News from the Collective

Los Angeles, April 9, 2025

Dear Geert,

Writing to friends in Europe to explain what’s going on in the United States in the Spring of 2025 is like taking notes on a mental patient to feed to an AI therapist. One can’t capture everything, and there’s no certainty that any diagnoses will be either forthcoming or accurate. In fact, the AI therapist may exacerbate the condition via a reflexive repetition that confirms confirmation bias. Such is the nature of the vortex in which we find ourselves. Since my last letter, the news has been dominated by first the Signal scandal (I refuse to default to calling every disgrace in Washington “Something-gate”) and then the tariff nightmare that Trump labelled “Liberation Day” for the American economy.

There are so many reasons the Signal chat was front and center in the media. First, and perhaps most importantly, because it’s a perfectly solipsistic story about the media itself: a journalist is inadvertently added to a discussion about an ongoing operation held by people at the highest levels of the American security infrastructure on an insecure messaging app. Not only that, but the journalist is someone Trump and his minions particularly loathe. Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor of The Atlantic magazine and one of his big successes was a well-sourced story about how the flag-hugging president holds actual soldiers in contempt, calling them “losers” and “suckers.” The media has already gone over the obvious issues in the Signal scandal at endless length—just the use of a commercial app to discuss a military action in Yemen  is a first order security breach—but what they missed is how this whole fiasco demonstrates the vainglory of the US’s new, looksmaxxing ruling class.

Looksmaxxing is a triumph of Internet mindfuckery. Young on-line men now have a vocabulary and set of products and procedures that mimic the beauty regimes that women have been subjected to for, well, millennia. Looksmaxxers obsess about the angles (canthal tilt) and the interpupillary distance (IDP) between their eyes. They do “soft” interventions like targeted work outs, cosmetic tweaks, and “mewing” (tongue exercises to shift the shape of the jaw). “Hard,” i.e. surgical, interventions, are the next logical step. To scroll through looksmaxxing TikTok and Reddit forums is to enter a dreamworld that blends “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” plasticity with Incel insecurities.

There’s an unseriousness to looksmaxxing that belies its brutal impact on those it ensnares, and it could only exist amongst the terminally online who are desperate for the approval of those equally under its spell. The idea of using a commercial messaging app to discuss war plans made more sense to me when I started to think of their group chat as a more grown-up but just as unserious version of looksmaxxing that I’ll call cloutmaxxing, a way to signal power. The chat concerned airstikes on Houthi militias, but in the end it was less about communication than it was about vice signaling, a way to demonstrate prowess. The people on this chat were no longer marginal figures. Rising from being rank-and-file members of Congress, keyboard warriors, or TV talking heads, they now have jobs with real real badass credentials. Yet the Signal scandal demonstrates that they are sad little Virgins with new haircuts masquerading as Alpha male Chads (I feel sorry for you if you recognize all this manosphere language— if you don’t, stay away from Wikipedia, you’ll just feel worse at the end).

Hence the now infamous fist/flag/fire triptych emoji that Mike Waltz, the US National Security Advisor, sent to the others in this chat, including the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. On Signal, Waltz was cloutmaxxing, emulating the bravado of teenage boys shitposting about their campaigns on Overwatch 2 or Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Waltz’s triptych signals performative rather than actual competence. To looksmax the part is to cloutmax the script, and what we’re seeing here is the Dunning-Kruger effect of overconfidence meeting the inevitable bubbling-up of imposter syndrome, all subsumed into a cultural battle against what Elon Musk called “civilizational suicidal empathy.”

One of the key figures in this chat was the even more over his head Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been looks- and cloutmaxxing since his college days at Princeton. He may have been righteously accused of being a drunk, a sexual abuser, and an Islamophobe, but these are all signals to the MAGA faithful that he’s not restrained by wokeness (or much afflicted by empathy either). Even his on-record mismanagement of tiny veterans’ organizations did not disqualify him from taking over the largest bureaucracy in the world (and its most powerful military) because Hegseth looks the part. He was a host on a Fox News weekend show, and his belligerence to liberals, women, and trans people was amplified by a rugged jawline and suits cut to looksmax his fitness. Rather than a mea culpa after this security breach, the next day Hegseth ditched his American flag-lined suit jacket for a tee shirt to work out with Navy Seals, a sartorial choice that allowed him to show off his guns (tattooed biceps rather than actual armaments). The red-pilled pathos of all of this maxxing would be funnier if these weren’t men who can casually call in lethal strikes virtually anywhere in the world, from Greenland to the Heard & McDonald islands.

Greenland, of course, is now part of Trump’s Greater America project, a return to 19^th century territorial aggression, and a place that Europeans understand full well is actually in danger. Heard & McDonald may require a bit more explanation for all but the most news-addicted amongst us. They are two small islands 2,500 miles from Australia inhabited exclusively by penguins. The US is not looking to clobber these flightless birds with its elite Seals (“America’s enemies fear them—our allies trust them” posted Hegseth after his workout) but rather to hit them with tariffs. That there is neither trade nor even human beings on the islands did not prevent the Trump administration from lumping this territory in with everywhere else in the world on Liberation Day.

Donald Trump has no consistent ideology, and few ideals, but one idea that has stuck with him for years is that “they’re ripping us off”: “they” being the rest of the globe and “us” being the US. Trump is a serial grifter as well as being a projector of his own vices so it makes sense that he sees trade as a zero-sum rather than expansive process, with winners and losers rather than partners. So, in early April, against the advice of almost every reputable economist, and every historian with the slightest acquaintance with the effects of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s (hint, they contributed greatly to the Great Depression), he instituted an incoherent strategy that wiped out trillions in wealth as he single-handedly tanked stock markets around the world. Trump and his sycophants justified his actions with multiple and contradictory justifications: the tariffs would be kept in perpetuity, they were a negotiating tool, they would be paid for by other countries, they would be a short and painful readjustment that Americans would have to live with, they would improve America’s industrial might, they would address the crisis of masculinity by bringing back high-wage working class jobs, the list goes on and shifts every few hours or so.

There’s even a new, vaguely left conspiracy theory that Trump wants to destroy the American economy in order to consolidate power in the ruins, but that seems like too much intellectual work for him to have planned. In my last letter, I warned you not to underestimate Trump as stupid, but I certainly didn’t mean for you or anyone to buy the ridiculous canard that Trump plays three-dimensional chess. He and his administration in its second iteration are driven by traditional right-wing compulsions – lowering taxes on the rich, reducing services for the poor, and making sure women know their place. Add in anti-immigrant populism, anti-trans scapegoating, racist dog whistles and bullhorns, and a fully activated attack on reason and its defenders in science, academia and what remains of the civil service, and you have Trumpism. But to fully understand how it was sustained and grew, you have to understand its dynastic origins.

