Happy New Year

2015 in about two hours PST. Good riddance 2014. 2 intense 4 me. Plenty more to come I'm sure. Well, Happy New Year anyways.

Spheres of Control

As master of your own environment and means of living, you are required to exercise an active management of your own wants and needs. That means taking into account the relationships, environmental qualities, and behaviors of the greater system you are part of over a longer period of time. Neglect any of those parameters and you are essentially responsible for your own suffering, barring any extraneous events completely outside your control.

This is of course a limited way to understand control. Control is experienced differently in times of material abundance and scarcity, in times that are stable and unstable, and in varying degrees of approximation to the loci of control, the material and ideological levers of social power so to speak.

Perhaps a better way to speak of control is through the lens of participation. If one is allowed access to and modification of one's own means of living, and one has a selection of conscious choices to make as to how those means are carried out, one feels a sense of control, however illusory it is, because one is participating in the administration of one's own life.

What is important here is the area of awareness that is afforded through the means of control. If one has a large sphere through which to exercise control, one is aware of more elements within that sphere through necessity and repetition of contact. Similarly, the less in control of one's environment one is, the less cognizant one becomes of its elements. One becomes functionally self-interested and short-sighted.

This tendency has important consequences for the concentration of both economic and political power. If a growing amount of control is relegated to a shrinking class of political establishment or economic monopolist, then the rest of the population is denied participation and becomes apathetic to the maintenance of the political or economic sphere. There is great pleasure in successfully administrating one's life, so that the loss of this pleasure has to be reclaimed through other avenues, some productive, some intellectual, some creative, others hedonistic.

Needless to say, the loss of this large-scale participation results in fragmentation, causing all sorts of distortions which require all matter of contrivances to prevent a society from breaking down completely.

Life, if left to its own devices, knows how to attend to itself with itself. Kept from these devices, life seeks to attend to itself against itself, requiring evermore contrivance to at least simulate this harmony, delaying the inevitable dissolution.

Complexity and Power

Part of overcomplexity has to do with power and its effects on social systems. What may be a simple solution to a complex problem could be out of reach if powerful interests are threatened by the solution.

Just as finer and finer branches develop out of larger branches, which develop out of the trunk of a tree, finer and finer modes of problem solving develop around primary modes of functioning, regardless of whether they are useful any longer. A society must maintain a certain shape, within which exist the solutions a society must take to solve its myriad problems. Binary divisions seeking alternatives to failure continue on from avenues long since traveled, with those divisions growing ever finer and numerous as failures mount around a fundamental premise that won't be questioned.  

Complexity develops like capillaries around an intractable contradiction, which ultimately reproduces the contradiction within each division seeking a solution, but these divisions do temporarily delay the ramifications of contradiction with the passage of time.

To offer concrete examples, our insurance-based health care system, fractional reserve banking, and industrial agriculture systems are predicated on the core driving principle that moves this business society: the sacred right of businessmen to make a buck.

Ever more complex insurance schemes are required to make vast mechanisms of extraction continue to work, interspersed between a populace and its health care institutions. Fractional reserve banking essentially functions to create debt money, perpetually owed to a financial class in greater amounts, so that ever more complex credit systems and financial instruments are required to cushion the oscillations caused by this antagonism. Agriculture must be both expanded and adulterated with ever-finer methods of manipulations to feed a growing population, while at the same time maintaining favorable rates of profit.

All of these systems are plagued with spiraling problems of overcomplexity, which won't be solved unless the organizing principle of industrial capital is scrapped. The ever-growing and interrelated layers of contrivance that are required to cope with a capital class that grows in wealth and a productive/consuming class that shrinks only delays the effects of problems caused by this contradiction. This also ignores multiple loci of contradiction, which put greater pressures on each other.

On a more fundamental but related point, no amount of large-scale green energy or organic farming programs are going to solve the problems of sustainability that are posed by a society that requires unlimited economic growth to function. The endless, class-staggered process of exploitation requires constant growth: nothing less than a radical change in collective notions of ownership and social relation will do.

