Cryptowen

imo there's an element of truth to the "you grow out of radical political positions as you get older" line of thinking, but it doesn't ultimately invalidate the radical position. for sure, young people tend to get caught up in overly simplistic "good guys vs bad guys" narratives. As they get older they hopefully become more nuanced in their thinking, and begin to recognize that many of the ostensibly rebellious acts they undertook in their youth were nothing more than commodified lifestyle packages sold to them by the very system they were trying to undermine. But it's also overly reductionist to suggest that this typical move away from revolutionary identities is wholly the product of wisdom. i think people continuously run a cost-benefit analysis on a semi-conscious level. when you're young the world seems full of possibility. as you get old, it starts to seem less likely that the revolution will happen in your lifetime, thus the idea of trying to eke out a stable existence within the logic of the imperfect world that presents itself to you becomes appealing. but obviously revolutions do happen. Old ways of thinking get swept away and replaced with new ones. it was not even 250 years ago that the united states founding itself on notions of individual liberty would have been considered a radical act. to suggest that we're in the end stage of human social development (even in embryonic form), that it couldn't be displaced by entirely different forms of understanding within this very century - pure ideology *sniff* imo a person of revolutionary inclination should hedge their bets. do research. try to better understand the functional limitations and psychological impositions of the system we're currently in. come to see the ways in which most people will resist your line of thinking. see the distortions playing out in your own thinking (even in your projections of what a post-revolutionary world might look like). recognize that these changes are largely unpredictable and move at a scale beyond that of a typical human lifetime. the revolution might not happen in your life, and it very well might not be the kind of revolution you'd like to see. but don't disregard that which compels you to ask - how could this be different?

*to the tune of janie's got a gun* https://terraforming.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sun

people upstairs have been waking me up having loud sex the last few nights. floors are thin so i can distinctly make out the conversation as well whether i want to or not. this morning at 4AM it was something about shamans & sacral cleansing tempted to play the all monster mash playlist next time this happens

many such cases

I like what you said in this post. As mentioned above, these passages remind me a lot of The Political & Man by Panagiotis Kondylis, which can be found here https://www.panagiotiskondylis.com/the-political-and-man.php . It's a pretty dense book & he expects you to be familiar with a lot of 20th century philosophy & sociology concepts going in, but imo it's well worth reading. Basically he puts forward the idea that we tend to still construct theories in a way that's subconsciously informed by the conditions of early bourgeois liberalism, even though the actual movement of capital has gradually mutated every previously existing culture & class stratum. Increasingly, human action is dictated by inpersonal systemic rational, of which the individual is not entirely conscious. Kondylis attempts to make this more explicit by deconstructing the sociological models of the 20th century, demonstrating the sorts of logical/perceptual pre-suppositions they load into any decision making process

*motivational dad voice* never forget billy, you are the best exorcist movie. and don't let anyone tellya otherwise

alas no. but it is sitting on a copy of on liberty by john stuart mill, the literary equivalent of working in an amazon warehouse

i found a sticker today that's just a drawing of an amazon warehouse on fire. i brought it home it's on my coffeetable

https://endnotes.org.uk/file_hosting/EN5_The_Passion_of_Communism.pdf Reading some Jacques Camatte exerpts this evening (page 12 in this pdf where it starts). he's good, i dig it - reminds me of Kondylis but much easier to parse the lingo

current power rankings for favoured usa vs china popular longterm outcomes: dune prequel everybody goes to space & gets their own planet to fuck around on scenario north america federates into warring tribal states, at least some of which are run by militant eco-cultists scenario madmax ATVs and machine guns collapse/global warming induced global sahara desert scenario china takes over the world but they aren't dicks about it scenario everybody gets UBI & things are just kinda chill i guess scenario guys trying to make virtual reality porn accidentally create the matrix scenario gotta go work 996 shifts in chinese glass factory with no eye protection scenario jeff bezos becomes neofeudal overlord, gotta work in the amazon factory, mandatory marvel movie screenings every weeknight scenario

yeah personally i'd describe "democracy" as a methodology for deciding on collective acts, which can vary substantially in form depending on the size of the collective, the culture, the historical era etc. There could be distinctly non-democratic aspects in a democratic system (ie the public votes that they want something, but a select individual or group ultimately determines how to go about executing the process), and vague democratic aspects in non-democratic systems (an autocrat might still pay attention to the general sentiment of the region he rules over, in order to reduce the possibility of violent revolt). also there is the eternal question of how exactly the individual comes to decide "what they want", to what degree they are influenced by macro level forces like propaganda, the media, or charismatic political figures maybe it would if enough people voted on it

