Perhaps the most embarrassing thing about throwing around accusations of cancel culture is the suggestion that having beef is, in itself, a bad thing. Or that when one person or a group of people come out fighting for something, one side shouldn’t win. There is no other cultural context in which this sort of wetwipe mode of engagement would fly. It’s the lamest thing I’ve ever seen. And yet, in the context of some so-called intellectual debates, the insinuation is made that we should all rise above the fray.
Of course, it’s not all about “winning”, but at the same time, what I miss the most about the old blogosphere is the sort of protracted and bloody-minded debates people would get involved in that weren’t all that serious but nonetheless had some stakes, even if they were entirely personal or subjective. There was often an unspoken understanding that, rather than agreeing to disagree, the writerly sparring was an opportunity for each person to shape and home the best version of their position. This wasn’t in the sense of some old Boys’ Club debate society or a performative and purely egotistical duel, but in a wonderfully exciting sense of dialogue — dare I say dialectics — that was as immersed in cultural history as it was present-day online vernaculars. I can’t lie, even when my own engagement was more indicative of poor mental health than displays of intellectual fortitude, I still loved it.
The conversation I had with Matt Bluemink on anti-hauntology and accelerationism in 2019(?) might be the last example of a conversation like this that I can think of. No one gets into that sort of healthy debates anymore, even though people still talk about them — and often that conversation in particular — as a real highlight of an online cultural space-time. And for all its general faults, that was always the biggest virtue of accelerationism discourse in general at that time. I certainly don’t stand by every position I once went to bat for (hi patchwork!), but those arguments shaped me and honed my positions today. They also felt like a collective exercise in advancing a thought for now. Even if the essence of each argument didn’t necessarily change year on year, the quality of its expression did. That was valuable and it kept things moving.
But the reality is that those conversations don’t happen anymore. Instead, the biggest drama to emerge from an old theory scene recently has been the fall of Nina Power and DC Miller (although Miller didn’t have any lofty reputation to squander in the first place). It felt like the culmination of a few years’ worth of deleterious arguments that sapped a once-lively and diverse community of any good will. Over the course of a few years, for better or worse, blogospheric discussion was replaced by self-contained podcasts, and if there is ever any sort of argument to hash out now, they take place on YouTube or other platforms with all the poise, grace and interest of a random beef found on there in general.
The general image I have in my head here is the inanity of the H3H3 podcast and its various dramas. More specifically, I’m thinking of the embarrassing displays made by Doug Lain’s Sublation crew after they lost Zer0 Books or the Theory Underground livestreams when they were publicising a ugly essay collection featuring Nina Power and other cranks. Mostly, it was people complaining about complaints, and just as discussion of Nina’s courtroom drama reached a fever pitch on leftist Twitter a few weeks ago, so too did all of the above came out to bat for her, her transphobia and her right to own Mein Kampf for research purposes only (promise!). The arguments were all the same too. It was all “cancel culture” this and “Mark Fisher’s Vampire Castle” that… I’m sure if you know what I’m talking about, you don’t need any further reminder, and if you don’t know, best to quit while you’re ahead. None of it warrants any sort of in-depth analysis here, nor will it get any.
But I was nonetheless thinking about these cries from the bottom of the proverbial barrel recently whilst watching a nearly-four-hour YouTube video about Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake. And it made me think of something about all the diagnoses of a cancel culture…
I like hip-hop, but I won’t pretend to keep up with it all that proficiently. I generally struggle to keep up with anything else days and usually find myself going on retrospective deep dives long after something has had its initial moment in the sunshine. What can I say, I’m getting old. Regardless, the back-and-forth exchange of diss tracks from Drake and Kendrick is one more thing I’m only just coming to understand.
The video I watched to get into all this was by F.D. Signifier (who runs a fantastic channel) and I liked his framing very much. The video begins with the following spiel:
A lot of Drake supporters and stans seem to think that this is all about jealousy and success (or lack thereof). A lot of Kendrick supporters and stans seem to think this is about legacy and status for Kendrick. Outsiders to this culture just think this is a celebrity feud like any other. [But] no, none of those things actually capture the totality of why this beef was so significant to black and hip-hop culture, or why it captivated people the way it did. This is not just about one rapper not liking another rapper. This isn’t just about jealousy or envy or pettiness. The core conflict of this beef isn’t just about settling who the best rapper of a generation is. It’s about dictating what hip-hop is for generations to come, and possibly rectifying what hip-hop has been for generations past.
