24 Hour Theory People: Part 3

This is the final instalment of a three part conversation on the legacy of the cultural theorist Mark Fisher and the wider blogosphere from which his thinking emerged. The conversation took place in September 2019, via Google Doc between between six writers who were each engaged with Fisher’s work and involved in the blogosphere at various, overlapping stages. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

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Part 3

Anwen Crawford: I want to ask two related questions, which may seem basic, but here we go:

What — if any — is the k-punk post that had the most impact on you, and why? (It doesn’t have to be one that’s in the book).

And, we’ve been circling around and around this but I will ask it directly: What aspects of either Mark’s work and/or the blogosphere can we carry into the future, towards the future? (Full Acid Communism…?)

Carl Neville: I’ll just take us slightly back to the going overground/counterculture stuff, if I may. Firstly, the counterculture — if we are thinking of say 60s through to mid-80s — was based in some ways on the post-WW2 compact: full employment, generous (by historic standards) welfare payments, cheap housing, generally rising living standards; under those circumstances people have the time and energy to be involved in experimental art and civil rights and anti-war movements. None of those conditions really apply anymore in the post-(post-?) Fordist world.

I caught the tail end of this in the mid-80s and early 90s. We had a friend of a friend, for instance, who had toured supporting Killing Joke (a big deal in our eyes) whose band had just sat on the dole for years practicing to get good. I don’t remember feeling I was going to get ripped off or kicked out by a landlord, i.e. that my accommodation was precarious in any way really, until I came back to London in 2013. I was in Leeds mostly at the time and squats were common both as living and rehearsal spaces. Libraries were a great source of books and records and later videos. There were physical, small scale book, record and video stores (and early computer game stores) with their respective magi from whom you could receive wisdom etc, hang out in. There was something like a Universal Basic Income/services already available: you had the hospital, the library, higher education/courses, much, much less stringent criteria for receiving dole/housing benefit and much greater help. As I was growing up and obviously work shy and unambitious in material terms but y’know, with a thirst for beauty and all that, the existence of these things was a massive psychological support: it doesn’t matter really, any of it, I can just go on the dole…. The  album which absolutely best captures this sort of wonderland of (relative) ease and time to experiment, the alternate dimension that ran alongside the everyday, mundane working world is probably that Blue Orchids album, The Greatest Hit.

This is why I think, increasingly, cultural production is becoming a middle class preserve: only they have the existential/psychological security and time to focus on this stuff.

And it’s also why I am a bit sceptical about the consciousness-raising stuff —  Acid Corbynism — which seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Social provision of the kind that the pre-Blair years offered sets a kind of base level of consciousness; you are no longer consumed with worry about how you’ll eat, where you will live, and have time to self-actualise/engage with theory and politics and so on. As the base for that disappeared through the 90s to now, and as it seemed impossible that on a political level we could materially improve and restore security to people’s lives, then a certain desperate and wishful relation to culture took hold. That was the only area where we had any purchase; maybe that could be the tool through which we changed things. So I don’t want to be a vulgar materialist and obviously we are now, in the British left at least, via Corbynism and its offshoots, in an ironic dialectical process where you have a group of people both trying to form a government and also simultaneously create, in a quite top-down fashion, the grassroots, extra-parliamentary left that will bolster it. This is an attempt at a virtuous circle of cultural and political expansion and many of the ideas are drawn out of things Mark argued about and for (people like John McDonnel are vital in this dual role, both as a highly effective bureaucrat and a man of ideas familiar with people like Mark’s work). 

Sometimes I think of blogging as being like an air pocket in a capsized ship, or a continuation, a surprising re-emergence, of that parallel world that the Blue  Orchids bloomed in: ‘Woke up one morning/threw my name in the bin…’

Simon Reynolds: The counterculture has always depended on economic surplus and the infrastructure created by industrial society/consumer capitalism.

It’s why straight people instinctively get annoyed with the freaks — or at least, the freakishness is a big part, but there’s a gut feeling there of ‘you’re getting away with something’.

And I sort of see their point — I mean, Castlemorton [rave, in 1992] was a fabulous irruption but you have to feel a pang or two for the people who lived there who had a small city of smelly, noise-making youths arrive on their doorsteps.

