Post-Internet Realism – My a'th Kar

April 26, 2026April 26, 2026

Mesotopia: Significant Findings and Contributions. Partial Revelation

If you spend nearly ten years on a thing – a thesis, a question, an ache – then what do you come away with? This is a problem that many researchers wrestle with long after their viva.

My thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (Verran, 2025), emerged from my exploration into the murky realm of meaning-making; into how humans make sense of their environment and articulate this through the art of language. While engaging with methods and approaches of scientific materialism, it was open to other, less quantifiable aspects of understanding. My approach exists between the hard data of environmental science and the soft collapse of attributing a lyrical utterance to a physical sensation. Mesotopia is that middle place. It is a weird, damp, mossy ground where you are forced to admit that you’re guessing, and that guess, that intuition, is something beautiful.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and I offer it not as truth but as partial revelation: all environmental research ends in conjecture. You can measure carbon flux. You can map watersheds, but the moment you ask why – why the tide is rising, why the magpie sings – then you have left the laboratory and entered the weirder world of the poetic. This requires intuition; not as a substitute for rigour, but as its strange twin. The best researchers I know don’t pretend to be robots or LLMs. They listen for what the data doesn’t say.

This became painfully clear when I tried to get a clean historical picture of Celtic culture. I wanted something tethered to the languages themselves: Old Kernewek, the living breath of Breton fragments. What I found instead was a hall of mirrors. There are no objective sources. Texts were scripted by either a monk or a cultist with an agenda. Every archaeological layer has been interpreted by a romantic, a nationalist or a grant committee. Anyone who proclaims certainty about Celtic culture should be eyed the way you’d eye a man selling miracle water from the back of a van.

This is the deeper sickness. Doing a PhD means watching how the money moves. You see funding streams shape ideological and political directions for corporate profit: pharmaceuticals, tech, and weapons. These industries don’t just buy labs. They buy histories too. They buy the humanities, indirectly, turning entire departments into PR factories churning out favourable narratives. There are red lines and guardrails everywhere. You learn them quickly. Don’t scrutinise the military applications or environmental impacts of all this wonderful new tech. Don’t question the ethics of corporate influence on land use. Don’t look at the family backgrounds of financiers recently termed ‘philanthropists’. Do that, and the funding dries up. The list goes on. This is the unspoken rule – to have any kind of career in Western academia, you need to learn when to keep your mouth shut.

I finished my PhD less certain about what is real. So much of academic work seems to be about inventing reality for other people to live in. I admit that I can never find my way through all the misdirections and dead ends, and that any meaningful clarity eludes me. On reflection, I don’t see that as a failure. That is the crack where light gets in. I’ve glimpsed the man behind the velvet curtain of western liberalism, working his bells and whistles and selling his snake oil, and I don’t believe him anymore. I do not believe in the neutrality of universities, nor in the clean hands of Western research culture.

I live in partial revelation. I am always listening. I am certain of nothing and sceptical of everything. However, I can still hope that somewhere – in a different kind of institution with a different way of asking – there is a place where intuition is honoured, funding doesn’t own the questions, and any person is free to research, interrogate or argue controversial positions.

As always, my a’th kar!

Follow this link to a video where I discuss this blog in more detail:

March 15, 2026March 15, 2026

Pride to Arrogance

I’m a word nerd. I always have been. Give me a fancy word and I’ll happily disappear down an etymological rabbit hole. Words aren’t just labels; they often carry complicated philosophies and histories. They tell us how people once felt about things, and sometimes how they still do.

Take pride.

We tend to treat Pride – with a capital P – as an unqualified good. It is banners and glitter and rainbows filling the streets. It is colourful defiance. It’s what Aretha Franklin was getting at when she sang about pride as “a deeper love.” After centuries of shame being attached to people who have chosen alternative ways of loving and presenting themselves, pride has been a necessary corrective.

Yet as an emotional state, pride has always been ambiguous. The traditional moralists were not entirely wrong to rank it high among the deadly sins. Not because feeling good about yourself is wicked, but because pride untethered can curdle into arrogance. Push it a little further and you get hubris – an ancient Greek warning sign that someone is about to fall flat on their face.

So let’s unpack my understanding of pride. Too much pride insists that not only am I worthy, but that I am flawless. Not only that my way of loving and living is legitimate, but that it is morally superior. That is the pivot point where something liberatory can harden into something faintly sanctimonious.

The antidote to arrogance is humility. Not humiliation or self-erasure, but the quiet recognition that I am one human among many, and that all of us are fallible.

Living a liberated sex life doesn’t make me a bad person, but it also doesn’t make me a saint. It doesn’t grant prophetic insight or moral authority. It simply means I am navigating the same tempestuous terrain as everyone else: desire, pleasure, guilt, connection, and loneliness. I’m not exceptional; I’m just another awkward mammal – albeit one who can claim a few good songs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since reconnecting with friends and colleagues at Margate Pride. The experience has also brought another word to mind: community.

