Hey everyone,

Welcome to PREGNANT #3

This past week has been pretty hectic for me because I've been helping my fiancé open her storefront and my brain is kind of mush as a result - ended up watching more TV than usual and that's reflected in the content of this week's newsletter. 

Hope everyone is doing well - as always, feel free to hmu about any of the stuff I'm writing about in these via email/dm on Instagram.

BigKneeLover is an inactive user on DeviantArt who gained notoriety in the mid 2010’s when his illustrations were featured in YouTube cringe-style reaction videos and has since gone silent. The KnowYourMeme entry on the account alleges that it is “more than likely a troll” and is parodying some of the more absurd and mystifying fetishes expressed on corners of DeviantArt, and while that is a nice and tidy way to make sense of this artist’s visions - my gut tells me this account is sincere, especially because of his disappearance after being mocked online. 

The illustrations BigKneeLover creates are more or less standard DeviantArt anime-inspired female characters with the addition of fatty, breast-like deposits on top of the kneecaps. It’s possible that someone spent time trying to imagine the most ridiculously niche fetish they could and ended up here, but it just strikes me as one of those things that’s way too weird to be fiction. 

The most fascinating thing about this account to me, is unlike other bizarre niche fetishes on DeviantArt: there’s no physiological basis for “big knees” as far as I can imagine. In ridiculous genres such as vore or inflation, there’s still a precedent for the exaggerated distortion of the body, (I.E. the bloating and spherification of the torso due to pregnancy or overindulgence) whereas “Big Knees” are more akin to breast kneepads. Not even the most morbidly obese human grows breast kneepads, so I just can’t imagine where this fetish came from. 

If BigKneeLover is sincere, it strikes me as a fetish that wouldn’t have gone beyond the mind of the person who dreamed it up pre-internet. There’s a lot of shit, not just weird DeviantArt fetishes that fall into that zone in my opinion - for instance, Submechanophobia “trigger” videos on YouTube helped me to recognize that my totally unrealistic but nonetheless debilitating fear of underwater animatronics (probably stemming from riding that submarine ride at DisneyWorld as a kid) was experienced by others as well, and I guess that felt kind of nice and reassuring. It’s sad people made fun of BigKneeLover so mercilessly because I imagine he was looking for a similar sense of belonging. 

After making fun of the DSA for years, I decided to join the Class Unity caucus about a month ago. I’ve wanted to participate in some form of political organizing for a while, but I’ve had a lot of trouble holding my nose and joining any group. The DSA especially because I fundamentally don’t agree with them on basically anything and see them as a networking/subcultural group for wealthy liberals who couldn’t be any more out of touch with the working class.

After the totally braindead cancellation of Adoph Reed Jr. by the Brooklyn DSA last month, I saw a well written and thoughtful rebuttal from the Class Unity caucus that made me have a glimmer of hope that I found a group who shared the insane idea I have that people who call themselves socialists should focus on class politics.

Within a couple weeks of joining the caucus there was an internal blowup that made me question the wisdom of joining at all.

The Bellows is a pretty small publication (57 Patreon subscribers) that publishes articles from a materialist POV, not all of them have been bangers to be honest but I’ve at least in theory supported the aim of the publication and enjoyed the majority of the content they put out. Sometime last week, one of the two founders was fired by the other founder due to a difference in vision - Edwin, the person doing the firing, more or less said he didn’t want to pander to the current incarnation of the “left,” I.E. the DSA/Jacobin/Current Affairs/whatever terminally out of touch with working people “socialism” of the professional managerial class as the primary audience for the publication, which is an assertion I tend to agree with, whereas the fired partner, Ryan, who is a member of the caucus I joined is definitely more entrenched in that scene.

What started off as an internal discussion around the method of firing quickly devolved into the kind of messy bitch mudslinging session that turned me off of the DSA to begin with. The sticking point in the conversation was a term that Edwin offhandedly mentioned in one of the communications regarding the directional shift in the publication: “Post-left,” and this term was not only being spoken about as if it was an actual movement but on top of that an existential threat to all socialists.

