After an extended pause, a new conversation with Pete Chambers on 2025: what is taking shape, what is disappearing, and how much is involuting.

Thanks to Memento Mastering for assistance with production.

A quarter of the way through the year, a quarter of the way through the century. On a recent visit to Australia, I had the opportunity for another in-person meeting with Peter Chambers. In the conversation, we explore the difficulty of defending the shabby status quo, disappointment and distaste with what ‘really existing’ unipolarity was, and the disorientation that comes with a world of 8 billion people in which much of what matters is now happening outside and beyond the US and the West.

This episode is something different: a presentation by Christopher Hobson on where the world finds itself at the end of tumultuous year. It explores some of the features of the present polycrisis, and moving into conditions in which the aperture of possibility looks to be considerably widening. The video presentation includes slides, but it can easily be followed in audio only.

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, recorded in the third quarter of 2024. This returns to the central theme of smartphones, social media and digital technologies, thinking through the social costs and consequences that come with them. What we are faced with is an ever-growing gap between the sophistication of our technologies and the simplification of thought and degrading of interpersonal interactions.

In this episode, Chris and Pete welcome Joseph Vogl, who is a Regular Visiting Professor at Princeton University, and until last year, he was Professor of Modern German Literature, Cultural and Media Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Our conversation focuses on Vogl's most recent book: Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present (2022), while also connecting it to his previous works, The Ascendancy of Finance (2017) and The Specter of Capital (2014).

In this episode, Chris and Pete welcome Guillaume Pitron, an investigative journalist who has been uncovering and examining the material realities of the unceasing advance of digital technologies, most notably through a pair of books: The Rare Metals War (La Guerre des métaux rares) and The Dark Cloud (L’Enfer numérique). 

For more information, visit imperfectnotes.substack.com 

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, this time recorded in-person during a trip to Australia in February 2024. Donald Horne famously described the country as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.’ That depiction could easily be applied to much of the West over the last few decades.

Central to our conversation is the issue of scale, prompted by a rare interview with Vaclav Smil. In his book Size, Smil writes:

there is nothing new about this trend toward larger sizes: the evolution of living organisms has supplied many precedents. What’s new is the ubiquity and the pace of the modern quest for larger sizes. This accelerated trend began during the latter half of the 19th century, powered by industrialization, and its intensification through the 20th century created our modern world of record-breaking sizes and superlatives.

We think through logics of consumption, transport, travel as they get scaled up and expanded, conditions in which ‘quantity has a quality all its own’. One of the clearest visualisations of this is the ‘great acceleration’ graphs presented by Steffen et al (2015):

In his 1963 book, Little Science, Big Science, Derek J. de Solla Price tracked and projected a similar kind of trajectory in the realm of research:

Scientists and engineers are now a couple of percent of the labor force of the United States, and the annual expenditure on research and development is about the same fraction of the Gross National Product. It is clear that we cannot go up another two orders of magnitude as we have climbed the last five. If we did, we should have two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the popula­tion, and we should spend on them twice as much money as we had. Scientific doomsday is therefore less than a century distant.

Considering these intertwined logics of over-production and over-consumption, Pete offers another quote from Jean Baudrillard, this time from The System of Objects (1968):

Our 'technological' civilization, as foreshadowed by the American model, is a world at once systematized and fragile. The system of objects is the embodiment of this systematization of fragility, of ephemerality, of the ever more rapid recurrence of the repetition compulsion; the embodiment of satisfaction and disillusion; the embodiment of the problematical exorcism of the real conflicts that threaten individual and social relationships. With the advent of our consumer society, we are seemingly faced for the first time in history by an irreversible organized attempt to swamp society with objects and integrate it into an indispensable system designed to replace all open interaction between natural forces, needs and techniques. The principal basis of this system would appear to be the official, obligatory and supervised demise of the objects that it comprises: a gigantic collective 'happening' whereby the death of the group itself is celebrated through the euphoric destruction or ritualistic devouring of objects and gestures. Here again one could argue that nothing more is involved than an infantile disorder of the technological society, and attribute such growing pains entirely to the dysfunctionality of our present social structures - i.e. to the capitalist order of production. The long-term prospect of a transcendence of the whole system would thus remain open. On the other hand, if something more is involved than the anarchic ends of a production system determined by social exploitation, if deeper conflicts in fact play a part - highly individual conflicts, but extended onto the collective plane - then any prospect of ultimate transcendence must be abandoned for ever. Are we contemplating the developmental problems of a society ultimately destined to become the best of all possible worlds, or, alternatively, an organized regression in the face of insoluble problems? Is all this the work of anarchic production relations or of the death instinct? What, in short, has made a civilization go wrong in this way? The question is still open.

