bm3719

Within the Landian system, I suspect he'd say the answer is economic "territorialization", the economic equivalent to the mechanism originally defined by Deleuze+Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus based on the territoriality of earlier work.

It's the process where social, political, or cultural meaning is rooted in some context. It's a state of stability and boundaries. For just the economic, the geographic would likely be the centroid of that, but the other vectors are not irrelevant.

One could argue that we suffer to the degree we are deterritorialized, because the effects thereof are alienating. So, we need structure that aligns both our economic and psychological needs. What we have is subordination to the machine, which will do what it's designed to: optimize for its own desire, which is machinic production.

Note that none of this is inherently good/bad. Like anything, a choice has trade-offs. We definitely get more production within the current structure. The cost is born by the individual, aggregating into the social ills that are now endemic.

This is the trade-off to connectivity and removing frictional barriers (i.e., globalism). This is the economic equivalent of what Nick Land and Spandrell called the "IQ shredder". Spandrell said of Singapore:

  Singapore is an IQ shredder. It is an economically productive metropolis that
  sucks in bright and productive minds with opportunities and amusements at the
  cost of having a demographically unsustainable family unit.

Basically, if you're a productive person, you want to maximize your return. So, you go where the action is. So does every other smart person. Often that place is a tech hub, which is now overflowing with smart guys. Those smart guys build adware (or whatever) and fail to reproduce (combined, these forces "shred" the IQ). Meanwhile every small town is brain-drained. You hometown's mayor is 105 IQ because he's the smartest guy in town. Things don't work that great, and there's a general stagnation to the place.

Right now, AI is a "capital shredder". In the past, there were barriers everywhere, and we've worked hard to tear those down. It used to be that the further the distance (physically, but also in other senses too, like currencies, language, culture, etc.), the greater the friction to capital flows. The local rich guy would start a business in his town. Now he sends it to one of the latest global capital attractors, which have optimized for capital inflow. This mechanism works whether the attractor can efficiently use that capital or not. That resource inflow might be so lucrative, that managing inflow is the main thing it does. Right now that's AI, but as long as present structure continues, this is how the machine of the global economy will work.

It's set by people for whom the clock serves as a mechanism to garner alarmist attention whenever they feel short of it. In so doing, they diminish not just themselves, but science as a whole.

At best, the clock is indeed a measuring device; one not of our peril, but of the anxieties of a group of otherwise non-notables. In that sense, it figures that it'd say we're closer to "doom" than during the Cuban missile crisis, because that's the intensity of current vibes, particularly if you're a modern activist plugged into the techno-socious of reactionary negativism.

Was in one of those chain book stores recently and decided to stop by the philosophy section. It was tiny, only taking up part of a single shelf in a huge store. I was surprised to find about half of the titles were on Stoicism and closely-related topics. There were many pop-psych texts about applying Stoicism to modern life. I guess it's been having a moment? Interestingly, it was right next to the massive self-help section.

I have a notion that both the ancient West and East experienced a chance to align with systems of thought that reject desire, either in part or whole. In the East, that was more successful and stuck around longer. Unfortunately for us, it remained a fringe notion (think how we would react to a modern Diogenes). However, we never completely forgot, flirting with similar ideas from the direction of Christian piety, the synthesis of Eastern thought that occurred in the counter-culture era, and the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan, Deleuze+Guattari, and others. Now that our desires are being exploited against us by the tech that mediates our very existence, it makes sense we would seek defense mechanisms. There's trillions of dollars of economic force out there creating, curating, and capturing desire. It's probably worth stepping back and asking how being embedded in that structure is actually affecting us and the degree it's aligned with our innate interests.

GPTZero calls this text 98% AI-generated.

Narrative warfare is real. Be especially careful when it's something that conforms to your priors. The cost for agitprop is now effectively zero.

Why bother? If you run updates, it'll randomly crap on all your custom settings anyway.

You win, MS. I thought I could keep a Windows box around for the occasional game and as an emergency backup for when I need random peripherals to "just work". I give up. The current Windows box (which I barely use anyway) is my last one.

Because we're intersubjective beings. Difference in intelligence level alienates one from the other. Past two standard deviations, anything like a "meeting of minds" becomes impossible. The only mutual interactions past that delta are economic ones (money exchanged for goods/services).

Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.

If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.

This stuff is all true. Lacan also had a habit of permanently "borrowing" people's collectible books, charging Felix Guattari to drive Lacan home, sleeping with his female clients, and many, many other despicable things. He was, by all accounts, a complete scumbag.

I still read him because his ideas are brilliant and helped me in innumerable ways. He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist. However, if we somehow resurrect Lacan, I won't be lending him any first editions from my collection.

I'm not fluent in French or German either, only enough for light reading in both, and certainly not enough for anything complex/dense. For Lacan, Hegel, and other continental thinkers, I read the same translations that most English-speaking readers do. Am I missing something of these text's core essence? Probably. But, it's also not my job and I need that linguistic brain space for programming languages, so I'm okay with getting 90% of it.