One has to keep digging deeper. What was it that produced these business-friendly principles in the first place? It seems as though self interest, hard materialism. and hard rationalism were all that would motivate a society that had grown exhausted from subsisting under the constant pressure of religious doctrines that were no longer living, so that this process of accumulation, started as a blind engine of emancipation, ran away from its creators and continues to shake itself apart.

And so, does it take complete disintegration and calamity for a large-scale society to solve its most pressing and fundamental contradictions?    

Bonds

A good question to ask of those that are close is the following: do you love me, or do you just love that I love you? Of course, the latter indicates a weaker bond that is more likely to break under strain, raising questions of just how much energy you are willing to put into such a bond.

Of course there may be instances of asymmetry in which one loves another, and that other person merely loves the love that is coming from the other. Love isn't simply a warm gooey feeling, or that self-indulgent bliss which popular culture posits is the end all, be all for concepts of love. Love can be much more complicated. If one cares about another, and seeks to preserve another against the forces of disintegration, regardless of what the other feels for oneself, is that not love?

And then of course there is the question of what should be preserved and what should be let go, what should be loved, and what should one turn away from? And sometimes favoring what one loves means letting go of commitments to preserve that thing, as sometimes preserving something essentially destroys it.

Give and Take

Given egalitarian power relations, there is insidiousness in giving too much, just as there is insidiousness in taking too much. A recipient of good deeds may be given to resent if those good deeds are impossible to repay.

There's an old story mentioned in Graeber's Debt which tells of a man who was given an elaborately carved shield or crest - can't remember exactly which at the moment - and in a fury, went off to kill his benefactor, who ended up escaping I believe. To this culture it sounds almost hilariously absurd, but in a culture where a gift economy is far more prominent, this can be a serious problem.

Contrary to standard economic doctrines, most people are reciprocal in nature, with only a minority solely self-interested. One has to be able to give and take. One must take to live, and another must give for another to take, but similarly, another must take for another to give.

In assymetrical power relations, it is true that one who has too much power should be giving far more than taking, but as those power relations even out, to continue to give is to invert the logic of uneven reciprocation.

Oddly enough, it is possible for two givers to enter into competition to see who is more giving; I've heard this referred to as the "selfless olympics" by spiritual practitioners, which is a pretty funny way to describe it.

There is a certain high social regard given to givers, which can be seen as a good, just as material goods or brute or economic power can be seen to be a good, so that someone who has taken on a prominent social role as a giver gains power that is different from the powers of violence or economics, but which is power nonetheless.

In a similar way, an abundance of love or accolades bestowed on a single person has an irradiating effect: it poisons the relationships around the person, as resent builds among the peers around the person, these peers feeling resentful for being deprived of that love, whether justly or unjustly. Of course this love and resent varies with the character and self-perceived security of the individuals doing the loving and resenting.

In the aggregate, these asymmetries of emotional/social power create the need for hierarchies and symbolic rationalizations, which can maintain these uneven topographies without causing greater social disturbances.

If one believes another is metaphysically superior, then that other can do much more taking, or giving, depending on the relationship. So indulging these uneven topographies - if we are holding egalitarian assumptions - puts us right back at square one. We are required to argue over what would make a better hierarchy, and that we should give up our egalitarian aspirations.

Of course, there will always be countless hierarchies existent in our social lives, at least weaker ones that are created and destroyed as social relations change. We aren't all born equal of course, and the very notion of equality depends on a society's dominant values.

The question then is whether to have a hierarchy that is stronger and more resilient through time, which creates its own set of problems, or simply to make do with that constant negotiation of giving and taking.

Preservation

To preserve something then is to hold something in place, in a sense. It is to at least temporarily slow its dispersion into ambient energy, which takes energy extracted from one's surroundings, subtracted as it were, to add to the preserved body in question. As something becomes preserved, it becomes an obstruction, around which life flows on. Which is just fine. One looks over the living landscape, and one finds matter in various states of flow, of transitions, of stable, preserved states and dispersing, breaking-apart states.

The tendency, at least for this closed solar system, is for concentrated energy to flow and disperse outward. The question arises as to where the concentrated energy comes from in the first place, and there are plenty of theories attempting to answer that question.

