This might be old news but it’s kinda wild to me.
You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)
Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left “YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism” or “One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU” style of slop. Y’know, the stuff where it’s super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it’s super serious marxist critique when it’s actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.
Yeah, that sort of stuff. He’s good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.
Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he’s uncritically buying into the whole “woke ideology” narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin’s #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn’t handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn’t really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.
In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn’t faze him - doesn’t matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it’s kind of a weird pivot.
I think Peter Coffin’s angle is pretty apparent - he’s just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.
But it’s still weird to me. Maybe they’re proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they’re all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.
But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I’m not surprised if he doesn’t give a damn, doing a similar thing and he’s broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It’s giving Strasserist vibes tbh.
Luckily it’s online and not the real world, I guess?
It’s gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because “tankie redfash”, only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:
We live in interesting times.
didn't this guy spend a whole year eating nothing but different kinds of cereal
Cereal Experiments: Lain
oh god
I didn’t like that insufferable lib years back when I unfortunately learned of his existence.
I still don’t like that insufferable lib now that you’ve reminded me of his existence after years of burying him in a memory hole.
They might have been an insufferable lib back then and they might be an even-more insufferable lib now but we’ll always have memories 🥰
If that doesn’t sum up their career in the spotlight, I’m not sure what would.
Oh yeah that annoying dork ass too.
Speaking of the intellectual heavyweight Ben Burgess, here he is just a few days ago contributing to some very funny Derrida discourse on Twitter
I find this tweet really funny.
I’m not sure if nobody challenged Burgis because they didn’t want to spend the next hour or more in a heated debate on interpretations of Derrida because everyone was still too traumatised from their previous experiences where this happened, if Burgis managed to stumble onto a decent interpretation of Derrida but he wasn’t aware enough to realise this fact, or if he talked absolute nonsense but due to him being a minor celebrity or the fact that it was a high level class everyone around him decided to save face and not call him on his bullshit so instead the people in the room stared at their shoes and shifted uncomfortably in their seats before someone finally broke the awkward silence with an “Oookay, moving on…”
Every scenario I can come up with is its own sort of situational humour. I suppose it’s a neat little homage to Derrida that there’s a lot of room for interpretation in the situation he described, although I’m not sure if he’d be able to spot that.
Personally I imagine everyone was just used to zoning out until he finished talking
Lmao that also works
I know I would
If only he had realized that that was most contemporary continental philosophy outside of maybe Wittgenstein.
Lain was always a dogshit editor; almost every book put out by Zero under his tenure was full of typos, poorly sourced claims, and drivel. And a hot take, while I’m at it: Capitalist Realism isn’t very good
CR was from before his time, right? It’s an okay book, I enjoyed it and it got me back into reading political theory, but I’ve leafed through it since and it’s very mid. The term Market Stalinism is extremely funny tho. Trotskyism and its consequences
I’m not actually sure if Lain was around for Capitalist Realism; I just think it’s hilarious that Zero Books had one single hit with that book and they’ve tried to coast on it ever since
So this is the timeline, afaik:
Fisher publishes Capitalist Realism and then leaves Zero Books to start Repeater Books under Watkins.
Doug takes over at Zero when John Hunt becomes the parent publisher, and he leads them for a while. So CR was technically before Lain, it happened around the same general period of time.
John Hunt then gets taken over by Watkins, so they now control Zero, and Doug gets ousted where he joins Sublation. I’m not sure if the original Zero crew who became Repeater along with Fisher ended up getting reinstated to Zero Books when the Repeater parent company assumed control over Zero Books or what happened.
I think CR is a popular book not because it contains any really profound insights, but because it fully and shamelessly articulates a hopelessness and fear that seems based in the actual political conditions of the left
I tried reading Capitalist Realism and gave up after about 20 pages. I was wondering if that was because I’m too much of a dumbass to get it, so the idea that it just might not be worth reading fills me with hope. Thank you.
There are a few valid ideas in there; I just think it could have been an essay instead
PatSocs are usually the next biggest suckers in the room if you’ve run your course with the BreadTube audience, so not surprising.
