Last year, I took a course on “Escaping the Sun Cult" that showed me the ways solar consciousness has been elevated into supremacy and enforced as a condition of survival. It was an exercise in understanding how the abandonment of cyclical, lunar principles has led directly to the commodification of life itself. To live under the Sun Cult is to submit to the mandate of unending daylight, the hijacking of the nervous system, and the endless, extractive pursuit of growth.

"The great big circle in the sky, however, was not merely a flat disc in the two-dimensional universe or even a sphere in the three-dimensional universe. The sun is a chariot. It is circular time."

I had been thinking about solar supremacy—the cyclical, inescapable demand to wake up, turn on the lights, and produce—and its impact on my body for a while. So, when I found Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Naomi Klein, Sara Ahmed, and Douglas Rushkoff in this chapter on the Sun, I knew I was home.

Alice Sparkly Kat dismantles the commercial/popular definition of the Sun that relates it to individualized ego, vitality, or generic abundance by defining the Sun through historical materialism where it becomes the centralized architecture of visibility, surveillance, capital, and the engineered orientation of power. In this framework, the Sun is the architecture of the neoliberal system. It acts as the centralized gaze of capital that dictates spatial organization, economic reality, and bodily discipline. By grounding the Sun in critical theory, the chapter establishes the premise of our daily lives: modern digital and physical infrastructure operates as a literal solar cult, demanding a constant, exhausting orientation toward a centralized gaze.

In the Sun cult, light does not simply illuminate what already exists. For example, the white, male gaze acts as a central projector, and its rays of "sight" determine what is granted the status of reality. If you are not illuminated by this specific gaze, you are rendered socially and economically invisible.

The exhaustion of the daily grind isn't just generated by labor itself, it is the physical toll of surviving a continuous colonial encounter, a system where our very existence is constantly validated or erased by a central, hostile surveillance. This is the literal, material cost of solar supremacy. The hyperreality of finance—where the speculative value of gold hoarded in Western vaults is treated as more real than the physical lives of the Black laborers exploited to extract it—operates entirely by rendering actual, physical violence invisible. The exhaustion of the daily grind is a micro-version of this macro-violence.

"Unreal things are not seen to control Fate and exist without futures. However, it is precisely the unrealized things that sometimes affect the future."

The system is terrified of what it cannot illuminate. It is a fierce reminder that uncommodified spaces—our rest, our bodies, and the things we refuse to produce for the light—are exactly what will shape the future.

The next chapter is on the Moon and I am so excited!

"Ma'am, this is Pagebound" I made you look though 👀

Anywho, Are there any authors you have unnecessary beef with? And why?

I'm not talking JKR, Sarah J Maas, or Colleen Hoover. We get why there is beef. No. I want the most random author you have beef with

For me: Jennifer L Armentrout I find the From Blood & Ash series a cash grab, like I have never known a book series where you have to read the prequel to understand future books. And who the heck needs a garlic scented book.... gross