Such Sites to Show You – Cenobites and the Cybernetic Hellbox

“And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”
-William Blake, Milton, Preface

“We have such sights to show you.”
-The High Priest, Hellraiser (1987)

I spent several months brainstorming for an essay I wanted to write on the epistemology, ontology, and consequences of what I call cybernetic consciousness—the consciousness formed by the habitual use of smartphones and (anti)social media. My assertion is that these technologies have produced the most dangerous and devastating transmutation of human consciousness since the industrial revolution.

I surrendered this project in despair, and decided to reserve my meandering thoughts on the subject for face-to-face conversations. Writing about it in-depth struck me as unnecessarily cruel to both myself and to any potential readers. What purpose is served by pulling the veil back on a device that most Americans cannot live without? And I mean live in the deepest sense; in this culture, if you don’t have one of these hellboxes, it’s difficult to even earn a living.

What originally inspired my aborted piece was this: over the last year, I’ve read a number of essays online claiming that millenials and zoomers are much more “progressive” and “radical” than the generations that came before them… This from the very people who were raised by the hellbox. As far as I can tell, these claims of “progressiveness” are based on… surveys.

We live in a world with the greatest stratification of wealth since the time of the pharaohs. The last time such a stratification existed in America, during the Gilded Age of Robber Barons™, people who were “progressives” and “radicals” literally went to war against the corporate-industrial order—there were shoot-outs, battles in the streets with cops and other hired goons, sabotage, bombings, and many other acts that would now be dismissed as “terrorism.” Whatever minimal rights and privileges still remain for working people were paid for in blood.

My question for millenials and zoomers: where are those battles now? They’re not happening, and part of the reason for this is that cybernetic consciousness is first and foremost two-dimensional; it’s a simulation that serves to convince people that symbolic discourse is the same thing as physical resistance. The supposed radicalism of millenials and zoomers is all sizzle and no steak.

Just because you have transgender friends, believe that “Black Lives Matter,” and go online to tell the panopticon how much you hate capitalism…so what? Where is the action? With life on earth on the brink of industrial extinction, if there was ever a time to fight, it’s now.

Cybernetic consciousness mistakes the symbolic for the actual; the machine-mind has transcended the merely physical and celebrates its own disembodiment. This is the apotheosis of an essential sickness; the philosophical architects of western civilization have claimed the superiority of “intellect” over body & emotions since at least the time of Plato.

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I don’t like horror movies, but every couple of years I watch Clive Barker’s film Hellraiser… as though consulting an oracle. A prodigy of the genre, Barker is responsible for unleashing many terrifying images into the popular consciousness. He’s indirectly responsible for terrorizing my entire adolescence; when I was twelve I watched Barker’s Candyman, then spent the next several years experiencing The Fear every time I entered a bathroom. The only other movie that’s ever fucked with my head to that degree is The Exorcist, a film notable for having cursed the cast and crew with numerous catastrophes. Some forces are not to be summoned lightly.

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“We are explorers in the furthest regions of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.” -The High Priest

Some of the defining energies of TechnoBabylon are manifested as characters in the Hellraiser series; they’re called Cenobites (from Greek/Latin: “cloister monks”). They are beings of a realm where pain, torture, and punishment are conflated with pleasure. They are summoned via an occult artifact—a puzzle-box. They arrive and take people to a cosmic Gitmo, where they subject them to infinite physical suffering. This suffering is linked to sexuality; the Cenobites appear as BDSM leather fetish freaks, mutilated and deformed. The High Priest of the Cenobites has a pale, undead face carved into a pattern of grids and metal spikes—which to me looks a lot like the aerial view of any modern city.

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The novella on which the Hellraiser movie is based was partly inspired by Clive Barker’s experience of going to BDSM fetish clubs, where he saw people piercing their flesh for jollies.

While he was young and trying to make it as a writer, Barker himself spent a period of time earning a living as a prostitute—or, in the obfuscative, industrial-Marxist parlance of our era, a “sex worker.” The utter frequency of people selling their ass to pay bills is a testament to the sinister nature of capitalism… and of civilization itself.

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Something I’ve noticed in my encounters with proponents of the BDSM Lifestyle™ is their tendency to provide unprompted details about their activities. They can’t wait to tell you how “liberating” it is to engage in sexualized ritual enactment of Domination, Submission, & Punishment; they gladly provide unsolicited descriptions of specific acts that helped them “heal from trauma.” This tendency reveals the truth of their values and worldview—they verbally initiate other people into this sex cult against their will.

If I didn’t ask for such intimate details, why are they telling me? Violating personal boundaries is inherent to a society that produces such fetishes.

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BDSM is merely a sexual efflorescence of a culture that hates the body and is alienated from its own animal physicality. The mechanized, materialist, “rationalist” western world is one gigantic Satanic Mill—its purpose, its aim, its gods, its forms and functions center on Power & Control. And, as many women and children have learned under the global cult of patriarchy, the ultimate form of power over any living being is murder.

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These kinds of rites are not limited to kinksters. Really, what’s more reflective of domination culture than wage labor, with its exploitation and ritualized humiliation? Please sit there politely while we give you this performance evaluation (*cue screams from the audience*).

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“You solved the box. We came.” –The High Priest

A recurring motif in the Hellraiser series is evisceration by barbed chains.

Here’s a fun fact I learned from the wife of a wealthy British oil baron: the British Empire used a unit of land-measurement that consists of 66 feet. This was the measure they used to carve up Turtle Island and many other places. They call this unit of measurement a “chain.”

They put the earth in chains.

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Rich White Junkie: “I didn’t ask for this.” The High Priest: “Oh, but you did.”

Back in the early ‘90s when I was in junior high, there was a series of underground videos that came out called Faces of Death, which featured all kinds of horrific footage, from kittens being chopped up to human bodies destroyed by car wrecks. I saw one of the early tapes, which both repulsed and fascinated me.

Once the internet conquered our society, people going online and watching such videos became standard. If you were born before 1980 and you’re feeling bold, the next time you get the chance, ask someone born in the ‘90s or later to describe for you some of the craziest shit they’ve seen on the internet. Hellish imagery is normal for them; they’ve sat around with friends, or more often alone, and watched hours of evil shit.

Their conception of life is polluted by these things.

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I entered into adulthood a few years before everyone in the universe had high-speed internet, and almost ten years before the first spacephones emerged from the Stygian ether. I studied the cultural shift as gonzo porn became as common as beer ads at a Superbowl. Now, after two decades of people constantly filling their eyes with bizarre, violent, and fetishistic imagery, we’ve got adolescent girls selling digital pictures of their feet to perverts, and a legion of women whose side-hustle is to enact the sexual requests of anonymous strangers on OnlyFans. Yay technology.

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I have a basic policy when it comes to dealing with people who are indulging their smartphone addiction; if we’re having an in-person conversation, and they start stroking their phone, I stop talking and wait until they finish… at which point, they will usually insist on their ability to participate in conversation while simultaneously diddling the hellbox.

Of course that’s bullshit; it’s impossible to give full attention to someone else while you’re engaging the machine. I’m always gentle in my refusal, but nevertheless I simply won’t compete for attention with unholy artifacts.

Compassion demands a degree of flexibility about this. There are too many people who are carrying such an enormous basket-case full of insecurities that my refusal to speak while they’re punching buttons might riddle them with too much anxiety to sleep. That sounds like a joke, and it is… but it ain’t funny.

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I often find it difficult to discuss spiritual matters with people who are not black or indigenous. The truth of the spirit is culturally real to us in a way that it is not to the post-Christian secular mechanical blah blah blah of mainstream America.

There’s a term in Swahili, “ntu”—interpreted into English, it’s something like soul/rhythm/vibe/spirit. It’s what gave us the songs of Al Green and the speeches of Martin Luther King. The African Studies scholar Marimba Ani discusses it in her book, The Circle is Unbroken, which analyzes the shadows of African culture that survived the cargo hold. Please note: you could replace every occurrence in the book of the word “African” with “Native American,” and it would still be more or less the same book.

Suffice to say that we take spiritual matters—and spirits—seriously. If you’re a secular materialist, feel free to interpret what follows through the lens of “psychology”: there are energies in the world that manifest themselves in certain ways. You can call these spirits or gods or archetypes or whatever, but, like Strange Attractors in chaos mathematics, they coalesce, they manifest in imagination and image. They influence.

Some people are more sensitive to these forces—you call it shamanism, or animism, or superstition, or maybe schizophrenia. Regardless of what you call it, I’m one of those people.

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A couple months ago the Cenobites started lingering in my imagination, so I re-watched the original couple of films to better interpret whatever it was they were trying to tell me.

They told me something very big and very bad was coming down the timeline.

Soon after, Israel activated its plans for genocide in Gaza.

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Recently I had a movie night with a friend who has a bunch of streaming services, and I requested to watch the newest Hellraiser flick, released in 2022; I needed to know what these entities had to say in contemporary form. This latest film is described as a “re-imagining” of the franchise (whatever that means), and the High Priest is now a woman.

The movie was a piece of shit and we spent the whole two hours of screen time (plus intervals of micro-torture in the form of commercials) griping about it. It was long, meandering, had no real sense of internal logic; the Cenobites all looked like harmless cosplay dolls, and whatever attempt at commentary on “the modern condition” that the filmmakers may have intended was scattered and generic.

Despite the wackness of the film, it haunted my dreams that night. I barely slept, vacillating endlessly between states of sleeping, dreaming, and waking. There was a recurring image of the female High Priest standing at a distance in front of a fence of black metal bars, accompanied by another recurring image: a small, empty, handheld metal frame with slots for the thumbs of both hands; when I held it, spikes shot out of the slots and impaled my thumbs.

This was the message I’d been waiting for, and the Cenobites delivered—the metal frame clearly represented the smartphone; people willingly torture themselves with it. Everybody’s got a puzzlebox.

I was glad for the vision, even though it told me what I already know.

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Some folks are scared of the “supernatural.” But what is there to fear of it in a world smothered in cement, metal, barbed wire, and shrapnel; where the arctic regions are melting, threatening to unleash massive quantities of methane and expose all kinds of toxic waste; where political leaders do nothing while Israel sets about murdering an entire population? TechnoBabylon already belongs to the Cenobites.

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The newest Hellraiser film was produced by Hulu, a streaming service. In the film’s blandness, its cybernetic vacuity, I see the torturous Cenobitic energies of contemporary consumer culture manifested as banality; there’s no there there.

But everything that makes such a culture possible is sheer cosmic evil.

Happy Halloween.

Subsidized Violence & Provocateur War-Merchants

Comfortable, class-privileged people have a lot of funny ideas about violence.

First among these, popular with “peace activists,” is the idea that an industrial state can exist without the violence of war—war between nations, war against the living planet, war against its own population. Yet war and imperialism are the basis of the state, going all the way back to the first ones to ooze out of the Stygian ether of Mesopotamia. State violence is inherent and systemic. You can have (relative) peace, or you can have the state, but you can’t have both.

Another funny idea is that nonviolence is some kind of moral imperative, rather than a tactic (a tactic, historically speaking, of extremely limited use to oppressed people; far more effective during most of state history has been escape). This is essentially a religious idea, based on blind faith and ignorance of the realities of violence & power.

My personal favorite is that old classic, “violence never solves anything,” often teamed up with its cousin, “violence begets violence.” I suspect Crazy Horse, Harriet Tubman, and the Zapatistas would disagree. For that matter, I knew a woman who once narrowly foiled a rape attempt by stabbing her attacker and leaving him to bleed out in a parking lot. Not only did violence solve that problem rather effectively, but it also might have guaranteed that the would-be perpetrator will never have the opportunity to rape anyone else. No further violence begotten.

