Postmodernism and Critical Theory. Or why the Empress has no clothes.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Typhoon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjQA0e0UYzI

OjQA0e0UYzI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwmx9crelg

tIwmx9crelg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVe_ComujRg

dVe_ComujRg

[Typhoon]

Substack - Michael Shellenberger | Why Elites Like Greta Thunberg Hate Capitalism [paywalled?]

Free markets have lifted millions out of poverty, liberated women, and protected the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives against them?

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. But last Sunday, she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow "the whole capitalist system," which she says is responsible for "imperialism, oppression, genocide... racist, oppressive extractionism." Her talk echoed the World Economic Forum's calls for a “Great Reset” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. There is no “back to normal,” she said.

But her claims are absurd. The "whole capitalist system" has, over the last 200 years, allowed for the average life expectancy of humans to rise from 30 to 70 years of age. The "whole capitalist system" produces larger food surpluses than any other system in human history. And the "whole capitalist system" has resulted in declining greenhouse gas emissions in developed nations over the last 50 years.

Capitalism is far from perfect. It worsens inequality by making some people so rich that they can rocket into space on liquified hydrogen while leaving others too poor to afford natural gas. It is characterized by cycles of boom and bust that create frenzies of wealth followed by high unemployment. And it is constantly turning non-market relationships, including intimate ones, such as between parents and caregivers, into exchanges between buyers and sellers.

But capitalism is plainly better than any other system of economic organization yet devised. High levels of inequality are the result of more rich people, not more poor people, who are much better off under capitalism than feudalism or communism. The business cycle of booms and busts provokes manias and depressions, but it is much more efficient, and less oppressive than governments deciding what should be produced, by whom, and at what price. And while it’s true that capitalism undermines non-market relationships, that’s often a good thing, even in the case of childcare, since it allows women and others to be compensated for their labor.

Some of the people who have benefitted the most from industrial capitalism are people like Thunberg and her family. The remarkable wealth of their home nation of Sweden is due to the industrial revolution, which allows for a tiny number of people to produce food, energy, and other necessities for life so that the majority of Swedes can do other, less arduous, and more pleasurable things. The same is true across the West. In the U.S., just 2% of the population works on farms and just 8% in factories.

And industrial capitalism allowed Sweden to create a generous social welfare state consisting of free health care, free education, and 480 days of paid leave for parents when a child is born or adopted. The Thunbergs are, by any global or historical standard, rich: the annual per capita income globally, according to the World Bank, is $11,000, which is less than the cost of the two chairs in Thunberg’s living room.

stolen_childhood.jpg (136.26 KiB) Viewed 3688 times

Capitalism is far better for the natural environment than feudalism or communism. Under feudalism, subsistence farmers rely on wood and dung for cooking fuels and must farm large tracts of land to produce a small amount of food. The industrial revolution not only liberated most people from back-breaking farming but also reduced the amount of land required, thanks to fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors. The same process allowed humans to switch from using wood to coal to natural gas and uranium as primary fuels.

The result has been the return, and “re-wilding,” of grasslands and forests around the world, including in Sweden. The reason is that market capitalism rewards economic efficiency and thus reduced natural resource use. Consider the whales. What saved them, in capitalist nations, was cheaper substitute oils, first petroleum and then vegetable oils. The Soviet Union, by contrast, kept whaling long after it was economically efficient to do so because whalers were protected from market competition.

All of this and yet, around the world, it is affluent and educated progressives like Thunberg who are anti-capitalist. Our language reflects this. Across the West, affluent anti-capitalists are referred to as “latte liberals,” “Neiman Marxists,” “champagne socialists,” “radical chic,” and “cashmere communists.” Similar expressions exist in non-English language nations: izquierda caviar (caviar leftist in Spain); gauche caviar (caviar leftist in France); Salonsozialist (salon socialist in Germany); and — in Thunberg’s home nation of Sweden — Rödvinsvänster, which means “red wine leftists.”

