The Gutter Art Critic

(This is a hastily written analysis of the somewhat recent banning and deplatforming of Alex Jones.  Please excuse possible grammatical and spelling errors. Thank you!) Over the past few days I have listened to literally hours upon hours of commentary about the deplatrofming of Alex Jones, from the kneejerk reactions of the alt-right, to the occasionally lucid accounts by the old left all the way to the ridiculous overcompensating reactionaries of the supposed radical left.   As the technosphere was busy puking over itself as a result of the Jones affair, there was very little in terms of real analysis of what transpired.   Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone came closest, but he somewhat conspicuously left out his analysis of the system that allows for the type of action taken by media conglomerates, Ben Shapiro had some interesting points, though he himself fell into the trap of self-preservation as the rest of the vlogo-bloggosphere, ‘if they came for Jones now, tomorrow they may

The rise of the Pirate party in recent Czech elections shows that the left may in fact be invigorated enough to go beyond the Occupy movement and its ultimate failure. Gaining 22 seats in the Czech parliament, the Pirates are now the third largest party in Czech Republic. The only irony here is that the Pirates consider themselves a center party.   This digital ‘left’ acts as a counter point to the alt-right described by Angela Nagle in her book on the subject called ‘Kill All Normies.’   As if there is no end to all the irony in the world, in today’s upside-down world, it is the ‘right’ that is most plugged into the digital world and the internet, somehow able to coopt every tactic that the old ‘new left’ used in its political stance on very diverse issues, from feminism and gay rights, to environmentalism and animal rights, and literally turning them inside-out, into stances like men’s rights, which were initially tongue-in-cheek, but developed into a strangely potent politica

For as long as I can remember, there has been fake news out there, from yellow journalism to paid advertising made to appear as news.   Advertising itself has in recent years gone to absolutely crazy levels of faking real life so as to make the two virtually indistinguishable.   There is a story by Jon Ronson of a group in England that faked a meteor impact in the country side, a crypto advertising campaign during a soccer match involved a Barcelona player and a spectator that threw a banana on the pitch, the player nonchalantly picked up the banana and ate it before serving up a corner kick, the whole event meant to advertise the campaign against racism in ‘football.’   There are countless of these stories.   In the 1930s yellow journalism spearheaded by the psychopath robber baron William R. Hearst, in a vast conspiracy with likeminded new-aristocrats like Dupont, made marijuana illegal for the next 80 years, only so they could have a monopoly in the paper and tree pulp market.