The greatest missed connection of all.
Welcome to feudalism, the new ruling ideology. I know, you thought it would be more. . .medieval. Oh well. Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter -- take your pick. These are all the new economic models by which you do the work of generating content (post, retweet, comment, share) for free and and the Lords of the site (landowners) collect the profit.
You and I are serfs, tilling the land. Happily it appears.
Uh, I'm unique and my content belongs to me!
No your not (yet) and no it doesn't.
What makes Twitter worth 24 billion? Not your tweets specifically. No one gives a steamy shit where you eat at and what you think of the movie Gravity. But the collective traffic is what makes advertisers take notice. The system doesn't have to be run by demonic illuminati, because the system is simply all the selfish wants of consuming, socially aware, hard worker bees - added together.
I eat organic and I don't want underage chinese girls to work as slaves!
Said the enlightened post on Facebook via a slave girl built smartphone. No, of course you don't, but your choices did. Identity over actions is the narcissist way as I know only too well.
The choice (so-called) imposed by the ruling ideology (liberalism vs. fundamentalism for example) is not a real one. It is the very absence of choice. Let us not be easily deceived.
II.
'We are invited by "the Machine" to submit our opinions and preferences. We give in to the pressure to categorize data and join the swarms of 'collective intelligence.' Donate your wisdom to the crowds. We are invited to create reading lists, rank music and evaluate the products we consumed. User bees working for queen Google. It is so tempting to become part of the online 'pollination' world, as French economist Yann Moulier coined it, with billions of users acting like bees that fly from one website to the other, adding value for the owners. Kierkegaard warned us that the crowd is untruth. But no one reads Kierkegaard.
Even when we try to be dissimilar we only enact sameness. Dressing different, even counter to the corporate images on TV only begets the creating of a new, marketable subgroup. The ruling ideology thanks you.
In other words, do you want to protest this weekend against police violence? Capitalism has the best scarfs, backpacks, posters and fireworks for you to get your street movement on with. On sale too!
Want to monitor, police and put down a protest this weekend? Well, lucky you. Capitalism also has the best gear (kevlar, facial recognition software, zip ties) for your increasingly militarized police force. The system, despite upheaval (which just creates even more market opportunities), remains intact.
Whats that? Your gay transgendered now? Awesome. Here is a line of clothing, books, sitcoms and artwork for you to create that unique identity with. What? Oh now your 'saved' and want to live for Jesus? Cool, here's some appropriate attire and accessories and specialty Bible end times charts for you to remake yourself with.
Just don't look like anyone else, ever. Be you. Enjoy Coke. Be a Botox rebel. YOLO.
Whatever the fuck you do, just consume. In fact if you buy XYZ we will donate a buck to some corporate charity for you. Saving your boring ass even that simplistic task. Your a god-damn hero simply via consumption!
Like a relief valve, the pent up pressure is released and we all go back to jerking off and watching Netflix. Or if you're like me, save time and just jerk off to Netflix. Spectators to a life we are not living.
Don't fret, the laugh track laughs for you.
III.
We are in the midst of the greatest missed connection of all time. While the blame for economic collapse is steadily shifting towards the have-nots and away from bankers and the Neo-Liberal politicians they 'pwn', you only seem concerned about which store you are going to kill someone in to get a PS4 on Black Friday. Or is it, Black Thursday now. Maybe we can just eat turkey jerky while we shank each other in the electronics department. At least then we would be true to the actual way we took this land.
Its for my kids N. I do it for the kids.
But lets not kid ourselves. To simply give those at the bottom the same 'opportunity' as those at the top is precisely what sustains the status quo. Ensuring the systems smooth functioning. What a contemporary system of oppression needs is equal rights to cloak the reality that social domination is already inscribed into the system itself. As long as some 'other' exists, to then grant equal rights to, the system advances. This is how middle class, white, christian, conservatives can call themselves oppressed with a straight face. The ruling ideology needs ever new - otherness.
Hey, thats not funny! Someone was reading the Koran in my favorite hangout N. thereby oppressing me and my jingoist family!