These days all sorts of organisations often brand groups of people with shared interests ‘communities’; the cycling community, the vegan community, the queer community. However, the word originally meant something closer to ‘the common people’ – those who share a place. Not the nobility; not the clergy; just the rest of us muddling through together. When I talk about community cohesion, it’s this older meaning I have in mind.

If we take that definition seriously, grass-roots engagement stops being about curating safe rooms full of ideological twins. Instead, it becomes about speaking to neighbours you might not agree with on everything. It requires enough humility to listen to what people actually say, and to recognise that we probably share more concerns than we assume.

In my experience, stepping outside your comfort zone is surprisingly productive. Most of my conversations with non-LGBT+ people within many communities have been positive. It turns out, the man who loathes ‘woke culture’ is also worried about paying his heating bill. The woman who doesn’t understand why everyone suddenly uses the word ‘queer’ is desperately anxious about her mum’s hospital waiting list.

Material concerns cut across identity in surprising ways.

For example, you might be a trendy queer artist and struggling to pay your rent and bills. Congratulations! You’re just like most people living on your street. You might be fighting for access to life-saving treatment because you’re HIV positive or trans. Most people I speak with are also fighting for access to different forms of life-saving healthcare. When you focus on housing, wages and healthcare you discover common ground, and on common ground, you can build something sturdier than a slogan or an annual event.

The secret to effective community grass-roots organising is no secret at all, it’s just talking with the people who live around you.

Pride got us out of the shadows. Humility might help us grow in the daylight.

As always, my a’th kar.

I discuss this blog in more depth over on my YouTube channel:

February 15, 2026

Why the Epstein Scandal Matters to Grass-roots Organising – Yes, Even in Cornwall!

I know. The moment you mention Epstein, half the room switches off and the other half assumes you’re about to spiral into salacious gossip about decadent royals. Fair enough. There’s been no shortage of lurid headlines, often supporting bad faith takes or outright distractions. If you’re involved in grassroots organising – environment, housing, disability rights, local culture – then the Epstein scandal actually matters a great deal. Even here in the Duchy of Cornwall. Especially down here, in fact.

Not because of the sex crimes themselves, horrific as they are. Without sounding flippant, those are not the important part from an organising perspective. What matters is that the Epstein documents give us a rare, unvarnished look at how power actually functions. Not how it claims to function in glossy brochures, mission statements, or charity galas, but how it works when the doors are closed and the theatre stops.

What emerges is a class of people who genuinely believe themselves to be above the law – not metaphorically, literally. They trade influence across governments, intelligence agencies, banks, weapons manufacturers, and ‘philanthropic’ institutions with astonishing ease. The Epstein network shows us that inter-institutional power doesn’t operate through democratic accountability; it operates through personal relationships, financial leverage, kompromat, and shared class interest.

This is vital for grassroots organisers to understand, because so much organising energy is wasted arguing with the performance of power. We petition the institution, we appeal to its stated values, we take part in consultations that are largely ceremonial. Such processes help cultivate the illusion of participation. Meanwhile, the real decisions are being made elsewhere, by people who will never attend a town hall meeting and who don’t particularly care what the public thinks.

One of the more sobering elements of the Epstein story isn’t just who he knew, but what moved through his world: money laundering, arms flows, political interference, even regime change. Governments toppled, leaders removed, and vast sums legally washed clean through cultural, educational, and environmental organisations. That should ring bells for anyone who’s ever wondered why certain funders always seem to back ‘good causes’ while working-class communities remain neglected.

People are still combing through millions of released emails in the US, but already the outline of empire is visible. The Financial Times article on Epstein’s banking connections is revealing in this regard. When you trace those networks outward, you don’t end up in abstract theory – you end up in very real places. Yes, even Cornwall. Through extractive industries like Imerys, and through respected institutions such as wildlife and cultural trusts. This is what global power looks like when it lands locally.

The same family that profits from extracting Cornwall’s mineral reserves also funds organisations that promote ‘greener’ approaches to resource management, including initiatives linked to the Cornwall Wildlife Trust’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund. This does not, in itself, prove any wrongdoing. However, it does help explain why certain environmental impacts, particularly those linked to mineral extraction, are often absent from official campaigning narratives. This is grassroots theatre in action: the same interests profiting from extraction are also funding the boundaries within which ‘opposition’ is allowed to operate.

To be clear, the Epstein revelations are often discussed through the lens of particular social or cultural networks, but focusing on identity alone misses the point. What is being exposed is not a uniquely Zionist phenomenon, but a familiar pattern of elite, transnational power that has historically operated across Mittel-European, British, German, Italian, and American ruling classes alike. This is simply how imperial power has reproduced itself.

