Exiting Reality

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Good introspection is probably the best technology I can think of for this kinda thing, shoddy as it may be. "Where did I get this desire? Why do I desire it? Would I desire it on a desert island?" and maybe cultivating a kind of disagreeableness, recognizing when someone's voiced opinion doesn't sit quite right, and interrogating that.
Yeah I'd say so too - as a start, at least. Not quite sure what would come after, if there is a systematizable praxis awaiting our understanding.

But as with becoming familiar with anything, you become more and more sensitive to the changes of whatever it is you are becoming familiar with. Like if studying a blurry photo hard enough, it actually becomes clearer, its resolution raises.
 

sus

Well-known member
Hung out with John a few times. Lovely guy. Don't know what he's up to now but I'm currently reading his book about the Zombie, which is amazing. I listened to an interview he did on Hermitix earlier this year a few weeks ago but didn't really rate it, didn't seem to say much new to me. I'm feeling too lazy to write a long post but you might find Hakim Bey's idea of the TAZ interesting, also his works on Immediatism - all about escaping capitalism while being in enmeshed within it. I occasionally note the former crop up in US leftist discourse.

Yeah! TAZ is definitely in the "another green world" realm of the heterotopic, the experimental realm outside the mainframe, etc

Apparently some of the founding CHAZ folks were into Hakim Bey, hence the name (AZ = "autonomous zone") but the pedophilia stuff led to them rebranding to CHOP.
 

sus

Well-known member
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Haven't finished reading it yet, so this is an undigested opinion, but early on this article managed to tie a few pre-existing thoughts together:

Some context. For several years now, I've been developing a growing discomfort with a philosophy of relating to technology I call Waldenponding (after Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment on which Walden is based). The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms."

Might this kind of reactionary... reaction to tech and technology be endemic to a sort of anti-neoliberalism?

Perhaps the article will provide an answer - I'm still only a paragraph in.

But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level. It's a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding/tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load required to keep the Global Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC) running effectively.

39/ If you are a genius who rises to Level 25 Omega Super Adept in a monastery in the mountains, who knows everything there is to know about candle flames, that's kinda... very convenient for the Pope and the King. Smart person out of the way in a log cabin learning Candleology out of FOBO.

40/ A real adept oughta be able to meditate on the angriest, most toxic twitter stream, consume the bile, and turn it into nectar: actionable insight you can bet on in the real world.

45/ We are all now part of a powerful global social computer in the cloud that is possibly the only mechanism we have available to tackle the big problems of the world that industrial age mechanisms are failing to cope with. We might as well get good at it. Do your part. Stay as plugged in as you can.

Very impressive - does well to express many of the things I'm rather scatterbrainedly trying to express, as well as things I haven't even considered.

So yeah I'll stick with the first point I made in this post: that there is a sort of reactionary rearguard, as well as a hyperconsumptive vanguard that mark the two extremities on the distribution of people's interpretations of techne's progress, or perhaps more specifically the immaterial world. (edit: the author got at this with the X axis denoting timescale of the information processed.)

The former "fights" the external past while the latter "fights" the external future - how to best process the past, and how to best process the future. The article describes it as "betting", so instead of fighting it would be betting on the best interpretation of the past, and betting on the best interpretation of the future.

The article describes the rearguard as succumbing to FOBO, fear of being ordinary, and describes the vanguard as succumbing to FOMO, fear of missing out. I can attest: its easy to succumb to the former while under the impression that you are climbing higher.

edit: that article/manifesto sated my inner zealot, and I would recommend it.
 
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luka

Well-known member

this is so silly and juvenile.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think he engaged with the subject matter very well, but he could have used some more of the original sources. B+

don't encourage him. i have aesthetic standards that need to be adhered to. this kind of writing and attitudinising, this 'hey buddy learn to code' nerd-jock alpha-nerd triumphalism is not acceptable.
 
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luka

Well-known member
i don't think it's really about inferior or superior although on those terms, probably both. that's the way these social things work usually isnt it?
 
What social things?

you strike me as someone who would gain great strength and confidence from programming a Raspberry Pi. Infinite gains.

Or maybe you're more of a woodworker. Do you have a feel for warp and weft? How will you ever know?
 

luka

Well-known member
i got chucked out of CDT class for messing about too much. pretty sure im not cut out for woodwork. i can't be bothered with learning anything it's too frustrating and boring.
 

woops

is not like other people
your wasting your time trying to get luke to do anything he doesn't already know how to do, i've tried myself a few times
 

woops

is not like other people
he's alot keener on trying to get you to do things you don't know how to, or want to, do.
 
Sad to think Luka may never know the ecstasy of a well-conceived spreadsheet, the pride in one's craft of freezing a row on UX grounds or copying a function down a column in a Google sheet. Never produced a competitive set analysis in Google slides, dropping the merest shadow here and there, nor accepted the warm praise of his colleagues for taking the time to make it all eloquent and elegant in equal measure.

What a dur-brain!
 

luka

Well-known member
i thought you ran an electric bicycle shop? since when have you been into computers? you\re having me on.
 
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luka

Well-known member
i definitely think its better to kill yourself than have to look at a spreadsheet.
 

luka

Well-known member
if i was weighing up the two alternatives i'd come down strongly on the side of self-murder.
 
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