High Tech Exploitation

The hyper-connectivity of the Internet has allowed capital to intensify its exploitation. Companies like Uber, AirBnB, Google, Facebook and etc. are constantly in the headlines, or at least in leftist consciousness, appearing as the new exploiters par excellence. But how?

As in many cases before, it is arbitrage that has always been the secret weapon of the businessman. With arbitrage, the businessman occupies two spaces at once, and upon discovering a strength in one space and a weakness in the other, uses the former against the latter.

This is most obvious in the form of globalization, with advanced communication and data management technologies that allow companies to exploit vulnerable labor, tax, and environmental law in developing countries to gather the maximal return on investment.

 But there are other ways in which this arbitrage plays out. For example, the Internet, with its hyper-connectivity, has supplanted the function of actual space, which allows people to gather and coordinate cooperation. These companies are taking advantage of a gap in social and legal understanding of the implications of an Internet sphere of interaction.

It took time and suffering to achieve the legal standards which govern actual human relations in space. The technological developments which have allowed an entirely different modality of interaction have happened too fast for legal and regulatory systems that are dominated by older generations, who relate differently and think differently about these technologies.

Further the technologies and the levels of abstraction are very dense. Within the Internet domain it is easier to hide one's deeper motivations and intentions, though our understanding of these things is quickly catching up. And it is easier to hide and wave away failures like security flaws and thefts, where it is difficult to trace hackers or stolen data, and so there is a plausible deniability of customer vulnerabilities. 

This happens in investment as well. All of this vaporware, such as the self-driving car and space exploration technologies, with their incredible complexities and abstract efficacies, can be hyped by investors for as long as their actual implementation is delayed, with all of the attendant resources flowing to those projects until it is too late.

The dense and complex technologies, upon necessitating divisions of labor and therefore divisions of understanding and perception, coupled with rapid and explosive cultural, social, and economic change, allow for a dense foliage to navigate, a perfect camouflage for those nimble businessmen who know how to navigate it and derive advantage from it.

And so the nimble capitalist, with his socially permitted and generated resources, gladly navigates the jagged and explosive social and cultural landscapes that he plays a tremendous part in cultivating, and derives advantage from the many discontinuities in visibility and understanding that arise from them.

Breaking Down Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance reveals some very interesting boundaries between different subsystems in the cognitive process. And of course it does: dissonance is essentially a crashing together of two contradictory or at least incongruous elements, which by their differing natures, cannot occupy the same harmonic space at the same time, and so the crash-relation between those two things reveals as much.

It might also be useful to further break down the concepts of harmony and dissonance, as they are both used so often for their explanatory power, a power which is not often visited in detail. It would take quite a bit of time to get into the physics of sound waves, their interaction, and what that means for our aural and emotional perception of them, but at least this much can be said: a harmony implies that two concurrent elements can coexist indefinitely with each other, whereas a dissonance implies that a concurrence of two incompatible elements can only be resolved through spatial and/or temporal separation, or that one or the other decays enough to be supplanted by the other, or that they both cancel each other out eventually.

Back to cognitive dissonance itself, and what exactly it reveals. Thinking about something and that actual something are two very different things. Actual somethings tend to be accessed when we act upon them in some way, which is connected to how we feel about them as well, whereas thinking can be administrated on an entirely different plane altogether, though this plane ultimately relies upon the plane of action in the end, as it is action and feeling that organizes the very possibility and basis of thought.

But this is very much a two way street, which is what makes cognitive dissonance such an interesting phenomenon. Because thoughts can also be used to organize actions to achieve a certain result as well, so that these separate systems depend on each other and influence each other.

And a thought, as a vessel, can be filled with a feeling or impetus to action. And that vessel must be examined from time to time, to verify exactly what is in it, and whether that accords with what one is feeling or doing at the moment. And thought, as a vessel full of something, can be used to retrieve that thing, or evoke that thing, that feeling or impetus to action.

And thoughts and feelings and actions must be constantly harmonized if one is to be psychically comfortable, and at home in the world. What this means for moving in the world is another thing entirely.

Cultural Futures

There are many different plants - onions, lettuces, cabbages, kales, etc. - that will bolt or "go to seed" upon being stressed. In other words, they will transfer energy away from their growth and development, and put it towards seed production and transmission.

So these plants have evolved with the instinct, upon being stressed within a current period of time, to give up on their present selves and transmit their seeds, their future selves, hopefully to survive the time of stress and begin a new life cycle elsewhere.

It isn't exactly the same, but it is striking how much time, energy, and thought we are putting into our cultural production - our media, games, and storytelling - and all of the infrastructure that sustains and transmits it. And perhaps this overlaps with futurist technologies and conceptions as well...all those things that are bound up with ideals that are supposed to outlast material generations, and reproduce those later generations in their image, and establish a sort of continuity with the past, present, and future.