Crucially, the people working at the grassroots level of charitable, cultural, or environmental organisations are not villains. Most have little to no awareness of the legacies of wealth tied to colonial extraction in regions such as Rhodesia, Palestine or Somalia for example. My research suggests these same mechanics operate throughout the provinces, particularly within the overtly feudal ‘Duchy’ of Cornwall.

This is why outlets like the TrueAnon podcast and The Grayzone matter. They’ve been doing the unglamorous work of tracing these connections through a historical materialist lens, rather than dismissing them as scandal or conspiracy. They remind us that power has a history, a geography, and a balance sheet.

If grassroots organising is going to be effective, it has to be grounded in reality – not the comforting story we’re told about how the world works, but the uncomfortable truth of how it often does. The Epstein scandal isn’t a distraction from local issues. It’s a brutal lesson in why local struggles are always connected to global systems of power.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this blog in more depth over on YouTube:

References:

(1) Cornwall Wildlife Trust (n.d.) Green Recovery Challenge Fund: Past projects. Available at: https://www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/what-we-do/past-projects/green-recovery-challenge-fund (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(2) Financial Times (n.d.) Jeffrey Epstein and the banking system. Financial Times. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/0d70b7d3-063d-43a0-812b-8b8b3e7c4c47 (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(3) Imerys (n.d.) Imerys in the United Kingdom: Cornwall operations. Imerys. Available at: https://www.imerys.com/united-kingdom/cornwall (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(4) Tages-Anzeiger. (2026). Tamedia AG. [online] Available at: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/epstein-beriet-ariane-de-rothschild-475024135092 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2026].

(5) @TrueAnonPod Truanon (n.d.) Truanon podcast. Available at: https://soundcloud.com/truanonpod (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(6) @thegrayzone7996 The Grayzone (n.d.) Discussion on the Epstein files and imperial power structures. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2wz4rGGRGA&t=8s

February 8, 2026

Mesotopia: Towards a Politics of Partial Revelation

One of the quietly awkward things about Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is watching very clever people try to prise a politics out of it without breaking the crockery. Graham Harman tends to sidestep the issue, while Timothy Morton leans into it with a kind of earnest bravado. Morton’s move toward ecognosticism, and the attempt to locate this within a Marxist framework in texts like Humankind, is genuinely interesting. However, it also feels slightly misaligned. Classic Marxism is grounded in class analysis, historically specific struggles, and the evaluation of material and economic exploitation. OOO, by contrast, flattens the ontological field. Everything withdraws. Everything is weird. The risk is that a politics emerging from OOO may be interpreted less as a material project and more as a kind of nihilistic mood that risks favouring apathy over engagement.

I explore this tension more fully in my thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a place of lyrical inquiry, but the short version is this: I admire the effort to push OOO into the political sphere, even when I don’t think it quite lands – and that misfiring is instructive, because it reveals something important about knowledge itself.

While researching the mechanics of mesotopian meaning-making, it became increasingly obvious to me that all research, no matter how rigorous, eventually arrives at a moment of pure conjecture. There is always a moment where the evidence runs out and interpretation takes over. Mesotopia names this space. I live here. We all do, whether we admit it or not. It is a state of partial revelation.

This is not as exotic as it sounds. In fact, it has deep resonances with classic Marxism and even elements of Maoism, where political life is understood to be structurally occluded. Much is withheld – not necessarily because it is illegal, but because it would be politically embarrassing, destabilising, or simply inconvenient if widely known. The very existence of scandals that sit at the periphery of respectable political discourse – such as Operation Gladio or Jeffrey Epstein – points to this condition. Power does not announce itself clearly. Decisions are made elsewhere, in rooms you and I, dear reader, are not invited into, using codes and languages we have not been taught to speak.

My own experiences of working at the fringes of empire have only reinforced my thinking here. I do not know the truth of political machinations at the highest level, but I do know, with absolute certainty, that the general public does not know everything either. This isn’t paranoia. It isn’t fear. It’s political realism.

Often in my research, I return to old-fashioned historical materialist strategies – following flows of money, mapping institutional relationships, noting who funds whom and why. These methods can clarify motivations and alliances that otherwise seem baffling. However, they do not constitute conclusive proof of wrongdoing. Many financial arrangements are perfectly legal. They are simply hidden because they don’t look good under fluorescent light.

This is why I’ve found Erik Davis’s approach in High Weirdness so refreshing. Davis manages to acknowledge the unknown, the speculative, and the unresolved without sliding into mockery or credulity. He takes uncertainty seriously.

