I've been sitting on this one for some time; maybe it is time to hatch it.
The Bitcoin phenomenon brings two particularly interesting subjects into relief with its curious attributes: the nature of money itself, and the nature of revolutions.
On Money
First, it brings the nature of money into relief because of how strange Bitcoin as a phenomenon is. Bitcoin is basically an artificial scarcity generator: it is a sophisticated algorithm that creates a virtual scenario that mimics gold-mining. This also comes coupled with a peer to peer distribution system, and cryptographic security, so as to satisfy the twin needs of distribution and preservation of private property.
Its currency follows the law of diminishing returns as natural resources do. The easiest coins are found first, and then it takes greater and greater computing power to uncover the remaining coins, creating interest and increasing their value.
Its power comes from ideology: it is so widely believed to be valuable because it represents the idea that problems of distribution - and by implication, many other serious problems - can be solved by computing power and the associated technologies.
And so why would money even work? Bitcoin could be better conceived as a social activity, an emergent phenomenon generated through relation, just as something as functionally useless as gold or printed paper could become such a powerful force through social relation and mutual desire, so long as the flow itself is carefully controlled and regulated.
A currency presupposes and represents a faith in the continuity of a given order, an order which is created either through mutual trust and functionality, or great acts of violence, or all of the above.
A currency tends to obscure the fact that our society is built on war, genocide, and slavery. The currency has to emanate from somewhere.
There was no Marshall plan for the post-colonial countries. Better to keep them weak and underdeveloped, so as to exploit and extract raw materials from them, and this now includes their labor and environmentally reckless manufacturing.
Central markets tend to create uneven patterns of development in which the overriding need to extend and retain market structures and the state mechanisms required to stabilize them is self-reinforcing.
These last couple of points aren't entirely self-evident, and will require additional elaborations that I won't be able to get to right now. Still, worth bringing up to chew on.
On Revolution
Bitcoin is also curious in that it represents a minor revolution - if underdeveloped - which transfers power to the tech sector of capital. I have spoken with people who have worked on Bitcoin, and they have been very conscious of the fact that they are attempting to tear currency creation power from global finance, but that they realize there are still old problems tied with the mechanics of a currency, such as with speculation, manipulation, and hoarding. Still, it is enough to attempt to wrest power from global finance.
Capitalism is very interesting in that given its pure ideological dictates, all power structures should be constantly dissolving under the extreme competitive pressures implied by competing self-interested individuals, which of course assumes each actor possesses relatively equal amounts of power, or at least equal opportunity to pursue their relative self-interest.
We know though that this is horseshit, and that the powerful are in the business of accumulating and sustaining power, and that yes, this free market ideology is conducive to their habits of accumulation, but as soon as they reach a certain critical mass in power, they turn to freeze the mechanisms of competition and accumulation to favor their own dynasties, oftentimes taking advantage of market concentration and compromised state mechanisms to further their schemes.
They willingly create contradictory states of affairs to preserve their own power, which of course is the nature of power and the antagonistic forces it unleashes.
These contradictions are the manifestations of fundamental tensions between growing bodies of power, and the originally creative and egalitarian visions they are built on.
However, there are periods in history when even the powerful can no longer keep frozen their own built up structures, when the contradictions they generate drop their own floors from underneath them, and a minor revolution is allowed within the system, which allows it to transform relatively bloodlessly to relieve the various built up pressures it has generated over time.
You'd think that the powerful would bite, kick, and scratch to keep
their power, whatever the case, considering their usual behavior, but then there are times in history when the powerful know enough to let the changing shape of the system settle, establishing a partial new regime.
This can happen if the minor revolution in question is of a nature that is not in too great of tension with the established system. I'm thinking here of the New Deal revolution in the 30s, and also of the counterrevolution that took place from the 60s to the 80s and continues in increments today.
The cultural and economic counterrevolution is often conceived as being heralded in through the Reagan administration in the 80s, but the same thing was happening under the Thatcher administration before that, and even more interesting, this counterrevolution was not a mere restoration of an old guard, but a shift in power from the industrial sector to the finance sector, a shift which gave the Right a material and ideological basis for its resurgence, and which took its shape as early as the 60s in Britain.
It remains to be seen whether Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency revolution will have a lasting impact, though the mere existence of these things definitely raises some interesting questions.
