A Weak Attempt at Defending Holidays (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Dear Friends, Fellow Travelers, and New Sign Ups at Theory Underground,*

Here you will find some bullet points of essential info including FREE GIFTS, as well as some of my thoughts on holidays.

Also CLICK HERE if you would rather listen to an hour-long livestream of me reading the email aloud while elaborating on certain points and stuff.

On holidays

Critical thinkers and theorists that you all are, it’s likely many of you scoff at holidays. “Oh, Thanksgiving? Don’t you mean Native Genocide day?” or, “Oh, wow, an excuse to be even more of a gluttonous American than usual!? Amazing.” Then of course there are those of you who think having a good time with your family while bad stuff is happening in the world makes you a fascist or whatever (please remove yourself from this list by replying “Remove”). 

Joking aside, I get it. I used to say things like, “Why do we limit our gratitude or gift giving to isolated and arbitrary days in the year?” In the last few years I have become much more of a realist on matters such as tradition or ritual.

Charlie Brown’s (Coca Cola sponsored) Christmas story is basically correct: Yes, the commodification and American greed that goes viral around these holidays sucks. But no, that’s not the whole story. At the end of the day, we are entering the time of year when it gets cold and dark. Preoccupied with our jobs, hobbies, or even vocations and passions, it is too easy to forget to reach out to a loved one who might be going through a really rough time. Holidays are reminders. Maybe you don’t need a reminder. Maybe you already spend tons of time with all your loved ones, telling them how grateful you are to have them in your life, gifting them something thoughtful, etc. Chances are that’s bullshit though. Chances are you tell yourself it’s a stupid holiday because of ressentiment, i.e. a cheap sense of superiority that is also very convenient to remaining aloof and in your own little bubble of comfort. 

Well, as we got into it in a stream recently, comfort is a prison. Holidays are an opportunity to put into practice the idea that it ain’t always about you. They’re an opportunity to show up and be present for others. You don’t know what they’re going through, and your presence makes a difference (don’t believe me!? Watch It’s A Wonderful Life!). Even if you don’t have immediate family to get together with, do a Zoom call (better yet: a real phone call!) with a friend or distant relative, or go volunteer at a food bank or soup kitchen. I don’t care, just don’t play video games and jack off the whole time while telling yourself you’re such a critical intellectual that you exist above it all, or you really are letting capital win. Of course, if you’re a regular working class person the chances are you don’t even get Thanksgiving off from work, which fucking blows and, in such cases, capital really has won. How crazy is it that we have to work so many of the holidays that only the PMC gets to have off? 

Ok, I’ll get off my high horse (though I’m totally sober, I promise) and stop with the preaching. (If you want to hear a full presentation I did in defense of the tradition of marriage, which also goes into how I used to be pro polyamory and full on anti monogamy + why my position on this changed, then respond to this email saying you would like that link!) 

Anyway, to get to the point: 

• I’m traveling for Thanksgiving week, taking a little holiday, and spending time with people who love me for reasons that have nothing to do with Theory Underground. So no TU HUB events this week. (They continue next week though! If you’re a new sign up with the site or any of its courses stay tuned for an email with the schedule for next week’s office hours and other special events, including the TU FILM club movie night discussion of Electric Dreams (1984) and Her (2013). We will discuss these on Tuesday the 28th at 13:30 LA / 14:30 Denver / 15:30 Chicago / 16:30 NYC | Go here for the Zoom link.)

Gratitude and gift-giving

I feel grateful for you all. In less than a year my email list has grown from 0 to nearly 500, based solely off of you, the people who have registered accounts at Theory Underground! Thanks to donations from my five patrons (Bert, Marilynn, Nance, Carl, and ) as well as course-fee paying students, I have been able to do Theory Underground full-time while supporting my (now) wife! Of course, I had to live in Mexico for five months to pull that off, and it also ate up my remaining savings—but now look at how much that has paid off! I only have to work at Amazon part-time, focusing the rest of my freed up timenergy towards TU administrative work, events, courses, publications, research, and writing. 

• I am especially grateful for the first app subscription tier sign ups: Tony, Mandy, Isuru, James, and Terence! (And have also just added the subscription tiers to the website here)

The goal of changing to a subscription model is that I can bring in a reliable monthly salary that eventually replaces the Amazon part-time gig. This is the only sure-way to free up my timenergy for real. Once that happens I won’t have to spend so much time recovering from the fucked up sleep schedule this job has forced on me (waking up at 3 AM is not my favorite thing… mainly because it means I need a nap at noon and that throws the day off…) Once I reach that point the focus will be on freeing Mikey from wage labor by making him a salaried instructor and full-time researcher. 

So how am I going to give back to you all? 

• First gift: Lecture 1 to the Critical Media Theory and Digital Literacy course. These lectures are a part of an ongoing research unit at TU. We meet on the 2nd Sunday of every month for a new lecture session, and then later to touch-base and reflect on our practical experiments.
• Second gift: Lecture 2 from the Intro to Nick Land course, on CYBERNETIC CAPITAL.

That’s it! Hope you have a good week.

Take care,

David McKerracher – Founder, Director, C.E.O., president, etc etc etc