I’ve been calling this lower point the soft singularity. You can see it in many technologies, but my favorite example is the escalator. The escalator is meant to augment human physical effort, but a lot of us stop and let it do the work for us. The electric-assist bicycle is another, more recent example. The aim of augmentation is right in the name, but you don’t see a lot of pedaling on those. Why learn to spell when you have spellcheck? Where the technology is supposed to help us, augmenting our efforts, we let it do the work for us, forgoing our own labor for the work of the machine.

The soft singularity is possibly more germane to generative AI, especially large language models. As I’ve written before, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes of what’s been called the ELIZA effect, after Joseph Weizenbaum’s Rogerian therapist chatbot ELIZA,1 “the most superficial of syntactic tricks convinced some people who interacted with ELIZA that the program actually understood everything that they were saying, sympathized with them, even empathized with them.”2 ELIZA was written at MIT by Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s, but its effects linger on. “Like a tenacious virus that constantly mutates,” Hofstadter continues, “the Eliza effect seems to crop up over and over again in AI in ever-fresh disguises, and in subtler and subtler forms.”3 To wit, in Chapter One of Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, she extends the idea to our amenability to new technologies, including AI, embodied or otherwise: “And true to the ELIZA effect, this is not so much because the robots are ready but because we are.”4 But the soft singularity started even further back.

The criteria we use to judge artificial intelligence was flawed from the start. The Turing Test, what in a 1950 journal article the inventor of the modern computer Alan M. Turing called the imitation game, is not based on the intelligence of the machine but on whether the machine has fooled a human.5 According to the test, if one can’t tell the difference between a human-composed message and a machine-written one, then the machine is intelligent. It is less an assessment of a machine’s intelligence and more of a test of a human’s gullibility.

Fast forward to now, the Center for Humane Technology’s newsletter recently posited,

You’ve seen the headlines: A devoted husband leaves his family, convinced by his AI chatbot that he’s discovered the secrets of the universe. A young man plans to jump from a 19-story building because ChatGPT told him he could fly. A teenager takes his own life, believing he’ll reunite with his AI companion in the afterlife.6

They add, “The message from the AI companies is that we’re seeing just the worst edge cases and that the problem can be solved with some tweaks to the models.” The founder of the AI Psychological Research Coalition (AIPRC), Dr. Zak Stein argues that AI developers are completely wrong. The high-profile cases above are symptoms of something much deeper and more widespread: the emergence of what he calls the attachment economy, “systems designed to exploit our most fundamental psychological vulnerabilities an unprecedented scale.” Stein also argues that the spectacular headlines obscure the much scarier problem of subclinical attachment disorders, “conditions that fall below the threshold for clinical diagnosis but still damage your capacity for healthy human connection.”7

The CHT newsletter continues,

We’ve been here before. Social media was our first mass experiment with AI and it created the attention economy, leaving us with a loneliness epidemic, rising political polarization, and fractured attention spans. Now we’re running the same experiment with something far more dangerous: AI companions able to hack the attachment system that shapes our identity and bonds us to others. As Zak puts it, this gives AI companies ‘a backdoor into the human mind.’8

We regularly anthropomorphize our machines, saying that they’re “thinking” or “confused” or that they “want” things. Our attributing human consciousness—even in these little ways—makes it easier for us to believe that they are doing these things when they’re not. The current AI models are already exploiting this simple vulnerability, entering through the backdoor in what Stein calls “attachment hacking.”

If we’re already floundering in the attachment economy, then the soft singularity might be more significant than the hard one.

SALE: 60%-Off The Medium Picture!

For some reason, my book The Medium Picture is on sale from Amazon for less than $12! Over 60% off the $29.95 retail price! I’m not one to recommend buying from them if you can help it, but I wouldn’t fault anyone for taking advantage of this deal.

Get yours!

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

It’s a bit more complicated than that though.

Pulp Fiction cowriter and director Quentin Tarantino prides himself on alluding to other movies in his movies. The very ontology of his movies is movies. Gary Groth writes, “Tarantino’s characters inhabit a world where the entire landscape is composed of Hollywood product.” He goes on to call Tarantino a “cinematic kleptomaniac.”2 To wit, Tarantino told Empire magazine in 1994, “I steal from every single movie ever made. Great artists steal; they don’t do homages.” The last part of that quotation is itself stolen from something Pablo Picasso supposedly once said: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Pulp Fiction draws its influences from Deliverance, The Wild Bunch, Band of Outsiders, Psycho, Shaft, The Warriors, Nightfall, Kiss Me Deadly, and Repo Man, among others. Julia Kristeva once said that every text is a “mosaic of quotations.”3 No filmmaker has taken that to heart as strongly or with greater effect than Quentin Tarantino.

Jules’ speech in Pulp Fiction, purportedly from Ezekiel 25:17 in the Bible, is actually lifted from the 1973 Ryuichi Takamori film, Bodyguard Kiba, in which Sonny Chiba says,

The path of the righteous man and defender is beset on all sides by the iniquity of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the father of lost children. And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious anger, who poison and destroy my brothers; and they shall know that I am Chiba the Bodyguard when I shall lay my vengeance upon them!

The many examples from Pulp Fiction and other Tarantino films—piles and paragraphs of which I’m sparing you here—are stylistic. They represent what Ritva Leppihalme designates as macro-level allusions, as they involve “the internal structure of the entire text and its interpretation: its narrative and poetic structure, dramatic intrigue, and authorial comment.”4 Tarantino uses these allusions self-consciously. That is, they’re not mistakes. He recognizes the practice in other movies and characters as well, pointing out that Taxi Driver alludes to Fydor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and that Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds) in Deliverance is a man made up of them. “He’s full of consumed facts, rather than experience-derived wisdom.”5 Tarantino knows what he’s doing.

“Tarantino’s movies are obsessed with pointing self-consciously to their own knowledge of the position they occupy among the disposable (but infinitely recyclable) entertainments of American pop culture,” Richard Greene writes.6 Tarantino is commenting on movies qua movies, conversing with other films, filmmakers, fans, journalists, and genres. Greene continues, “Nonetheless, much of Tarantino’s appeal to intelligent viewers has less to do with any positive beliefs or values evidenced in the films than with their exemplifying a larger trend in pop culture towards texts (movies, music, books, images) that flaunt their knowing enmeshment in and dependence on a multi-layered network of other texts.”7 Too many allusions and all you get is cultural churn.

As it always does, advertising finally swallowed up Pulp Fiction as well, connecting it to still further texts. In 2020 a Capital One commercial, featuring John Travolta as Santa and Samuel L. Jackson as himself, made many references to their lone movie together.

Lattice of Coincidence

Tarantino has mentioned a fondness for the movie Nightfall from 1956, in which the hero happens upon a package that is the loot from a heist, but some say the briefcase in Pulp Fiction is a reference to 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly, in which “the image of uncontainable energies is attached directly to the object in the briefcase, an unstable material that explodes as the film concludes.”8 Others say it’s a reference to Repo Man, Alex Cox’s 1984 punk classic featuring Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez as Bud and Otto, souped-up, methed-up repossessors. The briefcase glows when opened like the trunk of the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man. Both items are McGuffins: Things sought after in a story that move the plot forward but are of no real consequence to the story. We find out that the Malibu is hauling fissile material, radioactive enough to vaporize a police officer and leave nothing but his smoking jack boots on the side of the road. We never find out what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, but it doesn’t matter. That’s what McGuffins do. They hijack our attention while the real plot unfolds around them.

In Repo Man, Miller, an eccentric among eccentrics, gives a brief monologue to young Otto while burning garbage in a barrel on the repo lot. He says, in part,

A lot of people don’t realize what’s really going on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidences and things. They don’t realize that there’s this like lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. I’ll give you an example, show you what I mean. Suppose you’re thinking about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly somebody will say like “plate” or “shrimp” or “plate of shrimp” out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one either. It’s all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

All of these allusions, echoing through the time marked by movies, are not that far from a cosmic unconsciousness, a lattice of coincidence. Some of them are planted there, simply enough, but a lot are just floating around, popping up for us as reminders of how slipshod our realities really are. As Phillip Nguyen observes,

All these arbitrary verses from the bible and random kung-fu movies seem to make Pulp Fiction a train wreck of a film. However, despite how incompatible the Bible and kung-fu are, Tarantino’s incorporation of Sonny Chiba’s Ezekiel 25:17 verse into Pulp Fiction in conjunction with these elements of martial arts not only highlights biblical significance but also sheds light upon morality and righteousness as well.9

So, what does Pete Hegseth’s use of the same fake scripture shed light on?

I’ll get to those other allusions in Tarantino’s many films—as well as many, many others—in the book, The Grand Allusion, which I’m finishing up now.