Bitcoin is tolerated because it does not threaten establishment
systems enough. Its volatility as a currency makes it gimmicky, and
because of this, it tends to be exchanged for dollars. So it is more
like a collectible.
When its mechanisms became more
autonomous in exchange, such as with black market activity, then those
activities were attacked, as seen in the Silk Road incident, but its establishment activity is allowed
because it is useful in that it generates interest and desire. It is
still a type of commodity, and so it can be owned and controlled, and
integrated into the existing system.
Nevertheless Bitcoin represents a minor revolution, but which has become absorbed by
capital. Minor revolutions then can delay destruction of a standing system, but not halt
it. Why can some revolutions be absorbed and others cause great
destruction? Is it the presence or absence of sameness? Of a familiar
logic of accumulation versus the feared logic of hierarchical
rearrangement? But even disruptive patterns of accumulation can cause
hierarchical shifts. Better question: does it threaten one sector of
capital, or all of it, in which it can bond together and banish the
enemy?
But all revolutions are absorbed by the
overarching social system within which they take place, unless they
burst apart the social system in the process, and a new one forms with
similar problems.
Human history is a series of revolutions, all driven by the need to escape the dying shells of older revolutions.
And so what are we driving at? Why this constant growth and preservation? In this case, the constant growth and preservation of life is death.
What is a revolution to accomplish? What
should be the direction of change? The re-animation of modern industrial
society? Or its gradual dismantling and localization?
Monday, September 28, 2015
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Pre/Post Currency
I say pre because these systems existed before a central state-backed currency, and post because these systems will exist after.
When a central currency isn't working to animate a given social sector, that sector begins to trade directly in favors and resources. It easy to see the need for centralized currency given the demands of the increasing complexity of a centralizing system. This constant trade of favors and resources is quite a bit of work and can be stressful, as it implies maintaining the human relationships themselves.
It is probable that the neural circuitry itself changes. You begin thinking of individuals as extensions of a vessel you are maintaining. It becomes less about what you personally can do or take, and more about what you are putting into this system which you act on, and which acts on you.
When a central currency isn't working to animate a given social sector, that sector begins to trade directly in favors and resources. It easy to see the need for centralized currency given the demands of the increasing complexity of a centralizing system. This constant trade of favors and resources is quite a bit of work and can be stressful, as it implies maintaining the human relationships themselves.
It is probable that the neural circuitry itself changes. You begin thinking of individuals as extensions of a vessel you are maintaining. It becomes less about what you personally can do or take, and more about what you are putting into this system which you act on, and which acts on you.
Grants
The public red tape issue also manifests in the content of grants. Increasingly, grants emanating from these foundations and state organizations betray a profound distrust and a desperate need for control. They want to turn the recipients of their funds inside out, to pore over the finest details of recipient operations, while carefully controlling every movement and expression in accordance with the latest image of public efficacy.
Which is just as well considering the dysfunction of the non-profits themselves, which like their profit-seeking brethren, are only shell-structures within which games of extraction and grift occur.
But given the progression of the nature of the grant, the weakest institutions most in need are at a loss to request funds, while the powerful and prepared are able to muster the resources to write appealing grants regardless of whether the practical reality will match the grant's specifications.
The practical reality then continues its course, with the good left to administrate more and more functions with less and less resources, and the bad becoming more and more practically useless, while at the same time accumulating more resources, underneath the ballooning rationalizations and executive briar patches meant to address these pathologies.
Thanks to the control-obsessed and paranoid natures given away by these grant contents, we can come to an alternate view of OCD and paranoia as a form of privatization. Yes, as one comes to trust less and less other intelligences and life systems, one resolves to assemble ever more information and practical power within oneself.
It is much simpler, and it expends much less energy to simply trust an intelligence to uphold both their interest and yours. These towering regulatory structures do indeed hold everything together, but they take incredible amounts of energy, and they alienate through the course of their operation, furthering the need of their expansion.
Which is just as well considering the dysfunction of the non-profits themselves, which like their profit-seeking brethren, are only shell-structures within which games of extraction and grift occur.
But given the progression of the nature of the grant, the weakest institutions most in need are at a loss to request funds, while the powerful and prepared are able to muster the resources to write appealing grants regardless of whether the practical reality will match the grant's specifications.
The practical reality then continues its course, with the good left to administrate more and more functions with less and less resources, and the bad becoming more and more practically useless, while at the same time accumulating more resources, underneath the ballooning rationalizations and executive briar patches meant to address these pathologies.
Thanks to the control-obsessed and paranoid natures given away by these grant contents, we can come to an alternate view of OCD and paranoia as a form of privatization. Yes, as one comes to trust less and less other intelligences and life systems, one resolves to assemble ever more information and practical power within oneself.
It is much simpler, and it expends much less energy to simply trust an intelligence to uphold both their interest and yours. These towering regulatory structures do indeed hold everything together, but they take incredible amounts of energy, and they alienate through the course of their operation, furthering the need of their expansion.
Hustlers
The really good hustlers are basically out economizing the best methods for satisfying the desires of the poor, desires which are not being fulfilled by the market itself. They're working with those frayed ends, oftentimes within those deserts left behind by capital, bridging those uncoupled connections with repurposed resources that are scattered as detritus, as tissue shedded by a system that constantly needs to regenerate its "newness."
Wednesday, September 02, 2015
On Mimesis 3
One thing you notice about repression is that it is meant to keep the forces of mimesis at bay, at least the forces that contradict its own mimetic platforms. You see this everywhere. Consider for example the routine parental admonition which insists that if one child gets a special privilege, everyone else is going to want it. Or you see this in the rigorous manner that security suppresses any aberrant behavior, such as someone wandering past some arbitrary gate. Or perhaps the vicious corporate behavior in which a company hires an army of lawyers to descend on even the most innocent act of unsanctioned brand usage.
If a given system of logic places a sanction on a given set of behaviors, then that set of behaviors must be suppressed at any cost, as the more people engage in them, the more the general behavior is expressed through imitation. This is complicated by the fact that this danger can be real or imagined by the powers that be.
The more unstable a system, the more the system is on the verge of expressing a behavior or a constellation of behaviors that are antagonistic to the system, the more there is a presence of fear within the system, the more violent, desperate, and unprovoked the powers of suppression are.
If a given system of logic places a sanction on a given set of behaviors, then that set of behaviors must be suppressed at any cost, as the more people engage in them, the more the general behavior is expressed through imitation. This is complicated by the fact that this danger can be real or imagined by the powers that be.
The more unstable a system, the more the system is on the verge of expressing a behavior or a constellation of behaviors that are antagonistic to the system, the more there is a presence of fear within the system, the more violent, desperate, and unprovoked the powers of suppression are.
Pendulum
It is important to remember that as this epoch sours, it comes naturally to cast the whole state of affairs in an acrid tone. I know I do it.
But within this horrific system are countless individuals working and sweating and breathing within the framework of the system, laboring to make the system a more humane and dignified place for its inhabitants.
There is a tender side to capital even as it churns and burns.
One should take care not to exert too much weight on the ideological pendulum - though certainly a good push is required.
The Christians for example witnessed all sorts of hedonistic and sexual perversions taking place within the falling Empire, and instead of locating these perversions within a spatio-temporal set of relations, they placed taboos and curses on the acts themselves, which embedded itself into the ideological code.
And over time you have a whole civilization that grows with a profound alienation to some of life's natural and sublime pleasures, such as intercourse and various other material satisfactions, and of course this creates all sorts of problems.
I think I've mentioned before that Wilhelm Reich has made the case that this ideological sexual repulsion contributed heavily to the explosive character of pre-Fascist Germany. It is entirely possible that this sexual repression also contributed to the explosive growth of industrial empires in general.
And as countless thinkers have found, the more forcefully you repress something, or make forbidden and hidden away from society, the more forcefully it eventually returns, and the more society finds it irresistible, even if it is something natural and generally banal.
But within this horrific system are countless individuals working and sweating and breathing within the framework of the system, laboring to make the system a more humane and dignified place for its inhabitants.
There is a tender side to capital even as it churns and burns.
One should take care not to exert too much weight on the ideological pendulum - though certainly a good push is required.
The Christians for example witnessed all sorts of hedonistic and sexual perversions taking place within the falling Empire, and instead of locating these perversions within a spatio-temporal set of relations, they placed taboos and curses on the acts themselves, which embedded itself into the ideological code.
And over time you have a whole civilization that grows with a profound alienation to some of life's natural and sublime pleasures, such as intercourse and various other material satisfactions, and of course this creates all sorts of problems.
I think I've mentioned before that Wilhelm Reich has made the case that this ideological sexual repulsion contributed heavily to the explosive character of pre-Fascist Germany. It is entirely possible that this sexual repression also contributed to the explosive growth of industrial empires in general.
And as countless thinkers have found, the more forcefully you repress something, or make forbidden and hidden away from society, the more forcefully it eventually returns, and the more society finds it irresistible, even if it is something natural and generally banal.
Tuesday, September 01, 2015
Red Tape
Another thing one finds when organizing for change in public or semi-public spaces is the incredible density of red tape, which ultimately neutralizes non-antagonistic movements for change, however minor they are.
If someone wants to put in a couple of barbecue pits in a public park, or hire on a couple of student interns for a gardening program, one has to appeal to an incredible ecosystem of bureaucratic resources and processes, which can take a very long time, and consume serious resources.
At the same time, public governing bodies are afraid of the effects of certain changes on legal arrangements governing a given space, or whether a certain activity will require changes in an insurance policy, which can be fatal for a public organization that is pressed for cash.
What all of this amounts to is a pervasive fear from public officials of any kind of change that implies consequences that are more than superficial, a fear that at its base is a fear of upsetting the dense interconnection of often private interests that pervade our public sphere, which completely paralyses and shuts down the dynamic forces of a self-determining community.
One finds analogues of this density in our political and economic institutions. The built environment has become so dense, and so full of competing pressures and stimuli, that it has become nearly impossible to assemble a pointed discourse or practical organization for affecting change.
To effectively change something and have its results not only functional but effective, it takes a deep understanding of whatever is being changed. It takes time and energy to build the intellectual and practical understanding required to affect a given system, the demands of which grow with complexity and denseness. More information, density, stimulation, and overall complexity can also be paralyzing in this respect. Where to begin? What to address? One is flitting around from subject to subject, point of leverage to point of leverage, completely impotent and strung out.
To overcome this paralysis, it takes both shedding unnecessary complexity and regaining focus, and actively disobeying the laws, ordinances, and interests governing our public spaces. I say this like it is a solution, but then really these acts come with all sorts of problems of their own. So it goes.
If someone wants to put in a couple of barbecue pits in a public park, or hire on a couple of student interns for a gardening program, one has to appeal to an incredible ecosystem of bureaucratic resources and processes, which can take a very long time, and consume serious resources.
At the same time, public governing bodies are afraid of the effects of certain changes on legal arrangements governing a given space, or whether a certain activity will require changes in an insurance policy, which can be fatal for a public organization that is pressed for cash.
What all of this amounts to is a pervasive fear from public officials of any kind of change that implies consequences that are more than superficial, a fear that at its base is a fear of upsetting the dense interconnection of often private interests that pervade our public sphere, which completely paralyses and shuts down the dynamic forces of a self-determining community.
One finds analogues of this density in our political and economic institutions. The built environment has become so dense, and so full of competing pressures and stimuli, that it has become nearly impossible to assemble a pointed discourse or practical organization for affecting change.
To effectively change something and have its results not only functional but effective, it takes a deep understanding of whatever is being changed. It takes time and energy to build the intellectual and practical understanding required to affect a given system, the demands of which grow with complexity and denseness. More information, density, stimulation, and overall complexity can also be paralyzing in this respect. Where to begin? What to address? One is flitting around from subject to subject, point of leverage to point of leverage, completely impotent and strung out.
To overcome this paralysis, it takes both shedding unnecessary complexity and regaining focus, and actively disobeying the laws, ordinances, and interests governing our public spaces. I say this like it is a solution, but then really these acts come with all sorts of problems of their own. So it goes.
Community Erosion
I'm not entirely sure what else to call this, as it is a phenomenon that I'm not sure can be articulated clearly, which is a sentiment I tried to communicate in an earlier series of posts. The phenomenon I'd like to discuss this time may be indirectly related, but which has a slightly different frame of reference this time around. Perhaps the previous focus had to do with closed systems. This time, the focus is on the way in which disparate systems cohere, or more specifically, how they don't.
Please note that this was another difficult piece to put together, and will read as such.
Moving forward, this phenomenon is something to be experienced, and one feels its effects most acutely when one is attempting to organize an event or persistent organization within a community that scales beyond a gathering of family, friends, or neighbors.
That is, when one begins to traverse the social texture beyond the scope of one's selected companions and social settings, one gains a greater sense of the social topographies which are found in a community. One is afforded a greater sample of personality and class markers, and what's more, how all of these things are interacting together.
