Letter to the Editor: Roko’s Basilisk
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Hi Robert,
We are really pleased New Escapologist is returning to print – Can’t wait 🙂
Just a quick question about AI and your closing comment in response to the algorithmic poetry examples. You said: “We’re doomed. I for one welcome our new sonnet-writing computer overlords.”
Was this a reference to Roko’s Basilisk?
I read that some Silicon Valley libertarians and “crypto bros” are well into this theory.
Thank you for all your articles and books.
We are big time Robert Wringham fans in our house!
Warm Regards,
N
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Hello N,
What an excellent question! Alas, my attempt at a cultural reference was even lower brow than that:
Thanks for the nice things you said. Not much longer to wait for some ways to subscribe or buy the first issue. In fact, it’s available now.
RW
Shipped-shape
Everything is shipped. By which I mean the all-new Issue 14 and any books you might have ordered at the same time. Thanks again for supporting the return of the mag.
Yesterday, I hand-delivered three copies to unsuspecting subscribers in Glasgow while 160 other copies sat in the post office, ready to go.
The remaining overseas copies were shipped this morning.
Digital editions went out yesterday via Kickstarter’s messaging system.
It’s on!
There’s no need to tell me when your copy arrives but if there’s anything wrong with say, the packaging or a magazine’s non-arrival a few weeks from now, please let me know.
Let It Rot
“Let it rot” is the fructating new name of the Chinese phenomenon in which young people stop working and just lie down.
They refuse to work, refuse to start a family, refuse to engage with the economy beyond spending what is required for staying alive.
They changed the name because the Chinese government censored any social media using the movement’s former name.
Here’s a ten-minute video about the “Let it Rot” movement and why young Chinese people are giving up and dropping out.
A Shipping and Shopping Update
Phwoar! Look at all those lovely magazines. I have 250 of them in my tiny Glasgow flat at Escape Towers, ready and waiting to be shipped. It’s going to be a busy couple of days.
If you missed the Kickstarter or you were waiting for a more direct way to subscribe or buy the new issue, now’s your time to shine.
Remember that there’s a fiver off The Good Life for Wage Slaves as well. Use coupon code WAGE5.
Shipping announcement:
I’ve been promising to ship on 10th August (this Thursday) but Kickstarter haven’t actually sent us any money yet. Shipping hundreds of mags before being paid for them would be a significant financial risk so I may have to wait a couple more days before shipping them. They’re ready to go though and I’m looking forward to getting them into your hands.
Shop news:
There were some teething troubles at the overhauled shop, though I have hopefully fixed them. The problem seemed to be with PayPal. If PayPal still doesn’t work for you at checkout, please know that you can also order by credit/debit card or even by direct bank transfer. Please see the various options available.
If PayPal doesn’t work but it’s still your preferred way to pay, you can send your payment to me directly through PayPal instead. I’ll know from the amount of money what you’re ordering and I’ll treat it the same as any other order. Sorry for the palaver.
Here’s where to go if you’d like to be in the first batch of mags being shipped.
Catfood Omelettes
This is from the introduction to a 1998 comic called Queen of the Black Black by Megan Kelso:
I plan to be drawing comics when I am an old, old, woman, barring early death or a freak accident. Maybe I’ll own a skating rink or maybe I’ll be living on catfood omelettes in a damp basement apartment, but I WILL be making comics.
Such gorgeous integrity. I really admire the the certainty, the commitment, the ability to look sacrifice in the whites of the eyes. An aspiring or struggling creative person could take strength from this today.
Kelso, needless to say, is still making comics.
When I searched around the quote this morning I found it in full, quoted back to her, in a 2011 interview. The interviewer asks if she still feels that way “now”. Kelso:
My young self made a vow that my older self feels obliged to keep. I sometimes wonder if that very public vow I made is part of what has kept me at it. However, I love making comics as much if not more than I did back then, so I think I would’ve kept at it even if I hadn’t proclaimed it from the hilltops the way I did. I fear I’m going to be more on the catfood side of things than the skating rink side, but yes, I still believe it.
You can take it from me as well. There may be twists and turns in the road, times you feel foolish or low, but commit (and accept the catfood omelette contingency) and you’ll succeed. You might not become mega-famous or super-rich (dubious prizes anyway) but you’ll still be doing your thing instead of something you despise. And that’s Escapology.
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A Humanistic Sickness
“About 70 percent of people,” says Dan Cable, “are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.”
18% is a lot of people.
Cable is the Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the London Business School. As such, he unsurprisingly frames this repulsion as bad for worker motivation and productivity, but he also describes it as “a humanistic sickness.”
He traces the root of the disengagement/repulsion problem to the beginning of the twentieth century:
Each of the people in [a shoe shop] would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer [but a few years after the Industrial Revolution] we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.
As we know (read my books!), this led to Taylorism: the separation of “head and hand” and the division of work into smaller (and increasingly meaningless) sub-tasks. One person stitches the sole of those shoes, another stitches the heel, another threads the laces, and so on. We became a Big Machine, workers became alienated from their work or to lose sight of bigger pictures, and our daily activities lost meaning to the point where 70% are not engaged and 18% (the most likely Escapologists among us) are “repulsed” by it. Well done, Capitalism.
As Cable explains in the video, this way of working isn’t good for the way our biological brains evolved. Humans need novelty, we need change, we need problems to solve. We also, I’d add, need to be able to take a sense of pride in our crafts and to enjoy the moment of finishing a meaningful task.
The relevant part of the brain, Cable says, is called the ventral striatum and it’s forever “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious.”
This ventral striatum, especially here in the 21st century, will remain unsatisfied if we don’t escape into what, a few months ago, we called “the right kind of work.”