To add a note of ominousness to this - a specialty of mine - the smart weeder knows that the thistle in particular is especially vulnerable when it is flowering. All of the energy is going away from its root system and towards its seed production and flowering. They pull right up much easier if you wait a bit.

Planting in The Burbs

Suburban landscaping - which, as an outgrowth of greater cultural and economic motivations, tends to reflect those motivations - is fundamentally cruel in its effects.

The suburban landscaping project seeks to tear everything around it out of its context, to serve the pleasure of the individual who has the energy and resources to do or permit the tearing.

The suburban individual, which has become impoverished due to a lack of connection, constantly needs to form connections at a rapid pace, connections which decay just as quickly, and require a constant changing out and renewal.

So a popular plant is torn from its context, and placed into its planter, and as soon as the owner becomes bored with this arrangement, or the property changes owners, which is also increasingly the case, then the plant must be torn out again and destroyed, along with all of the communities that sprung up around that plant.

All of the promise and potential behind that small ecology which is artificially started is swept away, just as easily as it was suggested and initiated. This is a cruelty that is built into the movements of capital itself.

The tearing does seek to preserve certain valued parts: the plant and some of the soil perhaps, but then everything that is connected is done violence to and swept away. Communities on many different levels, whether human, animal, plant, etc. all experience this to an extent. The violence that is done needs to be just enough to move things where the powerful want them, but little enough that there is a catastrophic failure of whatever is being extracted, but even that consideration is rapidly passing away. So whether one is destroyed or preserved is a matter of luck, spatial location, differential of power, value to dominant culture, and etc. 

And anything that is torn from its context to be artificially grafted into the next requires a tearing of other things from other contexts, so as to connect it and situate it to its new context, as everything is interconnected and requires this. So the tearing triggers many other tears, and the new arrangement rapidly decays, and so it all begins afresh.

A question is begged here: why the rapid decay? A very interesting question, but one I'll have to look at another time.

Aha

Moments of realization - those "aha" moments - actually feel pretty good. We handle things that feel good in many different ways, such as constantly chasing new ones or freezing and repeating what was found before. Oftentimes a reverence descends around that thing, itself leading to many different outcomes such as worshiping it, evangelizing it, or claiming propriety over it and walling it off. Products of the intellect are no different, and often lead to these different outcomes.

It Isn't Working

A broken bone which is supported by muscle, such as a collar bone, can really start to hurt when that supportive muscle is exhausted. This basic relation, though dissimilar to society in many ways, can shed some light on some of our problems too.

Really, a society itself must constantly incorporate energy into itself and organize itself so as to maintain itself, so that all of its constituents have the strength and vitality to support each other. Today, that simply doesn't seem to be the case.

Part of the confusion and pain behind all of this, then, may very well owe itself to a working ideal that assumes all of the productive, materially efficacious, and organizational capacity of our society is still intact, and that if only we put the pieces together where they should go, then everything will be able to support each other.

And that ideal is coming up against a reality that everything is in fact weakened, and exhausted simultaneously, and upon acting against each other, further advance themselves into that state.

Avoidance

One of the many tendencies of the sensitive soul - a sensitivity that stands amidst an empire characterized by violence in its many forms - is to move away from suffering wherever it appears. An admirable pursuit to be sure!

But at this point in time, with a cursed but illuminating hindsight, it appears that this avoidance only led to a polarized ideal of suffering and harmony, so long as the avoidance took place within the logic of the empire itself. Those privileged enough with the energy and resources to avoid the former and pursue the latter did so, only to smooth out the rougher edges of the entire system, extend its life, and spread its abuses to a far greater breadth and scale.

These piecemeal fixes are not for nothing. A slightly less cruel world is indeed a slightly less cruel world. And the boundaries around what exactly constitutes this "system" are never completely clear. But one does eventually have to decide what to do with one's limited energy. Perhaps now it takes moving into the suffering, with the intent to maintain what one can of the harmony regardless. Because there will always be suffering within and without any given system, and there will always be harmony in those places too. Where is each to be? What is one willing to do and work towards?

Attempt at a Metaphorical Aphorism

The tender, meaty, and water-filled cactus, upon finding itself in the desert, must cover itself in needles to survive.

The Human Condition

One incredible thing about the human condition is that there are so many different instantiations and variations of us, and we're all still the same basic stuff. The human body, the human totality, is constantly folding upon itself, and transforming itself. In this way it becomes difficult to describe the oil company or the private equity outfit like one might describe the virus, as a foreign invader. Though functionally you can still do this and it will yield the appropriate results.

