Illuminating the New American Right with James Pogue

In the early years of Wake Island, around 2020 and 2021, we talked constantly about portals. The pandemic felt like an exit from one era and an entry into another. Eventually we stopped talking about them. Maybe because nothing had changed as completely as we imagined or maybe because we’d already passed through the portal and forgotten there was ever a door. Lately, I’ve started to feel another one opening. For thirty years we rebuilt huge parts of society around the assumption that everything would eventually move online, that the internet would become this infinite, searchable repository of human knowledge. Instead, the information itself is becoming synthetic, generated and regenerated by machines, mixed back into the human material it was trained on until the distinction starts to collapse. We may be approaching the end of the information age not because information becomes scarce, but because it becomes infinite and useless. Which makes this a good moment to talk again with Jarett Kobek, one of the great obsessive writers/journalists working today. His first novel, Atta, originally published in 2011 and now being reissued, enters the consciousness of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and follows the architecture, ideology and alienation surrounding him toward his horrific conclusion. His more recent book, Invocation of My Demon Brother, begins with Kenneth Anger’s eleven-minute 1969 film of the same name and expands outward into Anger himself, the occult, Bobby Beausoleil, the Manson orbit, and the strange network of people and ideas moving beneath the surface of the late sixties. They’re very different books, but both are acts of obsession: taking something seemingly contained and following its connections until an entire hidden world opens around it. The last time Jarett was on Wake Island, we talked about the Zodiac Killer and the death of the idealistic sixties. This time we move from Anger and the occult, through Atta and 9/11, into AI and an internet that may have already died without us quite noticing. Intro music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius. Outro music: “Balancine” by Black Polygons.

This week on Wake Island, we spoke with Adam Axler, author of American Triage: From 9/11 to Fahrenheit 451, a memoir about more than two decades inside American emergency medicine. Adam was a paramedic at Ground Zero and went on to spend years working in emergency rooms before walking away from healthcare and into another life, selling and collecting vintage science fiction books. What’s strange is that I’m moving in the opposite direction, a choice I’m still not sure is a smart one to be making this late in life. After twenty years working in images and media, I’m training to become an EMT. At times, reading his book had the uncanniness of being handed a map by someone walking the other way down the same trail. But speaking to Adam helped me frame this change as something I might be able to move through creatively, that being able to feel someone else’s pain and offer them more than sympathy might end up healing something in me too. Lord knows that after twenty years working for corporations I didn’t care about, and that didn’t care about me, made me cynical. Now that AI has forced me to step away, I should be happy about taking a detour away from corporate and spiritual entropy. Maybe learning a skill that few people have is worth being excited about. Maybe a few years from now I’ll look back on this time and decide it was a good idea. Hopefully, one day, it will make my daughter proud too. I’m pausing here on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, in this year of America’s ambivalent 250th anniversary, to think about what it means that this event occurred 10% of our nation’s history ago. My entire adult life so far, a period when I’ve hardly ever stopped working, stopped chasing, stopped pushing myself to manifest more. To reach the potential that I know is inside me, and that I know I’ll die profoundly disappointed if I don’t reach. Of all the things that 9/11 has meant, clearly one of them is that it set off a frenzy of activity in America, after the lull of the 90s, wrenching so many of us out of personal reveries and back into the grind of history. It caused frantic, delirious intervention overseas and unsatisfying soul-searching at home, a maddening discourse across a widening gulf that has only now, mercifully, dead-ended in silence. Of course it also set in motion the surveillance regime that eroded not only our privacy but even our innate sense of inner sovereignty, leading to the internet as it currently exists and paving the way for AI, trained on unfathomable quantities of personal data. Listening back over our conversation with Adam Axler, who served as a medic on that day and then experienced total burnout in the medical field in the decades thereafter, I think about the frantic energy of a wounded, revenge-mad, self-cannibalizing America in this quarter century and how it covered over a growing torpor, a growing disorientation and exhaustion leading to despair, and I find, within this despair, just before the point where it becomes total, some mercy in the concept of Rest. Of slowing down and decoupling from the narrative, decoupling from the nation even, if need be: of leaving the macro American story behind for a while and burrowing into the micro, into the subtle but never quite hidden layers of American thought and tradition and eccentricity, of private madness, even, that endure beneath the public hysteria. The quiet but durable forces that have always given this country and those who sync up with its latent energies a unique potential, never quite realized but also never quite extinct. I also think about the ceaseless, oceanic energies of the internet in 2026, the way that AI never stops processing, never stops sifting and combining and scanning for patterns to offer up in lieu of actual thought, and I realize how thought itself can never be forced or steered or even parsed: how every legitimately new and worthwhile human idea has to emerge in its own time, coaxed perhaps but never forced to the surface, and how

