Sam Altman's Lamp Lighter

Fentanyl is a synthetic (man-made) opioid that works like morphine. It may be used to treat severe pain after surgeries and for pain at the end of life in patients with cancer. Carfentanil is another synthetic opioid. It is used as a tranquilizer for very large animals like elephants.

Excerpts from video above:

...the problem is simple, it is the confusion of two words, prosperity and luxury. Our ancestors who like read the Bible and stuff, did not have this brain damage. They would see that while we are rattled with luxury, we have very little Prosperity. Electric cars are a luxury, porn is a luxury, fentanyl is a luxury. What is the difference between luxury and prosperity? At the lowest levels of Maslow's pyramid of needs they are the same. Both luxury and prosperity start with air, proceed to water, then food, then safety. Forty percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone outside at night where they live, and more might be if they weren't more worried about long-term changes in the temperature of the planet. Here, luxury and prosperity diverge. Prosperity is what is good for you. Luxury is what feels good to you.  Luxury serves your present self. Prosperity serves your future self. The greater the productivity you can command, the further apart these targets are.

--- 

...This analysis neatly distinguishes between luxury and prosperity. Luxury does not make a human being valuable, rather the opposite alas, whereas Prosperity does in fact. Whatever we mean by the value of a human being, it is corroded by idleness and luxury, and enhanced by practice, training, and discipline as the Victorians knew well. But we persist in forgetting a Lamplighter is a more valuable human being than a welfare recipient. Lamp lighting may not be useful in and of itself, but the lamp lighter can be reassigned to many tasks involving diligence and care. He is better for the world and he is better for himself, but he has less free time to inject elephant tranquilizer.

Will we be able to transition humanity to a "prosperity economy" before the coming Technological Singularity event hits?   Don't count on it...

From the TS Wiki link above:

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge – first in 1983 (in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8]) and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] (in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate). He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.[4] Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.[7]

Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction.[9][10] The consequences of a technological singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.

Imagine a Von Neumann Machine with AGI... 

Weinstein on Soros' Reflexivity

...on Soros' version

On Bioelectric Intelligence

Do anatomical morphospace communications solutions to problems involve the ability to reverse or reset (flip) chirality? (Ba exploding head solution)

from Google AI:

• Self-Assembly of Tetraphenylethene (TPE):

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  Achiral TPE molecules can self-assemble into chiral ribbons via solvophobic effects, which can be controlled by adjusting solvent composition and polarity. 

  Solvophobic effects refer to the tendency of non-polar solutes to associate with each other and avoid polar solvents, leading to reduced solubility in polar solvents. This effect is a generalization of the hydrophobic effect and is a driving force behind many biological processes and self-assembly processes. 

  Key aspects of solvophobic effects:

  • Driving force for self-assembly:

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    Solvophobic effects encourage non-polar molecules or groups to cluster together, reducing their contact with the surrounding polar solvent. 
  • Reduced solubility of apolar compounds:

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    Apolar compounds are less soluble in polar solvents due to the energetic cost of disrupting the solvent's structure to accommodate them. 
  • Influence on thermodynamic functions:

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    Solvophobic effects impact thermodynamic properties like Gibbs free energy and enthalpy of solvation. 
  • Stronger in high cohesion solvents:

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    Solvophobic effects are more pronounced in solvents with high cohesive energy density (CED), like water. 
  • Applicable to various solvents:

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    Solvophobic effects occur in both molecular solvents and ionic liquids, although their strength can vary depending on the solvent type. 
  • Importance in biological systems:

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    Solvophobic effects are crucial for the folding of proteins and membrane formation. 
  • Quantification using cohesive energy density:

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    The CED of a solvent can be used to quantify the strength of the solvophobic effect. 

  In essence, solvophobic effects highlight how the nature of a solvent influences the behavior of non-polar molecules, driving their tendency to associate in ways that minimize their interactions with the solvent.