In the end it is all humanity, which crashes into various geographically distinct states of affairs and is set in motion, to crash further into the rest of itself, and then the rest as they say is history.

I've Been Everywhere, Man

If it is the case that the ego is a mere mental construct, useful for integrating all of the various emergent phenomena that make up oneself, then in a way, it is also you that gets carried on within the emergent phenomena as it radiates outward and circulates in the world. And it is also you that is coming into and influencing oneself. The image and influence of you in another is you, just as the imprint of your boot on the earth is you. And the wind blowing your hair and reminding you of childhood is you.

You're Fired

Yes it has been quite astonishing - and at times quite comical - to witness the spectacle of the perpetual hiring and firing cycles in the present administration. It has become commonplace to observe that "they're dropping like flies," and a sporting past time has emerged to try to predict who is next in line to get the axe, so to speak. Though everyone has observed that such a phenomenon is "not normal," it is apparent that the political mainstream is at least content to sit by, leering with popcorn in hand, passively waiting as the next opportunity arises for the political changing of seats.

This is also completely disastrous though. First of all, the political culture is rapidly changing, with all institutions undergoing delegitimization, and an ideal as rosy as democracy itself quickly deteriorating. We've seen the Republicans in particular grow ever more bold in refusing the reality of basic election rules and outcomes.

We could very well have a couple of political cycles left, but how long can a constant cycling out of opposing parties - parties which also grow markedly similar in their effects - and the constant cycling in and out of individuals in institutional and administrative positions be sustained, before the entire function of the system itself - however ornamental it has become - is completely exhausted?

As we saw with bad assets and bad debt in the financial sphere, the toxic instruments and possessions could be circulated indefinitely as long as they were continuously changing hands, but as soon as their passage seized up, and the fear set in, the entire web of obligations evaporated and the entire financial system seized up. In an economic world now deeply financialized, so little can be done without the impetus for financial gain, so that the system in catastrophic failure had to be propped up by a government that was itself still getting by on fumes of legitimacy. And the financial system still has not been fixed either.

An authoritarian-leaning president has been rapidly shedding the outer layers that are supposed to insulate him from total power, no doubt. And we are left to sit and eat popcorn, and perhaps watch as the fuse burns away, and follow the rope with our eyes, and hope that unlike in the cartoons, the rope isn't connected to some preposterous pile of TNT or some such.

On Privatization

Privatization is a very interesting phenomenon in that its effects occur so far outside the understanding of those who promote it. Those professing to set human activity free into the market may very well believe that human flourishing will be a result, or otherwise private and selfish motivations have simply become too closely fused with this curious faith.

What the faith in privatization does achieve is that it serves to break apart the body politic to feed the ever-ascendant god - or perhaps more appropriately a demon - of finance. So that anything that privatization is applied to necessarily breaks down, as finance is proportionally inflated further. Privatization is not just the selling off of state assets to private actors, though this activity is certainly a clear distillation of the principle.

Privatization often falls on the heels of serious political conflict or collective trauma, in which collective political solutions become exhausted and impassable, and there is a recourse to faith in some vague notion of the market, which in its present state, exists as a ravenous beast which devours value and destroys communication.

Needless to say, the ravenous market beast, upon tasting the meat of deconsolidated social wealth, is driven to a frenzy, always sniffing out and even provoking the conversion of social wealth into private wealth.

Let's put it another way. Underneath privatization is a symbiotic and perpetual process of destruction that begets itself. Over the course of history, as the body politic undergoes catastrophic levels of traumatic force, and subjects its surroundings to that same force, the private actor is generated and becomes ascendant. The private actor, upon breaking away from a vessel that only serves to smother it, seeks to localize power and take back some notion of control.

What this achieves is the formation of an alternate body of activity that takes on a life of its own. Social production and wealth, upon being separated from the context of its prior social situation, is reinserted into a financialized process of accumulation. This naturally weakens the public sphere further, throwing public institutions deeper into a paralysis that only serves to strengthen the argument of privatization, an argument that is ever more forcefully advanced as the financial sphere grows, fed by the detritus of the privatization that it encourages.

On the other hand, the financial reconsolidation destroys the existing communication within production and service by supplanting it with a command and control structure that favors wealth extraction and accumulation above all else, leaving other questions of quality and cooperation to languish. The once robust structures of production are cut to the bone to favor extraction, thus guaranteeing a decline in general quality of product and service, and driving increasing swathes of the population - which are increasingly taxed under both inflating finance and atrophying government - into further precarity.

And so! A self-reinforcing destruction, within which a growing misery proliferates among the vulnerable, and those lucky lottery winners on top further the destruction, dreaming of a glorious market savior.  

