xmas / new years update (Patreon)

As we enter the taint of the year (the weird no-mans-land week between xmas and nye that everyone just calls "the holidays" or whatever) I thought I'd give a little update, let everyone know where I'm at professionally and personally. I have a video round the corner and will probably have the script for it up in the next couple of days, so you $3+ patrons watch out for that, but there's lots I can say about what's coming up next year and I think I want to describe it in a wider context because I don't just make content in a vacuum nor do I publish it into a void.

Projects:

This video immediately coming up is about Ye West, it's called Ye West and the Fascists Who Love Him. It'll probably be fairly long even though I've put it together quite quickly because it'll use a lot of clips from his interviews on far-right platforms and I've also interviewed FD Signifier and Ladykightthebrave for American black and jewish perspectives on what's happening, and I'll use clips from those chats too. The full versions of those interviews will go up on here in the next week some time and after the video is out I might publish them to YouTube as well.

I think it's really important that someone with a platform like mine should talk about Ye West, because what he's doing is creating real actual danger for Jewish people in the real world, and the liberal mainstream simply isn't going to respond in a way that will make Jews safer, so I want to not only publicly make my stance (which should be obvious) clear, but call on other leftists to make more of a serious effort to defend Jewish communities.

Politics is not a spectrum with cohesive right and left wings united by a centre, if it ever was, and we have to look at the right wing project on its own terms, as well as our left wing project on its own terms too if we're ever to be serious about achieving our political goals. This isn't about a range of acceptable politics in the voter base, or the overton window or whatever - although of course, who siezes power electorally matters a lot too - this is about the safety of marginalised people from violent fascists, and on our side it's about trying to build a better world. This same understanding is informing a lot of my perspective and my politics and therefore my work going forward. I'm hoping with this Ye project the script will be up in a few days, the video will be up around New Years and the video will be out on YouTube in early January.

As I've been saying for a while, I'm working on a video about climate doomerism and how we can free ourselves from the mind prison of fatalist thinking. It's called The World Is Not Ending. Part of it is already filmed, but the essay is far from finished at the moment. It'll be similar in length to Conspiracy on the Left but I think although it's still reactive (to doomer sentiments) it's much more of a platform for my own political thoughts than an analysis of others. The climate crisis makes it incredibly clear that we have to move beyond the glacial mechanisms of politics that most people think of as the whole available range of political action and engage in direct action if we want to make real change. I've become quite angry at the paralysing mechanisms of electoral politics over the last year as a trans person living in the UK, as a communist, and as a human being living on this planet, and I've come to see doomerism/political fatalism as primarily a symptom of that. This essay is going to be my best effort to inspire real change in how people think in order to broaden their imaginations, which I think will also help them stop thinking that everything is hopeless. I don't have a clear timeline for the release of this essay because I want it to be just right, but I expect February or March roughly.

Media analysis! Remember when I used to do that? I'm making an essay about Star Trek DS9 called Star Trek DS9 Gave Me Brain Worms which will come out some time next spring or summer. It'll be my main focus after The World Is Not Ending, and it's basically an examination of the whole series, why people love it so much but also the deep, deep flaws that plague it and what I think it all says about Star Trek more broadly. Star Trek has always meant a lot to me, and since transition I've found a new love for DS9 that I could never appreciate before, and I want to explore that because I think the difference between DS9 and TNG really captures a shift in my politics and understanding of the world that I can't quite put to words straightforwardly yet but I hope to be able to do in my video. My biggest hope is that the essay will get more people into Star Trek because I unironically believe that a society in which more people watch Star Trek is a more ethical society haha

I have a project about Eugenics called Eugenics: A History of Failing to get Smarter that I've wanted to make for years now and I think in the later part of 2023 it'll be a big focus for me. Understanding eugenics brings together such a huge complicated history of bigotry and class oppression that I think exploring it in a video essay will really help people understand our contemporary politics and lots about the modern world a lot better. No idea when this one will come out, just some time after the other things, but I really hope that in 2023 I'll finally make this essay, because I've been meaning to for a long, long, long time.

My friend Andi and I are writing a project which is a sort of spiritual successor to Conspiracy on the Left about Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Trump, the TERF movement and other modern day apocalypse cults. At the moment the project is called Apocalypse Preachers, which may change but may not. What I said earlier in this post about observing the right wing to limit harm to marginalised communities isn't all we can learn from looking at death-cult politics, and I think this project aims to explore that. I think that understanding conservatism as a kind of cultic milieu with various cult outlets is a good step towards being able to save more people from the bizarre obfuscations of conservative politics and raise class consciousness. When I say it's the spiritual successor to Conspiracy on the Left it's both because it focuses on the cultic milieu and the spread of weaponised unrealities in modern politics, and to a lesser extent because that focus has led us to frequently citing another book by the author who wrote Culture of Conspiracy, which provided the academic backbone to Conspiracy on the Left. Apocalypse Preachers will definitely be out late last year.

Monster Men will continue to be updated throughout 2023, I have big plans for it and I might even write a whole separate post just for MM to be honest

For those of you still on the hook waiting for me to release the first instalment of Cyberpunk 2022, my 9 essay collection about how we improve the online left: well, it's now gonna be Cyberpunk 2023, instead of 2022, and I do hope to have the first 3 essays out pretty soon. I'll talk about the delays in a minute but I've written a lot of this project, and although Elon Musk buying Twitter threw a little spanner in the works in terms of my analysis of digital anthropology, the first part is actually nearly ready, and I'd love to have it out some time in either January or February, but please don't hold me to that.

Delays:

You might have noticed I didn't release many videos this year, especially in the last 6 months. Lots of things have been going on - I met a girl, i fell in love, I had surgery, my dad died, I found out a lot of stuff about myself, grew and changed a lot and also endured a lot of trauma, frankly. A few days ago the girl I met 6 months ago and I broke up. She was the first other trans woman I've ever loved, and she helped me love myself. I love her to bits and I miss her, but it was the healthy thing to do for both of our sakes, so I feel like shit right now but I'm going to be okay. If I'm honest, I was consumed in that relationship in a very unhealthy way that was slowing down my work a lot, and I can already see I'm going to be a lot more creative now that I've got the emotional space I need. I'm not blaming her, like I said a lot of whacky fucking nonsense happened (I spent a month of 2022 in Armenia!) but I do know that things are gonna be quite different for me professionally and personally from the start of the new year. 

I'm gonna be getting back to regular streaming in the new year, I'm going to press on with all these projects, but I want to be totally clear that I'm also putting lots of my needs first, which as it turns out I've been really fucking bad at basically my whole life haha, so while I'm setting out all these milestones as hopeful release dates and goals, nothing is in stone, and I will simply work at a pace that is healthy and safe for me and my loved ones from now on. My politics and my perspective on the responsibility of having a large platform has evolved a lot during transition and especially in the last year (shoutout to the girl I met, she was and is deeply special) and I really hope to get to a place in the next few years where I'm able to publish works that are primarily intended as political philosophy, as well as continuing my work with Red Planet to help show people ways to organise and change things for the better.

What to watch for:

-Ye vid should be out on the Sophie From Mars main channel soon, but up here early for $2+ patrons.
-Streams will resume in January on http://twitch.tv/sophie_frm_mars once or twice a week, depending on my availability
-Red Planet will be streaming every Sunday 8pm-11pm UK on http://redplanet.team starting January 8th
-Cyberpunk 2023 part 1 should be up on here and perhaps on Medium in the first three months of 2023.

I hope you're all having a beautiful holiday season no matter where you are, who you're with or how you celebrate.

You deserve everything, never let them tell you otherwise.

Sophie x