I loved [free party collective] Spiral Tribe as a phenomenon but I could never take their ‘outside society is the true reality’ shtick seriously — they and the other travellers were driving on roads, using petrol, and most of them claimed benefits. The whole scene also relied on the influx of weekend ravers who had jobs and lived in cities to buy the drugs they were selling! Whatever they imagined they were doing, they were absolutely enmeshed with the thing they thought they were at war with.

The original counterculture/underground was a particularly striking example of this, because in the UK at least, it was very much institutionally bound up with both the state (the BBC through John Peel; the university circuit of music venues,  in some instances subsidised by the Arts Council; getting some kind of help from sympathetic local councils, and so on) and with the record industry (the major labels who all started their own long-hair divisions).

I don’t think it undermines the value of what was attempted or created under those auspices — you use what resources you can find — but it certainly complicates the idea of autonomy or creating a separate society.

The formulation I tend to come back to — as a vital contradiction, not necessarily a fatal one — is: the Alternative is a way of ‘opposing capitalism while living within it’.

In terms of k-punk head-rearranging blog posts, there are too many…  that’s the easy answer — true but also a bit of a cop-out.

The essay ‘London After the Rave’ on Burial’s debut album was a memorable moment — a sensation of being floored with awe, combined with a feeling of ‘damn, I wish I had thought of that’. Which relates to the earlier point about the blog scene being a space of competition as well as collaboration/camaraderie. Mark’s post was a massive preemptive strike that nailed the album and artist in an utterly and breathtakingly definitive way, such that no one has ever been able to get around it (although Adam Harper on Rouge’s Foam made a valiant attempt at a different reading).

Another memorable one for me, which is in the k-punk anthology, would be ‘Is Pop Undead?’ — where Mark introduces the idea of nihilation as a creative and dynamic force that drives pop culture forward. The sensation reading that was different from the Burial text; it felt more like the flash of recognition: a crystal-sharp, ferociously stark articulation of my own value-set (which I’d assimilated from the UK music press originally, lived by as a critic and a fan all the way through). Bringing it back to Anwen’s very first question [in the first installment], this was a very strong and strident defence of judgement — the capacity and even the duty to reject certain things. A manifesto for a kind of aesthetic moralism; a vision of culture as a field of conflict, of sides taken, causes worth rallying to. Culture ‘not as an archipelago of neighbouring but unconflicting options, not as a sequence of happy hybridities or pallid incommensurabilities, but as a spiral of nihiliating vortices’. 

And the piece was an act, a feat, of nihilation in itself, blasting to smithereens the prevalent and ascendant opposed way of going about things — which strove to see value in everything, understand things on their own terms, neurotically obsessed about avoiding any appearance of snobbery, etc.

Carl Neville: On the relation between rave and the underlying sets of social provision that supported it: I used to have a group of friends/peers back in Barrow when I was in my late teens/early twenties, small town anarcho-punks essentially, who all went off travelling, and that mobility and sense of being able to get out of your hometown not via the route of university (which was mine) was important to them, though in reality for a few of them it just made their drug habits even worse. By that point, late 80s on, we had shifted from a post-war full employment economy to one which saw some degree of unemployment as a way of maintaining the health of capitalism (profitability) so really you had a structural necessity that people were unemployed and they were — it had been decided — going to be mostly in the post-industrial North, Scotland and Wales. I think that did give people a very antagonistic attitude toward the state at that time: you were structurally unemployed and at the same time vilified for being a scrounger, so some people really were going to grab whatever they could from the remnants of the welfare state and get as much enjoyment out of it as they could. It was less a case of ‘dropping out’ than being kicked out (or down). There was a certain sense of anger, abandonment, that fed an aggressive hedonism that isn’t there in the late 90s and early 00s — they are just much more cautious and careerist times.

Owen Hatherley: I was thinking about what particular piece I would choose, and to be honest I found it quite difficult. If we’re going to talk about ‘swarms’, what made k-punk was often a cumulative effect rather than discrete essays as such, which is one reason why the three collections [of Mark’s essays] don’t always entirely work. The essays that ended up in Ghosts of My Life are his best, but my first choice was going to be one which should have been in it and wasn’t: ‘I’d Rather Fleetwood Mac’, from 2004, which as the title implies is actually about Fleetwood Mac. This is partly personal sentimentality — I was reading these when working in a bleak temporary job, and waiting for the canon-forming essays he was doing then was so exciting, and was always worth the wait (like the one on Joy Division, or the incredible three–part series on The Fall, both of which are in the big book, or the brilliant essays on Dennis Potter around then). This one was on something so apparently non-k-punk, and was so gorgeously written — an entire little enclosed world to explore just in itself.

