Simulacra and Cybernetics

I believe in gossip. I believe in talking about people behind their backs. I believe in complaining about bad movies and bad music. I think, like cigarettes and fast food, these are things best enjoyed without overindulgence or only when inebriated, but still largely harmless so long as they are kept in small, infrequent doses. I think it is possible to be mean without being cruel just as it is possible to be nice without being kind. Talking with your friends about someone you don’t like is meant to build bonds between the shit-talkers more than it is meant to tear down the shitted-on. Posting a picture of a stranger on the internet to make fun of—for doing something mundane or actively embarrassing—is meant to create an othering cruelty towards another person, reduce them to a spectacle. There is no communal bonding over this person’s shame, just a momentary sense of reassurance that viewers and commenters are not the Freak of the Day.

To lead a mass movement [...] Western-educated [global majority] intellectuals needed to express their political project in vernacular languages. As the British Marxist Tom Nairn famously put it, “The new middle class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to be written in a language they understood.” Enter the anti-colonial public intellectual. [...] Whether or not Benedict Anderson was right that the national form is modular and can thus move across space and time, we of the global majority countries have far less temporal distance from our founding nationalist movements compared to Europeans and Americans. The continuing neocolonial logics of European and US regimes further shorten that distance, while layering the past with fragments of present-day shrapnel. If Hegseth spends more time in the gym and on Fox than writing op-eds for the New York Times, it is in part because there is a gaping abyss between him and Thomas Jefferson, insofar as Hegseth displays a criminal absence of any intelligence about the human condition. In postcolonial Iranian history, the temporal gap between Ali Amini and Abbas Araghchi is far smaller. Hence, in Araghchi’s rhetorical flourishes as a public intellectual, he can reveal the wonders of his ancient, historic land and show the world the need for its defense, while Hegseth sounds like a lonely teenager in a dank basement with an provocative Reddit handle—something like #bonemashing.