Collective Feelings

I have some more partially finished posts to wrap up. Due to their being started and stopped at various times, and not worked continuously, they have problems with continuity and coherence. But they also contain in them themes and observations that I want to lay down for subsequent works, so please bear with me. 

So I'm sheepishly using this smartphone app called Visible, which is in the vein of fitness tracking apps, only that it is for sick people, specifically people with Long Covid and ME/CFS. Part of the sheepishness comes from the acknowledgement that this is a sad state of affairs: progress on our Long Covid research is best represented by the $1 billion ploughed into the NIH to not much avail. Large scale studies have amounted to some observational data, with these programs largely sputtering out under confusing and convoluted organizational failures, with stalling new patient admittances and no real treatments or relief to speak of. 

And then in direct contradiction to that perception, I've heard that there has been an explosion of research on Covid and Long Covid, with unprecedented advances in our understanding. You hear about various diffuse research projects happening upon new interesting revelations here and there. It is always somewhere else far away: somewhere with someone with better health care positioning is being studied and trying experimental treatments. There are waiting lists to get into these new clinics popping up that are going out for months. If you have Medicaid on the other hand, you can visibly see the staff stress levels rise as you walk in the door, and your tax dollars are hard at work trying to get you out the door as soon as you get in. 

So here peasant: have another app! What most of us are left with are private ventures such as phone apps funded with premium subscriptions to cool-gee-whiz wearable sensors and the like. I'm being a bit mean though. There are people trying to help in ways that they can with what they have; I get it. What the app does is collect data through an ingenious mechanism in which the phone's camera lens is used to take your pulse: the flash illuminates your finger as it is smooshed onto the lens, and the camera can read subtle visual variations in your fingertip as blood flows through it. 

The app calculates your resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV), and then builds a baseline profile based on an average of readings in similar circumstances. The HRV reading in particular does an uncanny job at predicting how your day will go in terms of symptom severity, which is backed up by a fair amount of data. This reading is taken in the morning, along with a survey of how your sleep was, and then in the evening you fill out a list of survey questions about symptom severity and how much you exerted yourself, and over time a profile is built up based on trends of sleep, exertion, morning resting heart rate and HRV, and symptom severity, and larger patterns over time can be further scrutinized. As a user, you can opt in to various research studies that collect the data. 

We can address the obvious problems with this arrangement right away. There is a loose set of introductory questions to determine whether you might have Long Covid or ME/CFS, and then away you go. You don't see anyone or interact with anyone or engage in further follow up: you just enter data into a phone app with very loose, subjective, self-determined standards and all of the anonymous (and decontextualized) data gets hoovered up by who knows who doing who knows what to organize everything. It isn't clear how the heart readings factor into everything, whether you're even taking them the right way, and how well any of this actually works. Who the hell then is at the wheel?

But then at the same time, something curious begins to happen as you regularly use the app. The daily routine of data collection takes on the vague emotional valence of a concerned friend. And the routine entry and organized representation of data helps you to begin organizing your own thoughts on your condition and keep track of what is happening, and it changes how you relate to your own illness and how you perceive and observe it, regardless of whether anything is actually working. So you start noticing things you hadn't noticed before; your behavior changes. And then through using the app you are connecting to other related outlets, such as listed podcasts and research projects, and through word of mouth and exploration you connect with other sources and collect new and useful information. A very mixed bag, you see. 

This skepticism, and the cloud of very complicated feelings surrounding that skepticism - not to mention the complex of feelings and intentions on the developers' and researchers' ends - will form the basis of the subsequent observations in this piece. 

So, to begin with, how to tackle something as complex as Long Covid? We're not just talking about a stationary target either. We're currently in the midst of a large scale disintegration of existing public institutions in the West: said institutions are terribly underfunded, short of staff, dysfunctional, and running on the last fumes of public legitimacy besides. Anyone who wants to solve real problems is increasingly dissuaded away from these institutions, which are increasingly dominated by grifters and social climbers and other nasties, whether in the remaining shells of their public presence, or within the large private institutions that have metastasized over the past couple of decades to take their place. And anyone who wants a problem solved is equally dissuaded in setting foot in such institutions. 

