It’s interesting about the romantic love aspect of things, because in a way it never really is private. Even when people attempt to make it private, it spills out into the collective through our many threads of connection, into our stew-pot families. Thinking of these connections as “all our relations” as Indigenous Americans might say, the effects of private intimacies become public, in the way a particular coupling can be a good thing for community or through drama, cause more problems for everyone. Thus the private is political.

About the vibes: cultivating a sense of aesthetics, or as the arch-Goth and symbolist (and sorcerer) Joseph Peladan might have it, an ethopoesis. This creation of character is critical in a time when reality is mediated by spectacle and absorbed in simulacra. The way we might create character can be embodied in our activities offline (going to art/music shows, readings, long hikes, walking our pet lobsters). Yet we have the internet for now, and one way to spread the stimmung is through this discourse, and revitalize some of these interrelated movements by getting people interested in them.

P.S.: I’m looking forward to your book, I’ve ordered a personal copy and will put in a request for the library I work at to pick it up. The 1970s were also the age of appropriate technology, a movement those of us interested in degrowth, and things like selective Luddism could glean so much from.