Thought and Reality

For now a placeholder meta post. One of the dogs peed on the router, and consequently, my internet life has been seriously disrupted, which has both good and bad consequences.

One consequence is that several pieces of writing are on hold, but I hope to get to them shortly.

For now, another thought and reality post.

Sure I've got tons of posts like these, but it is worth pumping out yet another iteration, another articulation, so as to continue to strengthen my own understanding through writing. It is generally repetition that builds strength - more on that last bit later.

For now, there is an interesting argument here, which is also built off of a sound scientific observation: that our realities are very much localized and subjective. The argument progresses to a chilling suggestion that all we have are private worlds, and the evidence bears this out.

But then the accumulation of those subjective and localized realities does form an objective totality, which, it is true, we have no conscious or symbolic access to.  I've been working for almost a decade trying to develop a streamlined philosophy that integrates multidisciplinary knowledge, a project whose object was crystallized after reading about half of Capital, Volume 1. How to build an onion, piece by piece, so that someone can peel its layers back once again and reach its core?

But the truth of the matter is that we are still talking about a patchwork of various interrelated knowledge and experience systems. I've still failed to see in my own conscious and symbolic thought a seamless whole. I can only jump from image to image, system of thought to system of thought, and put them together ad-hoc, one after the other.

Like looking through a pair of binoculars, there is only the juxtaposition of two images from two different, and limited angles. One can never see the middle, what is between the two images, and of course this metaphor holds for unaided human vision. But apprehension of the middle can be satisfied through the intuition, and that is the point.

It takes a sort of faith in the totality. That is partially what religion is about. When one looks out and feels an existential terror, and one sees only fragmented realities and disconnection, one is seeing a certain truth, but it is a truth predicated on the feeling that one is alone and isolated. It is an outlook that is valid, but which still exists as a limited experience in time and space.

The religious ecstatic vision is usually all that is needed to put this patchwork together. One feels connected and satisfied. Or else one gets along with one's peers, and is accepted, and feels connected, and all of this happens in the background. One fails to see the seams in the connected experience. But here the danger exists where one mistakenly believes that the patchwork of images which has been put together is in fact the ultimate reality. One is left to admit that loneliness and existential terror is a gift, and that with it, one can build a sound continuity.

Quit Eating My Lunch

Here's an interesting discussion on a source of unpaid labor, a source which often remains invisible because of existing preconceptions on labor and earning. 

Of course the idea of "paid" labor becomes pretty preposterous when we consider the history. When we look at feminists' observations of unpaid care labor, and we gaze over the history of unpaid slave labor, both in agriculture and on the railroads in particular, and then we look at the dividends paid off by stealing land through enclosure and the invasion of indigenous land, well, the concept of paid labor becomes pretty absurd; an insult even, to say the least. 

But for the sake of the discussion, let's assume the concept intact, at least as a starting point, though we'll quickly find it reduced to tatters yet again. 

The Internet has wrought all sorts of havoc on our conceptions of labor and property, a good thing I think. Take the "illegitimate" torrent and streaming sites, which distribute free media to consumers all over the world, while collecting ad revenue and possibly spreading spyware and other surreptitious mechanisms to scrape in an income and keep their operations running. 

In their own way, they're performing a valuable service by distributing media in an efficient manner, but they have to do it in a way that is declared illegitimate by an entertainment industry that has been slow to adjust its business model to meet digital realities, such as nearly instant delivery and infinitely replicable media artifacts, which are free. 

Of course the costs are now passed on to those who maintain the physical infrastructure that facilitates media distribution and consumption, and those costs are passed on by the owners to those who have the privilege of using the infrastructure. This sector of the market has been profoundly restructured. 

Newer tech companies however have been a little more savvy to the unique market properties of the Internet. The idea now is to distribute free platforms, whereupon user activity generates profit over time, such as by providing free content, data, and eyeballs for advertisers, all of which goes unpaid, only to be rewarded by various free services built into the platforms.   