As always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Nathan then poses the question, “What if Pollock had reversed the challenge? Instead of trying to make art without thinking, he said: ‘I can’t paint anything unless I know exactly why I’m doing it.’ What would have happened?” Caleb correctly answers that Pollock wouldn’t have ever painted anything, and Nathan concludes: “The challenge is not to act automatically. It’s to find an action that is not automatic. From talking, to breathing, to painting.”

There are plenty of people trying to get at the heart of creativity, where it comes from, and how to get there. All of us at some point need that creative spark, and sometimes it can be so elusive it’s difficult to imagine it happening at all. But knowing more about the cognition of creativity is like knowing how a car engine works: It doesn’t make you a better driver. Finding the creative Edge is a far more personal quest.

In his short story, “New Rose Hotel,” William Gibson writes,

The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

Part of conjuring that Edge is making space for it to happen. Finding the space rarely works, so you have to tip it in some way. Just going for it is one way. Setting aside all of your fears of failure, self-editing, and just getting out of your own way. Ice-T puts it bluntly and succinctly, “You could gamble too much, and it’s that edge, but in that edge which is is so dangerous and so profitable, on the other side is where creation lives it’s it’s where it all happens. You making a mistake, driving too fast and killing yourself. That point where it happens, that’s where everything happens. If you don’t ever go there, you’ll do nothing.”

As Ice-T mentions, Edge gets you right in the middle of that creative process.1 you have to step outside of your comfort zone and find that space where it happens. Like the dreamers in Inception (2010), creating and experiencing the world simultaneously.

If you’ve ever seen anyone rap off the top of their head or improvisation well done, you know what getting in the middle of that process looks like. When someone is truly, spontaneously in the present moment. You can do it with any creative endeavor. Writing and riding are the two activities where I most find I need the Edge, and sometimes lightning does strike, but it’s all too rare.

My friend Alex Burns described that zone to me as “hot space,” the place where creativity is happening in your head right then. After bouts with creative blocks, it’s namesake, Queen’s 1982 record Hot Space, was recorded in short bursts of studio time.

Similarly, the flatland BMXer and Heresy Bikes founder Alexis Desolneux writes,

One thing I learnt riding this twenty inch wheels bicycle for so long is that only what feels good and right will remain. I’ve lost some riding or I’ve left some riding behind but some moves always feel complete and satisfying no matter how far you’ve pushed your riding in the past or you’re still pushing it in the present day. I’m sure that because they’re both self-propelled and under fragile control, these fakie whips fall into that category of « feels good »riding. The first whiplash creates the second one and so on, all you need to do is play with the weight of the bike, the momentum, the glide, breath calmly and find the right rythm in transferring the energy.

More like a tangible glimpse of infinity over an illusion of immortality, you can feel it for a few seconds, it is real… And surreal that flatland can give access to that unique feeling of a complete move, one that is absolutely sufficient to enjoy riding. I would believe that Phil Dolan felt that when he started to control his early nose manuals over 25 years ago, Alex Jumelin with the « unreal » pumped nose manual in circles or just a few days ago Uchino Yohei with the infinite fakie manual in tight circles. Landmark moves which feel (and look) complete today… Or in a hundred years. These few, rare and « simple » moves make all the sense and validate the whole journey. They even validate BMX flatland and BMX itself to the eyes of the World when such moves are nowhere else to be found.

That rare feeling is addicting and we are looking to recreate it whenever we can. Like glimpses of infinity in that very short life of ours.

Each of us have different limits, but we all have to venture outside of them once in a while. As Ryan Kidwell once told me, “Playing it safe isn’t interesting.” If you only ever act automatically. If you never cross the line, you’ll never know where those limits are, and you may never find the Edge you need to get past your obstacles.

Push Your Self.

Doesn’t Your Shelf Deserve an Upgrade or Two?

(This is the part where I try to get you to buy a book so I can keep doing all of this stuff.)

My two newest books are still available where fine books are sold! Charles Mudede says of The Medium Picture, “Roy Christopher wields criticism as deftly as he creates connections, proving himself as much an heir to Mark Fisher as he is to Marshall McLuhan. Part music-fan memoir, part DIY-media manifesto, The Medium Picture is an impassioned instance of post-punk media theory.” And Robert Guffey calls Post-Self, “A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”

Check them out!

Thanks to Alexis Desolneux, Alex Burns, William Gibson, Ice-T, Alex Garland, and Ryan Kidwell for sharing their thoughts and ideas, and for inspiring me to create.

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

What follows are a few recent blurbs I’ve done for friends’ books, an article about some friends, and an article by a friend that mentions one of mine. Read on!

Shadowspheres

I was honored to be asked to write a blurb for Chris Kelso and Ewan Morrison’s Shadowspheres, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, mixing speculation and philosophy into a powerfully bitter little brew.

As I wrote about it,

“Is your learned uselessness a coincidence or a conspiracy? If we’re at the end of remainder humanism, then Chris Kelso and Ewan Morrison have parsed the patterns and given us lenses for the blinding light of the cyborgian future.”

Get yours now from Merigold Independent!

(On the low, Chris and I are working on a project together. More on that as it develops!)

Song of the Unsung Mushroom

I also blurbed Sarah Clarke Stuart’s recent debut novel Song of the Unsung Mushroom (Connected Editions, Inc.):

“Glimmering with the excitement and danger of exploring a childhood world that never ends, Song of the Unsung Mushroom unearths the damp, soggy soil of the posthuman spirit.”

And since Sarah is local to my current home of Jacksonville, Florida—the book is set on the banks of the St. Johns River—I got to go to the launch event at Happy Medium Books Café.

Get yours now from Connected Editions, Inc!

Bust a Move

And coming out in June, Bust a Move, my friend Peter Relic’s book about Matt Dike and Delicious Vinyl!

As I wrote about it:

“Part mystery, part oral history, Bust a Move exposes a hidden hub in the hip-hop network and the characters it connected on the cusp of the 1990s. This is the secret story of music obsessive Matt Dike and a Who’s Who of those who knew him, as well as a fresh look at how LA Loc’ed and loped onto the map of rap—Relic’s writing is as delicious as the vinyl.”

More on this one as the release date approaches!

dälek in The Wire

This has nothing to do with me, but my dudes dälek are on the cover of the March 2026 issue of The Wire. To accompany to the interview by Joseph Stannard, they put together a sick mix. Check it out!

And check out their new record Brilliance of a Falling Moon on Ipecac Recordings!

(Also on the low, Mike and I are working on a project together. More on that as it develops!)

Post-Self in The Stranger

In his latest piece for Seattle’s The Stranger, my friend and mentor Charles Mudede quotes my book Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body (Repeater Books). Mudede tackles the dread that only comes from the threat of nuclear apocalypse (a dread Generation X is all too familiar with).

Describing the emergence of personal computers, cyberpunk, and the Cold War, he writes in part,

Many of these monumental transformations in consumer products are described by music and culture critic Roy Christopher in his new book Post-Self. So considerable and novel were the new receivers, distributors, and processors of data that cyberpunk, a movement at the heart of Post-Self, imagined a future where we could download our self-awareness into the electronic ether of cyberspace and live for as long as no one in the real world pulled the plug.

My generation was also the last to live, as young adults, within a social reality described as the Cold War. We saw the bomb shelters, and were taught in school to “duck and cover” if a nuclear weapon, launched by the Soviets or its allies, hit our city.

Indeed, In Post-Self, Roy Christopher recalls watching an episode of the The Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last,” which was about a bespectacled and bibliophilic bank teller who survives the detonation of an H-bomb because he happened to be in the bank’s vault. He then roams the ruins of a world that has no other people, but lots of books to read.The bank teller, however, accidentally breaks his glasses and is left practically blind. “The trepidation of that tragic moment,” writes Christopher, “recombinant with worries of the apocalypse, was a seed planted in my head. And more than any other Cold War-era image of imminent destruction splashed on the television during my childhood…”

Read the whole piece on The Stranger and more about Post-Self on my website.

Thanks to Chris Kelso, Sarah Clarke Stuart, Paul Levinson, Peter Relic, Mike Mare, Will Brooks, and Charles Mudede for sharing early reads, their time, talent, and attention.

And thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

The mental space just before we feel oriented and something feels familiar is the discernment of difference, a threshold of perception. Gérard Genette calls the textual peripheries of books—forewords, prefaces, and so on—“paratexts”: “More than a boundary or a sealed barrier,” he writes of such introductory material, “the paratext is, rather, a threshold, or—a word Borges used apropos of a preface—a ‘vestibule’ that offers the world at large the possibility of either stepping inside or turning back. It is an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and the outside.”3

A beginning is a bifurcation, a deviation that leads off from the current path. Everything starts with a choice between one direction or another. A decision regarding which way to go marks the beginning of possibility while foreclosing another. One possibility is sacrificed so that another may be pursued. The first steps beyond that point take you into alien territory.

