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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Understanding what drives the revolution that is destroying the American republic gives insight into how the 2020 election’s results may impact its course. Its practical question—who rules?—is historically familiar. But any revolution’s quarrels and stakes obscure the question: to what end? Our revolution is by the ruling class—a revolution from above. Crushing obstacles to its growing oligarchic rule is the proximate purpose.

But the logic that drives the revolution aims at civilization itself.

What follows describes how far along its path that logic has taken America, and where it might take us in the future depending on the election’s outcome.

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The U.S. Constitution had codified as fine a balance between the powers of the Many, the Few, and the One as Aristotle may have imagined by arming the federal government’s components, the States, and ordinary citizens (via the first ten Amendments as well as elections) with means to maintain the balance. Its authors, however, were under no illusions about the efficacy of “parchment barriers” to prevent interests from coalescing into factions against the common good. During the 19th century, interests and opinions in the South and the North coalesced into antagonistic ruling classes that fought the century’s bloodiest war. In the 20th, the notion that good government proceeds from scientific expertise, as well as the growing identity between big business and government, fostered the growth of a single nationwide Progressive ruling class. Between the 1930s and the early 21st century, the centralization of administrative power in this class’s hands did much to transform the American republic established in 1776-89 into an oligarchy.

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The European tradition of government by experts reaches back beyond Napoleon and Hegel to royal techno-bureaucrats. Being essentially amoral, it treats transgressors as merely ignorant. It may punish them as rebellious, but not as bad people. That is why the fascists, who were part of that tradition, never made it as totalitarians. People—especially the Church—remained free to voice different opinions so long as they refrained from outright opposition. America’s growing oligarchy, however, always had a moralistic, puritan streak that indicts dissenters as bad people. More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Progressivism’s foundational proposition—that the American way of life suffers from excessive freedom and insufficient latitude for experts to lead each into doing what is best for all—is the intellectual basis of the oligarchy’s ever-increasing size, wealth, and power. The theme that the USA was ill-conceived in 1776-89 and must be re-conceived has resounded from Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden: “listen to the scientists!” The criticism’s main point has been constant: America’s original conception validated the people’s right to live as they please, and made it hard to marshal them for Progressive purposes.

But the Progressive critique adds a moral basis: the American people’s indulgence of their preferences—private ease and comfort, focus on families, religious observance, patriotism—has made for every secular sin imaginable: racism, sexism, greed, etc. Because most Americans are racist, sexist, un-appreciative of real virtue or refinement (these are somehow rolled together), because these Americans resist knuckling under to their betters, America is a sick society that needs to be punished and to have its noxious freedoms reformed.

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The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.

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Race (and sex, etc.) is yet another set of excuses for transferring power to the ruling class. The oligarchy is no more concerned about race than it is about education, or environmentalism, or sex, or anything else. It is about yet more discretionary power in the hands of its members, for whom not all blacks (or women, or whatevers) are to be advantaged—only the ones who serve ruling class purposes. In education, employment, and personnel management, co-opting compatible, non-threatening colleagues is the objective. As Joseph Biden put it succinctly: if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t black.” A ruling class of ever-decreasing quality is a result.

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I noted that this revolution’s logic leads to no logical end. That is because “the logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior.” Its force, I observed, “comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands,” but rather “from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation.” Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

In short, the Progressive ruling class’s intensifying efforts to oppress those they imagine to be their inferiors is not reversible. It is far less a choice of policy than it is the consequence of its awakening to its own identity—awakening to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them. It is awakening to its deep resentment—indeed, to hate—for whoever does not submit preemptively.

Let there be no doubt: the ruling class’s focus on Donald Trump has been incidental. America’s potentates do not fear one pudgy orange-haired septuagenarian. They fear the millions of Americans whom they loathe, who voted for Trump, who gave his party control of House and Senate, and who will surely vote for folks these potentates really should fear.

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The people who killed one another in 1861-65 respected each other as individuals and shared standards of truth, justice, and civility. But as our ruling class put the rest of America beyond the proverbial pale, what remained of friendship among the American republic’s components drained away.

By 2016, most Americans preferred either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders over ruling-class candidates for president. And of course, they increasingly despised one another. In short, the popular basis for constitutional restraint had ceased to exist on all sides. But mostly the ruling class, unaccustomed to outright opposition to its presumption of authority, deemed the voters’ recalcitrance to be illegitimate. That began the revolution’s active phase.

At that time, I wrote that, regardless of who won the upcoming election, the United States of America had crossed the threshold of a revolution, and that though no one could know how that would end, we could be sure only that the peaceful American way of life we had known could never return. Hilary Clinton’s or Donald Trump’s victory in the election would merely have channeled the revolution onto different courses. We would look back on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as relics from an age of moderation.

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The oligarchy’s offensive to forcibly disable the voters began as a mere protest against—and explanation and excuse for—the 2016 elections’ outcome. But, as its identity unfolded according its logic of hate, one thing led to another.

Official and unofficial ruling class confluence in the Resistance turned the Democratic National Committee’s July 2016 throwaway lie that the Russians had hacked its emails into a four-year national convulsion about Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Putin. Ruling class judges sustained every act of opposition to the Trump administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, nonstop, unquestioned. The Resistance made it official ruling class policy that Trump and his voters’ “racism” and a host of other wrongdoings made them, personally, illegitimate. In 2016 Hillary Clinton had tentatively called her opponents “deplorables.” By 2018 the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2020 they could be fired for a trifle, set upon on the streets, and prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, even for defending themselves.

This happened because the Resistance rallied the ruling class’s every part to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, and seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob. Success supercharges them. The Resistance fostered in the ruling class’s members the sense that they were more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger, and better about themselves than they ever had.

Ruling class violence started on inauguration day 2017 and grew unceasingly, at first an ominous background to all manner of bureaucratic, oligarchic, and media attacks on the election’s winners. But note well that the black-clad burners and looters were the very opposite of a proletariat and that, Marxist rhetoric aside, they never attacked the wealthy or the powerful—not Wall Street, nor major corporations, certainly not any government, never mind Google, Facebook, or Twitter, America’s most powerful monopolies, or corporate officials. Instead, they received financial contributions from these sources. The violent ones were as troops in the service of the powerful, out to crush the spirit of rebellious subjects. Some Marxists!

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Most remarkable has been the unbroken consistency with which every part of the ruling class’s entourage joined the campaign while piggybacking its own priorities to it—to the complaisance of all the others. That is the meaning of “intersectionality.” Teachers’ unions, for example, conditioned returning to the classroom on the government banning charter schools; Black Lives Matter (BLM) claimed that “White Racism” must be treated as another public health menace. All other components supported them. All signified solidarity by demanding that all Americans wear masks outdoors, and that those who don’t be jailed. Meanwhile, they insisted that persons convicted of rape, robbery, and murder be released. The world turned upside down.

The riots that began depopulating America’s major cities in late May are intersectionality’s apotheosis. Since blacks commit homicides at five times and other violent crimes at three times the rate of whites, confrontations between black criminals and police are quotidian. Violent reactions to such confrontations are common. Any number of personalities and organizations, mostly black, have made fortunes and careers exploiting them, e.g. New York’s Al Sharpton. Increasingly since 2013 BLM has become the most prominent of these, founded as a project of a hardline Communist organization based in Cuba and funded lavishly and unaccountably by a high percentage of America’s major corporations. Its stated goals of protecting the black community against police brutality notwithstanding, it functions to mobilize black voters on the Democratic Party’s behalf. Along with Antifa, an organization of violent Marxists and anarchists, BLM organized the physical side of the ruling class’s campaign of intimidation against the American people.

The patently counterfactual claim that months of burning, looting and personal attacks by mobs professionally armed, marshaled, and effectively authorized are “mostly peaceful protests” doubly serves the ruling class by warning the victims that they are alone, can expect no help, and that even resenting the mobs is culpable.

Yet the riots may be intersectionality’s downfall because ordering people to tell each other things they know are not true is the most hazardous of political power grabs.

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The major question overhanging our revolution is how all this has affected the Right side of American society. Since recognizing that the ruling class’s oligarchy surrounded them circa 2008, they sought to keep it at bay. In 2010 their Tea Parties elected the most heavily Republican Congress in a generation. But the Republicans they elected mostly joined the ruling class. Rather than voting for one of them—Mitt Romney for president in 2012—many stayed home.

Then in 2016, sensing that the barbarians were at the gates, they gave short shrift to whoever would not denounce Republicans as harshly as Democrats and elected the loudest denouncer, Donald Trump. By 2020, Trump notwithstanding, the barbarians had proved to be the gatekeepers. They cowed the deplorables, punished them to convince them that they are evil and isolated, deprived them of normal social intercourse, and made them dependent on media that pushed politically correct reality down their masked throats.

The deplorables are angry. But so what?

Why have conservatives mostly obeyed perverted authority? Did the ruling class succeed? Is the revolution over? A minority seem to believe that example may lead leftists once again to recognize their opponents’ equal rights. In short, they are conservatives who yearn to preserve something already gone. They are not yet revolutionaries for their own cause.

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No one could know for sure how much the empowered oligarchy had cowered ordinary people’s resentment or inflamed it. The fact that some two thirds of respondents told pollsters that they are afraid publicly to voice their views suggests much.

Whatever may happen, it is safe to say that, on the Right side of American life, conventional conservatism is dead, as is political moderation.

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When the American people vote on November 3, they—like the proverbial husband who walks in on wife in flagrante—will choose whether to believe what they are told or what their senses tell them.

The ubiquity, depth, and vehemence of the ruling class’s denigration of Donald Trump is such as to render superfluous any detailing thereof. Suffice it to note that not a day in four years has gone by without the news media hyperventilating or ruminating on some allegation of Trump’s wrongdoing or wrongbeing. For what? Again, the list of subjects is so exhaustive that it is easier to note that there is hardly any mortal transgression of which he has not been accused. Suffice it to say that, to the extent one depends on the media’s narrative, one cannot help but believe that Donald Trump is the enemy of all good things, that nothing he has done has been any good, that he is responsible for all that is bad.