The Banality of Evil

Blowing Woke Smoke to Deflect Accountability and Insulate Bureaucracies from Criticism

Counterfeit Lives

 

A Counterfeit -- a Plated Person --

I would not be -- Whatever strata of Iniquity 

My Nature underlie -- 

Truth is good Health -- and Safety, and the Sky.
How meagre, what an Exile -- is a Lie,

And Vocal -- when we die --

- Emily Dickinson 

On Fredric Jameson

 Slavoj Žižek, "Larger than Life: A note on the death of Fredric Jameson" (Sept 2024)

Fredric Jameson was not just an intellectual giant, the last true genius in contemporary thought. He was the ultimate Western Marxist, fearlessly reaching across the opposites which define our ideological space – a “Eurocentrist” whose work found a great echo in Japan and China, a Communist who loved Hollywood, especially Hitchcock, and detective novels, especially Chandler, a music lover immersed in Wagner, Bruckner and pop music… There is absolutely no trace of Cancel Culture with its stiff fake moralism in his work and life – one can argue that he was the last Renaissance figure.

What Jameson fought throughout his long life is the lack of what he called “cognitive mapping,” the inability to locate our experience within a meaningful whole. The instincts that directed him in this fight were always right - for example, in a nice stab against the fashionable cultural-studies rejection of “binary logic,” Jameson calls for “a generalized celebration of the binary opposition” – for him, the rejection of sexual binary goes hand in hand with the rejection of class binary… Still in a deep shock, I can only offer here some passing observations which provide a clear taste of his orientation.

Today, Marxists as a rule reject any form of immediacy as a fetish which obfuscates its social mediation. However, in his masterpiece on Adorno, Jameson deploys how a dialectical analysis includes its own point of suspension: in the midst of a complex analysis of mediations, Adorno all of a sudden makes a vulgar gesture of “reductionism,” interrupting a flow of dialectical finesse with a simple point like “ultimately it is about class struggle.” This is how class struggle functions within a social totality: it is not its “deeper ground,” its profound structuring principle which mediates all its moments, but something much more superficial, the point of failure of the endless complex analysis, a gesture of jumping-ahead to a conclusion when, in an act of despair, we raise our hands and say: “But after all, this is all about class struggle!” What one should bear in mind here is that this failure of analysis is immanent to reality itself: it is how society itself totalizes itself through its constitutive antagonism. In other words, class struggle IS a fast pseudo-totalization when totalization proper fails, it is a desperate attempt to use the antagonism itself as the principle of totalization.

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as a fake simplified solutions. However, years ago Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained by a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital” – for example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. The true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.

Another Jameson’s insight which runs against today’s predominant post-colonial trend concerns his rejection of the notion of “alternate modernities,” i.e., the claim that our Western liberal-capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization, and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonism of our modernity: once we realize that “modernity” is ultimately a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms:

”How then can the ideologues of “modernity” in its current sense manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution, and globalized, free-market modernity—from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about “alternate” or “alternative” modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.”

The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity—it concerns the fundamental limitation of the nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multitude (“there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of them irreducible to others”) is false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres in the notion of modernity as such: the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this aspect to just one of its historical subspecies. One should not forget that the first half of the twentieth century already was marked by two big projects which perfectly fit this notion of “alternate modernity”: Fascism and Communism. Was not the basic idea of Fascism that of a modernity which provides an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist one, of saving the core of capitalist modernity by casting away its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-profiteering distortion? And was not the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s also not an attempt at modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?

What Jameson avoided like a vampire avoids garlic was any notion of the enforced deeper unity of different forms of protest. Back in the early 1980s, he provided a subtle description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: "To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."

In a similar way, the Swedish detective writer Henning Mankell is a unique artist of the parallax view. That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad in Sweden and that of Maputo in Mozambique – are irretrievably »out of sync,« so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the »truth« of the other. All one can ultimately do in today's conditions is to remain faithful to this split as such, to record it. Every exclusive focus on the First World topics of late capitalist alienation and commodification, of ecological crisis, of the new racisms and intolerances, etc., cannot but appear cynical in the face of the Third World raw poverty, hunger and violence; on the other hand, the attempts to dismiss the First World problems as trivial in comparison with the »real« Third World permanent catastrophies are no less a fake – focusing on the Third World »real problems« is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding to confront the antagonisms of one's own society. The gap that separates the two perspectives IS the truth of the situation.

