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Discussion
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We’re all neurotic and fucked up because of these platforms. Yet we want to have some kind of philosophical community. What are the most pervasive and destructive tendencies we see occurring in these kinds of spaces online?
In his article “Escaping the Vampire,” Castle Mark Fisher describes it this way:
“The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.”(1)
I think this is a good start. In my first book Waypoint I talk about it in chapter 7, which you can read or listen to for free here: https://theory-underground.com/chapter-seven-cancel-culture-and-the-vampire-castle-2019/ (2)
What are good practices for countering these tendencies? How do we keep anti-vampire-behavior from becoming a new form of this behavior? How do we count the dynamics fostered by the platforms of the attention economy? I’m curious to hear peoples’ initial reflections.
1. Read Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/ or listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiV65LRWrvs
2.Read or listen to the whole book of Waypoint for free here http://theory-underground.com/waypoint/
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