Nursed on cowboy fairytales and other propaganda, some people are convinced that firearms have the magical ability to prevent violence. They’re so sure of this, in fact, that they stockpile massive quantities of guns & ammo. These are mostly Republifascist white men—probably the least endangered demographic in the general population (except for their own overdoses and suicides). All of the evidence shows that more firearms lead to more violence—from accidental shootings to suicides and homicides—but in my experience the kind of people who believe that guns automatically make you safer are immune to the influence of evidence.

Official statistics show that firearms are rarely used by civilians in self-defense. However, to be fair, there’s really no way of telling how dodgy those numbers are, for the same reason that the rates of sexual violence are likely to be dramatically underestimated—people who successfully “discourage” attackers by deploying a firearm, like rape and molestation victims, are unlikely to report it to institutional authorities. I’ve personally met several civilians who’ve induced a rapid change-of-mind in assailants by pulling a gun (and, in a few instances, by returning fire), and I’ve met many women who’ve been raped and/or molested. None of them filed a police report.

Comfortable, class-privileged people, whether they are aware of it or not, benefit from a world in which their violence is largely subsidized—violence by past invaders got them the land they live on; violence by soldiers and corporations gets them the resources that make their lifestyles possible; violence by cops against poor folks and political dissidents ensures that they get to keep their class privileges.

America’s ongoing efforts at maintaining global domination are currently being subsidized by death and destruction in Ukraine. Fighting a proxy war with Russia, a country with a staggering collection of nuclear weapons, is unforgivably stupid. Continually sabotaging attempts at a diplomatic resolution is even worse (the only thing dumber would be… provoking a war with China). But here’s the thing: regardless of how many Ukrainians or Russians are killed, the most dangerous thing about this war is not the war itself. That might seem like a cold thing to say, I know, but hear me out.

In 2006 I was bartending at a nightclub in L.A. Chinatown when I decided I was going to become a superhero. Rest assured, I didn’t bear any foolish delusions about “fighting crime.” My purpose, instead, was to make the entire space that I was in more magical, and therefore more enjoyable, for all of the people who were coming out to party in this environment that I dearly loved. Sporting a ninja mask and fetish suit, I danced at the bar and did kungfu tricks; I made a habit of learning as many people’s names as possible so I could greet them personally; I flirted with women and diverted creepers, and generally had a marvelous time being a trickster.

Most of the patrons loved this act, but not all of them. Some people are allergic to fun, and get irate when they feel others are having too much of it.

There was a group of young Chicanas who came to the club regularly. I called them the Aztlanteca Crew. They were all gorgeous. They loved music and dancing. They drank like there was no tomorrow. Naturally, we were fast friends. One night, they showed up with a male friend they’d never brought before. Near the end of the night, I was outside having a smoke break and joshing around with these drunken ladies, and their friend didn’t like it. Somewhat sauced myself, it took me a moment to notice that he was attempting to physically push me away from them; having been a martial artist for many years, I’d automatically shifted my weight in such a way that he failed to actually move me. Then I got upset that he was putting his hands on me, and I decided to fuck with him.

It’s easy to provoke a hostile reaction from most dudes; all you have to do is get gay on them. I pointed out to him that if he was touching me it must be because he found me attractive, then I felt up his chest and kissed him on the cheek. This was a move I’d used successfully on several other occasions; usually, the guy would freeze, then yell and shove me away. Then I would act like I didn’t understand what the problem was, apologize, and leave. I would triumph in these encounters because I was in control… and because it was hilarious to anyone watching. Top-monkey status achieved.

Well, that’s not how it went down on this particular occasion. Instead, the guy froze into a statue, balled up his fists, and growled at me: Do something.

Now, I’m going to explain what I did next using reason and logic, but that’s entirely an after-the-fact reconstruction, because at the moment it happened I responded instinctively; there wasn’t time to think it out. Something about the guy’s stance, voice, and energy told me that he was looking for an excuse to take a lifetime of accumulated hostility out on me—itching to beat me within an inch of my life. He was bigger and stronger than me. I knew that if the fists started flying, I was going to have to seriously injure if not kill this guy, lest he do it to me first.

And for what? Pride? Ego? That is not the True Path of the Buddha Who Prevails Over Struggle.

I perceived the situation, ceased my act, and stepped slightly to the guy’s side, giving me a superior position—more difficult for him to hit me if he swings, easier for me to get behind him and counterattack from his blind spot. I leaned in like I was telling him a secret and said: I am doing something, bro—I’m talking to you. I’m just trying to tell you that I don’t like it when people I don’t know put their hands on me. Do you?

He backed off, we shook hands, and I went back inside. Crisis averted. Epilogue: at my request, the Aztlanteca Crew never brought him back to the club.

This was a social situation in which horrible violence could have happened, which I would have provoked by being a smart-ass… but if violence had popped off, my ass is the one that would’ve been on the line. I would’ve shed blood for my arrogance, probably ended up in the hospital (I’m a hemophiliac), andpossibly lost my life. And even if I won the fight, I might have caught a case (might being the key word; this is Chinatown we’re talking about after all).

Instead, I engaged in tactical deescalation. I diffused the situation… but I did so while stacking the odds in my favor in case that didn’t work. As the saying goes, a warrior may choose pacifism; all others are condemned to it.

Which brings me the long way around to my point: the most dangerous thing about American warmongering in Ukraine, and state warmongering generally, is that the people doing the provoking are not the ones whose asses are on the line.

No matter how many children’s body parts are flying, no matter how many soldiers cry for their mothers and bleed, no matter how many homes become rubble, Joe “The Shill Supreme” Biden, a.k.a. Joey Botox, and all his arms-dealing collaborators will go home to their comfy beds in their big houses and never so much as drip sweat. Their level of removal from violence makes it easy for them to continue provoking violence. And, being arms-dealers, it’s how they make their money; the war in Ukraine is a glorified plot to increase their already grotesque wealth.

Lack of consequences for those of higher status is the nature of hierarchical systemic violence. To use a common example: statistically, you probably eat meat. Have you ever slaughtered livestock? Me neither. But I’ve seen it done; when I was four years old I watched my Filipina babysitter’s extended family butcher a live goat. I had nightmares for weeks, and it still gives me chills to remember the flies buzzing around the white ceramic bowl full of congealing blood that had poured out of the creature’s cut throat. Yet, as an adult, I realize that this was far more respectful and humane than the mass-murder & torture factories that most of us rely on for burgers.

Back when I was a university student and even more cynical than I am now, I held a deep loathing for my fellow students who were running around in Nike sneakers and Gap t-shirts protesting Bush II’s war in Iraq. It was obvious to everyone that the war was ultimately about securing access to oil, yet nobody seemed to understand that our entire consumer lifestyle is completely dependent on fossil fuels… and therefore war. The way I saw it, they were only against the war because it hurt their feelings. They were Good Liberals. Well, fuck their feelings.

With the heightened possibility of nuclear war sending the Doomsday Clock spinning, one could argue that everyone’s asses are on the line… which is certainly true, but there’s another ingredient here that makes it much easier for rich idiots to play provocateur from a position of vast remove: nobody has ever been in a nuclear war.

I’ve been punched, kicked, thrown, tackled, and cut by knives. I know what that’s like. Maybe you do, too. But none of us has ever watched the center of our city disappear in a mushroom cloud.

Sure, I’ve read at length about wall-shadows in Hiroshima, nuclear winter, and reactor meltdowns. I’ve read all of Joshua Frank’s chilling articles about Hanford. But none of that changes the fact that we’re talking about a kind of war that no human being has ever experienced. From that standpoint, it remains firmly in the realm of science-fiction.

That said, I’ll never know what it would’ve been like to fight to the death with some random asshole in a Chinatown courtyard either, and I’m fine with that. Sensible people don’t need to go through a horrific disaster before they decide it’s worth every effort to avoid.

The problem is, the people running the show are not sensible people. They’re super-villains.

Escape is no longer an option; there’s nowhere left to go. Even if there was, a nuclear holocaust would leave no place on earth untouched. If we want to stop the Joey Botoxes of the world from provoking their way into Armageddon, we’re going to need some serious tactics, as well as both the capability and the willingness to back our play with force if necessary. Everything else is just talk.

Get out your fetish suits, motherfuckers. It’s time.

Lament of the Living Weapon – Thug Thoughts on Violence and the State

“Any act of violence is shocking to the uninitiated.”
-Rory Miller, Force Decisions: A Citizen’s Guide

“Prisons are built with the stones of law…”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Few things are sweeter to me than a well-timed joke.

Case in point: recently I was attending my bi-monthly yoga class, sitting in a circle comprised mostly of bourgeois white people and their affiliates, awaiting my turn to introduce myself and talk about what made me feel magical that week (or whatever). This opening ritual is sometimes fun, but often enough turns into a miniature dumping ground for people’s emotional baggage.

When I first started taking the class over a year ago, I despised this ritual; I’ve never had much patience for coerced intimacy with strangers, let alone the kind who attend yoga classes taught at a bondage studio (hashtag: BayArea). However, my attitude changed once I decided that this was an opportunity for comedy.

During this ritual, people choose who will speak after them by miming the act of passing an invisible ball. Usually, I don’t get passed the ball until near the end; for reasons that will probably become clear, I suspect that most of the folks who attend these classes can sense something about me on a deep animal level that they find intimidating.

The invisible ball finally came my way, and I hit everyone with my routine—perfectly timed, perfectly executed. Laughter all around the room, of several types: the “that’s some crazy shit to say” gut-laughs, the “there goes Malik again” chuckles, and—most satisfying to me after hearing from people whose major challenge for the week was dealing with tedious office meetings—the nervous giggles. When I passed the ball to a woman across from me, her face was twisted into a grimace that was a hilarious blend of shock, fear, and amusement.

My routine went something like this: My name is Malik. I’m stoked because this week, after years of being a rapper and DJ, I finally started making my own beats… Oh, and I didn’t have to shoot anyone at work this week.

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I think of myself as a nice kid from the suburbs. I grew up in a nice home in a nice neighborhood, went to nice schools, then graduated and went to a nice university. If I’d followed whatever standard program that civil society has engineered for nice middle-class kids like me, I’d probably be in middle-management at some nice corporate office, or maybe a nice non-profit, or maybe teaching at a nice school. Maybe I would’ve married a nice woman and had some nice kids.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, I chose to pursue my creative callings, and I sought out employment that would leave me the most amount of time free to do so. I spent ten years working in bars and restaurants, three years running an education program at a non-profit, and three years working by contract at various schools teaching workshops on creative arts and hip hop culture. That last stint represented the most painfully broke period of my life; in my late thirties, I was living a life of functional poverty.

Then covid hit, and, like that, I was out of work. My fortieth birthday arrived less than two weeks into the initial lockdown of March 2020.

I spent several months panicking and burning through my savings before a friend of mine who was moonlighting as a security guard hooked me up. I got all my permits in order, bought a firearm, and became a thug-for-hire. I’m currently typing this while in the middle of a twelve-hour graveyard shift; I’m sitting in my car, parked in the back of an industrial lot under the spooky glow of fluorescent lights, watching the driveway ahead of me (thank god I took that keyboarding class in ninth grade and can type without looking at the keys)… and hoping no bad guys show up.

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I’ve worked in the security field on and off since I was in high school. I’ve sat outside of fireworks booths and construction sites all night, prevented fair-goers from parking in empty lots, and checked I.D.s by the thousands at concerts. But I’ve always avoided the rougher side of security work for a simple reason: my body can’t take it.

I was born with a rare genetic disability called hemophilia. Long story short, my blood doesn’t clot the way it’s supposed to, which means any type of physical injury is many times worse for me than it is for regular people. Since I was born, everything from cuts & bruises to sprains, joint injuries, and even simple muscle soreness have been far more intense and taken much longer to heal.

For most of my life, I’ve been in constant pain. Since childhood I’ve had an acute sense of my own mortality.

Alas, that didn’t stop me from taking a passionate interest in the study of martial arts. Naturally, I had no business sparring with people in backyards and alleyways, or donning protective gear and fighting full-contact with people who outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds. I certainly had no business free-climbing cliffs, practicing Parkour, or wearing a ninja mask and jumping across L.A. rooftops.

