Dying Ghosts: Censorship, Charlie Kirk and the Commons
Plus the quarterly reading list and upcoming events
Londoners, lend me your ears! I’m doing a live event with Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown on Monday, 29 September at 7pm at &Soul in Shoreditch. We’ll be exploring Ari’s AI film techniques, the role of art in traversing the meta-crisis, and Schuyler will guide us in embodied practices to bring it all together. Tickets here.
The Sámi people have a word to describe the feeling you get when a wolf has started to hunt you, but you can’t see it. Oavnjistit. Explaining this feeling in a recent interview, Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara describes it as ‘a kind of haunting’.
It is an apt word to describe today’s cultural and political landscape. In the US, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a collapse in progressive sensemaking, and the rise of authoritarian censorship has opened a chilling new chapter in politics.
Across the UK and Europe, the far right is rapidly outplaying a technocratic elite who are unable to deal with immigration or understand the populace. All the while, our information commons is crumbling, and chaos is bursting from the online realm into the real world. Oavnjistit.
After years of progressive censorship, we’ve now entered the era of the Woke Right’s revenge. As Andrew Sullivan points out in a recent piece, the Trump administration's cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel is partly the result of progressive censorship of the last decade, but also different in kind, and utilises the machinery of the state in a chilling new way. Oavnjistit.
The soul of Western culture roams a barren landscape and deludes itself that it’s still alive. Round and round it moves through cycles of outrage and censorship. Haunted, hunted, doomed to repeat history over and over again.
Like ghosts, we are trapped in a world that no longer exists, crying out for freedom. Like ghosts, we’re being called to reconcile our unfinished business, to name what has been denigrated and ignored. We are haunted and hunted by our own shadows. Until we turn to face the beast, we will never be free.
But how? How do we move beyond endless polarisation, failing institutions and technofeudal madness? How do we free ourselves from the spirit world and live again?
Nobody knows. I have loose ideas, but none of them feel satisfying. Maybe that’s all we can have right now. In one of the first Kainos films, Jordan Hall said that we’re now in a post-strategy age. There is no strategising in the midst of chaos and outrage. Instead, you have to wait, watch and feel until you can see a way forward.
What a drag. What will I write about? When cultural complexity exceeds my ability to navigate it, I start writing about not knowing, and see where it leads. There are many ways to do this, and I use a technique I call Somatic Inquiry. Repurposed from the Diamond Approach’s beautiful practice of inquiry, it’s a kind of talking meditation in which we track our bodily sensations, images and subtle changes in state. I have some instructions and an example past the paywall below, along with the quarterly reading list.
These practices can be done alone, but are best done together. My friend Berry Liberman suggests what we need most now are ‘Islands of Coherence’ in an ocean of insanity. Kainos was founded to be an island of coherence, a gathering point and nexus for active hope and imagination.
As polarisation increases once again, I feel a draw to return to real-time dialogue where we can feel each other while we talk about ideas. Transparent journalism. Ethics. Information as free as possible from the perverse incentives that consume everything true and beautiful. Ideas and ways of being that combat the blind extraction of a force I’ve called the Leviathan, others have called Moloch, and others still Yaldabaoth.
This is the active hope that Kainos was founded on, and I’ve been spending the end of the summer planning its next phase. To kick it off, and share what’s coming and how you can get involved, we’re hosting an online gathering for all paid subscribers on Tuesday 30th of September at 6:30pm UK time. You’ll find registration details below. If you want to join but can’t afford a subscription right now, email info@studiokainos.com and we’ll send you a link.
Upcoming Events
For Founding Members, we have bestselling author Tim Freke coming on on Wednesday, 24 September at 6:30pm UK time to discuss why, after writing around 30 books, he’s radically re-evaluated his whole perspective on science and spirituality in the last few years. If you want to join a thriving community of inquiry and practice full of sessions like these, join up as a founding member.
If you’re in or near London, I’m hosting an event with Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown on Monday, 29 September at 7pm at the lovely &Soul in Shoreditch. We’ll be discussing Ari’s AI art, including how he creates it and why, and Schuyler will take us through embodied practices to ground it. Tickets available here.
Below the paywall, you’ll find a somatic inquiry on authoritarianism, the loss of the information commons and active hope. I’ve also collated a reading list of relevant books and articles, and a lovely photo of a pangolin to offset the disturbing wolf above.
