Critique Is Over, Morality Is Dead, and Surreal Utopias Are Where It’s At

The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.
—Paul Robeson, 19371

A nimble mind can still uncover the politics to justify its own selfishness.
—Torrey Peters, 20212

Intellectuals used to publicly critique the powerful on moral grounds. Today, both critique and morality have become dysfunctional—for perfectly political and material reasons. I argue that, for political gains, we should now craft surreal utopias—hospitable, euphoric, lesbian.3

1. Critique Is Over

Critique can “speak truth to power” in two ways: It can argue its points, or it can appeal to (often moral) preconceptions or pre|judices (held before judgment). Let’s start with critical arguments, such as “human conduct destroys the planet, therefore human conduct must change.” This critique can work—if power legitimizes its conduct through knowledge.4 “I am right and therefore I act like this.” Should political power cease legitimating its conduct through knowledge, critique would lose its political impact.

Capitalism submits everything to the logic of private property, aka commodification: “I can exclude everybody from the use of my stuff” goes the idea of private property. Applied to thoughts and beliefs, we get: “This is my belief—never mind what anyone else says!” In this sense, opinions are the property form of thought. “It’s just my opinion!” allegedly immunizes one from external scrutiny—such as critique. In other words: The commodification of thought exempts individuals from the obligation to take account of what other people say—and to learn from them. It debilitates the mental conditions of critique. In short: Capitalism makes you stupid.

Another cause for the erosion of critique is tyranny, understood as the concentration of political power in the hands of a single person.5 Here, power justifies itself.6 Where knowledge is not required to justify power, critique will have no political effect. Again, it breeds stupidity. This is why Trump and his trum|pets do not argue their points. For allegedly, they operate as a direct expression of sovereign power above and beyond all justification. In this sense, the tyrant’s immunity to reason is not a bug, but a feature of a new order where power claims direct access to truth without detour through propositional procedures.7 Arguments are beneath them.

To sum up: Critique as political argumentation requires the power-knowledge link. But both capitalism and tyranny unglue the power-knowledge connection. And without power-knowledge, the age of political critique is over.8

2. Morality Is Dead

In the absence of viable argumentative critique, appeals to moral feelings may seem the next best option. And really, this is where the tide is going—and across the political spectrum. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me” is how Donald Trump summarized this condition.9 In a similar sense, “it’s genocide—you need to stop this!” appeals to familiarity with an ultimate and unquestionable moral value that commands immediate and indisputable compliance. Likewise, “protect the children!,” “protect the women!,” “trans-ideological lunacy!,” and the incessant flood of digital images of global misery are meant to trigger moral affects such as empathy or outrage or guilt. It would seem that we live in a post-critical age of hyper-morality.

Yet this morality lacks political impact. Consider the following 2024 quote by Gregory H. Stanton, author of “The 10 Stages of Genocide” and founder of Genocide Watch: “The default policy of diplomats and world leaders when there are warning signs of genocide remains to do nothing and wait until the genocide is underway. Even then, because the cost will be so high: do nothing.”10 We can see this currently in Myanmar (2017 and ongoing). Other than in the case of Palestine, virtually all Western powers are convinced that the military of Myanmar is committing a genocide against the Rohingya in Rakhine state—and they are public about it.11 Yet they still did not and do not act in any meaningful way. Western politics on climate catastrophe indicate the same: With few exceptions, morality has little political effect.

Why? It’s capitalism! Politicians do it for the polls, the lols, the votes, the ‘gram, the money, or to hate-bait. What matters is mostly the social response. In other words, beliefs as private property, aka opinions, become commodities, meaning: They are valued primarily in relation to other beliefs, to what others believe and to their immediate effects. As long as genocides, climate collapse, and suffering minorities do not translate into immediate losses for acting politicians, our suffering is simply too cheap.

Furthermore, morality has been highjacked by mass digital propaganda. Unlike critique, the main goal of digital propaganda is often not to convince you of any particular claim.12 It is, rather, to escalate high-stakes political conflicts to incapacitate political discourse in general. Thus, during the 2016 and 2020 US federal elections, Russian actors supported both Black Lives Matter and white supremacist social media accounts to provoke an escalation.13 This does not mean that Black Lives Matter was not legit—it was and remains so. But it does mean that the constant emotional escalation on social media and the ensuing impossibility to even talk with one another about delicate topics is subject to geopolitical interests.14 

Let me repeat: Digital propaganda appeals to affectively and morally charged topics that will have an overall divisive effect regardless of being true or false.15 Even if the original content is legitimate, artificial amplification creates a false impression of relevance, popularity, consensus, urgency, and opposition.16 Of course, this is even more the case when opposing actors push opposing content. For example, since October 7, 2023, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine content has been heavily pushed by various international actors.17 At times, digital propaganda is even automated.18

Regardless of the legitimacy or moral accuracy of such messaging, its heavy rotation and the ensuing emotional impact are subject to geopolitical engineering from multiple sides,19 even on smaller social media platforms such as Fediverse, Gab, and Minds.20 Already in 2019, a global study by Oxford University found digital propaganda in seventy countries, disseminated by at least forty-four governments, among them ministries and militaries.21 China was already employing between 250,000 and two million people for this purpose back in 2017.22 Nothing indicates that these numbers have gone down since.