I was also thinking of choosing one of the more political pieces (especially that one on Jimmy Saville [‘Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and “the 70s On Trial”’] ) but I find they also have this odd incompleteness to them, the sense they’re constantly moving towards something without actually achieving it, which I suspect was partly the point. So I’m going to cheat and pick two, the opening one-two of Ghosts of My Life: ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’ and ‘Ghosts of My Life’ itself. I’m not sure what I think about the book as a whole, but the start of it is astonishing. Almost everything of what I liked most in Mark’s writing is in those two — the more balanced and melancholic controlled fury he settled into around 2009 is in the first (and its extremely pessimistic assessment of 21st century culture). Then in ‘Ghosts’ you have both this capsule autobiography solely through one motif in one song sampled (or recited) in two more, and an extraordinary statement of why pop music mattered, and how much it upended the strictures of class and race. I’ve written elsewhere that one of the most important things about Mark’s work is that, unlike Marxist intellectuals who engage with pop culture, like Fredric Jameson, he came to theory with pop absolutely part of him, it was completely in his DNA, as I think it is for most of us. It’s surprising that’s so rare, but it is, and that post weaves that together with breathtaking delicacy and authority.

That’s also a way of answering the last question. When in the future people want to understand this thing, this weird explosion or renaissance or whatever it was that was the intersection between class and pop music and mass culture and television in Britain between (give or take a few years) 1960 and 2000, he’ll be one of a tiny handful of writers that they’ll turn to, and most of the rest of it will just be noise and banter. Whether we can use any of it to understand what culture will be, or what it’s  becoming, I don’t know. I suspect we’re all attached in some way to 20th century culture, and to seeing culture in terms of artefacts. While there are obviously still good records and films and TV series, Mark was absolutely right in insisting that these artefacts are no longer anywhere near as important as they were.

Going back to Acid Corbynism, I suppose Carl was referring to the article on John McDonnell in n+1 a few months ago by Barnarby Raine, which argues — I think rightly — that the aim is to create a situation in government that can make possible the strong workers movement that we don’t currently have, which would be able to support a left government. This is the total reverse of the usual order of things in your actual class struggle. Maybe that insight could be transferred to culture, and a possible situation where the taking down of the class and monetary barriers that are in real force today would lead to an explosion like that of the second half of the 20th century. But maybe it just won’t, and maybe instead there’ll be a democratic socialist culture that looks absolutely nothing like that, and there will be more about how people relate to each other, without an artefact as an intermediary. I don’t say this in criticism of Mark’s work but more to say that insisting one thing has ended, as he so firmly did, can be a useful way of preparing for what happens after it. And one of the first things that was really ‘after the 20th century’ was the blogosphere itself, in the way this elective community was formed, and the way it could so completely sidestep all the old means of distribution and cultural production, which, however much I’m glad to be actually paid for my work now, is something that does still have a utopian side to it. So rather than lamenting the blogs’ passing, I think it’s better to see them as presaging something of that culture to come. That [legacy] being carried today by political movements rather than by quasi-political laments and polemics is a good sign, not a bad one.

Ivor Southwood: Formulating thoughts about the Acid Communism excerpt is not easy, as it was obviously meant to be the beginning of a large project, expanding historically and theoretically in parallel with the buried collective consciousness it was going to bring to the surface and set free, and we have to imagine how it was going to get there. It is also desperately sad. The fragment is bubbling with optimism — much more so than most of Mark’s other writing — and however sceptical I am about some of the claims made in it, I am sure that over the course of a whole book, Mark would have argued me around and made me realise how my horizons are being limited.