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Since 2016 the ruling class have had the luxury of acting as if the deplorables were lifeless punching bags. On November 3 they will find out to what extent that may not be so. Its leaders have already discovered that their “intersectional” entourages are not entirely controllable. After the election, the politicians bidding for leadership of conservatives will make Trump look like milquetoast. As the ruling class tries to suppress them, it will also have to deal with uncontrollable allies, whose violence will spur the conservatives to fiercer resistance.

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The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.

#angelo codevilla #the american mind

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agape-philo-sophia · 5 years

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➝ False Enslaved Zombie Sheeople! ➝ The Modern Augmented Prison Cell - This is Why They Call a Mobile Phone a Cell

Smartphones and other modern day smart devices have now become the new drugs for this generation. Billions of people worldwide have become techno-junkies/prisoners that are over-whelmed, rewired and addicted to the constant stimuli (a predictable dopamine driven, social validation feedback loop) of this social-matrix. We are outsourcing our brains to these smart devices, that in turn are doing the thinking for us (weak AI). How long can we last doing a simple task without obsessively checking our smartphones or computers (internet, social media feed, web browsers, etc) before feeling lost, anxious, fidgety, sad or bored? We all have the freedom of choice to either live as mental slaves that are trained to be unconscious, distracted and reactive to artificially induced realities that remove us out of the Present Moment or reclaim our true sovereignty and power as conscious observers/creators. Most of us parade our private lives on social media for the battle of attention, respect and external validation - our photos, personal stories, memes, song choices, status, relationships, accomplishments, sexuality and all the rest. Yet, our authentic self gets covered over (replaced by a false, socially engineered self-image) as if we are too afraid to bear the thought of what others might think or say about us. Each and everyone of us is a unique, focal point of Source Awareness and we all wield its creative potential because WE ARE IT. The only thing that limits and compromises our divine essence is giving away our unlimited, creative power to self-limiting, programmed thoughts, beliefs and behaviours. -------------------------------------------------- Slavery in our 21st century. You might think that slavery is a phenomenon linked to the old ages when war and lack of human rights were the norm. You might also picture slaves in your mind as groups of people tied in iron chains walking slowly with their heads down in humiliation. Slavery never ended with the arrival of our modern times. This is a misconception. It only took on newer forms. In the present time, slavery comes in disguise. With huge technological advancements taking place rapidly, human freedom is being taken away without us noticing. With the unveiling of the new iPhone event becoming watched by millions worldwide who sit on the edge of their seats counting down the days till they lay their hands on the new product, this widespread obsession with new gadgets is alarming. People tend to buy these new products without actually needing them. It has become a habitual practice, or in other words, an addiction. Rivalry between Apple and Google has made its way into everyday common discussions about which company offers better products and has fired hot debates everywhere. But, stop for a moment and think, who is the real winner from all of this? I cannot help but regard this generation as obeying slaves to technology, the incredibly powerful master. The sad thing about 21st century slavery is that the slave doesn’t realize it. He doesn’t fight against it. It is self-induced and this makes it even more complicated. People are now driven by technology in every aspect of their lives. A person is now dependent on smartphones to wake up, communicate and feel happy. Wouldn’t you choose the Wi-Fi free area over the one that is not? Wouldn’t you choose to sit on the seat beside the power plug over the one that is not? Wouldn’t you choose to give up all your savings for that smartphone with a zillion megapixels camera? You would, wouldn’t you? But why? Does this make you any happier? Stop and wonder how the older generations acquired their happiness. For countless decades, humans lived with zero technology and nobody found it hard. People did not harvest their happiness from touch screens and digital pixels; they harvested it from happy experiences and memories. Technology masterminds are investing millions of dollars for the most effective marketing campaigns. Their only aim is to convince you that without technology, there would be no life. Without a smartphone in your hand, you cannot function. Without connecting to servers, you cannot communicate. This idea of complete dependence on technology is gaining ground day after day. You don’t feel ok if you go out without your phone, or if you walk for a distance instead of driving your car. I believe that with this unfortunate response from people, technological companies will definitely reach their aim. In fact, they have now raised their marketing campaigns to make us believe that humans and technology are one entity. With Google glasses and iWatches being introduced and heavily advertised, these companies aim at erasing the line between us and technology, making technology an indispensable part of us that we cannot discard. People have already acquired some traits previously attributed to machines in this fast-paced era of ours. Most of us now fail to contemplate and wonder about the world as it is frowned upon and labeled as time wasting. We don’t realize that most of our human discoveries and notable literary works were direct results of contemplation and meditation. Nothing extraordinary will result from someone working as a human machine. If anything is wireless in all this new technology, it would be our own chains to it. Try to disconnect from its tempting portals for a while. Happiness is not about the gadgets you own. Some would give anything for an expensive car or the latest collection of iPhones, tablets and laptops, but as for me, I’d rather ride my bike at the break of day and watch the sunrise as the chirping orchestra of birds begins performing their pieces. No notification beeps, no buzzing vibrations. Just the Earth and I without microchips present. No wireless chains. ➝ Freedom and happiness lie in the natural world. Break your chains! “The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb “We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence, because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.” - Jefferson Bethke "Man is a slave. He is not born as a slave, he is born free. He is born as freedom, but he is found in chains everywhere. He lives in chains, he dies in chains. This is the greatest calamity that has happened to humanity." – Osho ------------------------------------------------- Day-by-day we are becoming not only emotionally but also intellectually disabled due to these deleterious effects of social media. These days most of the people get their news and knowledge about current issues from the Facebook, they absorb the information and propagate it without even checking the authenticity of such news. Studies have shown that fake news is more disseminated than the real story. The power of viral distribution provided by the social media has frequently been used for nefarious activities like creating mass panic, inciting communal violence by false propaganda, etc. Just "Look Up" from your screen, logout from your Facebook, and login to the real world. Technology is just to assist us in making our lives simpler. Don't make, technology your life. Unplug yourself and have a technological detox. -------------------------------------------------- Most people won’t believe they are enslaved, though some believe they are enslaved by the ruling elite. But when we look deeper into this predicament, we may be able to see that we are in fact enslaved or trapped by our own minds. https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1081908385228386304?referrer=MindCom -------------------------------------------------- #Truth #Zombie #Sheeople #DumbedDown #Enslavement

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exhibitionclub · 5 years

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23 November 2019

Tony Cokes, “If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol 1,” Goldsmiths CCA and Jeremy Deller, “Putin’s Happy,” Hannah Barry Gallery. Part 1.

“If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late: Vol. 1″, the first UK solo exhibition of US artist Tony Cokes, takes its title from a 2015 music album by the North-American rapper Drake. Popular music is a key element and preoccupation in the work of Cokes, always intertwined with political questions --in many cases directly related to a racialised subject-- and cultural theory that evidence the artist work in and engagement with academia. However, the engagement with these matters in the work is done in a non-straightforward manner, resulting in works with a certain degree of complexity, but also ambiguity, that through the use of music, rhythm and text establish an affective relationship with the viewer.

From a formal point of view, Cokes artworks are relatively simple: the majority of his output presented at Goldsmiths consists of screens (sometimes projections, sometimes old cathode-ray tube TV monitors) where text on a flat colour or abstract background is animated as a discourse is presented following certain rhythms, whilst at the same time loud popular music (rock, electronica, techno, electro-pop) blasts through speakers or headphones --sometimes directly connected to the text presented, as in Evil 16 (Torture.Musik) (2009-2011) with fragments of tracks of popular music used by US (and UK) troops to torture detainees in Iraq in the work ; and sometimes not.

Two works have been specially commissioned by the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art with the occasion of this exhibition, The Morrissey Problem (2019) and Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) (2019). The Morrissey Problem presents the thoughts of Joshua Surtees, a black British Morrissey fan, adapted from a piece published earlier this year in the newspaper the Guardian, expressing his concern and disappointment about the singer’s open and public embrace of far right ideas.

Stills from The Queen is Dead, Fragment 2 (2019), a work by Cokes on the political reverberations and legacy of Aretha Franklin. It is made of fragments from a selections of articles on the late singer, and it is presented accompanied of some of her music. At the moment of my visit, this was a techno remix of one of her songs, and the text on the screen spoke of Franklyn’s support of the Black Panther activist and philosopher Angela Davis.

The second piece commissioned by Goldsmiths, Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) (2019) verses on Mark Fisher, the late philosopher and lecturer at Goldsmiths College’s Visual Cultures department. The text used as the base for this work is not one of the many pieces of writing by Fisher, but part of the contents of the first memorial lecture in his honour, delivered by his friend and colleague Kodwo Eshun in January 2018, one year after Fisher’s death. The lecture is an intellectual eulogy and a testament to the power and potential of Fisher’s ideas. You can watch it here. Cokes deploys the thoughtful and precise words of Eshun in a way that he replicates the extraordinary rhythm and cadence of that specific speech, making the viewer slowly absorb the clarity and carefulness with which the words were articulated and the power of the message delivered.

Cokes engages with Fisher as well through the choice of music accompanying the text animation in yellow and pink. One track he employs is the song ‘Ghosts’, by the British 1980s new-wave band Japan. A verse of this song gave title to one of Fisher’s books, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). In the chapter with the same title, Fisher reflects on the electronic music of Goldie, Japan’s singer David Sylvian and Tricky using this song as a connector between the three artists. Fisher creates a genealogy of art pop and a picture of the electronic music (and the culture) of the beginning of the 21st century, exposing at its core the very British preoccupation of class.

Extra materials:

An interview with Tony Cokes on Artforum, regarding this exhibition.