They deserve each other
Coffin’s swan dive into the shallow end of the pool is old news. Lain I didn’t know about, but I kind of assumed, just based on his previous work and the general weightlessness of his original work. I’ll still maintain that Zero Books published a lot of interesting material, but they “fell off” as the kids say, seemingly due almost entirely to executive mismanagement.
Anyway, suffice it to say that these people are the refuse of history. “Unserious” doesn’t even begin to describe them.
No surprise there. Everyone involved with publishing Angela Nagle’s book should face some serious questions about their political convictions. Also, I didn’t know what Rockhill what’s up to now, but I guess everyone who blames French academics for the failure of the left ends up in the same place eventually.
I guess everyone who blames French academics for the failure of the left ends up in the same place eventually
Lmao
I’ve been doing some more digging and the COO of Lain’s new publishing group, Ashley Frawley is deep into the anti-woke stuff. Like really deep into it.
I haven’t been able to get a good read on her but she has said some odd things. Not entirely wrong but just that the framing doesn’t sit right with me - she said that Marx didn’t argue for people looking inwards to find their own happiness internally, which is true, but that The Communist Manifesto was written like an ode to capitalism and it extolled the virtues of capitalism, that Marx argued that capitalism has liberated us but in an incomplete fashion (which is true, technically, but it doesn’t come off as a genuine reading of Marx in totality but more as a cherry-picked one and it’s not a very historical reading for someone whose whole thing is historical materialism - if capitalism has liberated us, what has it liberated us from and where have we been delivered to?) and she says that Marx advocated for an expansion of production and consumption beyond what capitalism has been able to provide us. Which, again, is not untrue but it’s a very lopsided interpretation.
I wish I could find the whole interview where this was clipped from because if she’s responding to a question or it’s part of a broader point then I can see how she might find herself saying this but if she’s just saying this absent of any particular context then either she’s intentionally misrepresenting Marx to court an audience or she genuinely believes it then that’s no good.
She was also a bit disingenuous, I think, by saying that Marx was advocating for the expansion of production and consumption. Sure, he was doing that in the mid-to-late 1800s, as was everyone else at that time except for Malthusians and those who wanted to see a restoration of the feudal order, maybe. But just because Marx wanted to see the expansion of production and consumption back then doesn’t mean that he was talking about the economic conditions nearly two centuries later. Marx wasn’t one for making sweeping predictions about the future to the point where he would dictate economic policy for us today and it’s a fool’s game to play at what he would or wouldn’t have predicted. As for what Marx would say about the current state of the world if he were alive today, I think his first urge would be to identify that capitalism has reached a situation where it has externalised its contradictions to the environment and now it has reached a point where those externalities are threatening the existence of capitalism itself but, being what it is, it is fundamentally incapable of resolving this contradiction and thus the masses are faced with an urgent choice between socialism or (climate) barbarism. Not to play the “My dad could beat up your dad” card, but it’s hard to imagine that he wouldn’t take climate science seriously and that he wouldn’t see it as capitalism running up against a force capable of permanently hemming in the ever-expanding forces of production.
The way she talked lacked any acknowledgement of the antagonism inherent to class society. I wasn’t getting any dialectical analysis from what she was saying and whenever someone talks about Marx’s ideas without driving home the dialectical nature of his thought and how central this is, I find myself asking if they’re just simplifying it and if so, are they simplifying it to the point where they’re gutting the Marxism from Marx himself.
I wouldn’t want to call it with just the little bit that I’ve managed to find with her takes on Marx but it is enough that it makes me feel suspicious.
Peter Coffin isn’t handling the divorce well
somebody spill the tea on this
Peter Coffin went from middle of the road BreadTuber who was making winks and nods to being communist but who actively courted the BreadTube audience by hedging their bets and being mostly focused on anti-capitalist analysis and driving his concept of the “attention economy”, or something to that effect. They had a partner and maybe some kids with a woman who was… Irish? I think Irish. She featured in some of their videos, but not all that often.
