Byung-Chul Han: "Psycho-Politics"; The Crisis of Freedom (Ch 1)

Excerpt from above video:

Today's dialectic of master and slave means the totalization of Labor. As the entrepreneur of its' own self, the Neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do enterpreneurs know what purpose free friendship would even look like.

Originally, being free meant being among friends. 'Freedom' and 'Friendship' have the same root in Indo-European language. Fundamentally, Freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of Freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship, when being with others brings happiness. But today's Neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation. As such, does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine "freedom", to reinvent it, in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing "Freedom" into "Coercion".

Neoliberalism represents a highly efficient, indeed, and intelligent system for exploiting Freedom. Everything that belongs to practices and expressive forms of Liberty, emotion, play, and communication comes to be exploited. It is inefficient to exploit people against their will. Our exploitation yield scant returns. Only when freedom is exploited, are returns maximized.

It is interesting to note that Marx also defines freedom in terms of a successful relationship to others. "Only in community with others, does each individual have the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions. Only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible".

From this perspective, being free means nothing other than self-realization with others. Freedom is synonymous with a working Community i.e.- a successful one. For Marx, individual Freedom represents "a ruse, a trick of capital". Free competition, which is based on the idea of individual Freedom, simply amounts to the "relation of capital to itself as another Capital, i.e.- the real conduct of capital as capital."

Capital reproduces by entering into relations with itself as another form of capital through free competition. It copulates with the other of itself by way of individual Freedom. Capital grows in as much as people engage in free competition. Hereby, individual Freedom amounts to servitude, in as much as capital lays hold of it, and uses it for its' own propagation. That is, capital exploits individual freedom in order to breed. "It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition, it is rather Capital which is set free."

Dancing Brainwaves

 

Vibe Bregendahl Noordeloos, "Music sends our brainwaves dancing"

In a joint venture, researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Oxford have uncovered how our brain reacts to and recognises music. The research shows that listening to music sets off a complex chain reaction of events in the brain —a discovery that may one day be used to help screen for dementia.

Ever heard just a snippet of a song and instantly known what comes next? Or picked up the rhythm of a chorus after just a few notes? New research from the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University and the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at the University of Oxford has uncovered what happens in our brain when we recognise and predict musical sequences.

When we turn on the radio and our favourite song starts playing, our brain reacts in a complex pattern, where areas that process sound, emotions, and memory are activated. In a feedforward and feedback loop, our auditory cortex first responds to the sounds and sends information to other brain areas, like the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and the cingulate gyrus, which helps with attention and emotional processing. This process helps us recognise songs quickly and predict what comes next, making listening to music an enjoyable and familiar experience.

Knowing how our brain reacts to music can play a pivotal role in understanding our cognitive functions, explains one of the leading researchers behind the study, Associate Professor Leonardo Bonetti from the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University:

“Our research provides detailed insights into the brain's ability to process and predict music and contributes to our broader understanding of cognitive functions. This could make a difference for studying brain health, as it offers potential pathways to explore how ageing and diseases like dementia affect cognitive processing over time.”

In fact, understanding how our brain rocks along to Bohemian Rhapsody or reacts to a childhood classic may help researchers detect dementia in the future.

“In the long run, these findings could inform the development of screening tools for detecting the individual risk of developing dementia just using the brain activity of people while they listen to and recognise music.”

In the study, the researchers measured the brainwaves of 83 people as they listened to music, and they will follow up with additional studies, says Leonardo Bonetti.

“Future studies could explore how these brain mechanisms change with age or in individuals with cognitive impairments. Understanding these processes in more detail could lead to new interventions for improving cognitive function and quality of life for people with neurological conditions.”

Behind the research - more information:

Method: Basic research

Collaborators: Aarhus University and the University of Oxford, with additional contributions from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Bologna

External funding: The key foundations are the Danish National Research Foundation, Lundbeck Foundation and Carlsberg Foundation

Information on any impartiality issues: Nothing to declare

Information on deviations from the principle that the research result is based on a peer reviewed article published in a scientific journal.: The article has been peer reviewed and information about such process is freely available in the article

Read more in the scientific paper

Deleuze and the Internet (2007)- The Medium and Its' Message: Machines/Bodies w/o Organs for Ghosts

Excerpt from video above:

...Australia did not opt, however, for complete State control as Britain did, but neither did it leave it all to the market as the US did, although even there the government placed severe restrictions on content. Australia aimed for a kind of Middle Ground that allowed for commercial applications, but kept a close eye on what those applications were. TV was essentially a national technology and the issue of what it could, and should, be was a matter of national debate. The internet has never been being a national technology in this sense, so its' development has not been overseen by a governmental body except in the most ad hoc way VIA Band-Aid legislation, which in the case of child pornography, say, can do no more than ban certain practices and create the Judiciary conditions needed to punish the offenders but cannot actually stop it. And that is how thing should be according to the majority of Internet pundits, whether e-business billionaires or left-wing academics: internet equals Freedom.

This is the internet body without organs, the great and unquestioned presupposition that it is an agent of Freedom. The material problem confronting schizo-analysis is knowing whether the bodies without organs we have are any good or not. Or more to the point, knowing whether we have the means of determining whether they are any good or not. The body without organs is an evaluative concept which, as Guattari instructs in his last book "Chaosmosis", (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/20/primal-scream-chaosmosis-review) should be used dialectically. Which is to say, with a view towards an understanding of how it is produced. In other words, we should ask two basic questions, "how is a particular body without organs produced?" and "what circulates on it once it has been produced." Just how enfeebled a concept of "Freedom" the internet rhetoric implies was exposed by the Press reaction to the story of Google's entry into the Chinese market, which is said to be growing by 20 million users a year and was already worth an estimated $151 million per annum in 2004, a figure that is literally tiny by US standards. But it doesn't take a genius to see that the potential for growth is huge. With everyone predicting that China is going to be the next Superpower, one can understand why Google would want a foothold. To be allowed to set up servers on Mainland China, and create a Google.cn service, which will be faster and better suited to the purpose than the regular US version that Chinese people already have access to, Google had to agree to adhere to the Chinese government's regulation and control of Internet content. This means complying with its T's rule. Tibet, Taiwan, and Tienamen are all off limits, as are such search categories as human rights, Amnesty International, pornography, and of course Fallon Gong. It is believed that there are 30,000 online police officers monitoring chatrooms, blogs, and news portals to ensure that these topics aren't discussed, and these kinds of sites aren't accessed. Although this isn't the first time Google has agreed to cooperate with government, and effectively censor its search results. In Germany, it restricts references to sites that deny the Holocaust, while in France, it restricts access to sites that incite racial violence. The scale of its compliance with the Chinese government's censorship requirements far exceeds anything it has done before.

That Google chose to make these compromises as the necessary price of doing business in the world's fastest growing economy was read by many as a betrayal of the values of freedom for which Google is supposedly an emblem. The fact that these jeremiads were largely confined to the business pages of liberal papers suggests that the notion of "Freedom" they had in mind was largely of the the freedom to do business kind, wrapped up in the rhetoric of "freedom of speech". The obviously self-serving acquiescence to censorship is defended by the company on the grounds that providing no information, or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information, is more inconsistent. What this case demonstrated is that Google isn't really concerned about our access to content at all. All the Bluster about "compromised values" was really just a verbal smoke screen to cover up this one glaring truth. Google's priority is its' access to New Markets, and it will not hesitate to compromise its' putative ethic of "Do no Evil" in order to achieve that goal.