The Kendrick-Drake affair, then, isn’t simply an insular battle within a culture, it a battle for the status of that culture itself. This is how F.D. approaches things:
To fully understand why this beef exists, why it captivated so many generations, you can’t start in March of 2024. You can’t even start in 2013 with good kid, m.A.A.d city. You can’t start in 2009 when Drake signed to Young Money. You have to start earlier than that. Because if you don’t, then you don’t fully understand why Drake’s existence as a whole is such an anomaly that many might find dangerous and toxic to what hip-hop is and has been for the last decade and a half, and what Kendrick has been or has tried to be for most of that time. So you have to understand what hip-hop was and is, what it might continue to be, and what it hopefully will be going forward. And both of these rappers represent two conflicting paths that hip-hop has taken, and to understand all of that, you’ve gotta start at the beginning, so that’s what we’re gonna do…
To wit: Plato’s Socratic dialogues begin… I’m joking, but I like the sentiment, and I hope you will already see what I’m getting at here…
F.D. goes back to the birth of hip-hop, to DJ Kool Herc, and soon surmises:
Whenever you have hungry, underserved people — young people especially — vying for a set of resources, there’s gonna be conflict. And conflict was no stranger to hip-hop. MC and DJ battles have been a big part of hip-hop culture almost from the very beginning. And we’re not just talking MCs and DJs: dancing, rivalries in graffiti art, pretty much anything you can think of, there is a tradition of competitiveness that exists there.
Beyond the most famous and bloody examples of rap beefs that end in gang feuds and murders, F.D. stresses that many of early hip-hop’s most significant beefs were battled out solely in the studio and never broke out of that context, and he stresses how this is a tendency found in artforms of all kinds.
Although it might seem like a stretch you tie this kind of cultural battling to something like blogospheric debates and discourses, it is obvious that these dynamics are visible in cultures of all types. Sometimes commercial competition is a factor, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s ugly, sometimes it’s not. Overall, though, F.D. concludes, “I can’t deny, when done right, the human drama of a rap beef has the ability to create some of the most memorable and impactful moments in any form of art.”
The same can surely be said of the culture so many of us have spent the last few years immersed within. Personally, I can point to the release of Pete Wolfendale’s Object-Oriented Philosophy on Urbanomic in late 2014 as the first thing I read in relation to the speculative realism blogosphere, and that book was partly so attractive to a layperson in their early 20s like myself because of the drama surrounding it (whilst, by the same token, Graham Harman’s Skirmishes (2020) was one of the most underwhelming and embarrassing texts anyone from those circles has ever published — and I think that’s true whether you’re Team Harman or Team Wolfendale). There is, of course, the potential for debate-via-beef to be a wholly wasteful expenditure of philosophical energies (whether as a reader or a writer), but as F.D. suggests, when done right, such moments can define a generation or era of thought. (Lest we forget Zizek’s endorsement for Pete’s book invoking the historical disagreement between Kant and Swedenborg…)
Taken as a whole, it is these moments of fiery dissensus that move a culture on and even define the trajectory a culture continues along from that moment, and so when I say (perhaps all too often) that I miss the heights of the blogosphere, it is this potential for fractious disagreement that I mean, because it did give us a sense of movement and drama that is generally missing from both the academy and the spectacle of the ‘culture war’ (with the latter really being a misnomer, since it does absolutely nothing to advance culture as such).
This is the overall point of F.D.’s video and the importance he ascribes to Kendrick Lamar’s recent volley of diss tracks. It is not insignificant that, after the universal praise of To Pimp a Butterfly, hip-hop seemingly fell into a period of stagnancy for many rap fans, he argues, but this has since been reignited by the Drake affair. The shots taken might be embarrassingly personal at times (for Drake especially), but more symbolically, Kendrick’s clear victory also serves as a rallying cry for a generation of artists who want to take a stand against the over-commercialisation of rap in the streaming era. It is a rap battle not simply about the status and legacy and commercial success of two individual artists, but more broadly, it is a collection of statements (from Kendrick) about the status of hip-hop itself and its future. In taking a stand with regards to what he believes hip-hop can and should be, Kendrick has produced a groundswell of excitement that may well fuel a new vibrancy in the culture as a whole.
In the aftermath of Nina Power’s downfall, there was an argument had in a group chat I’m a part of where the usual terms were debated. Should we really be calling Nina a fascist or crypto-fascist? What is this culture of political purity that we have all fallen into where the F-word is thrown around all too readily? Personally, I think the designation of “crypto-fascist” is apt. The laundering of reactionary viewpoints and bigotry under the guise of philosophical debate and I’ve-been-abandoned-by-the-left posturing is reprehensible and encapsulates the worst tendency of a number of online commentators who want to stoke drama for engagement only. But beyond that, to suggest this is a problem of political purity or cancel culture is to woefully misunderstand what is at stake. Indeed, it is not “cancel culture” so much as it is “cancellation” (I’d prefer the term disavowal) for the sake of culture. Our culture. Our intellectual culture online. What do we want this culture do be? The resounding cry from so many is decisively “not whatever this is.” It is not a question of purity, then, but of having a political backbone, and taking a stand against certain strands or modes of intellectual debate in favour of others.