Then suddenly, around the time where the Maupin/CPI spanking scandal drops, Peter undergoes a massive pivot, breaks up with their partner, wipes most of their old YouTube content, and becomes an avid Maupinite and has a new partner who features on their channel pretty regularly.
I remember coming across a clip of them talking about how… Maduro, maybe? Had name-dropped Maupin and the CPI in a speech and how the movement is kind of a big deal, gaining international recognition, and I thought that it must have been satire or part of a bit but, upon further investigation, it became obvious that they went all-in on Maupin for some reason.
I don’t really know what happened between them and their previous partner and I didn’t dig because their previous partner seemed to shy away from much media attention and I figured that she probably doesn’t need people getting really in her business over this. I’m sure it sucked and was awful and she just wants to move on with her life, which would be completely understandable.
Edit: Holy shit, I completely forgot that they had a fairly significant sketch comedy arc and got massively catfished by a troll or a team of trolls, some people arguing that they self-catfished in order to make themselves seem cool to others because they had a hot girlfriend (you wouldn’t know her - she goes to a different college), prior to their BreadTube arc.
i don’t think coffin’s turn was that sudden. in fact i think they’re a fascinating character because they put their psyche on open display and have been mocked so many time by so many people that they’re pretty much immune to shame by this point. my read on them is that they were desperate to be a celebrity (something that they openly admit to) but failed miserably at comedy and kind of had the personality of a dog turd, so they decided they’d have to become a human engagement farm (something that, again, they openly admit to), first by crusading against gamergate on Twitter, then by starting shitfights on Left Twitter, typically about cancel culture and identity politics.
the marriage is something i feel okay wildly and baselessly speculating about. i have no idea how or why Ashleigh (she’s Scottish) married and (apparently?) had kids with Peter, but the videos she first started appearing in were lightweight reaction content where she seemed incredibly tense and uncomfortable in front of a camera. My wild guess is that she had no desire to be a youtube star, but Peter recognized the attention economy value of a really hot woman, begged or cajoled her into Making Content with them. At one point they convinced her to start a channel of her own, to which she posted exactly one video (about the Joker movie) before giving up. She also had a Twitter account that went silent after she left online, but it was actually funny so I’m pretty sure it was really her and not a Peter sockpuppet.
Also I believe Peter’s story about being catfished could be true but at this point it’s more likely that they made her up.
Oh there you go, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the additional information, that clarifies a lot of things.
I never followed them closely enough to really get a decent measure of what was going on with this shift. I can just remember coming across a clip of them talking about Maupin and being astonished since it was a pretty dramatic pivot and I didn’t hear about what happened to them from anywhere, I just stumbled across the whole thing and tried to piece it together.
That definitely sounds like their wife though. I remember her being pretty awkward and uninterested in the spotlight, and since an expose about what really happened never came out from her I figured she was done with it and ready to move on.
As for the catfishing thing, I’d be inclined to believe your take. I wasn’t there when it went down, it’s all a bit clouded by history and competing claims, and it just didn’t interest me enough to investigate it for myself so I didn’t want to stake a claim in any particular narrative by representing it as fact. It’s one of those things where I didn’t feel comfortable editorialising too much since it’s not worth gambling credibility on.
i dont know whats wrong with me
Lain sucks. I’m glad that when repeater bought zero back they didn’t bring him along.
fart
Fetterman Automotive Repetitive Trauma
Lmao he got divorced
Many such cases
I didn’t know the full story on Doug Lain. The only times I heard of him and Zero Books was when Derick Varn mentioned the time they worked together and their later disagreements.
I never got into BreadTube people like Peter Coffin either. The whole BreadTube community always bored and disappointed me because it was so devoid of theory to explain the politics and economy of the present. No grand narrative or explanation of the history of theory, nor discussion of present regimes of political economy or geopolitics. Always just chasing after the “flavor of the week,” so to speak and using a text by Foucault to scry for answers. Not my thing.
Lain is absolutely cracked oh man, I was searching Rockhill on here and it’s great to find this short essay on that 😂😂😂