This is something one has to find out for oneself, as the fragmentation of our cultural, political, and economic landscape conceals its own nature, as we tend to move between isolated systems which appear to be cohesive in their isolation: corporate bodies, commercial spaces, private gatherings, institutional systems, transportation networks, and other systems, though of course one can witness all matter of dysfunction within these isolated systems as well.
To cut to the chase, one finds a landscape today in which the well-off, well-adjusted, integrated, and absorbed dominate and command a lion's share of resources with rigid objective-based behaviors, various symbolic and technical modes of communication, hierarchical and rigid organization structures, and complex technological systems.
Outside of these contrived, compressed systems exist the poor, the marginalized, the unabsorbed, and un-integrated who persist with their own structures of ad-hoc support, or who are otherwise taken up into the prison-industrial complex. Here we see lower tech and social modes of support. Communication here is becoming oral and immediate. Attention tends to become more diffuse both through lack of nutrition and an over-abundance of irritants and alarms that require attention, which include but are not limited to body pains, pest problems, crime, domestic disputes, anxiety, depression, diseases, financial troubles, and various social humiliations.
Over time, these disparate systems become ever more polarized as each takes on a more definite shape. The wealthy and absorbed attempt to improve with finer detail the functions of the system they have always administrated, while increasing the activity and frequency of these functions to account for economic contraction, labor exclusion, energy adulteration and contraction, cultural and political antagonisms, and crumbling infrastructure among other things, all of which makes the system more rigid and authoritarian.
The poor and unabsorbed on the other hand are left to their own devices, to make do with what they have in increasingly widening "sacrifice zones," deserts of commerce and resources. Their living patterns within these environments grow ever more ingrained as time passes.
It is important to note that there are vast asymmetries between these two groups. Considering that capital seeks to transform all of its surroundings into itself, making its surroundings dependent on itself, the poor and unrepresented cannot be seen to exist as an autonomous unit. And as capital gives up on the industrialization process when its profitability drops, it leaves those transformed communities behind.
The victims of capital still need to function like capital, as they have been deprived of land and community, but then they are denied the resources for doing so, so they must subsist with the resources they have left.
In other words, the over-extension of over-complexity destroys the individuals left outside of its expression, due to the tensions that arise in the social sphere, which are attributable to a centralized sphere of power which monopolizes available energy while attempting to convert surrounding life fields into replicas of itself, without actually tending to those transformed life fields.
There is a diffusion of social intent, so that it all has to be pulled together with authoritarian compression mechanisms: institutions and economic corporate bodies which situate by force the functions required for their perpetual operation.
It is as a grim tide, which washes over and situates individuals within the economic machine when it is powered, but which then wanes and leaves individuals left out to fend for themselves in their diminished state.
Within the authoritarian modes of compression themselves, one finds incredible social constituting pressures which are governed by binary categorizations and sorting mechanisms. And so this mode of functioning is constantly clashing with the diffuse social environments outside of it, with its multitudes of oscillating impulses and desires, material disorder, and general economic chaos.
Working within the diffusion, I could not help but think of myself as one of those sad, water-starved tomato plants, attempting its growth in a variety of directions but wilting at all of its limbs, working nevertheless to attempt to bear fruit.
This state of affairs requires both a growing, delimited body which seeks to capture energy flows external to itself, rearranging them to sustain itself, as well as a distinct governing system of logic which regulates the body. Problems of overcomplexity or overburdened bodies should result in the decoupling of said bodies from each other, so that they can exist in accordance with their own logic.
But we have a problem in which the various constituents of a body are not free to leave, and so complexity continues to grow to account for a relationship which is failing with ever-greater frequency. Further, the very mechanisms required for maintaining this relationship are administrated with ever-greater speed to account for growing dysfunction, further advancing the pathologies caused by this process, not to mention the resource usage and output of linear waste.
The fatally contradictory modes of functioning which demarcate the divides between the wealthy and the poor, or better, those absorbed and integrated into the system and those who are not, could be resolved if each party were free to continue functioning with their own set of resources and spaces, if it were not for the parasitic relationship that keeps the rich and absorbed bound to the poor and unabsorbed.