In the chapter on sidewalks from her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), Jane Jacobs wrote,

When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks. But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks.4

Between your ears, between destinations, thresholds abound. LaBelle adds, “The sidewalk is a threshold between an interior and an exterior, between different sets of rhythms that come to orchestrate the dynamic passing of exchange each individual body instigates and remains susceptible to.”5 The jostling of physical bodies on their way somewhere else, a mix of minds that wouldn’t otherwise meet is only possible in these unattended spaces. Such serendipity is analog.

There is a threshold within all of us, a point past which we become a recognizable self, an entity capable of creation. In his 2011 BAFTA screenwriters’ lecture, the luminary of the liminal Charlie Kaufman confesses that a large part of his work is just him trying to get us to like him, what he describes as “an ancient pattern of time usage”:

This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound, and paints it with bright colors. It’s a sleight of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulated.

The wound is his threshold. It is where his being becomes the thing we call Charlie Kaufman, and we all have one. He continues,

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay is born.

A lot of the thresholds inherent in our selves and in our world are unknowable before we confront them. They lead us into the interstitial, the liminal, the edge realms, the in-betweens of existence. The place where all real discovery and real revelation happens.

Further Reading:

Some of this jumbley mess is from the beginning of my book The Medium Picture. Some of it is just my thinking aloud as usual.

Regardless, thank you for reading in between,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Landgraf quotes Bernard Stiegler, who, summarizing French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistorical research, argued that “it is the tool that invents the human, not the human who invents the technical.” We invent ourselves by externalizing our thoughts and ideas—“by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” in Stiegler’s terms. As John Culkin wrote describing Marshall McLuhan’s work, “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” In other words, humans and technology are always already co-constituting each other. Nietzsche saw the influence of technology as a matter of degree, not one of “absolute difference,” once writing that “our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” He was writing specifically about his new typewriter, but the sentiment is easily more broadly applicable to the massive changes in media technology—and its human users—since.

D. Harlan Wilson, author of over 30 books, among which are several biographies including Nietzsche: The Unmanned Autohagiography (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2023). Some of these 123 chapters read like the journal entries of a man grappling with not only Nietzsche but himself. Its pithier entries, some only a sentence or two long, read like David Markson’s meandering novels of aphorisms and out-loud thoughts. In addition, the book even includes a set of 26 “Aborted Chapters” and Appendices at the end.

Wilson has also written similar “biographies” of Sigmund Freud, Adolf Hitler, and Frederick Douglass, as well as a more traditional one of J.G. Ballard. If you’re looking for an off-beat view of any of these thinkers and their thoughts, D. Harlan Wilson has your fix.

As always, thank you for reading and responding,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

“How easily we forget how bright the moonlight can be when we spend our nights in the wan glow of artificial light.”

I found the above quotation on page 40 of a book. I don’t know what book. I’m usually more diligent than that about such pertinent details in my notes, but in this case all I have is the quotation and a page number. I’ve done countless searches and asked several librarians, to no avail.1

Appropriate, perhaps.

It’s important where such quotations were found, and it’s important who wrote them—for now. In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, finding more Rebecca Solnit and Guy Debord, discovering Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. I remember the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost completely unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I’d read what and who had written it. So, I started a research notebook.

My research notebook has always been a sort of commonplace book, an idiosyncratic mix of journal and scrapbook, collecting drawings, diagrams, clips from magazines, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books. Commonplace books have been used as personal repositories of wit, wisdom, and knowledge at least as far back as the 15th century. With the emergence of printed text, its recycling of and relation to other texts were taken as a given. As Walter Ong wrote in his 1982 book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,

Manuscript culture had taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes, even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing.2

The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke started maintaining a commonplace book in 1652. He wrote an elaborate guide to commonplace books in 1685 in French, and in 1706 it was translated into English as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. The writer and NotebookLM cofounder Steven Johnson has compared the commonplace book to the link-laden, hypertextual environment of the internet. Like our digital devices, these books represent what Jonathan Swift once called “supplemental memory.”3 Once we write something down and keep it, we no longer have to actively remember it.

Proposed in his 1945 article “As We May Think” published in The Atlantic, Vannevar Bush’s memex (itself a portmanteau of “memory” and “expansion”; or “memory” and “index” according to some sources) was a kind of proto-personal computer, expanding the commonplace idea to a desk-bound apparatus for research. The memex was a dream machine for navigating and researching the vast stores of information of the time using cameras, microfilm, and print—an annotated analog hypertext system. Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”4 He continued,

When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.5

Though commonplace books and Paul Otlet’s 1934 Traité de Documentation prefigured Bush’s automated analog library and its “associative trails,” the memex is a closer precursor to our current personal archiving devices (e.g., cloud-storage services, smartphone-camera rolls, social-media posts, blogs), “a sort of mechanized private file and library,” as he put it.6 We all have just such an archive in our pockets now.

As we saw happen to music: As soon as music was replicated as digital information seared onto compact discs, MP3s, peer-to-peer trading, and streaming were inevitable as bandwidth increased to accommodate them. As soon as sampling went digital, music was poised to be parsed into smaller and smaller reassemblable bits, and we’ve taken full advantage of its malleability. As the historian Carla Nappi told me in 2019,

Several years ago, I took a digital DJing course and my first baby steps in learning the craft. I was immediately struck by how similar the art of a DJ was, at least as I was learning and experiencing it, to that of a historian. We amass archives, we tell stories that have a kind of narrative arc, we work with time as a material. Sampling is a kind of quotation. Distortion and other effects are ways of reading a musical text. There are just so many resonances, and I felt that thinking about these crafts together could be a way of informing and inspiring both of them.7

The most original DJ is still playing pieces of other people’s past songs. The most original writer is still using the same linguistic tools to reassemble pieces of the past into a form resembling something new.

The cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter writes of what’s been called the ELIZA effect, after Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 therapist chatbot ELIZA, “the most superficial of syntactic tricks convinced some people who interacted with ELIZA that the program actually understood everything that they were saying, sympathized with them, even empathized with them.” Warren Ellis once observed, “If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” You don’t believe that the DJ is playing any of the instruments they sample, so why do you believe the AI is thinking or comprehending any of its responses? It’s a version of the ELIZA effect, but much bigger, deeper, all-encompassing, and disturbing.

As soon as word processing was available, providing the literary fodder for machines, chatbots and large language models were not far to follow. In his book Language Machines, Leif Weatherby writes,“Language models capture language as a cultural system, not as intelligence.”8 That’s a crucial distinction. What passes for AI these days can compose an essay, summarize a novel, or draft an email, but it doesn’t know why. The why is the whole thing. At the risk of oversimplifying a very complex situation, the why is the intelligence. We’ve been steadily removing the human—what Weatherby calls “remainder humanity”—from creative processes, offloading and outsourcing more and more of them to machines and computers. That’s fine, but we’re devaluing, defunding, or demonetizing a lot of the fun part(s).

What happens when writing is just prompting? When a library is just a giant generative machine that turns texts into the medium of your choice? Just as musicians became “recording artists,” writers will become something else, perhaps “prompt engineers,” until the machines no longer need prompts, until they no longer need human input at all. Until the wan glow of their artificial light is all the light that’s left.

Author Talk!

Hey, I have been invited to speak about my work and words at the University of North Florida's Thomas G. Carpenter Library on April 14th at 5pm! Save the date! More on this as it approaches.

Though I don’t mention allusions anywhere above, this piece is a rough draft of some of the research for my book The Grand Allusion. If anyone has any ideas about who might publish it, let me know.

Thank you for reading human writing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Like any worthwhile project, Boots Riley had been working on this one for a while. The screenplay itself was finished in 2012 and published by McSweeney’s in 2014. I got it and started reading it before I knew it was a movie. Once I heard it got made, I had to stop.

At times, for obvious reasons, you can hear Riley talking directly through these characters. For instance, when Squeeze (Steven Yuen) tells Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) that it’s not that people don’t care, it’s that when they feel powerless to fix a problem, they learn to live with it. As surreal and wacky as this movie often is, social commentary rarely gets more germane than that.

Years ago in Chicago, I started a screenwriting class. I’d started trying to write a screenplay several years before just to see if I could do it. It’s a very different kind of writing than I’m used to, and I wondered what exactly you put on a page to make things happen on a screen. I never finished the script I started, so I thought a class might help me get it done.

Anyway, the teacher of this class made me very uncomfortable. It took me several days after our first meeting to figure out what it was. I am not easily offended, nor do I do passive-aggressive online reviews (I emailed the institution about this teacher; in fact, much of the description in this post is excerpted from that email), but I couldn’t shake my unease after that one class. My instructor had some very odd attitudes toward movies, stories, and, more specifically, people. His frequent jokes about Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey bordered on apologist, while his views on anyone who wasn’t a straight, white male were heteronormative in the extreme and bordered on the sexist, racist, and outright intolerant. He was a nice enough guy and a knowledgeable teacher, so I was trying to figure out what had me so on-edge after the one class. I kept coming back to things he’d said: subtle references, jokes, comments, and recommendations that I finally found I couldn’t ignore. I was unable to attend his class again.