As all good Marxists, Jameson was in his analysis of art a strict formalist – he once wrote about Hemingway that his terse style (short sentences, almost no adverbs, etc.) is not here to represents a certain type of (narrative) subjectivity (the lone hard-boiled cynical individual); on the contrary, Hemingway's narrative content (stories about bitter hard individuals) was invented so that Hemingway was able to write a certain type of sentences (which was his primary goal). Along the same lines, In his seminal essay »On Raymond Chandler,« Jameson describes a typical Chandler's procedure: the writer uses the formula of the detective story (detective's investigation which brings him into the contact with all strata of life) as a frame which allows him to fill in the concrete texture with social and psychological apercus, plastic character-portraits and insights into life tragedies. The properly dialectical paradox not to be missed here is that it would be wrong to say: »So why did the writer not drop this very form and give us pure art?« This complaint falls victim to a kind of perspective illusion: it overlooks that, if we were to drop the formulaic frame, we would lose the very »artistic« content that this frame apparently distorts.

Another Jameson’s unique achievement is his reading of Marx through Lacan: social antagonisms appear to him as the Real of a society. I still recall a shock when, at a conference on Lenin that I organized in Essen in 2001, Jameson surprised us all by bringing in Lacan as a reader of Trotsky’s dream. On the night of June 25 1935, Trotsky in exile dreamt about the dead Lenin who was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This was after your death’; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill…’”

In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious link with Freud’s dream in which his father appears to him, a father who doesn’t know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn’t know he is dead? According to Jameson, there are two radically opposed ways to read Trotsky’s dream. According to the first reading, the terrifyingly-ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin “doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living – that he was the originator of the Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP – none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, upon him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here – which would be that of Trotsky in the dream, no doubt – what is our own non-knowledge, what is the death from which Lenin shields us?” But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Badiou calls the „eternal Idea“ of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.

Like me, Jameson was a resolute Communist – however, he simultaneously agreed with Lacan who claimed that justice and equality are founded on envy: the envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. Following Lacan, Jameson totally rejected the predominant optimist view according to which in Communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures; dismissing this myth, he emphasizes that in Communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. Jameson’s solution is here radical to the point of madness: the only way for Communism to survive would be some form of universalized psychoanalytic social services enabling individuals to avoid the self-destructive trap of envy.

Another indication of how Jameson understood Communism was that he read Kafka’s story on Josephine the singing mouse as a socio-political utopia, as Kafka’s vision of a radically-egalitarian Communist society – with the singular exception that Kafka, for whom humans are forever marked by superego guilt, was able to imagine a utopian society only among animals. One should resist the temptation to project any kind of tragedy into Josephine’s final disappearance and death: the text makes it clear that, after her death, Josephine “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people”(my emphasis added).

In his late long essay “American Utopia,” Jameson shocked even most of his followers when he proposed as the model of a future post-capitalist society the army – not a revolutionary army but army in its inert bureaucratic functioning in the times of peace. Jameson takes as his starting point a joke from the Dwight D Eisenhower period that any American citizen who wants socialized medicine needs only to join the army to get it. Jameson’s point is that army could play this role precisely because it is organized in a non-democratic non-transparent way (top generals are not elected, etc.).

With theology it’s the same as with Communism. Although Jameson was a staunch materialist, he often used theological notions to throw a new light onto some Marxist notions – for example, he proclaimed predestination the most interesting theological concept for Marxism: predestination indicates the retroactive causality which characterizes a properly dialectical historical process. Another unexpected link with theology provides Jameson's remark that, in a revolutionary process, violence plays a role homologous to that of wealth in the Protestant legitimization of capitalism: although it has no intrinsic value (and, consequently, should not be fetishized and celebrated for itself, as in the Fascist fascination with it), it serve as a sign of the authenticity of our revolutionary endeavor. When the enemy resists and engages us in a violent conflict, this means that we effectively touched its raw nerve...

