Russell Brand's Conspiracy Grift

The twisted rhetoric of an amoral narcissist

Today I feel this urge to write about — respond to — so many things. I fear we have crossed some threshold beyond which it becomes impossible to re-establish coherence as a society. How extraordinary that the Internet, which seemed, initially, such a positive force for individual and collective evolution, seems most responsible for causing this breakdown. I recommend Yannis Varfoukanis’ important new book, Technofeudalism. He proposes we have actually exited Capitalism and entered a new form of economy based on control of our identity, attention, and consciousnesss via the digital realm. Here is one new interview with him where he presents his ideas.

Terence McKenna talked about the moment when you realize you have taken far too big a dose of a psychedelic to have any hope of controlling what’s coming. You just have to give up, surrender into it. We seem to have gotten there, now, as a “civilization” (if that is what this is?). We see things melting away without the capacity to respond meaningfully.

In “We’ve Lost the Ability to See Reality”, David Farrier explores the proliferation of AI-created deep fakes that distracted online people, increasingly, respond to as if they are real. This will only get worse in the coming years, he proposes, increasingly turning everyone’s brains to mush. “It’s as if reality is being viewed through a heavy fog, eyes unfocussed; staring through things, not at things,” Farrier writes. Deep fakes will be used to tilt elections, hack passwords, intimidate and destroy lives — they are already being used to do these things. A few weeks ago, a fake AI Joe Biden robo-called thousands of voters in New Hampshire and told them not to vote in the Primary.

Meanwhile, my former celebrity friend, Russell Brand… What happened to him?! I am still in shock. I’ve never seen such utter moral degeneration. Even physically, he looks different… like a tinplate huckster, staring out at his 6.75 million “awakening wonders” with a guilty addict’s false-messianic grifter intensity.

Russell, if you are reading this: I am here for you. I still care about you. Please reach out any time. We can still go to the Amazon together and drink ayahuasca, as we discussed long ago (you were too scared back then). You can purge whatever diabolical critters have infested your mind and soul. You do not have to be a seven-day-a-week shill for MAGA, Putin, Tucker Carlsen — an Alex Jones in training. You don’t need to trawl the bottom of the Internet ocean just to increase your “likes” and “subs.”

I suppose this is what ultimate sell outs do to make money and hold onto their decaying fame? I can’t believe it is worth it. In Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein offers “a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like: Narcissism(Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right-wing meltdown.” This seems to sum up Russell’s seven-year swivel from Leftist neo-messiah to MAGA shill. Where Russell — a hyper-intelligent amoral narcissist — was once a lackey to British television and Hollywood, maximizing his celebrity within those systems and structures by using provocative sexist tropes, he is now doing the same in the new media world defined by our Technofeudalist overlords, shamelessly shimmying to the tune of Elon Musk’s Right Wing populism and Youtube’s algorithms.