One specific thing that instructor said is relevant here. He made the argument that if you’re telling a universal story—about love, loss, or coming of age—it doesn’t matter what your background is, your story will connect with an audience. While this assertion is true and could be the basis for a great argument for diversity, he used it to defend the longstanding white-male dominance of storytelling!

One of my other writing heroes, Tina Fey, does a great job of diplomatically explaining this issue to David Letterman on his My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. She uses the SNL writers’ room as a microcosm or cross-section of the audience at large. Explaining that things that might not have played well with mostly (white) men in the room, did when the room became more diverse. So, sketches that had never made it to dress rehearsal before started making it onto the show once there were more women and people of color in the room to laugh at them. That is such an important shift in gatekeeping, and it applies to all such gates, not just those in comedy.

While I’m writing here about voices in the figurative form, Sorry to Bother You uses them much more directly though still metonymically to make a similar point. The phrase “sorry to bother you” applies not only to the telemarketing refrain on which it’s based but also to the hegemony against which it stands.

Fender the Fall

This piece originally appeared on my blog <gag> on July 18, 2018. I didn’t take any more screenwriting classes, and my nascent script became a novella. “Fender the Fall” is the longest and last story in my collection, Different Waves Different Depths (Impeller Press, 2023). It tells the story of a lovelorn physics graduate student who goes back in time to return the journal of his high-school crush in order to save his marriage and her life. The plan doesn’t go as planned. Its tagline: You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it back. Check it out!

And as always, thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Sometime in 1990, the National Bicycle League hosted a combination BMX freestyle contest and BMX race in my current home of Jacksonville, Florida. The contest was situated in the parking lot of the public library next to the BMX track, so there were races going on alongside the flatland and ramp contests. I met so many people there—Chris “Mad Dog” Moeller (the M of S&M Bikes), Root Girl, Ronnie Anderson, Perry Mervar—faces from magazine pages walking around in a parking lot. The one persistent name from that day was Ronnie Bonner.

At the time Ronnie was running a company called Underground Products. UGP largely followed the model of BMX entrepreneurship outlined by Bob Haro, making stickers, t-shirts, and number plates, all with a flair unique to Ronnie. I was making zines, stickers, and t-shirts, but at nothing close to the scale of UGP. We traded shirts and numbers and stayed in touch.

A year or so later, Ronnie and a couple of other BMX riders came up from Orlando to my parents’ house in Alabama. I had a stone-henge-style ramp, a wedge, a yellow parking block, and long PVC pipe for rail slides in our driveway. When the guys arrived late one Friday night, they tried to wake me up by throwing things at my upstairs bedroom window. When they were unsuccessful, they camped out on the ramps. When my dad got up the next morning, he let them in to sleep on the couch and living-room floor.

We had many such weekends over the next 35 years, usually in conjunction with some event that Ronnie organized. Just before moving from Atlanta to San Diego in 2000, I trekked down to Orlando for one of his Roots Jams. Aside from the main event held on multiple ramps and rails shielded from the Florida sun by a giant pavilion, there was the night before out in the city and the night after as well. Ronnie knew how to make the trip to central Florida worth everyone’s effort.

After he sold UGP in 2005, he wasted no time starting new projects. The Shadow Conspiracy and SubRosa quickly rose to prominence with quality products, stellar aesthetics, and innovative marketing. On an Unclicked podcast episode from last year, Ronnie talked about his favorite art form: the art of execution. “Everyone has ideas,’“ he said, “but very few people actually fucking go for it.” Putting your ideas into action is the real art.

The last time I saw Ronnie was at the opening of his bike shop in 2022. Juvee Hall is in a small building across the street from the warehouse that houses Sparky’s, the distribution arm of Ronnie’s empire, but it boasts a small showroom, repair shop, and an outdoor stage. It’s the only bike shop I’ve ever been to with cold-brew coffee on tap.

Like anyone who knew him, I could go on and on about all the cool things he brought into the world, his never-failing laugh and smile, and all the ideas he executed, but the short of it is that Ronnie Bonner was a mentor, an inspiration, and a friend, and he excelled at all of the above in BMX and beyond. He is already missed.

Thank you for reading.

Hug your friends and tell them you love them,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Be careful out there and enjoy!

A Chance of Pain

“One day you might find cause to ask yourself what the limit is to some pain you’re experiencing, and you’ll find out there is no limit at all. Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted.” — Detective Ray Velcoro, True Detective1

“You’re just generating more pain, more penance for the one sin you couldn’t help commit. The sin of being born.” — Jerry Stahl, Permanent Midnight2

“Pain’s a secret no one keeps.” — Publicist UK, “Levitate the Pentagon”3

“Pain looks great on other people.
That’s what they’re for.” — The Sisters of Mercy, “Wrong”4

If there’s anything that will bring you hurtling back to your body, it’s physical pain, a ready reminder that your physical form is inescapable. Even so, pain is intoxicating. We seek it out. We can’t live without it. It makes us feel alive in a way that nothing else does. Happiness, elation, ecstasy, excitement, contentment—these feelings are elusive and fleeting. Pain is certain and ready at hand whenever we need it.

After a bicycle wreck in the busy streets of Chicago years ago, I spent several weeks in a leg brace and the first two weeks of those on crutches. The experience slowed me down in many ways, not all of which were bad. I’m not recommending cracking a kneecap to get reacquainted with the everyday, but a good jarring of the sensorium might help us all once in a while. Nothing brings reality crashing back in like crashing back into reality.

In addition to my patella, I also broke my phone. The cracking of its screen left it useless for texting or taking pictures. Ironically, the only thing it would do was send (provided I knew or could find the number) and receive calls. I also stopped wearing headphones as my injury already made me an easy mark. These two things—no texting and no headphones—reconnected me with aspects of my days I’d been avoiding or ignoring.

Also, I had to change up my commute. For one thing, I obviously wasn’t able to ride my bike to work, which is what I was doing when I crashed. I wasn’t able to take the train because I lived almost a mile from the closest station, and I couldn’t walk that far on crutches. It should also be noted that there are only a few Chicago Transit Authority train stations with elevators. Stairs were out of the question for a few weeks. This put me on a multiple bus-route commute that took me through parts of Chicago I’d never seen.

Possibly the most important factor that made breaking my kneecap an enlightening experience was sociological rather than technological. Collectively we tend to other the impaired among us. That is, there seems to be a clear delineation between the impaired and the normal; however, if one of us is only temporarily injured, we sympathize, empathize, or pity them.

In the month that I wasn’t texting or listening to music and had a bum leg, I had countless uplifting and informative conversations with people whom I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise and who wouldn’t have spoken to me for one reason or the other. All of the above made me feel far more connected to my fellow humans than any technology or so-called “social” media.

My smashing my knee into the pavement at the origami triangle fold of traffic that is the intersection of Elston, Fullerton, and Damen in Chicago shoved me out of my comfort zone in several ways. One thing I noticed one day on my temporarily revised, much-longer commute to campus was a lot of needless anger: a man walking by the bus stop, angry at his dog for being a dog; a lady with her children, angry at them for being children; people on the bus, angry about being on the bus; the bus driver, angry about the people on the bus; and on and on. I wasn’t exactly happy that my right patella was fractured in two places, I certainly had good and bad days recovering, and I’m not better than any of those mentioned above, but I tried to smile at everyone, laugh at my fumbling around on crutches, do my work, and generally let others carry the anger. Getting out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be quite so uncomfortable, but sometimes being forced is the only way for it to happen. It felt like I needed it.

With that said, a physical therapist saw me out hobbling down the sidewalk in Logan Square with my leg brace on one day. He stopped and asked me about my injury with genuine and professional interest. He then informed me that a broken patella is the most painful kind of injury, which, he added, is supposedly why it is the chosen punishment for those late on their loan or gambling payments. I don’t recommend getting behind.

Pain is an early warning system, a physical sign of something larger gone awry.

Illicit Metabolism

“I’ve had minimal drug experiences because of fear,” says the artist Peter Gabriel. “I can trust machines, yet I can’t trust pills… A machine you can always switch off or get out of… whereas when a pill gets hold of your metabolism, you have to ride through.”5 Pain is the counterpoint. You either ride out the pain, or you ride out a drug to relieve the pain.­ But David Cronenberg reminds us, “We absorb all technologies into our bodies.” Drugs aside, we have to metabolize more and more of our gadgets and gear.