It may or may not involve making shoes.
How will you make that escape? Alternatively, how did you make that escape? Let me know. New Escapologist, in its return to print, will have space devoted to such stories. Tell them to us. Tell them to your community: the rest of the 18%.
Shopping is Good
Here at New Escapologist, we’ve always said that shopping and consumerism are forces for good. Or something like that anyway, I forget the details.
Sorry folks. This is just my naughty way of saying that the New Escapologist magazine shop is back in business.
You can now buy our first print edition in five years (shipping on August 10th) or subscribe to two or four brand new issues.
But that’s not all! The back issue bundles are still expensive because they’re print-on-demand, but there’s a PDF version of our complete archive (that’s Issues 1-13) for just £25. Imagine that! The whole original run of the magazine for your very own hard drive to enjoy. 90% of each PDF sale is profit and will help us to keep making wild new things.
There’s also a fiver off The Good Life for Wage Slaves using code WAGE5 while stocks last.
Thanks everyone. Here’s to a bold new era of shopkeeping.
Live Deliciously
The spooky season might have come a little early in our house and we’ve started watching spooky films.
If you happen to have seen The Witch (2015), a particular line might have stood out to you. It’s just so memorable.
“Black Phillip,” a cute little goat who turns out to be the devil, tries to tempt our hero into witchcraft. He says to her:
Wouldst thou like taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
I love the escalation and I admire the decisions made on the choice of words. Butter and a dress, luxuries in the 17th Century and heart-breaking to the modern viewer, give way quickly to “living deliciously,” which could mean any level of erotic decadence.
“A taste of butter” sounds almost sexual by the end of the offer. “A pretty dress” ties innocence to sexuality. It’s all very devious. Deviousness is obviously what one would expect of the devil but, since most recent horror films are poorly thought-out rubbish, it’s a rare treat to get this kind of literary attention to detail.
Anyway, I would like to tempt you, madam, with a life of deliciousness. Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
If the Puritan mode of hard work for little reward isn’t working out for you, come on over to my place. You know you want to.
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Kyriarchy
In feminist theory, kyriarchy (/ˈkaɪriɑːrki/) is a social system (or set of connecting social systems) built around domination, oppression, and submission.
It was coined by a theorist called Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza in her 2001 book Wisdom Ways. Her glossary defines kyriarchy as:
derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein) […] a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.
So the kyriarchy is the social system that keeps all intersecting oppressions (e.g. patriarchy, racism, the work ethic) in place.
We sometimes like to remind our readers that, with all these forces raging around us, being stuck at an office desk or flipping patties in a fast food place IS NOT YOUR FAULT.
You’re at the razor’s edge of history, the crest of a century of what we might now call kyriarchy. It doesn’t matter how normal everything looks, because you’ve never seen anything different. Listen instead to your bones: you’re not out of your mind for wanting escape.
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There are 4 days left on the Kickstarter clock. Here’s where to get involved.
The Enshittification of the Internet
Here’s an old Guardian article, to which our attention is drawn by a letter-writer in the Idler magazine.
It’s about the “enshittification” of the Internet (a term borrowed from Cory Doctorow), specifically the decline of Twitter.
Enshittification goes further than Musk’s Twitter (or “X” has he absurdly wants us to call it now) and even social media in general.
For years, so many websites have been plagued by pop-ups, surveys, cookie warnings, paywalls and adverts that are sometimes so full-on as to make the site barely usable.
For example, the adverts on the “Fandom” Wiki, a platform for pop culture fans to add to the collective knowledge of their favourite fictional worlds, are so pervasive that the long-established Memory Alpha (the definitive Star Trek Wiki) has been completely ruined. I dearly wish they’d move the content to another platform. I complain about this so much that my wife bought me a 1999 Star Trek Encyclopaedia for my birthday last year. Being a real book, it is of course ad-free, beautiful, well-written by experts instead of semiliterate randos, mercifully untouched by terrible “NuTrek” additions to the cannon, and it doesn’t take ages to load. Of course, it means I have an embarrassing Star Trek book on my otherwise impeccable bookshelves, but desperate times mean desperate measures.
And then there’s the Guardian itself, the UK’s most prominent so-called Liberal news source. It’s theoretically free and unlimited, but it’s plastered with belch designed to make the site unpleasant in the hopes that you might shell out on a subscription. To me, this deliberate act of enshittification has the opposite effect and I spend far less time on the site than I used to. I certainly won’t give the bullies my lunch money.
Anyway, that Guardian article (after explaining the problems of network effects) ends with:
we are left with the hope that, eventually, enshittification might become so repulsive to users and consumers that they will rebel. For that to happen, though, they will have to remember that other realities are possible – that there was a time when things were better. The world doesn’t always have to go to the dogs.
That’s sort-of what happened with my Star Trek Encyclopaedia, I suppose. My wife remembered there was an alternative reality. If only to shut me up.
Wikipedia remains mercifully unmolested by claptrap (and if you have an account there, which you should, you can change your settings to stop seeing the fundraisers and the “Wiki loves monuments” banners).
You’ll often find that the Old Web is still there, which is why there’s an Old Web review page in our new magazine, to serve as a guide to non-enshittified places on the Web.
Elsewhere, you can limit your exposure to website (and YouTube!) ads using AdBlock Plus, which I’ve been using to great effect for decades but which I’m surprised to find people often don’t know about.
I hereby promise that the New Escapologist website will never fall to enshittification. This is partly on principle but also partly because I don’t know how to make a pop-up even if I wanted to. Even so, you could buy our print editions, which are literally impossible to enshitten.
