Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous Delightmares
The Assault on our ability to take things seriously
(Title image via @swatercolor on X)
On February 18, the White House posted what it called an ASMR-Video of “Deporting Illegal Aliens”. It features video footage of people that are being shackled and chained in order to deport them from the United States and has been somewhat swiftly picked up both by fans and enemies of the Trump administration. While France24 reported that the “White House was being blasted” on social media, the MAGA Circle found delight in the public outcry: Musk himself simply commented “haha wow” with a troll and a medal emoji, while other “conservative influencers” reenacted the video with additional ASMR material.
It is somewhat hard not to succumb to the feeling that all of this triggers somewhat necessarily: a feeling that art critic Ben Davis recently dubbed “Delightmares” in a very noteworthy article on artnet.
Davis calls this feeling “delightmares”: “The emotion is something like “the feeling of being terrorized by stupid shit.” You’re horrified by something, then embarrassed that something so stupid is the object of your horror, then horrified at a more profound level at what that coincidence of real fear and obvious stupidity says about the world…”
Davis focuses on the cultural aspects of the phenomenon and analyses it as a general vibe that has been increasing in recent years and traces its lineage back to the first Ghostbusters movie, when the seemingly innocuous Marshmallow Man turns into an destructive image of terror. Yet, while an analysis of the specific imagery and its precursors is a worthwhile task that might eventually blossom into a laboratory to develop counterstrategies to Davis’ “Delightmares”, it fails to acknowledge that the specific onslaught of mindnumbingly stupid cruelty we are currently experiencing is at least partially the result of very deliberate political decisions that reflect the informational strategies of the current GOP.
The New York Times sees this with greater clarity: we are living through Steve Bannon’s vision of a media-blitz – the “Zone is flooded with shit”.
The strategy aims to overwhelm the opposition in general and the media in particular with such a torrent of problems to address that ultimately none truly can be adequately covered. This wave of shit also makes it impossible to discern where we are encountering delightmares and where nightmares proper: while the ASMR Deportation can be somewhat straightforwardly counted as the former, the picture becomes less clear when we think of the various territorial expansions Trump has been teasing. Is Canada as the 51st state still a feverdream or a veritable international security nightmare? What about the Panama Canal and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza? Are these topics that need to be addressed as serious proposals? Are these ways of testing the waters or are they merely shit supposed to flood the zone? We are merely a month in and the set of stories that has been glossed over or simply forgotten is already too large to be covered by a single blog post: it is arguably even too big to be covered by an entirely staffed newsroom that provides around the clock coverage of current events.
What we are looking for is an understanding of the role delightmares play in the horseshit tsunami we find ourselves in: Davis’ own understanding on the term actually provides us with an entry point for this: what makes the occurrence of these real-world events so “viscerally upsetting” is the “spectacle of entertainment appearing where it should not”.
Davis is absolutely on point with assessing the impact of delightmares as such, yet he drops the thought immediately after this, which is not even a shortcoming of his essay: his main task is to discern what delightmares are, not why they are. After all, these man-made horrors well within our comprehension don’t merely appear from thin air, they rather are mass-produced and deployed by this movement like other movements produced leaflets and pamphlets. Why then does the cultural production of the modern authoritarian movement assume this specific form? To answer this, we first have to understand what it means that entertainment appears where it should not. This “should not” is a moral injunction that is necessary for the delightmare to take its form. It isn’t merely that cruelty is enacted, but rather that cruelty is offered with the somewhat explicit promise of jouissance.
In offering a blissful rejection of shared humanity, the administration suggests a ritual within which the not-yet persecuted masses can find themselves together in a common delusion. Trump’s promise towards the vast majority of his voters was explicitly economical: suggesting that he would be able to ease the plight of “ordinary Americans” by imposing tariffs and lowering the prices for groceries, yet he barely tried to even appear to be delivering on any of this. In lieu of material improvements for his constituents, the boon the “King” offers to his servants is participation in the Carnivalesque.
The irony baked into this process is necessary in order to mask the actual detachment of the masses from even the joy of the pogrom, which characterized the fascism of the 21st century.
Instead of a November pogroms, they are invited to join in a cozy youtube party to listen to shackles clanking at home. They get to laugh at Trump’s AI generated semblances of himself as a king, get to parade the memes within the social networks and get to relish in the outrage they create with it.
Yet, at the same time, a very real assault on the democratic structures is taking place that expands the powers of the Commander in Chief even beyond those of a king. None of this should be seen as coincidental when the project has been laid out explicitly.
