One of GritCult's podcast guest appearances. For the full list, see Podcast appearances.
| Subversive | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Episode | |
| Show | Subversive |
| Host | Alex Kaschuta (@AlexKaschuta) |
| Released | February 2021 |
| Length | 1:35:46 |
| Watch | YouTube |
GRITCULT - What is our Future? is an episode of Subversive, hosted by Alex Kaschuta, with GritCult as the guest (February 2021). Recorded during the GameStop squeeze, a long conversation with Alex Kaschuta in which GritCult reads every trend as decentralisation, predicts many simultaneous futures and argues for a culture of death in a society that denies it.
Summary
Kaschuta opens on the turmoil of January 2021, online and partly in person, and GritCult reads it through a single meta trend: decentralisation, driven by technology that lets people reach and organise one another at a scale never seen before. His example is the GameStop short squeeze, then unfolding. He calls himself neither a techno-optimist nor a Luddite. Technology is a tool to aid rather than replace, and what is missing is a culture around it, the way bread making carries an aesthetic and a set of habits. He expects a growing backlash against the corporations that run large parts of digital life.
On politics he repeats his prediction of multiple simultaneous futures, with Jetsons and Flintstones living in separate decentralised communities. He recalls tweeting around 2018 that America was at risk of fracture, doubts that civil war will come, and expects secession movements instead, citing Texas, Brexit and independence campaigns within Britain. He says he would prefer a world of city-states and calls himself a big supporter of localisation.
The spine of the episode is death. Kaschuta raises his thread on the missing death culture of the West, and GritCult says he is constantly motivated by death, surrounds himself with memento mori skulls he draws, and once made a video essay that was close to his own eulogy. Tradition he defines memetically, as ideas refined through time by Darwinian selection, and he argues that biology, not technology, is the operating system that makes history repeat. He also suggests that online gurus are becoming surrogate fathers, that men are regrouping in male-only group chats, and that modern society lacks an honour culture.
On David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, which he admits he has not read, he takes an Austrian line: value is whatever the market will pay, so the category barely exists, though a long project cancelled by senior management taught him to build things that last. He predicts a post-office economy and prefers family business to careerism. He closes on the digital afterlife: everything posted is permanent, he has experimented with generating tweets from his own archive, and he has set up bots to keep posting after he dies. Asked for underrated thinkers, he recommends small accounts whose views are hard to pin down.
Key moments
Timestamps link to that point in the episode.
- 5:50 A tool to aid, not replace
you also gotta recognize that technology is a tool to aid rather than replace
- 10:58 Many futures at once
it's going to be multiple simultaneous futures existing at once
- 24:23 Motivated by death
i think it's a very huge part of my personality that you know i'm constantly motivated by death
- 27:48 Tradition as refined memes
set of memes that have been refined through time so you know through darwinian evolution of memes or ideas
- 43:54 Biology over technology
when i'm talking about technology what i'm really talking about is biology and i definitely think that biology has more of an influence on future events than technology
- 51:48 Value is what the market pays
very austrian kind of school economic thinking is that value is whether the market is willing to pay for it
- 1:22:18 Everything online is forever
everything you do online is like you should just basically have the kind of mindset that it's going to be online forever
Themes
- decentralisation as the meta trend
- many simultaneous futures
- a culture of death
- tradition as refined memes
- biology over technology
- building what outlasts you
See also
External links
- GRITCULT - What is our Future? on YouTube