What surprised me most, in the aftermath of the release of transcripts from Nina’s trial, was the way in which these discussions around the kind of person she had become (and the kind of intellectual culture that she’d come to represent for many) had taken on a significance far beyond our relatively small circles. It sparked a wider conversation that many of us had been having online for at least five or six years… Many were now asking themselves how this kind of thing happens? How can someone fall from being a generally respected leftist commentator to a cliched reactionary writing for Tory newspapers and online magazines obsessed with the culture war?
Many who came to Nina’s defense predictably cited Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” essay as a canary in the coalmine, whilst as predictably memory-holing the fact that Fisher himself moved on to develop a whole new line of thought in the aftermath, whereas they are still stuck in 2013. Fisher hated “vampires”, after all, because they “don’t feed on energy directly, they feed on obstructing projects“, and the biggest fans of his grumpiest essay thus epitomise its central figure today — they are not interested in “the left” or contemporary leftist culture, but rather in obstructing its development into areas they see as unworthy of it (notably, the intersectional struggles of marginalised people, which they deem to be “woke”).
I think a better (if nonetheless partial) answer to these questions is instead the state of our media ecology. The relative openness of blogs has been replaced by the more insular space of podcasts. At the risk of begrudging this development too much — — I hope it goes without saying that I love plenty of podcasts, and I love my friends who run their own podcasts (just as I’ve helped host some previously and am still regularly a guest on many others) — I do think more of a conversation should be had around how this change in medium not only reflects changes in the consumption of intellectual culture but has also actively helped shape it, and not necessarily for the better.
Elsewhere, once independent magazines have faltered, and in their place we have platforms like Compact Magazine that are backed by shady money and equally shady columnists. My inchoate feelings about it all are thus: in a culture with a lifeblood that is still predominantly constituted by young people vying for limited resources, the two diverging paths available to most are either entering the neoliberalized academy or undertaking some sort of online grift, and it is also increasingly the case that a combination of the two is encouraged by various institutions. Indeed, my university actually offers courses on setting up podcasts to share research.
Once upon a time, I’m sure there was encouragement from academic senior management to set up blogs too, all in service of “public engagement”, but in the far more “professional” sphere of home audio-production studios, this mode of cultural production does hit differently to the old blog days. And it’s not just podcasts. Repeater Books and Zer0 Books both appear to be on the ropes. As alluded to by Alex Niven recently, disagreements over displays of solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement have called the future of both imprints into question. But if I can also be a bit more frank, there was also discord behind the scenes when Repeater published (or sought to publish) some of the more reactionary writers that many associated with the scabs at Zer0 2.0. These books raised eyebrows for many, but speculations around how they came into print are moot at this point. Behind it all, there seems to be a struggle to stay afloat in a culture that fundamentally does not reward long-form writing. Indeed, writing, for me at least, remains the main focus and interest here, but since the pandemic (when I briefly held open a subscriber-only space of my own to supplement by drastic drop in income), I have repeatedly had mixed feelings about the extent to which an interest in writing has had to be necessarily sidelined in favour of other modes of engagement — none of which I enjoy nearly as much as writing right here on my blog.
But again, none of this is really about a sense of financial sustainability, although this is both an understandable and important concern. It is rather concerns around cultural sustainability that are at heart of all of these dramas and beefs and arguments. A few years ago, it felt like the arguments themselves helped sustain that culture; now, not so much. And it worries me. With Repeater seemingly in its death throes, with blogospheric discussions now seemingly a think of the past, where is home? Where is The Culture? What is The Culture? Whatever it is, it feels like it is languishing. It feels like too many things have come (or are coming) to an end.
The idea that some blogospheric Kendrick Lamar might wade into the fray and reignite a sense of culture for everyone feels like a pipedream. I desperately want someone to prove me wrong. Then again, maybe Ray Brassier was right all those years ago when he declared the whole enterprise an “orgy of stupidity”. But it wasn’t always that way. Online theory culture was a real force to be reckoned with, and the likes of Zer0 and Repeater explicitly grew out of that swell of energy. Now that these imprints are collapsing, what will we fall back on to regather our strengths?
It is true that some of the best books to be published in recent years have come directly from podcasts and vloggers — Acid Horizon’s Anti-Oculus, Alice Cappelle’s Collapse Feminism, et al. — but I do worry that these more isolated nodes within our media ecology are not enough to sustain a culture on its own. This is not because I somehow think those platforms are lesser; rather, vlogging or podcasting has a far higher technical or production threshold for wider significance than the guerrilla accessibility of blogging platforms. I often think about how, if I was starting out today, I don’t think I’d be able to afford it or have the extra time or energy needed to produce something of the quality necessary to make an impact. Whether that energy is syphoned upwards into a smaller circle of high-quality media producers, or syphoned downwards into the swamps of Elon Musk’s Twitter, I can’t help but feel like the writerly groundwater that has long sustained our wider ecology has all but dried up in recent years. And yes, it does worry me.