If we regard Google as a gigantic multinational corporation which, with a net worth in excess of $80 billion making it bigger than Coke, General Motors, or McDonald's, it in fact is, and not simply a Search tool, then there should be little to surprise us in its' "about face" in China. It is only if we continue to buy into the fantasy that it, and somehow the internet as a whole, is a "Bastion of Freedom" that we find these events dismaying. If the internet was ever a "Commons", to use the word anti-corporate commentators like Naomi Klein have made fashionable, then there can be no doubt that it is rapidly being enclosed. The implication being that Amazon, Google, and eBay are still only at the "Primitive accumulation stage". Information is, in effect, a natural resource like oil. But Google exploits without regard for the environment, as all companies do when we aren't watching, and sometimes even when we are.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Google led hype surrounding the convergence of Internet and mobile phone technology. In an Op-Ed for the FT, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went on record saying that internet enabled mobile phones would effectively solve the problem of how to gain access to emerging markets in underdeveloped countries, where the absence of landline infrastructure would otherwise have proved an impossible obstacle. He doesn't put it like that, of course, he's never so indelicate as to mention the dirty word "market". His rhetoric is liberatory and egalitarian. The internet has democratized information ,Schmidt claims. Or at least it has, for those who have access to it. And that, he says, is the problem. "Not everyone has access in sub-Saharan Africa," Schmid laments, "Less than 1% of households have a landline."

If that statistic wasn't bad enough for a business that presupposes the existence of such basic utilities as a functioning telephonic network, then there is the worse news that "even if Broadband was available to every household, it wouldn't change things all that much, because very few people in this part of the world can afford computers. Mobile phones will liberate this technologically dark region by overcoming these twin obstacles to online access. On the blessed day when everyone has internet enabled mobile phones, a school child in Africa will be able to find research papers from around the world, or to see ancient manuscripts from a library in Oxford." Schmid. "Until then, however, the digital divide prevents this democratizing magic from having its effect." According to Schmidt, thanks to the internet, we don't have to take what business, the media, or politicians say at face value, and this is empowering. Schmid's view is that what is actually said online isn't as important as the freedom to say whatever one happens to want to say. Thus, he says, governments should stop focusing on how to control the web, and concentrate on how to give internet access to more people in more countries. Government should, in other words, help Google to expand its Market.

By the same token, as Google's negative response to requests from US law enforcement agencies for assistance in tracking down users of child pornography illustrates, Google thinks the government shouldn't be allowed to impinge on its Market. Although Yahoo, MSN, and AOL have been willing to help out, Google has held fast, citing the right to "privacy" as its rationale. But Google patently speaks with a "forked tongue" on this subject. Co-founder of Google, Larry Page, defended the company's refusal to help identify Child pornographers by saying rather tellingly, that the company relies on the trust of its' users, and that giving out data on users would break that trust. His implication is obvious, if Google gave out data on its users, it would effectively turn customers away and eventually lose its preeminent place as market leader. Protecting market share is how we should understand Page's call for legislation that stops government from being able to ask for such data in the first place.

But this doesn't mean Google actually respects the privacy of its users, if by that one means it doesn't keep them under surveillance. It is constantly gathering data on users, individually and collectively, and even publicizes this fact under the innocuous sounding rubric of "Google Trends", by releasing maps of most frequently searched topics, broken down by region. Refuting any pretense to being scientific, these search maps make for titillating reading, as one Ponders what it means in cultural geographical terms, that the most frequent Google searches in the city of St Alban's in Hartfordshire, were for gym's, weight loss, and the Atkins diet. Does this make it the most self-absorbed City in Britain, as claimed by the Sunday Times in a half page piece studded with such titbits of spurious psychosocial information gleaned from Google Trends? Obviously more of a lifestyle puff than a hard news piece, although it was in the news section, what is particularly striking about this article is its' complete lack of sensitivity to the fact that such maps are the product of electronic surveillance. That is precisely the kind of thing the Sunday Times normally rails against. That a liberal paper like this doesn't see Google Trends as surveillance, is evidence of just how little critical attention is paid to this dimension of the internet in the public sphere. I don't however want to give the impression that this is some kind of conspiracy because the fact is, Google is very open about its snooping. One Google executive, Marissa Mayer, has even said we should expect it.

The Rhizome

Is the internet or rhizome? All the straws in the wind say, "yes it is":

"Whereas mechanical machines are inserted into hierarchically organized social systems obeying and enhancing this type of structure, the internet is ruled by no one, and is open to expansion or addition at anyone's whim as long as its' communication Protocols are followed. This contrast was anticipated theoretically by Jacques Delueze and Felix Guattari, especially in "A Thousand Plateaus (1980), in which they distinguish between arboreal and rhizomic cultural forms. The former is stable, centered, hierarchical. The latter is nomadic, multiple, decentered. A fitting depiction of the difference between a hydroelectric plant, and the internet. Mark posted, "what's the matter with the internet?"

There are, of course, excellent grounds for thinking that the internet meets some, if not all of the basic criteria of the rhizome which Deleuze and Guattari list as follows:

...the rhizome connects any point to any other point, connections do not have to be between same and same, or like and like, the rhizome cannot be reduced to either the one, or the multiple, because it is composed of Dimensions, directions in motion, not units. Consequently, no point in the rhizome can be altered without altering the whole. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, and offshoots, not reproduction. The rhizome pertains to an infinitely modifiable map, with multiple entrances and exits that must be "produced". The rhizome is a-centered, non-signifying, and acephelus. The rhizome isn't amenable to any structural or generative model.

So, how well does the internet map against these six principles? At the bare Machine level, it seems to agree with the first principle very closely. The ideal of the internet is that any computer can be connected to any other computer. How well this works in practice, is another matter altogether, as anyone who has experienced the frustration of trying to access big sites using low bandwidth connections, such as dialup, or has had to rely on servers clogged by high volumes of traffic, can readily attest.

But the more interesting philosophical question here, which applies as much to Deleuze and Guattari as to the internet, is the premium we place on intention. Until the Advent of search engines, of the capability of Google, it was extremely difficult to implement one's "intent" in relation to the internet. The phrase "surfing the internet" reflects this. Using the internet used to be, and in some cases still is, like looking for a needle in a Haystack. And basically what one did, in order to find something, was surf from one site, to another, until one found it. Hence, the proliferation in the early 1990s of books listing useful websites, which themselves tended to be indexes or directories enabling you to find other sites. By the same token, little attention was given to domain names at this time, with the result many of them look like nightmare calculus equations rather than the userfriendly pneumonics we're accustomed to now. You move from one web address to another, as though from one fixed point in space to another, which interestingly, is not at all what Surfers do.

This brings us to the second principle. Here the match is a little less straightforward. For a start, the practical reality of the internet is nothing at all like the multi-dimensional sensorium envisaged by William Gibson when he first used the term cyberspace in his groundbreaking novel "Neuromancer". But then again, he famously didn't even own a computer at the time.

However, Gibson's vision of cyberspace has had a lasting influence, and many people do think of the internet as the realization of the Deleuzian ideal of Multiplicity. But the incredible proliferation, and constantly expanding number of websites does not by itself mean that the internet can be classed as a multiplicity in Deleuze's sense, our website's dimension, or unit of the web.

There is a simple way to answer this question. What happens when we add or subtract a site? The answer is that, it isn't clear that the addition or the subtraction of any one site actually affects the whole. If several million sites were to vanish, then that would clearly make a difference. But the loss of a few hundred, or even several thousand, might not.

