the inexhaustible wealth fund (weekly meeting)
March 4, 2022
Welcome to Reality Farm.
Some spring cleaning:
First, WEATHER REPORT 🖼 will be replaced by LETTERS HOME FROM THE WAR ON REALITY 🪖, wherein I have been drafted into the technocorporate war on reality in the Bay Area. Dispatches from the front lines to follow.
Please welcome Indweller Iomharach, a raccoon, the newest contributor to Reality Farm, and the best foreign correspondent we could afford, God keep us and save us. While Indweller primarily resides with his family in an old rotten desk out by the scrapyard, he will supply us with missives from his business travels in a new section, THE FOREIGN DESK, HOME TO A FAMILY OF RACCOONS 🗺️.
Forgive me for not having anything clever to say about Ukraine.
Lost? Confused? Excellent, me too. Here’s a map.
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Giovanni Gasparro — “L'Illuso”
Giovanni Gasparro — “San Nicola di Bari”
Giovanni Gasparro — “San Sebastiano curato da Sant'Irene”
LETTERS HOME FROM THE WAR ON REALITY 🪖
Dear Lucille1,
The modern workplace has changed. No, not yours, yours is a milk barn, same as always. My workplace has changed, I’m told. On my computer, a woman with a home office larger than my entire apartment tells me that flexibility is the word of the day. She tells me to work from whichever of my bedrooms best suits my needs. Alas, I only have one. My roommates won’t let me use their bedrooms — I tried, and now my chicken thighs keep disappearing from the fridge.
I hate working from my bedroom. Bedrooms are for sleeping and sex, though I mostly use mine for reading. Ten years ago, if all of my coworkers forced their way into my house and paraded through my bedroom, I’d be put on trial for murder then acquitted on grounds of self-defense against an abominable act. Now, this very act plays out hour after hour under cover of video conferencing and we pretend like it’s normal. It’s not normal. It is inflicted upon the young and it forces you to sterilize your personal spaces to conform to your boss’s notions of propriety.
Well. Enough of all that. The real reason I go into the office every day is because I’m undisciplined. Dozens of unread books lay piled about my room and if I work from home, a voice in my head asks, If you read books all day instead of working, how would anyone know? I look up from Moby Dick, “What? What did you say?” Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck. Ah, shit. I’m late for a meeting.
So, the office. It has its downsides, which we’ll explore further in the coming weeks. One thing about it: it holds you down in the infernal river of corporate America, until you’re pulled up by your ankles spitting and sputtering about “let’s double click into that” and “+1” and “achieve alignment.” The effect is stronger here than at home. Here you are submerged without reference to the outside world. In this bright expanse you must be wary, lest corporate language seep in through your ears, corporate language that withers, corporate language that causes living things to shrivel up and die.
I perform small rituals to keep it at bay. Our conference rooms are made of glass and passers-by can see the name of your meeting splashed across the TVs. I reserve rooms for myself and name my meetings after snippets of poems and novels. When coworkers peer in, I hold their eye and shake my head slowly, like I’ve just previewed Q4 earnings and they’re a fucking disaster. This ritual keeps me sane. Here is a selection of my meetings:
A Survey of Cobwebbed Kingdoms
The Smell of the Future Symposium
Horses and Theology Roundtable
The Arctic League of Tropical Fish Annual Meeting
Review: Cats in Plague-Time
The Nimble Leap Panel
The Inexhaustible Wealth Fund (Weekly Meeting)
Into the Unimaginable Roadmap
Cold Locomotive Committee Meeting
Supply + Demand + Magic
A Review of Nameless Edens
Things, Ghost Things, Towers
Unmuting Knowledge
Names as Destiny
Operation Smoldering Peat
Highly Lambent Proxy Vote
Speaking into the Unspeakable
Updating All Points of Departure
Planning for Wolfish Appetites
How to Riot on the Sea
Negotiating the Secret of Longevity
Uttering the Unattainable
Exploring Phenomena with Meanings and Implications
Making Writing Difficult for Oneself
Until next time. Eat the sweet grass, drink deeply of the sun, and defend reality.
