#35: Haunted by lost futures
This week: YouTube philosopher CCK at the meeting point of two worlds // Plus this week's reads, news and must sees in the Creative R&D ecosystem, and your chance to try Existent's BETA at 50% off.
This week we go back to YouTube land to look at one of its best philosophers, CCK, and turn one of his own ideas against him, asking not what it means, but what it does, and what that tells us about digital freedoms.
Reader, this will not be as deep as it sounds - what makes CCK brilliant is the way he explains philosophy through its combination with popular culture.
It will be fun, I promise.
Plus the usual must reads and more from the week in art, ideas and technology.
SADDLE UP, PARDNERS.
Ideas! // CCK, thinker of lost futures
We are culturally obsessed with the negatives of social media culture.
The doom-scrolling inanity, the relentless capturing and displacement of attention. Those problems are real and deep. We still have barely begun to solve them.
But we have to keep the counter view.
The internet remains deeper with intellectual and artistic wonder than any other resource in history. And YouTube, with its millions of archival lectures, concerts, art-films and more is full of brilliance.
You just have to look for it.
This week I’ve been watching the films of YouTuber, CCK, the channel of Jonas Ceika - he’s both an academic philosopher (he’s written a book on Marx and Nietzsche) and an influencer.
His channel has 270,000 followers - that’s more than the British Library, the Barbican, UCL and King’s College London combined.
For someone who talks about complex ideas from Hegel, Heidegger, Deleuze, Adorno, Derrida and Marx - the really tough ends of German and French philosophy - that is a huge amount of reach.
He does that by what on the surface might cheapen or diminish both the complexity and the richness of the thinkers he talks about - explaining them through references to popular and digital culture.
I stumbled on him through this brilliant film that looks at Hellraiser - a peak point of 1980s horror, and still deeply weird and unusual now - through the work of Georges Bataille.
There is a rich vein here to be mined.
If you’ve any interest at all in complex ideas about how the world works and need a way in, I’d go for at least the three below.
First up, is this take on a custom modded version of classic computer game Doom, which makes Margaret Thatcher leader of a horde of NeoLiberal aliens to be destroyed. Taken as a way to explain the idea of neo-liberalism, it turns on a subtle analysis of computer games themselves in economic and cultural history.
Then go to this film on Post-Punk as an explanation of Mark Fisher (who I mentioned last week) and his idea of popular modernism and Adorno’s idea of the Culture Industries. Grounded in the ideas of Simon Reynolds, who I wrote about back in issue 28, this is a wide-ranging look at music and architecture, and a looming sense that the future has disappeared, replaced by hyper-capitalism’s relentless dynamism.
He riffs on that same idea in this film about Hauntology, the sense of being haunted by a lost future that Fisher wrote about and which comes from Jacques Derrida. Here he explains it through the computer game Fallout and the 50’s film Forbidden Planet.
These are excellent films, deep and rich.
But if you want to get what they mean, watch this one, “Explaining Deleuze through Drum Machines”.
Reader, I LOVED this.
My PHD, now disappearing horribly into the past some 20 years since I finished it, was mostly a take on Deleuze, a philosopher who stood self-consciously at odds with both the mainstream of philosophical history and the Post-Modernism I hated that couldn’t ever quite take things seriously. Deleuze took the task of re-imagining the history of thought with a brutal seriousness, laced through with wit and imagination.
This video gets that, and distills Deleuze’s way of thinking into a great take on 1970s proto-synth punks Suicide.
Suicide remain one of those most super-cool bands. Impossibly stark, noisy, dark and funny. Their first album is a dead set classic.
CCK’s take is about how they used the drum-machine - and how this explains Deleuze.
Deleuze was always asking how we can make the new. To do that, we have to stop worrying about what things represent, and think instead about the untapped potential of what they do.
With Suicide, he takes their abuse of the drum machine. When they stopped trying to get it to sound like a mechanical drummer, and turned the speed up, messed with the reverb effects and more, they got a sound that was otherworldly, utterly NEW.
By asking what a thing does, and could do, and responding to that, they found something that did not, and could not exist before.
I think that’s the right way to respond to a film-maker like CCK, whose thought is grounded in a strain of existential misery that thinks digital-age hyper-capitalism has robbed us of the futurism that led to past generations of creativity.
Adorno, Deleuze, Mark Fisher … they’re all guilty really of a failure of perspective. Or of looking in a representational way rather than asking what creativity in a digital world does.
CCK’s films in their content might decry the failures of hyper-capitalism - but in their existence, in their popularity, in the way they make complex ideas relentlessly accessible to digital-age viewers, they are forging spaces of resistance and enabling the new to be made.
They’re brilliant and important.
Go see them.
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Ideas! // Stories from the digital edge
A quick round-up this week.
Congrats to Luke Ritchie, digital pioneer at the London Philarmonia and now heading partnerships at Reactional, which brings adaptive licensed music into games. They’re now fully integrated with Unity - a big leap forward into the ecosystem
I’ve been waiting to see what COSM - the LA immersive venue with aspirations to spread wide and far would look like. Now it’s here, an interesting mix of immersive and streaming - a destination venue to go and watch sports, take in a DJ or more on wrap-around screens.
Last-up, one i’m not sure where to go with. This take on autonomous weapons in warfare will have some knock-on effect into creativity - new ways of seeing, new registers of meaning. War is - sadly - our greatest domain for innovation. This will have spillovers.
Relatively short newsletter this week. Joys of decorating.
We’re coming into summer so August may not see too many newsletters as I to Sri Lanka for a couple of weeks. I’ll see how we go.
Then it’s on to the big 1 year anniversary in September. YEESH - A YEAR!
Big love.