The Darkest Timeline

Re-Imagining the Future at the End of the World

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In my discussion with writer

Bram E. Gieben

we focus on our apolyptic times and dystopian present, technological singularity, neoliberalism and precariousness, the divide between online personas and pragmatic reality, paradoxes of counter-cultural revolution in late capitalism, Mark Fisher as a gateway drug for theory, and much more.

Bram E. Gieben is a writer and cultural theorist who has written about music, film, TV and comics for Sublation Magazine, The Quietus, io9, Mishka NYC and other places. He is the author of The Darkest Timeline, as well as podcast host at Strange Exiles and co-host of Revol Press’s Theorise and Be Damned. For Gieben it is about ideas, no matter how strange or far out. It is about identity — how we relate to ourselves, and the world. It's about ideology — the structuring beliefs that underpin the way we see things, and how we act.

Throughout the video we discuss:

1. We are living in a world with no future (apocalyptic times, both as cathartic release and genuine collapse), which is why we need to imagine the future anew

2. Aim of the book is to look at the dystopian present from a global perspective, asking the question: do cultures evolve beyond point of technological singularity?

3. Neoliberalism creates an impoverished/precarious world, people feel powerless, countries becoming unstable/wildly unequal, driven by corporate interests

4. The book is designed to provoke and not provide concrete solutions, solutionising is part of the problem, we need to come to terms with conditions as they are

5. Rather than thinking about technological singularity as a point we are evolving towards we need to think it is a point of the present that we cannot escape

6. Difficult divide: self arguing in books + self living in pragmatic capitalist reality, they seem diametrically opposed and at the same time complimentary

7. Problem with navigating online identity and your imagined audience, constantly thinking about how you being perceived vs. how you want to be perceived

8. Need to rethink paradox of the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s where this counter-culture was sublated by capital/marketed back to itself

9. The importance of Mark Fisher as a thinker, writer, and a gateway drug into philosophy about late-stage capitalism/neoliberal society

10. Substack as a remarkable community of emerging writers that seems alive in a way that other blogging platforms are not

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To find out more about Bram E. Gieben’s work, see:

• Linktree

• The Darkest Timeline

• Strange Exiles (Substack)

• Revol Press (YouTube)