It wasn’t always this way. Left-wing parties, from communist to socialist to social democratic parties, used to be the parties of the working class. Now, across the Western world, they are the parties of educated elites. The latest polls show that Democrats have a 14-point advantage among college voters and a 15-point deficit among working-class voters, an 11-point increase since 2012. “Lest anyone think that declining working-class support was solely due to white working-class voters moving away from the Democrats,” writes the self-described social democrat Ruy Teixeira, “it should be noted that nonwhite working-class voters moved away from Democrats by 19 margin points over the time period.”

This is true across the Western world. From British Brexiteers to Dutch farmers to the French yellow vests, working-class people are turning away from the Left and embracing pro-free market political movements and pro-capitalist political parties. Why is that? How did educated elites like Thunberg become anti-capitalists, and working-class people become pro-capitalists?

Why do working-class people tend to favor capitalism over socialism and other forms of anti-capitalism? Anti-capitalists say the reason is “false consciousness”: they have been tricked by the schools, news media, and churches into believing that they are better off under capitalism than socialism. A more sophisticated version of this, taught in elite universities around the world, is that capitalism’s strength stems from the “hegemony” of specific pro-capitalist values, like the ones held by my 83-year-old mother, who grew up on a working-class farm in Indiana in the 1940s and 1950s. She was recently asked what she learned from her parents. Here’s what she wrote:





The above lessons are roughly identical to what Max Weber famously identified as the Christian (not necessarily Protestant) values held by workers in the system of capitalism, in contrast to the values held by peasants under feudalism, which put a lower value on saving money and education. An anti-capitalist would say that her parents should have taught her:

The capitalists who want you to work hard and “stick with it” are exploiting you.

In your free time, you should organize others to help you overthrow capitalism.

You should be ambitious, not humble: the goal is a worldwide socialist revolution!

We should reject bourgeois schooling and get a radical anti-capitalist education to support efforts to overthrow capitalism.

Families are an extension of capitalist social arrangements and people should not be confined by marriage or family.

Disrespect people who hold different views than you; they are the enemy of humanity.

During the 20th Century, people around the world considered these two very different sets of values and overwhelmingly chose the ones held by my mother’s family. A big part of the reason for this is that they rightly associated the latter set of values with the horrors that were occurring in the Soviet Union and China, where Communist regimes killed millions. And, they realized, that working people in Western capitalist democracies were far richer, and freer, than their counterparts in Communist nations.

In response, socialists spent the 1950s and 1960s re-grouping. Taking the advice of Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci, a great theorist of cultural hegemony as a socialist strategy, the radical Left in the West began “the long march through institutions,” from universities to NGOs to the media, identifying as “issue advocates” as a way to mask their radical agenda. The greatest pioneer of the issue advocacy strategy in the U.S. was Ralph Nader. The rate of motor vehicle deaths, both measured per vehicle and per mile, had been declining since 1934, but Nader persuaded much of the public that capitalism was antithetical to public safety.

Shortly after, Nader moved on to nuclear energy. The problem with nuclear is that it produced no air or water pollution and was functionally infinite, thereby undermining the ability of anti-capitalists to use pollution control and resource scarcity as justifications for expanded state control over the electric power industry. And so Nader and other anti-capitalists deliberately conflated nuclear power plants with nuclear weapons in minds of Baby Boomers who just a few years earlier had been terrified as schoolchildren by duck-and-cover classroom exercises to prepare for nuclear war. Fifty years later, progressives pursued a similar approach against fracking, convincing people that it was somehow worse for the environment than coal.

In admitting that she wants to overthrow capitalism, Thunberg briefly let her mask slip. Until then, she, like other anticapitalists, had successfully convinced the public that she was simply more sensitive than other people. “I remember when I was younger and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears, and so on,” Thunberg recalled in the spring of 2019. “I cried through all the movies.” This sensitivity is sometimes referred to as liberal or environmental guilt.

There is, without a doubt, a religious component to liberal and environmental guilt. Educated elites tend to be more secular than working-class people. Without traditional religion to make them feel guilty for their original sin, elites find new reasons to feel guilty, with environmental degradation at the top of the list. Though capitalism has massively reduced humankind’s negative environmental impact, the psychological need to feel guilty remains.

