EsotericHoe
Neuroqueer 🏳️🌈 Community Organizer 🧚 Feminist Geographer 🤸♀️ Ecological Planner🌿
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We are no longer waiting for the end of the world; we have already entered it.
This is the central thesis of Semiotics of the End. Sbordoni argues that the apocalypse is not a future physical event we must brave for, but rather the exact economic and digital reality we currently inhabit. Capitalism has mapped every corner and commodified the physical world.
I came to the book based on my interest in liminal horror films popping up like Backrooms and Exit 8. Backrooms of which, the author has an essay/chapter in the book for, where they describe this "recycled" media as a form of architectural horror, diagnosing the phenomenon as the "apocalypse of the boring".
Drawing on Kant, the author argues that the end of all things derives from the total absence of change. The terror of the Backrooms is the realization that the world is permanently stuck. We no longer fear the unknown; we fear the agonizing realization that the capitalist infrastructure we built has no exit.
While the author doesn't discuss AI, clear parallels can be drawn to generative AI as they note, "everything is reproduced already faster than it is imagined" and that the modern image is "already a copy". This is the reality of algorithmic dominance. Capitalism becomes our only remaining imaginary: we do not originate new concepts; our machines calculate probabilities to output a continuous, inescapable past. Human imagination becomes obsolete by the sheer velocity of algorithmic reproduction.
Semitiocs of the End is a useful diagnostic text for our current digital condition. It showcases how we are operating within a closed cultural system, endlessly recycling data into a haze. Sbordoni argues the physical destruction of the world is no longer our primary concern but the act of staring at the screen itself.
Why You Should Read This Book at a Snail’s Pace
I supported in co-hosting the Weird + Wired book club where we read this book over the course of 5 weeks which was so restorative. The book has done so much for me, not only has it been reinvigorating for my love of reading, but it has me reading fiction, I'm no longer multitasking, I'm letting myself rest because I don't want to be a casualty of capitalism.
It has also helped with unpacking white supremacist programming—hyper-individualism, perfectionism, and personal responsibility. I started experimenting with collective rest ins. Body doubling where the intention is to rest. This book changed my perspectives and heart. Highly recommend reading this at a slow pace as criticism I've read is that it's repetitive. But taking your time with it makes the repetition meaningful.
The following are discussion questions created for each section of the book:
Part 1
If I stripped away my labor, my output, and my utility to others, who am I?
Witness where the systems are extracting your divinity? (e.g., Are you holding your breath? Are you ignoring hunger? Are you performing urgency?) Where do I ignore my biological needs to finish a task? Where do I feel "urgency" in my body when there is no emergency?
Hersey says they ponder the following, what do you think: What will a well-rested world for all hold? What will be the elements? Will everyone get free from grind culture? Have we been tangled up in the muck of the grind for so long that we may never come up for air?
Part 2
What happens when the noise stops? What keeps us in a cycle of consuming? What feelings come up when we actually stop consuming?
"Grind culture keeps us all in a cycle of trauma; rest disrupts this." How can your rest and dreaming be an act of resilience?
Part 3
Tricia Hersey calls spaces for temporary rest "third places" or a "spiritual practice". What does the space where boredom may lie bring up for you? Do you feel the itch to be productive? What is underneath the itch?
Where do you feel you must be productive? How could you start to unpack this?
"Our DreamSpace has been stolen." When we are scrolling, we are not resting; we are consuming. What are ways we can resist scrolling and give ourselves more time for DreamSpace?
Part 4
Who in your lineage was forced to be a machine and grind? Who in your lineage was a Trickster who stole moments of rest?
If you were to create a "Not-To Do List", what would be on it? What are you refusing this week?
Hersey invites us to use rest as a way to hear our own inner voice. Looking at the question she provides, “what do I feel called to do?”, how do you tell the difference between a "calling" that comes from your soul and a "demand" that comes from the "grind culture" we are trying to unlearn?
We often think of rest as a solitary act (unplugging, napping alone), but Hersey emphasizes the collective. How can we move from individual self-care to community care? What would it look like for this group to hold space for each other’s rest even after this book club ends?
I have spent the past decade thinking deeply about containers to the point that containers inform my orientation to the world, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction anchors this perspective.