I get what Edwin was referring to - and I don’t think it’s a deviation from your core principles to recognize that the current incarnation of the “socialist” left, which has become a party of upper middle-class professionals (a third of DSA members make over 100k a year) who are incapable of creating a material difference in the lives of working people because they're absolutely allergic to power... is a dead end. That’s not to say that detangling yourself from the left means you compromise your positions, it just means that you recognize that remaining entangled in a “socialism” that cancels people for material analysis and doesn’t pose any meaningful threat to capital is a gigantic waste of your time. 

And that’s why I was surprised so many in the group were being particularly vicious, I thought my line of thinking would be shared by others and I guess I was wrong. One particularly egregious comment stated that there was no room in socialist organizing for “blackpilled post-left nihilists” which blew my mind - if you’re not totally blackpilled over the current state of the left as someone who supposedly cares about class politics, you’d have to be either a moron or not paying attention or maybe both. 

While all of the recent What’s Left episodes with Angela Nagle and Malcolm Kyeyune have been great, the most recent one touches on this subject specifically in a way I found to be helpful although pretty fucking bleak as far as the outlook goes.

Starting on YouTube as a vegan fitness blogger and slowly devolving into an anti-vegan who antagonistically eats raw meat at animal rights protests, opines about the gut health benefits of eating “high meat” or meat that has rotted, spends hours staring directly into the sun, and apparently attacked 3 students with knives in his Latvian high school when he was 16 - Sv3rige is definitely a unique personality.

I enjoyed this bio on him, sums up his story arc well:

Biosphere 2 is one of those things that has captured my imagination as long as I can remember being introduced to it on PBS as a a kid -  and I’ve watched every documentary on the subject I could get my hands on over the years. I figured Spaceship Earth would be another rehash of the failures of the project, the critique from the scientific community of the project being “ecological entertainment,” etc. And while this film does capture those aspects, the focus remains more on the traveling theater group “The Theater of All Possibilities” who would go on to realize the Biosphere project. 

Even though Biosphere 2 was realized in the 90s, the group behind the project has such a boomer post-60’s revolutionary trajectory, albeit delayed by a couple decades: they retreated into themselves and created a tiny utopian society in the middle of nowhere after starting in a big city, propelled the project through magical thinking, and eventually shacked up with repugnant billionaires who financed their project with blood money. 

I read Hippie Modernism a few years back and was really into the speculative architecture projects and alternative modes of living that were attempted in the late 60’s and early 70’s, which the Biosphere is definitely spiritually akin to. While we have access to more information and more tools to collaborate and create now than ever before, it also feels like the window of possibility has been narrowed so drastically by the ever-bleaker material realities we face in 2020.
The emancipatory energy of the late 60’s, early 70’s has been neutralized and morphed into a punchline, or as Mark Fisher wrote in Acid Communism, it’s become a “deep past so exotic and distant that we cannot imagine living in it, and a moment more vivid than now — a time when people really lived, when things really happened” by virtue of neoliberal absorption and defanging of any revolutionary potential.

I’m sure a lot of you have already been exposed to Adam Curtis via Hypernormalization. I hadn’t watched any of his documentaries in a minute, but I worked with a documentarian on a design project recently and we talked at length about Adam Curtis’ stuff and it made me want to refamiliarize myself with his work. 

I’ve watched a few of his films recently, but the Century of the Self I have probably enjoyed the most. It’s a 4 part BBC tv series that details the usage of Freud’s psychoanalysis theories in marketing and governance, pioneered by Freud’s nephew and inventor of PR Edward Bernays. This documentary series is a nice companion piece to Christopher Lasch’s the Culture of Narcissism which I’ve been on and off reading for a bit.

Thanks again for subscribing to PREGNANT!