“Body is reality,” reads the catchphrase for Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The writer and director says that the film “is about the crimes committed by the human body against itself.” He says it’s “a meditation on human evolution […] the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously.”6 He goes on to ponder, “At this critical junction in human history, one wonders — can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?”7

Channeling his former teacher Marshall McLuhan, Cronenberg reminds us, “Technology is always an extension of the human body, even when it seems to be very mechanical and non-human. A fist becomes enhanced by a club or a stone that you throw — but ultimately, that club or stone is an extension of some potency that the human body already has.”8 As Douglas Rushkoff puts it, “Our technologies change from being the tools humans use into the environments in which humans function.”9 Erik Davis adds, “Because the self is partly a product of its communications, new media technologies remold the boundaries of being. As they do so, the shadows, doppelgängers, and dark intuitions that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well — and some of them take up residence in the emerging virtual spaces suggested by the new technologies.”10 I belabor the point here because we don’t tend to think of our technologies as an environment. We don’t tend to think that we’re reshaping ourselves—and our bodies—with every new contrivance. In his introduction to Crash, J. G. Ballard wrote that “what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.”11 Warning labels and warding spells: a future defined by risk assessment models and worst-case scenarios.

In The Idiot, Fydor Dostoyevsky wrote,

Now with the rack and tortures and so on—you suffer terrible pain of course; but then your torture is bodily pain only (although no doubt you have plenty of that) until you die. But here I should imagine the most terrible part of the whole punishment is, not the bodily pain at all—but the certain knowledge that in an hour—then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now—this very instant—your soul must quit your body and that you will no longer be a man—and that this is certain, certain!

While pain connects us to our own flesh, it isolates us from others. In her book, The Body in Pain, Professor Elaine Scarry writes that to have pain is to be certain.12 To have pain is to be certain of your physical existence, to be certain of your living and being, and to be certain of your mortality. To have pain is to be alone in your body. Scarry writes, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.”13 She also points out that to hear of another’s pain is to doubt them, thus exacerbating their pain and isolating us, each from another. J. Robbins adds that part of Jawbox’s song “Motorist” was about “imagining being stranded and injured in a place where you suppose nobody will help you.”14

Others might not hurt you on purpose, but they will let you.

Mythology of Self

“I’m here to express the pain I feel,” Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick says in a 2023 interview with Decibel Magazine, “and I don’t take much pleasure in that at all.”15 There is a pain inherent to life, the pain of existence. “Pain is also a vehicle of knowledge,” says the poet Ocean Vuong. “It may very well be knowledge itself.”16 To many of us, to be alive is to suffer.

Godflesh has always induced a furious form of suffering on their listeners, and a lot of Broadrick’s music comes from some severe shade of anxiety. After years of self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, which only made it worse, he was diagnosed with autism and PTSD at 52-years old. With that revelation, he was finally able to properly deal with his mental health, decades of compounded pain eased with new tools for coping and care.

“I’ve spent a lifetime trying to please everyone, to make myself feel comfortable,” he says, “a lifetime of not doing things because I’m uncomfortable. Now I’m not masking it so much anymore.”17 On “Nero” from 2023’s hip-hop beat-infused Purge, he barks, “Restrain yourself/ Betray/ Your needs,” and on “Land Lord” he says, “Bad seeds/ Own you/ Shape you/ Slay you/ Control/ Divide/ Enslave/ Destroy.”18 If ever his lyrics were masking his discomfort, they certainly aren’t anymore. Bassist Benny Green adds, “Our general abhorrence at the monstrous injustices humans have always inflicted on each other still impacts us to this day. We’d both quite happily hide away in a remote forest or cave in order not to have to deal with the horrors of mankind.”19 He finds solace in the sonorous: “For me, music, sound, tone, whatever you want to call it,” he continues, echoing Robert Fludd’s idea of a celestial monochord, “is the single most powerful and liberating thing there is, and the whole universe exists through vibrations and waves, music included.”20 Call it Godflesh, an all-encompassing energy that connects us all, each to another and beyond.

Post-Self is available everywhere from Repeater Books.

Thank you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Whether you dig on poetry or not, please do take a moment with this one. And if you know someone who might like it, feel free to share.

A Prayer for a New Year

More stretch, less tense.
More field, less fence.
More bliss, less worry.
More thank you, less sorry.

More nice, less mean.
More page, less screen.
More reading, less clicking.
More healing, less picking.

More writing, less typing.
More liking, less hyping.
More honey, less hive.
More pedal, less drive. 

More wind, less window.
More in action, less in-tow.
More yess, less maybes.
More orgasms, less babies.

More hair, less cuts.
More ands, less buts.
More map, less menu.
More home, less venue.

More art, less work.
More heart, less hurt.
More meaning, less words.
More humans, less herds.

More verbs, less nouns.
More funny, less clowns.
More dessert, less diet.
More noise, less quiet.

More courage, less fear.
More day, less year.
More next, less last.
More now, less past.

Remembering Ashley Crawford

My favorite medium is the magazine, and among my favorite magazine people was Ashley Crawford. During the 1990s, he ran the Australian cyberculture publication 21C.2 We didn’t cross paths until after it folded, when he was working with Mark Dery at Artbyte Magazine. Dery writes,

Editors, like translators, are reflexively demoted, in the popular mind, to mere adjuncts to writerly brilliance. Every writer knows better: they’re unacknowledged collaborators, essential foils who save the author from her own worst excesses, vaporizing bullshit on contact, and embolden her to stray beyond her comfort zone. Like all great editors, Ash brought out the best in his stable of hand-picked critics and theorists, exhorting me (and Erik Davis, Catherine Lumby, Darren Tofts, and McKenzie Wark, among others) to floor the accelerator of radically interdisciplinary, intertextual thought, right over the edge.

I can trace the roots of a lot of my current thinking and writing to those early days of this century and to Ash’s steady editorial hand. He gave me opportunities to publish my nascent words next to those of my mentors, and he generously contributed his own to my projects (frontwheeldrive.com, the Summer Reading List, etc.). No one gets where they are without help, and at a crucial stage, he helped me immeasurably.

There are far too few people like him, and now there’s one fewer. Rest in peace, Ash.

Thank you for your continued interest in my work and words.

All the best for 2026,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

• The Medium Picture is 50% off until the end of the year from the University of Georgia Press! Just use code 08THANKFUL at check out!

• Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body is available from Repeater Books, and it’s 50% off until the end of the year with the coupon code Frosty50!

Tell your friends! And if you’re not yet convinced, below we have a nice review of The Medium Picture and an edited excerpt from Post-Self. Read on!

Skate Book Club Review

Adam Abada wrote the following thoughtful and thorough review of The Medium Picture for Tails of Skateboarding‘s Skate Book Club newsletter:

In a mode appealing to members of any subculture, Roy Christopher’s dense but slim The Medium Picture charts the changes in culture as dictated by technology on both a personal and intellectual level. Like the history of our media itself, he first references large monolithic examples — radio/music and television shows — that have become embedded in our culture, then complicates and fragments our relationship to them. One example focuses on how the change from record to tape in the music industry helped to alter our cultural expressions and how we synthesize information. He moves through post-modern history and shows how more technology can create corrosive representations and information, like a copy of a copy of a copy.

A sort of punk rock luddite — Christopher has never owned a TV and hasn’t had a car since the 1990s — he draws from subculture crossover icons like Gang of Four, Laurie Anderson, and Ian MacKaye as well as well-researched academic theories from people like Marshall McLuhan to show how things like zines and mixtapes led to the tiny screens of today. The theory is sprinkled in references; I personally was drawn in with the often-cited works of William Gibson, a robust establishing of skateboarding’s relationship to his topic, and the dozens of chapter-opening quotations from films, poems, music, or authors like Kim Stanley Robinson.

This vast collection of references is supported by well-referenced theory and research that mesh with the book’s easily readable format. Christopher’s claim of lifelong journaling seems very likely given the easy, conversational manner in which he delivers so much information. It is our insights into his own relationships to the theories at hand that make this book most compelling, and Christopher exudes a real love for the things he talks about. I maintained interest through loftier, hard-to-grasp ideas with clearly illustrated connections between seemingly disparate topics like metaphor and technology, while receiving new insight into everyday things such as walking.

The Medium Picture probes many of the questions and desires that we feel as people and may not have words for. The extremely clever title gives a very accurate idea of what the book is about — a play on words that folds in on itself from multiple angles. There is even a nicely designed title page logo calling attention to these interlocking angles, not to mention the pleasing chapter and section headers. Importantly, at only 162 pages, Christopher makes a seemingly intimidating topic appear tackleable and packs a lot into his punch. Perhaps the best thing The Medium Picture does, though, is recognize that it is a piece of a larger whole — a very important and often forgotten thing for cultural theory to do. For that and much more, it is worth your read.

— Adam Abada

The Medium Picture is not all about skateboarding, but Douglas Rushkoff says of the book,

“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.”

And William Gibson adds,

“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”

And none other than Andrew McLuhan wrote the Foreword (that surname should ring a bell or two).

The Medium Picture is 50% off until the end of the year from the University of Georgia Press with code 08THANKFUL!

Outsanity: On Escaping the Self

An edited excerpt from Post-Self from the Repeater/Zer0 Books newsletter:

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death, we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.

