The Consolation Nexus
Yes, things are terrible. So: what's next?
It’s an oldie and it’s a goodie, but there might be a few of you who don’t know it.
Anyway, happy new year? (Insert gallows laughter here.)
To stay level-headed, I have been looking for consolation this year, the perspective that helps make (broadly gestures) this all feel less singularly apocalyptic.
I recently watched Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat (extraordinary), an Oscar-nominated documentary and editing masterclass about the thwarted attempts for Congolese independence in the 60s and the soft power used by the American government sending jazz musicians overseas as ambassadors of goodwill, which reminded me that all eras are full of corrupt lying governments that are complicit in ruining lives, and that our times are not special or unique in their broad strokes.
I take some schadenfreudean pleasure in the Elon Musk vs Steve Bannon falling out, knowing that these two uniquely terrible people seemingly cannot coexist in the Trump administration and that one of them (currently Bannon) will simultaneously be shut out of said administration whilst having enough power to undermine the other. A coalition built on hating others only holds together when everybody hates the same people, it turns out.
But mostly I’ve been thinking about the importance of connection, and in between being overwhelmed with work (for which I’m endlessly grateful after the longest quiet patch of my career, even if it’s only lasting another 10 weeks or so - get in touch if you’ve got any work for later in the year!) and heading off to the avalanche of screenings of Oscar contenders, I’ve been thinking about how to build better connections and support structures in my community.
Connection has come up a lot in my current work project (which is, loosely, about mental health - more about it closer to air date), and what I’ve been watching and learning reinforces a lot of my existing belief that what most humans really want is belonging and connection. The corollary to that being: if they don’t find it in good places, either they’ll find it in bad places, or else they won’t find it and they’ll wither.
And we’re in poor times for connection. On the one hand, there’s dispiriting events like the election of terrible fucking governments in America and New Zealand that leave people feeling defeated and diminished and not looking outwards. Then, there’s the sickening rot that’s settled in to every major social media source and digital behemoth we once considered value neutral and the virtue signaling by their overlords, whether it be by Musk’s “Roman salute” and Nazi jokes or Meta changing their rules to permit trans hatred. I haven’t left Meta in disgust (bailed on Twitter the moment they let that sink in), but I’m there a lot less.
(I am on Bluesky, but I have done a *lot* of muting to not feel like I’m walking into a high-volume outrage echo chamber. I don’t criticize people for being outraged, mind. I simply can’t absorb that much without breaking. Even if, ironically, I can’t help but be outraged or amplify posts about outrage now and again.)
So there’s that system decay. There’s also the fact that I’m middle-aged and friends are going through losses of loved ones and health crises, because bodies are transient things and we all die but that is basically impossible to truly comprehend while still operating on a day to day basis, and these crises demand a lot and drive us inward. Plus the economic precarity that permeates the screen sector that I work in, where the phrase “survive til ‘25” has been replaced with “ok, we’re here, now what the hell?”.
So much of my overlapping communities in film, art, music and writing - not just the creators, but the appreciators - feel increasingly disconnected. And that’s suffocating.
Intuitively, I think a lot of people know this. But the ecosystem that connects creators - which is what I’m going to speak to here, largely - to both each other and to audiences - is impoverished and splintered, both digitally and physically. To the former: in the time between the release of Jake in 2014 and Gut Instinct in 2024, most of the places that reviewed the former no longer exist. In their place, I have something like twenty-five music and film Substacks and Patreons that I subscribe to in the culture sector or adjacent, some of which have very lovingly covered Gut Instinct, to a fractional and much more targeted audience. (If there’s a 2024 Aotearoan equivalent of Pantograph Punch or The Lumière Reader, I am ignorant of it.)
Both virtually and in real life, things feel increasingly fragmented. There are exceptions, communities that have grown as our other sources of connection collapse. One of the most successful I know of is the Pan-Asian Screen Collective. I’ve yet to visit Poco Moto, but they seem do be doing some very cool stuff for musicians.