If sites were dimensions, then according to Deleuze and Guattari's definition of the rhizome, their removal would alter the whole. So we have to conclude that in individual websites are units of the internet, not Dimensions. Empirically we know that the number of websites is important. There is, for example, a vast difference between the internet of today, which has hundreds of millions of specific sites and trillions of pages to go with them, and the internet of 1990, which had fewer than 200 sites and could be contained in its totality on a single PC. But this doesn't mean we have to abandon the idea that the internet is a multiplicity, because there is another way we can come at this problem.

Thus we come to the third principle. That the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, and offshoots, not reproduction, which is essentially a matter of population. And which in contrast to the numbering, number can be grasped in dimensional terms. Darwin's two great insights, according to the Deleuze and Guattari, were that the population is more significant than the type in determining the genetic properties of a species. And that change occurs not through an increase in complexity, such as the proliferation of individual websites or multiplication of web links entails, but rather the opposite. Through simplification. Internet usage certainly bears this point out, as recent Trends confirm the internet is the standard source of product information, everything from details of the latest designs, to replacement user manuals are lodged there. It is also becoming the preferred point of sale, as more and more businesses conducted online. And it is steadily taking over from its Rivals, TV and radio, the role of content provision, as podcasts and downloads become more the rule than the exception. In the process, the internet is changing how we understand media. On the one hand, it is steadily displacing the variety of media that used to exist, newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, and Cinema, onto itself. While on the other hand, it is absorbing new interactive functions, such as data searches, and Direct online sales, that the other media can't offer. Paradoxically then, from the perspective of the user, the internet is without doubt the most powerful homogenizing and standardizing machine invented since money. Firstly, all pre-existing forms of media have been compelled to adapt themselves to suit the internet environment. Second, having stripped the traditional media of its' exclusive preserve to make and distribute news, movies, or whatever, the internet has enabled a whole new kind of media production. From the so-called "citizen journalists" we hear so much about today, to bloggers, to home Movie Makers, and amateur photographers. Viewed from the perspective of the media as a whole, that is, from a population perspective, the internet has simplified what media means. And in the process, set off a massive expansion of media operations into virtually every corner of existence. It is having the same effect on retail.

The fourth principle, that the rhizone pertains to an infinitely modifiable map, with multiple entrances and exits that must be produced, is, I would Hazard, the most important. But its' implications are neither obvious, nor fully explained by Deleuze and Guattari. In effect, however, what it means is this: the rhizome is not manifest in things, but rather a latent potential that has to be realized by experimentation.

This can be linked to the sixth principle, namely that the rhizome is intermeanable to any structural or generative model. Because basically, what Deleuze and Guattari are saying is that you can't either prescribe the rhizome into existence, or expect to find it naturally occurring, it has to be invented. The rhizome is the Subterranean pathway connecting all our actions, invisibly determining our decision to do this, rather than that. In so far as we remain unaware of its existence, and indeed its' operation, we do not have full control over our lives. The rhizome is, in this sense, a therapeutic tool.

For both statements, and desires, the issue is never to reduce the unconscious, or to interpret it, or to make it signify according to a tree model. The issue is to produce the unconscious, and with it, new statements, different desires. The rhizome is precisely this production of the unconscious, "A Thousand Plateau." The rhizome of the internet cannot simply be the pre-existing network of connected computers. Rather, we have to conceive it in terms of the set of choices that have been made concerning its' use, and determine the degree to which the resulting grid is open, or closed.

The fifth principle, that the rhizome is a-centered, non-signifying, and acephalous, appears to be one that could be left unchallenged. Yet, if we were to grant that the internet is a-centered, non-signifying, and acephalous in appearance, and indeed in its very construction, the reality of its' day-to-day use still does not live up to this much vaunted Deleuzian ideal. Here, we have to remind ourselves that Deleuze and Guattari regard the rhizome as a tendency, rather than a state of being. It must constantly compete with an equally strong tendency in the opposite direction. Namely towards what they term, the arboreal. The internet exhibits Arboreal Tendencies, as well as rhizomatic Tendencies. And any balanced assessment of it would have to take these into account too, and weigh up their relative strength. 

To begin with, one still moves from point to point through the internet. There is no liberated line of flight in cyberspace. Moreover, Google searches are very far, far, from disinterested. As John Bartel's pathbreaking book, "The Search" makes abundantly clear. Now that retailers can pay Google to link certain search items, with what Google calls "AdWords", to their business name, so that a search for a book, for instance, will always lead to Amazon or A-Books, or whoever, the minimal conceptual distinction that used to separate Google from the Yellow Pages has basically vanished. The operating premise of Google searches may not be that, when, whenever we are searching, no matter what we are searching for, we are actually looking for something to buy. But its' results certainly appear to obey this code.

In so far as we rely on Google as our user's guide to the internet, the internet we actually see and use, is thus stable, centered, and hierarchical. That is, the very opposite of rhizomatic. Google searches are conducted on a stable electronic snapshot of the internet, not the living, breathing thing itself, which it indexes very precisely. The search engine is patently a 'centering' system de facto, and a jury. And what could be more hierarchical than page rank? This is not to say that Google isn't an extremely useful tool, because plainly, it is. But it is to insist not only that it has its limitations, some of which are quite serious, but that it isn't the only means of searching for information available.

A new problematic.

If we were to follow Deleuze's watch word, that philosophy has the concept it deserves, according to how well it formulates its problems, then we would not start from the idea that the internet might be a body without organs, or that it looks like a rhizome, or indeed, from any other pre-existing point of view. Instead, we would try to see how the internet works, and develop our Concepts from there.

In its first flush, the internet seemed to be about connectedness. But that idea has since been exposed as a perhaps necessary, but nonetheless impossible ideal, like the Lacanian conception of sexual relations, that we are at once compelled to try to realize, but destined never to succeed in doing so. Now though, Patel's work has made it clear that the internet is much more about "searching" than "connecting". Although Connecting People, strangers with strangers, Friends With Friends, is a major feature of the internet's cultural role, it is predominantly used to search for objects, that is, Commodities. And in the case of pornography, and celebrity gossip, one may well say it is searching for people in their "guise as commodities".

A lot of quite utopian claims have been made on behalf of the internet, the strongest being that it has so changed the way people interact that it has created a new mode of politics. But it now seems clear that it is just another "model of realization", Deleuze and Guattari's term for the institutions capitalism relies on to extract Surplus value from a given economy. That business' couldn't immediately figure out how to make money out of the internet, that is turn it into a "model of realization", meant that in the early years of its' existence, the utopian image of it as an affirmative agent of cultural change was able to flourish, giving the internet a powerful rhetorical Legacy it continues to drawn on, even as it is molded more and more firmly into a purely commercial Enterprise.

Google is effectively the common sense understanding of what using the internet actually means, both practically and theoretically. It is at once our abstract ideal of searching, and our cumulatively acquired empirical understanding of it. But more more importantly, searching is what we think of as the proper practice associated with the internet. One writes with the pen, makes calls with the phone, and searches the internet.

When our searches don't yield the results we're after, we tell ourselves it is because we don't properly understand Google, that we don't have enough practical experience with it or sufficient competence, to use it fully, rather than to dismiss the search engine itself as fundamentally flawed. It is in this precise sense that Google has become, in neurological terms, the image of the search.

Google's significance is clearly more cultural than technical, because it determines our view of internet technology itself, deciding for us in advance and without discussion, what it is actually for. If the problem in the early days of the internet was that no one could foresee the range of its applications, and seemed to stand around waiting for history to decide, instead of putting in place the appropriate legislation and policy to guide its development some now think of as missing, the problem today is that everyone thinks they know what its' application should be. Namely, the facilitation of sales, and any sense that it might have a more Progressive use, as being consigned to the Dustbin of fantasy. If there is something the matter with the internet, it is that its' utopian beginnings block critical thoughts about its future, as though somehow its' starting point was already the fabled "end of history" when the concrete and Abstract became one.

