moodgored

[moodgored]

aziz + cucher: some people - lisa freiman + tami katz-freiman (2012)

[moodgored]

[moodgored]

The conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the United States, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and the irony that the labor of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the “technologies of patience” that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now.

Cruel Optimism - Lauren Berlant

[moodgored]

Algorithms facilitate the mechanical production of death. There is something pornographic, something obscene, about killing as a data-driven operation. The opponent is dissolved into data. [...] Drone warfare is an image of the society in which everything has become a matter of work, production and performance.

– Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals (2019)

[moodgored]

Edgardo Cantoni - untitled - 13-03-2025

Source: Glitch artists collective - Facebook

[moodgored]

"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Page 29)

[moodgored]

Navneet Alang, “Terror of the Archive”

[moodgored]

"Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevent you.

Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no is pointless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the mental asylum.

Hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you.

Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that ‘work makes you free’.

Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself" -Alfredo M. Bonanno, Armed Joy, 1977

[moodgored]

When computer scientists gain entry, as they’re doing, into the presidential palaces and mayors’ offices of the world’s largest cities, it’s not so much to set up shop as it is to explain the new rules of the game: government administrations are now competing with alternative providers of the same services who, unfortunately for them, are several steps ahead. Suggesting their cloud as a way to shelter government services from revolutions — services like the land registry, soon to be available as a smartphone application — the authors of The New Digital Age inform us and them: “In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government.” And in case it’s not quite clear who the boss is now, it concludes: “Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure but virtual institutions will survive.” With Google, what is concealed beneath the exterior of an innocent interface and a very effective search engine, is an explicitly political project. An enterprise that maps the planet Earth, sending its teams into every street of every one of its towns, cannot have purely commercial aims. One never maps a territory that one doesn’t contemplate appropriating. “Don’t be evil!”: let yourself go.

To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee, 2008

2008

[moodgored]

'extirpation of evil by incision,' 1994 in adriana varejão: histórias às margens [at the margins] - museu de arte moderna de são paulo (2013)

[moodgored]

“TW: Fake Body”

Oil on Canvas

[moodgored]

Surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcome. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. In this phase of surveillance capitalism’s evolution, the means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive “means of behavioral modification.” In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

[moodgored]

The Internet adores this second-person voice. There it is, at every cyber–street corner: Recommended for You, Suggestions for You, Here Is Something You Might Like. Behind each of these You’s, an algorithm sits at an easel, squinting, trying to catch Your likeness. But these algorithms are true Renaissance practitioners. Not only portraitists, they’re also psychologists, data-crunchers, and private detectives, extrapolating personality from the evidence of our past actions: from our online histories and, increasingly, from what they can eavesdrop, without any meaningful warrant, in the physical world. From all those toothsome bytes of behavior, they create an image of You.

Laurence Scott, "Hell is Ourselves"

[moodgored]

'tongues + clams' by e.v. day

[moodgored]

Grégory Chatonsky

[moodgored]

This influence over minds is a psychopolitical regime: It directs the environments where our ideas are born, developed, and expressed. Its power lies in its intimacy—it infiltrates the core of our subjectivity, bending our internal landscape without us realizing it, all while maintaining the illusion of choice and freedom