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

Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews 1918–1974, ed. Philip S. Foner (Citadel Press, 1974), 118.

Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby: A Novel (One World, 2021).

For brevity, I will not be able to expand on the lesbianism—but wanted to leave it here as a reminder. For a sketch, see Luce deLire, “Trans Lesbianism at 38c3,” talk, December 28, 2024, posted March 30, 2025 by Evil Philosophy, YouTube →.

See Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivi de La culture de soi, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini (Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2015), 35.

Such tyranny is a result of capitalism, but we don’t have enough space here for that.

Carl Schmitt, Die Diktatur: Von den Anfängen des modernen Souveränitätsgedankens bis zum proletarischen Klassenkampf, 8th ed. (Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 137–41.

Another good example is Trump’s January 2025 executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” →.

Knowledge is of course crucial in arms development, technological progress, disinformation campaigns, and so forth. So power does rely on knowledge, but it does not justify its political decisions based on knowledge.

Quoted in David E. Sanger et al., “Trump Addresses Venezuela, Greenland and Presidential Power in Wide-Ranging Interview,” New York Times, January 8, 2026 →.

Gregory H. Stanton, “Looking Backward into the Future: Why the United Nations Has Failed to Prevent Genocide,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs, September 19, 2024 →.

See exemplarily International Court of Justice, “Joint Declaration of Intervention Pursuant to Article 63 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (The Gambia v. Myanmar),” November 15, 2023 →.

Michael Hameleers, “Disinformation as a Context-Bound Phenomenon: Toward a Conceptual Clarification Integrating Actors, Intentions, and Techniques of Creation and Dissemination,” Communication Theory 33, no. 1 (2023): 2.

See exemplarily William J. Aceves, “Virtual Hatred: How Russia Tried to Start a Race War in the United States,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 24, no. 2 (2019): 177 →.

See also Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, “The Global Organization of Social Media Disinformation Campaigns,” Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 1.5 (2017).

Konrad Bleyer-Simon et al., How Is Disinformation Addressed in the Member States of the European Union? 27 Country Cases (European Digital Media Observatory, 2025), 8 →.

This has been the case for a long time. See Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard, Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation (Computational Propaganda Research Project, 2018) →.

Jeremy Scahill, “Netanyahu’s War on Truth,” The Intercept, February 7, 2024 →; Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel, “In a Worldwide War of Words, Russia, China and Iran Back Hamas,” New York Times, November 3, 2023 →.

Lucrezia Blas et al., “Large-Scale Detection of Multilingual Coordinated Activity on Telegram,” npj Complexity 2, no. 33 (2025) →.

Bradshaw and Howard, Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers, 13; Alina Polyakova, “The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 5 (2020): 143–44; Sy Rowlands, Landscape Analysis: What We Know on Anti-gender Movement Measures and Actors Targeting Trans People Across Europe and Central Asia (TGEU, 2023) →. See also Giuseppe Fenza et al., “Investigating Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior on Alternative Platforms During the 2024 US Election,” ICWSM Workshop Proceedings, 2025.

Giuseppe Fenza et al. “Investigating Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior on Alternative Platforms During the 2024 US Election,” ICWSM 2025 Workshop Proceedings, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence →.

S. Bradshaw and P. N. Howard, The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation, University of Oxford, Computational Propaganda Research Project.

Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, Not Engaged Argument,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 3 (2017): 486 →.

I take the term from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Harvard University Press, 1999), 259, 268—but I use it in a slightly different manner.

For more on this, see Luce deLire, “The Queer Art of Hospitality—If You Can Fuck, You Can Dance,” in Lo: Tech: Pop: Cult: Screendance Remixed, ed. Priscilla Guy and Alanna Thain (Routledge, 2024).

See Luce deLire, Spinoza on Sex, Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

McKenzie Wark, Raving (Duke University Press, 2023), 47.

Soroush Vosoughi et al., “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (2018) →; Alexandre Bovet and Hernán A. Makse, “Influence of Fake News in Twitter During the 2016 US Presidential Election,” Nature Communications 10, no. 7 (2019) →.

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity (Basic Books, 2025).

For an audio recording, see →.

For another example, see Luce deLire, “Other Palestines—On Khaled Jarrar,” in Khaled Jarrar—Works of Art (forthcoming 2026).