But feelings of guilt are rarely innocent and frequently tied to demands for greater power and control. Judeo-Christian religious leaders claim that we are all guilty of having sinned against God and must behave in particular ways, such as by avoiding particular foods, procreating, and donating money to the church. Environmental leaders today claim that we are all guilty of having sinned against Nature and must behave in particular ways, including avoiding particular foods, not procreating, and donating to environmental groups. Expressions of guilt for the supposed suffering of polar bears are pretexts for demanding an immediate halt to fossil fuel use.

As such, innocent-seeming “awareness raising” is tied to anti-capitalist demands. The films about plastic in the ocean aren’t just about making school children feel guilty, they are also about demanding that society stop using plastics made from fossil fuels. The European Commission’s reports about nitrogen pollution aren’t just about the side effects of meat production, they are also about demanding a reduction in livestock farming. And Thunberg’s student movement isn’t just much about reducing carbon emissions, it’s about overthrowing capitalism.

As such, expressions of guilt are the emotional shock troops of the war on capitalism. The proven solution to plastic waste is to send it to landfills or incinerators, and not attempt to recycle it, since doing so is not cost-effective, which is why “recyclers” quietly send it to poor countries where it ends up in the ocean. The obvious way to reduce nitrogen pollution is to more carefully apply fertilizer, and control manure, not reduce livestock, which we need for food. And the fastest, cheapest, and easiest way to reduce emissions is to use natural gas and nuclear instead of wood and coal, not ban them, as Thunberg and her allies demanded, and which resulted in an increase in coal and wood burning.

The reason anti-capitalists like Thunberg oppose such technical fixes to environmental problems isn’t because they don’t work, it’s because they do. At some level, consciously or unconsciously, Thunberg and her allies recognize, as Nader did, that solving environmental problems through waste disposal, nitrogen management, and natural gas and nuclear undermines their anti-capitalist crusade, which consists centrally of making food and energy less, not more, efficient, through the use of labor-and-resource intensive renewables and organic farming.

Why would people who ostensibly care so much about lifting people out of poverty and protecting the environment want to use less efficient methods to produce energy and food? Because their primary concern is not lifting people out of poverty and protecting the environment. It’s about maintaining and growing their power as a social class over the rest of society.

Such was the central insight of an early 20th Century Harvard economist named Josef Schumpeter. He believed Karl Marx was correct that capitalism is a process of “creative destruction” characterized by new technologies (e.g., chemical fertilizers, vegetable oils, coal) replacing older ones (e.g. organic farming, whale oil, and wood) and ushering in whole new modes of production (e.g., modern farming, modern food production, and modern electricity systems). But Schumpeter thought Marx was wrong in seeing the interests of capitalists and the working class as opposed. Quite the contrary, he argued: they were united.

Schumpeter argued that the real class struggle wasn’t between capitalists and workers but rather between the new rich and the old rich. The new rich were capitalists, their managers, and their workers. The old rich were the people who were born-rich, their employees, and allies. Today that group includes the professional-managerial class of philanthropic executives, journalists, NGO employees, university professors, school teachers, and government employees.

The old rich hate capitalism because it reduces the gap between them and the new rich. The heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller say they are financing anti-fracking advocacy because fracking is bad for the climate, but it was always obvious that fracking, by creating cheap and abundant natural gas to replace coal, would reduce emissions and be great for the climate. The real and often unconscious reason that the heirs to the Getty and Rockefeller fortunes finance anti-fracking is the same reason that Putin consciously did: fracking threatens their economic wealth, social status, and political power.

More oil and gas from fracking reduced the price, and thus the value, of existing oil and gas assets. It meant more money for free-market Republicans than for pro-scarcity Democrats. And it meant the old rich had to make way for the new rich in social circles. Think of how the country club snobs looked down on the Rodney Dangerfield character in “Caddyshack.”

Anti-capitalism thus became the ideology of the old rich, or what early 20th Century sociologist Thorstein Veblen of the University of Chicago called “the leisure class.” Veblen noted the importance of “conspicuous consumption,” the tendency of elites to flaunt their wealth through fancy dresses and jewelry. Today, elites flaunt their wealth through what Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs,” which he defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status in the upper class while inflicting costs on the lower class.” Today, the main luxury beliefs of the ruling class are that we must make food and energy more expensive, through a return to less efficient, feudal modes of production, in order to protect Nature.

There’s a reason why anti-capitalists tend to be the people who inherited rather than created their wealth. The capitalist class, the people who built their wealth from scratch, tend to feel proud, not guilty, for what they built. They defend free markets as part of their legacy. Their children and grandchildren who inherit their wealth struggle with their purpose. They tend toward neuroticism because they know, at some level, that they did nothing to deserve their good fortune. They compensate for their feelings of inferiority by devising various ways to put down the new rich and their workers, such as by financing activists to block roads, writers like Bill McKibben to claim that natural gas is worse for the climate than coal, and politicians like President Joe Biden to restrict oil and gas production.

The anti-capitalist agenda of Thunberg is thus much worse for working people than a pro-capitalist agenda. The lives of elites like Thunberg aren’t materially impacted if food and energy prices increase; they are affluent enough to afford it. A recession might mean that the Thunbergs won’t be able to afford another $9,000 chair, but they’ll no doubt be able to pay a higher electrical bill. While there are some aspects of today’s progressive agenda that benefit working people, such as allowing the federal government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, the highest priorities of anti-capitalist elites are all bad for workers since they are aimed at making food and energy more expensive.

Few working-class voters are doing a close cost-benefit analysis of the policies of the Republican and Democratic Parties. But they understand perfectly well that the Democrats are saying that we must pay more for gasoline and other fossil fuels in order to deal with climate change. By embracing free markets and rejecting anti-capitalists, the British Brexiteers, Dutch farmers, and French yellow vests are simply fighting for their class interests.

And so why, in the end, are educated elites like Thunberg anti-capitalist? Because capitalism reduces their power. Why are working people pro-capitalist? Because it increases theirs. If climate change didn’t exist, elites like Thunberg would find some other reason to be anti-capitalist, to demand a “Great Reset,” and to demand higher costs for energy and food, since such demands are essential to keeping the new rich, and their workers, down. The real reason Thunberg insists that there be no “back to normal” has nothing to do with the environment. It’s because back to normal means back to economic progress. And that, more than anything else, threatens her status, power, and privilege.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

James Lindsay dissects Critical Theory in a primer that comes in at just under 15 minutes. The part that especially pertains to Greta Thunberg is the Marxist recounting of the Fall of Man as opposed the the Christian version.....'>.......

Trauma and harm. Trauma and harm. Harm and trauma. It seems virtually everything Woke these days is justified on the back of some obviously nonsense appeal to "trauma" or "harm." Schools are arranged as being "safe and welcoming" and "places where everyone feels like they belong" in response to the pervasive "trauma" and "harm" of everything else in society. What's going on? In Woke Marxism, like everything else, trauma and harm are understood systemically. They're the result of oppression, which is the result of systemic power, which is the result of the structural stratification of society, which is how Marxists read everything in the world. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay breaks down how "systemic trauma and harm" are nothing more than the same old Marxist religious impulse (to undo the Marxist Fall of Man) and latest excuse for seizing power over everything.

TEk4vMaNzeo

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Nonc Hilaire]

Don’t deride Derrida.

[Doc]

Summing up Post modernism and Critical theory before they were "things":

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”― Heinrich Heine 1820

[Typhoon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JX4bsrj178

4JX4bsrj178

All the usual suspects are briefly reviewed

Marx
Gramsci
Horkheimer and the "Frankfurt School"
Marcuse
Crenshaw

[Parodite]

https://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is wonder.

Curiosity is a constant. You and I are beings of the cosmos.

This life is nothing short of an evolving rebirth of conscious conscious living.
The infinite is calling to you via vibrations. Can you hear it? It can be difficult to know where to begin. Have you found your circuit?

Humankind has nothing to lose. Reality has always been bursting with beings whose bodies are opened by transformation. Throughout history, humans have been interacting with the totality via electrical impulses.

