Geoff Shullenberger

New York

Managing Editor at Compact

Managing editor @compactmag_.

Articles

The Prospects of Anti-Woke Capital

5 days ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.
The Prospects of Anti-Woke Capital

5 days ago | substackfwd.xyz | Geoff Shullenberger

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class.
Cronenberg Beyond the Grave

1 week ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

It has been a big few weeks for Canada. Just before the Liberal Party returned to power in Ottawa under the globalist technocrat Mark Carney on the basis of an improbable revival of Canadian nationalism, one of the country’s greatest living artists has bequeathed us another great work.
The Covert Theology of ChatGPT

2 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

I’ll be brief today, as I’m currently in Boulder, Colo., participating in a conference on “Renegade Futurism.” I’ll be speaking on a panel later about “AI as God,” which prompted me to revisit some things I’ve written about AI over the years. In lieu of a full post, I will republish a few parts of a newly relevant old essay on the subject, along with some brief framing remarks. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.
From the War on Terror to the War on Covid-and Back Again

3 weeks ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

A good deal of my writing in the years 2020-22 involved revisiting material I had studied in graduate school in a particular historical moment—the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s—and applying it to a new moment, that of the pandemic and its political fallout, which both resembled the prior one and did not. Compact’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The Great Neoliberal Novelist

1 month ago | compactmag.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the late literary critic Frederic Jameson argued that while the literature of the industrialized West had largely retreated from its political vocation, that wasn’t true of the great writers of the developing world.
The Long Birth Pangs of Post-Postmodernity

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

My candidate for tweet of the week comes from Putin’s (alleged) Rasputin:Dugin posted this on April 9, the day the “yippy” bond market prompted President Trump to pause most of his “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs (with China the big exception). Whether the Russian philosopher intended it this way or not, I think we can be quite precise about what he’s getting at, with some help from Stuart Jeffries’s 2021 book Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.
What did y’all think post-neoliberalism meant? vibes? papers? essays?

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a recent post, I quoted a line from Anton Jäger that has stuck with me: “The left’s real trauma might be that neoliberalism died without them actually killing it.” Jäger wrote this in March 2020, the last time we saw a stock market crash comparable to (although significantly larger than) the one occasioned this week by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
Notes on Viral Hegemony

1 month ago | compactmag.substack.com | Geoff Shullenberger

In a Washington Postcolumn this week, Shadi Hamid argues we are already at “the beginning of the end of the Trump era.” Trump still has nearly four years left in office, but according to Hamid, the “vibe shift away from the vibe shift” has commenced. After the November election, he recalls, he briefly “thought that a new era had begun—one of Trumpian hegemony,” but now, he goes on to argue, “Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment.
Notes on Viral Hegemony

1 month ago | substackfwd.xyz | Geoff Shullenberger

In a Washington Postcolumn this week, Shadi Hamid argues we are already at “the beginning of the end of the Trump era.” Trump still has nearly four years left in office, but according to Hamid, the “vibe shift away from the vibe shift” has commenced. After the November election, he recalls, he briefly “thought that a new era had begun—one of Trumpian hegemony,” but now, he goes on to argue, “Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment.