Lockdown diaries became a literary fad in 2020, but few if any were memorable. What if the real literature of lockdown was written over a century ago? This is the hypothesis behind "The Machine Book of Weird," an anthology of fiction from the late 19th and early 20th century that explores isolation, domestic confinement, and the uncanniness of home…

In this special episode, guest host Daniel Hadas interviews Medical Nemesis on covid, Illich, industrialized medicine and thought, and more. https://twitter.com/DanielHadas2 https://twitter.com/Medical_Nemesis https://medicalnemesis.substack.com/By Geoff Shullenberger

Matthew Crawford joins me to discuss his essay, "Was the Sexual Revolution a Government Psy-Op?," the politics of masturbation, Wilhelm Reich, the Frankfurt School, masculinity, the therapeutic state, and more. https://unherd.com/2022/12/the-politics-of-masturbation/ https://mcrawford.substack.com/By Geoff Shullenberger

Brian Chau returns to Outsider Theory to discuss ChatGPT's woke catechism. https://cactus.substack.com/By Geoff Shullenberger

Blaise Bayno (@urgurlblaise), former critical theory PhD student and co-organizer of the conference "Society Must Be Inoculated," joins me to discuss how critical theory became uncritical cheerleading for biopolitical authoritarianism, academic labor issues, the history of the UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program, and more.…

Thomas and Brett from Psyop Cinema join me to discuss Hollywood and cultural engineering. Psyop Cinema: https://www.spreaker.com/show/psyop-cinema My Psyop Cinema episodes on Roland Emmerich: https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/shullenberger-interview https://www.spreaker.com/user/15144188/geoff-shullenberger-2…

Brian Chau (Cactus Chu on Substack, @psychosort on Twitter) joins me to discuss institutions and why midwits rule them, decentralization, sorting mechanisms, right-wing aesthetics, Curtis Yarvin, William F. Buckley, and more. https://cactus.substack.com/ https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rule-of-midwits…

Jon Askonas joins me to discuss his ongoing series of essays in The New Atlantis, "Reality: A Post-Mortem." Read the series here: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/collections/reality-a-post-mortemBy Geoff Shullenberger

Essayist and poet Alice Gribbin joins me to discuss her recent essay in Tablet, "The Great Debasement," on the ideological transformation of museums and other cultural institutions into propaganda organs; the utilitarian attitude to art; the continued relevance of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing"; and more. https://substack.com/profile/5192682-alice-…

Tablet senior writer Jacob Siegel joins me to discuss the rightward trajectory of certain insights of Frankfurt School-derived critical theory, especially in light of the history of the journal Telos and its founder and editor, Paul Piccone. We also discuss Piccone's friend Paul Gottfried, the continued relevance of Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive To…

Writer and policy researcher Michael Cuenco joins me to discuss his recent American Affairs essay "'Victory is not Possible': a Theory of the Culture War," and two related essays on post-material politics and post-literate epistemology: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/02/victory-is-not-possible-a-theory-of-the-culture-war/ https://americana…

Jacob Shell is Associate Professor of Geography at Temple University and the author of Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants (2019) and Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility (2015). He joins me to share his insights into the Canadian trucker convoy, the cong…

Sam Biagetti of Historiansplaining podcast joins me to discuss what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly in David Graber and David Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything." We begin with an appreciative account of their dismantling of deterministic accounts of human social evolution, and then turn to a critical assessment of their theoretical assumption, …

With the 2001 publication of Angels and Demons, Dan Brown shifted away from his early focus on the US security state and its post-Cold War identity crisis and introduced a new protagonist: Harvard professor of "Religious Symbology" Robert Langdon. This improbable hero's first two adventures transport him to the Old World and entangle him with a sec…

George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" begins as a report on life in the depressed coal and industrial region of Northern England and expands into an ambivalent critique of socialism and progress. It's a book that belongs to its era – which saw the Great Depression, the peak of industrialism in the capitalist core countries, the rise of both comm…

Malcolm Kyeyune (@tinkzorg) joins me to map out the contours of class conflict today. Beginning with a discussion of the Canadian trucker convoy and other recent challenges to biomedical authoritarianism, we explore the managerial class's demand for ever-expanding intermediation (diversity consultants, localized public health bureaucracy, etc) in r…

Dan Brown is one of the best selling authors of all time; just fifteen years ago, "The Da Vinci Code" was a ubiquitous document of global popular culture. Yet Brown, now immensely wealthy from his novelistic success, is oddly neglected today. Pseud Dionysius MPH returns to the show to investigate the unlikely rise of Brown, his protagonist, Harvard…

