In the past couple of years, the idea of ‘the bugman’ has become common currency among those who spend way too much time in the wrong parts of the internet.
Put simply, the bugman is slang for a default, normie consumer, who imbibes uncritically the great narratives of today’s power structures: the kind of person who mistakes the basic bitch hedonism that Western society offers in abundance for a source of deep meaning.
Accordingly, the bugman enjoys Netflix and Deliveroo; Marvel franchises and Blue Apron. The bugman probably thought The Last Jedi was pretty cool for its feminist messages. It is an article of faith for him that Beyoncé is a queen who slays. In fact, the bugman’s opinions are so tediously orthodox they can be widely shared on social media without any fear of payback.
The bugman’s original etymology (and entomology) refers to how he lives in a kind of honeycomb of similarly indistinct humans — a block of flats, say, probably in a major metropolis. But in recent years, the bugman has taken on another origin story. It can now mean ‘he who would gladly eat the bugs’. A global citizen, primed for the coming age of deep ecology proposed by XR and Greta, in which cows are banned, and protein is dispensed from reconstituted insect matter with far lower carbon footprints.
It’s the future in which we no longer own cars but merely rent space in self-driving taxis; the one in which we have to apply for our annual flight credits from the National Carbon Register. In its most extreme version, it’s the world of pod people — where the joyous citizen takes on the awesome planet-saving responsibility of limiting his housing to the necessary few square metres of dormitory space. After all, the bugman is instinctively a globalist, deeply trustful of international institutions, and their high-level plans for his future.
Which brings us neatly to an international institution, and its high-level plan for our future. It takes us into the heart of a conspiracy that isn’t, but a tendency that most certainly is. It is in the spaces between this non-existent conspiracy and the thriving tendency that a new war to control meaning is now raging.
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