But I did it anyway. I’ve got the scars and aches to prove it.

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As a result of working in the security field, being involved in martial arts for over thirty years, and participating in First Nations ceremonies, I’ve met and befriended many people who most nice folks only encounter on a bad day—law enforcement officers, combat veterans, mercenaries, bodyguards, vigilantes, street-fighters, professional bone-breakers, violent ex-cons, and former outlaw bikers. As you might imagine, I’ve heard a lot of wild and horrific stories.

In my early twenties I began to study the dynamics of violence in-depth, primarily to soak up enough wisdom from people who’d been to the other side of the anti-rainbow that I could handle violent situations in the best way possible: by avoiding them to begin with. I learned the value of diplomacy, I learned how to gain the respect of ruffians, and I learned how to prevent becoming a victim—what places and people to avoid, how to maintain an active awareness of my surroundings, and how to carry myself with an aura of sufficient menace to discourage would-be predators.

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Sometimes I get irritated with leftist perspectives on police, prison, and crime. It’s not because I don’t think those three things suck (they totally suck), but because I feel that much of the talk is either insufficiently nuanced or overly naive; there are certain ideas that are easier to maintain from a privileged and comfortable position.

For example, I’ve encountered any number of people who consider themselves “prison abolitionists,” yet few of them are able to reasonably engage what I feel is a key issue: there are a whole lot of people in prison who are exactly where they belong. My father’s wife is a former vice-warden at a federal prison; the rap sheets for many of the inmates there are nightmare fuel.

We live in a society that manufactures violent predators as a matter of course. One can see prison as a form of punishment, but I see it in a more pragmatic sense: locking up predators minimizes their pool of potential victims.

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Here’s the thing; no aspect of industrial civilization can be separated from any other aspect. A caste-based society by definition is going to have a handful of wealthy people, a lot of poor people, and a group of people who fall somewhere in between. It’s going to have crime, criminals, law-enforcers, and violence. Much of that violence will be invisible, or unrecognized as violence; around 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents… which is only possible because we have an economy based on the use of automobiles. Is that not violence?

Perhaps I could interest you in some Babylon abolition.

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Many leftists like to compare the homicide rates in this country with other countries on the basis of wealth. We don’t fare well in this comparison; America is way more murderous than England, Norway, or Japan. But I think this comparison is somewhat disingenuous. America is not an Old Country™ with an ethnically homogeneous population; it’s a glorified colony created through genocide and chattel slavery.

How does the murder rate in the U.S. compare with other colonies? Say, El Salvador or Guatemala?

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One thing that most leftists share with the most obnoxious right-wing blowhards is a belief that society should function on the basis of law—that’s liberal democracy, state socialism, and everything in between. Only the anarchist weirdos (god bless ‘em) are anti-state, and therefore anti-law.

Mass bureaucratic societies, so far as I know, are all based on law. If you’re going to have such a thing as laws, then those laws don’t mean anything unless there is a specialized class of people to enforce them—force being the key word here. Their job is to deal with all the ugly stuff so that nice people can stay nice. The “state monopoly on violence” means this class of people is authorized to use violence in service of law. For everyone else, violence is a crime.

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I have no doubt that law enforcement officers consistently abuse their power and authority. It comes with the territory; caste societies are authoritarian by nature. But how often does abuse happen relative to the number of times when officers act, even with force, in a legally justified manner?

Note the legal part.

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Years ago, I was walking along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica when I saw a homeless man beating another homeless man bloody with a stick, in broad daylight, just off the sidewalk where bourgeois, comfortable people were hurrying past and pretending not to notice. I was the only one on the street who stopped to assess the situation. I wisely decided it wasn’t my business and moved on.

If I was a cop, it would have been my job to intervene… though whether or not they will could be up in the air. Note: a stick is a potentially lethal weapon, and therefore could potentially justify lethal force.

Many of the people who like to provide rear-view outside perspectives on police use-of-force incidents have no direct experience whatsoever with this level of violence—they have no idea what it’s like to scramble with another person on the concrete, wondering if you’ll get stabbed or catch hepatitis. They’ve never pissed themselves from fear or sat on the curb puking after a desperate fight.

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Adrenalization does things to you. Blood has a smell.

****

Law enforcement officers have much higher rates of domestic violence than civilians. Hmm… a specialized class of people given the authority to use violence, and they beat their wives and children more often?

Is this surprising?

Is it even possible for it to be different? I have my doubts. There is some evidence that applied psychology can reduce this sort of behavior, but that practice is new, and therefore unproven in the long run.

****

For several years now, each summer I’ve served as security chief at the Sun Dance ceremony I attend. My role mostly involves scheduling look-outs (contra los fascistas), listening to gossip, and occasionally mediating disputes. It helps that I have the ability to be detached from other people’s emotional states. I can remain calm even when everyone else panics (well-cultivated skill or mild autism? Not sure.) I’m friendly, I’m respectful… and I have zero misgivings about putting someone’s face in the dirt if necessary.

If shit goes sideways, I’m the one responsible for dealing with it… among a population that represents centuries of cumulative prison time.

****

I spent a couple of years working the door at a large concert venue in Berkeley. I was part of the “floor staff,” a weasel term for underpaid security guards. There was a young black man on staff—a friendly, good-spirited kid who was also a musician. One night, a belligerent patron started a fight with our senior security officer, a Native woman in her fifties who’d been bouncing in bars since she was fourteen. The young man jumped in to help her.

The patron slashed his neck with a razor blade. Our friendly, good-spirited kid missed his appointment with death by a distance of about a millimeter.

The venue management fought hard against paying his medical bills.

****

As long as humans have existed, there has been a certain percentage of us who ran toward the monster instead of away from it, so that the rest of the tribe could escape—warriors, protectors, guardians of the circle.

What can TechnoBabylon do with us now, other than turn us into weapons?

Feature, Not Bug: Reflections on Trump’s Indictment and American Rape Culture

Now that Trumplestiltskin is being arraigned over paying hush money to a porn star, we finally have the opportunity for giggles at his expense. It’s a helluva way for an openly fascist wannabe dictator to take a political dive, but the dive was inevitable and it was bound to be over something stupid. Years ago I correctly identified Trump as an evil trickster; clown gospel states that you can only rub muddy boots on people’s couches for so long before they beat the shit out of your legs.

The other night I was having a discussion about Trump’s arraignment with my mom, and by “discussion” I mean that we were trading jokes and sending each other into torrents of laughter. I cackled until tears rolled down my cheeks when she told me that Stormy Daniels claims to have spanked ol’ Mango Dingus with a rolled-up copy of Fortune magazine. I didn’t fact-check this story, because for my purposes (gut laughs), it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.

Part of what makes the story hilarious is that it’s entirely predictable; wealthy people have been skeevy pervs for as long as there’s been such a thing as wealthy people. I doubt there were a lot of sexualized beatings happening among the Miwok and Ohlone back in the pre-contact days; in order to have sexy spanking, “corporal punishment” would first have to be a part of your culture.

Whatever Daniels got paid over the course of her “relationship” with the Dayglow Goober, she deserves more. I’m sure she got paid plenty long before the hush money; who would fuck such a repulsive maggot for free? I imagine the experience was tedious and embarrassing even for a porn star, and that’s saying something.

***

Billboards line the desert highway like undead sentinels. One of them is an advertisement for a local strip-club, complete with directions. The billboard’s images of objectified, sexualized women activate programming in my mind that is as old as my first contact with the Screen. A fog of erotic memories drift across my imagination; the touch of skin, the smell of perfume and conditioner, the taste of sweat, the seductive gaze, the sensual writhing of hips. For a moment, I contemplate taking the exit.

I recover and my rational mind kicks in; strip-clubs are horrible places.

I’ve only partied at a strip-club twice in my life, both times at the request of a male accomplice. The first visit was over 25 years ago, for a friend’s birthday. I was 18 and broke. I think I spent about $60 total that night, which at the time was a small fortune for me. Sitting front row, I threw enough singles at the stage for one performer to wave her kuku in my face (quoth Lynyrd Skynyrd, Oooh, that smell!) I watched the birthday boy get brought on stage to be embarrassed by the night’s Featured Attraction, a name-brand porn star doing a stint at the club. I splurged on a lap dance, and was deeply disappointed that breast contact was forbidden. I left feeling horny, unsatisfied, and depressed.

The second time, I’d traveled from L.A. to Vegas for a 36-hour stay, visiting some friends who were in from Seattle to attend an MMA fight. I was 25 and still broke; I had about a hundred bucks in my pocket to cover the whole trip. One of my buddies really, really wanted me to accompany him to a particular strip-club, bad enough that he offered to pay my door fee. We planned to linger for an hour or so—just to check it out—then leave. Four hours later I owed him $250, because Jada. Once again, I left feeling horny, unsatisfied, and depressed.

Strip-clubs are hellish nightmares for those with eyes to see through the glamour. When I saw that billboard in the desert, I realized that whatever erotic fantasies linger in my imagination are far preferable to the reality of a place where women’s bodies are available for rent and sale.

When pimps exploit and sexually abuse women for money, anonymously, on the streets, we call it sex trafficking. When they do it in a licensed club, we call it entertainment. When they do it and record it on picture and video, we call it free speech. But pimping is pimping, no matter what ideological veils we use to convince ourselves it’s acceptable to participate in sexual exploitation, to enjoy it, to get off on it.

Nowadays, thanks to the tech mafia, we even have cybernetic pimps in the form of apps like OnlyFans. The people who own these platforms never even have to go through the trouble of meeting a woman in person in order to pimp her; she signs up for it, because diddling yourself in front of a camera for anonymous strangers is in many ways superior to working at Dollar General. Thank you, capitalism.

I instinctively hated the terms sex work and sex workers the first time I heard them. This is partly because of their mechanical, industrialist-Marxist overtones, but mainly because these terms don’t even begin to hint at the tremendous scale of violence involved in the sexual exploitation industries; it’s like referring to the Death Star as a “satellite workstation.” I’m aware that well-meaning people use these terms as a way of giving dignity to prostituted people, but dignified speech hasn’t done anything to slow down the rampant and systematic sexual abuse of women. And why would it? In the Babylon program, rape isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. Porn is propaganda for rape, because no matter what happens to a woman in porn, she always wants it.

The bodhisattva Andrea Dworkin (peace be upon her) made eternal enemies across the political spectrum for having the gall to point all of this out. To this day, almost twenty years after her death, men on the so-called “left” continue to disparage her and her work, frequently with condescending dismissiveness. If they bother to construct any arguments at all, they rarely address her actual writings, preferring their own rather haggard and threadbare straw-men. I often doubt they’ve even read her work; if they did, they either didn’t get it or didn’t want to… particularly her attacks on pornography and its attendant industries. Few are the men who are willing to surrender their entitlement to images of trafficked women, because few are the men who regard women as being fully human. Few are the men for whom women’s pain, exploitation, and humanity are more important than easily accessible orgasms.

I’ve had several lovers who were current or former “sex workers”—a couple of strippers, an amateur porn video performer, a couple of BDSM professionals, and one straight-up prostitute. I’ve had lovers who were never involved in sexual activity for money, but if they’d been charging for services they could have retired young based on sheer volume of partners. I’ve also had lovers who were fairly conservative, women well into adulthood who had only had a handful of sexual partners.

Guess which of these three groups were likely to have been victims of sexual assault, child molestation, and/or rape?

If you answered “all of them,” congratulations, you are correct.

Feature, not bug.

Upon reflection, the main thing that distinguished the first two groups from the third is an intensely dysfunctional childhood—parents who were neglectful, verbally or physically abusive, addicted to drugs or alcohol, or all of the above. Which, by the way, is also the basic profile for your average street criminal, especially the ones who spend most of their lives going in and out of jail.