Seriously, go fuck yourself.
So...how do we eliminate the idea of 'others'?
IV.
The solution is within the dialectic itself. First, to truly be different, one must differ not from the 'other' in just hairstyle, attire, nipple piercings and porn. One must differ from ones very own self.
Second, if global capitalism has thrived off fractures and splinters in identity, then constructing a universal community is necessary to undo it.
And paradoxically, a universal community would be constituted by individuals who each differed from themselves. The negation of self as real difference. Consumerist difference is still sameness so quit trying to buy your way out. Pure difference is difference from difference.
What in the fuck are you saying?
Militant egalitarian love baby! Can you dig it?
We become egalitarian when we see their is no "them" to oppress or help. There is only 'us'. A self sacrificing (negating) subtraction of my will for the love of 'other' who is really 'us'. This is revolution.
V.
Common ('pragmatic') wisdom tells us that all attempts to fundamentally change things (challenging hierarchal systems and so forth) in order to establish a new society (rooted in true equality, justice, etc.) are hopelessly divorced from 'reality', too 'utopian', and so on.
In short: an egalitarian order is impossibly 'idealistic'.
Yet let us turn things around, noting that modern idealists are actually and ultimately the irrational pragmatists. Enslaved to (so-called) 'facts', imbued with the ruling ideology. Only an idealist could think the status quo can go on indefinitely. It can't.
Thus, in sum, egalitarianism has not necessarily failed (as an 'ideal').
Rather it is we who have failed egalitarianism per our incessant clinging to idealism (i.e. vulgar 'feudalism', bourgeois - capitalist - ideology, etc.).
For egalitarianism is not an ideal to realize.
Egalitarianism is an Idea that must be defended against the onslaught of (bourgeois) idealism . . . through its very praxis--that is, its offense.
Egalitarianism is not what 'comes after' the fight, it is the fight itself, i.e. egalitarianism is 'a product of the very struggle for it'.
As simply as I can manage: Love your enemy, hate your family. For love does not alter the beloved, rather it alters itself.
And so become what no one else can. Yourself.
N.
Welcome to feudalism, the new ruling ideology. I know, you thought it would be more. . .medieval. Oh well. Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter -- take your pick. These are all the new economic models by which you do the work of generating content (post, retweet, comment, share) for free and and the Lords of the site (landowners) collect the profit.
You and I are serfs, tilling the land. Happily it appears.
Uh, I'm unique and my content belongs to me!
No your not (yet) and no it doesn't.
What makes Twitter worth 24 billion? Not your tweets specifically. No one gives a steamy shit where you eat at and what you think of the movie Gravity. But the collective traffic is what makes advertisers take notice. The system doesn't have to be run by demonic illuminati, because the system is simply all the selfish wants of consuming, socially aware, hard worker bees - added together.
I eat organic and I don't want underage chinese girls to work as slaves!
Said the enlightened post on Facebook via a slave girl built smartphone. No, of course you don't, but your choices did. Identity over actions is the narcissist way as I know only too well.
The choice (so-called) imposed by the ruling ideology (liberalism vs. fundamentalism for example) is not a real one. It is the very absence of choice. Let us not be easily deceived.
II.
'We are invited by "the Machine" to submit our opinions and preferences. We give in to the pressure to categorize data and join the swarms of 'collective intelligence.' Donate your wisdom to the crowds. We are invited to create reading lists, rank music and evaluate the products we consumed. User bees working for queen Google. It is so tempting to become part of the online 'pollination' world, as French economist Yann Moulier coined it, with billions of users acting like bees that fly from one website to the other, adding value for the owners. Kierkegaard warned us that the crowd is untruth. But no one reads Kierkegaard.
Even when we try to be dissimilar we only enact sameness. Dressing different, even counter to the corporate images on TV only begets the creating of a new, marketable subgroup. The ruling ideology thanks you.
In other words, do you want to protest this weekend against police violence? Capitalism has the best scarfs, backpacks, posters and fireworks for you to get your street movement on with. On sale too!