John Battell's books says he wrote "The Search" because it was his sense that Google, and its rival search engine companies, had somehow figured out how to jack into our cultures nervous system. His account of the seemingly inexorable rise of the search engine giant, which is largely a standard corporate biography, is by turns alarmist and infatuated. He is in equal measure amazed by Google's power, and disturbed by it. It is however Batell's attempt to use Google's history to say something about contemporary culture, that makes for the most fascinating reading. And whether we agree with his prognosis, or not, I think we have to take it seriously. There can be no doubt that the internet is going to play an increasingly significant role in shaping cultural attitudes, behaviors, and practices in the future. Batell's decision not to write a book about Google per se, but rather something like a Google effect, is undoubtedly wise. As much of a behemoth as Google is, there's no guarantee that it will be around forever. It may disappear as AOL appears to be doing, as its business model founders in the face of Google's. Or, it may be swallowed up by an even more aggressive Predator, such as Microsoft, presently three times the size of Google measured in terms of market capitalization, which virtually wiped out its' one-time competitor, Netscape Navigator, in the so-called browser Wars of the 1990s. By the same token, none of the other major corporations, not eBay, nor Amazon, nor even the venerable Microsoft, can be considered immune to such forces of change. Indeed, Wall Street is worried that Microsoft won't be able to shake off the competition. It has no answer to Apple's iTunes, and it is losing the battle to control the web. It has also lately been reported that Google, and Yahoo, as well as Microsoft, are cooking up plans to encroach on eBay's Turf, though so far the results are disappointing to investors. But the business sector at least, sees it as both inevitable, and desirable. Commercial users of eBay apparently feel they have maxed out on that service, and to reach new customers they need to access new providers.

The internet seems to engender a kind of restlessness in us, to always want to see what's just over the horizon, one click away. The success of Amazon, Google, and eBay, amidst the blaze of spectacular DotCom failures of the past decade, is intimately related to the way their sites facilitate searching. Google's strength in this regard is obvious. But we shouldn't Overlook just how good Amazon and eBay are, in their own highly localized domains. What these companies have cottoned onto, is something we might call "search engine culture." The internet thrives, not because it can be searched, but because the search engines we use to navigate it, respond to and Foster the desire to search, by constantly rewarding us with the little satisfactions of the unexpected Discovery. A potent search engine makes us feel that the world really is at our fingertips, that we are verily becoming world.

One can find objective evidence of the intensifying influence of search engine culture in the constant consumer demand for increased bandwidth and memory capacity, to facilitate it. Most households in the West possess vastly more computing power than they could hope to use except for such activities as searching the web. It may be that online business is only just now starting to take off and show genuine profits. Because it has only lately developed an appreciation of the architecture of the desire called "searching".

As John Lanchester puts it, Google has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its' wishes. I believe the same is true of Amazon and eBay, and indeed a range of other internet services such as online dating, and grocery shopping, that are yet to produce corporations of the gigantic proportions as these icons. But I don't accept that Google is the global Id, as Lanchester puts it, because to do so would be to accept that our deepest activistic desire is to buy something, and there could be no more dystopian outlook than that. Neither is it the "global body without organs", though with a bit of work, it could be. And who knows what changes that might bring.

...and Post-Punk/ Brutalism/ Pop Modernism (Ideal; Constant Formal Innovation):

Ghostly Analogies: Does this mean that the Spectre of Marx is Vacating the Premises?

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies."

-Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto"

Slavoj Zizek, "The specter of neo-fascism is haunting Europe"

LJUBLJANA – The surprise in this month’s European Parliament elections was that the outcome everyone expected really did come to pass. To paraphrase a classic scene from the Marx Brothers: \ 

Europe may be talking and acting like it is moving to the radical right, but don’t let that fool you; Europe really is moving to the radical right.

Why should we insist on this interpretation? Because most of the mainstream media has sought to downplay it. The message we keep hearing is: “Sure, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) occasionally flirt with fascist motifs, but there is no reason to panic, because they still respect democratic rules and institutions once in power.” Yet this domestication of the radical right should trouble us all, because it signals a readiness by traditional conservative parties to go along with the new movement. The axiom of post-World War II European democracy, “No collaboration with fascists,” has been quietly abandoned.

The message of this election is clear. The political divide in most EU countries is no longer between the moderate right and the moderate left, but between the conventional right, embodied by the big winner, the European People’s Party (comprising Christian democrats, liberal-conservatives, and traditional conservatives) and the neo-fascist right represented by Le Pen, Meloni, AfD, and others.

The question now is whether the EPP will collaborate with neo-fascists. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is spinning the outcome as a triumph of the EPP against both “extremes,” yet the new parliament will include no left-wing parties whose extremism is even distantly comparable to that of the far right. Such a “balanced” view from the EU’s top official sends an ominous signal.

When we talk about fascism today, we should not confine ourselves to the developed West. A similar kind of politics has been ascendant in much of the Global South as well. In his study of China’s development, the Italian Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo (also known for his rehabilitation of Stalin) stresses the distinction between economic and political power. In pursuing his “reforms,” Deng Xiaoping knew that elements of capitalism are necessary to unleash a society’s productive forces; but he insisted that political power should remain firmly in the hands of the Communist Party of China (as the self-proclaimed representative of the workers and farmers).

This approach has deep historical roots. For over a century, China has embraced the “pan-Asianism” that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction against Western imperialist domination and exploitation. As historian Viren Murthy explains, this project has always been driven by a rejection not of Western capitalism, but of Western liberal individualism and imperialism. By drawing on pre-modern traditions and institutions, pan-Asianists argued, Asian societies could organize their own modernization to achieve even greater dynamism than the West.

While Hegel himself saw Asia as a domain of rigid order that does not allow for individualism (free subjectivity), pan-Asianists proposed a new Hegelian conceptual framework. Since the freedom offered by Western individualism ultimately negates order and leads to social disintegration, they argued, the only way to preserve freedom is to channel it into a new collective agency.

One early example of this model can be found in Japan’s militarization and colonialist expansion before WWII. But historical lessons are soon forgotten. In the search for solutions to big problems, many in the West could be newly attracted to the Asian model of subsuming individualistic drives and the longing for meaning in a collective project.

Pan-Asianism tended to oscillate between its socialist and fascist versions (with the line between the two not always clear), reminding us that “anti-imperialism” is not as innocent as it may appear. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese and German fascists regularly presented themselves as defenders against American, British, and French imperialism, and one now finds far-right nationalist politicians taking similar positions vis-à-vis the European Union.

The same tendency is discernible in post-Deng China, which political scientist A. James Gregor classifies as “a variant of contemporary fascism”: a capitalist economy controlled and regulated by an authoritarian state whose legitimacy is framed in the terms of ethnic tradition and national heritage. That is why Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a point of referring to China’s long, continuous history stretching back to antiquity. Harnessing economic impulses for the sake of nationalistic projects is the very definition of fascism, and similar political dynamics can also be found in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries.

It is not hard to see why this model has gained traction. While the Soviet Union suffered a chaotic disintegration, the CPC pursued economic liberalization but still maintained tight control. Thus, leftists who are sympathetic toward China praise it for keeping capital subordinated, in contrast to the US and European systems, where capital reigns supreme.

But the new fascism is also supported by more recent trends. Beyond Le Pen, another big winner of the European elections is Fidias Panayiotou, a Cypriot YouTube personality who previously gained attention for his efforts to hug Elon Musk. While waiting outside Twitter’s headquarters for his target, he encouraged his followers to “spam” Musk’s mother with his request. Eventually, Musk did meet and hug Panayiotou, who went on to announce his candidacy to the European Parliament. Running on an anti-partisan platform, he won 19.4% of the popular vote and secured himself a seat.

Similar figures have also cropped up in France, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, and elsewhere, all justifying their candidacies with the “leftist” argument that since democratic politics has become a joke, clowns might as well run for office. This is a dangerous game. If enough people despair of emancipatory politics and accept the withdrawal into buffoonery, the political space for neo-fascism widens.

Reclaiming that space requires serious, authentic action. For all my disagreements with French President Emmanuel Macron, I think he was correct to respond to the French far right’s victory by dissolving the National Assembly and calling for new legislative elections. His announcement caught almost everyone off guard, and it is certainly risky. But it is a risk worth taking. Even if Le Pen wins and decides who will be the next prime minister, Macron, as president, will retain the ability to mobilize a new majority against the government. We must take the fight to the new fascism as forcefully and as fast as possible.

Ghostly Technologies

Pepper's Ghost

Marshall McLuhan , "The Medium is the Message",

The title "The Medium Is the Massage" is a teaser—a way of getting attention. There's a wonderful sign hanging in a Toronto junkyard which reads, 'Help Beautify Junkyards. Throw Something Lovely Away Today.' This is a very effective way of getting people to notice a lot of things. And so the title is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral—it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were, and the general roughing up that any new society gets from a medium, especially a new medium, is what is intended in that title"

Can You Spot All the Ghosts in the Machines?

Marshall McLuhan , "Understanding Media",

In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.[11] This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.[12]

Excerpt from "The Technical Mediation of Public Memory"

Without a retentional framework, the technical structures we use to communicate are inherently incapable of holding the content of the present to the tribunal of the past. Control of the present in this situation becomes a matter of taking up space within the medium, of the combinatorial flicker of rapidly generated content within familiar frames. Mark Fisher described this as the reduction of all memory to formal memory—the memory possessed by Jason Bourne, the amnesiac spy turned provocateur who, unable to base present decision making on a memory of the past, is nevertheless equipped with a set of reflexes and hardwired methodologies for navigating the apparently senseless and ahistorical circumstances he finds himself in (Fisher, 2009, p. 64). In culture and in the news media, the rational unity of content is replaced by an aesthetic unity of form: narrative coherence with brand consistency. Power in such a medium is a matter of proficiency in the techniques of framing, not in the production of valuable content (since the capacity to publicly stabilise value is the very thing that has departed).

VaporWave

Aphantasia/ Blindsight - The Ghosts that you Can't See... or Can You ("sense" them)?

...an 'Eerie/ Ear-y' Feeling just Came Over Me...

...perhaps just an auditory v. visual hemispheric dominance phenomena.  ;)

"So, What other goodies have you brought to my prefrontal cortex,"  the Wolf (disguised as Grandma) asked Red Riding Hood?

"...Visual Uncle's to  Wernicke and Broca wish to know!"

Did you cross the corpus callosum on your way?

My brain waves just keep pushing the data merrily along its' way.

Hauntology II - The End of History

from video above:

...contemporary postmodern culture has lost its ability to creatively imagine the future. In 2020. Merlin Coverley published his book, "Hauntology: Ghosts of Future's Past". In this Book Coverley traces hauntology back to the mid-19th century. Although the term was first introduced in the late 20th century by Jacques Derida. And the decision to look for the origins of hauntology in the dusty lanes and alleys of the Victorian era seems justifiable and reasonable. The Victorian era was rich in ghost stories, and various thinkers with rather esoteric ideas. Most importantly, it was the time when technology, such as photography, became available. Ghosts have to be "captured", and what better way to capture them than with a camera, or an audio tape? Coverley points out that technology is a vehicle for the capture of ghosts, so it's not paradoxical that hauntology is relevant at the time of technological development. Access to recording and playback opens a window for hauntological activity. Humans have always been obsessed with archiving and documenting their experiences through technology. But now, in the age of smartphones and cameras, the past is not only remembered, it is constantly replayed. What is television, but a parade of future ghosts? What is this video, but a recording of a future ghost's walk?

In "Hauntology", Coverley excavates a few long forgotten British thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century. One of them is John William Dunn, an aeronautical engineer and philosopher, author of "An Experiment with Time". According to Dunn, there isn't just one timeline, but an endless sequence of parallel timelines. We can access a higher dimension of time, for example while dreaming, since Dunn's theory was that dreams are made up of images of past experiences, and images of future experiences, mixed together.
Deja Vu, or the feeling of having seen something before is also embedded in this Theory, Deja Vu being seen simply as cases where this breach in time is visible for a short period. This theory is rather esoteric, and is based soley on the experiences reported by the author. But this principle of uncovering layers and layers of time is relevant to hauntology because hauntology is, in a way, the manifestation of cultural Deja Vu, the Eternal repetition of identical moments that by repeating themselves, cease to be identical. like the Droste's Effect. This effect was named after the design on the Droste's Cacao tin, which used an image that eternally reappears within itself. This process is also called "recursion", where something is defined in terms of itself, but by referring to itself, it transforms. In his 2019 book, "Recursivity and Contingency", Yuk Hui defines recursion as "an incessant self-referential movement that integrates contingency into its own functioning in order to realize its' ultimate goal.

Recursion seems to be relevant to many fields such as Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Art, and so on. As Michael Corbalis points out in "The Recursive Mind, recursion allows us to mentally travel through time, to project ourselves into the future, and the past. If we approach hauntology from the perspective of recursion, it seems that the spatial temporal ambiguity of our current cultural moment is not so paradoxical. It is par for the course. As Simon Reynolds points out in his "Retromania", we are currently witnessing a deceleration of culture compared to the acceleration of Technology. Technological development coincides with cultural stagnation, because technology itself allows us to constantly repeat ourselves, to relentlessly engage with the ghosts of the past. It feels like I've seen this (place) before, but where...?

America, a nation trapped in a flat, technologically constructed, infinitely recursive, Cultural Loop of Un-Time

The Foucauldian Episteme

Episteme: The set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific discourse in a certain society and time period and determine what does and what does not get taken seriously by that scientific community.

Differences between episteme and paradigms:

1) Paradigm is conscious, episteme is unconscious.

2) Paradigm affect a single scientific discipline, episteme affect all of the sciences.

3) Paradigms are shorter lived than episteme.  According to Foucault, there have been just three episteme in European science in the past five hundred years (changes  circa 1600 and 1800).

To change the "episteme", one must change the name/ language/ discourse:

ie - GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, was an early name for the disease that later became known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. In early 1981, doctors in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco began reporting strange symptoms in some of their gay male patients, including compromised immune function. The disease was initially called "gay cancer" or "GRID" because it primarily affected gay men. The term "GRID" was first mentioned in The New York Times on May 11, 1981, and contributed to the public perception that AIDS only affected gay men.

Excerpt from video:

Foucault's concept of an episteme is also very different from Kuhn's concept of a paradigm. In order to understand Foucault, we need to understand this difference. So, what is an episteme?

Before we answer that question, we first need to discuss the way in which Foucault approaches history. According to Foucault, all of us, including historians, have a tendency to put way too much emphasis on the subject, that is, on the individual human being and her beliefs, desires, decisions, and so on. For instance, if we want to explain why Germany lost the Second World War, we tend to favor explanation in terms of decisions made by important leaders like Hitler and Churchhill. "Germany lost the war because Hitler suffered from a mental breakdown and started making foolish decisions." That's the kind of theory that we can easily comprehend, and that we find satisfying. But it might not be the best explanation. Would Germany really have won with a different leader? Perhaps there were large-scale economic geographical and political facts which basically predetermined that Germany would lose. Maybe no individual, not even Hitler, made that much of a difference to the outcome. Explanations in terms of such impersonal forces can feel abstract and unsatisfying, but they might be closer to the truth than explanations in terms of individual subjects.