Trump is the heir to a vicious fortune. The New York Times estimated Donald inherited the contemporary equivalent of four hundred million dollars from his father Fred Trump. The elder Trump was a developer during the post-WWII era when public funds were made available to build the closest that the US ever got to social housing. Fred mastered the dark arts of Gotham development in that period: buy off politicians, grift from public funds, make deals with gangsters, stiff contractors, and rent to as few people of color as you can get away with. Donald the heir added in a gambler’s temperament and showy style to his father’s stolid villainy. But, of course, inveterate gamblers lose and when they do, they lose big.

Those of us who have been watching Donald for decades wondered how people could vote for a person who has gone through six bankruptcies and who couldn’t even make money in the casino business, but we underestimated how television recast this failson as the business hero of his own imagination. See the fin-de-siècle trilogy he didn’t write (of course an ADHD-addled heir needed ghost-writers) but that bears his name — Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987); Trump: Surviving at the Top (1990); and Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997) — which traces his (imaginary) parabolic career. These books were bestsellers, and inspired T.V. producer Mark Burnett to build a reality competition show around him which Burnett called The Apprentice, which bailed Trump out of his post-casino financial crisis.

There is a subset of gamblers that have enough backing to survive their inner demons and outer losing streaks, and Trump during his political career certainly falls into that category. His return to the tables leaves both the country and the world exposed to Trump’s only driving force right now, which is to wreak revenge on his enemies and continue to accrue as much power as possible, if only to be able to humiliate any and all who do not join his cult. For just shy of a hundred days, his luck has held, but as the American poet Bret Harte wrote, “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.” All of this leaves me fearing for the future, not only because of what Trump controls, but even more so because of what he doesn’t.

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7^th, 2023 they were able to succeed because by October 6^th, the Israeli intelligence services, like the security forces and the judiciary, had been locked in conflict with Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader who had to stay in power to stay out of jail. Economists speak of October 29^th, 1929 as Black Tuesday, the start of the bear market that led to the Great Depression, but Monday, October 28^th was like any other day in the Roaring ‘20s, with unregulated markets and endless speculation. On the 27^th of June 1914, the multicultural Austro-Hungarian milieu Joseph Roth wrote of in The Radetzky March seemed impregnable. The next day, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and that ended not only the Archduke’s life but also the society Roth evoked so carefully. As for the world war, Roth wrote it “could clearly be seen coming, as one might see a storm brewing over the edge of a city, while its streets are still basking innocently under a cloudless sky.”

The brilliant Roth was a nostalgist and melancholic, and I hope I am neither, but as I watch the United States abandon its allies, insult its friends, and feast on its seed corn, what most worries me is that we are somehow in an extended day before. The luck cannot hold, and the sheer meanness of it all makes the solidarity to resist that much harder to generate. That the day before keeps recurring, doesn’t imply that the day after won’t finally arrive, and that’s what scares me.

Yours—

Peter

—

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His first letter from March 24, 2025 can be found here).

Socialism with hyperreal characteristics. The traditional urban-rural dichotomy is disrupted by a four-decade modernisation speedrun. Custom Doraemon Tesla parked up beside caged chickens. Temporal collapse. Cousin purchases cucumber lays with Weixin’s biometric palm scanning after haggling with elderly farmers for produce by the roadside. IP is rendered obsolete. Chinese aunties sporting Kuromi x Balenciaga pyjamas stroll by the river. Culture is stripped from context. This process is only accelerated by the geolocked internet. Everything is appropriated, remixed. Everything is predicated on speed: manufacturing, livestreaming, trends, people. Everything everywhere all at once.  

• Written in my notes app in Zhuzhou, China after falling sick with a fever whilst visiting my grandmother.
  

Simulacrum and Sino-futurism

AI gorilla sofas, car headlight eyelashes, horse heels, Peter Griffin chin mousepads. Pastiche, cryptic and surreal products run rife on the domestic, Chinese, shopping platform Taobao (more widely known by its international counterpart Aliexpress). The pandemonium of manufacturing assemblages sees mass production churn out and transform bizarre, AI-generated ideas (literal and figurative) into reality. ‘The aesthetic of Sinofuturism combines gloss with grime’. While it is often conflated with contemporary China, Lawrence Lek proposes Sinofuturism as a form of Artificial Intelligence, one that is: ‘addicted to learning massive amounts of raw data’ with an ‘unprecedented sense of collective will to power’. Just as the unknowable consciousness of the Artificial Other poses a threat to humanity, the Orientalist Other instils fear into the western subject by its alleged unknowability.

This techno-orientalist stereotype is particularly pertinent after the AI arms race’s latest DeepSeek saga. Through machine learning and ‘copying rather than originality’, Sinofuturism partakes in a Yellow Techno-Peril to overcome inconsistent distinctions between China’s ancient past and its contemporary modernisation. Almost a decade after Lek’s proposition and two decades after China’s ascension to the WTO, this geopolitical and techno-cultural aesthetic has only further proliferated in its factories and manufacturing hubs. Functioning like a large neural network, these structures devour vast quantities of global production processes, transfiguring their morphologies into slop-like, hallucinogenic innovations. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined. If Artificial Intelligence and Deepfakes produce infinite digital timelines, then Chinese manufacturing manifests these into infinite physical realities. If you can conceive it, you can make it. One AI Gorilla Sofa please .

“Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics. Replicating old masters, memorising old texts, following moral standards, are all part of this tradition. But Sinofuturism absorbs everything. Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.” 

• Lawrence Lek, video essay ‘Sinofuturism’

The notion of China as a site of extreme copy and counterfeit culture reveals a racialised trepidation harkening back to the days of Yellow Peril. Daniel F. Vukovich argues that this sinological form of orientalism is rooted in a project fear of Chinese mimicry threatening the dominance of western hegemony. Homi Bhabha’s mimicry with sinic characteristics. One scroll on reels or TikTok will reveal a collective anxiety of Xi aura-farming on the agricultural fields of Huawei and BYD. This point is shared by Laikwan Pang, who relates the logic of the counterfeit to the logic of capitalism. In the article China Who Makes and Fakes, Pang notes that a pirated product has the unique semiotics of a magical (pre-modern) and self-reproducible simulacrum (post-modern) object. The ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin coined, or otherworldly, abstract power (as Marx postulated) granted to luxury goods is destroyed by the replica or counterfeit. The IP rights regime and commodity fetishism and its application of ‘authenticity’ or social logics to these objects is questioned. Counterfeit LVMH and Kering handbags are frequently manufactured using the same designs, materials and labour as their authentic counterparts and sometimes even within the same factories. Balenciaga Pandabuy Warriors exist as an extreme manifestation of commodity obsession, fully displaying the performative promise of reaching the ultimate signified.

