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I'm behind on my reading

So, you'd think with COVID shutdown, working from home, and Christmas break, I'd be getting a whole lot of reading done. In fact what I'm doing is discovering a lot of books and not having any time to read them. Here's a little overview of what I'm reading and not making progress on:

COVID-19: The Great Reset, by Thierry Mallaret & Klaus Schwab

This is *incredibly* boring. I'm reading it because the “Great Reset”, basically a rebranding of a bunch of neoliberal trends by the World Economic Forum, has been seized on by the far Right as a Marxist conspiracy to end private property and enslave everyone. I have been *meaning* to write an article about the phenomenon, I have a bunch of bookmarks and open browser tabs, but I have really been having a hard time finding time and energy to write, and I want to finish this book before I write this one. But it is soooo boring. It’s basically a recitation of the threats facing capital in 2020, and liberal technocratic proposals for fixing them and shoring up late capitalism. I don’t enjoy reading it, and so I don’t.

The Conspiracy Against The Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, by Thomas Ligotti

This was recently reviewed by Sandra at Idiomdrottning¹, and I thought it was kind of up my alley, so I thought I’d give it a read. It’s an argument for philosophical pessimism, i.e., the idea that human life is not worth living. I’m kind of in doomspace right now anyway, because « gestures around vaguely », and I am in love with the *aesthetic* of despair, even if I am taking quite a lot of drugs in order not to succumb to it.

I’m a ways into it; it’s not boring because Ligotti is a distinctive prose stylist, but it can be a little repetitive, and it’s not something I “can’t put down”.

1. Wrapping Up Conspiracy

Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, by McKenzie Wark

This is interesting, *and* a fun nonfiction read, but I’m still only on the introduction. I think I put it aside to work on “The Great Reset” and didn’t get back to it. My understanding is that it’s an argument that capitalism has been overwhelmed by the information economy that it created, and we are now in a new mode of production, one that vertically integrates the landlord and capitalist classes into something more ruthless.

Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism, by Peter Frase

This one I actually read when it came out, in 2016. I reread the chapters on *Rentism* (abundance without equality), and *Exterminism* (scarcity without equality), because they’re really relevant to both current events in general, and the Great Reset. I think it’s possible to see the Great Reset as an attempt by the neoliberal capitalist class to make a transition into Rentism rather than Exterminism (the egalitarian options of Communist abundance or Socialist scarcity are not considered worth thinking about). It may also prove to help me in understanding “Capital Is Dead”, which might be another way of looking at Rentism.

Virtue Hoarders: the Case against the Professional Managerial Class, by Catherine Liu

I finished this one, too, actually. It’s a great polemic against the PMC, that pseudo-class of people defined not so much by their relation to the means of production as by their educational attainment and lifestyle. (I myself am a downwardly-mobile PMC, in the process of discarding aspects of the PMC lifestyle.) It’s a little scattershot, but might be relevant to leftist organizing. Or perhaps not… the PMC are the strongest enemies of progress in the public sphere (as they include journalists and academics), but they *are* being steadily proletarianized, or at least narrowed so that most of them are.

Dead Lies Dreaming, by Charles Stross

I haven’t started this one. It’s supposed to be my reward for finishing these other things.

The Flesh Interface Series, by _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

EDIT: Oh I forgot that I also got into reading this, and read it pretty much straight through over a whole day. This, surprisingly, did not help my mental state.

A link to the whole serialized story (www)

End

So that’s what I’m working on reading right now. On the whole, it’s pretty dark. You’d think the Ligotti would be the most depressing thing I’ve read lately, but it’s actually the Extinctionism chapter of “Four Futures”. It all kind of adds up into the same picture, and the only thing I’ve found that lifts me out of the darkness is Deep Space Nine reruns.

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