It’s also very telling that Palantir’s marketing strategy is now leaning into a kind of patriotic workerism. Big Tech as the working man’s best friend.

They realise they need *some* sort of popular constituency, even if most people hate their guts. Trying to inherit the old hard hat conservatives.

However, we may also remind our colleagues that "we are talking about the future—that is, the distribution of death. How dare we treat it like a policy question or an opportunity for self-growth?"

Care *requires* us to practice the ways of negativity.

Critique has gotten a bad rap lately. Its best known academic critic is undoubtedly the late Bruno Latour; however, he is far from alone. I take statements from Latour, as well as Rita Felski, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and David Scott, as representative of the “post-critique” genre.

Gloomily enough, I resolved to understand the heatwave in terms not of the present but of the future:

"The future is death," I wrote. "We’re arguing about its distribution."

Another summer, another procession of record-smashing heatwaves.

After the heatwave of July 2022, I wrote this piece on dread, anger, and the duty to critique.

Re-reading it for the page proofs, I was struck by some things I wrote that already seem out of date, but also some that seem timely.

🧵

“UK suspending trade talks with Israel over Gaza blockade, Lammy tells MPs”

www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

We all know the line "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce," but this section from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire resonates with today remarkably well.

The (liberal) US feels dishonoured. Brought to its knees by con-artists and pro-wrestlers. Through its tears of shame, it sees nothing.

There are just so, so many better options at this point.

For one:

It's about development rather than arms industry, but seems comparable:

It was through these "technics of insinuation," as I called it, that the dynamic of confidence and anxiety is set in motion and deepened, consoling and cajoling at the same time.

To this end, I take a quick look at the anti-Critical Race Theory moral panic that reached its peak around the same time as the Capitol insurrection.

Probably the main thing that I got wrong in these articles was my assumption that liberals had, to at least some extent, figured out that they can't win by playing the Trumpist game. That they had learned, at least to some extent, not to take the bait. This proved wrong.

To say that Trump is a con artist is a statement of the obvious. What we seem to lack is a serious understanding of how the trick works, or how to resist it.

In making this argument, I weave a path between Brian Massumi, Lauren Berlant, and others.

The author who gives perhaps the keenest insight into the "confident" side of conservatism, however, is quite a different thinker: often credited as Donald Trump's spiritual mentor, Norman Vincent Peale.

In my article, however, I wanted to understand the relation of confidence to conservatism as a political ideology.

My basic argument is quite straightforward: confidence is crucial to conservatism, but it exists in a dynamic relationship with anxiety.

I take as my starting point the same case study as my other article: that of a QAnon follower and "January 6th" insurrectionist named Douglas Jensen.

This time, however, I focus on just one part of his testimony:

In researching this article, however, it also became clear to me just how much conspiratorial thinking is also crucial to the liberal centre.

Again, here's how I put it:

Jensen's testimony made clear that it was all about the influencers. I tried to understand this cultural milieu, first in dialogue with the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse, and then in terms of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony and the role of intellectuals

Here's how I put it in the article: