The Puppets

K

kumar

Well-known member
That is true on many levels and I can see why people might want to urge against the imagery of puppet masters but we’re talking about the same process either way. A mutual one if you like, where certain individuals gain a public platform through force of will and strength of their arguments etc, but presumably one that implies some convergence with the interests of broadcasters, pr departments, gatekeepers, you know, the puppet masters. it plays out at a mundane level that we’re all familiar with and recognise daily, you’d imagine that for all her talents greta may not have gained the position she has if she’d been photographed throwing up on her trainers like you lot did when you were her age. a bad example for sure but you get the idea, we all understand how the puppet masters reflexively intervene in this process.



They run the world but no ones saying they run the world. 

 
shiels

shiels

_
Yes, important to make it clear that i’m not criticising greta here, or saying she has no agency, what i’m responding to is the question about the machine speaking through human faces

I’m on board with the we’re all puppets thing, ‘meat puppets’, that was kpunk’s ‘granny doing her knitting' thing...

The danger, the great temptation, is to retain the dualism between the impersonal and the personal that Freud had so expertly dismantled. Ray put this to me very well once: we cannot think in terms of an opposition between the personal and the impersonal, as if granny doing her knitting was the personal, and the impersonal was the remorseless, gleaming wheels of the Kaptitalist megamachine. No. Granny too is impersonal, and the Kapitalist megamachine produces personality alongside cars and computers.
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But some puppets are more powerful than others, we’re talking about figureheads, icons, fame
 
K

kumar

Well-known member
Because i’m young and vibrant i cant gauge the current situation well but for those of you more jaded and infirm, is shiels point about moral simplicity a recent thing? Has there really been a decline in public debate, the ability to hold oppositional thoughts, an understanding of nuance and contradiction? I have developed the nasty habit of listening to drivetime radio which despite being a relative beacon of democracy and unfiltered opinion often ends up in a broad strokes, polarised discussion. Any mainstream issue in the last couple of months to do with race has been rubbish, understandably no one wants to ring up and say theyre a racist but it leaves the conversation in this useless back and forth between “the media is categorically racist” vs “you’re categorically making it up” instead of something like “yes there are structural forces at play and unconscious biases, reflexive profiling habits conditioned by growing up where we have done and we might not be aware we act on them… but maybe this time youre making it up”.

Sure this is standard issue culture warfare but i don’t believe that things used to be much better. Have heard loads of people say things like “we were actually all starting to get along not too long ago” as if 2011 was a high watermark for racial harmony.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
shiels said:
Yes, important to make it clear that i’m not criticising greta here, or saying she has no agency, what i’m responding to is the question about the machine speaking through human faces

I’m on board with the we’re all puppets thing, ‘meat puppets’, that was kpunk’s ‘granny doing her knitting' thing...

But some puppets are more powerful than others, we’re talking about figureheads, icons, fame
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But that's not mastery, that's the disorder of will chaotically manifesting itself.

There's the swirling eddy, the waves, foam and spray. Occasionally tides and currents affect the flow, but there is no dark force in the depths. Its all flotsam.

“Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada”
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shiels

shiels

_
I don't fully get you... you seem to be saying yes there are forces, systems, currents. flows, patterns but there's no overall meaning necessarily (now I type it that way I can kind of agree.....)

But I suppose the 'dark force' we're talking about here is the how the current media sets the stage for actors under capitalism, what types of people are valuable to push agendas. Sometime they're useful idiots sometimes they're pretending to be useful idiots. I'm trying to understand what needs they fulfil for us all and how they function, not who's behind the curtain.
 
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droid

droid

Well-known member
shiels said:
I don't fully get you... you seem to be saying yes there are forces, systems, currents. flows, patterns but there's no overall meaning necessarily (now I type it that way I can kind of agree.....)

But I suppose the 'dark force' we're talking about here is the how the current media sets the stage for actors under capitalism, what types of people are valuable to push agendas. Sometime they're useful idiots sometimes they're pretending to be useful idiots. I'm trying to understand what needs they fulfil for us all and how they function, not who's behind the curtain.
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Well let's take media as an example. We know that media in capitalist democracies isn't controlled per se, rather there are sets of filters which combine to create a system which generally aligns with various overarching viewpoints. Occasionally certain actors will try and exert more control to push certain agendas, but this in turn leads to a weakening of overall efficacy and a loss of faith in existing channels - something what we've seen over the last two decades.

