Meet My Publisher
Sam Bankman-Fried will join a proud legacy ... just not in the way he was hoping for.
I have been given the go-ahead from my publisher to go fully public with our deal, so I’m very excited to announce it to my subscribers here first. My book about Sam Bankman-Fried, under the working title “Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried and the Tech Utopians,” will be published in the fall of 2025 by Repeater Books.
Hopefully some of you appreciate the magnitude of this. Repeater is an incredibly prestigious and renowned boutique press, cofounded by philosopher and essayist Mark Fisher. Read on for an introduction to Repeater …
But in brief: Holy Fuck.
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For a writer of my particular stripe, being invited to publish a book with Repeater is like being asked to become the 9th member of the Wu-Tang Clan: these are the absolute best people to do it in the contemporary era. They are targetted, they are incisive, they are expansive, and most of all, they are fearless. They are also a nexus of people - an intellectual movement, some would call it - whose work I’ve been devouring as a fan for most of my adult life.
Repeater is also the embodiment of my own central ideal as a writer: they publish grittily intellectual books, which scale the highest heights of weird theory and structural analysis, without succumbing to the allure of opaque academic jargon. They write smart books for smart people - not just for people with the right training, background, and standing.
In this sense, Repeater is the best and maybe only possible home for a version of this book that might truly fulfill the ambition I harbored when I left academia and transitioned into journalism just over a decade ago: to capture radical, challenging ideas in engaging, creative, fun writing.
The starting point for understanding Repeater is cofounder Mark Fisher, also sometimes known as K-Punk. Fisher was also a cofounder of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, where he worked alongside Sadie Plant and, yes, the misbegotten genius Nick Land. Fisher didn’t follow Land into the darkness, and his 2009 book Capitalist Realism has had an immense impact on the Left. That book was published with Zer0 Books, of which Repeater is a fork/successor/partner sharing key personnel. Tragically, Fisher took his own life in 2017.
The Repeater lineup is studded with crucial volumes and edgy luminaries as diverse as Eugene Thacker, whose work deeply influenced True Detective, and Ben Wheatley, director of A Field in England, who publishes his scripts with Repeater. Below, you’ll find a list of some of my personal favorite Repeater books.
An anecdote may help drive home the magnitude of what I’m feeling right now. About seven years ago, I turned a strange experience during my honeymoon into an economic horror story titled L’hotel, about Greece in the wake of the great financial crisis. The story climaxes in academic horror, just as the protagonist crosses paths with a fictionalized depiction of … Franco ‘Bifo’ Birardi.
Birardi’s The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (published by Semiotext(e)) was absolutely a tool that I brought to my own analysis of Sam Bankman-Fried. It influenced some of the foundational essays in the development of this newsletter’s perspective, voice, and approach. Now, via Berardi’s Quit Everything, we’ll share a publisher.
This turns my stomach to knots, because it means I actually have to somehow live up to all that - an impossible task.
I should also acknowledge that I will be joining Repeater at a time of transition, with the recent departure of cofounder Tariq Goddard. In his parting statement, Goddard wrote that “the strength and influence of Repeater and Zer0 Books is felt as much in the publishing ether, and in the creation of our own community and niche, as it is in market share or famous names.” I hope I can help carry that strength and influence forward, in my small way.
My Favorite Repeater (and etc.) Books
I’ve been reading books put out by Repeater, Zer0, and their fellow travellers for well over a decade. They are, to quote Zer0’s mission statement, “intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist.” Here are my idiosyncratic favorites.
Eugene Thacker: In the Dust of This Planet (Zero Books) - A groundbreaking work that only feels bigger a decade on, this was ground zero for the popularization of horrific philosophy, and helped fuel widespread interest in figures like Georges Bataille, Reza Negaristani, and Nick Land. It also showed up in a Jay-Z video, in the form of a t-shirt, and notoriously influenced True Detective creator Nick Pizzolatto.
Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie - My personal favorite of Fisher’s books, because I’m frankly more obsessed with genre than politics. This is one of the most profound things ever written about how spooky stories work, with great essays on the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
Josh Davila: Blockchain Radicals - I’ve done a couple of events and podcasts with Josh, also known as The Blockchain Socialist. This is an essential introduction to the new political possibilities enabled by blockchain technology.
Franco Birardi: The Uprising – On Poetry and Finance (Semiotext(e)) - If there’s one great intellectual endeavour I consider myself to be contributing to, it is the quest for a true sociology of finance: an understanding not merely of finance on its own terms, but of its role in contemporary human mythology and self-understanding. This examination of the “meaning” of modern finance, in the deepest sense, should simply be required reading for anyone looking to truly understand the system.
Mark Steven: Splatter Capital - A rolicking good time, if you’re into meticulous recountings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre through the lens of America’s 1970s economic disintegration. A spectacular work of historical and cultural analysis, which stalks from David Cronenberg to The Evil Dead.
John Boorman: Zardoz - This is actually a preorder, but I’m very excited about it as a reader. John Boorman is of course the legendary director of Deliverance, Excalibur, and the bonkers slice of crazy that is Zardoz. Apparently this reissue novelization expands considerably on the mythos of a world where Sean Connery wears practically nothing at all.
Hubba Hubba.
1) I assume DZM gets to pick the picture that displays next to the article. Choosing Sean Connery in Borat-esque skimpy drawers next to "Meet my publisher" is a bit unexpected, and seemingly intentional.
2) I can't believe I will be making two Wu Tang comments on this substact.
"like being asked to become the 9th member of the Wu-Tang Clan"
2a) If you look up how many members there are currently, there are actually 9. But, I don't know enough about the Wu. It's quite possible that being asked to be the next member now (i.e. 10th) would not be as prestigious as a point of time when there were 8 members. Since Ol' Dirty Bastard is dead, that could have been at least twice in the history of Wu. Who Wu?
2b) The next member of Wu. Means more cuts of that NY thin crust. I had a talk with a friend about this who read/heard how there are already so many cuts from profits to ancellary music industry types: agents, managers, producers, labels, concert venues, a certain monopolistic concert ticket company, etc. That after all that, they then have to split whatever's left amongst all the members. And, since that conversation with my friend, apparently there has even become (not sure if still is in existence) a tier system. Such that if you became the newest member, you'd almost certainly get less of even that little sliver that won't even hold a single pepperoni. Heck, not even the tiniest condiment you can think of.
But making music for a living is definitely better than digging a ditch or looking at spreadsheets all day. And getting paid to write cryptocorridos can be sweet too. So... Get the money.