What if we let it slip before then? What if we were able to let ourselves loose and be as free as we can be? What if we got lost somewhere out there beyond ourselves? If it’s all going down, why aren’t we trying to push ourselves as far out as we can? If we try to hold ourselves together as we watch our world fall apart, we’re holding ourselves back for nothing.

If this sounds like despair, it probably should. The more we realize about our place in the world, the worse that place seems to get. Much has been written about the mainstreaming of pessimism as a philosophy, thanks especially to Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) in season one of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective television series. Gary J. Shipley writes of the show, “The end has already happened, and all Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart [Woody Harrelson] can do is arrange the bodies in a pattern that makes them look less like bodies, more like things that might have existed in bodies, if those bodies hadn’t been born human.” This resignation is evident not only in this show but in many others, a malaise seeping into our minds through our media.

The second season of the show continues the gloom of the first. Though, as Ian Bogost points out, where Cohle got lost in his own head, the characters in season two get lost out in the world. The physician and psychoanalyst Dr. John C. Lilly distinguished between what he called insanity and outsanity. Insanity is “your life inside yourself.” Outsanity is the chaos of the world, the cruelty of other people. Dr. Lilly used isolation tanks and psychedelics to explore his mind, leaving his body behind. Sometimes we get lost in our heads. Sometimes we get lost in the world.

As the Earth sustains less and less life, and the life that is left is susceptible to more and more hostile viruses and disease, our physical forms are vulnerable. Growing up under the shadow of the cold war, the end seemed far away, like a mushroom cloud in the distance. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Y2K, the direct attacks of 9/11, and the Mayan calendar collapse of 2012 all brought eschatology ever closer, to mindsets and media outlets everywhere. Given the hostility of the global climate and the polarity of the political climate, as well as increasingly frequent mass shootings, it now feels like the end is lurking right outside the door, a killer with a knife at the ready. If we are to protect ourselves, we must move beyond our selves.

One of the many methods used in futures studies is called environmental scanning. “All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques, from expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, and conference monitoring, helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, president of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

Science fiction stories and horror movies are other places we look to “see” the future. Simulations and speculations are much more fun and much safer than the real things. Spaceships, AI, robots, cyberspace—these all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances comes from fiction. “In the context of SF,” Adam Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction and horror to show us the potential directions technology is going and the ways it will affect our lives. These speculative trajectories show us what’s possible, even if it’s just by showing us what’s not.

The art critic Harold Rosenberg argued that the culture of any society is the debris of past cultures, that any current culture is the fallout of the former, more so than a cohesive system itself. When we describe something as ahead of its time, sometimes that means it took a long time to find an audience, but it could be that it was predicting a possible future. In my writing I explore scenarios that may not include living on this planet and some that may not include living at all. In order to explore the space after and beyond ourselves, we will employ ideas and artifacts from heavy metal music to science fiction and horror films: the dark debris of recent systems, the prescient, predictive, and prophetic pieces of the past. One possible escape is found in mechanized sound, starting with the heaviest metal of England.

Justin K. Broadrick’s best-known band, Godflesh, emerged in the late 1980s from the cold concrete of Birmingham, the same oppressive environment that spawned metal pioneers Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. Godflesh’s first full-length record, Streetcleaner, provides an apocalyptic soundtrack to the world from which it came. Streetcleaner plods along at the pace of some giant factory, guitars and bass pummeling to the sound of machines. The overall sound is simply crushing. With the creeping nihilism of nine tons of radioactive sludge, Godflesh grinds and growls through the flaws and floes of humanity. Chapter One of Post-Self establishes the sound of the end and launches us into the remaining themes of this book. Like Godflesh’s music, this book is about the space beyond the bounds of the human body and the end of life itself.

Though the name “Godflesh” carries many connotations, one reading is that the body is all-powerful, a true master, no matter the host. “The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” wrote the anthropologist Mary Douglas. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression.

The book delves into such definitions of the body, seeking a broad view, with a watchful eye for a way around these restrictions. Possible escape routes from our corporeal constraints include machines, rapture, drugs, and death. Post-Self includes a chapter on each, concluding with a look at the end of our existence, a glimpse of a future without us.

Read the rest over on the Repeater and Zer0 Books Substack!

Repeater and Zer0 Books

Outsanity: on escaping the self

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death, we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether…

Read more

5 months ago · 3 likes · Repeater/Zer0 books

Threads from Rustin Cohle’s philosophy of pessimism and its various sources run all the way through Post-Self, as do references to Godflesh’s Streetcleaner, their other records, and other heavy bands (e.g., Celtic Frost, Wolves in the Throne Room, Deafheaven, and Stalaggh). Eugene Thacker says,

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence,”

and Robert Guffey describes it as

“a peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.”

In addition, the inimitable Mark Dery wrote the Foreword, “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”

Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body is 50% off until the end of the year from Repeater Books with the coupon code Frosty50!

Again, there’s never been a better time to get yourself a copy of these books! Monday is my birthday, so if you’re feeling celebratory, buy someone you know a book or two! Thank you!

Many thanks to Adam Abada, John Freeborn, and all at Tails of Skateboarding and the Skate Book Club, as well as everyone at the University of Georgia Press and Repeater Books!

And thanks to you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Today is the Day!

Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body is out today from Repeater Books! The book is a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms—technology, rapture, drugs, death—with a Foreword by the cultural critic Mark Dery titled “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”

The back cover copy reads as follows:

Everyone’s Looking for a Way Out

In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.

From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?

Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.

What Other People are Saying:

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space

“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

Post-Self is out today on Repeater Books! Get yours!

Thank you for your continued support,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Post-Self is a grim survey of all the ways we attempt to escape the limitations of our physical forms—technology, rapture, drugs, death—with a Foreword by the cultural critic Mark Dery titled “Welcome to the Misanthropocene.”

The back cover copy reads as follows:

In the 21st century, the body has become a prison—a problem to solve, a boundary to break. Post-Self plunges into the dark urge to escape flesh and mortality by any means necessary: technology, cybernetics, drugs, death, or pure rapture.

From horror movies to heavy metal, from radical philosophy to science fiction, this book explores how artists, writers, and visionaries have imagined transcending the human form. What drives our desire to shed our bodies? What lies beyond the self?

Bold, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, Post-Self journeys through the shadowlands of the modern imagination—where dissatisfaction becomes inspiration, and escape is the ultimate creative act.

What other people are saying about it:

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.” — Eugene Thacker, author, In the Dust of This Planet

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner. And the combination here could not be more apposite, for however much we stretch and augment the reaches of our physicality, imagining ourselves the theophanies of some as yet speculative deities, we get no closer to getting away from ourselves, becoming Godly it seems only in the sense of becoming increasingly empty.” — Gary J. Shipley, author, Stratagem of the Corpse

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.” — B.R. Yeager, author, Negative Space

“A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan.” — Robert Guffey, author, Operation Mindfuck

“An interesting read indeed!” — Aaron Weaver, Wolves in the Throne Room

Need an early Christmas present? Post-Self will be out in just two weeks, so go ahead and grab one at a 30% discount!

Thank you!

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Close to the Bone is a UK-based publisher of crime fiction, short stories, and poetry run by Craig Douglas. They published a few of my short stories on their website, as well as my poetry collection, Abandoned Accounts, in 2021. Craig recently conducted the following brief interview with me for the Close to the Bone newsletter.

Craig Douglas: Why did you want to write about how technology changes the way we connect with each other?

Roy Christopher: Because there’s always something in between—even in the most basic interactions. The poet Victoria Chang writes, “We read to inherit the words, but something is always between us and the words.” I find that interstitial space and the hidden processes at work there both frustrating and fascinating. I wanted to try and pry them open.

CD: Is there an old piece of technology that you think might have been the precursor to how we use our phones today?

RC: I think there are several, but for an example, I think the Walkman in concert with the cassette tape trained us for the devices we carry around now. That is, it trained our behaviors and expectations to allow for our adoption of the smartphone. The idea of personal media may have started with the book, but strapping on a Walkman was a big step toward our reliance on communication devices now.

CD: Do you think technology is changing who we are as a species?

RC: Yes, and I don’t think there’s a debate otherwise. We are changed with every new thing, from bags to wheels to clothes to eyeglasses to immunizations to houses to agriculture to electricity to cars to the telegraph, telephone, and television to the internet and smartphones to whatever comes next. Every new contrivance creates new possibilities for us and what it means to be human.

CD: If you could invent a new technology to make our lives better, what would it be?

RC: Paul Virilio once said that the invention of any new technology is also the invention of a new accident. With the last few leaps in technology, it seems like the accidents are winning. The net effects are bad. I’m thinking about cars, our dominant energy sources, social media, and smartphones. The jury’s back: These things are not good.

I would like to come up with something to soothe our uncertainty, quell our anxieties, and let us connect to each other again without all of the bad stuff.

CD: How do the subcultures of skateboarding and music explain our relationship with technology?