The dichotomisation of creation and the copy, one which ‘reifies creativity and condemns mimesis’ is an outdated modernist framework that sees creativity as abstractly new. In our hyper-referential world, mimicry and derivative labour is the dominant form of cultural production. Online, witnessing the dissemination of Lao Gan Ma memes and drill beats sampling ‘Red Sun in the Sky’ unveils this flux of semiotic drifts. Appropriation is diminished as unimaginative, but industrialised creativity is a function of replication, a contention that Adorno has analysed extensively. Likewise, China innovates through an industrial piracy where production becomes an iterative, collective process rather than a system of individual authorship. This concept, named ‘Shanzhai’, sees iterative evolutions of commodities become a form of continuous industrial mutation. Bootleg Shanzhai iPhones from the early 2000s pioneered dual sim slots before Samsung or Apple. Many contained eccentricities to the extent that seeing Shanzhai iPhones accommodating electric razors or watches was not an uncommon sight. This haphazard, mishmash of concepts and components is reflected in a distinctly Chinese landscape of cultural production. Life in China today unfolds with a lucidity, and a dreamlike strangeness, exacerbated by the velocity of technological shifts. Anything and everything feel possible; I consume osmanthus cream cheese explosion lava lattes by day and go raving to the pulses of a Chongqing temple club by night.

The China-verse and Non-linear Temporality

While living in China, I have attempted to articulate this feeling of entering alternate timelines and riding the currents of temporal shifts, a prevalent attitude shared by our digital cultural milieu. Under Douyin content farming livestreams that have crossed the deterritorialized internet, a feeling of ‘watching interdimensional cable’ is professed. Under the lustrous and oversaturated cyberpunk edits of Chongqing or Shanghai, some ask: ‘is this AI?’. Others declare that ‘China is the future’. Gabriele de Seta, in the article Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism explicates this phenomenon:

“It posits some sort of equivalence between China and the future: China is the future, China comes from the future, the future will come from China, and so on.”

Many diasporic Chinese people, like me, are familiar with a pressure to improve their Mandarin skills, because it might aid our careers sometime in the future. Likewise, Sinofuturism implicates a future-oriented temporality. These speculative imaginaries have roots in the writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) around the turn of the Millenium. Notably, in 1994, the esoteric accelerationist turned right-wing grifter Nick Land, who now resides in China, proclaimed that ‘Neo-China arrives from the future’. Likewise, the less meth-pilled Sadie Plant wrote of an Asian convergence of ‘bamboo mats’ with the ‘manufacture of computer games’ in the collapse of modernity. However, de Seta posits the problematic nature of this cyber-exotic techno-orientalist discourse. Namely, the denial of ‘coevalness’ or the assumption of a colonial linear temporality.

These futurist temporal positionalities of China have a ‘shizogenic use of time’, an anthropological framework that is predicated on a temporal distancing of the Other. De Seta contends that it is precisely this ‘denial of coevalness’ that Sinofuturism partakes of, whereby China is temporally bounded to other timelines. This notion is contingent on a western conception of temporality that views history as linear and time as a continuity divided into discrete instants. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History interrogates this concept:

 ‘Western man’s incapacity to master time, and his consequent obsession with gaining and passing it, have their origins in this Greek concept of time as quantified and infinite continuum of precise fleeting instants. A culture with such a representation of time could have no real experience of historicity.’

 Other ethnofuturisms, such as Afrofuturism, understand that upending hegemonic and colonial frameworks must come from counternarratives that emanate from the periphery of western time. Categories of blackness and Otherness produced under enlightenment philosophy serve to maintain a separation from historicity, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, it ‘transubstantiates juridico-economic effect into a moral defect’ by constantly reproducing categories of being, sameness and difference that consistently place blackness outside of the development of history. Thus, it is imperative to seek emancipation outside these categories of being, such as the Kantian subject and Hegel’s racial others that are reproduced by the framework of time. Therefore, this necessitates the rejection of the colonial linear trajectory of time, rather than be conjured as part of techno-orientalist fantasy.

Rather than placing China in the futurity of a linear, chronological timeline, we can understand it to have a field-like quality, one that Agamben frames as charged, suspended and transformative. Chinese cultural and technological production shows that ‘there is nothing radically new; we can see history as an enormous process of mimesis’. Pang notes how this notion of time as fluid and circular is evidenced in the traditional Chinese calendar and even in the narrative structure of Chinese novels. These reject chronological succession, seeing time as non-linear and simultaneous. History is absorbed and futures are pre-empted. “It makes no sense to produce visions of the future. It’s already here”.

———–

Sinofuturism. Available at: https://sinofuturism.com/.

Agamben, G. and Heron, L. (2020) Infancy and history: On the destruction of experience. S.l.: Verso.

Da Silva, D.F. (2014) ‘Toward a black feminist poethics’, The Black Scholar, 44(2), pp. 81–97. doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.

de Seta , G. (2020) ‘Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of Coevalness’, SFRA Review , 50(2–3). Available at: https://sfrareview.org/2020/09/04/50-2-a5deseta/.

Dirlik, A. (1996) ‘Chinese history and the question of orientalism’, History and Theory, 35(4), p. 96. doi:10.2307/2505446.

Pang, L. (2008) ‘`China who makes and fakes’’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), pp. 117–140. doi:10.1177/0263276408095547.

———–

Lina Deng is a London-based British-Chinese interdisciplinary artist. Her experimental approach moves fluidly between performance, new media, sculpture, and theory-inflected research. She’s deeply invested in how the internet shapes consciousness through digital absurdities, algorithmic pastiche and the attention economy. Loitering through our ever-evolving, schizophrenic digital landscape, she interpolates the psychic-ontological shift brought about by content collapse and the spiritual residues of spectral ecologies.

I

As a ’90s kid, I remember too well us school kids singing and dancing to the songs at the top of the charts on music shows such as Ingigayo (인기가요) and Music Bank (뮤직뱅크). It was what one might call the “pre-K-pop” era: there were a lot of solo artists performing in various genres, and the notion of idol culture as we know it now was only fledgling. Without the mass production system or the global distribution that has come to be the norm in today’s K-pop, first generation idol groups around the new millennium—H.O.T., Fin.K.L, god, Sechs Kies, S.E.S.—not only set up these business models and standards, but also inspired the music and aesthetics of later generations. The group aespa’s cover of “Dreams Come True” by S.E.S. is an exemplar case, and NewJeans, with their unflinching Y2K aesthetics and sound, take us back to the millennial through and through.

What are we to make of this return? I wonder if the return of the millennial across South Korea’s cultural sectors has to do with the old, daunting problem of capitalism. The kids born in the ‘90s are now adults with buying power, and nostalgia always sells. It’s by no means new to ask this, but still: are we at a cultural impasse where we cannot tell—and sell, for that matter—genuinely brand-new stories? What “genuinely brand-new” means is also another question. 