By amplifying content that exists independently (i.e., not faked into existence by a troll factory, which includes: your content), operators can claim they’re merely “sharing” or “discussing” content rather than creating propaganda. This perfect blend between digital propaganda and digital democratic discourse disables digital morality: There is no expression on social media that wasn’t co-constituted by some dimension of cyber warfare. Meanwhile, that real engagement still exists is the perfect cover for digital propaganda: Blurry lines provide better cover than all-out fake content. And inversely, the effect of obvious “fake news” is that you feel more secure around what you think of as trusted sources—it’s a distraction. Overall, our form of political communication is essentially gunfire.

The twentieth-century intellectual used morality to counter political power. In the twenty-first century, morality has become a lubricant for hybrid warfare. What looked like hyper-morality from afar turns out to be post-moralism: the depletion of morality as a political tool. Surrender is not an option of course. We must state our position wherever that has impact. Yet the twenty-first-century intellectual must not be reduced to an instrument of international warfare. 

3. Surreal Utopias

The commodification of thoughts into opinions destroys our critical capacities. We no longer learn critique as a kind of discourse. The constant exposure to an incessant flood of moral catastrophes debilitates our mental capacity to imagine a world outside of the latest drama (Gaza, Iran, ICE, anti-trans hate, etc.). Both the commodification of thoughts and the incessant flood attack your mental apparatus. This erosion of resources for critique and morality is epistemic violence.23 The effects are depression and brain rot.

Capitalism is a cause of this disaster. It is based on private property and commodification. Hospitality can fix the structural problems of private property and commodification. When I have friends over, I don’t count minutes or drinks—if I do, it’s an appointment. At a rave, I don’t count hours, moves, or substances. Sexuality is my favorite kind of hospitality: We are simultaneously guests and hosts at and in each other’s bodies, without giving up self-ownership. Yet while private property rests on exclusion, hospitable ownership implies the joyful encounter with, in, and through others.24 At its peak, hospitality is euphoric: immersive, wholistic joy that gives a sense of infinity—there’s no end to what can happen.25

“A rave is just a pocket in time in which there’s more time.”26 And so are hospitable dinner parties and hot, hot sex. The indeterminacy of the moment becomes a source of euphoria—a pocket of joy in which there’s more joy. Queer and trans sexuality is emblematic because it cannot assume who likes or dislikes what. More space for pockets. Queer and trans embodiments are emblematic because they cherish hospitable euphoria as a guiding star in the absence of moral certainty.

“What’s that?”
“My genitals”
“I’m not familiar …”
“That’s OK, we don’t have to … ”
“No, no—I’m curious. Just thought I’d let you know.”
“Do you want me to introduce you?”
“Yes.”

A world geared towards euphoric hospitality … If you think, “That’s impossible, I shouldn’t waste my time on it,” note how you embrace the status quo as absolute necessity. Capitalism and disinformation debilitate our power of imagination and our capacity to collaborate outside of transactional encounters. The result is a traumatic attachment to present miseries in the absence of alternatives.

Utopian thinking as a collective practice can fix these miseries. Utopian imagination concerns creative solutions for the pressing problems of our times—in whole or in part. Yet private utopias remain limited to individual capacities. And yesterday’s utopias have already lost their political appeal. Utopian thinking must be collective and ongoing. It needs an artistic hive mind through which we hospitably de-commodify ourselves together.

These utopias will probably seem surreal. That should excite us. Their surreality is a symptom of the incapacitation of our political imagination strung to “efficiency.” It means we are moving in the right direction. Furthermore, surreality makes utopias travel faster than truth.27 Its novelty attracts like disinformation does—though without the falsity. It’s our winning ticket. We can adjust to reality once we have unlearned our traumatic attachment to the downward death spiral of the present. It’ll take a period of retraining the imagination to even get to the point where we can invent something interesting. Until then, don’t leave the crazy future genre to the tech bros.28 Let’s stake our claim. Surreality guides the way beyond brain rot and involuntary algorithmic bootlicking in the service of geopolitical actors. 

Take as an example Dream Laws, a recent performance by music-based artist Callaz at Cittipunkt Berlin.29 After she sang out some of her self-made laws in the style of neue musik, audience members were invited to submit their own proposals via an online form accessible through a QR code. We then sang them together (to much laughter), followed by an engaging conversation about the future. Here are some examples.30

“Imagination is valued like water.”

“All cultural institutions (libraries, museums, theaters, etc.) are open 24/7 and can be used without having to spend money there.”

“People don’t blame each other and always analyze power before being assholes.”

“Writing laws is a subject in schools so as to encourage citizens to perceive themselves as lawmakers.”

“All laws have to be written in illegible handwriting and nobody may interpret or claim to understand the law.”

“When your conditions no longer support your flourishing, you may receive new ones without submitting a request!”

“Every time someone decides to start a war they hear a loud boooo inside their head.”

“All university-related debt is hereby eliminated.”

“HRT in vending machines.”

“Whoever comes out of a toxic marriage gets a trip to New Zealand.”

“Government who?”