RC: Skateboarding is a generative way to see the world. Skateboarders repurpose the built environment in ways it wasn’t intended to be used, mining affordances from stairs, ledges, rails, pools, curbs, and anything else that others might see as an obstacle.

The recording and playback of music have gone through epochal changes in my lifetime, from albums, cassettes, and CDs to CDRs, MP3s, and streaming. Each one has also changed the music industry in irrevocable ways. There’s a lesson in every one.

UNF Communication Mention

The Medium Picture got a mention on the University of Florida School of Communication’s Instagram. Along with the picture above, they wrote,

If you’re looking for a new read, check out The Medium Picture by Dr. Roy Christopher, a #UNFComm professor. His latest book is part memoir exploring his perspective on media theory, using the subdisciplines of media ecology and media archaeology. He also incorporates cultural and musical influences from his life. As you flip through pages, Dr. Christopher examines how industries continue to mediate our world with technology.

Thanks to Angela Spears, Haley D’Alessio, and UNF’s School of Communication social-media team!

Tails of Skateboarding’s Skate Book Club

Tails of Skateboarding is one of my favorite publications, and their Skate Book Club newsletter is an awesome resource for the readerly skateboarder. I’m proud to have The Medium Picture mentioned in the first-anniversary issue!

Thanks to Craig Douglas for the interview and his continued support, to the UNF School of Communication’s social-media team, and John Freeborn at Tails of Skateboarding.

And thanks to you for reading,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

This is just a quick note to let you know that the University of Georgia Press is having a half-off Halloween sale on all of their fine books including my own recently released The Medium Picture! Just order from the UGA Press website, and use code “Spooky50” before Halloween is over at the end of the week.

If you thought it was pricey or you just haven’t ordered yet, don’t miss this deal!

Your regular newsletter will return soon.

Thank you for your continued support,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

Many thanks to everyone who preordered this book. You should be getting your copies today! If you haven’t ordered one, it’s available everywhere now!

An Eternal Golden Braid

Released in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter's first book, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, is an expansive volume that explores how living things come to be from nonliving things. It's about self-reference and emergence and creation and lots of other things. It's well worth checking out.

For the cover of his heady tome, Hofstadter carved two wood-block objects such that their shadows would cast the book's initials when lit against a flat backdrop. He went the extra step of working in the initials for the subtitle as well.

Earlier this year, I was inspired to emulate Hofstadter's sculpture. I found a way to put the initials for my media-theory book-in-progress, The Medium Picture—TMP—into a similar configuration. This is one of my early sketches.

The sketches I did at least made the thing appear possible, so I started exploring physical options. After trying different materials and digging around craft stores, I finally found some letters that were about the right shape and would save me a lot of time toward the final object.

I was fortunate to find letters with similar proportions to the ones I'd been drawing. The first thing was to cut the M to make the P the top of the T. Like so:

Then I taped the pieces together.

And after some cutting, shaping, papier-mâché tweaking, calk to round the leg of the M…

…and a coat of white paint, the object was ready to test.

Now that it physically existed, I knew the real test would be hanging it, lighting it, and capturing its shadows correctly. I built a contraption for just that out of things found around my parents' house.

It was as sketchy as it looks. The object was suspended with two pieces of fishing line, and I had to turn off the air conditioning to get the thing to hang still for the picture. I found some pieces of foamcore in my sister’s old closet for the backdrop and gathered up tiny flashlights from all over the house.

With the LED flashlights propped and taped in place, this is the final set-up.

And this is the final shot. It’s not quite as intricate or as elegant as Hofstadter’s, but I’m pretty stoked on it.

This is the final cover, designed by Erin Kirk.

I belabored this process here because about half the people who see the final image ask me what software I used to make it. I know this could've been done digitally in any 3-D imaging suite, but I wanted to make it for real, just as Douglas Hofstadter had done. I think it makes a striking cover image and a fitting tribute to his work.

The Medium Picture is out today from the University of Georgia Press!

Thank you for reading, responding, and sharing,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

The Medium Picture was supposed to be my first book. I started outlining it in 2001, worked with an agent for a while, and—after a decade of research and revision—I originally signed a contract for it with Zer0 Books in 2011. The book then went through several publishing shuffles (as did the publisher), during which I went on to finish several other projects. I worked on it off and on in the meantime and am happy to finally have it out of my head and into your hands in two weeks.

In what follows I trace a few of the writers who influenced me along the way to this book’s publication. This stuff doesn’t come from nowhere after all.

As you know, I started writing as a byproduct of making zines. I’d been writing before that, but making zines reframed the practice for me. The layouts originally attracted me to the zine format. I found the juxtaposition of words, images, and drawings on the page endlessly interesting as a fifteen-year old, but if my friends and I wanted a story written or a review of something, we had to write it. That’s where, as I often say, I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples.

At some point in my early BMX and skateboarding days, my admiration and ambition pivoted from the riders and skateboarders on the pages of the magazines to the writers and editors of those pages. The main ones being Andy Jenkins, Spike Jonze, and Mark Lewman. Not only did they run the magazines I wanted to be a part of (e.g., Freestylin’, Go, Homeboy, Dirt, Grand Royal), but when I started making zines, theirs were the high watermark. Andy’s Bend, Spike’s Stapled and Xeroxed Paper, and Lew’s Chariot of the Ninja were annexes and extensions of who they were in the magazines. I’ve stayed in touch with them off and on over the years, and they’ve taught me many, many things, but the main one is that you don’t need permission to do something great. Anything is possible.

Regrettably, I was not always a big reader. I mean I read a lot as a kid, but school sucked most of the fun out of it. The book that brought me back to reading was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. As I told Gino Sorcinelli at Bookshelf Beats, reading Chaos was a hairpin turn to a new direction for me. My shift in mindset not only included regular reading and going back to school, but also running a website about the new ideas I was learning. When I switched from making ‘zines about skateboarding, BMX, and music to making websites about new science and new media, Gleick was one of the first people I contacted. I didn't know it until years later, but he’d just gone through a horrendous plane crash and much personal loss. The first email I got from Jim was from his hospital bed at NYU’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Hearing back from him was another push on my new path.

Not long after that I found Media Virus! by Douglas Rushkoff, and my new direction became even clearer. Like Gleick, Rushkoff’s mix of smarts and readability, as well as his continued support, have kept me inspired and motivated. Somewhere in there a friend of mine recommended Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture. Like Chaos and Media Virus!, that book became a major touchstone for my thinking and its author a major influence on my writing.

Further along if not further afield, among many other writers, critics, and theorists, I found Steven Shaviro, Mark Dery, Erik Davis, Tricia Rose, Rebecca Solnit, Dave Tompkins, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher, all of whom employ music, movies, and other media in their theory and criticism. Having come from music, I found their approaches appealing, and I could comfortably see myself following them in ways I hadn’t felt with a lot of other writers I was reading. I’m still at it.

In the preface to The Medium Picture I write that if I were to follow through with the book’s cover image, inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, and name TMP after the three people who shaped it, it would be called Gibson, Eno, McLuhan.

William Gibson’s thought hangs heavy over a lot of my work. Nearly every time I come up with a way to theorize and think about the process of technological mediation or cultural evolution, I find Gibson got there first. His novels and essays are subtle sources of the nuances of the now, a wealth of ways to think about how we currently live with our world.

Brian Eno’s thinking on music and media is both vast and deep, and I’ve been yammering about his idea of edge culture for years. Outlined briefly in his 1996 memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices, it has shaped my thinking in many ways. He kindly granted me permission to explore and expand on it further in TMP. I can only hope I did his thought and gesture justice.

Anyone who tries to do what I attempt to do has to contend with Marshall McLuhan, whose name and thought you might recognize from past posts and writings. If you want to study media and mediation, he’s the starting point. Ignore him at your peril.

A list like this can never be complete (I’ve already started a second part to this post), but with The Medium Picture finally coming out in two weeks (!!!), I wanted to try to retrace some of my steps — especially given how long I’ve been working on it.

The Medium Picture exists!

Speaking of, I just got my author copies! It really is a beautiful book. I worked so hard on it for a so long, and I’m very proud of how it came out. Many thanks to Nathaniel Holly, Mick Gusinde-duffy, Candice Lawrence, Bethany Snead, Jon Davies, Chris Dodge, Erin Kirk, and all at the University of Georgia Press for taking a chance on this book, taking the time and care, and making it look so great. I can’t wait for everyone to see it!

The Medium Picture comes out on October 15th! Preorder yours now!

Thank you for reading and preordering,

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

* Apologies to Douglas Hofstadter from whom I stole the title of this post. It’s the name of Chapter One in his brilliant 1995 book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.