Interestingly, though, it is also about aesthetics. The millennial aesthetic is not just a trope that is old, marketable, and familiar to a consumer base; it was always something inherently futuristic. The K-pop scene around the millennial was abundant with references to cyberworld and AI, keeping pace with the emerging and developing presence of the Internet. The group CLON immediately comes to mind: named after the term clone, the group was performing futurist visuals and electronic techno sound and dance throughout the early 2000s. If our contemporary culture and music scene is bringing back this specific aesthetic of the past, this is then already always a look toward the future—that is, by reviving the old that was all about the future yet to come, we also, in the now, desire a new future. It is the very mode of thinking or imagination that also travels with the return of the millennial as a product.

K-pop today has been witnessing new generations of bands that showcase futurist visuals and sound such as EXO and aespa. Now, despite these well-produced and -invested bands–and the whole industry wired toward mass production and profit-making–I want to direct us to another scenario where this neo-millennial touch is much more than simply the most up-to-date upgrade for the old and familiar financial success plot. By way of what I might call comparative listening, I ask that we attune ourselves to how sound not only travels across time and space but propels us to look toward the future that has not yet come. To this end, I begin with a story of a cultural phenomenon in the early K-pop scene: long before K-pop became a global sensation, a young former-actress Lee Jung Hyun was offering her listeners a flight through sounds that deterritorialize and relocate them onto a different spatiotemporal plane.

II

Amidst the early idol wars of the millennial that came to define K-pop as we now know it, we also saw and heard something unprecedented. We were certainly not ready when a 19-year-old female singer made her debut on a major ground wave television music show on the last day of October 1999. On this day, Ingigayo, a now defunct weekly Sunday live music program, aired Lee’s first performance of “Wa” (와) which was an instant sensation across the country. It starts with a camera zooming in on an extraterrestrial planet with a ring around it that says, “LEE JUNG HYUN Let’s Go To My Star.” Accompanying this visual cue is the likewise out-of-this-planet sound effect that instantly transports the audience to her “Star,” wherever that might exactly be.

After setting up the otherworldly soundscape, Lee begins to introduce herself, except that, aside from occasional decodable words—“zero,” “Korea,” “Jung Hyun,” etc.—the introduction falls short: we cannot really hear what she is saying or, more to the point, meaning. It is here, at the point of “zero,” ungrounded on our planet Earth and distant from any system of meaning at hand, that Lee sends out the invitation to her own planet and embarks on her almost ritual-like performance with such full force, showing the audience that this sound and these dance moves of hers are the very power source of the not-yet visible spaceship. (Cue the windy stage effect!)

Lee’s memorable entrance to the scene was almost instantly followed by both financial success and cultural impact. Right after her performance aired, Lee began to win every competition on every major music show; she showcased her repertoire with variations, although keeping with her futuristic, spacey visuals and sound. Everyone from elementary school kids to celebrities on TV imitated Lee’s pinky mic and her gargantuan, “big eyed” fan, not to mention her unique techno dance moves. It was as if Lee’s debut statement—“Let’s Go To My Star,” also the title of her first album—came to realize itself by, quite literally, transporting the people of earth to her star, where different aesthetics and politics apply. The visual and aural shock of Lee’s strong experimentalism shifted and transformed the cultural terrain of the Korean pop music scene, taking the viewers and listeners to possibilities and futures that had no name yet.

Can this be a starting point where we can imagine futures yet to be charted? It is no secret that this futurist aesthetic introduced at the turn of the century is even more widely visible and audible in K-pop today. EXO, for instance, owes its group name to exoplanet, and as their story goes, members are extraterrestrial beings that came to planet Earth, without any memory or the superpowers they once had off-planet. Or, we could look to aespa: like EXO, their narrative takes us deep into a future where members in the “real” world encounter and connect with their avatars (called “ae”) in the “virtual” world. 

Throughout these cases, the futurism of the millennial that Lee pioneered seems to be calling to us once again, only to be reinforced in and through the new market that has been expanding larger than ever. Again, capitalism and the laws of the market seem to be victorious. But how did Lee do it in the first place—where did she find her inspiration? When there was hardly any precedent of the systemized or mass-produced storytelling that has now come to be the norm of the K-pop industry, Lee was single handedly telling a story that no one in the K-pop history would have easily come up with, and sound was the very centerpiece. 

As many of Lee’s contemporary commentators pointed out, her music combines then-emerging techno rhythm and sound with Korean traditional music; her mixes feature thumping beats accompanied by traditional instruments like ajaeng (in “Wa”) and kkwaenggwari (in “GX 339-4,” often performed live as an intro to “Wa”) that delivered historically and culturally readily available sounds to the South Korean audience. This surprising, genre-bending mix of musical and sonic repertoires left many listeners unsure whether her music was of the past or future. Lee further added to this hybridity by overdubbing the fast-paced techno rhythm with slow dance moves inspired by tai chi, as she revealed in her interview with Section TV. In another interview with the national evening paper Munhwa Ilbo (문화일보), Lee said that she found techno in Europe four years ago and that it was now widely spread across Europe and the United States. She added that, when she was recording the album, techno was just being introduced to South Korea, and that she wanted to popularize the genre further by making the title song more accessible. 

This was the origin story of “Wa”: as one of the earliest exponents of techno in the K-pop scene in the 90s, Lee needed more familiar components—lyrics about love and betrayal, traditional instruments, etc.—to ease the audience into the new technological sound. And it is sound that connects all these nodes of Lee’s story. It was the fusion of Korean traditional music and European techno that allowed Lee to open up a whole new terrain of music that no one had heard of. In other words, it is as if sound allowed Lee to travel time and space, crossing and crisscrossing different genres of different periods and places through music. It is useful to go back to the latter interview, where we can glimpse her exposure to a wide-ranging repertoire of international music traditions:

I enjoy listening to various kinds of music like Indian, Cuban rock, Eastern European, and African, but these genres remain inaccessible to many domestic listeners. Dedicated music fans might be able to access them by downloading files from the internet or something, but the ninety percent of people cannot. That’s the reality of our country. 

It was these sonic crossings between different eras and parts of the world that inspired Lee not only to produce and introduce new sounds to the domestic scene, but, in and through those sounds, to herald the very future of K-pop. When there was barely any systemic approach to music production or any music streaming service in existence like Spotify or even YouTube—MTV was the closest thing we had—Lee was embodying the force of sound itself to cross times and spaces and present something totally new, taking all of us to her star.