So look at the example of Greta. Presumably, she would be anathema in a corporate media environment dedicated to the same profit goals as every other sector of capital, and the amplification of of her message would be the last thing 'they' would want, so how did it happen? If we view the world as a (consciously or unconsciously) directed & intentional process we might conclude that its because she was intended to discredit the ideas she represents, or perhaps as a safety valve to distract from other, more dangerous ideas about climate activism, a liberal panacea... or even as an atavistic cry for help from within the system itself, some kind of considered 'agenda' anyway.

On the other hand you could look at the reason most things happen at this level - profit and social relationships. She was a quirky and compelling story that was picked up due to grassroots rumbling on social media and rising concern about climate, amplified, reflected, re amplified, found to be profitable in engagement as both a hate figure and an inspiration. Clicks drove more profit which drove more sharing which drove more articles which drove more engagement... and she rode the waves of feedback until she was launched up to the next level.

You could perhaps make the claim that certain underlying global trends were a factor, or indeed that the collective unconsciousness demanded that a figure like Greta emerge at this time (she's not the first famous child climate activist either btw), but as with many things, the grubby reality of profit seems like a far more immediate, compelling and proximate factor.
 
shiels

shiels

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That’s fairly sensible droid. Nothing there I necessarily disagree with.

It feels like you’re still arguing against shady cabal conspiratorial thinking, but that’s not what I’m trying to get at.

I’m taking this thread to be about exploring how certain people become, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowingly, spokespeople for or servants of a machine... a campaigning machine, a social justice machine, a money-making machine. I’m thinking from a communications (with a big c) point of view. Like in the case of influencer marketing (which I believe is an interesting frame to look at the people mentioned so far) what game do people play? What do they conceal and what do they reveal? What happens to them during this amplification? What helps the process function smoothly and what are the needs they’re fulfilling for the audience?

If I was forced to give a simple answer to what I think the question on Greta is here I’d say something about her dominance of the issue of climate change being a symptom of neo-liberal subjectivity ie individuals as the solution or the problem, rather than structures, systems and processes (same can be said of many conspiracy theories too...), and she like all icons is somewhat produced by her family, by us, and the media, collaboratively as a subject, and an ideal to fulfil a need. What’s the need? Why so much attention that way?
 
shiels

shiels

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Here’s my take on conspiracy theory for the record: we’re all conspiracy theorists. Conspiracies and conspiring exists everywhere. Every conspiracy theory is wrong and incomplete in some way. Most are totally wrong, the rest mostly completely wrong.
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
shiels said:
It feels like you’re still arguing against shady cabal conspiratorial thinking, but that’s not what I’m trying to get at.
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Well yeah, that's not what youre trying to get at, but its the underlying premise of much of the discourse here! ;)
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
shiels said:
Here’s my take on conspiracy theory for the record: we’re all conspiracy theorists. Conspiracies and conspiring exists everywhere. Every conspiracy theory is wrong and incomplete in some way. Most are totally wrong, the rest mostly completely wrong.
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I think I disagree. You can believe in conspiracies without being a conspiracist. Can you expand?
 
shiels

shiels

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I’m being a dick and using conspiracist loosely. One of the primary modes of making sense of the world is paranoic, pattern-finding... we need authority, we’re naturally suspicious and threat focused and even the most hardcore rationalists go around all day making up dark little plots in their head, they might be suspicious of the plots too, filter them out, break them down with logic, but new ones will emerge, it’s going on all the time everywhere. Sorry this is boring and it’s been said and we should talk about other stuff you all hate me don’t you? Think i’m some paranoid crank???
 
sufi

sufi

lala
shiels said:
I’m being a dick and using conspiracist loosely. One of the primary modes of making sense of the world is paranoic, pattern-finding... we need authority, we’re naturally suspicious and threat focused and even the most hardcore rationalists go around all day making up dark little plots in their head, they might be suspicious of the plots too, filter them out, break them down with logic, but new ones will emerge, it’s going on all the time everywhere. Sorry this is boring and it’s been said and we should talk about other stuff you all hate me don’t you? Think i’m some paranoid crank???
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not at all.
we keep coming back to this stuff because we can't work it out, so we should keep trying. it's juicy
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Shiels is doing my ideas better than me at the moment he can be in charge for the next month while I recover from being brutalised by winter.
 
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