I encountered something similar while researching the Cornish language. I plotted the publishing output of writers who have subtly pushed narratives of Baltic and Celtic nationalisms and arrived at a moment of conjecture – why are they doing this? I also didn’t understand why certain groups of people attended some Celtic language meetings. I still don’t. I will never know the inner motives of esoteric groups. Mesotopia teaches me to live with that – not as resignation, but as orientation. Not knowing is not a failure. It is the condition of political life. However, this does not mean that we simply accept ‘not knowing’ as a reason for ‘not doing’. On the contrary, I suggest that a politics of partial revelation encourages us to continue to participate in a project to attend to our local environments even though we cannot possibly know everything.

I can state what I know and intuit what I don’t.

From my research, I observe that industrialists, financiers, and right-wing factions often push nationalist narratives to appeal to the sensibilities of certain minority groups. For what ultimate reason, I cannot know; my intuition, however, is to remain sceptical of their intentions. Partial revelation is the rule, not the exception, and politics begins not with certainty, but with the refusal to be paralysed by its absence.

As always, my a’th kar!

You can follow this link for a video discussion of this blog:

References:
(1) Davis, Erik. (2019). High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in The Seventies. The MIT Press.
(2) Harman, Graham. (2016). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Polity.
(3) Morton, Timothy. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Non-human People. Verso.
(4) Verran, Tristan. (2025). Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. The University of Plymouth. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/113/

January 24, 2026January 25, 2026

Why Are Some Of The Worst People Suddenly So Concerned About My Cornish ‘Identity’?

I remember the moment quite clearly. Back in 2015, I was part of a scrappy, grass-roots effort trying to understand what on earth had happened to London Pride. I’d started digging into the financials, following sponsorship pages and annual reports, trying to work out how something that once felt unruly, provincial and ours had turned into a vast corporate machine. I wrote about it at the time, half in disappointment, half in ironic detachment (4+5). What struck me wasn’t just the money, but who was supplying it.

Barclays, Citi, big law firms like Baker McKenzie, and polished NGOs with immaculate branding such as Exterion had all been sponsoring London Pride events for several years. At some point, amid the spreadsheets and sponsor logos, I asked a very simple question: why do these people care so much about my sexual orientation? When did global finance decide it was emotionally invested in my being a gay man? I didn’t feel particularly ‘seen’, as the cool kids like to say these days, I felt categorised, monetised and branded (3).

That feeling has stayed with me.

Years later, while researching my PhD on how humans comprehend their environment and articulate that through language, I found myself back in similar emotional territory. I was comparing grammatical features of the two languages of my homeland: English and Kernewek. As I dug deeper into the revival of Kernewek and the cultural discourse orbiting it, the same sensation returned. That tightening in the gut. Why? I thought. Why now? Why, after centuries of neglect, ridicule and outright economic extraction, were some very respectable institutions in the UK suddenly so interested in cultivating a Cornish cultural ‘identity’?

To be clear, I have nothing against LGBT people who pour their time and love into London Pride. Nor do I have anything against Cornish people who work tirelessly to protect Kernewek and explore Cornish culture. I admire the commitment involved in both. This isn’t an attack on grass-roots energy. It’s a plea for scepticism about institutions that have a long, well-documented habit of exploiting grass-roots movements for ends that rarely improve the material conditions of ordinary people.

Here’s the thing – symbolic recognition is cheap. Flags are cheap. Car stickers are cheap. Language initiatives, diversity panels and glossy campaigns are cheap compared to land, mineral rights or meaningful economic redress. If there were serious conversations about who benefits from Cornwall’s land and resources, things might look very different. Imagine if working Cornish people had actually benefited from generations of mining and extraction, rather than watching profits flow elsewhere.

Much of that wealth has continued to flow into multinational corporations. Some large corporations, in general, are known to fund cultural or heritage projects, often as part of wider reputational or social-licence strategies. However, my concern here is not primarily about arts funding, but about extraction and ownership. The Rothschild family, for example, through its company Imerys (formerly Peñarroya), directly profits from Cornish mineral deposits, continuing a long tradition in which the material wealth of Cornwall is extracted while local communities see limited material return (2).

This sits in stark contrast to the symbolic recognition of Cornish culture, such as Kernewek being granted Part III status under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1). I often find myself asking: would most Cornish people prefer dual-language signposts on every street and road, or would they rather see the profits of kaolin and lithium extraction invested directly into local infrastructure, housing and public services?

What I see is a familiar pattern. Cultural identity is elevated, polished and funded just enough to be celebrated – but not enough to be actually empowered. Difference is encouraged, curated and then quietly weaponised to keep people segmented and manageable. I am deeply suspicious of financial and industrial interests that have held this island, and much of the planet, to ransom for centuries suddenly presenting themselves as champions of minority issues. I do not trust people who have a proven track record of participating in land-theft, exploitation and mass-murder. This is not paranoia; it is historical materialism, grounded in patterns of extraction, enclosure and enforced dependency that are well documented.

