This grimdark future has more kinds of weather and lighting than I expected. I thought it would be gray overcast dusk and rainy with tire fires all the time. But there’s also bright blue skies and dawns and noons and cool breezes and stuff. Very disorienting.
Conversation
The average effect is lifeless, abandoned and junky, not foreboding with villainy looming over it. Forget Dark Lords, there aren’t even Bond villains or Mad Max grade local warlords.
2
14
In hindsight, having interesting villains to fight makes for an optimistic class of apocalyptic futures. True darkness is when there aren’t even any villains.
2
11
41
The word that really captures the 2021 global mood and energy is abandonment. Historically such periods had a focal point for the sense of abandonment as in “god has abandoned us” but since god died in 1882, modern apocalyptic periods lack a referent for the sense of abandonment.
1
7
27
Our sense of the meaning of the present is always framed by a sense of the future. Moods like ‘premium mediocre’ allowed you to read the zeitgeist in a certain coherent future-framed way. Now the built environment is just a jumble of signifiers pointing in random directions.
1
12
Replying to
The first is a subversion of the relationship of mutual care between the individual and society (always a somewhat child-parent thing)
The second is a withdrawal of the cohering effects of purpose on space (function —> form)
The third is the unraveling of temporal structure
2
1
14
The grimdark thing about Afghanistan post US abandonment is that there are no empires left that even aspire to that graveyard now. Not even China. Even if the Taliban harbor the architects of another 9/11 I doubt anyone will want to invade.
2
8
It will be some dispirited hellhole of guns, goats crumbling monuments, and mining equipment. That’s abandonment. Coming soon to your world too. Sub local fauna for goats. In the US it is domestic pets being callously abandoned by people who adopted them for company last year.
2
12
Abandonment is not chaos. Chaos is an energized high-conflict state. Abandonment is low energy. This is why trying to impose ‘order’ with rules doesn’t really help, and the JBP recipe (more generally, trad turns) don’t help. “Clean your room” works on chaos, not on abandonment.
3
1
24
In fact you need the opposite of rules to address the condition. A concept we have no word for. I’m calling it unrules. Things that energize the abandoned state enough to be even called unruly and call for order.
Quote Tweet
What’s the opposite of ‘rule’? The noun not the verb.
What would an unrule, a factor that promotes unruly behavior, be?
Aside, the archaic “ruly” (‘amenable to discipline or order’) is a great word and should be brought back.
Show this thread
4
15
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Replying to
Lol, I just don’t have the deep Japanese cultural literacy you and Brett have to get a lot out of these things. I try but clearly miss 90% of what you guys get since I’ve consumed like a total of maybe 10 hours of Japanese media in my life.

