Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake.

(Lest you think I’m pretending not to be complicit in this stuff too, the last movie I saw was a bunch of restored cinecam footage from 1972, depicting various stages of the recording of Neil Young’s breakthrough Harvest album, fifty years ago.)

Now, maybe you’re thinking “but apparently Andor is really good, and has an anti-fascist subtext which isn’t even very sub!” And, you know, great; that sure sounds better than the increasingly infantile, endlessly extruded and impeccably merchanidiseable product that has marked that franchise for hell knows how long.

But it’s still fanservice if you’re the fan being served, you know?

And how the hell did we end up in a cultural epoch where “franchise” is an approving term, or at least one with a presumed ethical neutrality? I’m pretty sure most folk celebrating the politics of Andor would also be broadly supportive of ongoing strikes among workers at Starbucks and similar businesses… y’know, franchises, pre-formed accumulative automata which rely on the comforting recognition of a ubiquitous brand to sell stepped-on product using commodified labour whose providers are afforded the absolute minimum of dignity afforded by law, and sometimes not even that?

“But Paul, Andor is a good story with a good message; why should we care about its being a franchise or not?”

Because in celebrating it we are celebrating first and foremost capital’s indefatigable ability to recuperate critique of itself. An anti-fascist story in the Star Wars franchise is an anti-fascist story that enriches the Disney empire—and yes, my using the term “empire” is a very deliberate textual allusion. An anti-fascist Star Wars story is Che Guevara’s face peering out from the front of a T-shirt made of cotton which was watered by aquifers in ever-more-dessicated countries, ring-spun and sewn on machines manned by children in sweat-shops, shipped from half a world away and sold in a mall you drove to… and it doesn’t even credit the photographer.

But OK, let’s leave aside the whole angry postmodern neoMarxist stuff, and note instead some of the comments in this Metafilter thread, along the lines of “this imagined world is great, it’s so capacious, you could set almost any story there: what if Cheers, but in the Star Wars universe? Miss Marple, but in the Star Wars universe? Saving Private Ryan, but in the Star Wars universe?”

Why is that so much more appealing than Cheers or Miss Marple in some other universe entirely, however more or less like the one in which we actually live? Why is that so much more appealing than the prospect of a story which can’t be reduced to a high-concept elevator pitch through the use of comparisons to things that have been successful before?

Why do we keep drinking coffee at Starbucks, instead of the little indie alternative?

“Ah, well, that’s easy, Paul: Starbucks achieves economies of scale due to ruthless business practices, meaning that the indie places that don’t get squeezed out completely have to either be more expensive or follow a similar process of rational commercial efficiency to the point that they become all but indistinguishable from Starbucks. And I don’t like that, but all the same, sometimes I just want to get an affordable coffee from a convenient location, y’know?”

Well, sure. At least you get to feel a bit better about it when they have a pride flag in the window, or when their birdsite account says something cute about social justice values, right? What if Starbucks, but with a Che T-shirt?

Starbucks with a Che T-shirt is still fucking Starbucks.

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The paradigmatic logic of fracking extends beyond culture, as is shown by the cheerful exposition by assorted THORT LORDS of the latest in “artificial intelligence”, which are nothing to do with “intelligence”, but rather amusement-arcade interfaces to vast statistical models of a certain subset of the corpus of written texts in certain languages. This is being framed by an army of useful idiots as the next step in “knowledge production”, clever pundits not clever enough to recognise (as Alan Jacobs noted a few days back) that they are in essence proudly proclaiming their own economic redundancy… but also their own intellectual bankruptcy.

For the Noah Smiths of the world to behold the statistically-probable regurgitation of what has been written before on a given topic and judge it “pretty close to good enough” is for them to concede that they have never really been much more than a brand name for a particular set of assumptions and conceptual connections, the Starbucks pumpkin-spice soy latte of opinions which can reliably handed out from a window somewhere in the strip-mall that is a masthead like that of the New York Times, to customers who will routinely complain about the drink and its price and the business model of the strip-mall, but who go back day after fucking day and buy it anyway.

“This is the future of knowledge production”, we are told by people who have apparently never known that there is no knowledge without a knower; who assume that statistically-probable patterns of data are, if not actually equivalent to thought, then indistinguishable enough for it not to make much difference; whose own failure to interpret what they read (rather than simply accepting the press-release and the aggregate positions of their fellow punditry at face value) leads them to conclude that interpretation is just a notion blown up out of all proportion by foreign theorists whose books are notoriously impenetrable and therefore almost certainly valueless, because as eny fule kno, if you can’t have it explained to you in two minutes in familiar words of fewer than five syllables, then it’s almost certainly wrong and anyway probably not worth knowing, because the truth is simple and if it isn’t simple then it can’t possibly be true, and I’m damned if I’m going to actually have to think my way through things, because thinking is hard and besides no one will pay me for it and anyway we have machines to do that now.

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We live in a culture that has elevated a shibboleth to the status of a moral imperative, a suitcase word to the status of teleology. And apparently the apogee, the ultimate extant expression of this culture of “innovation” is a vast, glacier-melting machine which takes a few sentences as the basis for its outputting of texts whose composition is predicated on the statistical likelihood of the correlation of words in certain orders in all the texts (or, more accurately, a hugely biased set of texts in a limited set of languages) with which the machine has been fed.

Or, more bluntly, the apogee of “innovation” is the production of texts which are by definition derivative of and limited by what has been written (by some people) before. What results might we have achieved by spending all that money and using all those resources to instead train and support human beings—maybe even many different sorts of human beings!—in the work of reading, learning, thinking and writing?

We will never know, because such results are unpredictable, unquantifiable, unprofitable. Such results contain the threat of novelty, the possibility of producing things that do not fit within the comforting bellcurve of what is already understood, whose means of immediate and remunerative exploitation is not apparent in advance of their arrival. Such results contain the possibility of arguments which cannot be deflected or defeated with the suite of ritualised discursive kata which has come to pass for thinking.

Which is to say that the ultimate expression of “innovation” as secular religion is the systematic eradication of the very possibility of producing something which cannot already be conceived of, and—as a byproduct of its own blinkered, anthropocentric and ruthlessly quantified conception of Progress, for which “innovation” is merely the synonym used by those who (secretly, or openly) believe that philosophy is a frivolous parlour game played with words in comparison to their own skilled and godlike manipulation of matter and energy, and who thus project their own intellectual inadequacies onto the machines which they mistake for their children, and call it “intelligence”—the conscious decision to lock ourselves into a solipsistic spiral of narcissistic self-regard and hubris. What could we possibly need to know that we do not know already? What could we possibly want to say but what has been said before, said more simply?

The use of the word “innovation” is the surest mark of reactionary anti-thought at this current moment in time. The more that an entity (individual, institutional, or corporate) uses that word, the more a creature and a sustainer of the status quo they reveal themselves to be.