Kodwo Eshun and Tony Cokes in conversation about this exhibition on 28 September 2019.

Tony Cokes’ Testament A (MF FKA K-P x KE RIP) as a visual essay on Frieze magazine (April 2019), with a text by Pablo Larios, senior editor at Frieze.

Mark Fisher’s series of lectures at DOCH, School of Dance and Circus, Stockholm University of the Arts, in May 2011.

I think that it can be interesting to re-read Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) in light of Tony Cokes’ work, but also as a key reference for Mark Fisher’s thought.

#contemporary art #exhibitionclub #video art #tony cokes #goldsmithscca #goldsmiths college university of london #visual cultures #mark fisher #morrissey #black art #discourse #art #london #exhibitions in london

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xtruss · 3 years

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Chinaphobia

Global CEOs Weigh the Risk of Doing Business in China as Tensions Rise

— By Bill Poell | 08/11/21 | Newsweek

Photo Illustration By Gluekit; XI BY Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto/Getty

For multinational companies, the ever-increasing tension between Beijing and its trading partners complicates the challenge of doing business in China. Just last month, the National Security Agency got wind of a massive cyber hack underway into Microsoft's Exchange email server. Within hours the NSA had determined where the assault had originated: the People's Republic of China. The PRC had over the years repeatedly forsworn any intention to hack into U.S. corporate computer systems and steal intellectual property. President Xi Jinping, in fact, had given Barack Obama his word, in September 2015, that China would not engage in commercial cyber espionage.

That was a lie, and now the Biden White House was fed up. While refraining, for the moment, to impose new sanctions against Beijing, it immediately contacted key allies, led by Japan, and asked them to join Washington in issuing a formal joint complaint to Beijing, which they did in late July.

"Beijing's message was unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values" - Matt Pottinger, President Trump's “CHINAPHOBIC” Deputy National Security Adviser

This marked a difference from the aggressively unilateral approach on trade that the Trump administration took, and was the first significant demonstration that the Biden administration meant it when it said it would work closely with allies to respond to China's economic predations.

In government offices in Tokyo and in European capitals, the change was welcome. "Now, on cybersecurity, we will be working closely with the United States, as well as other like-minded countries, to take countermeasures," Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga told Newsweek in an exclusive interview, via Zoom, during the Tokyo Olympics. "This is going to be a public-private effort. And in that, we'll be working closely with the United States."

Given how intertwined Tokyo's economy is with China's, Japanese companies are very much in the crosshairs. Japan over the past 30 years has poured $140 billion in direct investment into China, compared to $110 billion from the U.S. Tokyo now trades more with China than with the United States, as does Washington's other key East Asian ally, South Korea.

Joe Biden, who has pledged to work with allies to counter Beijing’s economic predation. Drew Angerer/Getty

In government offices in Tokyo and in European capitals, the change was welcome. "Now, on cyber security, we will be working closely with the United States, as well as other like-minded countries, to take countermeasures," Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga told Newsweek in an exclusive interview, via Zoom, during the Tokyo Olympics. "This is going to be a public-private effort. And in that, we'll be working closely with the United States."

Ever since Deng Xiaoping reopened China to the world in 1979, the country has seemed a promised land for businessmen and women around the world. First as a source of virtually limitless low wage labor with which to make their products, then as a vast market itself, the allure of the China Dream was unmatched.

To some extent, as the trade and investment statistics illustrate, that dream has been realized. But now, with escalating friction over trade and human rights, doing business with China is fraught. As the West squares off with Beijing in the 21st century's version of the Cold War, multinational companies are caught in the middle. As Matt Pottinger, President Trump's Deputy National Security Adviser says, "the ideological dimension of the competition [between China and the West] is inescapable, even central." CEOs—in the U.S., Japan and across the developed world—"need to come to grips with how much the situation has changed over the past few years and acknowledge that those changes are almost certainly here to stay."

This is the last place most CEOs ever thought they would be. Many companies have invested decades of time and millions of dollars setting up business in China. Auto companies like Volkswagen, Toyota and General Motors have joint ventures producing cars all over the country. In 2013, China became GM's largest market, and it has remained so ever since. Intel spent $2.5 billion on a new computer chip factory in Dalian in northeast China.

Top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi, who has warned of crossing “red lines.” Kimimasa Mayama/Pool/AFP/Getty

More and more, those companies' home governments are wondering whether those investments were wise. And Beijing is pressuring them to behave. When Biden assumed office, China waged a furious lobbying campaign aimed at CEOs in the U.S. and allied countries like Japan. Beijing urged them to weigh in against Trump-era trade restrictions. In a virtual meeting in February, Beijing's top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, told a group of American businessmen and former government officials that China was still very much open for business, but warned that issues like Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang (where thousands of ethnic Uighurs are imprisoned) and Taiwan were "red lines" they must avoid.

As Pottinger said in a speech at Stanford's Hoover Institution in late March, "Beijing's message was unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values."

U.S. allies heard the message as well. Many multinationals have already seen their businesses suffer as trade conflict ratcheted up. European powerhouse Ericsson AB, the second largest maker of cellular equipment in the world, said in mid-July that its sales in China had plunged, and warned that its market share there would likely diminish sharply in the coming months. The reason? Sweden late last year banned China's Huawei from the country's buildout of its 5G telecommunications network.

Multinational companies in every industry doing business in China are acutely aware that as the geopolitical environment worsens, all the money and effort they have put into building their businesses there could be at risk. In a recent, candid interview with Newsweek, Takeshi Niinami, the chief executive officer of Suntory, the Tokyo-based beer and spirits maker, said when weighing the risks of expanding the company's business in China, he and his team of senior executives must confront the possibility of a worst-case scenario: confiscation.

"Do we take the risk, or not?" Factoring in the possibility of confiscation is part of the calculus for foreign companies operating in China, says Takeshi Niinami, CEO of Japanese liquor maker Suntory. Shiho Fukada/Bloomberg/Getty

"We have to decide whether to expand production facilities or not in China," Niinami says. "Should we invest more knowing that the possibility of confiscation [exists]? Do we take the risk or not—and to what extent? If it's a 10 billion [yen investment], maybe not. Five billion? Probably. So we have to judge to what extent we can tolerate confiscation."

Global CEOs are rarely so blunt when discussing their business in China, but Suntory's risk analysis is rooted in reality. Beijing already has a record of punishing companies from countries who make decisions it disapproves of. In early 2017, giant South Korea retailer Lotte agreed to give land it owned to the Seoul government so that the U.S. could build a missile defense system aimed at deterring North Korea. Beijing insisted that the system's radar could also track its own military flights, and launched an economic war against the giant South Korean retailer. For months it shuttered Lotte's 10 stores across the country and disrupted its duty free shopping website—costing the company nearly $200 million in sales.

South Korean retailer Lotte lost nearly $200 million in sales when its 10 stores in China were closed during a dispute with Beijing. Zhang Peng/LightRocket/Getty

For countries like Japan and other developed economies, there are two primary concerns facing them and their companies. One is the increasing techno-national competition between Beijing and the West. In 2015, China issued an ambitious plan to develop leading companies in a wide array of high tech industries—from biotechnology to robotics to telecommunications and beyond. Among its goals is to have 70 percent of the components used in its own high tech industries be sourced domestically. And by 2049—the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party coming to power in Beijing—it seeks to have world class competitors in no less than 14 key high tech industries.

For an industrially sophisticated, high-tech nation like Japan, China 2025 presents a big problem. CEOs like Niinami of Suntory can continue to invest in China in pursuit of 1.3 billion customers, knowing that its business isn't targeted by Chinese economic planners. "But not technology companies," Niinami told Newsweek. Companies like Fanuc in industrial robotics, or Toshiba and Fujitsu in artificial intelligence, can no longer look at China as an ordinary market. High tech companies "have to view Beijing as a predator, and protect their intellectual property at all costs," says a former board member at Nissan, the Tokyo-based automaker, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.

The other driver of corporate investment decisions is the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China and showed multinational companies across the world just how vulnerable their supply chains are. In mid-June the Biden administration completed its 100-day review of U.S. supply-chain vulnerabilities. The results were eye-opening and, for a lot of companies, depressing. The review called for sweeping changes in how the government interacts with private companies, offers subsidies to a range of high tech industries (just as Beijing does) and presses companies to bring back supply chains long ago offshored to China.

Volkswagen, Toyota and General Motors are among the foreign auto companies with joint ventures to produce vehicles in China. Here, a VW factory in Dresden, Germany. Sebastian Kahnert/Picture Alliance/Getty

Prime Minister Suga was ahead of the U.S. president. Last year, Tokyo announced that it would devote $650 million in subsidies to help 87 companies move manufacturing out of China to either southeast Asia or back to Japan. Some analysts heralded the announcement as the commencement of a great "decoupling" of the Japanese economy from China's.

It wasn't. As Scott Kennedy, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, points out, "a perusal of the list of companies receiving aid are small and medium-sized enterprises, not major Japanese manufacturers with extensive investments in China." Moreover, a substantial portion of them are in two sectors—medical equipment and specialty chemicals—which were in high demand during the pandemic. Altogether, the Suga subsidy program affects just 1 percent of total Japanese investment in China.

Balancing an economic relationship with China against a worsening geopolitical climate is a delicate, complicated business. For major companies across the globe, the China dream—a huge, prosperous country with a massive middle class snapping up their wares—dies hard.

Consider the case of Microsoft. If the Biden administration was angry over China's cyberattack against the tech behemoth, Microsoft's management was embarrassed. The company over the years has endured Chinese abuse and constantly come back for more. For years, you could buy pirated versions of Microsoft's Windows computer operating system and programs like Word from street vendors in Beijing and Shanghai for the equivalent of a couple of bucks. Microsoft kept accepting Beijing's assurances that things would get better, and right up to this day has kept investing. Less than one month before the July cyberattack against its Exchange system, Bloomberg and other news agencies reported that Microsoft intended to invest billions of dollars in four new massive data centers in China, in the hopes of capturing Chinese businesses moving to store their data in the cloud.

