The Gutter Art Critic

This story was first published on Ten Fifteen, a semi-regular blog/newsletter about art, philosophy and cultural theory. Sign up here .    Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better, Fail a Lot, Fail Up On the morning of November 17, 1989, Ludvik Zifcak got up and made himself breakfast and tea. He did not rush, because the work he was about to do would not have to be done until evening. He turned on his Soviet-era color television, with its two channels, blurry images and sepia undertones, dressed while he sipped tea and read the minutes of a meeting he attended the day before. He was a special undercover agent of the Czechoslovak secret police (StB) and that evening he was to lead a group of students protesting against the communist government into a trap. Just weeks prior the East Germans have breached the Berlin Wall and toppled its government. In just a couple of weeks, the standing Czechoslovak government will transfer its power to the new coalition of artists, actors, economists

(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