Dr Benway returns to the show to discuss his extensive research on the vast oeuvre of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, as well as William S. Burroughs's prolonged engagement with Hubbard's doctrines and practices and their odd resonances with post-structuralist thought. We examine both the genealogical and analogical relations between Hubbard's …

@fitnessfeelingz posted a recent Twitter thread arguing that Covid is a modern myth: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1465794640481857542.html By this he means not that the pathogen SARS-COV-2 is not real, but that the existence of the pathogen does not account for its manifold social and political impacts. To make sense of these, we turn to René…

"[The pandemic] is a monetary event aimed at prolonging the lifespan of our finance-driven and terminally ill mode of production." This is the provocative thesis of Fabio Vighi, who joins me to discuss the series of recent articles for The Philosophical Salon where he elaborates this argument in full. He explains how Covid has served as a useful cr…

Timothy Wilcox (@PreCursorPoets) is one of my my favorite writers on contemporary literature. He joins me to discuss three very online novels published in the past year or so: Hari Kunzru's Red Pill, Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking about This. He shares his thoughts on the genre of internet fiction and the ev…

Default Friend is a writer investigating the deep history of the internet on her substack, Default Wisdom. She joins me to discuss one of our mutual interests: the work of the sociologist Sherry Turkle, and the light her pioneering 1995 study Life on the Screen sheds on the early history of the internet and the way the 90s internet anticipated pres…

Critics often present recent ideological convulsions at the New York Times as an embarrassing deviation from the paper's illustrious history. Ashley Rindsberg, author of The Gray Lady Winked, joins me to explain why they're wrong. The Times, as he documents, has been plagued by scandal after scandal over the past hundred years, and its journalistic…

My pseudonymous native informants from the illustrious realms of Science make the provocative case that medicine has become a quintessentially postmodern field. They attribute this development to the rise of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) in the 1990s in Canada, which has occasioned (as its pioneers intended) a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the field. A…

Federico García Lorca is revered as a literary martyr to the barbarity of fascism. His lesser-known friend and contemporary Leopoldo Panero narrowly escaped execution by fascist insurgents around the same time. In a strange twist, Panero later ended up as a fervent supporter of the regime that had killed his friend. Panero's loyalty allowed him to …

The author and radio personality William Milton Cooper exercised a remarkably broad influence on conspiracy theory in the United States and beyond in the late 20th century. After his death in a shootout with police at his Arizona compound just months after 9/11, his name passed into legend, but the extent of his influence is often overlooked. Coope…

"Foucault in Warsaw," just out in English translation from Open Letter Books, is a fascinating investigation of the time Michel Foucault spent as a cultural attaché in Warsaw in the late 1950s. The book is at once an intellectual biography of the philosopher during the pivotal year when he wrote much of his first major work, "History of Madness," a…

Writer Daniel Oppenheimer joins me to discuss his new book on the legendary art critic Dave Hickey, "Far From Respectable." We explore Hickey's case for the continued vitality of beauty as a criterion for thinking about art and culture, his defense of controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe and simultaneous critique of Mapplethorpe's other defende…

Phil Cunliffe, co-host of Aufhebunga Bunga and co-author of The End of the End of History, joins Outsider Theory to discuss the shifting co-ordinates of the post-Fukuyamaite world, the rise and fall of left populism, post-politics and anti-politics, the typology of the political outsider, the exemplary career of Silvio Berlusconi, and much more. Th…

Writer Sam Munson joins Outsider Theory to discuss the uncanny relevance of Dog Symphony, his prescient 2018 novel of plague and biopolitics, in which a nebulous entity called the Department of Social Praxis has assumed complete control over a dreamlike Buenos Aires. Other topics include the spectral place of Argentina in the North American imagina…

Illustrator and designer Sterling Bartlett joins Outsider Theory to discuss his comic book "How Did We Get Here?" We explore why recycling is the master metaphor for our cultural predicament, the rise of post-hipster aesthetic of aneasthetized minimalism, why Jordan Peterson and Marie Kondo are two sides of the same coin, and more. Buy "How Did We …

Emmet Penney, writer and co-host of ex.haust podcast, joins Outsider Theory to discuss Fredric Jameson's canonical essay "Postmodernism, or the Culltural Logic of Late Capitalism" and its continued relevance, as well as cultural fragmentation, nostalgia, the return of affect, LA architecture, and other themes. More info on my June 10/17 seminar on …

Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) joins Outsider Theory to answer an important question: is he now or has he ever been a member of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW)? We discuss the latter formation's place within the online culture war dynamics of the past decade, its relation to the more recent controversies around Substack, what its members got right a…