Jameson’s perhaps most perspicuous interpretation of theology occurs in his little-known text “Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat” where he argues how St Augustine’s most celebrated achievement, his invention of the psychological depth of personality of the believer, with all the complexity of its inner doubts and despairs, is strictly correlative to (or the other side of) his legitimization of Christianity as state religion, as fully compatible with the obliteration of the last remnants of radical politics from the Christian edifice. The same holds, among others, for the anti-Communist renegades from the Cold War era: as a rule, their turn against Communism went hand in hand with the turn towards a certain Freudianism, the discovery of psychological complexity of individual lives.

Another category introduced by Jameson is the “vanishing mediator” between the old and the new. “Vanishing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of a passage from the old order to a new order: when the old order is disintegrating, unexpected things happen, not just horrors mentioned by Gramsci but also bright utopian projects and practices. Once the new order is established, a new narrative arises and, within this new ideological space, mediators disappear from view. Suffice it to take a look at the passage from Socialism to Capitalism in Eastern Europe. When in the l980s, people protested against the Communist regimes, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside of state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy . . . in short, the vague ideals that led the protesters were, to a large extent, taken from Socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. In Europe, the socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.

Many of Jameson’s formulations became memes, like his characterization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Another such meme is his old quip (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) which holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine a total catastrophe on the earth which will terminate all life on it than a real change in capitalist relations – as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue… So what if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Jameson.

Sudan

Slavoj Zizek, "Global Capitalism and Perpetual War"

Sudan today has become the exemplary case of how the developed West contributes to the conditions for violent conflict and mass migration in resource-rich parts of the world. Beneath the façade of “primitive” ethnic passions exploding in the African “heart of darkness,” one can discern the unmistakable contours of global capitalism.

LJUBLJANA – When one looks for a figure who best represents the worst tendencies of our brutal age, the first names that come to mind include Yahya Sinwar (Hamas’s leader in Gaza), Binyamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong-un, or Vladimir Putin. But that is primarily because we are bombarded with news about these leaders. If we widen the lens to account for horrors that Western mainstream media largely ignore, those waging Sudan’s civil war stand out even more. The country’s new warlords are displaying shocking cruelty and indifference toward their own people (or those living in the regions they control), including by systematically hampering the flow of humanitarian aid and taking an exorbitant amount of it for themselves.

The situation in Sudan exposes a global economic logic that has remained obfuscated in other cases. Back in 2019, widespread demonstrations toppled the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, whose reign at least had maintained a semblance of peace and stability following the secession of South Sudan (a predominantly Christian country that is now mired in its own civil war). Then, following a brief moment of transitional government and renewed hopes for democratization, a brutal war erupted between two Muslim warlords: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) who is still nominally head of state, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (or Hemedti, meaning “little Mohamed”), the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and one of the country’s wealthiest men.

The RSF is behind some of the worst atrocities of the current conflict, including the Khartoum massacre on June 3, 2019, when more than 120 protestors were killed, hundreds more wounded, thousands of women raped, and many homes pillaged. More recently, Dagalo’s forces triggered a new cycle of violence on April 15, 2023, when they launched a broad assault on SAF bases across the country, including in the capital, Khartoum.

Although both sides express a vague commitment to democracy, no one takes such claims seriously. What they really mean is, “First we have to win the war; then we’ll see.” This is an understandable position to take. To all those involved, a mostly benevolent dictatorship like Paul Kagame’s regime in Rwanda may be the best that one can realistically hope for.

Further complicating matters is the role of external forces. For example, Russia’s Wagner Group, the Libyan National Army (under the command of Khalifa Haftar), and the United Arab Emirates have reportedly furnished the RSF with military supplies, helicopters, and weapons on a scale that has left it better armed than the SAF. Meanwhile, the SAF has been looking for its own backers, not least China.

