benadavis.bsky.social
Writer. Author of '9.5 Theses on Art and Class' and 'Art in the After-Culture.' My newsletter at https://substack.com/@benstoppable
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it's true, one of the first thoughts I had about dystopia as misleading was something like "I was told we let Skynet in the door because of nuclear war or something, not to give everybody an anime girlfriend"
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With regard to this point specifically, I actually wrote about the tendency to conflate bad taste with bad politics, and how that missed the "classy" version, years ago for The Baffler; of course you can have both; that's part of why 'Idiocracy' is wrong as a metaphor thebaffler.com/salvos/frien...
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The essay does what it says on the box, which is say "here's this feeling I am getting which I wish I had a name for" and then "here's how I think it is useful to think about it," which in this case is just to register that a lot of contemporary evil comes onstage looking ridiculous or pathetic
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it's an interesting line of criticism, and I will have to think more about it. But as the essay says ("it's not narrowly political") I really wasn't trying to provide a master theory of contemporary Trump or fascism
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Oh yes, absolutely, great reference
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yes, exactly, that's what the passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment is about, and I think about it a lot
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While we published our own response to that decidedly mid cover story, we’ve started the year with a consideration of an artist thinking more deeply about time, making work that burrows into history & the landscape, rather than reacting to the latest upheaval: www.culturedmag.com/article/2025...
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We also did this podcast with Kissick last week podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
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Love ETX Studio's motto #BetterDifferentlyLess
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Better yet, check out this great A.I.-slop version of my article on A.I. Cubism by the super cool company ETX Studio
www.msn.com/en-us/travel...
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This is amazing
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Thank you for the kind words Patricia... The way things are it's very daunting to think about writing a book or even an essay that will be published in more than a month's time, so I am glad to know it holds up
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I still don't know how to bluesky, but I agree, let's make it happen
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I'm cautiously skyin'