The global anti-incumbent moment is becoming its own genre of political theater

by | Nov 7, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-11-07

Ideas in Circulation

The global anti-incumbent moment is becoming its own genre of political theater

Election dispatches this week read less like reporting and more like dispatches from a shared mood: exhaustion with entrenched power, expressed differently in Detroit, Austin, and Belgrade.

What links Meek’s Michigan reporting, the Paris Review’s Texas dispatch, and its Belgrade diary is not policy but affect: a public performing its disillusionment with incumbency as spectacle, whether through a Trump-branded Senate race or Aleksandar Vučić finally facing a real opponent. Late-night comedy’s pile-on of Republicans “furiously backpedalling” from Trump after the midterms (Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon) is the domestic punchline to the same story. The throughline worth tracking into 2027: political coverage is converging with cultural coverage, treated by outlets as narrative and texture rather than just outcome — a shift that says as much about audience fatigue with conventional political journalism as it does about the elections themselves.

Automation’s human substrate is becoming visible, and it is uncomfortable

A wave of pieces this week insists on naming the labor and violence hidden beneath “intelligent” systems — from self-driving cars to military targeting software.

Aeon’s video on low-paid workers in Kenya, the Philippines, and Venezuela annotating footage to teach cars to see, and Weizman’s LRB essay on Israel’s use of AI targeting systems in Gaza, are not obviously related stories, but together they articulate a single argument now circulating widely: that “AI” is a laundering term, obscuring both the exploited human labor that trains these systems and the human costs when they’re deployed as weapons. Weizman’s point — that the discourse around algorithmic warfare risks treating the technology as the scandal rather than the scorched-earth campaign it enables — is a sharper and more unsettling claim than the usual AI-ethics hand-wringing, and it reframes the conversation away from novelty toward culpability.

Culture industries are being forced to reckon with structural abuse, not just individual villains

Russell Brand’s rape conviction and revelations about K-pop contract terms are being read as symptoms of systems, not aberrations.

The Brand conviction has produced an awkward split-screen: publishers moving fast to drop his books while streaming platforms dither over old content, a tell about which industries have built accountability infrastructure and which haven’t. Paired with the Guardian’s report on NewJeans’s contracts — which reportedly stripped away a minor’s right to “sleep, rest and free choice” — the throughline is structural: these are not simply bad actors but industries engineered to extract maximum output from vulnerable people, with scandal as the only functioning check. Expect more of this genre — structural rather than individual culpability — as the entertainment press continues digesting #MeToo’s second decade.

A quiet argument for curiosity and dilettantism against specialization and certainty

Several essayists this week are making the case, independently, for epistemic humility and wandering attention as countercultural virtues.

Phillips’s psychoanalytic argument that the superego is “the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves,” Jay Miller’s defense of the dilettante as the right anti-hero for a hyper-optimized age, and Mungiu’s irritation with films that exist only to confirm which side you’re on — these form a loose but genuine chorus against the moralizing certainty that dominates both algorithmic culture and political discourse. It’s a minor-key argument, but one likely to gain traction as audiences tire of content engineered for tribal affirmation.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

  • Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes-divisive culture-clash drama, deliberately resists both conservative and liberal self-congratulation — the rare political film trying not to flatter its audience.
  • You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary built almost entirely from extreme close-ups, is generating real debate about the ethics and aesthetics of the “true-crime face.”
  • Annie Proulx Stories: New and Selected, a career-spanning collection confirming Proulx’s singular, thorny American voice.
  • The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien, D.J. Taylor’s hybrid biography-criticism, argued by reviewers to be more interesting as literary study than life story.
  • Carnaval de Luz, U2’s new album, accompanied by a long Guardian profile in which the band frames its fiftieth year against what Bono calls a “little fascistic” new world.
  • SCTV, newly streaming on Netflix, prompting fresh appreciation (and a Dave Thomas interview) for the Canadian sketch show’s outsized influence on American comedy.

Essays Worth the Read

Eyal Weizman: Necro-Economics argues that the outrage over Israel’s algorithmic targeting systems in Gaza risks obscuring a far older and starker truth: that what’s happening is scorched-earth settler-colonial warfare, continuous with the Nakba and the genocidal campaigns of past centuries, for which AI is merely an instrument, not the cause. It’s a bracing corrective to tech-ethics framing, written with Weizman’s characteristic forensic precision.

Christopher Harding: Sometimes a man has to jump reconstructs the strange spectacle of Japan’s wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki rifling through rubbish bins in 1942, using the image as an entry point into the psychological unraveling of a man waging war on two fronts. The essay rewards attention for its tonal control — dry comedy shading into tragedy without ever losing historical rigor.

John Kerrigan: Zeno’s Tortoise makes the case for Mary Lavin, a short-story writer once ranked alongside Joyce and praised by Salinger and Welty, whose work has faded as the liberal Catholic Ireland she chronicled receded. It’s a quietly urgent act of literary recovery, the kind of criticism that sends you straight to a bookshop.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

Eyal Weizman: Necro-Economics is the piece to sit with this week. Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture, dismantles the prevailing frame around Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary NAZA — that its real scandal is Israel’s use of AI to select targets — and insists instead that the scandal is the campaign itself, a continuation of settler-colonial violence stretching back to 1948. This matters beyond Gaza: it’s a template for resisting the seduction of “novel technology” narratives that recast old violence as a new ethical frontier, a seduction currently reshaping how we talk about everything from autonomous weapons to algorithmic policing. Read against this week’s Aeon piece on invisible labor training self-driving cars, Weizman’s essay sharpens into something larger — a warning about how readily we let technical vocabulary do the work of moral evasion.