But the RSF has another major advantage: Dagalo controls a region with abundant gold reserves that allow him to purchase all the weapons he needs. We are thus reminded of a sad truth facing many developing countries: natural resources are as likely to be a source of violence and poverty as they are to underpin peace and prosperity.

The quintessential example is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has long been cursed by its reserves of critical minerals, diamonds, and gold. If it had no such resources, it would still be poor, but it might be a happier, more peaceful place to live. The DRC is also an exemplary case of how the developed West contributes to the circumstances for mass migration. Behind the façade of “primitive” ethnic passions exploding yet again in the African “heart of darkness,” one can discern the unmistakable contours of global capitalism.

After the fall of Mobutu Sese Soko in 1997, the DRC ceased to exist as a functioning state. Its eastern region now comprises a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords whose armies press-gang and drug children and maintain business ties with the foreign corporations that are exploiting the region’s mineral reserves. This arrangement serves both partners: the corporations get mining rights without having to pay state taxes, and the warlords get money with which to buy arms. Many of these minerals then end up in our laptops, mobile phones, and other high-tech products. The problem is not the “savage” customs of the local population; it is the foreign companies and the wealthy consumers who buy their products. Remove them from the equation and the entire edifice of ethnic warfare crumbles.

The DRC is no exception, as demonstrated by the de facto dismemberment – or, rather, “Congo-ization” – of Libya following NATO’s intervention and the fall of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011. Since then, much of Libya’s territory has been ruled by local armed gangs who sell oil directly to foreign customers, reminding us of capitalism’s tenacity in securing a steady supply of cheap raw materials. This is why so many states damned with the resource curse remain condemned to their plight.

The tragic upshot is that no party in ongoing conflicts is innocent or righteous. In Sudan, the problem is not just the RSF; both sides are playing the same brutal game. The situation cannot be reduced to a “backward” people who are not ready for democracy, because it is really about the continuing economic colonization of Africa – not just by the West but also by China, Russia, and rich Arab countries. We should not be surprised that Central Africa is increasingly dominated by Russian mercenaries and Muslim fundamentalists.

Yanis Varoufakis has written eloquently about the passage of capitalism to “technofeudalism,” as evidenced by the Big Tech companies’ de facto monopolies over their respective markets. In countries like Sudan and the DRC, however, we have something closer to the feudalism of medieval times. In fact, both descriptions are true: we are increasingly living under a combination of high-tech and analog feudalism. This is why Hemedti – even more than Elon Musk – is the true avatar of our era.

Adjusting My Spectacles...

...with Guy Debord.

A Jukebox Jive

Mark K. Spencer, "A Piano, a Jukebox, and a Life of Contemplation"

t the end of his recent book, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Life-World, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han tells the story of buying a vintage jukebox after he crashed his bicycle in front of the Berlin shop where it was being sold. He took it home to “a flat that contained only an old grand piano and a metal desk from a doctor’s surgery.” “I needed to be in an empty flat,” he explains, and “neither the grand piano nor the desk detracted from the emptiness; they intensified it.” By “emptiness,” Han “does not mean that there is a space with nothing in it. It is an intensity, an intense presence. It is the spatial appearance of stillness, which is an intense form of attentiveness.”

Like his desk and piano, the jukebox also intensifies Han’s attentiveness. Han is fascinated by the sounds and movements the machine makes, and by how it makes listening to music a tactile, bodily experience: putting coins into it, watching its lights and interior movements as it warms up and prepares a record for playing, listening to its ancient valves and speakers. Listening to music in this way, unlike listening to a streaming service, requires lingering in the presence of a physical thing. This story sums up many key themes that make Han one of the most interesting and unusual cultural critics of our time. (Readers of Law & Liberty have already been introduced to Han’s distinctive work in an article and a review by Scott Beauchamp and a review by Emina Melonic.)

