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We cannot fight for natural rights with war and coercion, because it is antithetical to the spirit natural rights, forcing a hypocritical solution.
Neither can natural rights be reinstated by appealing to settled peaceful times, because such a time is managed by industrial complexes and conglomerates that work fracture liberty and the individual into serfdom.
From Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate
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Nesting (organizing one’s environment) reaffirms and solidifies identity through external organization. To frame your environment is to reframe yourself according to the objects and choices you have access to. In this way, you solidify your identity for yourself (and others) as a person who has and does certain things, providing a stabilizing environment by reflecting yourself to you.
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Natural rights stem from peaceful industry and cannot be restored through war or coercive government, as these oppose the spirit of natural rights. (War or Government will not restore your rights.)
They also cannot be reinstated through settled peace and freedom, which would advance industrial and corporate dominance, further eroding natural liberty. (Peaceful will not restore your rights.)
from Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate
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One argument against democracy is governance by representatives, which means distant strangers who, despite theoretical accountability by voting, have split interests: first, they must promise that they care and will be effective (community solidarity for change), and second, they must make sure to be re-elected (self-interest as stability).
Both involve compromises that must be hidden: to be effective, you must work with the “enemy,” which runs against the cares of your constituents. The representative must necessarily be two-faced: hide compromise or stall effectiveness.
It seems there is a way in which social mores (ethics, values, social status) and an educated populace (reasonable consideration of multiple variables) could remove this antagonism, and yet harnassing a counterintuitive paradox (self-interest as community support) is the brilliance of democracy.
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Technology creates leisure by streamlining tasks, yet capitalism often repurposes this newfound time as an opportunity for more work, thereby increasing productivity and profit.
This cycle perpetuates an unsustainable drive for efficiency, usually at the cost of genuine leisure. Robots, of course, don’t need leisure, so as we rush forward we either become robots or are displaced by them.
The system logic’s embedded paradoxes imply its collapse, and yet we keep innovating our own survival.
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The competitive nature of the capitalist economic struggle, while it produces progress in products and raises the overall quality of life, also converts humans into individuated consumers, themselves produced and desires manipulated.
To know yourself as an individual (sovereign, autonomous) is to not know yourself as part of a community with reliant ties. You cease to know yourself as we once did, as a piece of a whole in which your identity is integral and there is no desire to differentiate or stive out of it.
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We are embedded in a planetary society connected for information, resources, and cooperative survival, yet we are simultaneously reminded to realize our personal potential (self-actualize) as a form of agency to stand out within this wired hive.
While being surveilled by the state and corporations, we are told to be private and autonomous, to be rebels. Personal actualization, we are told, comes from over-individuating, that is, leaning so hard into yourself that you are separated from consensus normalization. However, our very systems to communicate and sense our agency (our rebel status) in the world are technologically adapted against individuation in favor of communal alignment.
All that to say, anyone who feels crazy under these antagonistic imperatives is sane is normal.
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As materiality has evolved from the weight of gold to ethereal digital currencies, human connection and interaction also transition from solidity (physical presence, solid character) to the instability of digital relations. The economic transformation mirrors the shift from concrete to conceptual: all things become lighter forms of existence.
Consider communication, from letters inscribed on paper and ink to instant digital messages. Or physical marketplaces, where goods exchanged hands over handshakes, to virtual transactions and blind clicks.
This increasing ‘lightness of being’ spins us toward a non-material trajectory: the weight of our interactions mirrors the weight of our values, from physical engagement to ephemeral experience. Once, our presence socially was communally anchored (and bound to mores) but now fluctuates and disperses into the digital ether, yet our flickering agency now takes the form of ghosts wailing to be substantive again.
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We have more choice options than ever, but local color is falling into abeyance with standardized, mechanized consumer units.
The pound, the 12 pack, 6 flavors, or 3 finish options that can define you as a person: a set of limited, standardized gold-plating requiring your focus, functional blinders, preventing you from deciding who you really might be if you designed yourself without the ability to purchase.
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A product is an object or service, a one-time purchase, but a device is never complete and always engaged, reporting and tuning.
We have moved from products to devices, which capture behavioral surplus, exhaust data, and enhance predictive models. These algorithmic extractions forecast futures but beyond anticipating, they actively manifest their predictions.
All of this is traded in a new marketplace.
Wealth is in the future, not so much predicted as shaped. This reduces risk: programmatic behavior does not anticipate what will come to pass, it assures it.
~ via Shoshana Zuboff