This could all be a sample-bias on my part, but I’ve done enough reading and research (i.e. listening to women) to be confident in the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women generally.

“Gee, Mr. Diamond, you sure have hooked up with a lot of abuse survivors… maybe you’re the pervert.”

Perhaps. After all, I did get exposed to pornography around the age of 9, then developed a fairly robust porn addiction that was in full bloom from ages 12 to 26. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands if not millions of images of sexually exploited and objectified women. And let’s be real—as an American man in my forties, that makes me about as unusual as broken glass on ghetto asphalt.

However, I also emerged into pubescence before high-speed internet, smartphones, and the ensuing pornification of pop culture. Mine were the days of using two VCRs to bootleg the porn tapes your buddy smuggled from his dad’s stash. The ease of accessibility of porn in the cybernetic era has had predictably horrific effects—I have a friend whose teenage daughter briefly contemplated making side money by selling pictures of her feet to fetishists online; almost every woman I know has been the recipient of unsolicited dick pics; teenage girls frequently complain to therapists about their boyfriends pressuring them to reproduce degrading or painful sex acts that the boyfriends picked up from heavy porn use; men upload digital sex photos and videos of their ex-girlfriends for public display. And so on.

Domestic violence rates shot up during the covid lockdowns. I hate to imagine what stories may eventually come to light about the increase in rape and molestation.

In every article I’ve read about millenial married couples who are struggling with a negligible sex life, anyone who thought to ask the question discovered the husband’s porn use was a factor. What average wife could possibly compete with Infinite Teen Super Sluts? But doctor, it’s just… she won’t even get a Brazilian wax! The revelations in these articles are almost always followed by a quote from some collaborator doofus, an expert of course, assuring us that porn use is healthy and natural and doesn’t do any harm at all… least of all to the performers! How reassuring.

The disease of child sexual abuse is pervasive in Native reservation communities… along with every other kind of dysfunction. Make no mistake—this is a disease imported by European invaders. Many members of the current generation of Native elders, people in their sixties and older, had parents or grandparents who were kidnapped as children and imprisoned in the rape & torture camps we refer to by the obtusely generic term “Indian Boarding Schools.” Not to get all “generational trauma” on you, but if you’re interested in shedding some tears, or maybe indulging in some “white guilt,” you can look up the current suicide rates for reservation youth.

The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico managed to dramatically reduce the sexual abuse of women and children in their communities… by staging an armed uprising to gain the freedom to govern themselves. It’s a good model if you can pull it off; they live in rugged, remote mountain country, and are descended from cultures that until relatively recently gave genuine status and power to women… in contrast to European colonizers, for whom women were little more than property, brood mares, or, for the aristocrats, decorations.

***

I don’t much care for the concept of “trigger warnings,” but out of respect for those readers who are abuse survivors, a heads-up: what follows are some stories about different people I’ve known that illustrate the everyday atrocities of rape culture. You may want to skip them.

***

She tells me she doesn’t like having my hand on the back of her head, even to run my fingers through her long, silky black hair. Then, in a blasé and matter-of-fact tone, she tells me why. It’s just as horrible as you imagine.

***

Her mother used to get drunk and high first thing in the morning, then invite the neighborhood truant teenage boys over for sex.

***

Her older brother used to molest her when she was a child. He sometimes invited his friends over to join in.

***

His father prostituted him and his brother for drug money.

***

Unprompted, she starts to tell me what happened to her, but can’t. Instead, she cries.

***

Her mother was a junkie prostitute, her dad was dead. Her childhood involved rotating in and out of the homes of foster parents and familial legal guardians, where she was molested by multiple assailants. One night she starts to roll off the bed in her sleep and I grab her by the arm to keep her from falling. She wakes up screaming.

***

… and on and on and on.

***

Is it real to you yet?

FEATURE, NOT BUG.

Democracy: Fetish Cult of the Colonized Mind

“Liar—
saying it’ll be alright;
you could ask the prairie dog ghosts
haunting turnpikes”
-Baytime Vader, Mad Science

“You want to save the world… but you don’t want it to change.”
-Ultron, Avengers: Age of Ultron

Democracy is a load of horseshit.

There, I said it.

Speaking for most of our time on earth, humans are creatures of tradition and consensus rule; the tribe does things a certain way, as they’ve “always” done it—living as part of a landbase, integrated in communion and community with all other living creatures. Disputes are handled by diplomacy; if 70% of the people wanted to do things one way and the other 30% refused, the most likely solution would be a split in the tribe.

This, of course, was back when there were still other places to go—before TechnoBabylon killed most life on earth.

Democracy is a conceit of the pathological social system we call civilization; it is the tyranny of the majority, in a society where everyone is fundamentally alienated from each other by caste; power is concentrated up the pyramid, and control descends.

If you’re willing to be the person with a hand up in the back of the room who makes everyone else feel uncomfortable, the most enlightening question to ask of any “democratic” society is: who gets to vote? Historically speaking, if you’re a woman, a child, a servant, a slave, or a foreigner, the answer is: not you.

And there are plenty of other restrictions. In the United States, where there are more prisoners per capita than any other country on earth (or anywhere, ever), you can be stripped of your right to vote if you are convicted of crimes. But only certain crimes; if I tell you to pay me a bunch of money or else I’ll have you and your family removed from your home at gunpoint by thugs-for-hire, technically that would make me the perpetrator of a protection racket. Any sane society would forbid such an act; it’s an exile-worthy endeavor if ever there was one.

Here in America, as in most civilizations, we refer to what I just described as “being a landlord.” Landlords carry a great deal of social status, despite being state-sponsored racketeers. Meanwhile, petty dope dealers spend years behind bars.

And even if all humans were permitted to vote, what about everyone else? What about the wolves, the redwoods, the salmon and the soil? They’re obviously not going to cast a ballot, so who speaks for them? Who would you trust to speak for them?

I can tell you who I wouldn’t trust: a bunch of urban leftists.

Sometimes these folks get on some “negativity doesn’t help” bullshit whenever anyone has the sagacious audacity to point out that we’re all fucked and there’s probably nothing we can do about it—to quote a friend of mine, the war is over and the machines won.

The secret id of the adherents of delusional optimism reveals this: they can’t fathom the idea that one could have no chance at all of surviving, and yet, knowing this, go into battle anyway. That level of courage is rare in popular western consciousness. Meanwhile, warriors from some Turtle Island nations used to literally stake themselves to the ground in the off chance they might provide enough of a cavalry speed-bump to enable the rest of the tribe to escape.

These warriors did so because “primitive” tribal consciousness grants full individuality to every member in a context where everyone is an intimate part of an ancestral and environmental continuity that exists since forever, until forever. Their individual selves are not objects of fetishistic worship, and so they will proudly die to defend the circle. Western consciousness cannot conceive of this, because western consciousness is civilized, i.e. based on domination and narcissism; the self must be preserved at all cost.

That’s the difference between real human societies and those that have been colonized by the machine.

It’s not difficult to find a wokester or lefty who will talk a blue streak about how their cult of Veganism™ will save the planet from climate catastrophe, yet rarely will you find one of them who is willing to refuse to breed. If we’re going to talk overall drain on the planet’s “resources,” (I hate that word—are you a resource? Neither are trees), the burden of the average westerner’s continual procreation is heavy.

Next time someone’s beating up your ear about the evils of eating meat, ask them if their commitment to the earth’s well-being is sufficient enough for them to refuse to have children… But only if you don’t want to be invited to any more of their parties. They may agree that the earth needs to have far fewer humans, but of course it will be other people’s kids who have to go. Malthusian population-control schemes aside (hashtag Planned Parenthood), I may not have the exact numbers right in front of me, but I promise you that a single white-collar droid churning code at a tech company or riding tenure at a university is a far greater menace to the environment than a whole village of subsistence farmers and cattle herders.

It’s a popular leftist opinion that capitalism is the only thing standing between us and the glories of democracy. I disagree. I think democracy itself is merely a tactic of civilization—a method, in certain places and times, to ensure enough public support of the machine to keep it running. It’s a con, designed to make people feel better about exploitation. Added bonus: it makes people whip their own backs when things go wrong—another fetish cult of the machine.

Leftists’ proposed solutions to the problems of the capitalocracy usually require a mass resistance movement. In my experience, these folks don’t often appreciate criticism of their solutions, particularly when that criticism refuses to take for granted the continued existence of, say, electricity or mining.

And really, the idea of such a movement happening in America is laughable. The overlords and their armed enforcers have, at every opportunity, either sabotaged or crushed whatever strains of communitarian radicalism once existed in this country—from Shay’s Rebellion to the Anti-Federalists, from the Black Panthers to Standing Rock. With the minor exception of those few white freaks who’ve managed to channel their colonizer privilege into rural escapist/survivalist communes (god bless ‘em), there is no radical spirit in this country’s population, as a rule.

The last real political radicals on this continent are the Amish, who have the gall to refuse industrial technology. You personally might not like bonnets or child-marriage, but the proof is in the bland pudding. Someday I hope to corral an elder Amish man, then regale him with tales of people who have connected to each other strictly through the isolation of a computer screen, yet consider themselves part of a “community.” I imagine he would either shake his head in consternation, or, if caught at just the right moment, laugh so hard that he snorts organic milk all over his beard.

I think our current situation is hopeless… but I don’t believe it was inevitable.

A story:

Back in 2009 I attended a Halloween party held at a gentrifier-minimalist condo in San Francisco, the home of a trio of young tech-mafia dorks. I’d been invited by a buddy who I’ve known since elementary school, and who has now spent over twenty years working as a computer wiz at a government weapons lab.

After we arrived and settled in to the party, I was mainly focused on seducing a stupefyingly gorgeous Chinese-American woman with my (limited) Mandarin skills. The fact that I thought such a thing was possible is a testament to my general naiveté; while most westerners who learn Chinese do so in order to become bilingual shills for global capital, I learned it so I could spend my college weekends in the desolate outer sprawl of Los Angeles learning kungfu from a former Tong enforcer. I’m not exactly the dream husband for the daughters of well-to-do Chinese immigrants.

My plot to snatch this young lady from the clutches of her techbro boyfriend and disappear into erotic adventures failed utterly. Instead, I got so drunk that by the end of the party, it took me a full thirty seconds to notice it when a portly gay white dude was fondling my chest.

Anyway…

My romantic visions thwarted, I found myself in a conversation with my buddy and a random law school schmuck. Ever the anthropologist, I was asking the schmuck questions about her experiences in law school. This dovetailed into a whole other conversation when she introduced a hypothetical “ethical dilemma” that she’d picked up in one of her classes.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a train is about to hit and kill five people who are standing on the tracks; you’re standing next to a track-switching lever; if you throw the lever, the train will change routes and kill only one person, who is standing on the alternate tracks (why these people are loitering on train tracks is not addressed in the scenario). The question is: what do you do?

I responded immediately: I freeze time.

There was a great commotion of teeth-gnashing and eye-rolling as both my buddy and the lawyer-to-be chastised me for my foolishness. I ignored them and continued: I freeze time, move everyone off the tracks, then unfreeze time and let the train continue on its way. More chastising.

There are two key points here that neither of them were able to grasp, no matter how many hilarious jokes I made: One, that the entire scenario is fictional, which means, as far as I’m concerned, that I can solve it however I want; and two, that taking these kinds of bullshit scenarios seriously on an ethical or moral level is completely absurd—a product of the type of colonized minds who dream of becoming a peon for the crime syndicates we call “corporations,” or, as in the case of my buddy, whose idea of a life well-spent is sitting in an office contributing to weapons development for the forces of evil.

I find bogus ethical scenarios to be lame conversation topics, but certain people seem to think they’re fundamental to sophisticated living. Another perennial favorite is the ol’ “If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler as a baby?”

I realize that consumer culture and compulsory schooling cripple the imagination, but damn; talk about short-sighted.

