Transcript:

The line between the personal and the collective feels particularly fuzzy lately.

There seems an intense divide between the eye of the storm sort of spaciousness found in the great pause, and the undeniable tremors of structural collapse.

Grabbing for quick universals or demanding order as commonly and dominantly coded--as known--is a failed project.

Hence accustomed indicators of comfort are increasingly not equating to the expected ease.

For me, this is simply an uncomfortable, exciting, terrifying time all at once. And for certain despair is easy to find here.

I spend much of my time floating near the mouth of a great black hole.

That has been the same for some time in my life. Yet my relationship to this despair is changing. I'm feeling with some relief that my failure, my demise, is not just mine, but embricated to what I think I've known as an inevitable, overdue, and sickening collapse of the cultural hegemony known as whiteness. Which has kept me at once safe and indebted beyond what any, to quote Springsteen, honest man could repay.

Everything dies, baby. That's a fact.

And is this any surprise that in a moment of slowing, there is an uprising waiting in the wings? We've been on the run for a long time. Surely we know this.

Not on the run not from some red queen biological imperative to keep the edge on a virus, but from the unfathomable discomfort of empathy for externalities which threaten to jump off the balance sheet and return to us demanding disabuse.

Such things are kept from happening through the effects of speed. Motors of self-importance, machining utopias of innovation, endless perspectival insight, doping pretenses of virtue, and fine if you really don't want to play along murder.

To say it nicely, outsourcing is materially profitable and soul bankrupting.

Whiteness is cultural hegemony.

Considered for a moment that we live in a culture which is by definition psychotic, in which gaslighting is central. We must not for a moment assume we know the truth any more than that which we are manipulating towards our fantasy. We must suffer that we don't know. That we gave up our realness to a fantasy, and that those whom collectively we cast into this fantasy once disabused may have a better track on what the real is that's left.

We've been running from Earth or self.

We have not and will not make it to Mars in time.