Joni Void & Quinton Barnes, La Lumière Collective, 21 April 2025

“Your time has come your second skin
The cost so high the gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie.”
—Public Image Ltd., “Rise.”

The customary media scrum following the Canadian pre-election English-language leaders’ debate was abruptly cancelled on Wednesday 16 April because the Debates Commission could not “guarantee a proper environment for this activity,” it announced in a brief and vague statement.

The Commission’s executive director Michael Cormier didn’t elaborate on the reasons behind the decision. But most media observers pointed to the right-wing Rebel News group’s domination of the scrum the previous evening following the French-language debate at Maison Radio-Canada in Montreal. Rebel News was able to secure five questions while traditional outlets like La Presse and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were each granted only one.

In a post-debate analysis with news anchors Adrienne Arsenault and Rosemarie Barton, David Cochrane, host of CBC’s Power and Politics, characterized the media group’s tactics as “rage-farming.”

Rebel News appears to be merging the strategies of American outlets like Fox and Breitbart with the MO of social media. Indeed, the “new” digital media have now capitalized for decades on inciting extreme moral outrage.

“The mission of Facebook is to connect people around the world,” stated former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in an interview with the CBS News programme 60 Minutes. “When you have a system that you know can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke anger in people. Users say to themselves, ‘If I make more angry, polarizing, dividing content, I get more money.’ Facebook has created a system of incentives that divides people.”

Anger is an energy. But is it the right energy in a time when unity is more urgently necessary?

Pulse Mag Issue #1 Launch, Le Système, 17 April 2025

It logically follows that if digital media arouse outrage, analogue media might offer an antidote. One reason for this may be the quantifiable time that users invest in media engagement.

The speed with which we access and discard online content encourages a general sense of agitation. When we slow down to read printed words, say, in a magazine, we cultivate a more deliberative mindset, one which stimulates empathy and understanding. These virtues are the building blocks of community.

Magazines inspire readers to read, share, and re-read. On the internet, never are any two given people literally “on the same page.”

Payare Conducts Mozart’s Moving Requiem, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 16 April 2025

“If America (like ‘Vietnam’) was primarily the name of a war, we would understand its historical function far better.”
—Nick Land, “2014,” Outsideness.

Obsession with war is implicitly obsession with death. Regardless of whether a war is military or economic, hot or cold, the only product that war consistently generates is casualty. More than the axiom that war has no winners, war also renders life itself, even for those only peripherally involved, null and void.

Blood, contrary to popular belief, is not a form of fertilizer.

Persons with Cabral Jacobs and Bob Tape, Atlas Building, 18 April 2025

“A man complains of being hungry. All the time. Dogs, it seems, are never hungry. So the man decides to become a dog.”
—Brian Massumi, “normality is the degree zero of MONSTROSITY,” A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Modernity is inextricably linked to capitalism because no other form of socio-economic organization demands perpetual novelty.

Yet, newness has no truth value because of its inherent arbitrariness. How long does a cultural text hold its currency? How long is a McDonald’s hamburger allowed to sit on the counter before it gets tossed in the bin?

A society that prizes youth culture, in so doing, sacrifices what is true for what is new. The acceleration of so-called innovation in truth is simply the hastened refresh rate of desire. Novelty correlates with functional dissatisfaction. Capitalism thrives on habitual frustration.

Normalcy exists antagonistically against novelty because as soon as normalcy is achieved, it is no longer by definition new. Therefore, hyper-capitalism requires hyper-normalization.

Furthermore, modernity exists in opposition to pragmatism because it is pragmatic to repair and preserve and it is modern to discard and reinvent. Therefore, there is no true conservatism under capitalism. In its place, we are provoked with austerity.

Plural Contemporary Art Fair, Grand Quai, Port of Montreal, 11-13 April 2025

“The greatest disorder that those who order an army for battle make is to give it only one front and obligate it to one thrust and one fortune.”
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Art of War.

Cities are modern sites for alternating periods of movement and stasis, speed, slowness, and rest. They are naturally contested and potentially violent terrains that frequently mimic fields of battle. Think of vying for space on the metro, or how quickly a queue tightens up when one of its members leaves.

The Romans routinely broke their armies up into three speed-dependent battalions. The first, the hastati, struck the quickest. If and when they failed, their ranks fell back into the second, the principes, which attacked more slowly. If and when they, too, were expended, they all absorbed into the triarii, who lumbered behind in the lengthiest regiments.

Their enemy would have to conquer three separate meta-armies operating in three unique temporal intervals in order to prevail. First there’s the tweet, then the retweet, then the legacy media story that rounds up the tweets.

Donald Trump’s shadow strategist Steve Bannon famously said in 2018 that political rivalry paled in importance to conflicts in information. Democrats were not the enemy, Bannon believed. The media were.

“Flood the zone with shit” was Bannon’s solution. In other words, advance as many competing viewpoints across as many media platforms as quickly and consistently as possible to destroy wholesale the concept of credibility itself.

A healthy republic depends not only on information but access and intelligence to discern its accuracy.

If democracy dies in darkness, fuck with the lights on.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Rafael Payare conducts the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 16 April 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.}