I have a much better hypothetical scenario. It goes back a bit further in time, to circa 1492. At that time the feudal fascism of western europe was on the ropes for any number of reasons, but primarily because civilization itself is an omnicidal machine that is not and can never be sustainable. Like so many others before them, these kingdoms had burned themselves out with wars, plagues, and environmental destruction.

The cosmic villain known as Christopher Columbus barely got a sign-off on his mad mission to reach India by sailing indefinitely west. If he had never achieved his long-shot success, the nightmare future we live in would never have come into existence.

The theft of silver, gold, slaves, and other booty from the “New World” is what reinvigorated the economies of western europe. It laid the financial foundation for capitalism. The plots devised to extract maximum profit from New World plantations formed the blueprint for the modern factory, paving the way for the industrial revolution.

Fast-forward a few centuries, and now the entire biosphere is on the brink of extinction.

Without Columbus, there would have been no capitalism, no industrial revolution, no Native genocide, no trans-atlantic chattel slave trade, no nuclear missiles, no fracking, no Elon Musk, no cybernetic fascist cults, no World Wars, no nazis, no white supremacism, no George Washington the Town Destroyer.

Alas, there would also be no Italian or Thai cuisine as we know it; both tomatoes and chili peppers come from Turtle Island. But that’s a small price to pay for a planet that would almost certainly be liveable for much longer into the future than it currently is.

Furthermore, without the “discovery” of Turtle Island, it’s very possible that Islamic and/or African civilizations would have conquered western europe (now there’s a little something to hurt Proud Boy feelings). Because mechanical “rationalist” consciousness is a unique product of the western european worldview, I seriously doubt those other imperial societies would have created anything like our current industrial-cybernetic dystopia. We might not have “democracy” (or “socialism”), but I bet you the earth would be much better off.

I’m sure you’ve figured out where I’m going with this; if I could travel back in time, would I kill Columbus as a baby?

Please. If I had the keys to Doc Brown’s DeLorean in the ignition, I would’ve throttled the engine to 88mph before you finished asking me the question. Hell yes I would kill baby Columbus. With a baseball bat, if necessary.

Is that cruel? Ask the Arawak.

Unmediated Community – Ten Years of the Invisible Army

“Are we who live in the present doomed never to experience autonomy, never to stand for one moment on a bit of land ruled only by freedom?”
-Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“It’s been awhile since I gave a gadget a smack—
people feel some type of way when you do that”
-The Unseen Chiefs, The Protocols

I do not and have never used a smartphone.

Before you continue reading, I’d like you to stop and ponder that for a moment. Think about how much of your everyday life is now integrated into this machine.

No smartphone means no GPS directions. No Uber, no Lyft, no mobile soundtrack, no streaming music, no googling random factoids in the middle of a conversation, no constant access to (anti)social media, and so forth. I’ve never shopped for lovers on a dating app or Facetimed a holiday celebration to distant relatives.

The first i-phone came out in 2007. What began for me way back then as a casual rejection of what I regarded as a pointless, overpriced gadget has since evolved into a spiritual commitment. I’ve watched what these things have done to the remnants of society—the poisonous battleaxe Margaret Thatcher was a few decades ahead of her time in declaring there was “no such thing as society.” Looking at the effects of machine-colonization on the people around me, her words now seem like prophecy.

Don’t get me wrong; I realize that I’m extremely lucky to be able to maintain my freedom from these devices. Most people I know would not be able to do their jobs without a smartphone, from Uber drivers and labor organizers to contractors and schoolteachers. I’ve been fortunate in that I continue to be able to earn a living without it. That in itself is revealing; we’ve collectively become slaves to artifacts produced and controlled by a cabal of sinister corporations. Our lives, relationships, and livelihoods depend on them. So much for democracy.

If past experience holds true, at least a few people will read this, then send me e-mails extolling the virtues of smartphones, or offering silly platitudes about using the master’s tools to destroy the master’s house. Please don’t bother; I’ve heard it all before, and it’s all bullshit. I’ve never met any other variety of junkies who felt the need to so vigorously defend their addictions. This seems to be a particular characteristic of phone jockeys (and of BDSM aficionados, for reasons I dread to contemplate).

Back in the early 2010s I worked in a restaurant, and I regularly had to witness Moms, Dads, and their 2.5 Children spend entire meals staring at their smartphones—or, in the case of infants confined to high-chairs, in front of a propped up i-pad. I’ve watched people clutch their phones in hand for entire commutes, whether they were actively using them or not. I’ve sat on buses packed with teenagers, every single one of them diddling a screen. I see people compulsively shield themselves from any tinge of social discomfort with aimless scrolling. I’ve had to accept that at any given moment, any in-person interaction can be interrupted by the phone’s call to prayer.

This god has a name, and it is Disembodiment. Welcome to the virtual dystopia. Even Philip K. Dick would be aghast. Thinking too much about this repugnant sci-fi nightmare makes me physically ill.

I’m not naive; I know that no matter how evil and socially destructive these devices are, they’re not going anywhere. At this point they’re too thoroughly integrated into life for people to reject them even if they wanted to. We’re stuck with them until the Total Collapse arrives (stay tuned). In the meantime, it is still possible to carve out a piece of humanity within the toxic cybernetic shell… if you’re willing to be the asshole.

Enter: the Invisible Army.

The story goes like this—after the scraping through the 2008 economic crash, by late 2009 I had landed back at my mother’s house in suburbia, having abandoned burgeoning notoriety in the L.A. underground hip hop scene. In an attempt to recreate some of the magic I’d experienced in the Angel City nightlife, I teamed up with my nephew D.J. Innalect, who had recently graduated high school, and we began throwing house parties. They started off small, typically attended by fewer than a dozen people, mostly my young suburban co-workers.

By this time, the fix was in—people were well on their way to being fully colonized by smartphones. Instead of dancing, chatting, or enduring basic human awkwardness, people would spend half their time at the party staring at their phones. As you have probably experienced, this makes for a wack-ass party.

With a head full of Hakim Bey’s radical anti-mediation texts, particularly The Temporary Autonomous Zone and Immediatism, I decided to take a stand. We initiated what later came to be known as the Invisible Protocols: No Pictures, No Videos, No Phones Allowed.

I started referring to the party attendees as The Invisible Army, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to the protagonists of author Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a ‘90s comic book series about a team of occult anarchist revolutionaries. We threw our first official party on December 21^st, 2012—the winter solstice, and the end date of the Mayan calendar, famous for sparking a great deal of Armageddon Fervor among certain contingents of the New Age yuppitariat.

D.J. Innalect and I became The Unseen Chiefs.

It was after I moved to Oakland in 2013 that the Invisible Parties really blew up. I was performing at local shows, and later working at a hip hop activism non-profit. I met a lot of rap artists, all of whom had grown accustomed to lackadaisical, phone-stroking crowds.

I developed a simple formula: four parties a year, on or near the solstices and equinoxes; book six to eight acts, give everyone a strict ten-minute time limit, and fill the rest of the night with D.J. Innalect’s vinyl selections. Soon we were getting anywhere from 50 to 80 people at every show, packed into my living room and backyard, hands in the air and asses shaking. There was one party where almost the entirety of San Francisco State University’s Native American student union showed up.

“This is not a gimmick. It’s not even a movement. This is a motherfucking cult!”

In the beginning, I relied on the good faith of party guests to refrain from using their phones. Several years of frustration, fury, and phone-smacking later, we started collecting phones at the door—turn it off, label it with your name, put it in the box, pick it up when you leave. Or better yet, don’t bring it at all. The benefit of having gatherings in one’s home is that you have total control over the rules of attendance. I’ve kicked out a couple of people who refused to surrender their phones, but for the most part there were no problems. Of course, we had to eventually expand the ban to other new and exciting spy-tech—smartwatches, etc.

It helped that the parties were invite-only; I designed paper invitations and sent them out in the mail for every event. At its peak, circa 2017, there were over 100 people on the mailing list.

One of the most personally fulfilling moments for me came at one of the early Oakland events, when no less a luminary than James Mott—an active member of the Black Panther Party for over ten years, and a founding member of the Black Panthers’ funk band The Lumpen—attended with his wife. I’d met him at a reading for Ricky Vincent’s book Party Music, and interviewed him for a zine I published back in 2013. I sent him an invitation to our next event, not daring to hope that he would come. Not only did he come to the party, but before leaving he pulled me aside to praise my efforts in building community. That’s a hell of an endorsement, if you ask me.

Another such moment came when some friends brought their fifteen-year-old daughter—a genuine phone addict—to a barbecue. On the way out, she made a point of telling me how much she enjoyed having the chance to disconnect from the machine and bond with her folks. I might have cried a little bit.

People are so alienated by technology that simply removing phones from the social equation is enough to consistently create magic. The most common response from performers: that was the best crowd response I’ve ever gotten at a show. The most common response from attendees: this is the best party I’ve ever been to. Several women and queer folks told me that being there was the first time they ever truly felt comfortable at a party.

Over the years, whenever I’ve told people about the Invisible Parties, their reactions have generally fallen into one of two camps: they’re either immediately enthusiastic, or they’re immediately suspicious. The first is by far the most common; I’m convinced that most people secretly long to unplug from the matrix, even if it’s only for a short time. The second camp seems to believe that anything short of full and robust participation in the Surveillance Society is sure proof that we’re Doing Something Wrong. The worst cop is the one inside your head.

Now that everyone is carrying around their own personal wiretap, I’d like to take a moment to point out that it might behoove activists—both overground and underground—to initiate some basic level of security culture by having the occasional gathering where people are not permitted to bring their tracking devices. Just a thought.

The Invisible Army was the focal point of my social life for many years. It spawned a theme song, a manifesto, numerous erotic adventures, and copious amounts of drunken laughter. Organizing and hosting these events was a lot of work—printing and mailing invitations, coordinating performers, buying supplies, prepping the house, cleaning up, etc. I couldn’t have pulled it off without help from a small group of dedicated friends—shout-outs to Bernie Uber, Wisdom Born, Huracana, Vic, Cindy, and Kween Bi.

For a time, the Invisible Parties were a legitimate phenomenon. I got to play rock star, and, more importantly, I got to create an unmediated communal space and share it with many people who otherwise would never have had such an experience.

Then covid shut it all down.

Even now that vaccines are widely available, I remain reluctant to pack dozens of people into my living room… especially since I have both black and Native friends who refuse to be vaccinated. Many of us are familiar with how frequently the Powers That Be have used us as unwilling lab rats in their mad science experiments, and just plain don’t trust ‘em.

I get it. But I’d rather take my chances with the vaccine than end up dying alone on a ventilator. Either way, I’m not interested in hosting a super-spreader. I’m the last person in my circle of friends who still consistently wears a mask when indoors in public. Truth be told, in a world under such heavy and constant surveillance, I like having my face covered. Privacy is sacred.

This last winter solstice was the ten-year anniversary of The Invisible Army. I’m deeply saddened that we did not celebrate it with a raging fiesta. Rather than simply mourn the loss, I decided to write this piece, in the hopes that it will inspire some readers to recruit themselves into our neo-Luddite cult. All you have to do is create a space where the Invisible Protocols are in effect. Then write me a letter and tell me about it—P.O. Box 7654, Oakland, CA, 94601. I’ll send you a member badge (it’s blank).

Whatever you do doesn’t have to be big; it could be as simple as a dinner party or a date.

The point is to be fully present. The point is to be human.

No Pictures. No Videos. No Phones Allowed.

The Bourgeois Cybernetic Cult of Polyamory

“Tried to go mono, and he got crushed—
now the ship is lookin’ like sorority rush week”
-Baytime Vader – Ain’t Wayne Brady

Recently someone on my zuckerbook feed posted a link to an article in Vogue magazine about the growing popularity of polyamory among yuppies. I’m a bit upset with myself for exposing my sensitive psyche to this piece—after all, before reading it I knew exactly what it was going to say; I knew exactly for whom it was written; I knew that it was guaranteed to fill me with the Rage… and I still read it.