What Happens Now?

For multinational companies and governments alike, the Microsoft news this summer neatly captured the dilemma of dealing with Beijing. Reconciling the economic opportunity China still presents with the present dangers it poses will be a critical task for years to come. As Suntory's CEO Niinami suggests, companies producing run-of-the-mill consumer goods can relax because nothing much about their China business will change (aside from the fact that their competitors continually become more formidable).

Barack Obama with Xi Jinping in 2016. Xi promised that China wouldn't engage in commercial cyber espionage. Wang Zhou/Pool/Getty

But technology companies, particularly those that Beijing singles out in its Made in China 2025 program, are in for a rough ride. For them, Deng Xiaoping's famous mantra of "reform and opening" has been replaced by "reform and closing," says James McGregor, the former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing, now Greater China Chairman for consulting firm APCO Worldwide. The computer chip industry, McGregor says, is "at the top of the list of America's threatened industries." American chip makers are going to have to re-evaluate their China presence, and confront the likelihood that the huge and lucrative market will be controlled by domestic competitors in the coming decades.

That is likely to be true in a number of other businesses, from machine tools and robotics to new energy materials. Beijing seeks to dominate these industries. The task for multinationals and their home governments going forward will be to play defense to the greatest extent possible: push back against intellectual property theft as vigorously as possible to force Beijing to achieve its ambitious economic goals on its own.

For CEOS across the globe, that is hardly the stuff of which China Dreams are made. But it is the bleak reality confronting them now.

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transhumanitynet · 6 years

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The Social Futurist Worldview (1/4)

This piece is part of a series exploring salient aspects of the philosophy known as “Social Futurism” (a term coined and idea developed by myself from 2011-2018). For more full and systematic exploration of these ideas, see http://socialfuturist.party & http://socialfuture.institute.

New Bottles for New Wine

“New Bottles for New Wine” was a 1957 book of essays by Julian Huxley, which included his seminal piece entitled “Transhumanism”, calling for a movement to grow beyond the current phase of human development. Social Futurism is intrinsically and deliberately compatible with – even complementary to – the global intellectual and cultural movement now known as Transhumanism.

1.1 What is Social Futurism?

Social Futurism is a political philosophy, characterised by the use of advancing technology to solve social problems. This worldview’s primary vehicle is the Social Futurist Party (SFP), which has defined the philosophy via the Principles of Social Futurism since 1st May 2011.

To some extent Social Futurism (SF) may be considered a synonym for Techno-Progressivism, but SF is defined by coherent Principles in a way that the broader category of Techno-Progressive thought is not. The common, underlying line of thought is that technological augmentation of the individual is not enough to reach a good future. We must also optimize the societal systems in which those individuals are necessarily embedded, or any and all technological benefits of individual augmentation will be modulated and potentially negated by a less-than-optimal social milieu.

1.2 Convergent Promise, Convergent Risk

It is a fundamental premise of Futurist thought that streams of technological development converge, meaning that multiple types of functionality come together in single devices, and technological possibilities emerge from the new syntheses. We’ve certainly seen plenty of that in recent years, perhaps most notably in smart phones. The underlying logic or mechanism is simply that each innovation makes other innovations more tractable or likely, and so technological development as a whole accelerates over time and technical obstacles to efficiency have a tendency to dissolve (See Ray Kurzweil’s analysis of this phenomenon).

That’s a powerful and inspiring thing, but the problem is that not only can ever-more-efficient technologies cause problems, but problematic trends can and do also converge to create bigger, more dangerous, less tractable problems. As problems worsen they can become increasingly correlated or interdependent. For example, resource shortages and economic destabilization not only lead to an increased risk of both civil and international conflicts, but such conflicts can in turn worsen underlying systemic and environmental problems. In a world where patterns like these are inevitable, any movement toward a better human future must take societal and political factors into account.

1.3 A New Operating System for Society

In computing, an Operating System (OS) is the core software layer which effectively mediates between software applications (and users) on the one hand, and the machine’s hardware substrate on the other. The OS thus acts as something like a User Experience (UX) interface, providing users a framework for interacting with the “deeper” (and less User Friendly) computational architecture. Societies also have Operating Systems, and always have had, even if we haven’t always had the language to succinctly identify and describe the UX functionality of our civilization. Let’s take a moment to consider what society’s OS looks like, and whether it is in need of an upgrade.

There are two core functions at the heart of all human societies; (1) decision making, and (2) resource management. Obviously there is inevitable overlap between the two functions, but we can easily identify broad categories of decisions which aren’t primarily about resource management, and resource management that is automated in some manner that does not involve any explicit societal decision making process. Western “Liberal Democracies” approach these two functions with a variety of specific strategies or institutions, but generally speaking the “public interface” with those institutions is composed of the two mechanisms which together give the entire political-economic system its name; i.e. (1) Democratic assembly, and (2) Liberal (Capitalist) markets.

There is much more to be said here than could possibly ever fit in even a full TNET article, let alone a paragraph or two, so let’s content ourselves with one observation and let you draw your own conclusions: If you think that our current modes of democratic decision making and/or market-based resource allocation are not in any urgent need of serious review and upgrading, then you are not a Social Futurist. It is a defining feature of Social Futurist thought that both representative democracy and wholly market-based solutions to resource allocation are increasingly unfit for purpose in the 21st Century, requiring serious and urgent improvement, and that the revolutionary step required can be well characterized as a massive, society-wide OS upgrade.

1.4 The Importance of Principles

When we propose new ways of thinking, alert others to imminent danger, and indeed call for revolutionary revision of society as a whole, it behooves us to tread carefully. As much as these steps are utterly necessary to the survival and development of our civilization, history makes it all too clear that radical steps taken without proper care can have catastrophic consequences. Furthermore, it is quite clear that society’s ills have a tendency to be caused by self-interested behaviour unrestrained by any effective form of principle or regulation. Taking these things together, we can see that some simple rules for the proper regulation of society, starting from first principles with as few assumptions as possible, become very important indeed.

Human civilization faces a period of rapidly culminating promise and threat. If things are allowed to continue unfolding as they are, then the best likely outcome is that only a fraction of humanity survives and thrives, at the expense of everyone and everything which cannot defend itself from those survivors. The idea of the meek inheriting the earth sounds nice (particularly for the meek), but it is just a fairy tale unless we take steps to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Principles are not just a nice idea, but a stark matter of survival for most living things on this planet. Social Futurism is founded on and defined by principles for this very reason, and thus represents a robust rejection of our current civilizational paradigm.

The Social Futurist Worldview (1/4) was originally published on transhumanity.net

#Capitalism #Economics #Exponential #Julian Huxley #Liberal Democracy #politics #Principles #Singularity #Social Futurism #Societal OS #transhumanism #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

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lovelionparty · 3 years

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Love Lion Party Mission Statement

Love Lion Party aims to promote techno-progressive values, while first and foremost we wish to completely eradicate the over 3 million annual deaths from child starvation where ever they maybe in the world. We further aims to unite all humanity for global peace and to explore the potential of every individual conscious being and their relation to the Universe, space and time to maximize fulfillment and inspiration in through the human condition.

Love Lion Party seeks to promote love, open-mindedness and understanding for all individuals and their potential regardless of any perceived race or divisions, and sensitively facilitate the growth of both the individual and the collective enlightenment of our civilization.

We believe that the human consciousness is a force of nature and seek to guide it towards a positive and sensitive focus, on the development of art, science and technology to aide in the fulfillment of human and natural potential for the pursuit of engaged enlightenment and enjoyment for all.

Love Lion Party believes in encouraging all individuals in society to be educated to at least a tertiary level in particular to develop epistemological, analytical, nutritional and empathetic understandings funded by the state. It is our dream to provide Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Healthcare, as well as Universal Basic Housing for all citizens of the globe from age 16 and above, as a means to break free from the final vestiges of archaic feudalism still plaguing 21st century civilizations.

We believe education to be the most important investment in human capital that instigates long term benefits and growth across all society both economically and culturally. Love Lion Party thus also seeks to investigate new technological innovations that may improve the learning capacity at all levels and ages.

Acknowledging a common relation of all human beings and interdependence of national economies and natural resources, we strongly seek for a grand and great global union of humanity to foster and plan for the greatest possible sustainable and peaceful state imaginable on this Earth and beyond.

We are not limited by imaginary national borders and view the Earth as it truly is meant to be, for the unrestricted movement of people, commodities, goods, services, ideas and play in respect for all humanity to pursue and achieve a dignified and liberal existence beyond this planet, on the moon, other celestial bodies and universally where ever human conscious life may exist.

We further seek to explore our Solar system and beyond, to find resources and potential stations to ensure the continued evolution of the human condition.

Love Lion Party seeks to better understand climate changes and strategies for reacting to the potential impacts of both global warming or cooling, including the onset of the next Ice Age.

Love Lion Party seeks the eventual unification of all sovereign national armed forces for global peace and to protect the pursuit of liberty and enlightenment against both terrestrial and extraterrestrial risks. Guaranteeing the security and lasting of each and every person on this Earth.

We believe in providing healthcare and housing to all without stigma so that the entire populace may feel more secure. Hence we believe in inspiration and guidance above deprivation and desperation, as being one of the strongest progenitors for individual and societal growth and great success. Love Lion Party strives to create conditions where all individuals may have opportunity to engage in benevolent competition and collaboration to excel to their maximum possible potential and find their true and lasting happiness. We wish to support humans and all individuals to be innovative, learned and feel secure to take enterprising risks.

