NM's blog

By Richard Seymour QAnon is more than a global phenomenon of recreational conspiracism. It has not only recruited millions of believers, but utterly upended their lives, alienated them from their families and induced dreams of gory civil war. As a recanting QAnoner put it, from the inside it looked as if ‘everyone else was living in a dream world’. QAnon is a conversion-machine designed by no single hand, turning agnostic thrill-seekers into devotees of the apocalypse, transforming the ideological debris of conspiracism into a cohesive authoritarian subculture and translating the attentional surges thereby generated into profit for far-right entrepreneurs. As QAnon expanded, it drew the attention of an emerging ‘alt-tech’ scene, eager to secede from the tech giants that had capitulated to the ‘woke’ and capitalise on the demand for a stigmatised form of right-wing socialising. Launched in September 2018 with investment from the billionaire Mercer family and the millionaire YouTuber and...

“A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”?  Even the review does tell us almost nothing about how much Malcolm Harris incorporates ‘the world’ in his book. “ Malcolm Harris’s new book shows how Californian capitalism has thrived by exploiting an unequal world.” Which world? the world from Mexico to China and from Congo to India? Not a world about how the title relates to this world. The review informs us that the book is about California and capitalism. Nick Burns: “Most glaring is the mismatch between the book’s stated purpose and its actual content.  For most of its 700 frustrating pages,  Palo Alto  refuses to be the very thing it insists that it is: a history of capitalism. A “fitting bookend to Harris’s opening, equally earnest assertion that Palo Alto is “haunted” not only by the spectre of communism but also by supernatural forces – hardly suits the sober realism that the book’s subject demands.”