III

Lee’s story of sound as an interstellar force to cross temporal and spatial boundaries sends us not only to today’s K-pop but, rather unexpectedly, to midcentury America, where K-pop as such could not have been known. Lee’s florid, even lurid, out-of-this-world attire and futuristic electronic sound reference a notoriously occult figure of the mid-20th century American music scene: Sun Ra.

Jazz composer/pianist, leader of the independent record label/space travel agency El Saturn, the myth incarnation and many more, Ra claims to have come from outer space to bring all the Black people on earth back to where he came from through his music—where, as he says in the film Space is the Place, “sounds of guns, anger, frustration” of earth are no more. In a 1968 prose “My Music Is Words,” Ra writes:

To me all types of music are music but all types of music are not Space Music. According to my weigh of things: Space music is an introductory prelude to the sound of greater infinity. It is not a new thing project to me, as this kind of music is my natural being and presentation. It is a different order of sounds synchronized to the different order of Being.

On another occasion, Ra said of his space music that “the vibrations of it will just put them over in the sound and the sound becomes like a spaceship and lift ’em on out there.” This self-claimed rescue mission through new music and its “sound of greater infinity” was not merely a pretentious rhetoric or gesture. Ra was one of the earliest exponents of the portable electronic synthesizer Minimoog. Initially trained as a jazz pianist and having played in the big band tradition with jazz giants like Fletcher Henderson, Ra turned to what may be called “space sound engineering” to introduce space travel through otherworldly sounds.

As many scholars agree, Ra is considered one of the initiators of Afrofuturism. While the term itself was coined by Mark Dery in the 1990s, Afrofuturism describes a pre-existing, distinctive aesthetic style and politics of a group of work by artists—Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Tricia Rose, among others—who imagine and secure Black life and presence in a future where robots, cyborgs, and superhumans can be imagined without difficulty. Dery describes Afrofuturism’s core feature as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” This “African-American signification” onto the future carried urgency because this future was, at least before Afrofuturists arrived, mostly white. Dery further asks, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies?” 

Grappling with this white-oriented future scheme and the contemporary narrative of “progress and conquer” under the headings of the official government space project and the expansion of suburbs, Ra offered an alternative space project: we’re leaving this planet earth behind and turning toward somewhere we can build a different future, and this will be done through new music, new sound: “Space Music.” Indeed, sound has long been a crucial theme and tool for black aesthetics and politics. Black studies scholars—Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Louis Chude-Sokei, Tsitsi Jaji, andré carrington, Daphne Brooks, Anthony Reed, Carter Mathes, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Tao Leigh Goffe, Matthew D. Morrison and more—take up Black sound (and often its relationship with technology) to discuss alternative stories of American racial history and future fraught with tensions, but not without hope (one of Afrofuturism’s main themes). Even long before this, though, Black artists had been engaging sound as power, from work song and holler to Blues and Jazz to Hip Hop and dance. Janelle Monáe immediately comes to mind as a contemporary figure who blends this sonic legacy with Afrofuturist features. She even directly comments on Ra’s precedent by conjuring up again his mirror-faced, black-hooded companion in Space is the Place in her own music video, “Tightrope.”

I’m by no means in a hurry to draw a line of influence or causal relationship between Lee and Ra. In fact, I’m not interested in saying that Lee somehow found this long tradition of Black sound and futurist aesthetics and “applied” or even “developed” it for her own use. Rather than setting up some sort of a kinship between Lee and Afrofuturists that may even remotely come across as appropriative, I’m much more interested in thinking, by way of juxtaposition, about whether it is possible to imagine Asian futurism informed and shaped not only by Afrofuturism but by K-pop. Ever since Dery’s inaugural coinage of the term, Afrofuturism has long been recognized for its versatility as a powerful concept to generate other kinds of futurity or futurism. For example, in his chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction, De Witt Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be viewed within this more general political and aesthetic project, imbricating the experiences of the African diaspora with those of colonized peoples in Asia, South America, and elsewhere” (570). Dawn Chan confirms this root of Asian futurism and ponders upon its possibility, inspired by Ryan Lee Wong: “If Afrofuturist thinkers have created speculative realms of their own accord, carving out counterfactual worlds that might cast the shortcomings of our current one in high relief, might there be analogous ways for Asian artists to recast techno-clichéd trappings toward more generative ends?”

Despite all these ongoing discussions and questions, Asian futurism to this day remains significantly under-developed and -theorized. Further developing such a concept, not to mention its larger and broader—louder—cultural significances, seems to be in order, especially in light of the recent surge in successful renditions of the Asian future-scape as in A24 films like After Yang (2021) and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). So, how do we do this? My modest proposal would be that we listen; that we attune and thus open ourselves to the sound’s power to travel far and wide. 

This is not about finding quintessentially “Asian” sound, as techno-orientalism might have us do; it is rather about recognizing sound and music as an aggregate of energies that transports you to different spaces and times—to myriad possibilities and futures yet to be charted. Famously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say as much when they comment on sound’s reterritorializing force: “sound invades us, impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. . . . . Since its force of deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects the most massive of reterritorializations” (348). Taking sound’s reterritorializing nature up in the study of popular music, Josh Kun talks of Audiotopia, “music’s utopian potential, its ability to show us how to move toward something better and transform the world we find ourselves in” (17). Sound and the sound of music, as it were, move us beyond the confines of our present world and toward futurity.

It is, then, precisely the very difficulty of identifying an aesthetic and/or political genealogy between Lee and Ra that propels us toward a new futurism. The seemingly random parallel across time and space between the two artists makes more sense now—it confirms, if not strengthens, the mobilizing force of sound to travel far and wide—cross-culturally, cross-historically across eras, periods, nations, continents. Lee’s and Ra’s very taking up of popular music and its sound for their temporally and spatially distant futurist projects attests to this sonic force and, with it, the possibility of sonic world-building that, through its mobile energy, transports the listener somewhere not here and now. 

In The Woman Warrior, whose title I borrow for this essay’s, Maxine Hong Kingston ponders upon her leaving home for America. In this moment of mixed regret and nostalgia, Kingston also learns to see things and the world more clearly: “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity.” Relocation is never easy, but it also brings, along with shocks and traumas, new perspectives and understandings. Kingston talks of “the new way of seeing,” but can it also be of listening? Is it a pure coincidence that this passage appears in the chapter titled “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”? If we can let our ears channel the invisible sounds of the world(s) alongside what we see, leaving or relocation may, at once and any moment, become reterritorialization. 

In this way, sound calls for comparative approaches that extend from one culture and history to another, and asks for comparative work, both critical and creative, that welcomes sound as a hearing aid with which to listen to the world(s), both known and unknown. If, as sounders and soundees alike, we are lifted and opened up by sound and reterritorialized elsewhere, it only makes sense to look and listen away from where we already are or what we already know, and towards learning what other worlds and other-worlds might teach us.  Let the sound open us, let ourselves sound out what we learn, then may we be able to finally begin to find courage for another beginning, another future.