Here was my early Lacan workflow: Lots of Freud essays (you need to know Freud's major ideas cold), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan by McGowan, The Lacanian Subject by Fink, Seminar VII, Seminar XI.

I've read a lot of other stuff since then, but this path into Lacan worked for me. By the time you've read these, you'll know where to go next on your own. You'll also know pretty early in it whether Lacan is for you. Also, if you don't like Freud (and I don't mean disagree with him, but dislike the overall approach), you can safely stop there.

Say you wanted to teach cultural studies. That necessarily includes politics, so you should talk about it. However, you can teach politics (or even theorize about politics), or you can do politics. I assert you can't do both, at least not in an academic setting.

Note how the author can't help but take sides on every political signifier he references. He supposedly wanted to write about the Sokal affair from his side, but the essay ends up being a polemic deeply in the now, to the degree that the documentary effort is substantively diminished. That's what papers in his field read like in the 1990s, and still do to this day.

I think Lacan's obscurantism, if you want to call it that, can be thought of one of two ways:

1. He claims to not to want to be understood too quickly. If you believe that, you might say he's forcing the reader (or emerging psychoanalyst) to not just take his ideas as a simple list of facts to be memorized. He often rants about other fields being reductive in the face of necessary nuance. You might also justify this by saying precisely that perspective is necessary in psychoanalysis, with the human mind (particularly the suffering one) in all its unexplored complexity being its target. I'm of two minds on this: I see his point, but there are certainly times when such is an obstacle. Of course, that's if you believe him in the first place. He also said he was something of the master, and his audience the acolytes. He was trying to build a new school under his system, after all.

2. Lacan's ideas are indeed complex and extremely tightly interconnected (or polyvalent, as he likes to say). The graph of Lacanian thought has a lot of nodes (ideas), and an extremely high number of edges (relationships between ideas) per node, and thus very high graph density. If you think about it from that perspective, how does one present such a oeuvre in the linear form like essays or speeches? Further complexifying things is that he was building this in situ, his Seminars being akin to live-blogging that development. He often asks his audience if there's an expert on a particular topic and if so, to let him know about some detail. He never wrote a comprehensive final form of Lacanian thought, so any secondary texts you read will be that author's interpretation. All this creates quite the conundrum for anyone getting started.

If you want condensed info and clarity, go for a secondary source (Bruce Fink being my favorite), while noting the above. I'd also say that, like Hegel, Lacan has something of a language of his own, one you can learn. If you find his ideas compelling (I do, and have benefited from them in my personal life greatly) you should still read him as a primary source. Even if you do the actual learning via other sources, I'd assert that Lacan is one of the last of the true Renaissance men, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen, and I also find reading him an expanding experience just from that perspective.

Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas.

For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work.

However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life.

All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.

Our gestating Machine God doesn't yet have hands as good as ours, so good this is good advice.

We had a system of overproduction of sentient office equipment, who waste their time on pointless Zoom calls and sending emails that no one reads. That had to end sooner or later, and was already about to collapse on its own. BS job holders are miserable anyway. Let's give these people purpose (closing the gap between activity and tangible output), free them from debt-slavery, and fix all the broken infrastructure around us.

The thinking-averse outnumber the thinking-inclined. They've tried this thinking thing, and want nothing to do with it. They all went to public school, after all, and the rare times thinking happened it was painful and had to be forced upon them. Their ideal of Being is to react to content, experience positive emotional immediacy, or dull their intellects: all feeling, no thinking.

They'll win in the short term, due to the tyranny of convenience. Then, when all economic value has been extracted from them and the possibility of future value made nil, they'll lose. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll win though.

> This isn't even getting into the Jungian "death drive"

The death drive is Freudian, not Jungian. However, it might be very relevant here. Freud's conception of it would include passively accepting death. As you say, by the time the prisoner is about to be executed, they're often resigned to their fate, the death drive having overcome the id long ago. Contrast with massacres where the victims weren't expecting it (the Malmedy massacre of freshly captured troops comes to mind from the same era) and you see people trying to run away once it starts.

Lacan called himself Freudian, but I think his conception links the death drive with active desire, seeking a form of self-destructive pleasure by action. I recall from Écrits that he links it to masochism, for example, calling it an expression of transgressive jouissance.

Interesting that Kojève and Bataille were pals. Might be relevant to the following:

> In “Colonialism from a European Perspective,” Kojève argued that the industrial nations of Europe should give financial aid to the “underdeveloped countries” that were their current or former colonies. Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift and Bataille’s theory of expenditure, Kojève called this “giving colonialism.”

Bataille did suggest this in his book The Accursed Share, specifically that the US should give all its excess wealth to India "without reciprocation". He posits that energy (wealth) that isn't used for maintenance or growth can only be wasted on war or luxuries like monuments, calling that wealth the book's namesake.

What he misses is that there are other options, like investing in research which can open up new avenues for growth, or hoarding commodities (thereby storing the wealth) like China is doing with rare earths. Whether either of those (or other options) is a good idea is a separate question, of course.