Love Lion Party is driven by a calling for kindness to all human beings and seeks to understand the perpetrators of crime and their motives to discover potential social or biological triggers for their behavior, and based on such findings provide humane rehabilitation and develop strategies to forecast and prevent future malicious acts.

We seek to encourage the values of forgiveness and redemption, so that all can find a means to an open heart, that may have been blocked, hurt or broken in the past. We seek to do so, to build the best possible and sustainable civilization moving forward. As we all must move into the future regardless.

We seek to identify and move away from irrational and redundant traditional beliefs, conditioning and legislations through an intellectual study, scientific exploration, and artistic experimentation of their initial adoption and their present limitations and potential dangers to the psychological and physiological state of society.

Love Lion Party believes in developing the state beyond short term economic and isolated legislative policies. We are for a forward thinking approach that is more sophisticated in considering the ramifications of the emotional and psychological impact of legislation, taxation and regulations that can inadvertently fragment and stress all society, specific minorities and their relationships.

Love Lion Party strongly believes in the testing, investigation and the adoption of technological advancements including robotics, renewable energies and A.I. to mitigate the scarcity of resources and to provide infrastructure efficiently for the betterment of lifestyle, increased leisure time and access to information for all.

We believe in placing human life on the Moon, and beyond on all other potential celestial bodies where permissible, further we believe in the greater study of near earth astroids, for the purpose, to be fully prepared to defend against a potential extinction event impact, that is believed to have wiped out the Dinosaurs from Earth several million years ago.

We seek to investigate the mining of asteroids now known to be extremely rich in minerals that include iron ore, gold, platinum and even the harvesting of water, to mitigate economic scarcity on Earth and end the era of international conflicts for the control of resources. We wish to bring to the world with these minerals and precious metals so that there is surplus for all, and that artists and creatives have access an abundance of recourses as never seen before in human history, ushering a grand golden new era of a heightened renaissance spirit, human expression and freedom.

We dream to unite all the world’s armed forces under one umbrella organization, pooling all the world’s nuclear war heads under this new collective global body, used to defend us from extraterrestrial threats or natural disasters. We envisage this Global Army Organization would have its central command headquarters in London, England. Thus ending all conflicts by nations states ongoing today, and completely removing the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear conflict now, and far into the future, ushering in a great new era of global peace, unity and security for all creatures of the world.

Love Lion Party seeks for the adoption of English as an additional language from the age of one for all children around the globe, so they may be able to confidently communicate and solve complex problems together where ever they maybe in the future here and across the stars.

#endhunger #savethechildren #worldpeace #india

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christopherhudsonjr · 7 years

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Left-Libertarian Weekly Podcast Roundup (2/16/18)

Against the Grain - The Rise of Internet Radio

Anews - Episode 50: anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week

B(A)DNews - January 2018: Angry Voices From Around the World

Belabored (Dissent) - Thinking Outside the Box

Bi Any Means - Yelling at the Atheist Community with Larry Yellingman

By Any Means Necessary - What South Africa Will Be Post-Zuma; The Economics of 'Black Panther'

Cato Connects - The Nunes Memo, Surveillance, and Secret Courts

Cato Daily - Lives of the Necromancers with Anthony Comegna

The Chauncey DeVega Show - Yascha Mounk on the Rise of Trump and the Decline of Western Democracies

Citizen Radio - California police worked with Neo-Nazis to pursue “anti-racist” activists; Reading proficiency among 3rd-graders dropped nearly 75% in Flint schools affected by water crisis

Chapo Trap House - The United States of Care Lords feat. Dino Guastella

Clear and Present Danger - Liberty or License: Free Speech in Ancient Rome

Conversations with Tyler - Matt Levine Live at Bloomberg HQ

Delete Your Account - #OperationPush

The Dig - Aziz Rana: The Cold War’s Late Demise

EconTalk - Bryan Caplan on the Case Against Education

Electric Libertyland - The Military Industrial Congress

Felony Fridays - 13 Years in Prison for $500 Worth of Drugs

The Final Straw - Keep Loxicha Free!: A Conversation With Bruno Renero-Hannan About Political Imprisonment and Indigenous Resistance in Oaxaca

Foreign Policy Focus - Syrian Civil War: Iran V. Israel

Free Man Beyond the Wall - CJ Killmer of the “Dangerous History Podcast”

Free Thoughts - The Case Against Education

Friendly Anarchism - By What Authority Doest Thou These Things - Unfinished

From Alpha To Omega - Dialectical Materialism

Giving the Mic to the Wrong Person - Douglas Lain from Zero Books on Kill All Normies, Zizek, and Posadists

The Guillotine - Nazi Watch, Baltimore Pigs, Korean Reunification, and Dems. Vs. Dreamers

Hayek Program - "Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography" Book Panel

Historical Controversies - Filibuster in Nicaragua, Part 3: The Republic of Nicaragua

The Hotwire - Toxic Waste in STL—Labor Struggles in the Techno Age—A Rant on Love

IGDCAST - Eye of the Troll Storm: Tariq Khan on far-Right Outrage Engine

Intercepted - America's Distribution of Violence

Knowing Animals - Burger with Carol J Adams

Last Born In The Wilderness - Collective Trauma: Moving Through It w/ Patrick Dougherty

Lectures in History - 1880s American Anarchist Movement

The Libertarian Angle - The Korea Olympics Brouhaha

Liberty Chronicles - What’s a Loco-Foco?

Liberty Under Attack - A Lodging of Wayfaring Crypto-Anarchists with Paul Rosenberg

Life After God - Religious Abuse and the Problem of Forgiveness

The Magnificast - Popesplaining w Kaya Oakes

MilLiberty - Theodore Roosevelt’s Dishonorable Legacy

Neighbor Science - Alien Mask

Novara Media - The Straight White Man Who‘s Upset He Can’t Go to Labour’s Equalities Conference Does Not Exist

#NovaraFM - Taking It Back: Public Ownership in the 21st Century

Philosophers In Space - Using the USS Callister episode of Black Mirror to talk about The Experience Machine by Nozick

Political Research Digest - The Resistance: Who Is Protesting Trump and Are They Changing Public Views?

Punk Rock and Politics - Interview with Kids on Bridges about President Trump, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn

Radio Dispatch - The Weight of Heroism on Chelsea Manning

Reason - Did We Get the Tea Party Wrong?

Revolutionary Left Radio - The Politics of Friedrich Nietzsche: German Idealism, Nazism, and Freud

Rustbelt Abolition Radio - Dispatches from Zapatista Territory

School Sucks - Peter Gray: Foundations of Self-Directed Education / School's Impact On Creativity and Critical Thinking / A Future of Self-Directed Education

The Scott Horton Show - Andy Worthington on Trump’s plans for Guantanamo and the rehabilitation of George W. Bush

Short Circuit - 087: Non-neutral forensics in DUI cases, felon re-enfranchisement, and the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s single director model

Season of the Bitch - VaLeNtInEs DaY

Serious Inquiries Only - Getting Satanic with Jex Blackmore

Srsly Wrong - Economic Inequality

Street Fight Radio - Walk That Walk

Tech Policy - What is Cybersecurity, and How Can it Affect the Winter Olympics?

This Is Hell! - Incogito: On consciousness in the physical world, Andrew Cuomo's resistance, No Olympics, Why the internet was always spying on you, Police raids and the work of sex work, and Living with normal problems and apocalypse problems in Puerto Rico

Unregistered - Angela Nagle, author of Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right

Vegan Vangaurd - Should Domesticated Animals Go Extinct? A Radical Vegan Perspective

VersoBooks - "Made in USA" : Anna Feigenbaum Discusses Tear Gas

The Vonu Podcast - Financial Independence – Unjobbing & Freelancing

Who Shaves the Barber? - Catarina Dutilh Novaes: Logic as Social Practice

Words & Numbers - Has Uber Become Part of the System It Fought Against?

Zero Squared - Applied Philosophy

#Libertarian Left #left libertarianism #libertarian #libertarianism #left libertarian #anarchism #Libertarian socialism #socialism #anarchist #socialist #individualist anarchist #market anarchism #podcast #podcasting #politics

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epitome-the-burnkid-viii · 2 years

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testinbeta · 6 years

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#AltWoke Hyper-C

There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes.

Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and myopic. Woke is a safe space for the easily distracted and defensive pop culture inbred. Woke is the Left curled up in a fetal ball scribbling think pieces about Broad City while its rights get trampled by ascendant fascism, domestically and globally.

Woke is the easy button: it combats injustice by sharing videos of police brutality to an echo of outrage.

Woke is bereft of irony: it shares HuffPo articles about gentrification from condos in Flatbush and Oakland.

Woke is alchemy: it transmutes oppressed identities into advertising campaigns, trend reports, and new demographics to market towards.

Woke is poptimstic: it believes Jaden Smith becoming the face of Louis Vuitton is enough to qualify as a win for progress.

Woke is content with the status quo: it would be perfectly content if another economic collapse happened tomorrow, just as long as those who rigged it were sufficiently intersectional.

Woke is a sanctimonious grammar-nazi who critiques the bully’s phrasing of “stop hitting yourself,” through toothless gums. Woke is too ethical for its own good.

Woke is the gospel truth of the new evangelical Leftist. Woke is the Left’s consolidated failures distilled into a monosyllabic buzzword. A whimper into the digital landscape prefixed with a hashtag, arriving at the same point each time: #Woke is the literal antithesis of progress.

CATALOGUE OF THE WOKE LEFT’S FAILURES

1. Moderate Liberal

The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory. Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to grasp.

“Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.” — Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)

Identity politics became an albatross, however. Both the moderate and radical were too eager to evangelize oppressed identities. There was no room for discussion, no place for debate. Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics.

Representation is the de facto litmus of society’s progress for the moderate liberal — society appeared more inclusive and diverse because “Orange is the New Black” has a female lead and a multiethnic supporting cast. They inhabit a never ending, curated echo chamber of think pieces, listicles, notifications, and retweets.

Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large.

The moderate midwifed the birth of the Alt-Right through bipartisan compromises. Moderate liberals are basically content to vest trust in their vaunted Democratic Party as it slides further to the right, thereby underpinning a level of discourse friendly to the far-right. It’s worth remembering that the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries were a period of diehard cooperation between liberals and conservatives in crafting today’s authoritarianism.

Neoconservatism provided socio-political planning that complemented a neoliberal economic agenda. This is why the radical Left blames liberals as well as conservatives for “command and control policing”, mass surveillance and this century’s rationale for endless warfare.

Moderate liberals provided and adopted theoretical frameworks that explained away structural oppression but retained an appearance of caring about racism and equality across intersecting spectrums of gender and sexuality. This was an obvious farce that mystified progress and the far right took advantage of this because they actually suffered no serious political setbacks. Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change.

“If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

2. Radical Left

If the liberal is the evangelical, pearl clutching apostle of the woke Left, the radical, then, is St. Augustine — the hierophant, the pedagogue. The radical is the vanguard inhabiting academia & activism, creating the language and atmosphere of critique.

Its ideologies trickle down from intellectuals at universities to moderate liberals on social media, and more recently, the Alt-Right (e.g. culture jamming by way of “meme magic” or the synthesis of identity politics and white nationalism by way of identitarianism).

Radicals scapegoated liberals to absolve themselves of any responsibility by being all critique with no tangible answers. The radical left in its current incarnation is somewhat fossilized in terms of strategies and needs an immediate remodelling.

The radical is too comfortable inhabiting only the periphery of academia & activism. Radical academics and activists are insulated not only by algorithms but also their obsolescence. The radical academic has failed to bridge the gap between intellectuals & larger society.

That is, intellectuals failed to subvert hegemony and normativity. Academics did not do enough to reach beyond universities and make positive reforms to public education. Intellectuals failed to politicize the natural sciences early enough. Intellectuals lost programming and hacker culture to neoliberalism & libertarians. Computer science transitioned from cyberpunk to Silicon Valley venture capitalism.

Had radical academics succeeded, there might’ve been more legitimacy in the fight to combat climate change. Or traditional journalism wouldn’t have been so easily defeated by the post-fact information economy. What we have now is a new Scholasticism of students & professors as clergy dominated by an agitated, anti-intellectual populist bloc.

“Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.” Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994)

The radical activist lost its sense resistance. There are no radicals in Congress. There are no radical lawmakers. No radical judges. Community organizing is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. To remain relevant radicals have to widen their scope to adapt to the changing global climate.

“The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

WHAT IS #ALTWOKE:

1. Theoria

AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era. Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left. Or Second Wave Neo-Marxism. The Post- Truth Left. Anti-liberal postcapitalist left. AltWoke is antithetical to Silicon Valley techno-neoliberalism. AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil. AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right. AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics. AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology and radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning and the liquidation of Western hegemony. AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster. AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism. David Harvey is #altwoke. Situationist International is #altwoke. Lil B is #altwoke. Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke. Kodwo Eshun is #altwoke, Mark Fisher is #altwoke, Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke. Edward Snowden is #altwoke. Daniel Keller is #altwoke. Chelsea Manning is #altwoke. Theo Parrish is #altwoke. William Gibson is #altwoke. Holly Herndon is #altwoke. Frantz Fanon is #altwoke. Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.

2. Poiesis

Anti-liberal, Left-accelerationism. Revolution is slow & gradual. Technology, media, the global market, and culture accelerate the process.

Alt-Woke embraces the post-fact information economy as a pedagogical tool.

Culture is more important than policy.

Trickle-down ideology; AltWoke embraces normalization & hyperreality.

Memetic counter-insurrection: culture-jamming is the weapon of choice to tilt normalization in the direction we’d like it to go.

Xenofeminism. Technology is the missing component of intersectional politics. Eurocentrism and phallocentrism are obsolete, despite the Right’s best efforts. Queer is a verb, not a noun. If nature’s oppressive, change nature. Normalize “deviance.”

Reappropriation of globalism as a personal lifestyle.

AltWoke is duplicitous, amoral, & problematic. But also conscientious. The ends always justify the means. The Right hits low, so we hit lower, harder, and without mercy.

AltWoke is cautiously optimistic about the future.

PREFACE TO PRAXIS

Why support Left-Accelerationism?

Accelerationism is a contested and obtuse term among the Left, so in order to understand what accelerationism is, it’s crucial to understand what it isn’t.

Accelerationism doesn’t propose letting capitalism expand and erode to such a degree that its corrosive contradictions become so unbearable that the oppressed and working classes have no choice but to revolt. #Alt-Woke doesn’t and wouldn’t espouse such a simplistic and foolish framework, either.

In its neutral alignment, accelerationism is the idea that neoliberalism facilitates so much growth — economically, technologically, and globally — that its social contradictions continue to expand to such a degree that its “collapse” is not only inevitable, but creates a vacuum for new integrated social platforms. That is, like feudalism before it, late capitalism is transitory and incubates other socioeconomic ideologies that will ultimately replace it, since it’s now reaching its limits.

In its Right alignment, accelerationism is a schism: Neoreaction (NRx) is a radical libertarianism accelerating toward neoliberalism’s ultimate conclusion: plutocratic corporate monarchism (e.g., man as nation). The second is the Alt-Right, which is white identity politics accelerating toward capitalism’s ultimate conclusion: techno-fascism.

Left Accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it. It’s become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can’t sustain itself any longer. The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the Left’s struggle to combat structural power. In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism and democracy is imminent.

“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.” —Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1884)

Left Accelerationism is a vindication of Marxism that synthesizes vertical tektology. It anticipates capitalism’s collapse, repurposing growth and technology against its progenitor and nudges that collapse toward a Leftist counter-hegemony. Capitalism provides the efficiency of integrated networks, it provides the tools to combat the inequalities of its rapacious growth. A post-scarcity, socialist society can sustain itself from the technologies capitalism produces.

“The paradox of free-market communism is even more dramatic: the terms are strongly charged, ideological polar opposites, designating a kind of Mexican standoff between capitalism, on the one hand, and its archenemy and would-be grave digger, on the other. But the point of combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy selected features of the free market to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” —Eugene W. Holland, “Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike” (2011)

The process of acceleration is well under way and no one but the most dogmatic and naive beltway libertarian would argue contrary. Left Accelerationism in an alternative to traditional avenues like reform or revolution and attempts to reorganize power from within power. It does this without completely discarding avenues like reform or revolution, either.

Left-Accelerationism is a synthesis of Marxism with vertical-scale tektology. It’s Gramsci by way of Debord and David Harvey by way of Deleuze.

Why embrace a post-facts/post-truth information economy?

As it stands, narrative is more important than facts. Media and communications are so accelerated that both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle over consensus. Traditional pedagogy will not work in this instance. The Left hurts itself by not using this to its advantage.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.” —Franz Fannon, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)

Why is culture more important than policy? Why weaponize memetics? What is “trickle down ideology”? Why support hyperreality and normalization?

Culture is society’s barometer. From the meme unleashed by Marshall McLuhan’s too-oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message,” author Joshua Meyrowitz seems to have taken it most seriously. “No Sense of Place” is an analysis into how television changed society by altering society’s access to information.

Meyrowitz forms a clear theory on information-power systems and discusses ways in which television breaks those down. At the end of the book, Meyrowitz chooses three specific topics: the merging of childhood and adulthood, the merging of masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of the political hero through the demystification of power.

Meyrowitz fundamentally believes that many social groupings and hostilities exist due to access to and restrictions of information and space. When information and space are separated, then the boundaries between social groups relax. For example, the television show ‘The Jeffersons,’ brought white families in their living rooms to the living room of a black family; and news coverage of the war in Vietnam “brought the war home” in visceral detail.

Memes are ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution. The internet is something of an AI: a communication network operating as its own sovereign entity. Social media platforms, and other communications technologies accelerate the flow of ideas, bypassing restrictions put in place by traditional media.

A journalist in New York may engage with a senator in Washington over Twitter. A misguided 17-year old from Wisconsin who received their political education from /Pol, Breitbart, or Reddit can also join that same dialogue, and disrupt it. This is the best case scenario, unfortunately. Ideology is a memetic virus. Memes are an insurgent medium. The internet is an insurgent technology.

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, (1967)

What is xenofeminism?

Xenofeminism is a form of Left-Accelerationism and, by extension, can be read as AltWoke’s answer to identity politics. Or, more accurately, it critiques liberal “privilege”-based identity politics and re-situates Left “critical theory”-based identity politics into a technological framework.

Innovation is a consequence of capitalism’s growth, hence it’s irresponsible not to recognize how power operates not only through structures like capitalism, but also its incarnations like racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity.

When looking at history, it’s imperative to ask questions about how technology changes and affects the ways in which people communicate, disseminate, and process information. This should always be taken into consideration from an intersectional frame of reference.

AltWoke isn’t opposed to identity politics so much as it’s opposed to reductionist, two-dimensional, representation as the crux of liberal identity politics. This mode of thinking lacks nuance and oftentimes devolves into inconsequential arguments over single phrases and who gets to participate. Bad politics comes in all forms of representation.

Hegemony operates in such a way that it permeates every aspect of social life in late capitalism, yet this isn’t always apparent — its existence must be revealed. Culture’s more dubious incarnation tells society who is and isn’t worthy of praise, admiration, and, ultimately, life. The White Man™ is still the dominant conduit through which capitalism operates.

However, there’s a cultural shift happening that is impossible to deny. The chauvinism of Western exceptionalism, essentialism, and the central cornerstone, “whiteness” are sociopoitical dead ends. It confines itself within impossible paradigms, even while, nonwhite, non-Western, non-binary identities are accelerating the process. The West crumbles as China accelerates toward superpower status. It’s no coincidence that pop music is now synonymous with R&B. Hip hop, techno, house, and footwork bridge the gap between the avant garde and pop by accelerating language, form, timbre, and aesthetics to alien plateaus.