This is not merely a social problem. The effects of the drought throughout the West coast of the United States, which can be attributed to a constellation of interconnected pathologies such as agricultural overproduction, population, mismanagement of resources, and rising temperatures and erratic climate conditions, lays bare the consequences of the totalizing human claim to territory. A human claim whose nature is artificially truncated to that of the capitalist, or the mature expression of this domineering system of compression and circumscription.
I am not even speaking of the fields of fallow crops, dry wells, and the infernos consuming the hillsides - though these things are plenty significant in themselves - but the personal lives of individuals supposedly removed from the worst effects. Perhaps equally worthy of consideration are the distortions in both natural and artificial habitats and the effects these distortions have on the lives of humans and other forms of life.
For example, rats and mice have become omnipresent in many urban environments, including our own space. And the ants have been particularly virulent this summer.
The rats have infested the chicken coop. They are here to stay. We no longer have the energy or resources required to plug the rat holes and reinforce the chicken coop, at least for now. The cat sits and watches the rats, and that is all.
The ants are ever-present, constantly crawling over me throughout the day. I have become used to them, less uneasy about living alongside them day by day. As long as one doesn't leave out meats, sugars, or other energy-rich food stores, the ants generally keep to themselves.
There are ways to mitigate some of these issues, and make life easier on all parties involved, if the energy, time, and resources are available to do so. Or else if one completely can't stand the growing incursions of other forms of life, one is free to dash about various chemical agents every which way and poison one's living space.
In so many words, the powerful are bound to the powerless through the insatiable desire to control and consume all life, a binding together which amplifies the tensions between disparate life systems by attempting to hold all of them together with force. If one is to live in an urban environment for the time being, one is necessarily going to live alongside the various forms of life gathering together around the remaining resources and energy, as they are. At least until one can begin to make the systematic changes necessary to solve these problems at their roots. And alas, time is short.
Please note that this was another difficult piece to put together, and will read as such.
Moving forward, this phenomenon is something to be experienced, and one feels its effects most acutely when one is attempting to organize an event or persistent organization within a community that scales beyond a gathering of family, friends, or neighbors.
That is, when one begins to traverse the social texture beyond the scope of one's selected companions and social settings, one gains a greater sense of the social topographies which are found in a community. One is afforded a greater sample of personality and class markers, and what's more, how all of these things are interacting together.
This is something one has to find out for oneself, as the fragmentation of our cultural, political, and economic landscape conceals its own nature, as we tend to move between isolated systems which appear to be cohesive in their isolation: corporate bodies, commercial spaces, private gatherings, institutional systems, transportation networks, and other systems, though of course one can witness all matter of dysfunction within these isolated systems as well.
To cut to the chase, one finds a landscape today in which the well-off, well-adjusted, integrated, and absorbed dominate and command a lion's share of resources with rigid objective-based behaviors, various symbolic and technical modes of communication, hierarchical and rigid organization structures, and complex technological systems.
Outside of these contrived, compressed systems exist the poor, the marginalized, the unabsorbed, and un-integrated who persist with their own structures of ad-hoc support, or who are otherwise taken up into the prison-industrial complex. Here we see lower tech and social modes of support. Communication here is becoming oral and immediate. Attention tends to become more diffuse both through lack of nutrition and an over-abundance of irritants and alarms that require attention, which include but are not limited to body pains, pest problems, crime, domestic disputes, anxiety, depression, diseases, financial troubles, and various social humiliations.
Over time, these disparate systems become ever more polarized as each takes on a more definite shape. The wealthy and absorbed attempt to improve with finer detail the functions of the system they have always administrated, while increasing the activity and frequency of these functions to account for economic contraction, labor exclusion, energy adulteration and contraction, cultural and political antagonisms, and crumbling infrastructure among other things, all of which makes the system more rigid and authoritarian.
The poor and unabsorbed on the other hand are left to their own devices, to make do with what they have in increasingly widening "sacrifice zones," deserts of commerce and resources. Their living patterns within these environments grow ever more ingrained as time passes.
It is important to note that there are vast asymmetries between these two groups. Considering that capital seeks to transform all of its surroundings into itself, making its surroundings dependent on itself, the poor and unrepresented cannot be seen to exist as an autonomous unit. And as capital gives up on the industrialization process when its profitability drops, it leaves those transformed communities behind.
The victims of capital still need to function like capital, as they have been deprived of land and community, but then they are denied the resources for doing so, so they must subsist with the resources they have left.