Han’s choice of furniture alone clearly shows him to be something of an eccentric, which is also borne out by his criticisms of modernity. Indeed, his assessment of contemporary life is at times so negative, that one might be tempted to dismiss him as a reactionary Luddite. One of my students, reading Han for the first time, said he gave off vibes of an angry old man shouting at people to get off his lawn. My student wasn’t entirely wrong: Han’s writing is suffused with resentment of modernity, and that gives rise to some sloppy argumentation and gross over-generalizations about recent history. But even so, his work has extraordinary value. His pessimism may be overwrought at times, and his reasoning loose, but Han has been, for me, a writer who holds up a mirror to my life, such that, page after page, I say, “Yes, that is how things are.” For me and many other people, he has captured the mood of our times with impeccable accuracy.

As a philosopher, Han is interested in figuring out what conditions are needed for human persons to reach fulfillment. His philosophical approach is shaped by many influences: a range of thinkers from Plato to Walter Benjamin, medieval Christian mystics, Zen Buddhists, but above all, Martin Heidegger (though he is also highly critical of many of Heidegger’s ideas). Heidegger and Han are deeply interested in how human persons exist. By this, they mean the basic ways that we fit into our surroundings, ways that color all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. For example, if my basic stance toward the world, my way of existing, is fundamentally shaped by technology, then I will tend to approach everything—material things, other persons, myself, God—as objects controllable by human beings. Our basic, subconscious stances towards the world are shaped by the sort of political and economic society we live in and the sorts of artifacts we use. As a cultural critic, Han applies these ideas to our current technology. He wants to show how using Snapchat, Tinder, and ChatGPT (for example)—and smartphones and the internet more generally—yields a way of existing that is detrimental to human flourishing.

Han is famous for writing short, almost aphoristic texts. Few of his books are more than 100 pages. My interest here is in four of his most recent books: Infocracy, Non-Things, The crisis of narration, and Vita contemplativa. While these are published as separate books, they are one continuous meditation on the deficient ways in which we exist in the information age, and a proposal of a solution of sorts centered around contemplation. These are themes that have marked Han’s work since he rose to prominence with The Burnout Society (2015) and even before, but these four books give what is probably his most focused treatment of these themes. They are marked by a much more positive assessment of the Western, Christian tradition than some of his earlier work. While deeply influenced by the Buddhist tradition, Han is himself a Catholic. His understanding of religious ritual and the contemplative life as expressed in these books is a fascinating mix of the two traditions. This mix will be of interest to practitioners of both religions, I think, even if, as with many aspects of Han’s thought, they would rather observe than imitate his idiosyncratic blend of two traditions.

The story about the jukebox sums up a central theme for Han: the contrast between the analog and the digital. Digital technologies treat things as composed of manipulable, rearrangeable bits of information. In the world as mediated to us through the smartphone’s touchscreen, things are treated as so much information, effortlessly available at a single touch of a finger.

This situation leads, as Han sees it, to the possibility of a particularly insidious form of control over human persons by political and economic powers. In earlier stages of human history, those powers had to use means external to their subjects in order to control behavior. In totalitarian regimes, for example, the government has to use external surveillance means (like cameras and spies), prison systems, centrally produced propaganda, and workplace discipline to control citizens’ behavior. By contrast, our society, centered on information technology, does not explicitly forbid much and does not use totalitarian, disciplinary controls. Rather, a wide range of products and experiences are made available to us, and a very wide range of actions are permitted. Technology encourages us to see ourselves as producing ourselves autonomously by our actions, leading lives that can be summed up in the data that is collected about us. This leaves us prey to a deeper form of control than was available to the totalitarians: using big data, governments and corporations can effectively nudge people’s desires, while allowing us to believe that we are acting entirely autonomously. This situation leads, in turn, to the anxieties and sense of burnout that plague our contemporary world, including the exhaustion of always having to produce our own identity.

