AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism by Gareth Watkins
notes
- People who tend to sympathize with extreme right-wing ideals do not have the courage to face the ambiguity of a non-absolute world
- The article writer others those who do not align with him on the political spectrum through his language
- Should we critique the people or the ideology and social structures that enable individuals in power to exploit the vulnerable? Should we critique the people, or in our failure as a society to teach empathy and compassion?
- I don’t know how I feel about othering groups of people when “the left” also gets upset at “the right“‘s generalizations and impressions
highlights
The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.
No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable.
The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’
If you’ve been subject to computer-says-no rules governing your access to the basic necessities of life, then you’ll know how easy it is to disguise arbitrary and highly politicised whims as laws of nature, as ironclad as A = π r².
Despite all their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though ‘truth’ is whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.
It looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.
Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing ideology.