According to the common view the personality is never fixated on any one special thing, but expands in a natural, organic fashion into a comprehensive totality. On the other hand, it is also suggested that it is capable of forming such a totality entirely on the basis of its own resources, like a windowless monad. But it never really works out like that. The artist's productivity never forms the perfect fit with his individual subjectivity that is required by the concept of genius. Even his most individual qualities are secretly the products of a collectivity and, by the same token, his idiosyncrasies exhibit the marks of the collective, of the historical context. At all events, neither category befits a state of mind which has ceased to conform to the harmonious norms of neo-Classicism and in which the continuity of the individual personality and the general context is no longer a given. It is not for nothing that the word ‘synthesis' - which is equally opposed to both mannerism and eclecticism - sounds so feeble. The mediation between divergent trends can only be achieved nowadays by working through the extremes, not by any conciliatory compromise. To appeal to synthesis as an antidote to eclecticism is to imagine that the totality now inaccessible from within could yet be achieved, as always, by the man of genius. In short, mannerism and eclecticism are not the indices of individual failures, but stigmata inflicted by history. To continue to use them as pejorative terms simply demonstrates how far aesthetic thought lags behind the concrete specifics of art and how impotently it clings to the traditional ideologies. Webern, one of the most important of composers, was long regarded as a mannerist à la Schoenberg. What with hindsight proved to be the great musical tradition, that is to say, the emancipation of dissonance, and even Debussy's fastidious abstinences, once seemed to be a mannerism raised to the level of exclusivity. What is mannerism and what is style can only be established conclusively after the fact.”

Anna’s Archive has faced a barrage of domain takedowns in recent weeks, after Spotify and several major record labels filed a high-profile lawsuit. The music industry giants filed the case after the shadow library planned to release hundreds of terabytes of scraped Spotify data, including full tracks. While Anna’s Archive has since taken its initial Spotify metadata release offline, the legal pressure hasn’t been lifted. On the contrary, the preliminary injunction issued by the New York court, targeting domain registries, registrars, and other intermediaries, has proven to be quite effective.

The .org domain was the first to fall, followed by the .se and .in variants. However, not all intermediaries were eager to comply with the U.S. injunction. As we reported last week, AFNIC, the French registry responsible for the .pm domain, made clear that U.S. court orders carry no direct legal weight in France. Enforcing the injunction would require the music companies to petition a French court; as far as we know, that hasn’t happened yet. Instead, the jurisdictional barrier appears to have been sidestepped entirely through a different route.

Earlier this week, Anna’s Archive’s .pm domain became unreachable. WHOIS records confirm that the domain now has a “blocked” status, with a hold flag preventing it from resolving. Instead, the suspension may have been issued on the registrar level by the Dutch company Hosting Concepts B.V., also known as Openprovider. ... In the Netherlands, anti-piracy group BREIN repeatedly urged the local domain registrar Openprovider to take down the .se and .pm domains in January. ... BREIN doesn’t know for certain whether its pressure led directly to the .pm domain going offline, nor is it certain that Openprovider is the party that pulled the plug. Regardless of who took action, the .pm domain is now out of rotation. That left Anna’s Archive down to a single working domain earlier this week, but that didn’t last very long.

The choice of a Greenland-based domain is notable. With ongoing tensions between Greenland and the United States, the .gl registry may not be eager to subject itself to U.S. court jurisdiction. Whether that assumption holds remains to be seen. Previously, The Pirate Bay also moved to a .GL domain briefly. However, the Greenlandic telecoms company that manages the registry decided to suspend it soon after, over alleged illegal use.

Consistent with the United States’ continued slide into an economy powered almost entirely by LLM slop, financialization, and ever-pervasive exploitative gambling, “prediction market app” Kalshi “entered into an official partnership” with CNN this week to bring their “data to CNN’s journalism across its television, digital and social channels.” Soon, CNN will run live odds on world events where its viewers can gamble on them in real time on their smartphones. The “data” (see: betting markets) will, according to Axios, “be featured on CNN’s air through a real-time data ticker and can be referenced across CNN’s platforms when journalists discuss news predictions. The partnership will include prediction market content related to politics, news, culture and weather. The integration will be championed by CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, who will tap into real-time insights from Kalshi in his reporting on air, both via linear TV and CNN’s new streaming subscription service.” The day after this story broke, Wall Street news network CNBC announced a similar “exclusive partnership” with Kalshi, marking a grim turn for TV news. “Starting in 2026, CNBC will incorporate exclusive Kalshi predictions market data [see: betting props] into its programs,” the press release read. What are these events that viewers will be able to bet on? Some are seemingly harmless enough: who will win an upcoming election, the weather in Chicago, the federal government’s jobs numbers, or what will be said on Kroger’s next earnings call. But many offerings are on life and death issues that will, as a matter of course, reduce these issues to just another chip on a roulette table for Western audiences increasingly isolated from the violence and suffering their governments inflict on the global south. Take, for example, one recent Kalshi betting market that allowed people to bet on whether Palestinians in Gaza would suffer mass starvation. “Will the IPC classify Gaza as experiencing famine this year?” read the wager from this past summer. The bet was eventually settled in the affirmative after the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) did indeed declare famine in Gaza on Aug. 22. The more overtly cynical Polymarket, a rival of Kalshi that’s backed by right-wing multibillionaire Peter Thiel, allows for even more obscene wagering, permitting users to bet on whether Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed. “Gaza mass population relocation in 2025?” reads one of its many Gaza-related betting markets. You can also bet on when Israel will bomb Gaza, bomb the West Bank, or annex either. One cannot, of course, wager on when or if Hamas will attack Israel since, in polite circles, Israelis are considered fully human and Palestinians are not.