To throw a deeply uncool pop reference into the mix: although the focus of the intro was the culture of the 1960s and 70s, the group that came to my mind while mulling over Mark’s idea of a new form of psychic and political consciousness-raising was indie-dance act The Shamen. You could even imagine them dropping the phrase ‘acid communism’ into an interview circa their album In Gorbachev We Trust. Way before blogs, from 1989 to 1991, The Shamen were my first almost-political awakening: they talked about hallucinogenic drugs and ‘altering your consciousness’ in a very contemporary way (they only got really hippyish about it later, when they teamed up with Terence McKenna and lost the plot somewhat) and En-Tact was a sort of Iain M Banksian program for a psychedelic techno-socialist utopia. These days of course The Shamen are remembered as a cheesy novelty act, but they were a huge influence on me and not in the way you’d expect. They were also one of the few acts at the time to try to intellectualise rave culture and connect it to broader social and political trends.

I’ve always been wary of calls from political activists that ‘revolution’ is probable or even possible, and I am not sure I agree with the assertion that material conditions are more oriented towards revolutionary change now than they were in the 1970s, especially if you include time as a ‘material’ element. Nevertheless, the suffocating effect of the present ‘existential and emotional atmosphere’ is crucial. As well as being immersed in pop culture, as Owen says, another thing that distinguished Mark from more conventional theorists was his grasp of how the external, material environment created by neoliberalism has in turn cultivated a particular interior, emotional state — a sort of overstimulated misery and resignation which, while individualised and for the most part unspoken, is still experienced collectively.

Given the reasons why the [Acid Communism] book never got further than this fragment, the ending of the introduction is heartbreakingly poignant, pointing as it does towards a subsequent section which would analyse Capital’s machinery of ‘consciousness-deflation’, as a first step towards reversing it and igniting a collective desire for action. And this is one of the areas where we should concentrate our energies, because the liberation of psychic space is a necessary precondition for any attempt to dismantle the system of power which threatens our material survival.

Carl Neville: The k-punk post that had the most effect on me is probably this one on The Shining. Apart from the sheer luminous beauty of the prose — and for someone who disdained the well-crafted sentence he certainly produced enough of them — it was the fact that I thought The Shining was a terrible film and on reading the post I just had to concede that perhaps, as the trope has it, ‘everything I knew about The Shining was wrong’. I re-watched it. Rubbish. I re-read the essay. A marvel of insight and interpretation. I had to accept that I was in some sense wrong. Ironically, this helped me to detach from my own responses to art more: O, it isn’t grabbing me but is it important/interesting by some other metric that isn’t just my subjective attitude? That broadened my interests and made me less tribal/defensive about what I liked, which eased a burden in some way. Again, it’s that thing of encountering a more perceptive/intelligent/acute mind being both somehow traumatic and liberating…

As an aside, I haven’t read any of the books Mark put out after Capitalist Realism, I never revisit the blog and I probably won’t. That’s not a ‘position’ I have taken on it, it just feels that we all thought, talked, and felt enough about him and his work at the time right up until his death. He was a great, understandable source of interest, influence, and fascination to us. What’s Fisher up to? Where might he be going next? And in our heads I suspect we were in semi-permanent dialogue with him. I wonder what Mark would think about this long, endlessly extending dissemination of ideas that he formulated ten, twelve, more years ago (hauntology… the hauntology of hauntology almost).

I don’t want to fetishise him I suppose. Perhaps it’s just snobbery and tribalism and I am simply reluctant to see the Normies get him. Perhaps I am over-attached! I have already had that moment at work when an affable but not especially engaged colleague has asked, knowing of my interest in ‘culture’ ‘…have you heard of this guy, Mark Fisher?’ It’s difficult to know how to respond.

I suppose, and excuse me if it seems inappropriate, but are we a bit bored of talking about Mark? Are we a bit resistant to hagiography and canonisation? I think I am. I think it’s clear a sort of mini k-punk industry has been in formation since his death (he’ll be the Arthur Russell of cultural criticism, I remember thinking at the time). That’s good because he deserves to be read and because his wife and child need money, but on another level, and Owen’s hinting at this too above I suspect, we don’t want blogging to be some bigger deal than it was, because everyone loves to believe that true underground/epochal shit happened just before they were old enough to participate in it. Now is much more interesting/important in ways that our 00s selves could barely have imagined. Apologies for all this ‘we’ presumption.

Ivor Southwood: Part of the ‘secret sadness’ that Mark identified in 21st-century culture is that there is no external site of conflict anymore, and this is connected with the loss of collectively experienced mass media which Mark mourned. Just as there is almost no industrial conflict, merely a series of more or less exploitative take-it-or-leave-it assignments imposed on a passively atomised workforce, and there is no real conflict in news media, just token punditry and accusations of trolling, in pop the contested territory of the chart has given way to a clickable menu of genres and trending topics. There is no counterculture, just niche culture.