Curtis Yarvin, the Dark Enlightenment Blogger and ideologue of Peter Thiel puts forth the idea of a 21st-century monarchism:
“As for the charismatic leader and would-be king, he must combine the two most important ingredients of hypermodern political communication: irony and sincerity.
This entire project of 21st-century monarchism (on the blockchain!) is both utterly ironic, and completely sincere. Every part of making it happen will feel like a joke. The result, however, will be completely real—both sincere, and irreversible.
Electing an absolute king is the essence of both the fascist and monarchist programs. But fascism conceives that king as a servant of the movement; monarchism conceives the movement as a servant of the king.
And once he is king, and commands the police and the military, what does he need with a political movement? When politics itself is a thing of the past?
Fascism is in a way easier to get people to sign up for, because supporters of fascism keep their democratic power, or at least feel they have kept it. They are acting collectively through the leader; the leader is their instrument; if he does not perform, they would have to find a new instrument.
Supporters of monarchism use their democratic power only once—to give it away. They do not feel they are participating in any collective direct action. They never posture at all. To a fascist, this kind of experience seems feeble and unstimulating, like nonalcoholic beer. Not like World War I.»
The stupidity of delightmares, their constant oscillation between an ironic and a dangerous pole is therefore absolutely paramount to advancing the agenda of a mass movement that ultimately tries to abolish itself. By its very nature the idea of monarchy – be it a 21st century monarchy or another – is limited to a select few. It therefore needs to advance its goals simultaneously through mobilizing the masses against the current order while keeping them away from the levers of power. Delightmares offer a vehicle to advance just this agenda. They are harmless enough, insofar they aren’t on a material level unleashing any potentials that goes beyond the horrors that are already firmly in place:
Sure, we might be outraged about an ASMR Video of deportations, but is this really worse than the actual deportation that already happened before and potentially already under other administrations?
Yet, they break enough taboos to let the subordinated feel that they are part of a profanization of the holy, as if they themselves would be allowed to participate in the joyful excess of abusing power over others.
Finally, while just enough of these horrors do become a reality, each and every one of them appears to be just a part of a gigantic feverdream: “Every part of making it happen will feel like a joke. The result, however, will be completely real—both sincere, and irreversible.”
We may not take Greenland, but we take Gaza: or will it be the other way around? And while the peasants are still debating what is going to happen to the Panama-Canal, they will have plundered Ukraine and disenfranchised Congress.
To fight the Delightmares and their movement it isn’t enough to be outraged by them, as this only falls pray to their allure; the goal has to be to reject the entire fever dream as such. As they are flooding the zone with shit, maintaining a firm grip on the media apparatus both on- and offline, this will increasingly seem like a Herculean task. It’s not.
So what does rejecting the fever dream mean?
The current political climate relies deeply on a common mistrust against each other and each and every deployed Delightmare aims to further this climate. The illusion we are being provided with is that people are fundamentally unable to govern themselves and that the division of powers is meant to be broken. Each Delightmare ultimately also speaks: “I am here, enjoy me or perish. Delight in the powers that be or be crushed by them.”
Rejecting the fever dream means rejecting this false choice. And it means building sustainable dreams of our own. They are flooding the Zone with Shit, they are invoking the Roman Empire and the Fascists, they are telling tales of power and submission as if these were the only ones to be had.
They aren’t. There are pockets of solidarity, visions of hope and a tradition of equality and common fight that is richer than anything these people have to offer. They do not offer cheap thrills or winning an argument on the internet. They are long, winded and at times entirely trivial to the point of being boring: but they are what we will need to weaponize.
Against both the delight in the crumbling of western civilization and the joy of supplying each other with self-congratulatory outrage we will have to build sleeper cells of shared softness and care, for ourselves and the Other. We will have to work both with and against the prevailing bureaucracy.
This seems like a Herculean task and a fight that is too big to be possibly won. It is a blessing that our fighting cry need not be: “We have no choice but to win”, though it is true. We may also take solace in the knowledge that this very appearance of insurmountable obstacles is in itself merely a part of the spectacle we fight.
Our forces are far from weak. Not everyone that has voted for Trump or votes for the Authoritarians in the EU is lost to the project of a shared humanity. Government workers are putting up modest roadblocks to protect the people they care for.
The Judiciary isn’t entirely poisoned yet and is putting up a fight. Volunteers help refugees as they did before, people ally themselves with each other.
It is all too easy to brush these efforts away as insufficient: they are. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t harbingers of something else to come. Surely, there is no guarantee for this. But to denigrate a noble goal and a worthy effort because they as of now lacking the power to realize themselves is the task of the enemy.
We will have none of it.
And this will be how we prevail.