One of the best ways to learn about a cultural or political epoch is to look at its epithets. Back in the ‘60s, the standard term for a certain kind of paranoid and gin-blossomed right-wing freak was to call them a “Bircher.” By the time I was a political animal, that had turned into “teabagger,” and of course in both eras, the term “fascist” was pretty standard – a term completely delinked from historical fascism, but awfully easy to deploy against the usual array of cops and chamber of commerce scharführers.
The right, for their part, haven’t been big on novelty in their slurs. “Communist” of course was always a favorite, along with its derivatives – “red,” “pinko,” and so forth – but those had largely been subsumed by more self-identifying terms: “liberal,” “feminist,” (and at least at its origin points, “woke”) and so forth, with the pejorative indicated more by the tone than the terminology. I am deliberately leaving out some of the terms used in the American South – lest large black men materialize in my living room and kick my ass for using certain words without the necessary pass.
But in the post-4chan era, they’ve gotten a bit more creative. What’s off-pissing is that frankly some of them are actually pretty pointed insults. Things being “soy,” for instance – fuck yes, there are pictures of me with my neatly trimmed stubble, chambray shirt, and Japanese glasses in full soyface mode, although it was more likely to be over a bottle of vintage Burgundy or an industrial ruin than a Marvel movie poster or something made with bacon, no matter how epic.
However, the term du jour for a certain type of effete metropolitan male seems to be “bugman,” coinage of Costin Alamariu, a.k.a. Bronze Age Pervert, someone you probably don’t need to be aware of. He tries to do the Nietzschean bitter aphoristic philosophy thing, but comes off as an undergrad tryhard who keeps the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in an open tab. He also tries Nietzsche’s humor, and fails miserably. However, there’s a regrettable shortage of definitions in his Bronze Age Mindset, and all we get are allusions to the nefarious means by which bugkind seeks to overthrow noble souls.
So for a working definition, let’s go to the Substack of former writer of painfully unfunny British sitcoms (The IT Crowd, Black Books) turned professional transphobe Graham Linehan:
“On closer inspection of the day to day life of a bugman one finds at its core the implementation of social erosion, everything that is taken from its origin is likewise bastardized into a regressive, virtual, stir-crazy version of its former self: eSports, Fantasy Football, Copy ‘n Paste Vidya (à la Bethesda/Ubisoft), New Atheism, Beards-as-personality, etc. each of these characteristics is of course filtered through the latest piece of cutting-edge high-brand technology the bugman can afford. One may have noticed already that bugmen’s ‘personalities’ are nothing more than the accumulation and composition of various popular brand names, technologies, TV shows, bands etc. The bugman is entirely defined by that which they consume. Thus the bugmen easily assimilate into their own groups, for their archetypes and traits are based off material possessions, as such grouping is quick, painless and has the added benefit of instantaneous conversation: ‘Sweet mechanical keyboard dude!’”
It’s not 100 percent wrong. And in the critique of the late-capitalist subject… the parallels with, say, Mark Fisher are numerous, even if Fisher was a genuinely humanistic thinker and Linehan is a whiny tittybaby who happened to get something right. Although given the fact that Linehan is himself a chubby, Twitter-brained new atheist, methinks the lady doth protest too much.
(And in another point against his credibility, he used a picture of Owen Jones as a type example, and frankly it’s difficult for me to imagine Owen Jones ever saying “sweet mechanical keyboard” in between his principled coverage of Gaza)
But that is the rough assemblage of ideas that was on my mind when my office moved from a rather dowdy modernist office tower built at the height of Bangkok’s ‘90s irrational exuberance to a shiny mixed-use development on what for years been a vast concrete lot on some of Thailand’s most valuable property. You can still smell the fresh paint.
But saying “high-security postmodern complex suxxxxxx” is nothing new, nor is a discussion of its innate bugmannishness. We’ve all seen Fight Club. Or for that matter. The Lego Movie. By now it’s hack. But when I look down at the ugly corporate-minimalist sculpture dangling over the chain coffee shop, I cannot help but entertain ideas. Needless to say, everything is not awesome.
So what is far more interesting to me is not the fact that it sucks, but the ways in which this genre of non-place is perceived. Because architecture easily becomes a proxy for culture and politics more broadly – unlike the other arts, which are increasingly siloed off into specialized and inaccessible realms, architecture shoves itself in your face daily.
Dense, mixed-use, transit-accessible, sustainability-minded development is posited by self-styled “urbanists” as a solution to the woes of our current era, and there’s a truth there, and their hearts, at least, are in the right place. We just crossed 1.5 degrees Celsius of mean global temperature increase, our dependence on the automobile is slowly killing us, and North American cities in particular are seemingly designed to alienate and isolate. So why not build things that are readily accessible by metro system or other public transportation, that combine residences, office space, and retail, that get people out of their cars and hopefully sharing a coffee in a more welcoming and inclusive atmosphere?
To which the main riposte is always… well then why is it so shit? Whether it’s the ugly condo-over-barcade-and-vegan-noodle-bar developments with chilly concrete plazas that constitute dense infill across the United States, or the sort of Erewhon’d and Uniqlo’d complexes with an architectural idiom that builds on the worst ideas of Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid that have blossomed all over Rising Asia, the actual environment fails to live up to how it is marketed. In these ostensibly public spaces that are run purely for the benefit of the private sector, dependent on mass surveillance and creepy biometric data theft, rife with hostile design elements, community simply becomes a shared purchasing pattern. Sustainability is at best a means of getting a tax break, and is more likely just another branding element. Inclusivity is great as long as it sells more matcha lattes.
Furthermore, my particular complex is just so fucking jankety – how fragile-looking some of the fittings are, as slapdash as Ikea furniture, the persistent sense of the temporary, the way the QR code readers I have to use in lieu of giving them my facial data are unstable at best. Again, we should know how this ends. The story of how the nice tweedy middle-class British professionals went ape in High Rise was published in 1975. My god, the story of an attempt at a firmware update leading to mass chaos, R.U.R., was written in 1920. The fact that the term “robot” comes from a play about robot failure should have been a warning, shouldn’t it?
So the complex has become targets for traditionalists of one kind or another. Some of them are architectural traditionalists, of course, who want to return to golden-ratio classicism and Ionic orders, and who are mostly just harmless nostalgics.
Others are rather more sinister -- those who don’t want to return, they want to RETVRN. Those whose conservatism is an incoherent blend of 1950s suburban American dream, Victorian moralism, grandeur both Bayreuth operatic and classical Roman, and completely romantic and mythological conception of nation and volk that quickly reveals itself to be more a function of aesthetic desire than any kind of actual intellectual or political program. The lack of program is important here – that would require them to actually commit to the bit.
Consider Alamariu, whose gigglewanks about “xenoestrogens” and silly classical-hunk posturing that’s frankly one step away from full-on man-boy love have filtered down through the brain-rot of the discourse, particularly in its techie, Peter Thiel-affiliated corners, whose participants seem pretty terminally bugmale – far too chinless and Fortnite-brained to have a chance at Periclean heroism.
So the bugman’s termite mound is a product of the capitalist institutions, with the only major challenge to their hegemony being pure reaction – appropriate in an era in which the representatives of electoral politics in so many of the Occidental power centers have devolved into a bunch of impotent centrist dorks on one side and a group of hooting vandals on the other side. But regardless, the processes of wealth accumulation continue – more power is in the hands of a tiny brahmin class, protected by the surveillance state, while the rest of us burn in the trenches.
How hot that fire burns and how deep that trench is both vary.
As for this bug? He could use a whiskey.
