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Category: Systems

  • Theme:

    The Quasimodo silhouette of art: utility, commodity, and economics

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    1–2 minutes

    One similarity between the techno-libertarian manifest destiny of futurism and the populist backlash of Trump or Brexit is a bluntness about the bottom line of “utility.”

    Art and its complex, tangled, and soft messaging -its layered density, subtlety, and non-productive pursuits- is a threat. The effort to unpack or ascertain its message is inverse to its bottom-line value: the more baffling, the less quickly capitalized or commodified.

    Good art looks to reject easy commodification, or quick absorption, containing its incompatible antinomies within itself. Its greatness can only be realized over broad swaths of time.

    The knee-jerk reaction points to the high sales value of good art: good art has been successfully commodified, and the price inflated through investment portfolios. However, that is the art of economics glomming onto something alien to it’s nature.

    Art commodified is a malformed conflation: a disfigurement warping art into a shape recognized as the discourse of dollars. It is not that the art does not still carry its message, but cloaked and hunchbacked with economic weight, it has been Quasimodo-ed and requires a genuine heart to see past its ugly silhouette.

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    Return to Nature: a reaction to precarity that is precarious

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    1–2 minutes

    The first reaction to precarity from complexity is returning to a natural state (rejecting society). Which is noble and -definitionally- insane.

    The attempt is for humans to return to themselves and reinhabit the flesh in a state of nature as they exit the digital, mechanical, cybernetic systems that distort you.

    The anxiety producing the rejection is real: We are in a fragmenting machine chewing apart the world’s stability. T

    The problem is you enter another level of precarity by excusing yourself from society: you have no sway or power and are entirely reliant on compassion when they decide to displace you.

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    inferiority from grandiosity

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    1–2 minutes

    Your inferiority complex is because of your grandiosity complex.

    The reason you feel bad is because you think everything should be so good, so perfect.

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    uniqueness, happiness, and capitalism

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    1–2 minutes

    Our uniqueness is at hand; it is merely a matter of believing in its value.

    The rub: People say “Follow your passion,” but that rarely provides payment (which is tangible value.)

    Over time we undervalue uniqueness by aligning it with what the market will pay, devaluing it, and, therefore, ourselves.

    Capitalism, mostly, pays people for things almost no one wants to do: painful chores, abnormal skills, or sociopathic cruelty are well compensated.

    The intersection between your passion, how you are paid, and your unique ability becomes the overlapping Venn diagram: what you care about, can do happily, and get paid for is a very tiny cross-section.

    Consider instead of getting paid and narrowing this range of happiness, you can freely and complicity contribute to the “invisible hand” that keeps society moving.

    The economic side will attempt to take a bite out of the hand that feeds it, that is the hand of passion and uniqueness.

    Still, you can refuse to devalue yourself by separating your passions from payment: you can forego bland contentment and false subjugated uniqueness. Instead, save you for yourself.

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    Artificial intelligence: the return to being human

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    1–2 minutes

    Artificial intelligence, like any tool, reaffirms the difference between utility and humanity.

    The impulse is to flee or join: regress to a nostalgic, barbarian state, or merge into a techno-cybernetic future that will dissolve humanity.

    when we see ourselves as machines (tools), aligning our goals with their production, we forget that we are uniquely human.

    Being displaced by AI drives us to return to ourselves: dismantle our machinic adaptation and reveal what it is to being human.

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    social media is performative, it is anti-social

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    1–2 minutes

    Social media is not social: it is performative. It is a theater (platform) to entertain an audience.

    Social media is (arguably) anti-social because it encourages politics and morality plays.

    (first sentence from Naval)

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    The artificial intelligence Threat

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    1–2 minutes

    The threat of artificial intelligence seems to be the culmination of our dedicated efforts:

    1. We made tools to help us rise above nature.
    2. Machines to expand and proliferate.
    3. Text and computers to help us think.

    We worked extremely hard to make ourselves altogether irrelevant.

    This is an extension of competitive, capitalist labor into the digitized world where we labor against ourselves until we are extraneous. We have replaced our enslavement to the cruel master.

    Perhaps now free of our servitude to machines/data we can return to being human and caring about human things. But I doubt it.

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    the immanent improvement impulse

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    1–2 minutes

    We have an internal compulsion that comes from the survival imperative: perpetual striving.


    Even periods of sloth end or become obsessive in as sophisticated, ordered, and avoidant compulsions.

    To order our life is a struggle: a persistent fight that burns our energy. Even when there is no witness, which means it is not only a social construct of achievement but an immanent (innate) means of relating to the world.

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    is avarice good?

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    1–2 minutes

    When the economic conditions were a fixed pie avarice meant one person taking more for themselves, which meant hurting others.


    However, in today’s economy, the poor do better when the economy booms and expands the pie.


    In reverse morality, the greed of the wealthy -who are responsible for much of the economic growth- benefits the poor.

    In this myopic economic or capitalist view greed is positive, but it intentionally avoids the systemic ramifications of discarded dignity or global environmental catastrophe.

    from Yuval Noah Harari

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    Flipping: Conservative v Progressive

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    1–2 minutes

    Perhaps a “conservative” merely wants stability, and the “progressive” merely wants change.

    The complication is when the backward-looking move forward to recreate and the forward-obsessed stall out into regressive stability.

    This flipping of values for achievement combats the motivating soul of the movement, forming a contradictory spirit versus action paradox seemingly impossible to rectify.