The biggest red flag is right there in the article’s title: Inside Love’s Sharing Economy (barf).

I really should have known better, because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area in the era of hyper-gentrification. This whole region is flooded with rich, college-educated liberoids whose political consciousness extends to the microscopic limits of their race/gender/sexuality identitarianism and no further. Most of them are from Somewhere Else. If you work with any institutions involved in education or “social justice” around here, as I did for most of a decade, it’s impossible to avoid these dunderheads. They came, saw, conquered, and they brought their internet-generated pseudo-philosophies with them from the factory.

In the Bay Area you can’t throw a quarter without hitting a sex freak of some kind. Pimps, players, prostitutes, dominatrices, kinksters, genderqueer top-surgeried pansexual burlesque dancers… we’ve got ‘em all, homegrown and imported. And still I have yet to meet somebody who “identified” as “polyamorous” who wasn’t either a bourgeois white person or one of their affiliates.

My spider-sense has been tuned to high alert on these people for years, and now a major national publication has a whole piece about “Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM).” Ugh; even the phrase draws bile to my lips; it smacks of consumerist ideology, it smells like psycho-babble, and its smarmy abbreviated letters burn like a branding iron. According to Vogue, polyamory might even be a Sexual Orientation™! Dig that! Honey, I was born to cheat. It’s in my DNA!

Do you need a lifestyle category and a label of identification to date more than one person at a time? The contemporary answer, of course, is a resounding YES. TechnoBabylon has reduced all aspects of social behavior and identity to an ever-expanding fractal geometry of boxes you can check on a screen—human sociality as mutilated by the cybernetic imperium. Are we compatible as lovers? Scan my barcode to find out!

So, let me get this straight: after being born into the undeniable privilege of middle- and upper-middle class life, and obeying all the House Rules that your planet-devouring industrial culture developed to keep the peons in line and the wealth flowing upward, you’ve now reached a point in your insulated life when the emotional challenges of a monogamous relationship are so burdensome that your solution is to approach love & sex buffet-style—grazing from one bin to the next, free from any troubling concerns about the romaine lettuce growing jealous at the attention you lavish upon the bacon bits.

As an added bonus, there are plenty of apps available that make shopping for lovers convenient. The consumer class is all about convenience.

If I were to pick the one thing that infuriates me most about bourgeois poly freaks and their hokum—which is a challenge—it would be their self-righteous conviction that they are achieving some kind of liberation by “deviating from social norms,” when in fact their behavior is just as subservient to the dictates of Consumption & Capital as it ever was. Here at the apotheosis of alienation, drowning in Capitalist Realism, with life on earth at the brink, where community is a forgotten piece of folk culture that didn’t survive the cyborg implants and everything in existence is defined by dollar value… And I’m supposed to believe that the yuppie masses have suddenly made a grand discovery that—oops—lifelong marriage is a Problem and its solution is to fuck other people?

The raw forces of libido are subsumed by the banality of consumer life—the wage slavery, the commuter traffic, the hours of staring at screens and stroking phones. We have generations of people who were raised on the visual hate-speech of instantly accessible pornography. And now, the bourgeoisie can experience “sexual liberation” without ever having to leave or question or think about the cages of WAGE LABOR or FAKE DEMOCRACY or INDUSTRIAL EXTINCTION. Freedom, apparently, is the freedom to cheat with permission.

It’s a good thing they’ve finally found an outlet for all that subsumed libido; us savages were starting to get worried, what with all their talk about Virgin Mother Nature just waiting to be Ravished. Now they can have sex with whoever they want before they go back to couch-riding with the spouse and streaming the latest Hollywood zombie flick, plastic smiles intact. Their nannies can watch the kids.

Polyamory: another drug that only rich people can afford.

One could argue that this is a legacy of The Sixties™; there’s many a sappy and sentimental treatise on the greatness of the “free love” era. The number of girls and women in that era who were drugged into a stupor and molested by their hippy male friends remains unknown. In the same way that the psychedelic revolution was assimilated and devolved into a culture of tech workers micro-dosing on shrooms, the inheritance from Babylon’s sexual revolution consists of infinite porn, J-Lo stripper-dancing at the Superbowl, and the total metastasis of the sexual exploitation industries. Even your mom is on OnlyFans.

In the doltish sexual dialogues of wokesters, there is much use of the term consent. There is also a general failure to understand that consent is a rather troublesome concept in a world where every alternative to Starfleet has been systematically destroyed. For example, I have yet to “consent” to living in an omnicidal machine culture responsible for murdering and enslaving my ancestors… unless you count as a form of consent my refusal (so far) to commit suicide.

When it comes to sex, how meaningful is the idea of “consent” when we’re all born into a world in which rape and coercion are endemic to the point of invisibility? The bodhisattva Andrea Dworkin made many eternal enemies for daring to explore this question. After decades of reactionary dilution of feminism, by the early 2000s the average liberoid had decided that murder by drone strike was the best way to free Afghani women from the oppression of the Taliban.

I love sex. It’s one of my great passions, falling somewhere between smoking rolled cigarettes and writing venomous screeds. I’m also really good at it. I claim this not as a boast, but as the consolation prize for a humiliating truth: my original impetus for developing this skill was the devastating and obsessive loneliness of growing up as a geek in suburbia. As an adolescent I held a firm delusion that if I was really good at sex, then when I finally managed to convince a girl to date me, she would never leave me. It began as a control tactic, an act of profound Fear, born of authoritarian and isolating conditions that legendary kook Wilhelm Reich identified as a major problem decades before I was born.

Later in life, after years of studying TechnoBabylon’s many pathologies and developing the proper hermetic defenses against them, I was able to defeat the Anti-Nature Codes and embrace my beautiful, animal, physical self. Sex became an adventure and a path of exploration, rather than an obsession— here I am, just a dirty working-class tantric indigenegro ninja bachelor, praying to ancient goddesses via body-melding ecstasy. Sexuality, like cartooning and kungfu, is a cultivated physical & spiritual skill.

As a certified scallywag, I admit that when it comes to many of the women I’ve dated, to call them promiscuous would be diplomatic; the various titles they would be eligible for here in East Oakland have fewer syllables. For many years, what surprised me about these women was how utterly rare it was for them to have ever had really good sex. They’d had plenty of sex, in some cases with many dozens of people (sometimes all at once)—but it never touched their spirit. They’d rarely, if ever, fully & genuinely connected with someone through sex.

I now recognize this as yet another trauma symptom of a culture that truly loathes everything about nature and the physical body… especially sex. Instead of an act of bonding, it’s an act of conquest and objectification. In a society where Religion, Technology, and New Age Pop Philosophy are all in agreement that Paradise consists of some form of disembodiment, is it any wonder that so many (white) people can’t dance? And if you can’t dance, I’ll take odds that you can’t fuck either.

Whenever wokesters get to babbling about things like patriarchy and heteronormativity, I find my hand itching to reach for a revolver. The TechnoSpectacle of Cybernetic Alienation has long since looted radical and dissident theory for all of its tweet-worthy terminology. Now there are legions of people who couldn’t explain the difference between the sex class and biology class brandishing the word patriarchy as if it was a magic wand to make “rape culture” disappear.

Meanwhile, the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the United States is murder.

The virtual chatterbox drains words, symbols, and concepts of their meaning and power. Even the term woke started as black slang to describe people with knowledge and political consciousness. As late as 2016 the term would have mystified anyone who didn’t either have a lot of black friends or spend a lot of time immersed in the mediated worlds of black pop culture. Now your bigoted uncle in Tacoma uses it to complain about people being trans in public.

It wasn’t so long ago—and in some parts of the world, it’s still the case—that a married couple was merely part of an extended family unit. Mom, dad, & kids, sure, but also grandmas and aunties and nephews and cousins, lots of work to be done in the fields and wash your hands before you sit down at the dinner table. Prior to the first World War, most Americans were independent farmers. Farm families are big because farming requires tremendous labor. The economic family unit of agriculture is therefore communal, and is linked with other communal units.

And even agriculture is a horrific fall from the grace of hunter-gatherer life, which defined the human experience—and biology—for hundreds of thousands of years before a plow ever existed. We are tribal creatures, a communal species meant to live in groups made up of anywhere from several dozen to several hundred members. Some of my ancestors were still living this way as recently as 300 years ago. In such cultures, marriage is almost always common and easy, and so is divorce. Sometimes male chiefs are entitled to multiple wives, as one of the few perks of serving a role that most undomesticated humans would never want, i.e. holding any kind of singular authority.

All the weird body-hatred and sheer anti-life disgust for nature is simply not part of these cultures. As a result, they display any number of traits and activities that would shock even the most libertine city-dweller into paroxysms of Puritanical revulsion—from the hilarious fun of clowns throwing feces at people during otherwise somber ceremonies, to children playing group sex games with each other in the bushes.

How could any regular person be expected to share life with the same one or two other people for decades without going completely ape-shit? Human adults are not meant to have the majority of their social interaction take place with only one other adult, just like human children are not meant to be raised by only one or two adults. These phenomena are alien infections masquerading as “modern life,” and retain their destructive power to the exact extent that we take them for granted.

Anyone familiar with women’s experience in Pyramid cultures knows that it is largely one of victimization and violence. Marriage under the cruel hierarchy of man-rule is little more than a slave-labor camp, where the rights and value of women are often less than those of livestock. One of the great secrets of the Turtle Island frontier is how common it was for white women who were taken as prisoners by Native tribes to refuse the opportunity to return to Babylon. Empirical freedom is empirical freedom.

A few months ago a former lover subjected me to a frantic diatribe expressing, almost verbatim, the ideas in the Vogue piece—proof of their reality as an ideological commodity. If you ask me, the instant your sexual politics line up with those of Vogue magazine, it’s time to surrender your feminist credentials. But I digress.

This former lover, who spoke at length on the merits of polyamory, group sex, and the Truth & Light of polyamory as a “sexual orientation,” is a white woman from a middle-class family, in her early 30s, with a master’s degree in philosophy. She has spent most of the last four years making an obscene amount of money doing nothing much for a cryptocurrency firm founded by a compulsive gambler. Until getting sober late last year, she spent plenty of her ill-gotten riches on booze and designer drugs. We had our first sexual encounter in 2018, which consisted of a make-out session in my bedroom during the epilogue of a house party. We then had a few dates—if meeting up to get naked and smooch counts as a date. I later found out that less than a year before we became involved, she’d suffered a drug-induced psychotic break and spent time in a rehab facility—a rescue operation that her parents financed.

Over the course of our on-and-off affair, she talked a lot about things like Communication™ and Consent™… then deployed a litany of emotional manipulation tactics to try and pressure me into having intercourse with her, which I had declined to do after she confessed to a herpes infection. She currently lives in Denver—capital city of the Fourth Reich—where she relocated to be in a relationship with an emotionally abusive junkie ex-con who she met at a meditation retreat. Yes, really.

She may be a particularly egregious example of the personality type I associate with people who advocate polyamory, but not by much. She was far less obnoxious than most I’ve encountered; she was at least willing to listen to me explicate the Eurocentric and class-biased assumptions of her worldview. Among other lessons I learned from my time with her is how easy it is, in this dystopian age, to put “radical” political concepts to service of one’s own selfishness, immaturity, self-indulgence and narcissism.

The sad part is, I dearly loved this woman. She’s smart, funny, creative, and a fantastic listener. She’s one of precisely three women I’ve dated with whom I would have considered entering into a committed long-term relationship. Now, months after falling out with her, I’m starting to feel like I dodged a bullet. Maybe I’m just bitter.

Many years ago I had a dream in which I visited Andrea Dworkin in the spirit world. She was dressed like my Native aunties at ceremony. We were walking along a hill in the afternoon sunlight, barefoot in the soft grass of springtime. Off in the distance was a wide valley opening out to the horizon. There were many people in the valley, and though I could only see their silhouettes, I knew they were all women. There was great pain there, deep and mysterious.