And so the media companies demand that customers pay a fair share for their products, while the customers spend so much unpaid time online, and get paid in peanuts by their existing employers, while additionally being taxed and tolled to hell by various governments and rentiers. Let's feign surprise as us fleeced sheep have no more wool to spare, and deign to get relief on free media besides. 

Basically we have a situation in which everyone is eating everyone else's lunch, so everyone has to get their lunch from somewhere else. Eventually you have to reach someone who doesn't get a lunch. Though of course it is much more than that. 

To point to a parallel phenomenon, the mortgage loan becomes so chopped up and fragmented in the course of becoming a derivative, and passes through so many hands, and undergoes so many fraudulent processes of authentication, that we can no longer tell who the rightful owner of the property is. The chain of title ownership system becomes steadily corrupted, and we merely demure to the judgement of large financial institutions, who for all intents and purposes decide to go on their merry way stealing people's houses in order to regain solvency. 

Similarly, we have no simple way of determining labor and earning on the Internet marketplace. There are no mechanisms, no punch cards or time clocks to distinguish between labor and leisure, and we simply demure to the tech companies and advertisers who profit off of all that free activity. 

All of this goes pretty far to explain Silicon Valley's support for the universal basic income. Reason enough to raise one's eyebrows right off the bat, but it couldn't hurt, especially those hurting the most, those left without a lunch.   

Russkies

Besides a short and decent analysis of international affairs and the future of the US empire, the article makes the much-needed point that Trump more closely resembles Yeltsin than he does Putin.

The article does not go into enough detail on this point, but it nevertheless provides a clear antidote to much of the nonsense that is coming out of Democratic-aligned media organs as of recently, which consequently, contributes to the obfuscation and the Trump-obsessing that characterizes the perpetual dysfunction of our national discourse, also pointed out by the article.

What seems like a relatively trivial comparison actually has the result of yielding a richer understanding of global affairs, making possible an anticipation of the future which may be tenuous, but that is not actively misleading the American population into all sorts of self-destructive avenues. Of course, I'm going to be one of the last people willing to serve a ringside seat, coaching and pepping up a battered US empire whose collapse will be a net positive for much of the world.

Much energy goes into comparing Trump with Putin, in order to illustrate the rise of right wing populist and nationalist entities around the world. We're not talking about a creative observation of connection here; Trump has repeatedly expressed his admiration for the leader's authoritarian leanings in particular. But this comparison does more to obfuscate than reveal.

Somehow, Putin's mass popularity in that country is attributed to a nebulous mix of state-dominated propaganda and a cult of personality, and a people with agency - who are presented with an unsatisfying menu of shitty choices - are reduced to a population of authoritarian, Putin-worshiping automatons.

What is repeatedly left out - and not without reason - is the wave of privatization and deregulation that Yeltsin encouraged during his reign, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While selling off everything that wasn't bolted down in that nation to various oligarchs, the perpetually drunk and unhinged Yeltsin (read Trump's disposition and governing style in general) made good friends with US leaders like the first Bush and Clinton, who were eager to secure for their business friends control of or at least participation in various national resources, including oil fields, which were among the most coveted. The felled nation was turned into a massive looting opportunity.

The private evisceration of the Russian people rivaled that of their oppression under the Soviet Union, so much so that probing the matter has indicated a nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, a nostalgia that not even Putin's state capitalism could banish, though he certainly attempted to emulate some of the old regime. As evidenced by his sustained popularity indicators, his efforts don't necessarily amount to nil.

Back to the turn of the century, this is the backdrop with which Putin came to power. His nationalist instincts lead him to actually punish and throw in jail the most corrupt oligarchs. Of course upon actually "draining the swamp" he ushered in another form of corruption more favorable to his own power, but it was a corruption that was at least less exploitative than before. Putin recognized that national power depended on not completely pulverizing one's population, and instead of tearing away all of their social safety nets, providing at least basic health care, education, and housing resources. Who would have thought?

It is a testament to the degraded state of national discourse, and global affairs for that matter, that one has to go about defending Putin. Much like the Mafia moving in and taking control of a blighted neighborhood, when someone is forced to clean up the mess, you're going to get what you get.

