Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
For the first time in 17 years, Fox spent an entire week in third place in prime time in the all-important 25-to-54 year-old demographic. The last time Fox found itself in that ditch, Bill Clinton was president of the United States, Gladiator was in theaters, and Jesse Watters was in college.
Somehow I Stayed Thin While The Other Guys Got Fat | The World That’s Coming
Back from the dead. We’ll see how long I keep this up, considering previous attempts have stumbled and failed.
And so we return and begin again, again.
Everything collided in the last year or so to keep me from updating this — work and personal stuff, house projects and an obsession with the U.S. election that turned into an obsession with everything that followed, and kind of flattened everything else out. One of the things I’ve been trying to do this year is regain the sense of perspective that just utterly disappeared last year. We’ll see how that goes.
What actually prompted me to return here this time was this article, as pointed out in Warren Ellis’ recent email newsletter, of necessary skills for the “postnormal era” that we’re now living in. It’s a fascinating list, filled with insights like “We can’t be defined just by what we know already, what we have already learned. We need a deep intellectual and emotional resilience if we are to survive in a time of unstable instability. And deep generalists can ferret out the connections that build the complexity into complex systems, and grasp their interplay.”
This speaks to something I’ve been wrestling with for awhile now — a way to escape the internet’s demand for complete and utter surety and confidence in everything. There’s something to be said for being lost, and thinking out loud, and being willing to be wrong in public.
Along those lines, I keep realizing the more I do it, how much I appreciate doing Wait, What? with Jeff — the very nature of it allows us (requires us?) to be wrong and uncertain and explore things in real time, and I think that’s necessary. The conversational — and safe — space inside the show feels more productive and helpful as a result, if that makes sense…? Uncertainty, ambiguity and a freedom to be wrong: I think this is what I’m looking for more of online, I think.
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Current earworm:
I think I need to explore more of Big Audio Dynamite’s stuff. It feels like a step towards Gorillaz that I hadn’t really considered before. I heard this in a store the other day and thought, “Man, I haven’t heard this in years. It’s awesome!”
(Changing the music I listen to is another thing to do more of this year; I’m not sure obsessively listening to Humanz counts.)
I remember My Faith in Frankie doing a pretty good job with this, but it’s been a few years since I read it.
Off the top of my head, both Millennium Fever and Enigma come to mind – but both are Vertigo comics from the ‘90s (and both with Duncan Fegredo on art, oddly enough.)
To an outsider, the WikiLeaks of 2016 looks totally unrelated to the WikiLeaks of 2010. Then it was a darling of many of the liberal left, working with some of the world’s most respected newspapers and exposing the truth behind drone killing, civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and surveillance of top UN officials.
Now it is the darling of the alt-right, revealing hacked emails seemingly to influence a presidential contest, claiming the US election is “rigged”, and descending into conspiracy. Just this week on Twitter, it described the deaths by natural causes of two of its supporters as a “bloody year for WikiLeaks”, and warned of media outlets “controlled by” members of the Rothschild family – a common anti-Semitic trope.
The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?
These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed.