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.
Tag: order
- Theme: Growth
the industrial cognitive labor trap
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1–2 minutesIndustrial work as cognitive labor is a problem: first, industrial work is repetitive, with the worker serving the mechanization of his/her labor. Second, the monotony stifles innovation or novelty, by which you may find value in yourself, leaving the cognitive industrial worker to rely on wealth or status for value, not any inherent/intrinsic virtue.
This valuation of social status separated from personal worth is vital to undermining any rebellion against the system: you are not you but merely the benefits the system provides. And since the industry champions repetition with only incremental change, the more predictable you are, the more promotable you become.
And yes, novel risk takers create transformative wealth, but they are not the vast majority of cognitive workers funneled into industrialized, managed positions.
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– - Theme: Growth
violence as bleach
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1–2 minutesConsider violence as a harsh problem solver: it removes obstructions and stains. However, like any caustic agent, the short-term fix applied repeatedly is corrosive to the structure.
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– - Theme: Self
Fallacy: Reality as essentially rhetorical
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1–2 minutesIn moments of idleness, we invent ways of being, transforming language into our reality—like a wizard casting spells.
Yet, the infrastructure supporting and stabilizing these dreams isn’t merely a backdrop for self-discovery and immediate desires, as noted by Benjamin Bratton.
Our era blurs sincerity and parody; assuming our rhetoric can reshape reality risks undermining the very structures that sustain us. Believing in the power of rhetoric over tangible reality will lead to the neglect and degradation (the condemnation) of the critical supports that uphold our luxuriously indulgent lives.
- Theme: Self
Scripted Failure: Emotions as progress
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1–2 minutesRejecting algorithmic and scientific models for historical prediction leaves communities opting for non-hierarchical, human-centric engagement. They often experience catastrophic breakdowns on schedule; refusing predictive models, they predictably collapse.
The apparent solidarity and spontaneity in these ‘hippie utopias’ are ironically scripted and performed, ensuring their failure. We have comprehensively mapped emotions heuristics, so retreating into feelings as a basis for progress or escape is the inverse: a truly automated failure.
Idea from Benjamin Bratton
- Theme: Self
Ends/Means for me
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1–2 minutesThe ends justify the means relationship is beyond transactional into a limited world view: the anti-golden rule.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2024/04/21 - Theme: Self
Neither left nor right, salvation from the subaltern
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1–2 minutesAny framework attempting a steady state (flatline or normalization) will encounter alternate, differential lines of flight.
Since most systems limit divergence, we end up with a binary of excess or reserve, that is progressive explosion attempting escape, or a neutralizing deadening attempting static fixity. The first is a line of flight, the second is hunkering down.
The termination of the norm (dissolution via distance) is energetic, compulsive and revolutionary, while the stability resembles retreat, antipathy or non-action.
Fascinatingly, both political parties are active (positive cybernetic) lines of flight: Both promise "progress" drawing from a topic vision, both work to unmake the current reality, and both use a polarized, modified social fabric to embolden and normalize their fringe stances and capture the center.
However, the counterforce that achieves the flatline (negatory group) is not even the ambivalent center but the completely non-engaged: those who have already escaped through non-participation. Those subalterns who do not register in our accounting and from whom perhaps the only sustainable (nonbinary) model of progress may stem.
They may offer novel solutions, uncaptured and unpredictable, nullifying our destructive escape attempts from our current anxieties.
- Theme: Systems
Options without Choice
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1–2 minutesWe 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.
- Theme: Systems
Beyond Capitalism: Post-Materialistic Order
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1–2 minutesCapitalism was initially revolutionary. It broke ideological and feudal barriers, uniting people through mutual self-interest, yet also perpetuated the disposability of humans, similar to feudalism and religion.
This system -equally stabilizing and disruptive- reshaped social dynamics but hinged on efficiency, materialism, and unending growth.
As we consider post-capitalist revolutions, we may ask: is capitalism a transitional phase that has lasted too long? A new revolution, not into Marxist communal notions of governance, but a period where society learns to transcend the human-breaking thrill of efficiency and eternal expansion.
- Theme: Self
Community is a stance, not a standard
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1–2 minutesCommunity is not formed by adherence or conformity to a norm per se, but by aligning yourself with the others emotional state and accommodating decision-making, a utilitarian meshing of mutual recognition, which must happen authentically.
Community is not a standard, but a stance.