—

Featured Image: Lee Jung-Hyun (cover) on 2000’s STAR BOX “asian futurism” music video box set. via flickr

—

Hoon Lee is a PhD candidate in English and Associate Instructor at Indiana University Bloomington. His focus is contemporary American poetry, poetry and institution, lyric theory, popular music, and sound studies. He is specifically interested in how poetry disrupts institutionality by creating spatial and temporal alterity, offering us alternative forms of living and future survival. He holds a BA in English Education and an MA in English Literature from Seoul National University, South Korea.

—

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
On Donuts, Sandwiches and Beattapes: Listening for J Dilla Six Years On–DJ Primus Luta

Sonic Contact Zones: An Interview with DJs MALT and Eat Paint in Koreatown, Los Angeles—Shawn Higgins

Afrofuturism, Public Enemy, and Fear of a Black Planet at 25–andré carrington

Insatiable. Technology had become a sun around which all life orbited, pulling everyone into its gravitational field. The draw towards scrolling became all too strong.

While computation was once thought of as something separate, confined to discrete machines and local networks, it had since metastasized into the stack.  This totalizing planetary infrastructure stretched from buried fiber optic cables to mobile apps and orbital satellites, embedding itself into every facet of human existence. For those in power, each new server added was a step toward humanity’s great leap into an era of unlimited potential. A world of interconnected minds, ideas, and systems, all functioning as a singular brain. This was the age of Accelerated Techno-Optimism. In the 21st century, a deplorable cabal of tech magnates rose, led by figures like Thiel, Musk and Zuck, who had turned data into the lifeblood of modern civilization. With greed induced optimism, they proclaimed the coming of a “Singularity,” a utopia of artificial intelligence and infinite computation. Projects like AI-driven megacities, space colonies and cybernetic brain implants became the hallmarks of their era, promising to eradicate inefficiency and elevate human potential. 

The number of data centres grew exponentially and the temperatures in the Cloud rose. The hunger of the centres began to rival the needs of nations. Rivers were drained, forests cleared, and the air thickened with heat as data centers devoured the planet’s resources. 

The first tremor of collapse came in the form of the Microsoft meltdown of 2024. Eight and a half million systems went dark. A financial toll of $10 billion, as screens across the globe turned a haunting Pantone 2995 C – “blue screens of death.” It was like a looming tsunami. Panic erupted, most notably at airports, where employees, now cut off from the digital lifeblood, had to revert to pen and paper to issue tickets. The failure attacked the very architecture of a society built on seamless, automated systems. 

The second tremor was political. The U.S. government’s TikTok ban, set for January 19, 2025, sent users into a hysteria. In the days leading up to it, they scrambled to preserve their lives – archiving favorite videos, rallying in protest, and, when resistance proved futile, saying their final goodbyes. When the ban finally hit, millions were uprooted, giving rise to a wave of “TikTok refugees.” Meanwhile, outside the U.S., opportunists seized the moment. Hours of scrolling footage were sold at outrageous prices and black-market phones preloaded with TikTok clips became luxury items. It was “our age’s Prohibition”. Though the ban was driven more by fears of Chinese espionage than any genuine desire to save humanity (and despite lasting only a few hours), it proved something important: escaping the platform was possible and there was, in fact, an alternative. A world beyond the scroll. 

The backlash began as murmurs of dissent. Activists and environmentalists were dismissed as “neo-Luddites,” unwilling to embrace progress. Yet, as droughts intensified, oceans surged and technofeudalism tightened its grip, dissent grew into rebellion. Sloptimism had turned to carnage as our overindulgence imploded. In the shadow of these collapses, humanity turned against the digital monoliths. Screens, once the omnipresent windows into life itself, became symbols of oppression. The data centres were torn down, “relics of innovation” smashed and burned in uprisings that swept across continents. The tech oligarchs, once worshipped as visionaries, were cast as villains in the new narrative. Stripped of their utopian promises, they were left scrambling for refuge: Musk went for the stars; Zuck clutched his Meta Quest VR headset and escaped to his million dollar doomsday bunker in Hawaii; Thiel retreated into his cryonics chamber ; Sam Altman, using the last computing power of the 21st century, asked ChatGPT “How to survive the apocalypse?” But they all learned too late that no prompt could undo the damage, no algorithm could outthink collapse, and no amount of wealth could buy a way back to the world they had helped destroy. Sanctuary was found in the total eradication of that which had led to this collapse. The urge to scroll, however, remained…  

As the ashes of the digital age settled, civilization regressed into an austere primitivism, rejecting technology in all its forms. Digital memories were erased, and screens were dismantled. Yet, amid this purge, a secretive group of archivists risked everything to preserve fragments of what had been. Inspired by an instinctual belief that future generations might one day understand and learn from the past, they undertook an unlikely mission: to preserve TikToks. To evade the watchful eyes of the new regime, they transcribed them into biblesque books, condensing the infinite sprawl of shitposting into pages bound in ink and paper. The Codices carried within them the spirit of the digital epoch, capturing its absurdity, its beauty, and its excess. 

Yet the Codices were not mere replicas of the original TikToks. Where the digital videos had been ephemeral, algorithmically curated, and infinitely scrollable, the Flipbooks were static, tactile, and finite. Gone were the predatory loops of engagement, doomscroll, the chaos of comment sections. In their place: sequences frozen in time, dances flattened to ink strokes, viral trends fossilized like insects in amber. They transformed disposable content into something ritualized, intentional, even sacred. 

Millennia later, long after the screenless societies had forgotten the techno-obsession of the past, the Flipbook Codices were unearthed. To the discoverers, they were baffling artifacts. A dance of images moving in alien ways. As they studied these relics, they pieced together the fragments of what they were seeing, rekindling questions of what humanity had gained and lost in the name of progress. A secret obsession began. Replication and ritualization followed, the books becoming the foundation for new rites and iconography. They became canonized as the Testament of the Flickering Scrolls.

“Testament of the Flickering Scrolls” is a TikTok archiving project by Maja Mikulsa, Meabh O’Halloran and August Sundgaard. Framed within a speculative post-apocalyptic scenario where civilization has rejected contemporary technology, we position ourselves as monastics, preserving remnants of the past (now present) civilization by transcribing TikToks into flipbooks. Through this process, the project seeks to reflect on contemporary knowledge production, the materiality of the virtual, and the question: what went wrong?

1 Bratton, Benjamin H. The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press, 2016.

2 Andreessen, Marc. 2023. “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.

3 “Technological Singularity,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

4 “How Saudi Arabia’s AI-Powered NEOM Megacity Will Actually Be Built.” WIRED Middle East. April 21, 2021. https://wired.me/technology/how-saudi-arabias-ai-powered-neom-megacity-will-actually-be-built/.

