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Tag: society

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    AI Marxism

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    1–2 minutes

    Artificical Intelligences promises broad, populist access to once-elite crafts, like writing and art creation. It levels the playing field of drafting and illustrating your ideas, denying class distinctions and privileged hierarchies.

    This conception of “AI as a leveling tool” highlights its neutralizing, even socialist or communist potential: equity of outcome, despite circumstances, and populist access to lofty realms.

    AI, in this regard, de-centers and disincentivizes traditional skills. Devoid of these meritocratic virtues, your worth could be valued by your humanity alone, not rarefied traits or pathological diligence or supportive access.

    And yet, those who make the AI platform and decisions that govern the LLMs and Generators maintain distance with their rarified skills and wealth: the pinnacle of capitalism and meritocracy. In this regard, the intelligent coder and platform backer outmaneuvers mass humanity to further dissuade or reprogram resistance by removing the friction of process and thinking, which is itself a rarified skill.

    Similarly, capitalism once again dissuades skill acquisition, like the industrial assembly line wasting talent on monotony. Meanwhile, utilizing the “tools of capitalism” hollows the revolutionary spirit into platitudes since we develop a symbiotic reliance.

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    Society: solving Repression leads to Depression

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    Freud would say our problem is repression. Byung-Chul Han says our problem is depression.

    Over 150 years ago, people knew who they were in society: a body with a job.
    Most of our work was labor, from which the body might suffer but could recover with a short break. Our stratified placement limited the mind, so ambition and possibility were limited, implying reduced cognitive anxiety and strain.

    People were likely to repress ‘delusions and abnormal behaviors’ under authoritarian control. Still, they were not responsible for self-optimization, perpetual fear of not meeting your potential, or the imperative to fulfill and achieve impossible dreams.

    Now that we are free of repression, we have burnout and depression.

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    Corporate Zealotry: Fleeting Bonds

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    1–2 minutes

    I overheard two men bitching about work as a means to bond. They both aggrandize their superiority in navigating and adhering to policies, portraying themselves as paragons of corporate responsibility, zealots that sacrifice to make up for the flaws in the system.

    This conversation, seemingly typical or mundane, underscores a deeper societal tendency: bonding through competitive allegiance to corporate structures. Such alliances, intense and short-lived, are rooted in bureaucratic fervor and often negate fundamental human values.

    Paradoxically, to create the human bond we are missing within corporate alignment, we announce and parade our commitment to inhumanity as a worthy attribute.

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    The Modern Medieval

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    The Enlightenment championed the democratization of knowledge, emancipating society from the information monopoly of the clergy. This heralded a new era of freedom.

    Yet, in our contemporary, information-saturated world, often basic knowledge (like a specific component’s dimensions or materiality) remains elusive. We’ve supplanted clerical gatekeepers (the human compendium) with intricate systems of knowledge (the digital table), bureaucratic formalities and complexities, and capitalist-driven reductive efficiency.

    These layers obscure direct access to information, ironically mirroring the medieval period’s hierarchical information control. Our ‘hypermodern’ society re-enacts the constrained knowledge dissemination of the medieval.

    {from Matthew Crawford}

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    Honor as a Mirror

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    To maintain honor is to behold yourself as others behold you.

    The mirror of society is the distortion that maintains our shape.

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    Public/Private and Scene/Obscene

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    The difference between public and private is the difference between the scene and the obscene.
    The obscene is an excessively close-up intimacy beyond the discriminating distance of theatrics or mirrors. The disgust stems from a breaking of moral limits, where the private is made known to the public beyond request, beyond intimacy, beyond imagining.

    At this point, the obscene collapses the imaginary with too much reality. The scene is quaffed for the public, while the ob-scene moves into the private, and then through it.

    An implication: The media’s functional role is to expose, to move beyond the public/scene into the private/obscene, which takes it beyond pornographic. The willingness to capture is not titillation but a function swollen by the technology: with a zoom lens and access, the imperative to forensically reveal is undeniable.

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    Pride in lethargy

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    In today’s world, we are surrounded by the attention economy and the optimization movement that demands our attention every waking moment.

    However, there is a growing trend towards “disciplined disengagement,” which involves actively disengaging from these demands to maintain our mental health.

    This is not laziness or lethargy though it appears so, but a conscious effort to find a healthy balance between productivity and non-productivity. Yet this trend and prioritizing our mental well-being over the societal pressure to be constantly productive is itself another optimization to normalization and hyper-production: balance now for intense anxiety later.

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    friendship based on lameness

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    People often find it challenging to befriend someone who is unpredictable. Even if you are generally somewhat weird, there is a limit beyond which you may become off-putting. Overindulging in your creative freedom can sometimes overwhelm those who simply seek casual entertainment.

    Many relationships seem to be based on your ability to moderate your level of creativity to a degree of lameness, which is not true creativity but rather something adjacent to it – adjacent to being interesting.

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    identification double-down

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    1–2 minutes

    We all have certain traits that we identify with, such as intelligence or kindness. However, we may feel the need to exaggerate and elevate these traits to appear more special and deserving than we actually are.

    This may involve engaging in gray morality (hedging) to gain an advantage. For instance, we may believe that we deserve more time off, special consideration, or forgiveness when in thee wrong.

    Ultimately, this behavior is driven by our insecurities, which in turn creates situations that are not secure.

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    comedic grounding

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    Comedy often employs the technique of contrasting highbrow symbols with vulgar ones.

    The highbrow symbol, which is essentially a façade, is flipped or inverted to create a sense of ridicule. This juxtaposition allows us to rediscover our humanity by highlighting the absurdity of high-mindedness and the relatability of vulgarity.