One way to consider it is in the form of memory. As energy concentrates, there are excited particles which transfer their "excitement," which tends to decay as it bleeds into space, but which also retains memory. Memory in this sense could be understood in the negative, for a transgression, or a concentration of energy that forces itself past the tensile forces of thermodynamic equilibrium, creates as a complement a region of energetic lack, with its own varying gradients of concentration, which sits at the ready to accept an incoming flood of energy at the closest opportunity. Nature abhors a vacuum and all that.

And so every transgression is repaid in some form, and everything that is preserved must eventually dissolve, that the more preserved something is, the higher potentials for its dissolution climb, so that something that seems as if should last forever grows ever more brittle with time, and inches ever closer to the brink of rapid dissolution.

More esoteric writing; a bit simplistic perhaps. But worth sketching out for later I think.

Industry Like Genitalia

One covers the organs of production and reproduction. Why? In the course of sexual relations we have this tendency to swing from sensations of extreme desire to extreme repulsion depending on the observer and the object of observation in question, sensations which are modulated and transformed through our social relations, and so we cover up various portions of the body to avoid these disruptive oscillations altogether.

This isn't to say everyone has this reaction, but that a vast majority of the population (as constituted culturally at this particular historical juncture) behaves this way, and so in the interest of a wide social stability we choose to keep certain areas covered, though we may allow skin to show here and there, to skillfully open the valves of desire so to speak - but not too much!

I began the discussion like this because of this odd analogous tendency in our industrial nature to commit a similar behavior repeatedly, a behavior which isn't always easy to pin down.

Built within the industrial nature of capital is a fundamental contradiction, perhaps grasped by many, but not always explicitly stated. The primary animating ethos, the primary motivation driving the head of capital and all of those who serve capital, is to expand and accumulate as an individual, unique and distinguished from the productive masses.

But through these powerful motivational forces of production, capital achieves its desired aim: expansion and amplification, a growing human body whose demands grow with its power. If one gazes over the architecture, the productive institutions, the political regulatory apparatus, mass distributed goods, one finds that everything is built to handle volume.

The shape that a good or service must take to be mass distributed reflects the dictates set by volume: goods and services must be stripped of all personalized idiosyncrasies, streamlined, standardized, to be accepted by the greatest mass possible. Like the classic popular student archetype: an object or individual must take on the traits required at the necessary times to appeal to as great a number as possible, so that the individual is obliterated. That is besides the fact that production at high volume requires this streamlining, for reasons of production cost and process.

A very strange thing happens: a great population explosion paradoxically shrinks from itself. Its constituents refuse to acknowledge themselves as numerous and interchangeable, as their motivational ideations posit themselves as unique and irreplaceable. Life in its abundance becomes cheap and disposable: whole swaths of life can be tossed aside if they fail to fulfill the narrow, selfish aims of the ruling class. Life can be picked through, like one searching for the better apples in a pile.

Whole cities rise through the dictates of production, and then are abandoned to languish.

This is a nature that induces great horror, so that it must conceal itself with relentless, vivid imagery. The productive body becomes compartmentalized, within which function fields of manipulation to conceal the productive regions of the body from itself, and even from its relations to the outer world. Fearing the loss of productive power when the body realizes it is but dust, the ruling class peppers the populace with propagandistic, individualistic imagery: one is unique, one is a self, one stands apart, powerful! Powerful as long as one consumes, and produces.

And what of the organs of production themselves? What of the transportation networks that feed and are fed by them? Where they are not concealed by simply living within them, breathing through them, they are to be sheathed and hidden away. One cannot see the systems of mass production, ever more so the more they bend towards organic life. Here we have that partial glimpse mentioned above: we are given brief views of the manufacturing apparatus as it produces widgets and other lifeless things. We see the machines working and we remark, "Ah! What a powerful industrial nature we have!"

But the closer the machines approach living systems, the more rigorously they are concealed. We must not see the industrial food systems, and to witness factory farming is to see horrific things. And we must not see the workers themselves and the way they live, or if we are one of them, we do our business and then retreat home, the workday a blur, and become immersed in images that celebrate our selves. One must believe one is living a unique and spectacular life with this speedy, shiny new car, and not simply another cell swimming down vast, vein-like transportation networks. One is to navigate traffic grids with personal skill: one is not sucked through as the grid valves open and move traffic streams. And so on. The engines of production must not falter!