This is just a personal take, but I consider this in conflict with (my interpretation of) Bataille's famous essay, The Solar Anus. Perhaps if he was able to conceive of the above, that wouldn't be the case.

Hegel, and later Sartre (but from a very different perspective), emphasized the importance of The Other, in the sense of the definition of the Self.

In short, by defining the other, one demarcates the boundary of the self and defines ones identity. Self-identity necessitates the other, in its self-conception and interdependence of the latter's existence. To be reductionist, what does it even mean to be oneself if there is no other?

Arguably, we've let metrics rule in the same way the Soviets optimized for steel and wheat production, but instead for pure economic market signals. Doing so, we see a market strongly signaling that it has a peasant surplus. Unfortunately for them, peasants are (presumably) conscious beings, so suffering ensues.

If the 2024 DJT win is to be interpreted as a peasant revolt against this system, perhaps it's one that is attempting to use the non-market force of government to create new Schelling points (mostly via protectionism) that meet libidinal (more in the Mark Fisher sense, less Lyotard) desires. Procreation is literally libidinal, after all, so we can see how powerful our system's market forces must be to completely override it.

They don't matter because we've finally created a world where the modern peasant is as economically irrelevant as any other outdated farm or industrial equipment. If you opened a printing press staffed by scribes with fountain pens, you'd just lose money. Same goes with hiring your modern peasant; they're simply incapable of producing net economic value thanks to centuries of engineered optimization.

If you have kids, even if your partner and you are both high IQ, you're statistically more likely than not to add to this mass of economically unviable peasants unable to be top-tier in the global economy of tomorrow. Maybe that's partly why birthrates in the first and second world have plummeted, as we all kind of know this, if only tacitly.

A potentially simpler solution if you just want something like a header on the page(s), org-publish-project-alist elements support a :html-preamble key that you can assign to any custom function on a per-project basis.

That's how I insert a static <nav> header, and therefore don't have to eval any org-babel blocks as it's just integrated into org-publish. Also the function lives in your init.el this way and not an external script.

As someone who works for the federal government, I'm surrounded by waste. Untold millions of dollars of it; the sum total accounting for millions of Americans' worth of tax revenue. I'm also surrounded by chair warmers, who at best do nothing, and when they don't they create negative value. Some of us try to get things done despite this, but I've been on projects where the host is so loaded with parasitic mass, that that's impossible.

It's long past time to take out the trash.

His sister agrees with that notion:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69520118/1/altman-v-alt...

Probably the biggest disservice done by Scrum was changing our thinking and language around methodology. It made it so that if something was going to displace it, it had to start with a capital letter, be a "real" version of something, and have a lot of institutional momentum behind it. It acted like some kind of social exploit--one we had no immunity to.

So, we ended up stuck with it, suffering untold millions of hours wasted in useless meetings and untold creativity crushed since it didn't fit into the process. We should've just tossed the notion that there's some kind of planning structure that makes sense across all possible projects, then done whatever made sense for our specific environments, not put a name on it, or even talked about "methodology" much at all.

Maybe it's because money doesn't buy as much as it did 4 years ago. Since most employees have limited control over their mostly-static salaries, they've scaled down output accordingly.

Good. Some of us don't use smartphones. 10% of US adults don't according to a 2023 Pew survey, though I suspect most of those are old people. Any business requiring one explicitly excludes me as a customer and generally makes the world a less-accessible place.

The smartphone-required world is a dystopia. Build on open protocols so people can write whatever software they want on top of them. UI should be personal preference, not dictated. I prefer to control my life from Emacs, but wouldn't dream of forcing everyone else to. Please return the courtesy.

It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one.

If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).

So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.

I do this because I have to protect my brain from marketers that are working against my financial interests, time management goals, and general mental hygiene. If I'm searching for, like in your case, tech info, it's because I want a solution to a problem that has nothing to do with getting sold crappy VPN services or mobile games.

We could have a decentralized and open medium for global information exchange. Instead, the web is a cesspool, and a large part of why is because we've commercialized everything.

You may be interested to know that you are actually quite fashionable, as haute couture has recently discovered the garbage bag look:

https://www.balenciaga.com/en-us/trash-bag-large-pouch--whit...

> Of all the things my kids and i have looked at under the microscope, sperm is some of the most entertaining to watch.

Nothing like the wholesome family activity of looking at your father's sperm. Maybe you should print a picture for over the fireplace or get t-shirts made?

There's certainly other forces at play, but having participated in one, I tend to view the main reason that war is traumatic to the individual is its depersonalized (and in modern times, mechanistic) nature.

A person being confronted so undeniably with their place in the machinery of superorganisms in conflict induces all sorts of problems, including cognitive dissonance, and the mind struggles to form the individually senseless nature of strangers lining up to disassemble each other with kinetic force into some kind of cohesive narrative, usually failing miserably.

So, that's the true horror of it: the deep destruction of the self. That's why what remains of participants are often these psychological husks, their reality model permanently shattered.