I've been in and out of various health institutions in the United States for 4 years now, constantly being held at arms length by Medicaid institutions that see me as an expense, and then being misunderstood and ignored and redirected by various medical professionals running on fumes themselves, squeezed by their administrations to handle large volumes at minimal cost and energy. And after those 4 years I have had very little to show for any of it, and have learned much more and benefitted much more simply doing independent research and inquiry and trying things for myself. Which is not necessarily a good thing: if one is ill or in distress, one should be able to go somewhere one knows about and get the help one seeks without being derided as a moocher. At some point in another post, I intend to illustrate some of the very serious consequences of this problem. 

To continue on though, that doesn't mean there is necessarily a shortage of talented, driven people who want to solve these problems, some of whom are still fighting in said institutions, though their number dwindles as they are steadily filtered out through pathological selective pressures. It also doesn't mean that everyone with a problem that needs solving is just rolling over either. So where is everyone going? Where is the energy going? 

The app that I've described, and the implied ecosystem that the app is a part of, partially suggests where some of that reorientation is happening. Cheap internet access and low-trafficked, low-value virtual real estate have allowed people from vast geographical distances to stitch together various alternative systems of thought, knowledge, and practice, activity which is occurring in more localized or smaller scale conditions, or otherwise drawing from the surplus of the larger decaying public and private institutions, all of which is connected and organized through internet communications. Activity is carried out through necessity and through what makes intuitive sense to individuals. 

One example I can think of is the disintegration of our creative and journalistic information ecosystems, which has resulted in the exodus of multitudes out to various blog, newsletter, podcast, and video networks, where they subsist with the help of patronage platforms like Patreon and Substack. New forms will gradually take shape around this exodus, with institutions edifying around that activity, set up to both formalize and rationalize that activity and at the same time better exploit it, and the "enshittification" progresses, forcing an exodus once again, and so on. 

We can generalize this to a social phenomenon that happens cyclically throughout history. There is a currency that develops - both in the electrical and monetary sense - in which people looking for answers and people constructing answers are finding each other and exchanging in knowledge and services, furthering human development in increasingly organized modalities, around which are developed additional infrastructures to further edify and intensify those modalities, directing the currency towards increasingly organized and predictable ends. 

At the beginning of the cycle, there is a lot of trust and excitement, and therefore a lot of chaotic and loosely directed activity takes place that is tolerated within the bounds of a given locus of activity, which with its broad-based action, draws resources from disparate places and synthesizes them. No one really knows where everything is ultimately going, setting aside certain visionary guiding ideals which specify a general direction, but vigorous activity continues because it is enjoyable and exciting, while simultaneously useful. After enough repetitions of the cycle, various favorable results begin to accumulate and are increasingly organized in service to a given society's collective aspirations. 

But then as organization and dependability grows, so too does predictability, and it increasingly becomes possible for the entire process to be subverted and manipulated, with a growing surplus to be diverted to increasingly private ends, after which the dynamism of the creative process dies down and resources are diverted further and further away from majorities operating within the process. Eventually much of the talent and labor bleeds out of the original process, which collapses, with its constituents set free and seeking other forms of organization, preferably in the periphery, where it is cheaper to get anything done away from the prying and judging eyes of the gatekeeping establishment. 

We've seen this cycle repeat over and over again at scales large and small throughout history, with the general iterative shape of human societies evolving over time as they act on their environments and transform their environments, which transform them, and so on. 

You had the coalescing of early civilization into the palace economies of the Bronze Age, which eventually collapsed, and eventually systems like Rome's military republic and then empire would emerge dominant before eventually collapsing, and then the churches would rise and form feudal states in alliance with monarchs, before collapsing, with parliamentary systems arising from that rubble and then the modern representative democracies coalescing, and so on, with a larger arc towards the historic accumulation of wealth strata and the centrifugal forces that that wealth unleashes in which power is perpetually diverted to oligarchies and creditors, in tension with governing centralities attempting to retain coherence. 

And all of these systems would form in accordance with the necessities posed by eras of war and revolution, and in accordance with the structures that arose in ways that people felt and related to each other. 

To get back to "feeling" though. Yes, necessity is important. People need to survive, and even prosper and thrive. But so many of these really complex problems that threaten those aims are very difficult - if not impossible - to solve with any kind of limited directed activity. It is difficult to predict what effort will have the desired effect, especially in the context of a complex society in which any given set of activities can spiral out with exponential effects through the mimicking actions of a multitude. 

So the collective feelings of a populace, and the passage of those feelings over time as individuals and collectives receive feedback in light of their activity is an important component which influences the direction and intensity of the activity in question. 

Yes, there is also the possibility of organized collective spiritual and intellectual activity producing various guiding and driving forces which help to shape and propel other forms of collective activity, but those higher activities too involve incredibly complex forces which resist localized or individual control, but which spread out exponentially and co-evolve with the material forces of production, and which are informed by a complex of evolving feelings themselves, much of it rooted in deep, spiritual experiences and commitments.   

We'll further elaborate on and describe individual and collective feeling and the role it plays in time. 

The Quantitative Maintenance of Class

Class is always much more than economic positioning. It is also a set of sensibilities, aesthetics, aspirations, social and political privileges, social regard, and so on, all of which can better be arrived at and rationed through economic positioning, to be sure. 

Class seems to emerge through necessity in a given societal and environmental structure, as individuals associate to solve problems and then in many cases, clamber over each other in time to live the "worthwhile" life, in which various sets of problems are separated into kinds and tiers, each coming with their own challenges, requirements, regard, and rewards. And then these tiers of living and problem solving have to eventually be clearly defined and maintained as a society matures and seeks to further perpetuate itself. 

Historically there are numerous ways to maintain class, such as through the control of land and through hereditary lineage, guild systems, caste systems, educational and bureaucratic institutions, and etc. which regulate the production and reproduction of human beings who are capable of certain things and who have access to certain resources to exercise those capabilities. 

Veblen talked about the "leisure class," which was a very different beast in the ancient and medieval worlds, though there are certainly core similarities between those classes and the modern leisure class.  For one thing, the early leisure class Veblen was analyzing was in Viking Scandinavia, which looked down on farming and similar means of daily production and reproduction, leaving those things for women and slaves. Though they also weren't afraid to get their hands dirty - or bloody - and could be seen to live violent and dangerous lives. They were a warrior class that considered the highest pursuits to be in battle and martial glory, even if it meant dying for it. 

Not the leisure class we think of in the modern world, which seems to be very much concerned with not dying, eventually going to the extremes we see in the pursuit of cryogenics or anti-aging science or bodily transcendence through tech or what have you. 

But to be fair the ideal of immortality comes in many forms, with ruling classes across history pursuing those many forms in their own ways, such as in ancient Egyptian concerns with burial, Roman conceptions of eternally-remembered "glory," and for that matter, the Viking passage into eternal remembrance and into Valhalla through death. Though I do digress. 

In modern capitalist societies, one prominent way to maintain class boundaries is simply through quantifiable thresholds of monetary resources. We loosely refer to "lower, middle, and higher" classes which imply certain levels of monetary accumulation and attainment. 

Theoretically, much of the exercisable power sloshing around in our society is commensurable, in that much of it is reducible to divisible monetary quantities, no matter how incongruent a given form is. For the right quantity of money, you can buy land, you can buy reproducible livestock and plants, you can buy water rights and other resource rights, you can buy capital which in combination with purchasable labor can augment money quantity, and so on. And these various forms of wealth are effectively power: they can do things in the world, or else they can be traded for other things that do things that the owner wants. 

We know historically how a currency tends to work: it is the tax that sets the currency into motion. By requiring a tax be paid in a specific currency - the failure of which gets you a club upon the head, or a stay in a cage - it creates a very strong desire for that currency, making it very useful to anyone trading for it, and so it gets that currency moving and in use. 

In the same way, for money to act as permission to do just about anything, it requires that the money is highly desirable for just about anyone, and for it to be highly desirable to just about anyone, it must be completely necessary for mostly everyone. If you need money to purchase the various necessities to stay alive and persist in the world, and the only way to get money is to offer your very essential capacity to produce a portion of wealth and power for the rest of the world, that is what you're going to do, and so all the necessary functions to sustain a human society and form the basis for any kind of power is carried out, making widely available the very necessities that money is essential for purchasing.  