In other words, the over-extension of over-complexity destroys the individuals left outside of its expression, due to the tensions that arise in the social sphere, which are attributable to a centralized sphere of power which monopolizes available energy while attempting to convert surrounding life fields into replicas of itself, without actually tending to those transformed life fields.
There is a diffusion of social intent, so that it all has to be pulled together with authoritarian compression mechanisms: institutions and economic corporate bodies which situate by force the functions required for their perpetual operation.
It is as a grim tide, which washes over and situates individuals within the economic machine when it is powered, but which then wanes and leaves individuals left out to fend for themselves in their diminished state.
Within the authoritarian modes of compression themselves, one finds incredible social constituting pressures which are governed by binary categorizations and sorting mechanisms. And so this mode of functioning is constantly clashing with the diffuse social environments outside of it, with its multitudes of oscillating impulses and desires, material disorder, and general economic chaos.
Working within the diffusion, I could not help but think of myself as one of those sad, water-starved tomato plants, attempting its growth in a variety of directions but wilting at all of its limbs, working nevertheless to attempt to bear fruit.
This state of affairs requires both a growing, delimited body which seeks to capture energy flows external to itself, rearranging them to sustain itself, as well as a distinct governing system of logic which regulates the body. Problems of overcomplexity or overburdened bodies should result in the decoupling of said bodies from each other, so that they can exist in accordance with their own logic.
But we have a problem in which the various constituents of a body are not free to leave, and so complexity continues to grow to account for a relationship which is failing with ever-greater frequency. Further, the very mechanisms required for maintaining this relationship are administrated with ever-greater speed to account for growing dysfunction, further advancing the pathologies caused by this process, not to mention the resource usage and output of linear waste.
The fatally contradictory modes of functioning which demarcate the divides between the wealthy and the poor, or better, those absorbed and integrated into the system and those who are not, could be resolved if each party were free to continue functioning with their own set of resources and spaces, if it were not for the parasitic relationship that keeps the rich and absorbed bound to the poor and unabsorbed.
This is not merely a social problem. The effects of the drought throughout the West coast of the United States, which can be attributed to a constellation of interconnected pathologies such as agricultural overproduction, population, mismanagement of resources, and rising temperatures and erratic climate conditions, lays bare the consequences of the totalizing human claim to territory. A human claim whose nature is artificially truncated to that of the capitalist, or the mature expression of this domineering system of compression and circumscription.
I am not even speaking of the fields of fallow crops, dry wells, and the infernos consuming the hillsides - though these things are plenty significant in themselves - but the personal lives of individuals supposedly removed from the worst effects. Perhaps equally worthy of consideration are the distortions in both natural and artificial habitats and the effects these distortions have on the lives of humans and other forms of life.
For example, rats and mice have become omnipresent in many urban environments, including our own space. And the ants have been particularly virulent this summer.
The rats have infested the chicken coop. They are here to stay. We no longer have the energy or resources required to plug the rat holes and reinforce the chicken coop, at least for now. The cat sits and watches the rats, and that is all.
The ants are ever-present, constantly crawling over me throughout the day. I have become used to them, less uneasy about living alongside them day by day. As long as one doesn't leave out meats, sugars, or other energy-rich food stores, the ants generally keep to themselves.
There are ways to mitigate some of these issues, and make life easier on all parties involved, if the energy, time, and resources are available to do so. Or else if one completely can't stand the growing incursions of other forms of life, one is free to dash about various chemical agents every which way and poison one's living space.
In so many words, the powerful are bound to the powerless through the insatiable desire to control and consume all life, a binding together which amplifies the tensions between disparate life systems by attempting to hold all of them together with force. If one is to live in an urban environment for the time being, one is necessarily going to live alongside the various forms of life gathering together around the remaining resources and energy, as they are. At least until one can begin to make the systematic changes necessary to solve these problems at their roots. And alas, time is short.
Listening
Our society would do well to stop and listen to those most oppressed, those places in the body politic which are pressed down upon the most.
Many types of pain responses can indeed be local. But eventually that pain travels. Great enough pain in a given area can lead to more pain in sympathetic areas. And soon enough the body is sweating, the heart is racing, and the breaths are coming harder.
Oh right, it is all connected.
Many types of pain responses can indeed be local. But eventually that pain travels. Great enough pain in a given area can lead to more pain in sympathetic areas. And soon enough the body is sweating, the heart is racing, and the breaths are coming harder.
Oh right, it is all connected.
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