But Russia is essentially a petrostate, and the low global oil prices have strained that nation's population. Combined with perpetual sanctions on the part of Western powers, the threatened state is taking more aggressive foreign policy measures to secure its interests.

Meanwhile Trump blossoms into a US version of Yeltsin, selling away the republic and feeding the American people to the wolves, while promising to do the opposite, at least for the whiter, more privileged segments of the population. It could be that one day he will grow up to be an authoritarian dictator, much like his Russian hero, but it doesn't seem that his personality or his competence could pull off such a transformation.

What is more likely is that someone with that ability will rise after the Trump administration is done wrecking the empire. The national humiliation and desire for rejuvenation will prove to be a dangerous instinct in the face of these foreign affairs. And Putin, already bristling at the rebukes of Western nations, will find increasingly nationalist and closed societies flexing their muscles in his face, pursuing throwback mercantilist policy and racing to secure the meager resources left on the planet.

Admittedly, it could all go very differently, and I really have no idea what will happen. However, mapping out such a timeline of events does allow us to think more clearly about the moving parts that actually make up our global politics. The Democratic establishment would much rather paint Trump as neo-Hitler, and Putin perhaps as neo-Stalin, and imagine that the two are really working closer together than what is probably likely, than to actually contend with the failings of this country's political establishment in general, and its fealty to rapacious oligarchs.

Such a failure may bring us face to face with an actual bogeyman or two, bogeymen which necessarily emerge from collective failings, and who don't necessarily pop out of thin air like the Satans of the fundamentalist Christian imagination.

Rise of the Machines?

It is a common thread that embattled political establishments in the Western world have turned constantly to machines, Big Data, and AI to hold and maintain power. The Hillary and Obama teams were known for employing behavioral profiling algorithms and other techniques for guiding their political marketing efforts, and the military has been known to use such technologies in their foreign propaganda efforts.

Even the right wing populists are courting such forces, which is really not a big surprise, given their odd antagonistic Oedipal relations with the establishment. In other words, they hate the establishment not for what it is, but for what it has that they themselves don't have.

It takes capital to produce these technologies, and the logic of capital itself requires its perpetuation to hinge on the decisions of friendly establishment politicians, which necessarily makes them natural allies. Machines, data, and AI allow us to automate a variety of tasks, amplifying the labor of the human beings that control them. These technologies are a way to extend the material power of the powers that marshal them, and as human power becomes gradually more unreliable and expensive, machine power becomes more desirable to dominant power itself.

However high our levels of trepidation reach in worrying about the revolt of the machines, it is still a common instinct for Imperial personalities to rely on machines to gain and maintain power. Machines don't harbor political opinions. They don't talk back. They do exactly as they are told.

Or do they?

Machines are still built and programmed by human beings, and their very existence and functions are predicated by assumptions and axioms held by their creators. Their construction and programming are also contingent on the organization, harmony, and efficacy of the human labor that goes into them. Not only are our ideals about technological efficacy proving to be overblown, but the economic organizations which give rise to that technology in the first place are even failing to deliver basic promised functions of the product itself.

There is much more to explore here in time, but human relations and human material cooperation efforts are in the process of corrupting just about everywhere. The reasons for that are very complex, but of course they are intimately connected to the reasons that ambitious politicians and capitalists have for increasingly placing their hopes and desires in these technologies in the first place.

Political and Economic Chaos

The strange spectacle of the constantly morphing Trump administration provides plenty of opportunities to interrogate the nature of chaos in general. Because after all, what in the world is chaos? This is a slippery concept: we assign chaos to processes that we are at a loss to understand, so we try to anticipate them by removing expectation of anticipation. And we can anticipate where we have the time and energy to study and catalog, and even then some organizational frameworks simply break down, until new ones are formed with greater explanatory power.

A shattering vase looks quite chaotic indeed, but the many fragments are bursting in the directions they were supposed to. And what exactly is organized about the vase in the first place, apart from the fact that we formed it in accordance with our needs?