Our guest today is Gideon Jacobs, a writer, performer and artist. I actually met Gideon over ten years ago when he was the creative director at Magnum and I was a photo editor at TIME. We were both working inside institutions built around photography and the idea that images, however complicated and subjective, had some direct claim on reality. It’s surreal to reconnect now, at a moment when that whole photographic relationship is imploding. Gideon recently wrote an essay for Spike, “All Images Are Quite Useless Now,” in which he says AI has finally severed the documentary relationship for good, and that this might not be the disaster it sounds like. DEBRIEF: This is what it’s like to stumble out of the internet after the prolonged adolescence of the past decade, the frothing, manic addiction that the internet forced us to go through in its death throes. I picture it like a mall shutting down, disgorging all the associates of my youth as the lights go off. With that whole entity dead behind us now, it’s time to trudge into the manure fields behind the mall, where new entities are being fertilized, growing in the late-summer darkness: this is what it feels like to understand that AI is our child now, ours to love and hate and try to understand as it grows, and perhaps ours to kill or be killed by if it turns out to be evil, or decides that we are. These thoughts occurred to me while listening back on our conversation with Gideon Jacobs, and I found them relaxing and even hopeful as I ruminated on Gideon’s analysis of the evolution of photographic images and humanity’s relation to them, the way that first we saw these images as literal and concrete proof of events that had really occurred, and then we panicked as we came to see that this was not always the case (and perhaps never could have been), and then, finally, we strained toward a third phase, that of seeing images as entities unto themselves, beings with their own needs and their own life cycle and their own mysterious origin, beings that bear a relation to reality far stranger and slipperier than simply recording and preserving it. Beings that play in and toy with reality, beings that act in the world rather than simply letting us store it on a shelf. Gideon puts a version of this same idea another way later in the conversation, talking about spiritual practice rather than photography, but it’s the same move, from content back to container: “The medium is the message, to me, is a vertical koan, a koan that inspires vertical movement. When one meditates, or prays, or does almost any spiritual practice, they’re softening their focus on the contents of consciousness, so as to rest in the nature of the medium of consciousness itself. The container, rather than the contents. And the minute that container has contents, you’re not doing it anymore. You’re back in the contents of consciousness. You’re back looking at the image.” An image that finally stops behaving like an image, that becomes a being instead of a picture of one, is the same event as a mind that stops looking at its own contents and rests in whatever’s underneath them. Both are a kind of falling out of the frame. I thought of the notion of AI images emerging, for the first time, from the pitch darkness of data centers rather than serving as a record of light on film, and it occurred to me that this is how thought functions too, a mysterious process of images emerging from the pitch darkness of the mind, bubbling up from nowhere, or not from nowhere but from the unknowable murk of memory, perception, and whatever we really mean when we say “imagination.” So let’s return to those manure fields behind the mall at the tail end of summer, trudging away from the arcade, the movie theater, the food court, the roller rink, and all the chain stores where I used to be so excited to go back-to-school shopping with my mom. Goodbye to all of that, and goodbye to the partisanship, the rumor-mongering, and the nonstop bitchery

Wake Island is back. It’s been a long hiatus, a lot of life changes and transitions… the usual upheavals that seem to have hit everyone over the last year or so. We’re kicking things off with past guest of the show, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, a philosopher, writer, and teacher, and a vector for a lot of the ideas that shape the tone and approach of Wake Island. What I love about listening to Jason is that he comes at things from the perspective of the avant-garde, whether it’s the after-dark, mania, or the apocalyptic imagination, he brings a level of sophistication to these ideas that I admire. This episode we’re talking about his latest book, Evil: A Study of Lost Techniques from Scarlet Press. Jason doesn’t moralize evil in the ways we’re accustomed to. He treats it as a set of techniques that operate below the threshold of cognition, things that bypass your defenses, in the same way a lullaby ushers a child out of consciousness into the realm of sleep, or doomscrolling steals hours of your life before you realize they’re gone. It’s less a study of bad behavior than a diagrammatic map of how evil reclaims the world. Also thank you to Matti Bye and Mambo Noir Trio & OONA Recordings for letting us use “Noir” to close out the episode.

Today’s guest is Dr. Teodor Mitew. He’s a systems thinker, historian, and digital media scholar at the University of Sydney, and the author of a new book called ⁠The Red Queen Trap: Complexity, Collapse, and the Myth of the Future⁠, along with a volume of Balkan Neogothic short fiction called T⁠he Samodeva Queen ⁠and the ⁠Turbulence substack⁠, where he focuses on complexity, systemic transformation, and the emerging architecture of the near future. We discovered his work through a recent essay called “⁠The Gated Age⁠,” about the war in Iran and how it is likely to fracture whatever remains of the old Enlightenment dream of universal consensus, pushing us back toward a New Dark Age of mutually incompatible fiefs and sovereign realities. He argues that the Local -- material reality, food, plumbing, geography, and actual bodies -- always eventually wins out over abstract universalist ideology, no exceptions in history. Universalism, he argues, was always a kind of con, Enlightenment reason just replacing God as the guarantor of truth for a period of time that is now drawing to a close. Now that the trapdoor beneath this waning universal order -- the sea lanes, the payment rails, the energy flows, the mutually incompatible eschatologies -- is finally visible, we’re moving from a world of sovereign equality into a world of gate permissions, a neo-medieval world of madmen, fools, and wanderers. A new Renaissance, if we’re lucky. Whoever controls the gate controls the future. As Teodor will now demonstrate, this isn’t altogether a bad thing... ⁠Outro music by Teahouse Radio: “Dreaming Splendid Spaces.” Enjoy the show? ⁠Buy us a coffee.⁠ Wake Island is available on all platforms.