Analog things, represented by the jukebox, appear as wholes that are not entirely subject to our effortless manipulation. Analog things exist more stably in the material world, and so can provide some stabilization for our lives: Han delights in the fact that his jukebox will likely last longer than he does, whereas digital information is, in many ways, ephemeral. In an analog world, we understand ourselves not in terms of big data, but through narratives. Just like physical things, narratives—like religious stories about our relation to the divine, or early modern stories about hope in progress—give stability and meaning to our lives. This meaning is not reducible to bits of information; rather, stories give meaning to data, by incorporating data into a wider whole. That wider whole is best grasped through rituals, in which narratives are conveyed in ways that involve us as wholes, body and mind.

Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to producing one’s own identity that plagues us today. 

Han observes that the world of data and information aims to be entirely transparent: in another image repeated across all these books, Han sees our world as fundamentally pornographic. Like in a pornographic film, many people feel a compulsion to show too much about themselves online, because they think that it is through this showing that they construct themselves. Digital technology is oriented to constantly make us feel good effortlessly. Han sees the digital economy as too smooth; our contemporary world has lost a necessary sense of effort, of melancholy, of being wounded by others. In an analog world, we often suffer when we run up against other material things or persons. This suffering gives us a sense of their otherness, their difference from us; grappling with what is other than me—what cannot be reduced to information that I can manipulate—is good for me especially because it forces me to take my attention off of my egotistical self.

Han’s solution to these perceived problems is to engage in contemplation. This is his focus especially in his recent Vita contemplativa. Han’s critique of modernity primarily consists of helping the reader feel how we exist in the information age, and also feel what is missing in that world from a flourishing human life. Han’s proposals for solving these problems also are aimed at helping us feel the desire for contemplation—that is, focused attention on what is other than us. Some of what Han says about contemplation is redolent of the famous work of Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. Like Han, Pieper understands a major part of the problem with the contemporary world to be a focus on productivity, on justifying actions entirely through their utility. Leisure activities are done entirely for their own sake; they bring us to flourishing by themselves, without needing to attend to their results. Like Pieper, Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to produce one’s own identity that plagues us today.

But as the story about the jukebox indicates, Han’s emphasis is not so much on Pieper-style leisurely activities, as much as it is on inactivity. If we’re going to compare Han to a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher, he is more like Elizabeth Anscombe, who, when asked to state her recreation activities for Who’s Who, wrote “sitting around.” For Han too, the world would be a far better place if we all just spent time sitting around. A haiku that he quotes sums up his vision:

Sitting peacefully doing nothing
Springtime is coming
and the grass grows all by itself.

The economy of the information age is good at absorbing all of our activities into itself. It can make anything—other people, ourselves, the stories we tell, political acts, ideologies—into a commodity, and into a source of data that can be further used to nudge our desires, while making us temporarily feel freer and happier. Han wants to find a way of existing that stands outside this system of potential control, leaving us truly free to flourish as human persons. He finds this way of existing in silence, stillness, emptiness, and waiting—in a stance of receiving whatever happens as a gift.

Religious festivals and contemplating beauty are valuable to him when they are pursued not for the sake of personal fulfillment, but for the sake of forgetting ourselves and attending to other things. When one does nothing, and just intensely pays attention to other things, everything “converges in friendliness.” This contemplative state requires effort, and it is the happiest of ways of existing—paradoxically, we are happiest when we do not pursue our own happiness, but respond to what is important in itself for its own sake. Han does not promote inactivity for therapeutic reasons: he does not recommend being inactive and attentive because it will make you a more productive person, more rested, or more aware of your own fulfillment. Rather, this contemplative state will remove you from egotistic attention to yourself altogether; it will lead you to stop caring about self-production, usefulness, and pornographic transparency.

I admit that I find this vision of human life deeply attractive. I also readily grant that it will be repellent to a lot of people; all the more, when it is coupled to Han’s sweeping indictments of contemporary life and his preference for aphoristic assertion over careful argumentation. It will be off-putting to many who might otherwise be his allies. What value does this apparently romanticized, mystical, hippie, or Buddhist vision have for us today, especially for Christian conservatives? Most of us value action and hard work, and many conservatives would like to retain many aspects of our current technological, economic, and political systems, seeing a lot of practical benefit in them, of a sort that may facilitate human flourishing. While most conservatives eschew the visions of self-production that underlie a lot of sexual politics today, self-production as such is key to many conservative visions of work and action. To such views, Han’s criticisms will seem deeply misplaced, and his preferred mode of inactivity may look like nothing but laziness or self-absorption, an unwillingness to practically engage in improving society.