Imagine an unveiling of what could be. We must learn how to lead angelic lives in the face of yearning. It is in awakening that we are guided.

The goal of bio-electricity is to plant the seeds of rejuvenation rather than yearning.
Non-locality is the truth of learning, and of us. Learning requires exploration. The quantum cycle is radiating ultrasonic energy.

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

I like the guy and think he's cool, but that doesn't mean you can't play around with this.....'>........

http://www.wisdomofpeterson.com/

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[noddy]

I was under the vague impression that society had swung between thoughful tolerance and earnest legalist many many times over the course of history.

it does suck being in an earnest legalist period, people think of victorian era as being restrictive but they were sensualist libertines compared to the chaste and responsible modern kids.

i do also remember a shitload of anti relavatist articles from the spengler board - western philosophy (except the french) has always struggled with areas of grey around the opinions of imperfect humans.

it always tends towards "i am right unless you manage to convince me im wrong, using my framework"

and their is no point indulging wrong, that would be evil.

[Parodite]

Air Jordan Peterson is my favorite wave-particle improvising jazz player from the West, a gift to humanity.

And then there is my other hero, the anti-wordsalad, guru anti-guru, destroyer of symmetry from the East, UG Krishnamurti. A pity these two mutually-exclusive antipodes never met and talked.

Frustration! (very funny too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGY37Am7dQ4

HGY37Am7dQ4

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

What caught my eye was the framing of Lyotard with regicide. While I wouldn't claim a long genealogical chain here, it is becoming increasingly difficult to always distinguish a current position under a progressive banner (or in the name of postmodernism) and what was, not that long ago, arguments only found in those labelled reactionary sources. And the number one thing they all share is that modernism, whatever that is, is illegitimate because of some sort of violent foundation or blood debt.

[noddy]

we all suffer from everything looking like a nail while we wield our philosophical hammers.

the blood debt is always present, we cant escape our history , only have to see the Ukraine situation

havent had anything to do with Lyotard - on first glance he does seem to have fun poking holes

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

we all suffer from everything looking like a nail while we wield our philosophical hammers.

the blood debt is always present, we cant escape our history , only have to see the Ukraine situation

Whatsoever do you mean? *retreats to fainting couch*

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I know I've posted this once before elsewhere on this forum but it fits here as a description of our cultural predicament:

“The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.”
“There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values,” and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it is the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who is stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten onto places, behaviours, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything about the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behaviour, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people they have colonised. This is why they are envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labour of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end.”

[noddy]

the South Pacific, India, Africa all have massive groups of multiple truths and cultures - barring some of Africa they mostly have settled into a pattern of peace aswell, so it is possible.

our only problem right now is we arent really one nor the other - no longer a unified monoculture, and yet not capable of the indifferent tolerance of a multiculture... this brings out the crisis.

I dont really think we are capable of being India, I think the righteousness of the one true path infects both conservative and progressive world views and its impossible for most to be indifferent to the suffering of other groups.

so we will be China - authoritarian and centralised with progressives and conservatives fighting to the death over the one truth and who is in control of it.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true.

this the crux of it, a demand for central authority ... the true principle of any westerner when they arent lying to themselves about bullshit freedom narratives.

oday Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it is the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who is stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude.

well, on most levels its painfully true.

we got 8 billion or whatever people on the planet right now, less than a billion of them are western christians, and out of that tiny subset, none of them agree on too much except some very wishy washy statements about the nature of the trinity.

gets even worse when you look at the billion muslims.

so, yeh, their are multiple truths and everything is relative - thats an absolute boring statement of reality, its not an eye rolling attack at people that believe things.

perhaps the problem is people not being allowed to form groups living their own truth - progressives not lettting conservatives have schools which hide the kids from gross adult displays of pornographic sexuality etc... grumpy old women who want male free spaces not being allowed to kick trannies out.

in places which are free, all the sub groups schools and villages are living the truth of the magority members and their is no central authority stopping that.

their is also rampant pedophilia, abuse , slavery and chaotic variations in outcomes, fair and foul.

so, this is a painfully contradictory part of American rhetoric and philosophy that shows up everywhere.

freedom for me, not for thee... their is one truth and surprise! im the one with the mostest of it.