Heart’s best,
Murdo
CONTENT CROP 🌾
I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion and David Krakauer—our president—said that the same idea had occurred to him. Which pleased me a good deal because David is very smart.
. . .
Of the known characteristics of the unconscious its persistence is among the most notable. Everyone is familiar with repetitive dreams. Here the unconscious may well be imagined to have more than one voice: He’s not getting it, is he? No. He’s pretty thick. What do you want to do? I dont know. Do you want to try using his mother? His mother is dead. What difference does that make?
. . .
So what are we saying here? That some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing. Yes. Of course that’s what we are saying.
note: Cormac McCarthy on dreams, language, the unconscious. He’s a delight to read, not sure how I missed this essay.
Inventing the Shipwreck || Real Life Mag
In the estimation of philosopher Paul Virilio, the refusal to seriously contemplate the chance of failure can have calamitous effects. As he evocatively put it in 1997’s Open Sky, “Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us.” Virilio’s formulation is a reminder that along with new technologies come new types of dangerous technological failures. It may seem obvious today that there had never been a car crash before the car was invented, but what future wrecks are being overlooked today amidst the excited chatter about AI, the metaverse, and all things crypto?
note: it’s called we do a little techno-cautionism
However, the strongest predictor of female sexual response was none of these—it was attractive partner smell.
This will come as no surprise to, say, Jennifer Aniston, who is on record as saying that there is no better smell than that of the man you love, but it was an interesting finding to us. This is because smell appears to advertise your genome to potential partners. The science is complex, and some of it is in dispute, but there is credible research that immune system compatibility—what would make your baby healthy if you were to have one together—is signalled (both ways) by how attractive you find your partner’s smell. That women’s olfactory bulbs, the part of the brain that processes smell, are fully 40 percent denser than men’s would fit well with the knowledge that their decision-making here needs to be keener than men’s.
note: come for the disclaimer “I do not claim that we have solved the puzzle [of the female orgasm],” stay for the insights into body odor and romantic compatibility
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
THE FOREIGN DESK, HOME TO A FAMILY OF RACCOONS 🗺️
I’ve never been to a city like Orlando. It’s not even a city, it’s a few intersections and amusement parks bound together with decorative pirate ship rope. A few days into my trip, I made a wrong turn and ended up at SeaWorld. Like any good coastal elite, I seethed at in-the-know Orlandoans lined up at the entrance, armed with insider knowledge on the latest orca or rollercoaster or whatever. Yeah, have fun with that. When I line up for a new exhibit at the Met, it’s different.
And yet. And yet, people here seem happy. They seem relaxed. There’s none of that frenetic energy that I all too often conflate with culture and prestige. Maybe that’s America outside of the six zip codes with Michelin stars. Maybe that’s Florida. It doesn’t matter.
Why should Central Florida, of all places, trigger an existential crisis? I see the pastel stucco crumbling into sun and water. I have to laugh. It feels more and more that, in struggling toward the undefined yet concrete in my ego – legacy, success, love – I will fail. There is no escape. I can’t quit, I don’t want to. Orlando, as it were, is not for me. Not yet. — Indweller Iomharach
WALKING THE FENCELINE 🕸
Someone converted a 600-year-old Franciscan monastery in Croatia into “a contemporary space that can host conferences, symposia, retreats, and bespoke private events.” Do yourself a favor and don’t look at the furniture, the couches ruined my day.
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
This is it. The king of the hill. The best take of the year, against which all other takes must measure themselves. Tao Lin, a novelist, takes stock of the Big Bang and considers what it might mean for humanity if it never happened.
New Cosmologies: Could reconsidering the Big Bang theory save us?
tl;dr: Big Bang cosmology can’t explain gravity and governments and corporations are hiding “secret physics” that would give us personal UFOs and unlimited energy
THE BOOK BARN 📖
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
(Fiction, 2004. $20.)
Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence.And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read.
note: in my Roberto Bolaño era, reading about hundreds of unsolved murders in a fictionalized Ciudad Juárez
THE RIGHT’S WING 🦇
Seismic events out of France. Éric Zemmour, a right-wing journalist, the son of Algerian Jewish immigrants, and a figure quite literally out of a Michel Houellebecq novel, is running for the French presidency. There’s a glut of Zemmour profiles, but I thought this one putting Zemmour within the context of France, Macron, Le Pen, etc. was good:
France Is Living in Zemmour’s World || Palladium Mag
On the “four I’s”: immigration, identity, insecurity, and Islam.
Zemmour believes that France will face a civil war in the near future—or at the very least, some form of profound ethnic and religious partition—if the vast demographic change that has occurred over the past 50 years is not checked.
Zemmour’s views are not just popular among the population, but increasingly reflect a turn within the French political establishment itself. This Zemmourization is most evident on the flashpoint issues Zemmour himself calls the “four I’s”: immigration, identity, insecurity, and Islam. France’s politicians, including its current government, are steering sharply to the right to adjust to this new political reality. While a Zemmour presidency still seems unlikely, his ideas will shape France’s politics for years to come.
One of his most ardent beliefs is that Islam will never be compatible with the French culture. Pointing to the rise of France’s Muslim population, which is believed to comprise between 6 and 10% of the country, Zemmour has argued for years that a clash of civilizations exists within France itself.
On mainstream adoption of Zemmour’s views:
This convergence between Zemmourian ideas and French public opinion is not confined to the center-right. A recent Harris Interactive poll concluded that 67% of the general population are concerned to some degree about the idea of a “Great Replacement.”
The mainstream of French society—including the Macronist base—has shifted toward a consensus that, only a few years ago, was too radical even for Marine Le Pen to endorse publicly.
The greatest threat to Zemmour might not come from his ideological opponents at all. The French establishment seems increasingly capable of updating its ideological lines in order to preserve itself in the face of the conflicts that are fracturing French society—and to steal the wind out of the far-right’s sails.
But perhaps the clearest sign of France’s Zemmourization can be found in Zemmour’s foremost political opponent: President Macron himself.
Since then, Macron has pivoted from a center-left candidate to a center-right incumbent, especially on economics.
This convergence does not seem limited to public political rhetoric or diplomatic chess moves. Over the past few years, Macron himself has publicly engaged the French right’s intellectual circles and media outlets, and has repeatedly acknowledged the legitimacy of many of their concerns and even policy positions. In 2019, Macron gave a 12-page interview to the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles where he criticized Zemmour’s “deadly dialectic,” though he simultaneously argued that “we need to expel all the people who don’t belong here” and denounced a creeping “secession.”
What keeps Macron distinct from Zemmour is not an unwillingness to address issues around culture and immigration, but his insistence on seeing them in the frame of international French power and influence, rather than cultural preservation.
On Zemmour’s chances:
This means that Zemmour’s radical plans on immigration would likely be declared unconstitutional if they went through the normal legislative procedure. Short of a constitutional amendment or a referendum on immigration, French and European courts would seriously limit the capacity of a right-wing government to implement a Zemmourist migratory agenda.
Either Zemmour or Le Pen would probably have more difficulty implementing their agenda given their lack of governing experience. They would also likely face administrative pushback. Unlike the United States, France does not have a spoils system that would allow a new president to position ideologically-aligned individuals in key administrative positions. Many high-profile servants had made their opposition to Le Pen clear ahead of the 2017 election, with some saying they would stay at their jobs to resist her administration from the inside. If the shift comes from within the French establishment itself, however, such resistance strategies would become more difficult and costly.
The French presidential election has become a battlefield between a rising far-right, an increasingly hardline center-right, and Macron himself, with the left seemingly relegated to irrelevance. France is increasingly living in Zemmour’s world. He may yet be defeated at the ballot box, but the French establishment itself might just bring his vision to pass.
Lucille is a heifer