How exactly does capital take this shape? One thinks of the tremendous social pressures associated with an expanding universal mass; one pictures a great thunderhead erupting into the sky, exploding, forced upwards, eventually to discharge itself through a physical transformation and fall back to the earth.

On Modern Protest

The founding fathers saw political protest as a necessary component of a healthy civic life, that it should kick into gear whenever some political grievance should crop up, like some recurring organic homeostatic function, whereas today the protest appears much more as some delineated, contained game which is loathed and held in contempt by the authorities and their sycophants.

This is not to diminish the efforts of the protesters. They are doing good and necessary work. But it is always interesting to see how political dissidence actually works in real world conditions, especially in a conservative society such as this one.

The founders could probably be referred to as radicals in their day, though the extent of the radicalism and revolutionary tendencies of each founder could be debated, which I'm not going to get into. And what radicals typically envision is a society in which their radical inclinations are made a regular occurrence in the operation of an ideal society.

What usually seems to happen instead (or better, what seems to happen in cycles in this mature stage of civilization) is that moments of political radicalism, if they are to be transformative on a system-wide scale, come and go in different eras. There are periods in which the energy emanating from below bursts open the rusted jaws of convention, forcing change, and then there are periods in which convention prevails, buttressing its preferred shape of society against the transformational powers of political movements, or at least compromising with the movements in return for a watered-down radicalism.

Perhaps in a healthy society with a strong sense of collective security, protests could be encouraged and even communicated with. But in a sick society such as this one - which fears constant disintegration at every turn, and which resists any kind of meaningful change - protest becomes a sort of game due to the opposing and irreconcilable aims of its participants, as well as the constrictive bounds of what's left of civic life. Competitive games take their tension from the opposing aims of the competing players, and modern protests, with their intricate games of psychological warfare, are similar in structure, though the stakes are certainly higher.

So. The object of protesters is to force a dialogue that political elites refuse to entertain, and this has to be done by disrupting the elites' precious system. It requires a dramatic and vivid impact, and a forcing of the dysfunction of business as usual, to jolt a society into a mode of self-reflection. Walking down the streets and shouting with signs is not enough, though it can raise some awareness at least. If you can be ignored, business can continue, and usually that is all that is required for a protest movement to become ineffectual.

Protesters rely on social media, limited communication encryption, theatrical tactics, and various methods of direct disruption, such as blocking roadways, chaining themselves to important buildings or objects, sitting in, making noise, and directing public attention at offending individuals, institutions, classes, or other objects. Some protesters believe in property destruction and other destructive acts, though this observation is complicated by the fact that there were actual undercover cops in Berkeley smashing windows and instigating looting. It isn't always clear how these movements unfold.

The object of police on the other hand is to maintain the shape of society. Police seek to minimize the protesters' impact in several ways, such as by neutralizing the power of protests with various tactics. Police rely on containment and inter-agency coordination, and legal monopoly on the instruments of violence. Police will carefully coordinate individuals and material resources to find and isolate accumulations of human mass, and then direct them through parts of the city which are removed from important commercial activity, taking care to use intimidating tactics which cause gradual dispersion.

Dispersion is the primary police aim. There are reports of the police now using drones to confuse protesters as to the location and direction of the protests (we checked Twitter feeds and searched for circling helicopters to find ours). The drones pose as helicopter decoys, confusing protesters as to the location of the march, further preventing accumulation.

The accumulation of human mass mentioned above is perhaps the most important parameter. The protesters want a large, vibrant, growing mass, the size and spectacle of which communicates a public will. The mass also changes properties of the protest movement itself; it amplifies expression. With the presence of social witnesses, numerous protesters are more likely to vigorously express some point of view, or they are more likely to commit a certain pointed, political action. The mass movement creates the conditions for finer, more vigorous public expression, with types of public expression varying as more varying individuals become attracted to the protest. And then a greater body of people is simply more capable of disrupting commercial or civic centers.

