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Jameson says parody relies on idiosyncratic style. The style is an inimitable way of moving through the world defined by a period of history, and parody can emerge only from such historical authenticity.
Modernism has dispensed with the characteristics of history via universalist flattening, thus robbing a parody of a barbed, driven imitation, leaving it as a blind, toothless mask.
Parody today is merely pastiche—dumb style with no content: “a statue with blind eyeballs”
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Online political spaces function like a GAN (General Adversarial Network), producing conflicting ideas to smash out new political theories.
This super rapid accelerationist growth implies multitudes of points, rapidly moving into a space where everyone has their own accelerationism: not merely followers but deconstructive creators of networked broad agression.
(partially from Benjamin Bratton)
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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
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In the office,, social time is more productive than producing.
Consider that as you build loyalty and practice likeability, you will not only get into less trouble for being non-productive as you “form” ad-hoc committees for “feedback”, but the most likely way to elevate your career is moving into management, not being more efficient, timely, or productive. Look at your current management.
Equally sardonically, if you want to achieve anything in life, quit paying attention to politics outside the office, as they occupy your free time and can get you into trouble at work.
On a deeper level, political engagement accelerates into crisises that replicate and consume humans. Not to advocate for disenfranchisement, but prioritize something that can benefit you longterm, a produtive life, instead of allowing the politics of the moment as a placebo for living.
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Once, things could only be figured out after they occur: retroactively.
This means the traumatic kernel that influences the behavior that creates the event is latent, and can only be witnessed (and examined) after the action.
However, pattern prediction can map likely outcomes, foreseeing consequences. In therapy one may imagine a future based on current behavior, not like the result, and change to align with a preferred outcome.
Yet, we once created the self both by practicing in private moments and performing socially. Today, technology (an external mediator) tells us who we are in a tightened feedback loop as we self-report to aid algorithms in shaping us. We no longer look to the traumatic kernel, we no longer must unearth the hysterical event that created our unique reactions; we are maintained in an ever-becoming state with little need to look back.
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We seek understanding and purpose, motivators that lend meaning to our work and life. Yet, could this desire be misplaced, a faulty attribution, leading us further from life?
As a driven individual, each life change—be it adopting a new scheduling tool, relocating, or job switching—ushers in a phase of engaged positivity (a kind of stressful happiness), until the novelty fades into routine, diminishing your passion, which leads you to seek more novelty.
Consider that true aliveness may not stem from new meanings or intentions, but from relinquishing old ones. In this brief interlude, free from old systemic constraints, we engage with the world as it truly is, before new routines and purposes obscure our view of life.
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One day you will get hurtful news that would have infuriated you a year ago.
Today, you shrug it off.
Your old priorities have been displaced over time. You can intentionally speed it up or hold on tightly, but physics will win.
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The impatient need to speed things up in an anxious attempt at control, which can soothe fears.
The lazy procrastinate and ask for patience. Claiming they are unwilling to expend excess energy, the lazy inevitably feel anxiety as immanent failure approaches, yet do not alleviate it (act to directly solve it).
Both stem from a fear of not doing enough, well enough, but in polar approaches.
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When you look to the future, you hope and worry; you begin to plan, project, forecast, and fidget; you cease to be present and enliven potential concerns that determine your actual behavior.
When considering the future, you try to fight for a “future you” who doesn’t exist, but might.
Paradoxically, in clinging to fictitious dreams and concerns (attempting to manifest one and dodge the other), you are not your best in the present moment, which assures a distracted outcome. That is, you only achieve being absent now.
If you are your best self now, right now, and right now and now, your future self will be the compilation of all those present, best versions of you.
Please consider the future during a set aside time and decide who you want to be, but realize that version will only emerge from your behavior in the present.
