who are you?
you may call me r. kothar. i am truly insignificant.
what is this place?
acid feudalism is a blog and newsletter in the spirit of an older internet. i am a habitual realist, afraid of following the thoughts of my betters. though this is not a good thing, it forces me to find my own path to ideas; once i do, it is better for me to write it down.
i may not stick to a single topic for long, as my own interest is fleeting and the world is too varied a place. history, international relations, technology, philosophy, literature, and politics are recurring topics, and within those topics certain themes and motifs will eventually emerge. in any topic, i begin as a well-researched layman, stumbling through a field of noise. i am expert in no field. accordingly, if you find an idea to which you are hostile, if there remains anything of interest to say, i hope that you will comment for my own benefit.
why ‘acid feudalism’?
because my sense of humor is a malignant rot. i have experiences with LSD, the genre label of ‘acid’ ahead of music (acid house being a great influence on me), and have poetic notions about the many connotations of the word itself. actor david tennant once described famed psychologist R.D. Laing as ‘the Acid Marxist’. the late Mark Fisher, one of the greatest bloggers ever to grace the ‘net, took the label and bent it into his ‘acid communism’, describing online marxism to connote its grassroots passion. acid feudalism corrupts it, strychnine in the elixir; it describes not what i wish of world politics but what i see in it. feudalism is a derogatory term for new authoritarianism, in particular, and if the acid might be directed toward the microdosing elite in certain west-coast sectors, it can make for an amusing contrast to acid communism (and after all, didn’t Apple turn LSD itself into an engineer’s own status symbol?)