Now the same thing might be true in a history of science. We like to talk about individual geniuses like Newton, Darwin, Freud, or Foucault. But perhaps the course of science is not determined by such individuals, but by large-scale processes and tendencies in science itself, and in society at large. Perhaps our science would have been pretty much the same if Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Foucault had never lived. Foucault would agree with that. But he doesn't just want to move away from the individual subject to explanations that are at a larger scale involving groups of individuals. He wants to move away entirely from the level of the "consciousness of subjects".

Well, what is that? At the level of our conscious thinking, we have certain beliefs and desires and we make decisions based on those. Historians of science, Foucault points out, have mostly been interested in these conscious phenomena. We want to know why Darwin believed certain things, what his arguments for those beliefs were, why he decided to publish them when he did, what other people there thought about them, and so on.

When we write a history of science, we were mostly focused on these conscious aspects. But for Foucault that is a problem. By focusing on the things that people are conscious of, we miss the most important stuff, the unconscious rules that determine how we think and write and act.

Let's consider that for a moment, if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way, it is of course important to know about their conscious beliefs, and desires, and decisions. I am making this film about Foucault because I have decided to do so. And I made the decision because I believe Foucault is a very interesting thinker, and you should know something about his work. if you want to understand why people behave in a certain way it is also important and maybe even more important to look at the unconscious rules that govern our behavior.

 

There are all kinds of rules, for instance, that determine which thoughts we take seriously enough to really consider, and which ones we don't. Before making this film, I made a conscious decision about which shirt to wear, but I did not make the conscious decision to wear a shirt rather than appear completely naked. Why? Well it never occurred to me that I could go here naked, and if it had occurred to me, I would have dismissed that thought without really considering it. Why? Because there is a cultural rule against nakedness that is incorporated so deeply into my mind that it affects me even when I'm not consciously thinking about it.

According to Foucault something like this is also going on in science. In every society, and in every period of time, there are unconscious rules that determine what kinds of discourse, that is, what kinds of speech or writing are taken seriously. In science, the vast majority of the time scientists aren't even aware of these rules, but they determine what is, and what is not discussed. In any scientific period, these rules are what Foucault calls an "episteme".

So, an episteme is a set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific discourse in a certain society, and time period, and determine what does and does not get taken seriously by that scientific community. 

Here's an example a popular kind of book in the Middle Ages was the "beastiary". An often beautifully illustrated collection of descriptions of animals, these descriptions were often copy-pasted from different sources, including the Bible, ancient authors, and more recent reports, with almost no critical fact-checking. One major aim of many beastiary authors, was to draw a moral or religious lesson from every animal, because the idea was that the animal kingdom illustrated God's intentions for mankind. These beastiaries were taken seriously as sources of what we can anachronistically call "scientific knowledge in the Middle Ages, but they would not be taken seriously by a modern scientist. The rules of the medieval episteme allow, perhaps even encourage, the scientists to copy his knowledge from famous authors, and to draw moral lessons from Nature. The rules of the modern episteme on the other hand, require all knowledge to be based on critically examined observation reports, and require a strict distinction between science and moralizing. A modern biologist wouldn't even think about drawing a moral lesson from an animal. Whereas the medieval author sees this as perhaps his most important task. 

"Wouldn't even think about it." That's the phrase that Foucault wants to emphasize. The epistemic determines what thoughts we take seriously enough to really think about.

Derrida - Hauntology

from Wiki: 

Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology, also spectral studies, spectralities, or the spectral turn) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. It has since been invoked in fields such as visual arts, philosophy, electronic music, anthropology, politics, fiction, and literary criticism.[1]

Solstice @ Avebury

from Wiki:

Avebury (/ˈeɪvbəri/) is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles, around the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, in south-west England. One of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.

Constructed over several hundred years in the third millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument. Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill.

By the Iron Age, the site had been effectively abandoned, with some evidence of human activity on the site during the Roman period. During the Early Middle Ages, a village first began to be built around the monument, eventually extending into it. In the late medieval and early modern periods, local people destroyed many of the standing stones around the henge, both for religious and practical reasons. The antiquarians John Aubrey and William Stukeley took an interest in Avebury during the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, and recorded much of the site between various phases of destruction. Archaeological investigation followed in the 20th century, with Harold St George Gray leading an excavation of the bank and ditch, and Alexander Keiller overseeing a project to reconstruct much of the monument.

Avebury is owned and managed by the National Trust. It has been designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument, as well as a World Heritage Site, in the latter capacity being seen as a part of the wider prehistoric landscape of Wiltshire known as Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites.

About 480 people live in 235 homes in the village of Avebury and its associated settlement of Avebury Trusloe, and in the nearby hamlets of Beckhampton and West Kennett.[1]

On Litha:

Litha is a pagan holiday; one of their eight sabbats during the year. Litha (also known as Midsummer) occurs on the summer solstice, and celebrates the beginning of summer. The traditions of Litha appear to be borrowed from many cultures. Most ancient cultures celebrated the summer solstice in some way. The Celts celebrated Litha with hilltop bonfires and dancing. Many people attempted to jump over or through the bonfires for good luck.

Other European traditions included setting large wheels on fire, and rolling them down a hill into a body of water. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and in some traditions, Litha is when a battle between light and dark takes place. In this battle, the Oak King and the Holly King battle for control. During each solstice, they battle for power, and the balance shifts. The Oak King, who represents daylight, rules from the winter solstice (Yule) to Litha. During this time, the days steadily get longer. However, during Litha, the Holly King wins this battle, and the days get steadily darker until Yule.

For modern day pagans, Litha is a day of inner power and brightness. Some people find a quiet spot and meditate about the light and dark forces in their world. Some other observers, particularly those with children, celebrate this holiday outside. Lastly, some observers choose to observe Litha more traditionally, and they would hold a fire ritual. This might include a large bonfire, or a small fire in a fire-safe pot in one’s house. Litha is also considered a good time to practice love magic or get married. The pagan version of this ceremony is called handfasting, and it includes many of the same practices one might find at a wedding.

Japanese Identity Technology Supplement - Ikigai (Sincerity related?)

Ikigai (生き甲斐, lit. 'a reason for being') is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living. It has 4 principles:

Tenmei - Sky/Heaven life: The path that is given by the god (innate qualities you have, strengths/weaknesses) that cannot be changed.

Shukumei - Exist/ Dwell life: The path that your spirit has (fate inherrited qualities given and can't be changed like race and personal history) (hero's journey).

Unmei - Move/ Deliver/ Transport life: The path of love and creation (Destiny) and can be changed by "will" and constantly changing by choices made.

Shimei - Use/ Serve life: What we are for others. The (changeable) path that you have to challenge yourself to accomplish

The Mark Fischer Experience - Capitalist Realism

Excerpt from the above video:

...the quality of life going to go down. What you'd also see if that were the case Mark Fischer thinks, is the expansion of what he calls "the audit culture" that's a plague that's been spreading across the globe recently. An everyday example of what he means by "the audit culture" is: just think of the person that's working at a company who's part of a team of some sort and and they have these meetings that they go to three times a week. And at these meetings, they got to have something to show for themselves and what they've been working on all that week to the rest of the team. Now, for the sake of this example, let's also say that this is not someone who works with 100% of their time every week when they're at work. Let's say they're coming up on 10 years at the company, and and they're kind of proud of this actually, but when it comes down to it they really spend 60 to 70% of their time scrolling through Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is. And let's say this person has not lost their job at this company as a member of this team because the skill they've gotten really good at over the years is being able to show up to these meetings and demonstrate to the group all that they've been working on this week, you know, the spreadsheet that I've created, all the obstacles I've run into... God, they were really bad this week, and don't worry don't worry, I got a great plan for how I'm going to be moving forward the second this meeting ends, I swear! I'm a good member of the team.