I might sound like im attacking the conservative side here but I havent even warmed up on the progressive side.

the fact their is multiple truths requires people to live by those truths and organise around those truths.

if a particular sub cultures "truth" doesnt allow them to pass a maths class, which has its own truth, its not the maths class fault.

this is where the idiocy comes in - this selective wishy washy gibberish on who is allowed to keep their truth and who has to abandon it.

that is my problem with the modernist idiocy, the fact the progressives arent actually mentally capable of dealing with multiple truths.

they are just the worst reflexes of bible bashing baptists, who have replaced jesus with themselves and scripture with statistics.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Before postmodernism it was not acceptable to manipulate the perceived realities of others. Now being judgmental and manipulative is expected.

Not really postmodernism’s fault, but an unfortunate side effect.

[noddy]

one thing i keep coming back to is the new levels of transparency and awereness in the post internet world.

I dont think many/any? are emotionally or intellectually capable of dealing with it.

the small world of your friends and family, workmates and the bland idiocy of the oldschool media left people in lovely comfortable bubbles.

learning that truth of what all the others think is blowing many minds up right now - they had no idea just how unpopular they are in some circles.

they always were, but now they know

add the adolescent need to fit in and be part of things, and the current crop of kids are on a wild ride to places none of us have a chance of understanding.

the first glitch is the "im special and different, i need my own unique label" response to the dreary reality they are an irrelvant mediocre nothing in a world of excellence.

next step will be them accepting their mediocre irrelveance, then the attack on capitalist meritocracy will be un stoppable.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

one thing i keep coming back to is the new levels of transparency and awereness in the post internet world.

I dont think many/any? are emotionally or intellectually capable of dealing with it.

the small world of your friends and family, workmates and the bland idiocy of the oldschool media left people in lovely comfortable bubbles.

learning that truth of what all the others think is blowing many minds up right now - they had no idea just how unpopular they are in some circles.

they always were, but now they know

add the adolescent need to fit in and be part of things, and the current crop of kids are on a wild ride to places none of us have a chance of understanding.

the first glitch is the "im special and different, i need my own unique label" response to the dreary reality they are an irrelvant mediocre nothing in a world of excellence.

next step will be them accepting their mediocre irrelevance, then the attack on capitalist meritocracy will be un stoppable.

You have a point if we accept the premise that there are new levels of transparency and awareness. Obviously, there are more capabilities; but not only is there more intense simulation and artifice, it is increasingly curated by a class who believe in "honest lying" and have such a hard-deterministic sociological outlook on the world that they view others as machines whose outputs must be controlled.

The degree on how it differs from before (because it is arguable isn't that off in kind,) does effect the premise.

And there is an irony to saying we get to see how people really think when we are all sluiced into increasingly narrow sociability ground down to multiple choice answer-people.

I guess people complained how conformists a lot of free consumer trends of the late 20th century made people; I'd say we are beyond that now and people are trained to answer in a machine-learning type of way.

[Parodite]

With a bit of a tongue-in-cheek; all-is-relative, all-is-subjective-and-superrr-unique; certainty-does-not-exist (except for the certainty that free will is an illusion, of course); rejecting another person's reality is unavoidable.... these have the same unholy grandparents: quantum mechanics and special/general relativity.

PTSS after Newtonian physics (roughly, the re-assuring world of our senses) was superceded by two violent, abusive, often tamper tantring, fighting, biting babies: The Terrible Twins. Its parents never had a good night sleep since: sleep deprivation psychosis became the new reality.

In the classical era when all we had was our senses, a simple religion sufficed as a band-aid. A bit of holy book and sermons on Sunday, holding Jewish hands on Shabbat, hypnotic rants in Mosques... Sing, chant, spread some holy smoke and shiny mirrors would do. Not any longer...

But we can't blame the terrible twins, nor regret we gave them advanced technical toys to play with. It was done out of love. Now that they start build their own ai-toddler friends and threaten to send clones of Greta Thunberg to babysit us to "teach us a lesson or two", or fly away to the stars, giving up on this planet of doom altogether.. they will find their way out of the mess, and if not.. just get cancelled.