The police want more than anything to direct, contain, and eventually disperse this mass, through force if necessary. They are less interested in lone individuals breaking off of the protest; as soon as you leave the crowd, you are typically free to walk away, unless the police are breaking off and isolating individuals to arrest out of spite.

This protest activity continues in cycles - especially after particularly egregious violations of justice - and then abates as the energy disperses, with the most dedicated activists and organizers moving on to other projects if there is no more possibility of effective action. Of course there are plenty of future opportunities for the outpouring of public sentiment. There is no shortage of pressure to be released as useless heavy things continue to press upon the body politic.

Bipolar Bay

An acquaintance remarked that the Bay Area seems to attract bipolar people. Not sure how true this is statistically, but they're definitely around.

It seems to get passed around like the flu; there is a delay in effects. Suddenly a couple of people start exhibiting manic, irritatable, sometimes paranoid symptoms, and then soon enough as the manic people are crashing, some other people in social proximity start to go manic themselves.

People come out here for art, music, underground tech, radical politics. Where you have people trying to do exciting things, you usually have this condition, though the condition is certainly not limited geographically. Simply, there is more likely to be a preponderance of it.

The cycle often appears as so: one is crushed, so that to compensate one must do or make exciting things. One's ideation of what should happen is raised, increasing the chances of being disappointed again, and one is most likely crushed again, this time in a greater way. One develops greater ideas for compensation, and so the cycle continues, its peaks and troughs growing in height and intensity.

Sometimes the cycle produces wonderful things. Sometimes it just disrupts things. And then sometimes one has a psychotic break.

Well, if you're excited about something, you should keep doing your thing. It is what you live for. But don't forget to mellow out here and there.

Commitment

Yes, these are dark times. And they'll probably grow darker.

The news is full of horrors and stupidity. Up here in the north it has been pouring nonstop. In our circle we are all pretty decidedly broke. Dreams remain frustrated and unfulfilled. And then unfulfilled and broke people typically run on higher levels of stress, crashing against one another. The dog has run off. He is lost for now. Fine.

Here is a nice quote for dark times, thanks to a mention from a friend:

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back-- Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."

The last two lines are Goethe's. The rest is attributed to a W.H. Murray.

* As an additional note, commitment in the wrong direction can prove catastrophic. Always fruitful to locate these motivational quotes within broader regimes of life strategy.

Work Sucks

I don't have to deal with a physical office, or the discomfort of being in constant physical proximity to a crappy boss, but as a freelance writer I still have to deal with my share of nonsense.

Besides the fact that I work hours on end everyday doing something that I really couldn't care less about, to make money to pay rents and buy things that allow me to keep doing what I really couldn't care less about, there is the matter of having one's work appreciated by one's peers, and having one's work serving some use in the world, even if one doesn't care about it. 

A fairly-sized chunk of economic activity in the US especially is nonsense work, constant work to manipulate symbols of desire or power obfuscation, or mere accounting gimmicks which shift around fictional value, or support work which administrates and perfects this nonsense activity.  

SEO writing is essentially semantic and syntactic finagling to manipulate search engine algorithms, funneling unassuming web surfers into the virtual stores of whomever can afford to do more finagling than others, web stores that are themselves usually expressions of manipulative, intermediary economic power, which also usually rest on suppressed labor, either within our borders or outside of our borders in places that are made stable by our military or our economic clout. 

The search algorithms are always changing, and there are a bunch of tech writers out there whose jobs entail sitting around gabbing about these phantom algorithms and whether the latest techniques are working. No one really knows. When it comes down to it, the harder you sell, the better. As always. When people keep having bright shiny things waved in their face, they eventually buy the things to make the hawkers shut up. 

Then there's the matter of peer appreciation. A lot of this nonsense activity can't exist on its own; it depends on expanding economies and other factors far outside its scope. So of course you find yourself amidst these nonsense efficiency maximizing regimes which are designed to make more efficient the nonsense work, setting aside actual economic conditions, and your work is judged in accordance with these regimes. For example, keyword placement, paragraph structures, repetition, images, and etc. Funnel in the visitors better. If people don't have money to buy anything, then you're not funneling hard enough! 