I’d suggest that Han’s work is valuable to conservatives first because it helps us make sense of current crises in conservatism, in religion, and in society more broadly. Every conservative should constantly ask him or herself: what am I trying to conserve? If conservatism is worthwhile, what we are trying to conserve must surely be something having to do with what is genuinely human; it must have to do with preserving a human way of life that is valuable in itself and does not see everything that we do as a mere expression or pursuit of power or results. Many conservative thinkers have advocated a life in which we do not impose our rationalistic plans on human life, but instead are attentive to what is given to us. Han’s contemplative life, while perhaps not the best life for everyone, is a powerful witness to that vision. He is also a master at helping us attend to features of human life that even those of us who care about culture, religion, art, and so on, generally overlook. He is a master at helping us see how, even when we feel freest, we might be enslaved, and even when we don’t seem to be doing anything worthwhile—like when we are just staring at a jukebox, waiting for it to play some music—we might be engaged in what is most human of all. Even if we end up disagreeing with some of his critiques and some of his solutions, Han’s work is worthwhile for the sheer education in attention it yields.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Han offers no policy prescriptions. He has outlined no systematic program of inactivity. You can’t market inactivity; you can’t have a course of training in the attention he recommends. If we read Han as offering practical, society-level prescriptions, he could only be read as naïve and deeply uninformed. The prospects he seems to hold out for societal improvement are rather bleak: pretty much all current political and economic activities (including the very marketing of his books and the writing of this review) fail to be fully human in his view, because they have all succumbed to the vagaries of the information regime. But, at the level of personal life, Han offers a lot of hope—and that focus on the personal, as opposed to the societal, is itself a deeply conservative theme. We can all become more inactive, perceive more attentively, linger more, contemplate stories, and engage in festive rituals with others. We can all submit to digital technology a little less, even if we don’t go as far as Han, and that will likely make us all a bit happier. So long as we don’t do these things for the sake of societal improvement, but do them for their own sake, we’ll be on the path Han recommends. I can’t see how doing all of those things a little more would be bad for any of us.

Proton Shells and Magic Numbers - Nuclear Chemistry Cheats

The Collapse of the post-WWII Global "Democratic" System... according to Weinstein

Benzian contrast?

00:00 Will Trump be Allowed to Become President? 12:02 MSNBC’s Editing of Joe Rogan to Support Kamala 16:48 The Media’s Gaslighting of Modern Politics 31:07 Is Google Influencing the Election? 43:03 How Physics Became Boring & Safe 52:40 Is String Theory Just a Shiny Distraction? 1:03:44 Why String Theory Still Gets Funded 1:07:41 Science’s Big Problems 1:13:45 The Danger of Criticism Capture 1:26:19 Eric’s Antidote for Cancelling People 1:36:15 Why Having Public Opinions is so Exhausting 1:53:21 What Chris Gets Criticised for Most 2:06:10 The Dynamics of Interviewing & Conversation 2:16:18 Trying to Become a High Agency Person 2:25:53 Eric’s Advice for People Who Don’t Fit in 2:33:38 Overcoming Impossible Situations 2:38:17 4D Complex Shapes, Geometry & Dimensions 2:49:09 The Internet is Destroying the Sacred 3:02:44 Reacting to “What Can Be, Unburdened By What Has Been” 3:19:06 Eric’s Thoughts on JD Vance

Deleuze mocks the formula: "Be yourselves - it being understood that this self must be that of others". - Culture is not a movement of normalization or conformity. - "Culture(...) is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a Sensibility, a Memory and then a Thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary, as Nietzsche said, precisely in order to "Train a Nation of Thinkers" or to "Provide a Training for the Mind."