Want to monitor, police and put down a protest this weekend? Well, lucky you. Capitalism also has the best gear (kevlar, facial recognition software, zip ties) for your increasingly militarized police force. The system, despite upheaval (which just creates even more market opportunities), remains intact.
Whats that? Your gay transgendered now? Awesome. Here is a line of clothing, books, sitcoms and artwork for you to create that unique identity with. What? Oh now your 'saved' and want to live for Jesus? Cool, here's some appropriate attire and accessories and specialty Bible end times charts for you to remake yourself with.
Just don't look like anyone else, ever. Be you. Enjoy Coke. Be a Botox rebel. YOLO.
Whatever the fuck you do, just consume. In fact if you buy XYZ we will donate a buck to some corporate charity for you. Saving your boring ass even that simplistic task. Your a god-damn hero simply via consumption!
Like a relief valve, the pent up pressure is released and we all go back to jerking off and watching Netflix. Or if you're like me, save time and just jerk off to Netflix. Spectators to a life we are not living.
Don't fret, the laugh track laughs for you.
III.
We are in the midst of the greatest missed connection of all time. While the blame for economic collapse is steadily shifting towards the have-nots and away from bankers and the Neo-Liberal politicians they 'pwn', you only seem concerned about which store you are going to kill someone in to get a PS4 on Black Friday. Or is it, Black Thursday now. Maybe we can just eat turkey jerky while we shank each other in the electronics department. At least then we would be true to the actual way we took this land.
Its for my kids N. I do it for the kids.
But lets not kid ourselves. To simply give those at the bottom the same 'opportunity' as those at the top is precisely what sustains the status quo. Ensuring the systems smooth functioning. What a contemporary system of oppression needs is equal rights to cloak the reality that social domination is already inscribed into the system itself. As long as some 'other' exists, to then grant equal rights to, the system advances. This is how middle class, white, christian, conservatives can call themselves oppressed with a straight face. The ruling ideology needs ever new - otherness.
Hey, thats not funny! Someone was reading the Koran in my favorite hangout N. thereby oppressing me and my jingoist family!
Seriously, go fuck yourself.
So...how do we eliminate the idea of 'others'?
IV.
The solution is within the dialectic itself. First, to truly be different, one must differ not from the 'other' in just hairstyle, attire, nipple piercings and porn. One must differ from ones very own self.
Second, if global capitalism has thrived off fractures and splinters in identity, then constructing a universal community is necessary to undo it.
And paradoxically, a universal community would be constituted by individuals who each differed from themselves. The negation of self as real difference. Consumerist difference is still sameness so quit trying to buy your way out. Pure difference is difference from difference.
What in the fuck are you saying?
Militant egalitarian love baby! Can you dig it?
We become egalitarian when we see their is no "them" to oppress or help. There is only 'us'. A self sacrificing (negating) subtraction of my will for the love of 'other' who is really 'us'. This is revolution.
V.
Common ('pragmatic') wisdom tells us that all attempts to fundamentally change things (challenging hierarchal systems and so forth) in order to establish a new society (rooted in true equality, justice, etc.) are hopelessly divorced from 'reality', too 'utopian', and so on.
In short: an egalitarian order is impossibly 'idealistic'.
Yet let us turn things around, noting that modern idealists are actually and ultimately the irrational pragmatists. Enslaved to (so-called) 'facts', imbued with the ruling ideology. Only an idealist could think the status quo can go on indefinitely. It can't.
Thus, in sum, egalitarianism has not necessarily failed (as an 'ideal').
Rather it is we who have failed egalitarianism per our incessant clinging to idealism (i.e. vulgar 'feudalism', bourgeois - capitalist - ideology, etc.).
For egalitarianism is not an ideal to realize.
Egalitarianism is an Idea that must be defended against the onslaught of (bourgeois) idealism . . . through its very praxis--that is, its offense.
Egalitarianism is not what 'comes after' the fight, it is the fight itself, i.e. egalitarianism is 'a product of the very struggle for it'.
As simply as I can manage: Love your enemy, hate your family. For love does not alter the beloved, rather it alters itself.
And so become what no one else can. Yourself.
N.
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