Every new editor that is hired has a different idea of how this regime should work, and really no one knows how it should work anyways, so it usually amounts to lots of trial and error and dumb luck, which is always fleeting in the first place. So you're constantly getting work back, along with "this doesn't match our content standards, so we can't pay you full" and this and that. One could imagine these poor editors sitting in their homes or running around the office, tearing at their hair, pinching their brows, going mad from these endless contradictory signals. Most people think within the confines of their limited fiefdoms, running on the old hamster wheel twice as fast to keep things running as the greater system contracts. This is what drives some people mad. 

It is a lot of imaginary problem solving, and you just sort of go along with it to keep getting paid. Maybe someone should look at search engine monopolies, or better yet, start fixing the problems that are keeping people from buying the useless junk.  But that's just me.

To subsist, you just have to jump through the nonsense hoops, while doing what you think is important at the same time. It takes a little finesse, but it can be done. All of this is supposed to be dignifying of course. Stand tall, you rugged individual!

The more I think of this, the more absurd and hilarious it all seems. But these are people's lives. And mine I guess. And we're burning up a lot of precious energy, doing what exactly?

On Ferguson and More (Cont'd)

We joined the protests over police violence in downtown Oakland, and the experience has certainly added some nuance to my outlook, as getting closer to the action will often do without fail.

I have to set this discussion up, so please bear with me.

First, the nature of our neoliberal system has it so that many people are forced into the role of homo economicus whether they like it or not. Its ubiquitous power creates its own self-fulfilling prophecy: if you buy up all of the public property, slash all of the public services, and sharply limit the flow of currency so that everyone is forced into an artificially created economic sphere to survive, then most people will attempt to hold jobs at the remaining institutions where the money and resources are flowing.

This state of affairs is the case because of what we allow our most powerful members of society to get away with. When the power of wealth and the underlying business ethos is worshiped as an end, then you allow the most economically powerful businessmen to control wider and wider facets of society. Every individual wants to see his or her self reflected in his or her surroundings in some sense. So it only follows that the most powerful individuals will see to it that their self is instantiated and multiplied across the land, altering the composition of society so that ever more of their spawn can acquire ever more power, or consenting human - and by extension technological - energy.

This is what you see lurking beneath the sterile surface of neoliberal economic propaganda. It is less the case that its adherents believe neoliberalism actually works - though they certainly do - and more the case that they believe it must work because it reflects what they are: selfish, sociopathic individuals, who probably experience a tragic sense of emptiness when they relate to other human beings. And so mass robbery becomes a ruling ethos, which by necessity spreads its logic, so that everyone caught up in the system must survive by some form of exploitation, so that finally universal exploitation becomes the case, with varying tiers of economic power forming wherein chosen economic classes and cultural groups are given a portion of the spoils in return for consent. Needless to say, even communal, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic outlets become sucked into this sinkhole.

Enough abstraction! To keep on point, I first mentioned that individuals are forced to take work where they can, as an economy with a large pool of unemployed can only absorb so many individuals. Of course this doesn't account for the numerous motivations one has to join the police force, but one necessarily has to take this reality into account when evaluating the institution itself: the institution is bent over the will of the ruling class, with the individuals within the police bent around this shape in turn, regardless of their illusions of what it means to be an officer of the law.

And so the institution takes on a certain character, with the most brutal, authoritarian, and corrupt individuals ruling the roost, especially at higher proximal locations to power, while the honest, well-meaning individuals are silenced to remain in the tribe, or who are pushed out or driven mad. Happily there are exceptions that buck the trend, but they remain exceptions.

But what does all of this have to do with our experience in Oakland? Well, looking for the actual site of the protest we happened by a homeless man that wanted to play on the drums we brought. After talking to him for a bit, we turned around and were startled upon coming face to face with four or five riot cops, and realized that we were right across the street from the police station. We made eye contact with several of these men and women and on their faces where not expressions of aggression and pugnaciousness, but exhaustion and reluctance, human workers caught within the fatalistic confines of a charged national symbol.

Granted, not all of the police exhibited these momentary signs of frailty. When the police grew tired of the march downtown, they advanced on us rapidly with a row of heavy riot units, shouting threats through a megaphone and commanding us to disperse, which is a common tactic. And supposedly the jackasses in Berkeley met a peaceful crowd of protesters with batons and teargas in short order. So much for the first amendment.

