Yanis Varoufakis: Inside the Panopticon

How the Prisoners Behave

CIA Psych 101

It always comes back down to Maslow... and "Safety"

Left vs Right? Or Dissidents vs. Collaborators

 Curtis Yarvin

excerpt from chapter 2:

Dissidents under all regimes often come to grief by expecting power, their enemy, to be fair to them - or believing that some demonstration of unfairness will harm the regime's legitimacy. Actually, successful illegitimate action CONFIRMS a regime's legitimacy. Only the powers that be can break their own rules.

Since the power of exception is the ultimate power, observing that any agent acts unfairly, lawlessly or with impunity means observing that it holds some share of objective sovereignty - ie, it is an authentic and legitimate government agency. This does not even require it to be an official government agency.

True sovereignty is observed and not prescribed. It may be prescribed in old papers, deeds, and pedigrees; it is observed in the usual and habitual process of government. An agent that makes and breaks its' own rules is clearly sovereign in its' own domain- and to be sovereign is to be unaccountable.

Anyone in a conflict with asymmetrical rules tends to lose. And if dissidents lose, the regime wins. And if it is not a good regime, this is a bad result. So it is better not to play. Very difficult logic! As a dissident, you always knew this. The trouble is just that you let yourself stop thinking about it.

Pursuing a strategy you know can't work is what coder call thrashing. Thrashing is what you do with a bug when you have no strategy for solving it. You try anything and everything you know won't work. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't.

Gravity = Entropy... ?

More chit-chat with Ted Jacobson

Finnegans Wake: A Philosophy of Rumour...

Adam Curtis on the Cult and Culture of Individualism

Excerpt:

Alan Moore: ...We were actually discussing "What is counterculture?" and Spurrious Hix said something very interesting, he said, "Well of course, counter cultures always fail". And they do, but that is because they are always assimilated into the overall culture. And I suggested that perhaps a good strategy would be to make your counterculture so toxic, or so psychedelic, that having assimilated you, Society would be feeling really weird for several decades afterwards. It also occurred to me that there in some ways there is no counter culture. In some ways counterculture is a necessary organ of culture. It's the part of culture that can criticize culture, and that is the way that culture criticizes itself, and the culture renews itself. And if you artificially Stamp Out Counter Culture, which is I think kind of what happened in the '90s, if you kind of forbid Counter Culture what will happen is, culture will die. Because the Counter Culture was a necessary organ in its' body. And I don't think that there's anything in modern culture that suggest that that wasn't the case. That sort of we cut out an organ, we thought, oh it's just an appendix, it's no function we can throw this away. And look what's happened. So yeah, I think that Counter Culture is vital. And if you haven't got Counter Culture you haven't got culture.

Moderator: Adam, over to you on that, with your recent film Hypernormalization, you start off with what was quite a shocking point, to like, oh my God it's all Patto Smith's fault, when you started talking about how when artists started to De-politicize and focus on the individual. Where does that fit with your idea of counterculture and where we are now? Would say how were you going with that?

Adam Curtis: Well I have a of rather ambiguous attitude to the counterculture. I mean we're talking about the counterculture that grew up in the late 1960s. It came out of the failure of any leftwing politics to change the world, and what replaced it was this idea that you, as an individual, use culture, and your attitude to culture, and the way you can express yourself as a way of challenging the corrupt old politics. Inherent in that was the idea that you, as an individual, knew what was right. "You were authentic" was the phrase. Whereas the Man, the corrupt old politics, was fake. What that authenticity depended upon was you trusting your own instincts, not joining a party, being an individual, being yourself. And in the process, it was your own Truth. That's what you're expressing. I mean Patti Smith was one of the early ones. She got there very quickly. She expressed that idea very clearly. That's what culture could do. It could counter the old corrupt politics.

What I argue is that actually, that's become the Conformity of our time. I mean the central to mass consumer culture is the idea of expressing yourself through your clothes, through everything. I think it rescued consumer capitalism the idea of Counter Culture, and I think Alan's right, in a way it did it died in the '90s because it became the norm. I mean everyone. I mean it didn't do anything, didn't do what it was saying, but everyone was expressing themselves and being countercultural in a very absorbed way. What I think they're waiting for is a yearning for some kind of new counterculture that goes the next step. You're not going to put individualism back in the bottle. It's what we all believe in, it's what drives us. We're all, at heart, Libertarians really, but what we're yearing for is what we were just talking about earlier on, is some kind of story that can unite us all. Yet at the same time, allows us to feel that we are in control of our own destiny. That we're not told to do what the man used to tell us to do. And until someone does that, we're slightly lost.

So in a sense I think that the Counter Culture of the' 60s only went half the step. And it got absorbed, and it got used ruthlessly, and we're waiting for something else to come along. The danger in that is that we were one of the reasons why individualism was so attractive in the' 60s, is the generation before that said, "Don't believe in mythologies. Look what happens. You get fascism. You get Stalinism. You get totalitarianism." So every idea of individualism became very big. The brave thing to do now is to find a mythology and say, "Maybe it isn't going lead to Fascism. Maybe it could actually lead people towards a glorious new world where they feel free, yet they're working together."

US Intelligence Community (USIC) Capacity Building

What is the Internet... but a "Capacity".  Jack's Magic Coffee Shop

...a Capacity/ Capability to Get into YOUR Head!

In the Age of Individualism (NOT Mythical Socialism)

USAID has NOT been dismantled by DoGE.  It's been transferred into the US Department of State.  The USIC Shell Game continues...

An example...

Susan Sontag, "The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer"

“For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing the saint) is the exemplary sufferer. And among artists, the writer, the man of words, is the person to whom we look to be able best to express his suffering.” 

― Susan Sontag

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, "Self-Portrait as a Soldier" (1915)

More on the Sontag text and "Notes on Camp"

More on Charismatic Transference.

Antoniazzo Romano, "The Virgin Invoking God to Heal the Hand of Pope Leo I" (~1475)

Economic Intangibles: On the Seemingly 'Strategic' Lack of Economic Information in the Information Age

How Technology can remain largely beyond/ "outside" the Legal System and Law and yet through Intellectual Property (IP) Law, wholly hidden and protected beneath it.

90% of the Value of S&P 500 firms lies in their "Intangibles"

It really doesn't matter whether 10,000 people, 100,000 people, 1 million, 10 million, or more consume the product. It can quite literally be stamped out or sold across the web with very low costs of production, and in that's the sense in which I say success is sweet. The profit that you see is almost all of it, economic rent,

especially once the fixed costs and the startup costs have been recouped.