[noddy]

one thing i keep coming back to is the new levels of transparency and awereness in the post internet world.

I dont think many/any? are emotionally or intellectually capable of dealing with it.

the small world of your friends and family, workmates and the bland idiocy of the oldschool media left people in lovely comfortable bubbles.

learning that truth of what all the others think is blowing many minds up right now - they had no idea just how unpopular they are in some circles.

they always were, but now they know

add the adolescent need to fit in and be part of things, and the current crop of kids are on a wild ride to places none of us have a chance of understanding.

the first glitch is the "im special and different, i need my own unique label" response to the dreary reality they are an irrelvant mediocre nothing in a world of excellence.

next step will be them accepting their mediocre irrelevance, then the attack on capitalist meritocracy will be un stoppable.

You have a point if we accept the premise that there are new levels of transparency and awareness. Obviously, there are more capabilities; but not only is there more intense simulation and artifice, it is increasingly curated by a class who believe in "honest lying" and have such a hard-deterministic sociological outlook on the world that they view others as machines whose outputs must be controlled.

The degree on how it differs from before (because it is arguable isn't that off in kind,) does effect the premise.

And there is an irony to saying we get to see how people really think when we are all sluiced into increasingly narrow sociability ground down to multiple choice answer-people.

I guess people complained how conformists a lot of free consumer trends of the late 20th century made people; I'd say we are beyond that now and people are trained to answer in a machine-learning type of way.

to be clear on my original post - I wasnt really disagreeing, just musing on the fact its all out of hand for a sensible solution - a return to normality and common purpose isnt on the agenda, so I cant consider it.

I dont think vegans and meat lovers come together, argue , then all decide to become omnivores.

it is increasingly curated by a class who believe in "honest lying" and have such a hard-deterministic sociological outlook on the world that they view others as machines whose outputs must be controlled.

this is obviously true, but its also not as true as it wants to be - the speed with which google is making itself irrelevant is astonishing me at the moment.

so yes, it is more of a siloing process than a control process, in my sense of things at the moment and also, that has to happen.

the intensity of it all in america, as always, is 10 times what it is here, so im never really on the right levels of worried about certain things.

we will remain a muddled, middling country run by incompetent technocrats for the foreseeable future, which is its own , different level of annoyance and morbid outcomes.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

to be clear on my original post - I wasnt really disagreeing, just musing on the fact its all out of hand for a sensible solution - a return to normality and common purpose isnt on the agenda, so I cant consider it.

Yes, it's just spitballing from this end too.

As for clarifying, I don't think I'm prepared to argue for a common purpose, I'm just not sure privileging aporia is any more productive than say the old positivism and a lot of it works not because it's insightful (and some of it is while raising some good questions), but because it is on borrowed time and habits quickly fading away.

Something tells me we've all had this conversation before, in 18 different iterations.

Every time I have a brain fart that I'm approaching something differently, I figure out I've already been in this exact same spot and just got lost & distracted momentarily-- not very flattering stuff.

this is obviously true, but its also not as true as it wants to be - the speed with which google is making itself irrelevant is astonishing me at the moment.

so yes, it is more of a siloing process than a control process, in my sense of things at the moment and also, that has to happen.

Google is one thing but I think the brakes being applied to ChatGPT is really driving home James Polous point that the future belongs he who "catechizes the bots".

[noddy]

im still not convincend national governments are going to continue to relinquish so much power to the tech giants - Im of the feeling their power will be a tranistory period that largely turns out irrelevant.

its like the shipping and merchant companies back at the start of empire - government is unsure of the outcomes and doesnt want to be involved in all the risky moves that trigger changes.

then, the legislate and bully the system back under their wings at the appropriate time.

no doubting the AI shiz is going to change alot of things, but i suspect most of that is going to be the destruction of the middle class paper shuffling classes - lawyers in particular.

anyone that makes a living by knowing how to peruse a large and complex library for existing information.

not people who write the books that fill that library, they will be safe for the forseeable future.