Nevertheless, everywhere there were breaches in the homogeneous facade of symbol. Many businesses stationed private security forces outside of their doors in anticipation of the protests, with many of these employees people of color, looks of despair and vacant disassociation on their faces, forced away from their own long term interests by the dictates of bare economic survival. A black man in a business suit stood outside of the downtown Wells Fargo building with a confused grimace on his face as he surveyed the shattered glass of the entire front door, though as we walked further past I was amused to find that the Wells Fargo building was the most targeted building on the block: everywhere were boarded up windows from previous nights. Nevertheless, property damage usually only hurts ordinary people, as the owners of property shrug and pass on the costs as they always do. The protest crowd expresses itself in many ways, not all of them productive, though this can be difficult to alter anyways.

Which brings me to the lack of homogeneity of the protest crowd itself, though its difference was unified under its common cause in this case. Some black bloc (and this group isn't even homogeneous) types ran up with a black flag and dropped a large window, and the rest of the protesters chased them away shouting "we don't do that."

The crowd was a mix of fun loving thrill seekers, serious but polite individuals, hipsters, hostile individuals barking slogans like "fuck the police" and even outright vandals, though the latter were far more rare. It has been a common observation of protest movements like Occupy that these crowds become greater social expressions which fan out in every direction, much as what happens at a festival, which was certainly the case for this one. There is a great public catharsis, and a great joy which is immediately apparent in the faces of the crowd. Looking at the radiant faces of the crowd, and the despairing faces of those individuals administrating the institutions of suppression, one gains a strong sense of where the energy is flowing.

Through these social ruptures, suppressed and socially unabsorbed egos burst forth in every direction, expressing themselves, finally to be witnessed by an onlooking public. People ride bikes, walk their dogs (we walked ours), bang on drums and pots, play instruments, display signs, dress up, and yes, occasionally wreck things or get into fights.

The smart cops know to allow these explosive social expressions to burst forth and curl their way down the streets, containing this energy at the more extreme edges, almost as one loosens a release valve, while the idiots that go in clubs swinging end up having this explosive energy slapped back at them eventually, albeit in a different form. That is, until benevolent expression can no longer be contained, and the forces of desperation and violence are unleashed.

And so that is that.

Usually when I go about putting on the old doom hat, the qualifications hat is soon to follow. As I write and strain to capture the intricacies of this process, I can't help but chuckle to myself as the infinite complexities of reality gnaw away at the account that I attempted, as lapping waters erode a carefully constructed sand castle. In the end, I can't look at a limited written account (whether mine or another's) as something that is true in an absolute sense. I want to know whether it withstands the erosion of time and experience; it will most certainly lose some of its original shape.

As I attempted to express a post back, the system is taking on a certain character, and it will fall in accordance with the shape of that character, regardless of the numerous potentials whirling about underneath these institutions, classes, and symbols. This is what is worth understanding, to me anyways.

And then of course I scold myself for these recursive layers of self-reflection and self-indulgence. It is the people out there that are worth all of the attention, and of course, the world they are a part of.

Clusterfuck

Excuse the vulgar title, but it is probably a good description of the social realities that are found in a society experiencing cascading, interconnected problems it can't collectively solve.

There is a repetitive mechanic which makes things progressively worse, which is possible to spot if you stop for a minute. Our social tendencies, being closely coupled with our lingual/symbolic systems, tend to look for identifiable problems which can be immediately diagnosed, oftentimes in the immediately manipulable relationship with an individual or class.

As the increasing effects of a ubiquitous and intensifying strain are felt, we locate failures and dysfunctions in the closest proximal causes we can identify, blaming complex problems on the behaviors and actions of individuals that are often suspect to our own standards of behavior and action, standards which are usually formed by the outlook of our own personality, or the shared personality of conventional society.

And so to convention it is the deviant that causes problems, to the deviant it is convention, to the liberal it is the conservative, to the conservative it is the liberal, to the teetotaler it is the alcoholic, to the homophobe it is the homosexual, and so on. It is difference crashing into itself.