A powerful representation of mindless, empty consumption taken to extremes is the figure of No-Face (カオナシ kaonashi) from Spirited Away (image care of Studio Ghibli):

Some further points of reference:

* Peter Chambers, ‘Capitalism delivers the goods’ and ‘Containment as one dimensionality’, Living Together, Somehow, February 2024.

* Gabriele Vogt and Sian Qin, ‘Does Japan dread or desire its influx of international tourists?’, East Asia Forum, 4 December 2023.

* Joseph Cotterill, Claire Jones and Martin Arnold, ‘China to export deflation to the world as economy stumbles’, Financial Times, 9 February 2024.

* Julie Turkewitz, ‘Migrants Become Influencers on Social Media’, New York Times, 20 December 2023.

* Cory Doctorow, ‘“Enshittification” is coming for absolutely everything’, Financial Times, 8 February 2024.

This conversation is an attempt to reflect on the scale and consequences of these dynamics, and to do so while continuing the ongoing practice of open thought.

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Using frames of mirrors, shadows and others, Klein manages to capture something about the deeply weird and warped relations that now prevail between online and the real / ‘real’ world. She explains the significance of the figure of the doppelganger:

For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded. That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarized, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours.

A useful concept she introduces is ‘pipikism’, which she takes from Philip Roth’s, Operation Shylock, one of the texts about doppelgangers that Klein engages with. She quote’s Roth’s description of ‘pipikism’ as ‘the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything—farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything.’ This captures the way in which the concepts and frames we use to help understand our world are rendered useless by bad actors and bad faith, caught in ‘a knot of seriousness and ridiculousness that would never be untangled.’

Klein’s explorations echo and amplify certain ideas I have developed previously about living in a world marked by bad faith:

Like putting colours into a white wash, means bleed into ends, truth and fiction blur together, and what is ultimately lost is confidence in the world. Everything is serious, and nothing matters. The corrosive and distorting logic of social media hypercharges these corrosive tendencies.

More recently, I considered this in reference to the ‘meaning grinder’, in which conflict is turned into content, suffering thinned out and rendered banal. That note was developed through this conversation with Pete, and our thinking through what a world of bad faith and pipiking means.

Given these themes we explore, it is perhaps unsurprising that another thinker we engage with is Jean Baudrillard, who foresaw powerful features of this absurdly serious and seriously absurd set of conditions we now find ourselves in. Pete introduces the following quote from Baudrillard’s 1970 work, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures:

The consumer society is at one and the same time a society of solicitude and a society of repression, a pacified society and a society of violence. We have seen that 'pacified' daily life thrives on a daily diet of consumed violence, 'allusive' violence: news reports of accidents, murders, revolu­tions, the atomic or bacteriological threat - the whole apocalyptic stock­ in-trade of the mass media. We have seen that the affinity between violence and the obsession with security and well-being is not accidental: ‘spectacular’ violence and the pacification of daily life are homogeneous, because they are each equally abstract and each is a thing of myths and signs. We might also add that violence is nowadays inoculated into daily life in homoeopathic doses - a vaccine against fatality - to ward off the spectre of the real fragility of that pacified life. For it is no longer the spectre of scarcity which haunts the civilization of affluence, but the spectre of fragility. And that spectre, which is much more menacing because it concerns the very equilibrium of individual and collective structures, and which has to be warded off at all costs, is in fact kept at bay by this roundabout solution of consumed, packaged, homogenized violence. This violence is not dangerous violence: blood on the front page no more compromises the social and moral order than does sex (despite the emotional blackmail on the part of the censors who wish to persuade themselves of this, and to persuade us of it). It simply attests to the fact that the balance is a precarious one, that the social and moral order is made up of contradictions.

How to recognise our deep entanglement in these contradictions, to peer into the shadows, to see our doubles, all while trying to avoid lapsing into ‘ambient nihilism’, these are some of the challenges we face as we seek to live together, somehow.

…the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest. But this truth is not self-evident and must be approached as a puzzle, or mystery; a problem to be solved.

Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, ‘The Forgotten Space: Notes for a Film’

Much of what we use and touch every day is likely connected to the sea: many items would have been wholly or partially produced abroad, and most – if not all – of the remainder would have relied on commodities that would have arrived on tankers and other ships. Yet this all forms part of that background web of global interconnections that we too rarely recognize or reckon with, but are vital to how we presently live.

Laleh Khalili, the Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter, has sought to bring these realities to light. In her work, she explores the forgotten space of the sea that Sekula previously grappled with. Indeed, Khalili wrote the introduction for the third edition of his remarkable photo essay, Fish Story. She has developed these ideas most fully in her 2021 book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula. Khalili explains her focus:

Many people who liked to photograph or film or write about maritime transport were interested in the subject as kind of an aesthetic sublime – awed by the engineering vastness and complexity of this system of trade. And it is massive, both in the things that you see and in the things that are made invisible. It looks massive when you are on a coast somewhere and you see those container ships or tankers, or when you fly over Gibraltar and you see all of those ships waiting to pass. The massive things that are invisible are the routes, the amount of goods that travel – the things that we have difficulty aggregating in our brains. There is a sense of awesomeness and a sense of rupture from the past, which everybody keeps reproducing. What gets lost in the reverence for that massiveness is the human element, the human scale, the historical.

I wanted to situate a work that dealt with the invisibility of the mega-ness of trade, and with the invisibility of the Arabian Peninsula.

In foregrounding these dynamics, Khalili is examining at an industry and a region of fundamental importance for the global economy. The manufactured goods that fill up ships in the busiest ports in Asia are largely made with energy inputs that arrive on vessels from the Middle East. In a recent feature, The Economist points to the defining feature of the region’s geopolitics and economy:

First, and most obvious, it is awash with hydrocarbons. It accounts for 36% of world oil production, 46% of oil exports, 22% of natural-gas output and 30% of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Those numbers will only rise. The region has vast reserves (52% of the world’s total for oil and 43% for gas) and low production costs. At a time when Western oil majors are skittish about investing, Gulf firms are adding capacity.

Location is important, too: the region connects Europe, Africa and Asia. Some 30% of the world’s shipping containers pass through the Suez canal in Egypt, while 16% of its air cargo flies via airports in the Gulf.

What Khalili does is make visible the maritime space of the Arabian Peninsula, identifying historical patterns and precedents in contemporary practices, highlighting the role of law and capital, revealing the technopolitics that shape the way ports are located and operate, as well as the considerable costs on coastlines and captains.

Khalili’s approach is one that emphasises connections and context, moving from the complexities of global finance down to the realities that it manifests, what it means to be working at sea and on ports. For these reasons, and many more, we were keen to have a conversation with her. The structure of the episode is the first 30 minutes is a discussion between Peter Chambers and myself around Khalili’s work, followed by a conversation between Chambers and Khalili. For more, see her page, ‘The Gamming’, a title suitably inspired by Melville, and she has some great pieces in the LRB exploring the intersection between finance, geopolitics and commodities.

Thanks to Laleh and Peter for this thought-provoking conversation.

In conversation again with Pete Chambers. With this episode we have moved to a new recording setup and the audio quality is much better as a result. Thanks for the feedback from listeners and to our producer, Peter Van Hoesen, for his guidance.

Our starting point is the extreme weather that has marked this year’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. From there, we discuss how we are individually and collectively (mis)understanding climate change, some of the consequences that come from the responses we are pursuing - notably the emphasis on electric vehicles - as well as the enduring challenge of individual agency in the context of massive systemic forces. How we can better comprehend the profoundly uneven and odd historical moment we find ourselves in? How can we live and act in such conditions? These are some of the questions our conversation circles around.

Some references mentioned:

* Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014).

* John Urry, ‘The “System” of Automobility’, Theory, Culture & Society, 21: 4–5 (2004), 25–39.

* Ulrich Beck, ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19:4 (2022), 39–55.

* Evgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of techno-feudal reason’, New Left Review, 133/134 (2022), 89-126.

* Imperfect notes: ‘Kitsch geopolitics’ and ‘Weakening powers’ (2023).

* Living together, somehow: ‘Unboxing the amateur unboxer’ (2023).

* Owl of Minerva: ‘A traditional symbol of wisdom, most famously invoked in Hegel’s remark at the end of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: “when philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.” Hegel means that the kinds of self-conscious reflection making up philosophy can occur only when a way of life is sufficiently mature to be already passing’. Taken from: The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.

Thanks for engaging. For the next episode, we’ll be inviting our first guest to help us think through the material realities of global supply chains.