I refuse to be separated from my neighbours by each aspect of my identity. I refuse to be further divided and conquered. Yes, I am Cornish. Yes, I am a gay man. But more than that, I am descended from people who have laboured on this island, generation after generation, for the enrichment of a very small number of Mittel European families and their attendant German and Italian banking cartels. This shared material history matters more to me than any corporate badge of recognition ever could.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this blog in more detail in the video below:

References:

(1) Cornwall Council (2026) Cornish language officially granted Part III status. Available at: https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/council-news/environment-culture-and-planning/cornish-language-officially-granted-part-iii-status/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(2) Imerys S.A. (no date) Imerys – Our history. Available at: https://www.imerys.com/imerys-group/our-history/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(3) Pride in London (2015) Sponsor Pride in London 2015. Archive snapshot. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150627020110/https://prideinlondon.org/sponsors/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(4) Verran, T. (2015) “Why we felt the need to bury Pride… #RIPPRIDE #QUEERFIGHTBACK”, Around the world in 80 gays!. Available at: https://tryg-aroundtheworldin80gays.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-we-felt-need-to-bury-pride-rippride.html (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(5) Verran, T. (2016) “The moment I lost my Pride”, Around the world in 80 gays!. Available at: https://tryg-aroundtheworldin80gays.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-moment-i-lost-my-pride.html (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026

Mesotopia: A Remedy to the Extremes of Utopia, Dystopia and Arcadia

I want to begin with time, because time is where much of our thinking quietly goes astray. In Mesotopia – Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (2025), I describe time not as a neutral container that events pass through, but as something that happens in the act of encounter. This idea is indebted to Graham Harman’s discussion of time in The Quadruple Object, where time emerges as an effort to determine a sensual object through its qualities. In mesotopian terms, time is not ticking away somewhere else; it is generated in the moment I attempt to make sense of what is directly in front of me.

Mesotopian thinking, then, unfolds in the present tense. It is a mode of attention that asks: what is this place, this situation, this feeling—right now? What qualities are available to me, and what meanings can I cautiously, playfully, and only partially draw from them? This is not a search for final truths. Rather, it is a resistance to the urge to escape the present by disappearing into imagined futures or idealised pasts.

Utopia, dystopia and Arcadia are powerful narrative modes, and I understand their appeal. Utopia pulls us into visions of perfected systems and frictionless lives. Yet these visions are always subjective. My personal utopia might feel liberating to some, while appearing deeply unsettling – or even terrifying – to others. Dystopia pulls us into a place of fear, catastrophe and collapse. Here again, subjectivity plays a role: what one group fears as dystopian, another may quietly celebrate as utopian. Arcadia operates differently. It tugs us backward toward a supposedly lost golden age, where life was imagined to be simpler, purer, more authentic. Despite their differences, all three exert a similar effect on our ability to engage with the present.

Each of these modes lifts us out of the here and now and relocates our attention elsewhere. In doing so, they distract us from the difficult, ambiguous work of understanding where we actually are. Utopian, Dystopian and Arcadian narratives are frequently invoked to obscure reality, conjuring cognitive boundaries that divide people along rigid – and often outdated – ideological lines.

There is another danger in these modes of thinking that concerns me deeply: they all tend to render us passive. Utopia can feel so vast and total that our small actions seem insignificant. Dystopia, meanwhile, paralyses us with the sense that everything is already lost. Arcadia gently encourages us to refuse the temptations of change and progress altogether. In each case, the outcome is similar: we hesitate, withdraw, and stop experimenting. We become trapped in a present that feels frozen – unable to take chances, explore possibilities or test new potentials.

I am not suggesting that foresight or memory should be abandoned. Mesotopia does not exclude planning for the future or studying history. What I am proposing is something more modest: that before we disappear into fantasies of what might be, or myths of what once was, we first learn to understand the present place that asks for our attention and care.

Mesotopian thinking requires us to attend carefully to what is already here – to notice the textures, tensions and latent possibilities of the present moment. It invites modesty instead of grand solutions, curiosity instead of certainty. From this position, the present becomes intelligible enough to respond to, which in turn makes the uncertainties of the future more manageable as they are encountered.

For me, mesotopia is a remedy, not an escape. It is a way of staying with the middle ground – where meaning is provisional, time is encountered rather than mastered, and the present is not something to endure until a better world arrives, but something to engage with, thoughtfully and creatively, in the moment.

I expand on this blog in the following video:

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1) Verran, T. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Available
at: https://doi.org/10.24382/nv45-pk79

(2) Harman, Graham. (2011) The Quadruple Object. London: Zero Books.