Again, the service they're providing isn't even that good, and they know this. But in a sense, it doesn't even really matter in this Society because we're in a neoliberal situation within capitalist realism where the goal is not to provide "good services to people" but is instead the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. It doesn't matter if you're actually providing a good service. What matters is that there's a quantifiable metric that can demonstrate to the Auditors that work is being done, even when it's not actually really being done that much. So, in a sense, the person who's doing this isn't even really a "bad employee," they're just smart. They've just locked in on what's actually important to their employer's performance metrics, not actually getting real work done. And, to Mark Fischer, this audit culture is something you'll see pop up in a lot of unexpected ways all across people's lives, not just in the workplace. But nonetheless, it originates in this overall ethos we have in the Western World Of neoliberalism.

The Smoking Gun for a lot of critics of neoliberalism is the 2008 financial collapse around subprime mortgages. See, what they say is, that if the role of government under neoliberalism was really just to ensure competition and free markets, then the best goods or services would have to rise to the Top. If a company provided a bad service and got themselves into a place where they were failing because of bad business practices, then they'd have to be left to fail in a truly free market. But what happened in 2008 is that companies that sold bad loans were bailed out by taxpayer dollars and the government. In other words, to the critics of neoliberalism, this was a very public visible example of what had been going on since the beginning of neoliberalism. This is not the government ensuring competition and free markets, this is the government meddling in certain markets and rigging them for certain companies that have the resources to manipulate the government in their favor. This is essentially social welfare for the rich in a system that generally doesn't even believe in social welfare for the poor. Or, as a Critic, Noam Chomsky, said all the way back in the 90s over a decade before any of this happened, that what we can expect under neoliberalism is "socialized losses and privatized gains".

Now, I want to pause here and just do some accounting of what's been said so far. Neoliberalism obviously has a lot of different components to it but with all this talk of Economics, one of the ones that can be pretty easy to overlook is just how much thinking in this way causes people to focus on the individual as the main building block that we're going to be constructing our societies around. We all know what it feels like to do that in the Western World, you know, born into a neoliberal society. Especially, if you're not very close with your family you can just live your life purely as an individual, only having to think about yourself. You know what life is to you is the goals that you have, the things you want. Then, you can find yourself getting older, starting a family and feeling like, "oh wow, the family is also an important social unit that we build our societies around, look at how much meaning I can find in my life where instead of being 100% of an individual, I'm 20% of a family." Point is, this is a different scale scale of life, that people often find meaning in. But anyway, it's just a unique challenge we have as people in Western culture just because of how our world is set up. To not fall into this place where you're too indexed on the individual side of things. And this is why the interpretive version of dialectics can be such a powerful tool when critiquing Western Society in particular. You know it's definitely important to look at something individually for what it is, for sure, but it's also undeniably important if you want to understand things at a deeper level to pay attention to what a thing is in relation to all the other things around it. In a sense, within dialectics, these are often the things that define what something actually is in a particular context (narrative).

You know, it's not uncommon in modern Western capitalist Society, we'll walk into a store, we'll see a pair of shoes we want and it's possible to see that pair of shoes just as a pair of shoes and think nothing else about it. Now there's another way of viewing what that pair of shoes is that considers the materials it's made out of, how they were harvested, transported, the design process that went into the shoes, the people that put them together, shipped them across the world, the people that stocked and sold the shoes to you as well. As this complex network of social relations that make the value and meaning of those shoes. Whatever they are, and the culture you're wearing them in, you can look at it this way, too. But again, in the western world it's very possible almost intuitive to our way of thinking to see them as just a pair of shoes.

Well, to Mark Fischer, we run the risk of doing this exact same thing with individuals. In Western culture, too, we see people as just an individual, a collection of choices that they're making values that they hold. But just like with the shoes, it becomes easier for us in the West to ignore the social relationships, or the structural setup to the world that have huge impacts on who a person is. And there's a balance, right? We want to be able to hold people accountable for their actions. And we certainly don't want to give people a blanket pass, that Society is to blame for everything that's messed up in their life. But, being self-aware that we exist in this neoliberal ethos that tells people if anything's messed up in your life, it's your job to work harder and fix it, can this tendency ever go too far?

Mark Fischer thinks one of the ways that it does is, when it comes to the way we often look at and treat mental illness, more specifically depression as an example, he had a lot to say about in particular. To Mark Fischer, we privatize depression in our society in a way that's honestly ridiculous from any other perspective, because what's often the experience of somebody who's struggling with depression in a neoliberal society. They're told in so many words, "look, that sucks, and all I get it, but this is a "you problem" you're dealing with. You have a chemical imbalance. You have a family history with this. You need to pull yourself together, get off the couch, force yourself to go for a run, drag yourself into one of these "professionals" that'll prescribe you these pills you can take to bring your brain chemistry back to normal. You owe it to the people around you to work harder on your depression."

But, as Mark Fischer says, "hey, even if we can say this person right here has a chemical imbalance, what does that have anything to do with what's causing that chemical imbalance? I mean, isn't it possible that the society you live in has something to do with the fact you feel horrible every day? Does it have nothing to do with it? Is the assumption that, you know, you were just born and no matter what Society you were born into, you were always going to have a chemical imbalance like this? We know there's different mental illnes rates in different countries. We know they've taken depressed people out of one environment, moved them into a different environment, and their depression gets better. But, no no, we treat this in our society like a private malfunction that's going on in your brain, with nothing more to think about. Now, be a good citizen and just take the pills that big pharma has made for you."

No, we're idiots. Mark Fisher thinks "if we're not considering that the society people are living in has an effect on this. Mental health is at crisis levels in the Western World, why is that? And to return this back to the beginning of the episode where we said, "look, I get that there's problems in the world as it is, but at least this isn't any of the other ways of setting things up where things get really bad."

If this is the best option we got, why, Mark Fischer would ask, "are there so many young people who are sick? Then why is one of the main conversations we're having that we need to figure out what to do with these tens of thousands of people that are struggling mentally, that are queuing up all around our society? Is this just a private issue? Do do we just got to go out and motivate these people more to get them off the couch? Or is there something fundamentally wrong when it comes to neoliberalism as one piece of this blend that's going to produce a way of thinking about the world that leads to capitalist realism? 