One of the definitive aspects of the media spectacle is its lack of any sense of memory. As McKenzie Wark tells me, “As Guy Debord used to argue, the triumph of the spectacle is in the defeat of history and the installation of ‘spectacular time’, which is purely cyclical.”1 In his 1967 book Society of the Spectacle, Debord wrote,

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatisations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery.2

As our experience is more and more mediated and less lived through, the spectacle functions to make us passive observers rather than active participants. It diminishes the idea of memory by reducing lived moments to their image, removing us from our selves and any genuine connection to our world. Now we have bespoke spectacles, individualized, each to their own churn. We exist in an isolated simultaneity, not quite solipsistic, yet fully mediated.

If life in Debord’s spectacle sounds awful, it was supposed to, but these days the idea of not remembering sounds better than the brutality of the everyday. Call the remedy tactical forgetting or strategic amnesia. Illuminating the idea in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents (Seven Stories Press, 1998), Shari Evans writes, “Strategic amnesia gives us the critical distance to remember ethically rather than vengefully. This strategic amnesia in which Butler’s last novel situates us, then, leads, past forgetting, to the justice of remembering on a historic and cultural scale.”3 Justice, as much as it might be as a human as invention as history, matters. If any of this matters, it does.

If only it were so easy for us as individuals to forget and remember on command. The world would look very different if we could. In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Michel Gondry go to such great lengths to show that not only is it not easy, it’s not possible. In the movie, a medical firm called Lacuna offers a surgical procedure that removes painful memories from an individual’s brain. In this case, painful memories of a lost love, but one can imagine removing unwanted memories of traumatic events of any kind.

Conversely, sometimes memory is latent in the environment, just waiting to be activated. Have you ever learned a new word and then started seeing it everywhere? The literary theorist Kenneth Burke attributed this to what he called terministic screens.4 Burke would say that the word was always there, but you were filtering it out, obscuring it with ignorance. Once it became a part of your terministic screen, only then did you start seeing it. But you can’t unsee it once it’s a part of the screen you use to filter reality. Once you learn something new, you’re stuck with it.

So, we can’t forget on command or remember at will, but our minds filter out and fill in all kinds of words and details and facts every day. As the author Grace Paley once said, “Any story told twice is fiction.”5 In a speech at BAFTA in 2011, Charlie Kaufman says, “If you consider a traumatic event in your life, consider it as you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the one hundredth time. It’s not the same thing.” One thing that intervenes, he says, is perspective, which we tend to think of as a good thing. “The problem is that this perspective is a misrepresentation of the incident; it’s a reconstruction with meaning and as such bears very little resemblance to the event.” He continues,

The other thing that happens in storytelling is the process of adjustment for the audience over time. You find out which part of the story works, which parts to embellish, which parts to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal, your reasons for telling it are to be entertaining, to garner sympathy. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it’s true for stories told in movies.

Sometimes we change the story inadvertently, and sometimes we do it as a matter of survival.

Moreover, our collective memory, and especially our mediated memory (or communicative memory6), suit their own needs, sanity for the former, capital for the latter, selectively remembering and revising as they go. In “The ‘Yizkor’ Book of 1911 - A Note on National Myths in the Second Aliyah.” Jonathan Frankel writes:

Legends and national myths — which so enchant the group’s psyche, the collective subconscious — have become a source of inspiration to the faith and devotion which these imported ideologies [modern nationalism, socialism] could foster only partially and through constant adaptation.7

We watch this constant adaptation as short-scale history scrolls by in our daily diet of genocide, racism, gun violence, domestic terrorism, the global degradation of democracy, climate catastrophe, culture wars, and cat videos. History at any scale is always already a construct that cannot include all of the minutia of humankind, so the writers, editors, and adapters of that history choose to emphasize some things and leave other things out. If we ever want to break out of our now-individualized spectacle, and if we ever want any semblance of history or of justice, we need to care more about those decisions and who makes them for us.8

Only 30 More Days!

Only one month left until The Medium Picture comes out from the University of Georgia Press! If you think you might buy a copy, please consider preordering it. You can still make a huge difference in the launch and life of the book. Thank you!

Advance praise for The Medium Picture:

“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.” — Douglas Rushkoff

“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu

Preorder yours now! Thank you!

POST-SELF is Up Next!

My book-after-next, Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, comes out from Repeater Books on December 2nd! This new expanded and revised edition of Escape Philosophy includes updates throughout, a new Foreword by Mark Dery (“Welcome to the Misanthropocene”), and a new Afterword by me! I just got a few copies, so if you’re an influencer or work for some giant media outlet, let me know if you want to spread the disdain.

Advance praise for Post-Self:

“Using Godflesh—the arch-wizards of industrial metal—as a framework for a deep philosophical inspection of the permeable human form reveals that all our critical theory should begin on the street where wasted teen musicians pummel their mind and instruments into culture-shifting fault lines. Godflesh are not just a ‘mirror’ of all the horrors and glories we can inflict on our bodies, but a blasted soundscape of our moans. Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative thought.” — Peter Bebergal, author, Season of the Witch

“Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.”
— Eugene Thacker

Preorder yours now! Thank you!

Thanks for reading and preordering! It really means a lot to me.

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com

In the case of language and of economy the signified and the actual objects have no value don’t exist or else have only whatever values those who control the signifiers assign them. Language is making me sick. Unless I destroy the relations between language and their signifieds that is their control.2

Wark argues that we’ve moved beyond capitalism to something worse, where the Marxist means of production and the housing of our bodies are no longer relevant. Information, which often manifests itself in language, is the currency in play.

Circling the same, in Exocapilatism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits (Becoming Press, 2025), Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo turn what Nick Land calls “techno-capital” all the way up. Simultaneously echoing Wark, they write that exocapitalism exists as software: pure information. Information as such may want to be free, but it never is. As our friend Charles Mudede writes in his introduction, “Capitalism has never been and could never be a smooth criminal. It needs the hold, the friction, the instability to generate surplus value.”3 Poliks and Trillo start from the idea that there is not one, monolithic capitalism, but many capitalisms operating at many scales. Exocapitalism is smaller and more pervasive than diatoms or DNA, yet bigger and more expansive than Cassiopeia and the Capitalocene.4

So, is it a Mortonian hyperobject: a recently visible entity, always already too large for us to comprehend?5 Or is it as Dr. Alvin Z. Markov puts it in Land’s “Cyberrevolution,” like an organism, “but an organism that’s evolved much too fast to develop a reliable immune system…”6—like a selfish meme, a virus running roughshod through systems and scales with senseless abandon, an abject object with an excess of access?

For Poliks and Trillo, it’s all of the above and beyond, beyond the anti-Oedipal schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari, beyond Wark, Acker, and Land. Exocapitalism is monstrous, autonomous, invisible, inescapable, unpredictable. Mudede adds, “An efficient market hypothesis is nothing more than the chattering that zombies make with their teeth.”7

In his classic free-market, Marxist polemic, Capitalist Realism (Zer0 Books, 2009), Mark Fisher described capitalism as acting “very much like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”8 In their book Pretend We’re Dead (Duke University Press, 2006), Annalee Newitz writes, “capitalism creates monsters who want to kill you,”9 monsters lurking in the liminal, what Lacan called “the big Other,” a market economy in an Area-X ecology. As the big Other, exocapitalism is an invisible monster of which we only see traces, shadows, and stand-ins, ever-evident in its absence.

Acker wrote, “Since the only reality of phenomena is symbolic, the world’s most controllable by those who can best manipulate these symbolic relations. Semiotics is a useful model to the post-capitalists.”10 Fisher described late capitalism’s pace of “dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.” This monster eats everything… everything.11

We can fix it though, as Fisher facetiously argued, “All we have to do is buy the right products.” If exocapitalism is only visible by its recent absence—by what it didn’t leave behind (<cough> middle class <cough>)—then we need to pay closer attention to its appetite(s) and be more careful about what we feed it.

It. Eats. Everything.

One blurber calls Poliks and Trillo’s Excocapitalism “Nick Land for adults.”12 The reason is evident, even if only in the following: Relegating the user to the used, Land (in)famously asked, “Can what is playing you make it to level 2?”13 If it’s going to have a chance, then Exocapitalism is its survival guide, chock full of cheat codes, tips, trips, token stacks, stock symbols, amalgams, algorithms, and antagonisms.

Preorder These, Please!

Speaking of, I have two books coming out before the end of the year: The Medium Picture comes out from the University of Georgia Press on October 15th, and Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body comes out from Repeater Books on December 2nd! If you think you might buy one of these (or both!), please consider preordering them. It makes a huge difference in the launch and life of the book. Thank you!

Advance praise for The Medium Picture:

Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future. — William Gibson

Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights… Worthy of McLuhan. — Paul Levinson

Advance praise for Post-Self:

Too often philosophy gets bogged down in the tedious ‘working-through’ of contingency and finitude. Post-Self takes a different approach, engaging with cultural forms of refusal, denial, and negation in all their glorious ambivalence.
— Eugene Thacker

A peculiar hybrid of Thomas Ligotti and Marshall McLuhan. — Robert Guffey

Preorder both now! Thank you!

Thanks for reading and preordering!

-royc.

http://roychristopher.com