entire U.S. economy hangs in the balance." This means that there is another 2008 waiting to be materialised. The effects, of course, will be disastrous. Even so, a future colonised by AI remains plausible, and we need to understand how these trends keep the bubble afloat until tech companies' models achieve AGI or superintelligence. It is therefore essential that people recognise the costs of scaling at a reckless pace toward AGI or superintelligence, above all the risk of environmental collapse.

Despite all this, what haunts me personally was the revelation from Exocapitalism (a book that I've read recently) regarding how Capitalism has maybe found its new endosymbiotic relationship in non-living entities such as softwares, and that the human as as substrate has finally become a nostalgia, similar to the kind of manufactured nostalgia we have relived with the 80s AI slop. 

Are we actually living in Exocapitalism?

Protests and Cultural Shock

As students and the youth of India are continuing their struggle against the institutional erosion that has been happening at the hands of the BJP-RSS, what stood out to me was Narendra Modi's reaction to the protests earlier. He said it was a cultural shock to witness how the students used "vulgar/abusive" language. 

This response shouldn't be surprising since it is exactly in line with how shamelessness works in our polity today. Even when thinkers like Žižek are of the opinion that people shouldn't try to shame those in power because they mainly operate by embracing shamelessness, I actually think the opposite. This political perversion of appearing to be the most shameless person is actually a paradox if one thinks about it deeply. Even when we think the appearance of decency has receded, that is not the case. The perverted actually believes in appearances even when circumstances or facts are against him. Practically speaking, politicians admitting something shameful they have done can come across as daring and transparent, but students/young people shaming those in power especially in a libidinally charged way, that too in a society like India, a society that traditionally accords respect to older age, can break new grounds.

In India, women are sexually assaulted and abused on the streets every single day. And these incidents have never shocked the cultural conscience of the PM. We, Indians, respect elders, speak sanskari language, act cultured, and stay silent while we witness brute violence on our very streets. This is the paradox. And yes, the facts of atrocities committed do not speak truth to the people in power. It is only by tearing down the veneer of the Indian sanskari society that we can challenge the patriarchal order that empowers people in power. So if you ask me, chipping away at appearances, taking digs at the PM using libidinally charged words, are effective in dismantling the fascist forces of this country. Also this shouldn't create discord within the broader left. Even when bourgeois morality overlaps across political spectrums, one should understand the spirit of what Arthur Koestler said to his comrades, "Appeasing the enemy is as foolish as persecuting the friend who pursues your own aim by a different road."

In View

Books

 Finally the English translation of Ibtisam Azem's The Sleep Thief is out, and yes, it is a really well-written small book. The Palestinian cause finds more meaning in identities stretched across love and family.

 

Cory Doctorow's latest delivers a new perspective on AI and how scaling by the corporations has created vulnerabilities in the financial structures of our economy. AI hype is nothing other than a huge bubble waiting patiently to pop.

Cinema

The historical drama Rose (2026) is a brilliant piece of political art that has created some serious hype over the film festivals. I finally got to see it, and it's unlike anything that I have seen recently. Sandra Hüller delivers an exceptional performance and is on a streak here. A good year for her with Fatherland getting ready for wide release and Project Hail Mary which came out earlier in the year. Overall, I wouldn't be surprised if she gets the nod at the Oscars next year. 

[And yes, you will only find Rose if you're really willing to look for the film.]