Is it any wonder why “cuckold” is the Alt-Right’s pejorative of choice? The old guard justifies oppression and inequality as immutable and “natural.” The deviant Other threatens this “natural” hierarchy. The normalization of deviance is the ultimate culture-jam. Cuckoldry is deviant, and deviance is the vanguard. #BlackPopMatters.

Why embrace and reappropriate globalism?

AltWoke perceives the “nation” as an information network and citizen –> user. The governance structure of the internet creates the subjectivity of power, the user, in the same fashion as the invention of the state created the subjectivity of citizens. Global scale computation has built a new governing rhizomatic architecture. All systems have integrated into platform stacks, and by extension, nations and governments are but another component in the Internet of Things (IoT).

People should be allowed in all physical spaces as a fundamental right. Politics has nothing to do with physical territory. AltWoke accelerationism fully separated land from politics once it realized that political groupings are aspatial networks: informational, cybernetic.

The old paradigm was political grouping by blood, land, and then language. These were all networks. Cyberspace is an artificial network same as blood, land, and language. It’s better, too, as it is instantaneous. Those who hold politics to be the defense of land, nation, ethnicity, or linguistics are the old-guard; they are demonstrably incorrect and stand between people and their liberty.

“Geology is sensible of itself in so much as it has an ordering logic, if it is articulate in its stratifications, reading pebbles, rocks, various kinds of matter, sorting, organizing (Roger Caillois calls this agency ‘computational’), folding, compacting the biological slime of the earth into its various layers.” Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene” (2015)

The American nation was formed by the economic activities of the thirteen colonies as they functioned with common standards, such as shipping timetables and commercial infrastructure, developing into a consciousness of togetherness and assumed similarity between participants in the network.

Nations are coextensive with land, not that the land has ties to blood or biology (the misstep of historical fascism and contemporary nationalism, to glorify the soil) but the physical geography of land determined the networks superimposed over it.

Europe, for example, has for so long been balkanized into nationalities and peoples separated by mountain ranges, seas, and long distances, and brought together by modifications to this physical geography (see: Spain’s hegemony over Europe and its fantastic road system prior to 1648).

Now, pan-Europeanism burgeons on the fact that highway systems, shipping, and a porousness of state borders has reduced or annihilated these impediments to a common access to the European network. It fails because it does not see that the same forces that drive Pan-Europeanism point towards a global society.

The separation of the information network from place thus reduces the determination of place upon network, of place upon user, of place upon that user’s conception of themselves interacting with others, to the point that in a globalized world the user will interact with their physical neighbor in the same network as they will interact with someone in a different (city/state/nation/region), such that planetary consciousness necessarily forms.

Why is #AltWoke amoral?

Short answer: Politics is amoral. Long answer: As it stands, the political infrastructures of Western governments are collapsing. The Right solidified its stranglehold on structural power. Right Accelerationism is several steps ahead of its Leftist counterpart.

In America, the GOP is imploding and the Alt-Right is slowly replacing this obsolete party. The Right is vulgar, so we’ll stop taking the moral high road and be even fouler. The Left has no structural power, and the stakes are far too high. We truly stand to lose everything.

Traditional means of Left praxis are ineffectual against this ascendant superstructure. Asking that every individual respect the humanity of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities is naive. It will take more deceptive and subversive methods for the political Left to affect any change. #Alt-Woke praxis is, if anything, a reappropriation of Vladislav Surkov’s idea of ‘nonlinear warfare.’ We don’t fight fair. We won’t be civil. We don’t resist power, we seize it.

3. Praxis

The question of AltWoke Praxis is also the question of Left-Accelerationist Praxis: How does one organize politically? AltWoke Praxis has two modal structures: Right Hand Praxis & Left Hand Praxis. Or, The Hand That Strikes & The Hand That Repurposes. RHP takes advantage of the cracks within the Alt-Right, disrupting any roadblocks to clear a path so LHP can shift the Overton Window. LHP repurposes existing technologies, networks, and power structures to initiate a counter-hegemony. LHP advances AltWoke’s core tenets without ever explicitly espousing as such. Privacy is crucial to Left Hand Praxis, so it won’t be listed, but appropriating multinational corporate identity is a crucial first step.

Right Hand Praxis

Alt-Right countersurveillance. Invade their spaces, disrupt their safe space. Break out of your filter bubble, learn their language. Learn who they are, and what they believe. Befriend them only to spy on them. Dox the doxers.

Exploit the right’s paranoia and affinity towards pseudoscience. If they believe that supplements will boost their testosterone or tin foil nets disrupt phone signals, exploit that market.

Direct action hacktivism. Penetrate the SEO. Make #altwoke viral. Twitter bot agit prop.

Appropriate post-fact culture. Conspiracy theories are memetically powerful. The Left does itself a disservice by not making its own. Speak their language to make it compelling: “Peter Thiel is a member of the Bilderberg Group!”

Exploit their contradictions: Human biodiversity is incompatible with Traditionalist Catholics. White nationalists think Identitarians are ineffectual Third Positionists. Drive them further into their own filter bubbles and out of voting booths.

Agitate Leftist demonstrations. The more the Woke, horizontal Left marches, the better. It takes any potential attention away from Left Hand Praxis.

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bestreasonstowriterecordreviews · 7 years

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“...the perfect NZ supergroup with David Mitchell of Goblin Mix and the 3Ds on guitar, Peter Jefferies on drums, and The Rip’s Alastair Galbraith and Robbie Muir on guitar and bass respectively...it’s the familiar chemistry of these friends that gives Galbraith’s voice a more optimistic timbre than his solo work.” - DAN VALLOR

XPRESSWAY PILE=UP, PART 13 by DAN VALLOR

PART 1: Intro and The DEAD C. “Even at its most structured, The Dead C. consistently has a sound so involving that it has a meditative quality.”

PART 2: THIS KIND OF PUNISHMENT “There are some fine moments on this release, but this is not the place to start with this otherwise exceptional band.”

PART 3: WRECK SMALL SPEAKERS ON EXPENSIVE STEREOS: “…bits of psychedelia similar to the Television Personalities from that era, but more prominent are elements of early-80′s Pere Ubu…WSSOES used electronics while avoiding the techno-pop cliches so prevalent in NZ and the international music scene at the time.”

PART 4: ALASTAIR GALBRAITH “…this is all pretty much a major work of art…in fact is among the most beautiful music I know…”

PART 5: XPRESSWAY PILE=UP “Perhaps it took a while for Russell to secure the rights for some of the earlier material, but it’s a blessing that he was clear enough in vision to revise Pile=Up into the important work it became.”

PART 6: I HATE PAVEL TICHY’S GUTS “A tiny review in Forced Exposure might have caused something of a stir as it was one of the first X/Way tapes to garner press in the states.”

PART 7: THE DEAD C “The Dead C. has followed countless musical paths since the release of The Sun Stabbed, but the EP represents some of the most distinctive. It is the document that vividly defines their early work.”

PART 8: THE VICTOR DIMISICH BAND “…favored something of a denser and darker sound than their southern Dunedin neighbors, expressed through a bleak vision and Velvet Underground inspired abandon…even in those early years, the brilliance of this band shone blindingly…”

PART 9: PETER GUTTERIDGE “…Gutteridge and Snapper have produced some beautifully hypnotic records…”

PART 10: ALASTAIR GALBRAITH & GRAEME JEFFERIES “This is a pinnacle of Xpressway’s brilliance, a tremendously spare and beautiful song…while they never lose control they do teeter now and then - only adding to the magic. Galbraith and Jeffries throw themselves at these moments with a glorious sense of spontaneity.”

PART 11: PETER JEFFERIES & ROBBIE MUIR: “…this is perhaps the apex of Peter Jefferies’ lengthy career…sears like some sort of acid shanty.”

PART 12: THE DEAD C. PERFORM DR503b: “…the resurrection of ‘(Beyond Help From) Max Harris’, a cacophonous strum and twang…an epic 12-minute masterpiece of varying layers and one-half of one of the greatest works never heard outside of their small community until this release.”

POPWATCH #9 Summer 1998 (page 51)

LESLIE GAFFNEY & MR. LESLIE GAFFNEY, Publishers & Editors

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Previously on Fuckin’ Record Reviews:

The entirety of Dan Vallor’s Xpressway history is available in viewable form as a lovingly (i.e., much better than FRR’s) scanned PDF with one simple click…you’ll never believe what happens next!

DAN VALLOR is well regarded as a musician, archivist and all around good human by those who know. He’s the producer of those essential GAME THEORY reissues Omnivore put out the past few years, but also works under the name CLARINETTE/KLARINETTE and has a brand new long player coming out on Feeding Tube Records on 3/24/17!

Order CLARINETTE’s The Now Of Then at Feeding Tube orForced Exposure; Byron Coley summarizes Dan Vallor’swork: “In the 15 years since Thurston and I released the first Clarinette LP, Haze (Ecstatic Yod),Dan Vallor has continued to produce music unabated. Most of it has been released in very limited editions (on CDRs, cassettes and lathes), but it has been a consistently cool flow of drone accrual and invention from a guy we still sorta think of as pop-oriented. Dan’s best known work probably remains his archival activities inside the archives of the late songwriting genius, Scott Miller, although others may know him from his efforts to catalog the output of the NZ lathe underground.Clarinette is a long running solo project that began in the ’80s, then went dormant until early in the 21st Century. The music is largely based on electric guitar huzz and hum, but there are plenty of sound events that pop up throughout the record, disturbing and enriching the surface with sproings, rasps and groons. The pieces on The Now of Then are all fairly reflective, and probably more suitable to stoned drifting than freak dancing, but hey — it never pays to second guess audience reaction. If you feel the urge to freak, so be it. Clarinette’s music definitely twangs the freak register. Who are we to say you should remain seated?”(2017)

An overview of Bruce Russell’s Xpressway at Audio Culture: “’Bruce Russell’s catch cry was ‘we know what’s good for you’,” [Stephen] Kilroy says. ‘And he could talk to it in an intellectual or artistic kind of way and justify it. People knew to trust Bruce; if it’s on Xpressway it must be good’.”