Mimicked Patterns

Something happens if you pay attention to an LED candle, and this is something that happens with many types of creations that mimic nature. You can pick up on the pattern of the flickering light, and begin to anticipate how exactly it will flicker. This eventually causes the light to lose its charm. After enough repetitions, the flicker becomes boring. Better not to pay attention to it at all, but let its effects continue in the background.

Predictable patterns lose their charm and become boring upon concentrated and repeated analysis. So a product may concern itself completely with generating ever newer and sophisticated patterns, while the comparable patterns in nature are always changing in subtle ways, and which escape analysis and mastery, maintaining their positions in that ever-elusive realm of mystery and charm.   

Traffic Patterns

Besides the traditional and institutionalized 9 to 5 urban and suburban work day cycle, one of the stronger influences on the work day is the basic fear of the daily commute. Many workers prefer to structure their day around the heavy commute traffic periods, when all of the working world is set loose to circulate between work sites and homes. Most people aren't too interested in sitting in an enclosed steel box, stopping and going, surrounded by aggression and mutual suspicion, where a minor collision could mean anything from hours upon hours of navigating financial and medical bureaucratic systems to death. 

Freedom and Constraint

For a moment I'm going to use two basic opposing concepts to delineate the boundaries of something that is far more complex than the summation of simple oppositions. And as a matter of fact this has become a sort of intellectual habit of mine anyway.

The time has long since come for everyday discourse to abandon the traditional conceptions of freedom and constraint, and plenty of thinkers and activists have already done this. In public schools and commercial spheres, the unfortunate students and consumers are taught daily that freedom is the mere absence of constraint, and so upon the establishment of this binary hierarchy, freedom becomes the ultimate good to be sought after by the self-interested actualizer, while constraint is the ultimate evil that descends amidst laziness and/or criminality.

Countless writers and thinkers have already touched on positive freedom - as opposed to negative freedom - in order to posit a less vapid and destructive notion of freedom. With positive freedom, one is free to enter into community and connect with others, for example, which is often opposed to the neoliberal and libertarian propaganda that urges white men to simply shrug off constraint, forgoing that bothersome commitment to community in return for individually concentrated material power. What I'd like to touch on this time though is spiritual freedom.

In spiritual pursuits, it is often the case - paradoxically so - that hard constraints are what give rise to the emergence of spiritual freedom. If you think about this for a couple of minutes, it makes a lot of sense, and the paradox easily melts away: through failure, impossibility, or inevitability, one is deprived of action in a certain sphere, and so one is forced to give up entirely on those related pursuits.

As countless mystics have pointed out long ago, it is the appearance of an apparent paradox or contradiction that often illuminates the yawning reality behind language and symbol.

It is probable that much of the confusion arises from various conflicting motivating impulses and desires. If one desires to be materially free to pursue a whole variety of material goods and ideals, then one is in a sense constrained to organize one's powers and circumstances in order to achieve those ideals, and secure those goods.

Material freedom arises out of the abilities made possible by the localized concentration of material power, power which must necessarily be taken from something else. Through this type of freedom, one is necessarily constrained by the modalities that are required to sustain this freedom, and additionally one is constrained by the antagonism generated when one power extracts power from another.

For example, if I want to be free to pursue information on the Internet, or drive across the country in a car, then I am constrained to work for perpetual access to the material resources necessary to carry out that freedom. In the case of a society characterized by a highly specialized division of labor, this would require permission to access those resources - money in this case. Unless of course I wanted to mine all of the resources required, and then manufacture them myself into the working products.

And of course this material access to material freedom is dependent on external factors as well. Pursuing information on the Internet requires a commercial and political atmosphere in which that activity is possible, and driving across the country requires free passage across that country as well.

If one the other hand one desires to be free of unnecessary and/or destructive material desires and motivations - if one, in other words, wishes to be spiritually free - then it is much easier to be barred from ever pursuing those attachments and motivations which make material freedom possible in the first place.

If the chances are sufficiently low that one will become a millionaire or billionaire, for example, one gives up on pursuing profitable opportunities, and is spared all of the agitation, frustration, and competitive stress that come with those activities. One feels free because one no longer wants, as Buddhists have long since taught.

That global and visceral desire to fulfill an ideal, upon melting away, releases oneself from the bondage of all of the small and large impulses to pursue that ideal in the material world. But conversely, if one allows oneself to become bonded to the ideal of the spiritual adept, one becomes constrained in many material ways, but then is awarded with an open spiritual space in one's life path, free to pursue all of those spiritual goods unimpeded by material distraction.

This is not to say that all material freedom is a distraction. Some material freedom is necessary for spiritual freedom after all, such as good food and water, relative physical safety, a quiet space to pursue spiritual matters, and etc. In the end, it depends on what the overriding motivations and desires really entail.