Merry Christmas you guys <3🎄
I’m excited to say that I will be part of the 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer. I was also a recent guest on the Chris Williamson podcast: Modern Wisdom #1032. (I’m certain this is the only time these two topics have been mentioned in the same paragraph.)
You can find Doomscroll audio episodes on: Apple, Spotify and all other podcast apps.
Welcome to Doomscroll. My guest is Liz Franczak, a co-host of the TrueAnon podcast. We discuss conspiracy theory, Lacan’s psychoanalytic insights into humor and the influence of the early blogosphere. Is techno-capitalism a rogue AI retroactively assembling itself from the future? (No, this will not be explained later.)
This episode explores what are (in my opinion) the most important subjects underlying political struggle today. A generation ago, “tech” was a stand alone and self-contained industry. Today, it has become the digital infrastructure of both the private and public sector. Most concerning, its stock value now functions as a quasi-reserve asset that upholds the entire US economy. Ensuring the inflated value of these tech stocks has become a political and infrastructural necessity. In effect, Big Tech has captured the American model of political-economy. Any successful left-wing movement will need to confront the complex design of these systems and the libertarian individuals who control it.
In the mid 2000s and early 2010s, Liz and I followed a small group thinkers, mostly coming from the UK, who published their writing to blogs. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this diffuse network of bloggers sought to theorize a new set of tools and strategies for political struggle in the 21st century.
Today, “accelerationism” is probably the most misused and abused word on the whole internet. It originally came from the left but has since been co-opted to mean just about anything to any side that might want to claim it. Broadly defined, accelerationism is the observation that the rate at which capitalism is transforming society has begun to outpace the ability of our institutions to govern it. For example, when disruptive ride share apps launched in the 2010s, they quickly remapped urban transportation systems before state regulators had a chance to intervene. At the time, accelerationists argued that rather than repeatedly failing to slow the speed of this technological transformation, we should instead look for openings to harness and direct this process toward more intentional ends. In the case of rideshares, we shouldn’t try to fight the rising of digitization but instead offer a cooperative or municipal ride-share platform of our own. These topics feel quaint and nostalgically charming now.
In our first year of the show, we’ve explored two broad clusters within online political culture; the populist left and the techno-libertarian right. One recurrent theme we have touched upon is the ways in which certain elements of the left appear as their bizarro-world counter parts on the other side. For example, the app designers of silicon valley serve as a foil to Soviet-style planners. They create complex systems that shape and manage the economy but from the opposite ideological position. These general poles of a social democratic left and libertarian right serve as a mirror image to one another. My hope is that by exploring these two worlds we can one day recapture the tools, rhetoric and ideas necessary to transform the world.
“Truth has the structure of fiction.”
- Jacques Lacan
Join us this week as we surf the Kalshi wave and launch a new OnlyFans x BumFights platform (ICO dropping v soon):
Liz Franczak: Conspiracy and Techno-Capitalism | Doomscroll
On this week’s private episode, we discuss Liz’s background in online culture, music and how she first discovered the Mark Fisher or K-punk extended universe during the mid 2000s.
Explore these related episodes:
Christmas came late this year
Since Land/Acc. was brought up, I gotta ask that ya to get Poliks and Trillo on to talk about Exocapitalism, which is just fantastic. First time I've seen writers on the left make a real attempt to build a theory of capital that's both urgently contemporary (theorists who understand SalesForce and AWS??) and deeply descriptive of capital as a force throughout time, starting since humans first began exchanging cowrie shells for cows.
https://youtu.be/144afKgO5Eg?si=mOOw4FXKCHPL8H4h