In culture generally, and especially at workplaces and in music and social media, positivity is more damaging than negativity. This is of course a classic k-punk position, as illustrated in the post, ‘Be Negative’, which includes Mark memorably recounting ‘the strangely solemn quality of Edith Bowman’s dead-eyed enthusing on BBC3’s coverage [of] Reading festival: she looks like a hostage forced to profess the “brilliance” of everything that happens to pass into her consciousness.’

Or listen to most of [BBC digital radio station] 6Music, where the presenters are contractually obliged to hail every new release as an epiphany, every show as the best ever, helped by the social media feedback loop. Then there is the constant promotion of reissues, the relentless anniversification of the past to fill the void of the present (again, practically asking for a k-punk critique…). And when everything is hyped as the best thing ever, value loses all meaning and you are basically listening to a shopping channel.

Compare this publicly funded soundbed of hype with John Peel’s matter-of-fact enthusiasm: the countercultural element was built in, it didn’t need to be advertised, with Peel himself as an outsider at BBC Radio 1 who only succumbed to mascot status in his last few years (and I’m aware that, although Mark harked back to the BBC as a refuge for the avant-garde, he loathed John Peel, presumably for class-related reasons, even though most of the k-punk canon relied on Peel for its exposure).

Mark, on the scourge of positivity, from a 2010 interview with Agata Pyzik: ‘when there was a more vibrant culture, there was more refusal, criticism and negativity within the culture. In this culture, which is quite objectively, an unashamedly mediocre, retrospective one, there’s very little negativity, and those two things are related.’

Simon Reynolds: To Carl’s point about being a little weary of talking about Mark… On the one hand, it’s a way of still conversing with him in a sense, relating to him — still creating sparks out of his tinder, which is one of the things about k-punk — it was literally thought-provoking, you would be sent down pathways of thinking that otherwise you would never have been — and there are many many more replies to Mark’s posts that went on in my head that I never wrote up, compared to the great many that I actually composed on Blissblog, or Dissensus. 

Just personally, I have done quite a number of public commemorative or tribute things to do with Mark and his work now, over the last couple of years, and this colloquium here will doubtless not be the last occasion, so there is a little bit of fatigue setting in. At the same time, the fact that I’ve managed to squeeze out  some new-enough thoughts and sentences and so far have not repeated myself too much… well that’s a testament to how rich and various Mark’s work was. There probably will be Mark Fisher Studies set up at universities sooner rather than later, if they aren’t already courses themed around ‘Capitalist Realism’. You’ll have different camps competing over their version of Mark — that’s a kind of immortality. Mark is becoming the site of fruitful misunderstandings, in the sense of different interpretations, different investments.

Anwen Crawford: ‘Fruitful misunderstandings’ strikes me as a good way to think about the blogosphere — and, actually, as a good way of describing what interesting criticism does, in so far as you never really ‘understand’ a work you’re responding to in any transparent, straightforward sense. Instead you’re trying to map the contours of your inevitable misapprehension, and, as has already cropped up a few times now, sometimes this results — frequently, in Mark’s case — in writing that is more interesting than the work being responded to. It strikes me that Mark, as a critic — though we’ve talked about his ferocity, and his sense of judgement — was very generous in wanting the things he took seriously to be the best version of those things. He took the artistic and philosophical implications of his favoured works, whether it was a Dennis Potter TV show, or the Burial albums, or Japan doing ‘Ghosts’, to their outermost limits.

