lsd9000000

[lsd9000000]

[lsd9000000]

Hortensia Mi Kafchin (Romanian, 1986) - Angel in the Server Room (2020/2022)

[lsd9000000]

Azuki Furuya — The Three Graces (acrylic, oil, mixed media, on board, 2024)

[lsd9000000]

Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive

[lsd9000000]

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven’t noticed already.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

[lsd9000000]

Danilo Xhema

[lsd9000000]

“Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

[lsd9000000]

“I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”

—

W. E. B. Du Bois

[lsd9000000]

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!

— Terence McKenna

[lsd9000000]

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

—Terence McKenna

[lsd9000000]

The funniest, most cutting film criticism was when Jean Baudrillard said that The Matrix was exactly the kind of film that would be made and shown inside the Matrix.

[lsd9000000]

[lsd9000000]

"The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

[lsd9000000]

“At the same time, I believe that the argument about boredom has to be somewhat nuanced. It is certainly true that one could feel almost nostalgic for Boredom 1.0. The dreary void of Sundays, the night hours after television stopped broadcasting, even the endless dragging minutes waiting in queues or for public transport: for anyone who has a smartphone, this empty time has now been effectively eliminated. In the intensive, 24/7 environment of capitalist cyberspace, the brain is no longer allowed any time to idle; instead, it is inundated with a seamless flow of low-level stimulus.”

Yet boredom was ambivalent; it wasn’t simply a negative feeling that one simply wanted rid of. For punk, the vacancy of boredom was a challenge, an injunction and an opportunity: if we are bored, then it is for us to produce something that will fill up the space. Yet, it is through this demand for participation that capitalism has neutralised boredom. Now, rather than imposing a pacifying spectacle on us, capitalist corporations go out of their way to invite us to interact, to generate our own content, to join the debate. There is now neither an excuse nor an opportunity to be bored.

(…)

Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring.”

Mark Fisher, No One Is Bored, Everything Is Boring

[lsd9000000]

[lsd9000000]

“Capitalism is obsessed with death. The unconscious fear of death is what spurs it on. The threat of death is what stirs its compulsion of accumulation and growth. This compulsion drives us towards not only ecological, but also mental catastrophe. The destructive compulsion to perform combines self-affirmation and self-destruction in one. We optimize ourselves to death. Relentless self-exploitation leads to mental collapse. Brutal competition ends in destruction. It produces an emotional coldness and indifference towards others as well as towards one’s own self.”

— Byung-Chul Han, Capitalism and the Death Drive