what progress:
Chris Dorland

CD: I flew to Mexico for a family vacation earlier this year. The entertainment system, courtesy of DIRECTTV, was super janky and outdated, but it couldn’t have been that old. There was a weird contradiction to its clumsy anachronism. It felt and operated like dial-up. For the whole flight, and I mean the entire flight without interruption, the monitors on the seats across from us (and everyone else’s) were playing ads for the airline. You couldn’t turn them off. You could only switch to watching whatever crap shows were available. It was terrible. Ad after ad after ad. Cruises, flights, credit cards. It wouldn't stop. We ended up covering the screens with tape we had brought with us to keep our kid busy. At the end of the flight–the steward gets on the P.A. to say “Thanks for flying United” and then promptly dives into reading a script for a branded credit card advertisement. The whole experience was insane. Not only because it was a literal form of consumer torture that we were subjected to but because you could feel that it was also kind of quaint and old-fashioned. The whole flight, I thought, god fucking help us all, imagining what’s in store for us as capitalism continues its death spiral towards its next phase. When that phoenix rises from the ashes–it’s going to be terrifying.

SA: In many of your other interviews, you often use variations on the word capital. I usually cringe a little when I hear it. It feels like a stand-in for everything. Recently, I’ve given a lot of thought to libertinage and the idea that humans are first and foremost primal pleasure seekers, and knowing that one may create a series of checks and balances that are more predictable and civilized. Capitalism, I have much more trouble wrapping my head around. What do you mean by hyper-capitalism, late-capitalism, capitalism, capitalist, etc.?

CD: Yeah, I mean, I feel you. I think everyone, myself included, groans a bit at the mention of “Capitalism.” But at the same time, there is a reason capitalism or its multi-headed derivatives show up so much as a subject or catchphrase within critical contemporary thinking and the arts: it’s monstrously dominant and permeates all our lives without exception—even the richest among us can’t fully escape its tentacles. To reference the now-famous quote by Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

I grew up in Montreal, Canada, just north of the N.Y. border. My Dad, in particular, really exposed me to an incredible amount of pop culture in the form of music, television, and movies starting at a very young age. He was a communications and media professor, and despite his Marxist roots, he enabled me to flourish as a consumer for some reason. There were very few boundaries, if any; it was almost perverse. We watched The Shining when I was five years old. I mean, it’s kind of insane in retrospect. So, as a kid, I was heavily invested in consumer culture. As I got older, mainly as I developed my first body of work, I came to understand that the myth of the future, of progress, or even the cherished concept of “freedom” are all interconnected into the logic of a particular brand of American-made corporate capitalism that has functioned very effectively as a form of highly effective propaganda that has enabled a tremendous amount of ideological dominance over the planet. One can easily see how Hollywood functions the seductive dream factory in the propaganda machine. It’s so pervasive and all-encompassing a matrix that it’s almost impossible to delineate. It’s as if we’re all living in the Truman Show inside some giant mechanical dome we can’t visualize. That’s why the financial crisis was so powerful: it was a significant crack in the ideological screen. And as such, it exposed that there was an illusion. Unsurprisingly, Mark Fischer’s writings emerged at that time and were so influential in analyzing and dissecting what he calls “Capitalist Realism.”

I’m pretty sure we no longer really live under late-stage capitalism but have already begun to slowly morph into whatever postcapitalism is. The conditions of which will slowly reveal themselves over the next few decades. Cryptocurrency and AI are both likely going to play prominent roles in that. To reference Leonard Cohen: “I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder.”