A fairly long comic by Nate Powell, about iconography as a "shield against shame and trauma" and how symbols of power are being co-opted by current and future fascist paramilitary groups. My least favorite thing about the piece is the fact that it contains no recommendations on how to counteract the appropriation or subversion of pop culture symbols, but I don't have any answers for that either.
I haven't heard or seen much about the paramilitary groups in Idaho who've been sheltering the runaway Republicans from Oregon, but if I had to guess what their aesthetic and iconography look like it would be similar to the above comic. My gut (and every trend from the past few years) says that there's gonna be more of this, not less.
Ooh, that looks like a good book. Gonna add it to the list.
William Gibson has been staring over my shoulder since '84. There's a passage in Neuromancer about Ting Ting Jahes that I happened to be reading while enjoying my last packet of bought-on-a-special-roadtrip-to-the-only-asian-market-in-New-Mexico Ting Ting Jahes. I was single-digit age and there that fucker was, plucking my psyche. All the stuff in Pattern Recognition and all the stuff in Spook Country is close enough to count. It's fair to say that Bigend is Gibson's alter ego; his is a career of break bulk, of exploring the non-packetized information at all costs in a subsidized Blue Ant dream. I recognize all of it and have interacted with it quite closely; I had a ZX-80 and have held Curtas (without being able to afford them). A Klein blue jacket? Obviously that appeals (and my experience with the color is contemporaneous with the publishing of Pattern Recognition). I had a Lyft driver who was one of the marines tasked with guarding the pallets of cash that got shipped to Iraq. Fifteen years later it still haunted him. There wasn't a day in his life he didn't work through the opportunities he had to disappear with a 23lb duffel full of Benjamins.