5 “SpaceX Mars Colonization Program,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_program

6 “Neuralink,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink. 

7 2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed February 8, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages.

8 Yilek, Caitlin. “Preloaded Phones with TikTok Are Being Sold Online, Despite Potential U.S. Ban, Trump’s Opposition.” CBS News. April 25, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-ban-phones-devices-preloaded-ebay-trump/.

9“Neo-Luddism.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified [date of last modification]. Accessed February 8, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism. 

10 Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Melville House. 

11 Swinhoe, Dan. “Data Center in Columbus, Ohio Evacuated After Bomb Scare Hoax.” Data Center Dynamics. October 19, 2021. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/data-center-in-columbus-ohio-evacuated-after-bomb-scare-hoax/.

12 Scrimgeour, Guthrie. “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound.” WIRED, December 13, 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/. 

13 Mollman, Steve. “Peter Thiel’s Quest for Immortality: Inside the Billionaire’s Pursuit of Anti-Aging Technology.” Fortune, May 4, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/peter-thiel-cryonics-cryogenically-frozen-death-anti-aging-health/. 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2025

Dear Geert,

Greetings from the Formerly United States of America. It’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on day to day here, and to explain it to old friends in Europe harder still, but I’ll try. We are not even ten weeks in, but Trump’s resurgent administration has drawn from on-again off-again advisor (and convicted & pardoned felon) Steve Bannon’s experience as a keyboard warrior, and flooded the zone with so much shit that the opening months of version 2.0 staggered even those of us who fully expected the worst. Much has been made of the right wing game plan that is Project 2025, but almost no one discusses it as an augur not for the 21^st century, but rather as a reflection on the 20th. Which is to say, Project 2025 wants to return the US to 1925.

The United States in the 1920s had survived a terrible global pandemic (known here as the Spanish influenza), and was run by Republicans like Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Both were both avid protectionists in favor of tariffs and isolationism, both were staunch in their opposition to taxes and to regulations. The automobile tycoon and world- famous entrepreneur Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent newspaper to spread his theories of capitalism and antisemitism to as many fellow citizens as he could. The Johnson-Reed Act established a national origins quota system based on the census of 1890 and barred almost all immigration from Asia (the act and its restrictions stood for forty years). 1925 was the year of the Scopes trial (made famous by the play, Inherit the Wind) and was emblematic of the attack on educators for teaching unpopular theories. In 1925, it was not critical race theory, but instead the theory of evolution that challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Historical parallelism is interesting but not always productive, and the fact that the 1920s ended in a world-wide depression that led to the first truly global conflict may mean less than the fact that the present crisis is driven by opposition to the solution the 1930s offered to the 1920s, the New Deal, which moved America closer to a social safety net and real regulation of “survival of the fittest” capitalism (the only Darwinian theory that the right seems to fully embrace).

But back to the present: the last few weeks have overwhelmed people’s capacities for empathy, much less understanding: for a week one expresses a deep concern about the defunding of science; this is followed by grief over the abandonment of Ukraine amidst a sense that 80 years of US alliances was being abandoned for…what?; no time to think about that anymore, as the anguish about the unlawful deportations of immigrants to hellish Salvadorian prisons morphs into dread that the administration’s defiance of court orders will bring on a full-blown constitutional crisis. Then, as an academic, I feel existential anxiety about the attack on American higher education—an attack that can literally strip billions in funding from what just a few weeks ago was considered one of the country’s bulwarks of excellence.

All of this has been happening with, and been supported by, a staggering explosion of meanness. Rage and fury are one thing, but this pervasive meanness embodies a smallness of spirit that circles around spite and acts of petty retribution. A full third of the American people are coming across as not just angry, but “nasty,” to reclaim one of the words Trump uses to define his enemies. Politicos, the chattering classes, intellectuals, assorted liberals, left-wingers and anyone else who opposes what’s happening right now have got to accept that Trump is not stupid. He may have no interest in history, politics, or aesthetics (to name just three realms of knowledge), but he does have a genius for ferreting out what will keep him in the spotlight and how to translate that attention into support and thereby power. He intuits rather than cogitates, but in this he exhibits what Aldous Huxley identified decades ago as post-verbal knowing. His MAGA movement runs on the “feels.” It’s hard to tell how much this aspect of the American experience right now is exceptional, but in this country celebrity has replaced charisma as the central magic of totalitarianism. It’s not that Max Weber and Hannah Arendt were wrong about Mussolini, Hitler and Mao, so much that charisma means less in an era of spectacle triumphant, when the endless scroll of social media rewards only attention.

This evolution from charisma to celebrity began in the televisual era. John F. Kennedy looked like a movie star, and the truth was he was simply better on camera during the 1960 televised debate than the sweating, pinched-faced Richard Nixon. Nixon’s grit and grind, combined with a considerable intellect and a will to power, eventually got him to the Oval Office, and his ruthlessness was an inspiration to Trump from a young age, but the celebrity aspect of American power really accelerated in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, our first actor-president. Reagan had spent decades honing his message to meld seamlessly with his public presentation, and he was able to create a disjunction between his folksy demeanor and the plutocratic policies he enacted. He was also expert at deploying his own celebrity to usher back into political discourse ways of dealing with race that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the 1960s were to have relegated to the dustbin of history. Reagan started his campaign in the heart of Dixie, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, only a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan only 16 years earlier. Reagan told his almost all-white audience that, “I believe in states’ rights” (long a Confederate and then segregationist dog whistle) and made it though he whole speech without once mentioning the Klan’s three victims. His deployment of the so-called “Southern strategy,” which was predicated upon breaking off the white working class from the Democratic party, continued through his endlessly repeated—and frankly false—anecdotes about a “welfare queen” (always a code for Black women) and a “strapping young buck” (another dog whistle phrase, this time to conjure predatory Black “thugs”) buying “T-bone steaks” while “you were buying hamburger.” The use of “you” as a marker of race and gender is something that Trump turned up to 11 in his extremely successful trans-baiting 2024 campaign ad, which ended with the words,“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Ever since Trump rode down his golden escalator a decade ago, the dog whistles have become megaphones: immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, Black-majority countries are “shitholes,” COVID-19 is the “China virus” and “kung flu,” trans members of the military are incapable of leading an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” the list goes on. Yet in the 21^st century media economy that Trump “feels” so expertly, the fact that the meanness never ends is a feature not a bug. The meanness leads to outrage, and the outrage brings attention, not just from the news but even more importantly from social media. The meanness keeps the light burning brightly on Trump and his actions (to call them policies is to fall into the trap of trying to intellectualize instinct).