I asked Andrea was that place was. She smiled and said, “That place is only for us, and you can never go there. But if you make a place in your heart for us, we will come to you.”

Indeed.

Malik Diamond is a hip hop artist, cartoonist, author, educator, and martial arts instructor. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is the descendant of kidnapped Africans, conquered Natives, and rural laborers of the Scots-Irish, Swiss, and German varieties. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with two brown humans and a white cat. E-mail: malikdiamond (at) hotmail (dot) com

Black Lingo vs. TechnoBabylon

In honor of Black History Month, I dedicate this piece to Marvin, Dre, Innalect, my grandma Mary (R.I.P.), my pops, my long-lost sister, and all my Allendale neighbors.

Prior to the Covid Apocalypse, I spent six years paying my bills by giving lectures and workshops on hip hop culture and social justice. There was a teacher I worked with a few times who held a high office with the Black Student Unions of California. Among other duties, he organized and recruited high school students for the BSUs.

He called me up one afternoon to tell me about the latest initiative he was putting together with his collection of upwardly-mobile black students. Basically, they decided to declare that the word nigga was a Problem, and was now off-limits; none of them were ever going to use it again. Furthermore, they were going to embark on a mission to convince other blacks to do the same. He invited me to attend one of their conferences and speak, to provide another black voice to sign off on this initiative.

I like and respect this man, so I didn’t fire off on him the way I might have if someone else had come at me with some ol’ sideways respectability-politicking-ass bullshit like that.

Not to get all Marx on a nigga, but some of these folks out here could use a few lessons in good old-fashioned Materialist Philosophy™. Fred Hampton, where are you when we need you?

Oh yeah, they murdered you.

In your bed.

Anyway…

First of all, changing how you talk isn’t going to change the material, economic realities of being black in this country. Refraining from saying nigga never got anyone out of the gutter, and no cop ever decided against shooting a nigga because he spoke the King’s English.

Second, this is a perfect example of class conflict in action; what you have is a bunch of students with class bias and class-climbing aspirations—students who have been, in my opinion, led astray by an adult leadership composed of former frat boys and sorority girls—who are attempting to position themselves as morally superior to their poor and working class brethren. “We’re better than those negroes. See how eloquent we are?”

Third, if we’ve all decided that the word nigga is such a problem for us, I would invite any member of the Starfleet Language Police to come to my neighborhood in East Oakland and tell all the Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Cambodians, Laotians, Yemenis, and Filipinos that they, too, must now refrain from calling themselves and everyone around them nigga. If that’s the plan, please send me a “Save the Date” reminder card in the mail, so I can be ready with my lawn chair, gin, and pistol.

This is the same kind of ridiculous thinking that leads people to think they’re really doing something by spelling “women” with a “y,” or putting an “x” on the end of “Latin.” (By the way, that last one really bothers me; like, what are you going to do, de-gender the entire language? Only wokesters, coconuts, outsiders, and dullard Ethnic Studies majors talk and write like this; I’ve never heard one single person in my majority-Mexican neighborhood dribble out a silly-ass cyberword like “Latinx.” Here’s a hot tip for you good lefty queer-friendly white folks and non-Spanish speakers who are trying to be down: you could just say “Latins.”)

Impotent by nature, cybernetic consciousness treats the map as though it were the territory. The territory has been conquered and scorched, but folks want to be first in line to scribble symbols on the leftover corners of the map. It provides a simulation of accomplishment—activism without the inconvenience of activity.

As a wordsmith, cartoonist, and superhero, of course I have a great deal of respect for the symbolic… in its place. For example, when I express myself through words, I do my best to refrain from using machine language to refer to aspects of my life as a HUMAN in LIVING WORLD. I prefer to say “community” instead of “ecosystem.” Render unto Skynet what is Skynet’s.

I also hate almost all of the wokester lingo that’s infected the public through (anti)social media, most of which was generated in the last 10 years by consumer-class ivory tower phone-stroking Cybernetic Identitarians—you know, the kind of people who talk about being in community anytime they’re in a group, who like to be in safe spaces (where nobody will disagree with their ideologies), and who refer to average men and women as being cis-gendered. It’s revealing of their core worldview that these same people will casually refer to the rest of the living world as “natural resources”—the human-supremacist equivalent of calling the entirety of creation a nigger.

I prefer to use other, better words, and if they don’t exist, I make them up. My inner circle of friends has a whole collection of folk sayings and terminology that we’ve created specifically for that reason. Much of that verbiage is not even something we purposely concocted; it arose organically, over time, as part of our shared culture, thinking, conversations, and activities.

Humans used to do that. Some of us still do.

It probably helps that I’m from the Bay Area. This is a region that’s known for generating lingo. I doubt it’s a coincidence that prior to the arrival of European invaders, the indigenous peoples of this region had a staggering variety of languages that differed widely from each other, despite the relative proximity of the various tribes.

I want to emphasize that my linguistic practice is profoundly personal; I do it for the joy and beauty, I do it to clarify my thinking, and I do it to root my consciousness in my own cultural values—the black, the native, the folk. Those values are what enabled my father to escape the deadly traps of being a homeless black youth in the pre-Civil Rights Era™ south, and enabled my mother to escape rural poverty into a life of independence. Those values are what help me to endure, in a time when it has become clear that most life on earth probably won’t make it to the next century.

In short: I accept, refuse, or invent language as part of an ongoing effort to keep the oppressor-machine out of my head. And I can tell you, keeping the demons of TechnoBabylon at bay is an unrelenting occupation.

The LAST thing I’m interested in is berating regular folks for how they talk, or trying to force my terminology on others—especially not through the subtle and often overt bullying tactics that the Starfleet Language Police have mastered. If you want to be a bully, better to go full Dr. Doom mode—which means you’d better have both the will and the power to enforce your decrees. No BSU members are going to roll down 38^th Avenue with an army of Doombots, commanding niggas to repent.

One of my favorite things about black culture is its endless creativity in generating new slang and phraseology. As has been pointed out by any number of fringe black and brown thinkers over the years, English is a mechanical, undead language. We have to constantly flip it in order to represent our own experiences and cultural values, even when we don’t know what those values are, or where they came from. Our lingo is a manifestation of our essence, our swag, our Soul Sonic Force. And, though largely unconscious, it’s also a survival tactic.

I’m a Bay boy. For my entire life, my concept and experience of English has included the English spoken by those for whom it is not their first language. I’ve seen folks—especially white folks—get dumbfounded by accented speech that was perfectly clear to me. I’m adept at decoding Spanish-, Chinese-, and Japanese-accented English, both because of time spent around those groups, and because I’ve studied those languages. It’s amazing what can happen when you step out of your cultural paradigm.

In the same way that the rhythms and sounds of other languages manifest themselves in English as an “accent,” modern Black English maintains a continuity of phonetic and grammatical structures that go all the way back to Africa. Our ancestors are still with us.

All indigenous peoples have a name they use to refer to themselves; academia calls this name an autonym—as opposed to an exonym, which is a name used by outsiders. The autonyms of every indigenous culture mean some variation of “people”—The People, the First People—etc.

I’d say that for the average Black American, having been stripped of our indigenous heritage and mutilated by centuries of enslavement, the closest thing we now have to such an autonym is Nigga.

“But Mr. Diamond,” you say, “the invader-slavers are the ones who first called black people that!”

Nah.

They use a Hard R.

We flipped it.

I won’t speak for other places, but in my neighborhood, regardless of the histories, nationalities, and ethnicities that differentiate folks, on some level we’re all part of the same nation… and it’s not America.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m bout to bend a corner to the liquor to cop a bleez and some Easy, cuz me and the cutty finna get stuey in the lab. Y’fil me?

Recommended Reading:

Sterling Stuckey – Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America

Marimba Ani – Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora

John McWhorter – Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of “Pure” Standard English

Leanne Hinton – Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages

Malik Diamond is a hip hop artist, cartoonist, author, educator, and martial arts instructor. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is the descendant of kidnapped Africans, conquered Natives, and rural laborers of the Scots-Irish, Swiss, and German varieties. He has taught workshops on hip hip culture and social justice at schools and organizations throughout the Bay—including Oakland High School, Civic Center Secondary School, Laney College, and San Jose State University—for a cumulative audience of over 8,000 students. He currently lives in Oakland, California, with two brown humans and a white cat. E-mail: malikdiamond (at) hotmail (dot) com

Comics Masterclass: Carla Speed McNeil’s “Finder,” Vol. 1

I’m blessed to live in a region with a number of impressive libraries. I’ve been an enthusiastic reader since I was a boy in the ‘80s, a time when it was relatively rare to find collections of comics in a library, unless they were of newspaper strips. Graphic novels were a rare breed. By contrast, the main branch of the Oakland library currently has several hundred such books. It is heaven to my inner child.

I’ve been making my way through these books for a number of years now, checking out stacks at a time. A lot of it is entertaining but forgettable, and a lot of it is bunk—two ends of the spectrum that applies to almost everything published by Marvel or DC for more than a decade now, most translated manga (can’t speak for Japan), as well as much of what has been released by smaller publishers.

However, every once in a while I come across a real gem. This happened recently, when I checked out the massive first volume of Finder by Carla Speed McNeil, published by Dark Horse. I remember hearing about this series back when it came out in the mid-’90s, but I’d never read it. I grabbed it from the library on a whim and was blown away.

“McNeil is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, the kind of artist that other comics professionals talk about with a little bit of awe.”
–Douglas Wolk, from the Finder Vol. 1 introduction

Wolk’s quote is dead on. I started reading Finder and instantly got caught up in the strange story and the even stranger way that it was being told. Then, somewhere between pages 80 and 100, I realized I was reading a masterwork.

It’s not the technical ability of the art—the luscious brush lines, the shade and shadow, the detail, the compositions—though that’s part of it. It’s not even the rich dialogue, the depth of the characters, the fascinating world she’s created, or the fact that it’s one of the few works I’ve read with an indigenous character who is complex and fully developed. Really, Finder’s brilliance is on the level of The Total Package.

McNeil is working magic on these pages, enough so that I was compelled to analyze it from a perspective of craft, and focus my thoughts into words, as a student looking to a master for tools and tricks. I’ve chosen to examine two pages that to my eyes glow with the light of genius. On these pages you can see the skills at work even without knowing anything about the characters or the story.

Starting with page 152:

Lettering
I’ll say off top that as far as I’m concerned, digital lettering is a curse on comics. It adds the cold, slimy touch of cybernetic homogeneity to even the most glorious art and storytelling, and robs the work of something old, precious, and deeply human. I realize that it’s far easier to pull up Adobe Illustrator and diddle a keyboard than it is to gain competence in something that is its own unique art form, but “easy” and “art” rarely go together. I’ve hated digital lettering since it first became common in the early ‘00s. In the words of Bobby Bouche’s mama… it’s the Devil.

Like many of the best cartoonists from the pre-cyborg days of Paper & Ink, McNeil does her own lettering by hand. She is adept at manipulating the lettering to serve the emotional expressiveness of the story and characters—a refined skill, difficult to do well, and rarely encountered at such a high level. When I read her dialogue, I can hear every nuance of speech in my head.

Body Language
McNeil’s figures are dynamic, capturing subtleties of gesture and emotion that are the key to bringing characters to life. You could easily identify each of the recurring characters on any given page by their body language alone. They have life. On this page, you can see all of the girl’s frustration in the first five panels, followed by her instant transformation into a shy, scared teenager confronting an unseen authority figure in panel 6.

Storytelling Technique
The best cartoonists make appropriate use of techniques that are unique to comics as a medium, and this page has four great examples:

1) Panel size – Dig how McNeil uses panel size to affect the pacing of the scene, and the impact of each moment. When that last, narrow little panel hits, with nothing but a few words and a small drawing, it not only wraps up the whole scene perfectly, but it adds poignant humor to a moment that for the character consists of frustration, embarrassment, and panic.

