When preparing for the November 2023 performance of Assigned Earth at Birth (Episode 1 of Intrapology) I contacted a musician to ask if I could use a piece of music he'd published on Bandcamp. 

Before giving me permission, he wanted to understand the message of the piece of work I was creating, to make sure his work wasn't being used to support something he could not stand behind. After I sent him a script of the section the music would have accompanied, he had some follow-up questions. This seemed a little intense, particularly as my political alignments are pretty obvious from my website and publications, but I relished the opportunity to practice clarifying some aspects of the story and the worldbuilding. Besides, the worry about philosophical compatibility cuts both ways, so I didn't mind making my commitments clear to see if they matched with the other person.

As it happens, they did not match - in response to my answers, he politely said that he could not participate in the project. I'm fascinated by this turn of events, because I still don't actually know what it was that made the musician uncomfortable (I have a couple of guesses though). More recently, I've been listening to the audiobook of Naomi Klein's Doppelgangers, which I can already tell is going to be an important reference work for Intrapology. One of the things it is bringing home to me is how the political and discursive landscape has already shifted into a form that is unrecogniseable by old left-right divides (Klein calls this "diagonalism"). I imagine that whatever closed the door in this interaction is part of the new fault lines that divide us.

I've posted his questions and my answers on the Intrapology Patreon. I'm sure the irony will not be lost on you: I was trying to demonstrate how Intrapology aspires toward a narrative about coalition building and incommensurable worldviews, and something about how I did that highlighted a fundamental divide between us.

Read on Patreon

This is for paid subscribers to Intrapology - it only costs £3 or $3 a month, and helps me to grow the project into a series.