December 28, 2025January 9, 2026

Technocrats: High Priests of the Latest Doomsday Cults

In early 2020, I attended a conference put on by tech companies in association with a university in Wellington. The opening provocation was something about preventing public pushback to technocracy. I recall candid questions being exchanged, such as: “How do we stop them from killing us?” That was the tone-setter. Not how do we include people? or how do we serve the public good? but how do we manage the inevitable irritation of the masses when they realise what’s being built for them, rather than with them.

As the conference unfolded, what struck me most was the paranoia of our self-appointed harbingers of the apocalypse – Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and their various satellites – as communicated through their acolytes. Beneath the sleek sermons and benevolent rhetoric lies a deep suspicion of the human being. Many of them, and their postulants, appear convinced – after a century of institutionalised technocracy – that the human has become an impediment to progress. There are simply too many people destined for, what Yuval Noah Harari’s calls, the “useless class,” all too fleshy and too fallible to continue serving the sacred pyramid of civilised order. For this divine techno-order to flourish, some necrotic flesh will need to be sacrificed – and no prizes for guessing who that will be.

To hear the tech gurus speculate, often with messianic intensity, on utopian or dystopian futures has been revealing. What appears to be missing from almost all of these visions is people like you and me, dear reader. The human shows up mainly as a problem to be solved; an inefficiency to be optimised away, or a legacy system awaiting decommission. Depending on which esoteric order you belong to, the apocalypse arrives via one of the four horsemen – war, famine, conquest, or death – with the modern add-on of pestilence for good measure. Whatever the mechanism, extinction is assumed. The debate is not if, but how.

From there, the factions emerge. Some devotees of accelerationism argue that we should actively hasten the apocalypse, fusing with technology in order to liberate the human intellect from the messy constraints of the body. This is a rough-and-ready summation of Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment,” but it captures the mood: abandon the human form, upload what matters, and let the rest burn. Others imagine a post-catastrophe world of technates – planned communities where survivors are neatly organised and every aspect of life is micro-managed by AI, overseen by a priestly class of ordained engineers.

It all sounds like dreadful pulp science fiction. The trouble is that it’s a fiction sincerely believed by some of the most powerful and influential people on the planet. I see traces of this thinking seeping into policy papers, funding models, research agendas and academic language. Words like “legacy,” “scalability,” and “sustainability” quietly replace older ideas such as curiosity, investigation and lived experience. The human is reduced to a sequence of variables and processes, while faceless systems of governance steadily relegate us to the annals of history.

And yet – here’s where I stay upbeat – this worldview only holds if we accept its premise. It is merely a cult like any other. I refuse the premise that the human is a problem to be solved. We are not a transitional inconvenience on the way to some silicon rapture. We are meaning-making creatures, embedded in places, bodies, histories and relationships that cannot be fully reduced to an algorithm. The real danger of this technocratic doomsday cult is not that it predicts the end of the world, but that it might bring about a world without us in it – not through extinction, but through erasure.

I do not accept that technocratic utopias or dystopias are the only meaningful options for a future that still includes humanity.

As always, my a’th kar!

December 21, 2025

We Need to Talk About NATO!

Whether we like it or not, people need to start asking some serious questions about what NATO is actually doing – apart from serving, of course, as a ‘peaceful defensive alliance’.

Here’s something I’ve been noticing, behind the slick corporate think-tank presentations and branding, where NATO operates on the ground, there are frequently covert operations, huge propaganda campaigns, coups, assassinations, armed militias running around murdering people, false-flags, mass civilian casualties and – coincidently – US corporations on hand to profit from rebuilding critical infrastructure (1).

Not that most people I have met at NATO conferences seem to be aware of any of this. The type of person you meet at a NATO conference is the kind of mid-wit functionary who believes that Putin has been running the US executive branch since 2015, and that the CIA cares about Queer rights in Iran.

If you’ve read my earlier posts – Why You Should Be Embarrassed to Be Associated with UK News and Is Cornish Nationalism Part of a Broader Strategy of Tension? – you’ll know I don’t shy away from asking challenging questions about power, policy, and influence. NATO seems to echo the role that the East India Company played in the (former) British Empire – it’s a bloated non-governmental institution that meddles in disputes for shareholder profits. The NATO shaped elephant in the room just got more difficult to ignore, and it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that whatever has happened in Ukraine has certainly been facilitated in large part by NATO.

Amanda Sloat, who was Biden’s top Europe strategist on the U.S. National Security Council, let slip in a candid moment that what Western policymakers allowed to happen with NATO and Ukraine helped make this devastating war possible. She said that if Ukraine had clearly told Russia it would not join NATO – or if U.S. and UK envoys had advised Ukraine to drop that aspiration – this “may well have prevented the destruction and loss of life” we’ve witnessed over the past three years (2).

Not that this is news to anyone with the slightest understanding of NATO’s – uh, shall we say “colourful” history. To be clear: Sloat’s revelations are coming from a conversation with pranksters posing as Ukrainian officials, and yes, it’s apparent that while Amanda Sloat has served as an administrative functionary, she seems blissfully unaware of the gritty underside of NATO operations. But here it is, proof that Western policymakers considered explicitly ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, and then decided against it. That decision, Sloat implies, might have made all the difference (2).

So let’s unpack this.

For years, people who said NATO expansion was reckless – especially into Ukraine – were shouted down, called “conspiracy theorists,” or worse, accused of being “Kremlin puppets.” This isn’t fringe commentary any more (not that it ever was) it’s an admission from inside the policymaking apparatus. Sloat just admitted, off the record, that maybe it was a strategic misstep. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it wasn’t a strategic misstep at all, because chaos, fear and destruction seem to be the common outcomes of all NATO interventions. It’s almost like this chaos is the strategy – some wily conspiracy theorists might call this a strategy of tension! It’s hard to know precisely what NATO is doing, so much of their activities are mired in deep reservoirs of PR bullshit and think-tank wonk. A lot of this requires faith and devotion. People are obliged to trust an opaque organisation that seems to operate without any meaningful oversight or accountability – I’m not going to do that. How many people have to die before we really start to get an honest look at what NATO has been doing for decades?

My personal experience of being on the fringes of empire – where NATO operatives have a documented history of proactively employing the services of some groups who we’re all supposed to fear – reminds me that power without accountability is dangerous. Does anyone believe that NATO had nothing to do with overthrowing Assad and installing a member of al-Qaeda and ISIS as its newly besuited Israel-friendly ruler? I mean, I don’t pretend to know everything about the middle-east, but surely anyone looking at how this fucking scumbag al-Julani is now being paraded around the halls of ‘respectable’ Western governance like a hero can see this is an utterly shameless PR campaign (3). Whether it’s the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or now Ukraine, NATO’s footprint has always left debris in its wake – but of course, as we have always been told, it’s just a ‘peaceful, defensive alliance’.

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1) Wadhams, N. (2025). BlackRock’s Larry Fink Joins Trump Team Talks to Rebuild Ukraine. [online] Bloomberg.com. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/blackrock-s-larry-fink-joins-trump-team-talks-to-rebuild-ukraine [Accessed 17 Dec. 2025].

(2) Big News Network.com. (2022). Ukraine could have avoided conflict with one key step – ex-Biden adviser. [online] Available at: https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278749126/ukraine-could-have-avoided-conflict-with-one-key-step-ex-biden-adviser?utm_source=chatgpt.com [Accessed 17 Dec. 2025].

(3) Proletarian TV (2025). The sad downfall of the Syrian government. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdIDWKuQM8 [Accessed 20 Dec. 2025].

December 6, 2025December 6, 2025

Sober Talk: The Politics of Fun. Written at/ with/ for Pattaya 2025

When I first became sober eleven years ago, the line I heard most often from old drinking companions was: “You used to be so much fun!” At first, I honestly believed them. Yes I used to be fun. I had been a spirited drunk, the first on the dance-floor, the man who could stretch a mildly amusing anecdote into a raucous tale of comedic exaggeration. There I was, the very embodiment of a boozy raconteur fun distilled into human form.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

The truth was: I was deeply unhappy. I used revelry as a way to mask the creeping recognition of malignant trauma. I believed that fun was performance: the loud laugh, the daring dare, the clever comeback. Fun was something manufactured, something flung outward as distraction. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking that I recognised just how much emotional labour had gone into appearing fun, and how little joy I had actually experienced.

In day to day life, sobriety gets interpreted as accusation. People don’t tend to hear “I don’t drink,” they hear, “I disapprove of your drinking.” They don’t hear choice – they hear judgment. How do we talk about things that aren’t conventionally regarded as ‘fun’ without sounding like pious pricks?

Here’s something I’ve slowly come to understand: the politics of fun is fundamentally about not noticing. I’m not just talking about ‘drunk’ fun either – so much fun is learning how to switch off noticing certain things. It’s a conspiracy of selective blindness. Alcohol helped me blur the boring, soften the painful and gloss over the inconvenient. Sobriety, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. Sobriety is noticing – often against your will.

When I stopped drinking, the world sharpened. I suddenly noticed that A+E departments weren’t mysteriously chaotic on Saturday nights – they were flooded with intoxicated people who had fallen, crashed or fought. I noticed that many of the people I had grown up with – perfectly average ‘social drinkers’ – might more honestly be described as functioning alcoholics. I noticed how many relationships quietly revolved around the highs and lows of alcohol use. I noticed that behind many of the funniest people I knew lurked deep wells of avoidance, anxiety, grief and violence.

Alcohol was the soft-focus filter on reality. By removing it, reality became uncomfortably clear.

This great ‘noticing’ I have been continuing to experience has not been limited to the effects of substance misuse. No, it has affected me on a profoundly personal and political level. I started to notice that most of the things we buy or use are mined, farmed or produced by an invisible underclass of peasants. That’s not fun. I started to notice that so much of the world is actually built by slave or exploited labour – that’s not ‘fun’ either. I also started to notice endless war machines producing millions of displaced people wandering the world looking for sanctuary – so I volunteered to work in refugee camps. That, my friends, is definitely not fun.

So what can we do? You can’t just demand that everyone stops having fun any more than you can dictate what is or isn’t fun. I don’t have the answer. The problem is – so much of life for so many people just isn’t fun. In order to have fun, you have to not notice the trafficked people building your ‘wellness holiday retreat’ or serving your wine. You have to not notice that the economic heart of so much fun is that someone somewhere is losing out.

Now, before anyone feels judged – let me be clear: I don’t care what people choose to do with their bodies, their evenings, or their holidays. I don’t hold some puritanical moral high ground. I don’t deliver sermons. I am not the ghost of Christmas Temperance. I choose sobriety because I like it. I like noticing things. It suits me.

I’ve been trying to balance ‘noticing’ with ‘fun’ and believe that I’m much more fun now than I was as a drunken jester. My attention is real. My presence is not performance. Unfortunately, some of my former drinking buddies disagree – chiefly because I no longer serve as supporting cast in the theatre of their intoxication, but that’s just the way it is now – I can’t go back to ‘not noticing’.

It’s actually really challenging for me to live in the UK, given that so much of UK life revolves around substance misuse and existing in a state of ‘not noticing’. Fun now – for me – is clarity. It’s noticing. It’s connection. It’s feeling it all rather than numbing it away. And if that makes me “no fun” to the still-blurred, then so be it. I’d rather notice.

As always, my a’th kar!

November 9, 2025November 9, 2025

Is Tommy Poppers Real?

Since 2010, I’ve been experimenting with how to be a writer on the internet. I’ve made blogs, stories, anonymous profiles and strange hybrids that lived somewhere between art and autobiography. Some of these experiments worked; others fell flat or disappeared into the algorithmic abyss. But across these fifteen years of testing the limits of online identity, one question keeps returning to me: is Tommy Poppers real?

The short answer is yes—and no.

Tommy Poppers exists. He writes, he posts, he provokes. He’s had conversations with real people. He’s been misread, adored, and blocked. But he isn’t real in the metaphysical sense. There is no withheld essence to Tommy Poppers that could exist independently of me. He’s not sitting in some digital backroom waiting to log on. He is a performance, an appearance—a sensual object projected into a particular medium at a particular time.

This troubles Graham Harman’s notion that every object, whether material or immaterial, has an autonomous essence—something withdrawn, beyond all relation. I simply don’t see that in Tommy. He only flickers into being when someone reads, reacts, or misinterprets him. He’s not withdrawn but relational; not autonomous but dependent. He depends on my creative act and the network that sustains him. When the internet is turned off forever, this version of Tommy vanishes into the ether. Perhaps a version of Tommy would continue to compose and sing to people in ‘real’ life, but this would still be a projection of the ‘real’ me. After a performance, the sailor hat would be returned to the box, and I would concern myself with other things.

What’s more unsettling is how these digital experiments have rippled offline. Over the years, I’ve seen people respond to my avatars as if they were separate beings—proof, perhaps, that our culture has quietly accepted digital personas as real. Yet what these encounters reveal, to me at least, is that the internet exists—but it isn’t real. It’s a sensual distraction, an elaborate mirage designed to sustain the illusion of technocratic supremacy. It convinces us that the symbolic realm—the feeds, the data, the curated self—is somehow more meaningful than embodied life.

To clarify: yes, Tommy Poppers exists. So does an bardh wyls, and so, for that matter, do I—Tryg. These are not “characters” in the fictional sense. They are working avatars, conceptual tools I use to explore difficult themes. Tommy helps me confront the performance of masculinity and the shadow of male violence. An bardh wyls, “the wild poet,” emerges when I write through the lyric’s relationship to place about environmental decadence and grief. Both are masks, but masks that reveal as much as they conceal.

I never post everything about where I am or who I’m with. That’s deliberate. It’s not secrecy—it’s philosophy. The digital realm cannot contain the totality of human existence. It can gesture, distort, amplify—but it cannot hold.

Offline, my life is grounded. I work with people I respect, in situations that demand attentiveness and care. Those relationships are real. They’re not content. I would never diminish them by performing them online.

So, is Tommy Poppers real? He’s as real as any reflection, as any poem, as any name you’ve ever written down and then outgrown. He is the shimmer of the self meeting its medium—a reminder that being online is not being alive.