Category: Systems


  • Theme:

    Scarcity vs. solar economy

    1–2 minutes

    Our universe functions on a super-abundance of energy: the sun freely shares massive amounts of energy, yet we are concerned with scarcity and hoarding.
    Our worry is survival. However, we have developed an economy around desire fulfillment, which is never sated and easily converts "want" to "need": amidst excess, we experience lack.

    (source: Bataille)


  • Theme:

    infinity beyond measure

    1–2 minutes

    To "understand" is to grasp rules that allow something to exist and function: to map out the parts and their interactions.
    However, infinity breaks these concepts of rules, making us feel small in the face of something vast and unknowable: that is, unmeasurable.


  • Theme:

    Abundance of Life

    1–2 minutes

    Bataille discusses the excessiveness of the general (solar) economy in nature, yet we often apply a scarcity mindset: "I only have so much love to give."

    Instead of rationing out your life as a precious commodity, slowly squeezing yourself dry, realize life is infinite and wasteful.
    Paradoxically, you have more energy through excessive spending.


  • Theme:

    Science doesn’t need your belief

    1–2 minutes

    By stating science as a matter of belief or faith one shifts the empirical to the subjective, opening the indisputable to the option for disagreement.

    In wanting to profess commitment people unwittingly democratize (shift into the realm of popularity) and politicize science’s process into its opposite: a platform for affirmative declaration instead of contingent falsification.

    Science does not need your belief. Instead, it is actively harmed by the adherent’s myopic misunderstanding, like most religions.


  • Theme:

    Product fetish as self-production

    1–2 minutes

    Humans can now only relate to others as objects, as commodities: the human relation is now a product-driven object-obsessed interaction. Worse, how you relate to others is how you relate to yourself.
    The seduction is easy: I love working with tools whose smooth functioning moves into a frictionless joy of goal achievement. I am a product fetishist, producing myself as a proximate object for consumption.


  • Theme:

    nature is too real

    1–2 minutes

    Ever since the reasoning mind was granted dominance, our war against nature has increasingly mirrored a split from reality.

    Since we can predict a narrow point of progress and achieve it, we have lost -in direct proportion- our ability to comprehend and sustain broader symbiotic relationships.

    (inspired by Calvin and Hobbes and Bataille)


  • Theme:

    Binary thinking confounds reality

    1–2 minutes

    Our most significant flaw is binary thinking: winner-loser, zero-one, black-white. Binary categorization makes separateness and opposition fundamental.
    In reality, the world is highly relationally contingent. There are no objects or fixity so much as processes over time.

    The environment evokes action from an organism, yet we attribute the move as coming from the individual, using it to describe them. Yet, there is no individual without the environment and no action without interactive (shared) evocation.

    ~ Alan Watts


  • Theme:

    Does emergent consciousness require consciousness?

    1–2 minutes

    Odd thought: Our world made us to see itself. What if atoms were made in a way that allowed them to be capable of arranging themselves in a way that permitted comprehension of atoms?
    This circular argument implies matter itself has a will toward the complexity necessary for self-awareness.


  • Theme:

    Incentives and Algorithms

    1–2 minutes

    Social media is to blame because it perpetuates drama. If success is time-on-platform, not thoughtful engagement, triggering base impulses (shock and popularity) is expedient.

    Yet, corporations can alter algorithms to maximize time-on-platform by feeding in-depth conscientious debates.

    A contemplative public may have a higher price yet is worth incentivizing. Parading stupidity (until we live in an idiocracy) will be considerably more costly in the long run.


  • Theme:

    Debunking the sanctity of nature

    1–2 minutes

    Returning to nature (what is natural) means returning to a state of purity before humans intervened. Yet, we often forget that nature is not beneficent, and most of human history is a struggle to stay alive.

    Our romanticizing of nature is an idealistic return to a sanitized version: a version mediated by men.

    We shamingly pronounce “it’s not natural” or “they are playing God,” which reveals a value judgment that original states are preferable, while denying the broader scope and benefit from advancement.