Tom Syverson (@syvology on Twitter), author of the new book Reality Squared, makes the case for why reality TV is the essential cultural form for grasping our bewildering contemporary panorama. More broadly, we discuss the problem of how to undertake a materialist analysis of culture in the face of an increasingly dematerialized and abstract econom…

Fiction writer and cultural critic Alex Perez joins Outsider Theory to discuss a mutual favorite writer, Roberto Bolaño, and in particular his short story "Labyrinth." We also cover the contemporary literary prestige economy, the professionalization of literature, the propagandification of culture in the Trump era, and the prospects for literary ou…

Documentary filmmaker Alex Lee Moyer joins Outsider Theory to discuss her 2020 film TFW No GF and its reception during the year after its release, as well as the film she edited prior to that, The New Radical. We also discuss the broader project of documenting countercultures, the ambivalent role of technology in channeling and enabling the control…

The writer Michael Sacasas joins Outsider Theory to discuss what the tech critics pre-Internet generations – especially Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman – have to say to us today as well as what contemporary tech criticism tends to miss, and how he understands his own critical and philosophical project. We also explore…

Justin Murphy joins Outsider Theory to discuss leaving academia, his book Based Deleuze, why political correctness is only ones symptom of the real ailments afflicting the contemporary university, what conservatives get wrong about critical theory, and the current prospects of independent intellectual life, especially on the internet. Justin's proj…

Historian and writer Blake Smith joins Outsider Theory to discuss the teaching theory and the formation of elites; the surprising affinities between Strauss and Foucault; the parallel grooming practices of Straussians and Derrideans; the perverse economy of enjoyment in the Trump era; Obama’s failed use of theory as seduction prop; and why Foucault…

Jesse Walker, author of the excellent United States of Paranoia (2013) and books editor at Reason, joins Outsider Theory to revisit his book's arguments in light of Trump era politics. We discuss the Capitol riot and why it reveals not a unified front but a highly fractured right-wing fringe, and the continuities between liberal establishment paran…

Biz Sherbert, a theorist and writer focused on online fashion and Gen Z subcultures, joins Outsider Theory to discuss the current landscape of digital fashion, the shifting nature of subcultures, and the persistence of hauntological nostalgia of contemporary culture. We consider the acceleration of the trend cycle in online spaces and how it dramat…

Chris Gabriel, creator of the MemeAnalysis Youtube channel, joins Outsider Theory to discuss why memes are now the royal road to the collective unconscious. We also discuss how the internet traps Dionysian energies in an Apollinian dreamworld; why Burroughs's word virus is a better model than Dawkinsian memetics for understanding the meme form; wha…

Adam Lehrer is a critic and artist, the co-host of System of Systems podcast. His new substack is Safety Propaganda. He joins Outsider Theory to discuss how we got Marxpilled, how Marx got mainstreamed among the professional class in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and why the "ruthless criticism of all that exists" especially means criticis…

Outsider art historian and hypnotist collector Mónica Belevan joins Outsider Theory to discuss her various attempts to track the structures of feeling of the present. We explore the aesthetics and sensibilities of the Baroque and their relevance for grasping the topoi of the Covid era – in particular, the image of the labyinth, the theme of the mad…

In recent years, memes have risen to prominence as a medium for witty, irreverent, surreal engagement with the canon of High Theory. At the speed of the internet, memes now circulate the ideas of thinkers from Deleuze to Dugin, from Land to DeLanda, in humorous and fragmentary forms, instantiating in their mode of dissemination the sorts of positiv…

The Hungarian countess Erzsébet Báthory (1560-1610), allegedly one of the most prolific mass murderers ever, occupies the border zone between history and legend. She has become a part of the vampire mythology associated with Southeast Europe as well as a subject of fascination for avant-garde writers and artists and a frequent pop culture reference…

The "contrarian" is an outsider on the edge of the inside: attached to a particular group but defiant of its pieties and orthodoxies. Contrarians often seem to be one of the most despised figures in online spaces – yet strategic contrarianism can also be a career-building strategy. Hence, accused contrarians are often accused of "grifting" and simi…

Francis E. Dec (1926-1996) was a disbarred lawyer who wrote and circulated a series of pamphlets detailing the world's subjugation by the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God. He was largely ignored for much of his life, but his writings eventually gathered a cult following because of their unique depiction of a theme common both to late twent…

For the inaugural episode of the Outsider Theory podcast, I speak to Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies, about the Capitol riot and what it reveals about the right-wing embrace of transgression and subversion; the shift in the liberal consensus from celebratory views of technology to more censorious attitudes; and the ongoing weaponization of…