In a very mundane way, the chaos that is my brother's room suits him just fine. I come upon the room and view the planes of discontinuity and fragmentation with a sense of horror and desolation, as the whole of the room speaks to me, whereas he just throws things every which way and then retrieves them when he wants them, without much of a thought to the spacial quality of this discontinuity. Though even the sense of the whole presupposes a certain sensibility.

Chaos looks very different to people with short time horizons that are dominant in the perception. To someone with good short term instincts, chaos is very much a welcome element. Within a constantly shifting environment, the swift enjoy a sort of invisibility to move towards their interests, while the planners, moral proselytizers, and lovers of law sit scratching their heads and rubbing their knuckles.

And of course with chaos comes the dissolution of various organized centers of power which can no longer cope with their surroundings, and the formation of new ones which can. Chaos opens up potentiality, it frees up resources and connections towards new ends.

The Trump administration has caused all sorts of chaos, particularly in respect to the rule of law and their relationships with the media. But the problems that they are setting out to fix in their right wing ways are necessarily solved by transgression, particularly transgression on constitutional law. If you have spent decades simplifying complex social, political, economic problems in the form of a constant assault of propaganda, eventually you're going to have a political class that has to act on the realities generated by that propaganda, especially when cascading crises finally come up to meet it.

This is altogether easier to do because the rule of law has eroded so dramatically in the past couple of decades. A new organizational center of power is forming, after the old frameworks buttressed by law slowly crumble. So you have judges second guessing legal opinions, and law enforcement agencies bumping up against each other and enforcing or not enforcing certain orders. The confusion and chaos is arising through a sort of friction between competing visions of government.

On the other hand, the administration has been heavy-handed with its interactions with a hostile establishment media, though while these media professionals are screaming about the chilling of the First Amendment, it is actually their particular oligarchs whose channels of access are steadily eroding, and the administration is reaching out to smaller media outlets around the country, opening up the space for new entrants. Of course the victors that are selected for in this process are another thing altogether, considering the self-regard of the administration.

And where chaos exists in the face of an organized power that still possesses its faculties, there will exist a repression, a forced order of that chaos, on behalf of organized power. The nature and direction of the repression will be taken from the nature of the organized power itself. Marx noted that the coincidence of an anarchic free market and an autocratic private workplace was not some strange paradox, but a necessary condition for their mutual perpetuation.

With a chaotic and uncertain marketplace, there is the constant pressure of competition and economic warfare, which necessarily situates businesses into an autocratic state of organization, so as to maximize productivity and remain competitive. At the same time, the fearful and power-hungry executives are constantly moving to expand their operations, merge with competitors, and destroy enemies.

The capitalists love their state of anarchy; it feeds their ecstasy, their warlike spirit that pervades economic conquest. But to view this in a finer grain, it is the dominant capitalists that push most vigorously for free markets and deregulation, whereas the losing capitalists find themselves on the side of protectionism and regulation that is somewhat harmless to their bottom lines, and which affects others that they do business with. So you see the telecoms pushing for deregulation of their industry, and the majority of the Silicon Valley firms that use their pipes are pushing for net neutrality regulation.

A centrally-planned marketplace would clear up some of these problems, though we do know now that they will create new ones of their own, chiefly in the form of the dense bureaucracies that grow up around such efforts in order to manage the sheer complexity of the undertaking. But of course, this is a different set of problems that will not necessarily be solved by the capitalists' noble and courageous spirit, a fact that accounts for the viciousness with which "socialist" and "communist" are spit out in public discourse, though few truly know what those things may entail. And even those vile words are regaining favor, a sign of the growing weariness of unchecked private enterprise.

The victorious centers of organized power that arise out of this chaos will be the ones that properly situate themselves to their surroundings. The ongoing hybrid of selective deregulation, cost cutting, upper class tax cutting, protectionism, and military spending will produce an equally selective environment for those looking to rise to the top.

The desires that drive capital accumulation, global integration, and domination have been largely kept in place, while desires for change, national protectionism, and even more intense domination are coming up against them, producing offspring of their own. It is not hard to guess where things are going. Nevertheless, the pockets of potentiality that are opened up may give some more room to activists looking to do some good work.