#Dan Vallor #Leslie Gaffney #Mr. Leslie Gaffney #Popwatch #1998 #Plagal Grind #David Mitchell #Alastair Galbraith #Robbie Muir #Peter Jefferies #Xpressway

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panicinthestudio · 5 years

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Anger, MoMA R&D Salon 34 for MoMA Live, December 10, 2019

Anger. A word that often does the rounds in the 21st century. On a global scale, citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with their governments -- from discord within the current American administration to rising hostility within France, Germany, Greece, Iraq, and Lebanon. Anger due to the persistence of racial violence, threats against the rights of women and workers, discrimination against the LGBTQ community, repression, as well as fear and instability surrounding health care systems, income inequality, the environmental crisis, and the effects of mass migration.

A powerful emotion that can be both instinctual yet also intellectualized, anger has often been capitalized on for violent means. However, when channeled productively, anger has the power to spark collective imagination and forge empathetic relationships. While anger is subjective and not universally displayed across individuals and cultures, we will work to demystify and critically explore the current culture of rage.

Join a nuanced conversation in this MoMA R&D Salon hosted by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture & Design and Director of Research & Development at MoMA, with speakers (in alphabetical order):

Shaun Leonardo: a multidisciplinary artist whose work discusses societal expectations of manhood––namely definitions surrounding black and brown masculinities––along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure.

Lydia Lunch: a writer, singer, poet, actress, and speaker whose career was spawned by the New York City “No Wave” scene. Widely considered one of the most influential performers originating from New York City, Lydia has worked with a range of bands and artists.

Andrew Marantz: a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper’s, New York, and Mother Jones. He recently published his first book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

Marilyn Minter: a contemporary artist whose works are in the collections of MoMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

Pamela Sneed: a poet, writer, visual artist, and performer. She is the author of the books Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery (1998) and Kong and Other Works (2009), as well as the chapbooks Lincoln (2014), Gift (2015), and Sweet Dreams (2018).

The Museum of Modern Art

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gamerszone2019-blog · 5 years

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Why it's Time For Video Games to Address Climate Change

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/why-its-time-for-video-games-to-address-climate-change/

Why it's Time For Video Games to Address Climate Change

Climate change is often seen as a distant problem, a burden for future generations to bear. This comes as no surprise; the sheer scale of destruction that human activity has brought upon the planet since the middle of last century is overwhelming. Earth has heated dramatically. Islands and coastlines have begun to sink into the rising seas. Extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, storms, and floods, have drastically increased in frequency, displacing and taking the lives of thousands of people each year. Ecosystems have begun to collapse. Extinction has become a daily event. And all these problems are accelerating. Right now. The climate future is already upon us.

The solution to our climate crisis will require immense social and political transformations. Rebellion and civil disobedience – what we demand as non-negotiable to governments – will also be key in shaping the future of our planet. We are already seeing promising early signs of this in vital protest movements like Extinction Rebellion and YouthStrike4Climate. But there is another piece to the puzzle.

The 15 Hardest Contemporary Games

I am not about to suggest that a single piece of art will save us, but rather that cultural shifts in how we talk about our climate emergency are vital to confronting our planetary present and future. Art and society inform one another. You can glean a great deal about a period of history in a society from its art alone, particularly via culturally dominant storytelling forms such as the novel or film, and historically also the popular theatre. But art can also, in special cases, direct society towards change. We might look specifically here to: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which was seminal in emboldening anti-slavery sentiments, prior to the civil war; or the Jonathan Demme movie, Philadelphia (1993), which, though not groundbreaking by today’s standards, is widely credited as playing a crucial part in de-stigmatsing HIV in mainstream America; or Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), the renewed relevance of which, alongside its timely adaptation to television, is disturbingly clear today.

With their oft-cited two billion users and emergence as a new storytelling medium, a claim to such cultural relevance should theoretically extend now to video games (https://www.statista.com/statistics/293304/number-video-gamers/). And yet, video games – particularly the big ones, the kind we drool over during E3 announcements – have not engaged with human-made climate change on a serious level, at least not to the same degree as other storytelling media, such as the blooming literary genre of ‘cli-fi’ (climate fiction), which has spawned hundreds of novels about climate change in recent decades.

I am left to wonder: when are video games going to begin to say something about the defining crisis of our time?

Squint, and you might just make out the initial traces of climate change discussion in simulation and strategy games of the early 90s. SimEarth (1990) and Civilisation (1991) incorporated pollution and global warming into their game design, with the former going so far as to include melting ice caps and rising sea levels, rising temperatures, extreme weather events and ecosystem collapse. But the intervening decades did not witness an increase in the development of games that reflected intensifying public concern around climate change. It would seem, then, that as climate politics grew ever more complex and heated in the real world, video games, willingly or not, drifted into more tepid waters.

It’s not like nobody is trying. Strange Loop Games’ Eco, an ambitious society simulator that encourages players to work together toward collective sustainability, exemplifies such endeavor. Certainly, more climate-focused games are coming out nowadays, particularly in the educational and fast-paced indie spaces. Educational games, often targeted at younger audiences, are great in principle. They have a place. However, as researchers Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne observe, games like NASA’s Climate Kids ‘lack both the artistry and mainstream engagement sufficient to make contributions to the public understanding of the issues wrapped up in our current climate challenge in the way that cli-fi does.’

Indie games, on the other hand, have undoubtedly offered artful visions of climate-changed environments in recent years. But these backdrops rarely connect explicitly to human-made climate change. A clear example of this tendency is Earth Atlantis, a 2D side-scrolling shooter, the opening titles of which read:

“The ‘Great Climate Shift’ struck at the end of the 21st century. Ninety-six percent of the earth’s surface is underwater.

Human civilization has fallen. Machines have adopted the shape and form of marine animals. The ocean is full of creature-machine hybrid monsters.

You are a ‘Hunter’ and the new journey begins!!”

While games like these might encourage us to explore and play in changed environments, it would be a stretch to describe them as having any kind of commentary on climate change processes or the plight of our planet.

As a doctoral researcher, focussing primarily on how climate change is communicated within fiction, I am often asked: ‘What are some good climate change video games to play?’ It’s a thorny one; I am still asking myself that exact same question.

To be blunt, considering how many video games feature post-apocalyptic settings, there aren’t many. As we race uncontrollably towards countless irreversible ends, when one million species teeter on the edge of extinction, when Earth’s great marvels – the polar ice, the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon – are vanishing, when the planet is increasingly being deprived of all it needs to support life, video games are still throwing us into zombie apocalypses, pestilent plagues or nuclear holocausts.

There is so much creative potential here to envision a better world and how we might problem-solve our way there, or a powerful warning of what is to come if we do not act now. Video games’ capacity for setting rich and detailed stories in extensive open-worlds (potentially modeled in deeper, geological timescales) are well suited to the demands of carrying a topic as complex as climate change.

Video games have long explored climate aesthetics, but not climate politics. Floods, fires and all manner of catastrophes and wasteland visions abound, but they are rarely linked to our current emergency. I don’t think this is due to a failure of imagination, or because developers don’t care. It is telling, however, that Dennis Shirk, the lead producer on Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, whose expansion pack Gathering Storm affords players the chance to work with climate change modeling and scenarios, has stated that: ‘No, I don’t think that’s about making a political statement … We just like to have our gameplay reflect current science.’ While it’s possible that big publishers might currently view a climate change game as too niche and too politically risky an investment, we can only hope that, sooner rather than later, we will begin to see climate change feature more seriously in major video games. Who knows? Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 will do precisely this.

I have been careful not to state categorically that there are no climate change games in the triple-A echelon, only to highlight that they are disappointingly scarce. There is one major exception: Horizon

Zero Dawn.

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss HZD (because … well … it has really cool robot dinosaurs) but it would be wrong to do so. Without going into spoilerific detail, Guerilla Games’ exquisite RPG is ultimately unequivocal that we – the ‘Old Ones’ in our time of rampant techno-capitalism – are complicit in the climate apocalypse. Perhaps this is HZD’s greatest trick: its relatable backstory of climate breakdown is revealed slowly and in pieces, not all at once. We are emotionally invested in young protagonist Aloy well before we can fully comprehend her bleak world and what led to it. But the game also does so much more. It has a utopian pulse and deep moral core, a belief that radical transformations are still possible and that there is something worth fighting for today.

HZD marks a critical step towards bringing climate change to the fore of the global gaming community and carving a space out for more overtly climate-focused games to thrive. To date, HZD has sold over ten million copies worldwide and is one of the most successful new intellectual properties on PlayStation 4. It comes as no surprise that a sequel is in development. There is clearly a huge demand for this type of blockbuster.

Maybe it’s just that I see my three-year-old daughter in Aloy, but something about HZD moved me deeply. It is a damn good story, filled with nuance and poignant detail, whose shimmering world invokes sublime feeling. It reminds us of what we should truly value. It’s somewhat abstract, but by whatever narrative alchemy, HZD makes me want to make the world a better place, to leave it better than I came into it. It is a rare and precious artifact, and perhaps, one way or another, a sign of things to come. We need more games like it.

JR Burgmann is an Australian writer and editor. He is completing his PhD at Monash University, where he teaches and is a member of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub. He is writing a novel. You can follow him on Twitter @JBurgmannMilner

Source : IGN

#Game News #Game Reviews

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