2) Dropping borders – The border drops in the 5^th panel, highlighting the disruptive knock, and dividing the inner world of the girl and her frustration from the next panel, where she’s faced with an intimidating adult. The border drops again immediately after panel 6, giving us a borderless, words-only narrative panel that brings us right back into the girl’s inner world.

3) Wordless thoughts – Used properly, thought bubbles with drawings instead of words are one of my favorite cartooning techniques. In panel 5, when she hears the knock at the door, the picture of the girl imagining her own head in a vice is perfect, and says far more than any words could.

Thought bubbles as a device seem to have become old-fashioned. They’ve largely been replaced by boxed captions of narration, and these days they’re almost never used in comics that are supposed to be serious or dramatic. I see this as yet another casualty of the internet-generated, hyper-self-conscious, post-ironic sneer of modern culture, another fun and playful artifact that the droids now find embarrassing. It’s a shame, really. But I digress.

4) Facing the middle – In panel 8, the girl is looking to the right, leading us to the huge mess of a room in panel 9. Then, in panel 10 she’s facing to the left, reacting to the mess. The panel with the mess hits harder because she’s looking at it from the panels on either side. Panels 8 and 10 are narrow, standing like pillars on the side of the wider panel in between.

Looking at page 269:

There’s a lot going on here. First, the sheer number of panels: a 16 panel grid. The small size of the panels limits the space to depict action; it’s just enough for the head and shoulders view of the character Emma, which contributes to the intimacy of the scene.

Here we’re seeing a woman getting deep on the subject of her creative process. The first thing that hit me is the consistency of the character’s look; folks who draw comics, even when they draw the same characters over and over, know how difficult this can be. True, at this point in the book we’re well into the series, and McNeil has drawn these characters dozens if not hundreds of times, but the skill here remains impressive.

Once again the lettering is put to great use in communicating emotion, but Emma’s body language and expressions are the stars of the show. The whole sequence is so vivid. I especially love panel 10—shock, awe, wonder, and a touch of fear are all clearly visible in Emma’s face. To layer that many levels of emotion into a comic drawing is sheer virtuosity.

I haven’t included the pages that follow page 269, so until you have the book in hand you’ll have to take my word on this next point: in the next few pages, McNeil further demonstrates her mastery of pacing by gradually decompressing the narrative. Page 269 starts with sixteen panels, then the next has eleven, then eight, then three. By the last page in this sequence, there are only seven words of narration/dialogue on the whole page, after having quite a bit of talking in the previous pages. Everything serves to enhance the impact of the scenes at play.

Mas.ter.ful.

Shotgun Musings: The Filth – Habibi – The Watchmen

Recently, several unrelated events led me to dive into many hours of comics-reading within the space of a few weeks:

1. The discovery, while helping to clean out the apartment of a friend’s deceased relative, of a huge pile of early 2000s porno DVDs.
2. My first ever pilgrimage to Mile High Comics in Denver, Colorado—the biggest comics retailer in the country.
3. My first trip to the Oakland library since before the covid apocalypse.
4. My inheriting of a whole bookcase worth of graphic novels from a cousin of mine who passed away.

When I say it all together like that, it adds up to a hell of an October. But I digress.

In some cases the comics I read were new to me, and in others I was returning after several years to work I’d read before. What follows are my thoughts on a few of the works I read. No plot spoilers per se, but if the possibility of spoilers is a major concern in your life, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

The Filth – Grant Morrison & Chris Weston
I’m a huge fan of Morrison’s work, and I’ve read this book at least a dozen times. In a career that has been defined by entertaining, groundbreaking work of great metaphorical and metaphysical depth, I regard this title as the pinnacle of that career. All the major themes of Morrison’s writing are sewn together into a perfect tapestry. I think The Filth is Morrison’s greatest work. Weston was the best possible artist to bring the script to life.

The Filth is bizarre, confusing, crude, and frequently disgusting… but it’s also hilarious, poignant, heartfelt, and intelligent. This is Morrison at the top of his craft, working the kind of magic only comics can create, and it strikes a perfect tone on every note it hits. The Filth does what all of the best stories do: it gives you something new to take away every time you revisit it. What Twin Peaks is to the soap opera, The Filth is to the superhero.

I also credit The Filth with curing me of a horrid porn addiction back when I first read it in 2005. Astonishingly, the opening text of the collected addition claims the book’s ability to do just that.

When I read it this time around, it was a much-needed medicine for very different reasons—after digging through the belongings of two different dead men in as many months, this story was a reminder that to scour the filth is a job of utmost importance, and only certain people have what it takes. Reading this helped me recover from encountering everything from drugs to porn to sex toys to journal entries of despair.

Habibi – Craig Thompson
I’ve been hearing about how good Craig Thompson’s work is for years, but I’d never read any of his stuff. I used to date a woman back in the early ’00s who fell in love with his graphic novel Blankets; at the time, I had no interest in comics about the struggles of young love, because I was too stressed out from living them.

At some point I encountered a summary or a review of Habibi, enough to know the book was full of rape and abuse. That really put me off. A female friend read it and confirmed my suspicions, but also told me how great it was. I wasn’t convinced.

Then, I inherited a copy, and both the hardbound cover and the art inside looked so elegant that I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

Holy shit! I have a lot of feelings about this book. First off, as a cartoonist and a lifelong comics fan, I have to say that Habibi is absolutely masterful. From the perspective of craft, Thompson is simply one of the best to ever do it. The art, the page designs, the lettering, the storytelling, the character designs, the integration of Middle Eastern religion and folklore… all of it is Ab.So.Lute.Ly. FLAWLESS.

Among his other strengths, Thompson clearly understands something that nowadays is almost a lost art: he understands that lettering is just as much a part of the page design as rest of the art. After more than twenty years of comics’ nearly universal surrender to the mechanical mediocrity of digital lettering, it’s deeply satisfying to discover an artist who is not only still doing the real deal, but also knows how to use it to enhance the mood and themes of the story.

With all due respect to writers, pencillers, inkers, and Ye Olden hand-letterers, the folks who can do all of those things—and do them well—are in a whole different class of skill. Thompson is in the top ranks of that class, and Habibi is a masterwork.

After reading Habibi, I feel about Thompson as a cartoonist the same way I feel about Neil Gaiman as a writer—this motherfucker is so good, I’m angry about it. It is the fury and frustration of knowing that no matter how dope you are on the court, you’ll never be Michael Jordan or Stephen Curry.

That said, this work, in its very perfection, is also a perfect example of how unfortunate it is that comics continue to be almost totally dominated by the work of white men. While this book glows with a genuine love for Islamic and Middle Eastern culture, it is still cursed by some ugly things under the surface.

To read Habibi was to subject myself to hundreds of pages and countless hours of a brown woman being beaten, raped, and brutalized. This was the fate of the protagonist, who also has a borderline incestuous relationship with a son/brother/husband/lover character—an escaped black slave who is likewise beaten, raped, and brutalized, up to and including having his dick cut off and becoming a transvestite.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the book also includes a joke about one of the black slave men having a huge dick. Wow, Bob, wow.

Once you know what you’re seeing, you can never stop seeing it. I’m way too familiar with the history and pathologies of “western civilization” (global invaders) to see this work as anything other than what it is: the exorcising of a white man’s sexual id through the illustrated bodies of the “exotic other.” On that level, it is repulsive. There were many times I had to put the book down because that shit was making me sick.

But still, I finished it. It was just too well-crafted, even if it was some ol’ bullshit. You can learn a lot from well-crafted bullshit.

And speaking of well-crafted bullshit…

The Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
It had been at least five or ten years since I last read this. Recently I picked it up at the library, then a couple weeks later I inherited two copies of it—one is an early hardbound edition (1988), and one is the same as the library copy, a 2018 softbound edition. In the newer edition, the coloring has been entirely re-done by computer. I’m not normally one to keep multiple copies of the same work, but in this case, there’s quite a difference between the two.

I first read The Watchmen in 1993, when I was thirteen. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best idea. I was not at all prepared for the moral complexity or sheer nihilistic cynicism of this book. I read it a few more times over the ensuing years, but I was never a big fan. Now that I’ve spent the last five years becoming more serious about studying the craft and methods of cartooning, I have a better appreciation of it, and I’m better able to articulate my criticisms.

I realize this is going to flatten some hats and raise some hackles, but I think The Watchmen is probably the most overrated comic of all time. True, it is undoubtedly great—the pacing is razor sharp, the world and characters are compelling, Gibbons’s “down-tempo” art is both technically masterful and perfect for the story, and the story itself is ambitious and morally complex. This book is genuine achievement. But for me, that’s as far as it goes.

Fans and critics alike have made much of the “literary” quality of this book, and they’ve fired plenty of semen into the air over how it “reinvented” comics and blah blah blah. Frankly, I find The Watchmen to be over-wrought, like it’s trying way too hard to be deep. As a result, many of the storytelling techniques are just barely on the proper side of corny, and a few are on the wrong side. It has the kind of self-consciously “highbrow” drip to it that can only be accomplished by a working-class Brit trying to prove to the world how smart he is… which is what Moore has spent most of his career doing.

I think Alan Moore’s interviews are far more interesting than much of his comics work—but then again, I have a soft spot for fringe-dwelling curmudgeons, being one myself. Some years ago I read an interview where, in response to a question about the impact of The Watchmen and its reputation as “Best Comic of All Time Ever,” Moore said something to the effect of: “After all these years, I would have hoped a comic would come along to knock The Watchmen off its pedestal. Alas, there are simply no creators of sufficient skill and genius to cast me from the throne. And even if there were, the readers are all too stupid to notice.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough.

First off, anyone who thinks this cynical wankjob is the best comic ever simply has no understanding of the true gonzo majesty of comics, nor the sheer cosmic bullshit of Western “literary” conceits. Either that, or they need to read a greater variety of comics. We’re talking about a medium that is versatile enough for Love & Rockets, Maus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Zap Comics, Jughead, and Ghost Rider. Say what you will about the pulp absurdity of a flaming skeleton biker from Hell, but that’s the kind of story people will be telling around campfires long after Alan’s beard has turned to dust.

Second, The Watchmen got on its pedestal because of some very specific social, political, and economic circumstances. The baby industry of (American) comics publishing was just barely climbing out of its crib of disposable monthly magazines. We were living under the doom cloud of the Reagan years. Indy publishers, influenced by the underground comix of the ’60s and ’70s but with an eye on aboveground careers, were achieving great successes with unique and ambitious work. “Direct marketing” outlets, i.e. comic book stores, were reaching the height of their power in numbers. Superheroes were the big sellers, and they were ripe for new ideas; plenty of creators, in Europe and America, indy and corporate, were expanding the frontiers of the genre.

Then the King Nerd of the Old Empire came along and made geeks feel like their beloved medium was worthwhile after all, because he made it look smart for the masses—a royal triumph over a people desperate for validation.

*yawn*

Third, on any level you want to consider besides that of pretentiousness, there have been dozens of comics that crush The Watchmen like Godzilla in a shanty town. Just off the top of my head: Gaiman’s Sandman series, Morrison’s The Filth AND Seven Soldiers of Victory AND Final Crisis, Spiegelman’s Maus, Mignola’s entire Hellboy series, Thompson’s Habibi, everything Jaime and Gilberto Hernandezdid in the ’80s on Love & Rockets… the list goes on, especially for people whose taste in comics has a wider palette than Bang!-Pow!-Zoom!

For the record, I think Alan Moore’s best work was on Swamp Thing. He took a brilliantly pulpish monster mash and turned it into a masterpiece of poetic beauty and horror. He was also sblessed with some of the best artists in the game, including Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala. I may not be the biggest fan of Moore’s work in general, but I would kick an old man down a flight of stairs for a stack of original Swamp Thing pages from that era.