And undoubtedly there’s lots that I don’t know about. I went to see The Bemsha Swing at Whammy last week and stumbled into Sweet Treats Punx, a “sweet FREE not-for-profit, volunteer-run, punk music and art community monthly (for now) party”, where a Brazilian (I think?) performer spoke about the importance of community building and their successful attempts to not just bring Spanish language to stand-up comedy and theatre but grow an audience around it in Auckland. How many communities like this don’t I know about?
There’s people already fighting this fight in the screen sector. Tom Augustine runs his monthly film club at the Capitol. F. Theodore Elliott has been working hard for a while with his Aotearoa Independent Film screening events, and has upped his game with his latest Substack, shining a lot on some of the various small cinema-related communities - Dead Signal Film Club, Koha Cinema Club, and Auckland Table Reads.
And yet: these IRL and virtual efforts all feel, to me, like fragments. Fragments that could be a mosaic, a totality much bigger than the sum of their parts.
The Consolation Nexus, yes, we’re getting to that.
The term came to me as I searched for an antonym for the Torment Nexus. Because what that tweet captures is the absolutely enshittified way that every terrible idea seems to be made into reality for no fucking good reason. Like, say, an AI powered spice dispenser.
(This does not appear to be a joke. Then again, the Enron home nuclear reactor got me for a hot minute.)
We need to envision the opposite of a torment nexus, and we need to build it.
Consolation prizes carry the sense of “well, you didn’t win, but at least you got this”. And if you care about horrific human beings not running major Western democracies? Well, you sure as shit didn’t win. So all of us with that belief can only construct a positive world view in this sense of consolation. Yes, vulnerable people of all kinds will have their lives ruined in a myriad of different ways. And where this can be fought, it should be fought.
But to disconnect and give up hope is what they want. So from a direction of building a coalition for positive change -
- and you will have to excuse me for jumping between “how to band creatives together for better outcomes” and “changing the world by making things better”, but as a long-time punk who believes in punk ideals, I don’t think those two are unrelated and in opposition at all -
- we need the capacity for hope, for vision, for building what comes next when this hyper-capitalist nationalist hate-filled technobabble-laden shitshow ultimately collapses. And the promise of that vision is our consolation.
But there’s also the idea of consoling - bringing solace and comfort. Nexus, meanwhile, is just a fancy word for connection.
So: what does a Consolation Nexus look like? A place where the fragmented activists and community organisers building connections virtually and IRL become more aware of each other? A place where those feeling disconnected can access and feel welcomed?
To me, it’s something big and small at the same time. If the last decade has shown anything, it’s that positive change will only come from the bottom up, and it happens with individuals interacting, discovering common cause, and sparking larger things.
But this is all conceptual language, and what it means pragmatically, I don’t really know. This is all just ping-ponging around my brain.
So this is my provocation to you: what would you want from a Consolation Nexus? And how do we build it?
Listening: Rob Brown, Brandon Lopez and Juan P Carletti, Walkabout
Incidentally, it was this line in his bio that sparked me doing this post now, one of several I’ve been sitting on: “The real mystery is why more people aren’t talking about Rob. But then again, it’s no mystery at all. Rob’s too busy mastering the saxophone to spend time curating his online persona. He speaks through spontaneous group composition, not Facebook or Instagram. And that’s what you’ll hear on this album.”
Reading: Steve Smith, Night After Night (the Substack that introduced me to the above record) and Noel Meek (ed.), Archive Fever (a collection of 90s fanzine interviews with NZ noise musicians and a reminder of how a small scene can make an international splash)
Watching: David Lynch: The Art Life. RIP. If I start talking about him this will get twice as long, so instead, I’ll just post this.
I'm not sure if this is the attitude you're encountering on Bluesky, but a lot of people on social media write as though the more hopeless they are, the more progressive they are. I don't even know if it's entirely conscious.