My first introduction to the basket as humanity's OG technology came from a former friend completing her PhD in communications regarding food technologies and Marxist praxis. She shared the history of the first tool being a vessel for gathering, intentionally woven strand by strand. A "feminine" object.
A month ago, I was participating in the "Collective Footnotes" anti-book club held by the Institute of Machine Unlearning where we discussed "Feminism Confronts AI". The conversation drifted into the definition of technology and naturally Le Guin came up.
Staring down technofeudal futures driven by platform capitalism and algorithmic extraction, returning to Le Guin grounds me. With Donna Haraway providing the foreword to this edition, I can't help but think of the Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway’s cyborg rejects origin myths of pure, untainted nature; arguing that we are fundamentally entangled with our tools. The carrier bag gathers disparate, messy, hybrid parts and holds them together in relation. As Haraway noted over 40 years ago, we are already cyborgs embedded in these systems. Reclaiming the means of production means utilizing the basket/container to resist the architecture we currently exist within.
In addition to using the carrier bag to think through technology and capitalism, I find it helpful framing for thinking through relationality.
Taking separate, sovereign strands and bringing them into relation requires managing tension in real time. If we pull connections too tightly, the bonds can snap. If we leave things too loose, the structure fails to hold anything at all. The work is being flexible, learning how to interlace our histories and subjectivities into a shape with enough integrity to carry heavy realities—grief, conflict, survival—without breaking apart. Finishing a basket requires completing the rim, which sets the explicit boundaries defining what the container will hold.
When I think through containers, I think about my body as a container, I think of my time as a container, as space contained by multiple containers. And I think of Frank Ocean's Pink Matter:
"What do you think my brain is made for Is it just a container for the mind? This great grey matter Sensei replied, "What is your woman? Is she just a container for the child?" That soft pink matter"
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!
"Killjoy truths are the insight we have about the nature of social reality from our experiences of killing joy, that world-making project."
I feel killjoy truths need to be spread as "killjoy truths are hardworn wisdoms. When we express killjoy truths, we feel less alone."
I recommend taking time to read through them. Let them land in your bones.
To expose a problem is to pose a problem.
If you have to shout to be heard, you are heard as shouting.
We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it.
Things are fluid if you are going the way things are flowing.
You can't always choose battles: battles can choose you.
There is only so much you can take on because there is only so much you can take in.
When you have to fight for existence, fighting can become existence.
There can be nothing more unconvincing than the effort to be convinced.
If happiness requires turning away from violence, happiness is violence.
The unconventional daughter of the migrant family is a conventional form of social hope.
The less we see ourselves reflected, the more we see in a reflection.
Discomfort reveals worlds.
Those who are not "at home" in certain categories tend to know more about them.
To be given room is to be given room for error.
For some, to be is to be in question.
To become conscious of possibility can involve mourning for its loss.
You notice worlds when they are not built for you.
Just because they welcome you, it does not mean they expect you to turn up.
The more we challenge structures, the more we come up against them.
We learn about institutions from trying to transform them.
What is hardest for some does not exist for others.
When Black and brown people become poets, we are fighting against history.
Those who don't fit the old forms need to create their own forms.
Some have to insist on what is given to others.
What we create is fragile because we need it to survive.
Power works by making it hard to challenge how power works.
Silence about violence is violence.
What you are told you need to do to progress farther or faster in a system reproduces the system.
The more we come up against, the more we need more.
Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger
Soraya Chemaly
I've read the book a few times previously and it feels so relevant right now.
I wanted to share some questions contained within the book as points of reflection.
"What would it mean to ungender our emotions?
What would the world look like if all of us were allowed to experience and productively express the full range of our emotions without penalty?
What if girls and women were not so often and effectively cut off from this particular emotion as a function of being feminine?
What do we lose, personally, and as a society, by not listening to women's anger or respecting it when it does have a voice?
And, importantly, how does our treatment of women's "anger-free emotionality" relate to democracy and put us at risk of authoritarianism?"
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EsotericHoe commented...
Pagebound has drastically changed my reading habits. I only read 8 books in 2025. I joined pagebound in January and already reached my goal for the year. So grateful for the creators of the app and the community who has helped me reignite my love for reading. Here's to more reading!