Which is not to say all causes are equally to blame - or equally innocent - after all, top-heavy things must fall, and the fall of the system will proceed in a certain direction. The better you apprehend that direction, the better you can fare.

On Ferguson and More

I haven't taken much time to write in the last couple of weeks, but it is definitely worth commenting on the situations in Ferguson and New York.

People keep making the mistake - partially because of the nature of the news cycle and concentrated media - of quibbling over infinitesimal details of the shootings, brutalizations, trials, and protests, as well as the relative merits of all the actors involved. Of course, most of the people making this mistake are typically conservative with remaining comforts and resources to spare, and of course, to lose.

This is all completely understandable, and is certainly going to continue, as we as social creatures tend to rally around magnetic popular symbols, displaying our binary opinions. The social energy is tending towards these points of extreme injury and insult, almost as pain responses tend toward pin pricks.

In moderation, this process is essential to human social life, but when it tends towards the extreme - that is, when you get to arguing over tiny details on a mass scale, as is happening in the media - it kicks up a vast cloud of obfuscating noise which obscures the avenues to effective action, and even effective thought.

These flashes of public outrage over a vivid or forceful event are the socially visible reactions that are generated from profound structural problems, which are of course the true causes of a multitude of traumatic events. Needless to say, these structural problems are where our attention should be focused.

To take the Ferguson case for example, it doesn't matter where Wilson was standing, where Brown was standing, who was reaching for what, how big Brown was, or what Brown did in the convenience store. All of these details were simply manipulated to produce a moral narrative for a show trial that was already rigged to acquit Wilson in the first place.

What does matter is the systematic pattern of violence, indignation, injustice, and exploitation that African Americans suffer under the American justice system, and the virtual immunity of the police while perpetuating this state of affairs. Or for that matter the extreme economic disparities that have characterized the American caste system for centuries - and let's not pretend that we don't have a caste system - which create the conditions for these gross distortions of the concept of justice. All of this is of course empirically verifiable and well-documented for those interested in understanding.

What matters just as much are the amplifications of these grievances wrought by increasingly dire social, economic, and political problems which contribute to and are amplified themselves by environmental antagonism and diminishing energy resources. These amplifications are in turn contributing to the production of increasingly hostile and militarized state security institutions, which exacerbate these problems and feed back into these amplifications.

We're caught in what amounts to a gigantic Chinese finger trap, and instead of trying to figure out how to get our collective finger out, we are busy pulling and thrashing, tightening the trap while chattering maniacally about it.

A show trial is not going to put a stop to any of this. On the contrary, it will make things worse. It will contribute to the evaporation of what's left of public confidence in the court system.

People know when they are getting screwed. That said, it is very strange to see these intricate, choreographed legal, political, and media machinations expending huge amounts of energy to attempt to halt this inevitable realization. This is more a rationalization for those not afflicted to continue operating as normal, without initiating traumatic structural changes. It also betrays the supreme importance of engineering public consent in a fundamentally unjust social system, as the forces of violence are impossible to control, and expend great amounts of energy, probably far more than the organs of propaganda.

This is a blind spot that has been embedded in the bourgeois spirit from the very beginning. When society is operated as a universal struggle for raw economic power, constitutional protections and the rule of law inevitably collapse, for the very conditions under which these principles operate make it impossible for them to be sustained. The poor and the politically marginalized simply lack the means to defend their own rights.

For these comfortable people sitting in their homes, offices, and courtrooms, it may be a temporary victory to see the courts - which may be still legitimate in their eyes - put forth carefully doctored arguments which side with the police. To see these angry shouting people in the streets, with a menacing air suggested by media accounts, it may just appear that the poor beleaguered police are doing their best to defend themselves from the hordes of barbarians that prowl the streets of US cities in decline.

But as the rule of law continues to deteriorate, and the state is able to routinely get away with murder, putting people down in the streets like animals, this tendency will generalize. If a man or a woman's death can be rationalized away with frail prejudiced opinions and legal processes, the expansion of further rationalizations for ever more injustice is all but guaranteed. If you can't protect your most vulnerable, the concept of the rule of law is eaten away by public perception of contradiction.

To paraphrase countless political observers and writers, soon enough the guns will be turned on you.