Working on this group discussion has reminded me, forcefully — another old familiar feeling from the blogosphere — that the minutiae of popular culture has a very different weight and significance for people from the UK, and a role in the creation of collective and personal identity that simply isn’t the case in Australia. I opened the k-punk book again the other day and stumbled across a line (from Part III of his massive essay on The Fall) about The Birthday Party and their trash Americana schtick, which Mark described as a way for the band to try and ‘cancel an Australian identity that they in any case experienced as empty, devoid of any distinguishing features.’ Ooof. Ouch. But it’s true — I’m sure The Birthday Party did see Australia in those terms. I was having a text message exchange a little while back with a friend about how one of the tasks of trying to decolonise one’s thinking is to learn to see what’s in front of you, what’s actually here, in all its existing complexity, and not be forever in thrall to the idea that culture, ‘real’ culture, only happens elsewhere. But the cultural cringe, as we call it here, is really hard to unlearn, and there are material circumstances that contribute to it, like the sheer fact of Australia’s distance from the rest of the world, which the internet doesn’t really eradicate (though obviously, without it, I would never have come into contact with any of you). And the fact that when it comes to things like pop music, Australia has always been a secondary market. Expectations are always low that anything original will come from here, and I think we’re too often content to be sold to, rather than to make, or to answer back. I know that one of the reasons — probably the primary reason — I was so in thrall to the British music press as a teenager was because it seemed like these questions about popular culture, and cultural production, really mattered, and it mattering felt intuitively right to me.

I also feel very distant — in every sense — from the popular left renewal that’s going on in both the UK and US, though again, I think fetishising it and trying to map it onto what’s happening here in Australia, or what could happen, is worse than useless. The Australian Labor Party is never going to have its Jeremy Corbyn. I’m not at all convinced the road to parliamentary socialism will ever open up here, or even that it would be the best path to take, were it an option. But that’s okay. There are other strategies, other tactics.

And with that in mind, I just want to echo Rhian’s suggestions that part of our collective loss since the 90s has been ‘the idea of political writers, activists, spokespeople, etc. having a representative function that was wider than themselves’. One thing that is excruciatingly difficult to do in Australia is to talk about the nation’s history in any honest sense, and in a collective sense, and often the people who try doing so get picked off and targeted as aberrant individuals — particularly Aboriginal people, particularly people of colour, whether or not they already have a public profile, though I think an existing profile tends to compound the backlash. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘If you don’t like it here, then leave’ etc. etc. And the nation’s collective inability to confront our history has everything to do, I think, with the general devaluation of culture, here. Mark’s sense that The Birthday Party experienced Australian identity as ‘empty’ has absolutely everything to do with the ‘legal’ declaration of emptiness — terra nullius — by which the British justified invading and colonising this land in the first place. Nullity runs so deep in Australia, back to the nation’s legally fictional beginnings. There’s a lot of self-hate at work in this place, even when (or perhaps especially when) it operates as a belligerent nationalism.

The k-punk post that affected me most was the one about Joy Division, ‘Nihil Rebound’, from 2005 — which, looking back, seems a kind of early sketch for some of Mark’s thinking about capitalism and mental illness that would be articulated so forcefully in Capitalist Realism. But I wanted to argue with some of Mark’s thinking in that piece — specifically, his characterisation of depression in women as ‘contingent’, a result of women’s circumstances, while depression in men was ‘[n]ecessary… something that goes beyond the circumstantial’. In fact I did argue with it, on my blog, and was thrilled that Mark responded in turn, on k-punk — and I’ve kept arguing with that piece, in my head, for a long time. I wrote, then, that I thought the idea of the male depression as ‘necessary’ only led us back to the idea that men ‘understand’ death, and suffering, and can make art out of it, while women are barred from engaging with these fundamental, existential stakes if our depression and sadness is only thought of as reactive. I still think this, though maybe also I misunderstood (fruitfully?) Mark’s argument. And I know, now, that I’m arguing with a man who committed suicide.

Mark’s writing pushed me to try and be a better writer and a better thinker. I don’t have his gift for articulating the zeitgeist, but, in departing from his work, or reacting against it, I’ve learnt something about what I might try to do instead. And I’ve learnt the hard way not to imitate him, which I certainly did do, in younger and more craven times. Though even when I was busy imitating him, Mark did me the kindness of taking my work seriously. Simon too, who over the years has shown a generosity to younger critics that I think is (sadly) very rare.

I try to hold onto the hope that certain avenues are still open to all of us, and will remain so, and that we might also yet find new ones. What’s the line in ‘Ceremony’? Turn again and turn towards this time…

Is there anything that we still need to cover? (Genuine question. This seems, in a good way, a potentially limitless conversation, but I guess we need to draw a line somewhere…)

Simon Reynolds: I don’t have anything to add, except to say it’s been fun, even with the sadness of why we are talking here.

Ivor Southwood: When the film of the blogosphere, 24 Hour Theory People, is made, I want to see that scene with the communist bloggers in the Goth club. Thank you and goodnight.