UPDATE: I didn't get any situationist literature because i'm not in the right headspace to read 5,000 pages of untranslated Guy Debord rn. I did get Bakunin's God and the State, Alden Wood's The Cultural Logic of Insurrection (I think he's vaguely associated with the invisible commitee? i dunno i kinda got this one on a whim), Yuk Hui's The Question Concerning Technology in China (a friend recommended this for getting a sense of contemporary Chinese thought. @cyanobacteriahave you heard of this book? it seems like something you might be into)

okay yah that makes sense. My first impression here would be that a mob does have a sort of directionality to it (ie in the sense that there's some intensely-felt sentiment that gets people moving; though this can become confused as we see in the case of riots that break out following political protests & inevitably draw out actors who are just there for the sake of taking part in a riot). But it's a destructuring kind of energy, tearing through the fabric of the social landscape as an ireversable historical process. at most it clears space for a new self-sustaining order to develop in, but it doesn't provide these things of its own accord

in your opinion what are the fundamental distinctions between mob rule & government? (actually not trying to be contrarian or disagree here, genuinely curious to see how this could be formalized for you)

also dudes i'm about to go to the local anarchist bookstore because i need some research literature on the situationist movement, what are some other fun communist things to keep a look out for while i'm there?

pitchforks & torches are a form of democracy y/n

there's something magical about that weird ultra-consistent art style that wikihow has on every one of its articles. i've been aware of it for at least a decade & it still feels like it's the work of one guy, just banging out hundreds of images a day by awkwardly photoshopping stock photos together & then tracing them with his wacom tablet

i've been living alone since 2018, and it's been great. my irl interactions are like 95% performative, which is fine most the time but gets to be a problem if you have to be on the clock 24/7. living alone has done wonders for my mental health. rent isn't too bad either if you're down to live in a one room apartment. yeah +1. i've known some real hotties who were dating absolute chuggos (not implying zeph is chuggo). just tape some pictures of garbage on the inside of your sunglasses when you go on the date, that way when you look at her you won't be intimidated

if trump were half the dictator he was made out to be he would have jack ma-ed these guys ages ago

yeah honestly i feel like there's a real normative process that goes on with social media. basically the more content is reduced to memes & short soundbites, and the more the form of discussion literally begins to revolve around scoring points, the more the sort of hivemind sets in. obviously this process of mimetic opinion transfer & subconsciously catering one's expression to one's audience happens in every form of social interaction, but at least with real conversation there's a much higher degree of reflection & personal re-combination going on. go on facebook and it's like john carpenter's the thing is tryin to get me to watch tiger king or some bullshit

one of the advantages of not being on social media is that when i do randomly run into some person i haven't seen in a while they react like they just saw a fuckin sasquatch

i dunno much about che guevara but his guerilla warfare book was pretty badass. just out in the jungle with the squad doing military drills & competing for the daily cigar ration; that's the kind of communism i can get onboard with

I will say that that's definitely a consideration. After getting off fb my irl social circle quickly dwindled to the people I saw on a weekly basis, and maybe a half dozen or so close contacts. But that didn't particularly bother me, emotionally. Perhaps I missed out on some social opportunities, but I reckon I gained far more with the time saved from aimless browsing. It does make me wonder what socializing irl will be like post-covid however. Not being on social media in 2020 meant pretty much losing contact with everyone I had known irl - which didn't particularly bother me much. I was just about done with the circles I had been running in, anyway. I would like to build new circles eventually, however, and that's gonna pretty much be a "from the ground up" project

i got off music social media a decade ago, everything else 4 or 5 years ago. Just do discussion forums & things like that now. Social media gave me a weird feeling. It's like the pornographication of friendship