The rich of the leisure class could trade around their shiny coins all they wanted, but it wouldn't be much fun if those coins couldn't buy the devoted time and energy of a large swathe of the capable population, carrying out the many functions for human survival, comfort, and ecstasy, which form the building blocks of higher and higher forms of wealth and power. 

So in a sense, for money to move and circulate, where it can ultimately pool up and accumulate, it is also necessary to maintain gradients of its quantity and availability, so that it is desired in the first place, therefore freeing up those essential forces of human endeavor and resource that it can be traded for. Money must have empty space for it to move to. 

This is accomplished through a careful class manipulation of how much quantities of money can accumulate where, and how it can all be acquired. Our fractional reserve banking system, coupled with the financial and oligarchical strangulation of all of our public institutions, ensures that much of the currency creation is done in the private sphere, and controlled through the private sphere

And through the private sphere, the rest is done through the structure of the value chain and how private enterprise is structured: products higher up the chain, with value added, yield greater surplus, because all value added along the way up that chain has to accrue to various private parties skimming their share off of the top. Getting higher up the value chain requires organization and power and capital to begin with, which allows for a manipulation of the structure of that value chain by the incumbents. 

That part is a little difficult to wrap one's mind around, so I want to explain it a bit and then we'll wrap things up. Let's go back to quantity and the tiering you can achieve through quantity alone. The very basic essentials that are required to stay alive and stave off mass revolt and revolution are ostensibly available at a low monetary threshold: food, water, clothing, a very basic, shitty shelter that doesn't even have to be owned to carry out its housing function...these are very basic necessities that individuals tend to need to participate and labor in society. 

We'll set aside the paradox of thrift for now, which poses serious problems for capital in its own right. Wages are kept as low as possible not just for the benefit of maximal return on capital, though that is an important driving force. They are also kept low so that people just have enough to continue to subsist and labor, and not be given enough power to exercise more autonomy. 

Savings for example allow people to hunker down and bide their time, thumbing their noses at their bosses and looking somewhere else, or investing in education to acquire the skills and connections to move further up the value chain. Health care allows not only for subsistence but further thriving due to proper nutrition, cognition, and motivation. Cars allow for more mobility and movement and dynamism, and plane tickets and cross-border travel can do even more. Moving up to the higher tiers past consumer goods, housing can position one within certain communities which contain available desired products, social connections, quality of education, and favorable health and low-stressor environments, while at the same time accruing in value. 

All of this allows one to inch one's way up the value chain, acquiring the strength and the confidence and the well-being to produce things and do things at higher tiers that others want, who are unable to do it themselves, and so one can skim more value off of the top. 

Finally, if one can make it to the capital tiers, one can begin augmenting one's monetary resources. The rate and extent of that augmentation can vary based on the type of capital, where that capital is based, what that capital can do, and so on, all of which are manipulated and regulated as well. One may get lucky enough to eventually enter the big leagues, to climb to the top of the value chain, skimming off of the top of everyone else's accumulated labor, offering products and services monopolized and controlled by a very few, garnering the value one can get out of the whole of the market. A lot is still being left out in this picture, but we can only do so much in a single post. 

This tiering and the maintenance of this tiering is somewhat conscious at its late stage, but it also had to organically develop over a long period of time, and the ruling class had to steadily learn how it all worked and how best to implement it as it continued to develop. And a lot of its workings are so complex that navigating and controlling for them consist of equally complex organizing of the upper classes such as through decades of the evolution of law, political connection, business lobbying, and the like. The upper classes had to learn the limits of what it could get away with in grinding down the loser classes as the labor struggle evolved over the last century. And now that class is also unlearning much of this and destroying much of the basis of their own power, which is a whole other dimension of analysis and beyond our scope at the moment.  

This explanation sounds like a thermodynamic explanation - and hence naturalized and eternal - and in a sense it is. But I want to stress that this is not how things have to be. A lot of this is due to how our society is set up and structured, and then what is collectively valued and desired, namely a collectively held regard for material wealth and material power, and then how those things are to be obtained and maintained, and how individuals are to relate to each other in doing this. It is how the energy is moving through our particular society. Later on we'll get into how all of that works and why it is so.