Neoliberalism is the piece of this that is going to encourage a surface level individualistic, overly competitive, overly moralizing account of everything and everyone around you. I say overly moralizing there, because there's a narrative of "good versus evil" that people start projecting onto things in the world when they're not thinking about the world at a structural level. What I mean is, when you're hyperfocused on the individual, and you're not thinking about the social relationships that produce the bad results you see in the world, it becomes incredibly easy for someone to assume that this "bad outcome" I see in the world world must be being caused by "bad people". When in fact, it could just be an unintended consequence of a system we need to pay more attention to. I mean, it's worth asking. How many conspiracy theories are out there that claim there's a handful of people maliciously orchestrating events all around the world? You know, pulling the puppet strings, just trying to hurt people? How many of those are actually just unintended byproducts of bad incentive structures in a political and economic system? Anyway, this is a larger conversation, obviously. But the point is, when you privatize this stuff, when you turn what is actually a matter of Economic and political incentives into some battle between "good versus evil" that's going on, or that it's just a handful of bad politicians that drink the blood of children. when people ignore the structural components that are at work here, then they run the risk of spending their entire lives chasing a ghost, trying to chase down a group of people at the top they need to prosecute, to be able to stop all this. You know, trying to correct for a cause to the problem that doesn't actually exist, which then makes the problem effectively unsolvable if we live in an open society that relies on an informed and educated population. Now again, what we've talked about here today has only been about half of the way we orient ourselves towards reality that leads to what Mark Fischer calls "capitalist realism". And if the problems of neoliberalism seem like they narrow people's Focus, just wait until he hear about how he thinks postmodernism collides into all this, and makes Imagining the future seem impossible. At that point, we'll also be able to go deeper into what exactly is meant by capitalist realism as a state of affairs. He thinks it's moved Beyond postmodernism as well, as talk deeper about at least one way out of this that Mark Fischer was considering towards the end of his life. That episode (below)

We're trapped in the "nostalgiac pastiche" of Post-Modern Art & Culture with a cancelled future.  Call us all Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Excerpt from video above:

For Mark Fischer, we are caught in a perpetual state of the present. Postmodernism puts us in a collective haze, skeptical of grand narratives, not able to declare universals, and to create truly subversive artwork that gives us an entirely new look. And then, this is met with Market fundamentalism and the default set of values of capitalist realism that everything, including art, should be about the expansion of capital for the sake of capital. In other words, art in our world of capitalist realism is no longer about taking risks anymore. It's no longer about moving things forward. And the fact is, these days it is just good business for artists to sell people Nostalgia. And it's not because they're bad people, artists sell nostalgia in our time because remembering pleasant moments from the past becomes High art if you're living in a society where people can't possibly imagine a different future for themselves. And if it's not obvious by this point, art is going to just be a micro example of all this. The same thing applies to the way we think about creative ideas, when it comes to the realm of politics and making our societies better. Because, think of all that changes when a culture doesn't move forward and is incapable of developing new cultural forms.

Mark Fischer says, as one example, think of how this changes the experience of the way most people see time. Let's go back to our music example. From before just a few decades ago, it was possible for somebody to hear a song and be brought back in their mind to the summer of '75, "oh oh, I remember listening to that song," they'll say. "I was studying for my GED exam that summer. And then I remember next year, the songs of '76. I was listening to those when I started my new job at the meat packing plant. Good Times back then, in my life meat packing plant, GED, mhm?"

See, in a way, to Mark Fischer, this way of experiencing time is an important part of how human beings make sense of our lives. We have these snapshots in time that we remember, that are distinct to a particular cultural moment. And then, we look back on these moments, and we use them as an important part of how we structure "The Narrative of our lives". But what happens when don't have the ability to use these anymore because everything is a remix of something old? Well, as Mark Fischer says, the experience of the person living in this culture in the last 20 years or so is that time starts to become blurry. We live in a world he says, "where there's no criteria anymore for obsolescence," meaning there's no real point where you can look at something within culture from 20 years ago and say, "No no no, that thing is old all right. Old to the point that it's embarrassing now. I mean, with all due respect, Grandpa get that CD out of my face that you were listening to from 20 years ago. We got to move on from this as a culture now."

No, in our world, things just become retro or vintage or fall into some other category. And, by the way, fashion becomes yet another example of this culture you can see all around you that's constantly being remixed and recycled. People no longer have these clear boundaries between things that make them culturally Obsolete. And when you combine that fact with us having no clear boundaries for what the truth is, you know, "there's only different perspectives, morality is entirely relative." When you combine that with history being used just as a tool to confirm political bias, when you combine that with the fact that we have no distinct moments in time to help understand "The Narrative of Our Lives," this all leads for Mark Fischer to an experience of reality that can feel very blurry and confusing. It All Leads to what he famously calls "the slow cancellation of the future". See, to Mark Fischer, we used to be able to dream about the future in past generations. All throughout history, people have imagined different social Futures, and then done things to bring them about. Even as recently as a couple Generations ago, people still dreamed about a different world than the one they were living in.

Technology, for example. People used to think of it as a thing that could allow us to imagine entirely different ways of organizing ourselves as people. You know, people used to think, back in the 1950s for example, "what if technology could eventually make us so we don't have to work as much as we do right now" or "what if robots could help us around the house so we don't have to do as many chores that we don't like doing" or "what if we could colonize the moon or other planets, you know, start Spreading ourselves across the Galaxy?", who wouldn't love them a little more of us humans on their Planet"? These were revolutionary ideas back in the 1950s. But here we are, almost 75 years later, and where are we? Well, we're more or less dreaming about the exact same stuff they were back then, now. Why is that?

It's actually an interesting line of thinking. One answer you could give to that is to say, "well these people in the 1950s were just way ahead of their time, and they dreamed up the perfect future for us that we've never decided to deviate from, it's just taken us a really long time to bring all this stuff about. These are some big goals they dreamed up back then." But another way of explaining that is to say that we have the exact same goals as they did today because our political imagination has been depleted to a point that sadly, the most we can do these days is just remix and recycle our grandparents ideas of what the future should be looking like.... 

......Revolutionary efforts of people on the left are just remixes of the Revolutionary efforts that their grandparents tried. They have the same sort of tactics, same sort of slogans, same sort of communication style, and from one perspective, all they're really doing is trying to put a new spin on failed revolutionary efforts from the past. And again, in a world where this is the best that protest culture can come up with, then effectively, both sides of the political Spectrum become a form of conservative Nostalgia. Again, 20th century ideas delivered through 21st century technology. 

One way of thinking about it, in the language of Mark Fischer, and originally in the language of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who first came up with this concept, is that we live in a place where we are haunted by the past. And the future the world we live in is haunted by the ideas from the past that don't just magically disappear one day. In fact, they persist. They are reused by us in ways where they take on a new, ethereal kind of meaning that's difficult to fully see sometimes. But we're also haunted, for Mark Fischer, not just by the past, but by the Lost Futures that were supposed to come about, but never did. What he means is, the future worlds that were supposed to be better off for people that former Generations had imagined, those never came to pass. So, in a sense, now we live every day of our lives stuck in this present moment, comparing it to the Futures that never came, and the injustices of the past. That is Our Fate. To live in this time, we live in a state of what Derrida and Fischer call the hauntology of the present. And mixed between the words haunt and ontology, it's kind of clever. And there's a lot more to hauntology and derrida's work. We could do an entire episode on it. But the point here today is, how this concept enables Mark Fischer's description of capitalist realism, which is where all these points are headed. Because when you consider everything about how neoliberalism, postmodernism, and all the ancillary ideas that make these into the primary modes of people's thinking, what is a person supposed to do when they're caught in this narcissistic confused place? Well, what turns out to be a really common thing people choose to do as a defense mechanism is, they just try not to think about it too much, keep their head down, and just focus on making money. I mean, regardless of how confused you are, or aren't, that becomes the thing that you really can't deny about our world. You either make money, or you starve to death. 

This goes on enough at the individual level, then, on a more broad scale, what starts to happen is people start to learn, to accept the inevitability of capitalism. They learn to see capitalism not, as the current socioeconomic system that we're using for a society, something that could be changed if we want it to be changed, but instead no, capitalism is more than that. Capitalism is just the way the world is, at a realism sort of level, hence, Mark Fisher's name, "capitalist realism". As the French philosopher Alain Badiou once described our world, "We live in a contradiction. A brutal State of Affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone is presented to us as ideal.  To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot call it "ideal" or "wonderful", so instead they decided to say that all the rest is horrible.