5 Comments

Have you read any of the early cyberpunk authors? I’d be curious especially whether you’ve read Transmetropolitan, or the early 90s classics. This sort of shift was a big prediction of theirs.

One way I think about this is that these brands are stepping into a kind of spiritual void -- that there isn’t a major organized spiritual tradition today that actually works for moderns, and this leaves people undefended against both things like wokeness, and these corporate simulacra of meaning.

Expand full comment

In my recent Substack post (September 6), I used one of my favorite "dissident activism" descriptors... subversive eccentricity. I stole that phrase from Susan Sontag. As I read "How to Murder Propaganda," I stopped to contemplate the ad and propaganda strategy of dropping the manipulation and telling the target audience exactly who you are. Forty years ago, my first editorial cartoon was published here in Missoula, Montana. My early cartoons were an attempt to present America stripped of myth. If you go to gregleichner.substack.com and scroll through the text to the five cartoons, you can judge whether I was on the right track with my attempt at undermining American Exceptionalism.

Expand full comment

Fantastic series. In a class of its own

Expand full comment

Fantastic series. In a class of its own

Expand full comment