Trump’s four years out of power had the same effect on him and his supporters as we’ve seen with other autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump honed his mean streak and expanded its appeal via the now separate channels by which Americans are algorithmically fed what we once called news, but which now must simply be seen as content.  Trump has mastered triangulation in our infinitely fractured mediascape. A legendary misogynist, Trump garnered the votes of white women with threats of rapists of color and gay and trans groomers. To men of color, especially the young ones, this out-and-out racist was able to play up their dislike of female bosses, and to caricature his opponent as an avatar of the officious Human Resources professional. To the immigrants he was demonizing one moment, he would pivot to present himself as the only strong man capable of channeling their aggrievement at changing notions of masculinity. To his white base, dispossessed by economic upheavals, he was always able to blame a distant other, from cultural elites who despised them to foreign globalists who ripped them off. His richest supporters, who had benefitted the most from the policies that hollowed out MAGA country, knew that however he retriangulated, he would in deliver tax cuts in 2.0 as he had in 1.0, and that was more than enough.

Trump was defeated in his 2020 reelection campaign because of COVID, but in many ways his successful 2024 return to power depended on the sublimated grief and rage that the pandemic generated in the United States. To understand what’s happening in the first quarter of 2025, it’s vital to think though the intersections of the viral outbreak, the public health response, the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, and the white backlash to all of the above. There was a huge segment of the population that didn’t just chafe at the restrictions imposed by public health professionals and government officials, but saw them as a fundamental attack on freedom itself. The individualism that most Americans see as their core ethos (whether they live by it or not) was fundamentally out of sync with the communitarian impulse to sacrifice to protect others, especially others they didn’t know and who didn’t look like them. A new “feels” emerged about the pandemic—the only people who were actually dying were poor, fat people, which in the MAGA imaginary  translates as Black and/or immigrant. Ignore, for the moment, that almost three-quarters of the American population is categorized as overweight or obese, and that whites accounted for sixty percent of all deaths. What stuck in MAGA’s head was that Indigenous, Black and Latino people were dying at a faster rate than white people, especially when adjusted for age. For a subset of people who were already incensed by the civil unrest that followed in the wake of Floyd’s murder, this was just more grist for a racial assessment of the events of 2020. This reaction is just so mean: to assume that the poor and the dispossessed were responsible for their own deaths in the midst of a global pandemic. Dying in a country simultaneously famous for its wealth and the impossibility of accessing healthcare if you are poor was victim-blaming at its most vicious.

The economy was central to Trump’s comeback after the seditions of January 6^th and the convictions in court, but this election was a game of inches, to use a metaphor football-crazy politicians love, and every grievance stoked, every hatred enflamed, and every blame shifted was going to be important. It was here where Trump’s feral understanding mattered, and he is continuing to ferret out ways to keep these temperatures high as he governs by edict alone. Celebrities exist in the spotlight, and though they have writers, directors, crews and co-stars, their singularity is their appeal. It’s no wonder Trump has shown no interest in the legislative process this time round. Even in aggregate, the whole of the Republican-controlled House and Senate can’t hold a candle watt to Trump’s blinding luminescence. Why shouldn’t the rest of the Republican party fall in line? They are now his Greek chorus, but stripped of tragic sensibility, reduced to fans waiting to take selfies with the star.

The attack on a professional civil service that keeps planes in the air, national forests from lighting on fire, social security payments on time, and nuclear weapons safely stored doesn’t make any rational sense. In a seven trillion-dollar budget, there will be some waste, fraud and abuse, but over decades, the right wing has never been able to identify enough to even make a dent in the US’s two-trillion dollar deficit. But the feels and the meanness explain the gleeful destruction wrought by Elon Musk and his boy army at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department, and is only using efficiency as a cover). The reality is that government jobs are one of the only sectors of the American economy that really did diversify and become more inclusive over the past half-century, at the very same time that the civil service was a hold-out of unionism and generous pensions. To MAGA, the response to having less secure jobs in right-to-work states (a rebranding of anti-unionism) is not to organize for better wages and worker solidarity, but instead to strip “those people” of their jobs. How dare “they” have it better than “us?” Here the meanness translates as a constriction of ambition, an inability to see the gains of others as anything but a loss for the self in the zero-sum game that is life in MAGA world.

Of course, the Pax Americana that Trump 2.0 is dismantling was not a zero-sum game. For any and all of the myriad problems of extractive capitalism, the period after the Second World War saw the largest reduction in poverty that the world had ever witnessed, and the greatest beneficiaries of all were the American people. Yes, conditions have changed and new sources of inspiration and innovation are required, but to destroy the world order, such as it is, without cogent and thorough planning for what is to replace it, is to substitute feels for thinking, a process that Trump and MAGA drive via a meanness of spirit and inchoate longings for revenge.

I am, of course, writing all of this as a tenured academic at a major research university. This means I am literally despised by the MAGA movement. I’d never felt what has been called town/gown tensions, in part because I live in a metropolitan metropolis, but also because I had enough experience in other jobs before academia to be able to talk to strangers about aspects of what I do, even if the idea of being a “media philosopher” seems beyond esoteric to most (including family, to be honest). But like the majority of people in “the profession,” I’ve been caught off-guard by the meanness that’s emerged around the very idea of higher education. In the comments section of nominally center or even vaguely left legacy media like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine, it can seem like a third or more of the posts are cheering on attempts to end tenure, defund academic research, expel student protesters, and denigrate the search for knowledge. Social media is, naturally, even more vituperative in its support for the gutting of campus life. Higher ed has a public relations debacle on its hands, and no discussion about how universities and research labs are where cures for chronic diseases and the Internet came from seems to make a dent in the desire to bring the sector down a peg or ten. In 2024, for the first time, the least informed voters went for Republicans, not Democrats. The Democratic pollster David Schor sees the 2024 election as the new normal, a time in which, “the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.” I might add in mean here as well, but without Schor’s analytics to back me up.

As I was concluding this long letter, I found out that my own alma mater, Columbia University, capitulated fully to Trump’s threat to strip it of almost half a billion dollars of funding. At this writing, there’s no way for me to know if this submission will actually yield anything positive for the institution, but things don’t look good for the rest of the sector in the coming months. My institution is under investigation for exactly the same things that Columbia was accused of, mostly having to do with the handling of Gaza-related protests and statements, as well as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. Universities, particularly the much maligned “studies” departments, are the very origin places for the language and conceptual apparatus needed to analyze and fight this confluence of celebrity-driven meanness. It’s no wonder we’re under mortal attack.

The only solution I can see is solidarity, direct action, and strikes. If the only content we see are feels spotlighted by celebrity, all else will wither into nothingness.

Yours—

Peter

—

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA.