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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are frequently invoked to obscure reality, conjuring cognitive boundaries that divide people along rigid – and often outdated – ideological lines.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.

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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.

The New Doomsday Cult – Image generated by AI

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!

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Demystifying The Kernewek Language

I have argued in Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (1) that yes, there is a real world, but no, it does not open itself to our complete comprehension. We are always half-in, half-out of its meanings, fumbling toward the real but never quite gripping it. This weird middle place – a mesh of physical and conceptual terrains – is the domain of the meaning-makers. The poets, the oracles, the interpreters of signs have historically been quite happy to hide their operations behind opulent rituals or clever distractions. But does it have to be this way? My lyrical work has long been an effort to demystify poetics and language, to free these communicative events from the dictates of esoteric schools and elite fraternities who still treat language as a proprietary ritual.

Naming, after all, has long been the preserve of priestly classes: the magi, the monks, the keepers of alphabets and incantations. In many religious orders, “the Word” is not just a tool but a cosmological foundation – articulation itself becomes sacrament. And once you take this seriously, it becomes impossible not to notice how incantations, chants, spells, prophetic mutterings and other religious-poetic forms lean heavily on the idea of language as conduit to hidden truths. This is the vatic, the mantic, the magical dimension of poesis, the belief that words do not merely describe the world but summon, shape, or invoke it.

Modern linguistics attempts to scrub all this clean. Structuralists, post-structuralists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists; they all gather with laboratory-grade detachment to “demystify” language production. This is good in theory. But if you ignore the presence of mystery altogether, you’re not demystifying anything. You’re merely tucking your priestly robes into your slacks and hoping nobody notices the ancient hems. Many materialist linguists strike me as devout priestly magi decked out in secular boardroom drag. Here’s one of the many unspoken secrets of our supposedly rational institutions: even empirical research often rests on vast scaffolds of speculation. Each irrefutable graph serves as an article of faith – it’s an ‘educated guess’ berobed as a principle.

This is why it is difficult to determine how many theoretical schools are engaged in re-mystifying the archive of human knowledge – although some hide in plain sight. Even Tim Morton, spear-heading investigations into the ecological implications of object-oriented ontology, is overt about (eco)gnostic leanings.

Consider the accelerationists (2): the former CCRU crowd who hallucinated Deleuze and Guattari into a cybernetic fever dream, pushing symbolism to liturgical extremes. Their rapid decoupling of meaning from symbol, in pursuit of some machinic singularity, often sounds to me not unlike kabbalistic numerology or ecstatic glossolalia. It is not insignificant that many modern tech-titans are devotees of Nick Land. Listen to the quasi-prophetic ramblings of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen as they speak of merging symbolic and material terrains; you will hear the cadences of a neo-cult, not a scientific proposal. Meanwhile, various deciples of the structuralists continue to worship The Corpus Linguistic with devotional intensity. ‘and the Word was God,’ they seem to say – and seemingly never notice they are mimicking devotees of Thoth, Hermes or even John 1:1 .Once again, the priests return, this time wearing the unbuttoned casuals of liberal intelligentsia.

In contrast, I often return to etymology, a much subtler way of demystifying meaning. Not by banishing mystery, but by acknowledging its layers. English gives the game away easily: most of our “proper” vocabulary is padded with Greek and Latin. The professional-managerial classes (PMC) learn just enough of these roots to keep the bloated machinery of liberal institutions functioning. Autobiography: self-life-writing. Philosophy: love-of-wisdom. Nothing mystical, only inherited structure.

When we apply the same etymological pressure to Kernewek, interesting stories surface. Pysk, the Kernewek word for “fish,” appears to descend from Latin piscis. This aligns with what Celtic linguists tell us: the Brythonic languages had more prolonged contact with Roman, Norman, and Saxon cultures than their Goidelic cousins. History leaves fingerprints on phonemes.

Or – and here’s a mischievous alternative – it suggests that one of the more “colourful” characters in the history of Kernewek revivalism simply inserted Latin or Greek terms (along with Welsh and Breton borrowings) to fill lexical gaps. The line between linguistic evolution and linguistic invention is not always tidy.

On page 76 of my thesis, I discuss Linguist Professor Price’s uncompromising position: Cornish is dead, he insists, and modern “revivals” are “partially invented” (Price, 1984: 134). He writes:

“The Old Celtic speech of Cornwall died out two centuries ago. It is still dead, and will evermore remain so… The present century has seen the propagation by a small band of enthusiasts of a type of language that is partially derived from the old Celtic speech of Cornwall, but it is also partially invented… I shall reserve the term Cornish for the genuine language and refer to the modern pseudo-Cornish as Cornic.”

I do have issues with Price’s framing. As I wrote:

“What is involved in inventing a language? What is a pseudo-language? What does a ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ Kernewek sound like? I remain confused by the extent to which Price uses terms such as authentic, genuine, and pseudo in relation to Kernewek.” (Verran, 2025: 76)

Whether or not one accepts Price’s verdict, the point stands: Kernewek should be preserved and spoken as a breathing archive of our past, not re-engineered as an esoteric tool of ethnonationalism. We know too well what can happen when fringe political movements revive ancient languages to manufacture legitimacy. And it doesn’t surprise me that Celtic circles frequently attract a plethora of esoteric characters: Zionists, Catholic Religious Orders, Rosicrucians, Masons, New-Age Druids, Shamans or Wiccans – all projecting mystical significance onto minority languages. Why this conviction that certain tongues contain secret indigenous wisdom? Romantic nationalism, folklore, and the Arcadian fantasy of an unbroken Celtic lineage have all fed this impulse.

The more I learn about figures like Iolo Morganwg or Robert Morton Nance – who seem to have consciously cultivated a priestly order of Celtic mystics modelled on Julius Caesar’s accounts of ancient Britons – the more frustrated I become. We don’t need to live inside the art projects of eccentric artists or poets – and yes, that includes me! Trust me, we definitely shouldn’t live inside anything I create.

As a poet, I enjoy bending language into unorthodox shapes. I fabricate littoral places inside my verse, places that shimmer and sometimes misbehave. But I do not belong to the mystery schools of modern priestly classes, who still seem intent on fabricating material realities for entire populations to inhabit according to the whims of neo-feudal aristocrats or digital landlords.

For me, the mystery is not something to eradicate but something to remain in dialogue with. I continue to wrestle with the languages I have inherited. I am consciously rejecting past myths or Arthurian tropes all too often associated with Celtic languages. Through lyrical poetry, I keep listening – probing the metaphysical uncertainties that Kernewek, in all its contested life and afterlife, continues to stir.

As always, my a’th kar!

All References Available From Verran, 2025:

(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) Monoskop.org. (2017). Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – Monoskop. [online] Available at: https://monoskop.org/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit.

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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.