Category: Blog
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On the vibe shift pt 2: Nameless / Faceless
“The key contribution of angelicism01 is not artistic anonymity but artistic anonymity as a delivery system for extinction qua extinction into the cultural algorithm.” Angelicism01 The Prince cried out for joy: ‘Good friend, I’ll giveWhat you will ask: guide me to where I live.’The man pulled back his hood: he had no face—Where it should…
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Zoom Call #1
And I said, I said, ‘a simple point that people forget to explain to outsiders about the consumption of random/plain/goofy/noisy artifacts is that it’s not the random/plain/goofy/noisy artifact that is doing the work but the 3000 years long acummulation of techniques for attentively scrutizing objects (which developed as a corollary of 3000 years of creating…
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All Is Well E17: Acculturation as Brainwashing
It’s great how Mingyu (or the CC translator) chose “brainwashed” here, because that’s what piety is, a cultural expectation that gets drilled into you while your brain is in a formative state, that’s enforced through social pressure and shame. “Brainwashing” as we think of it is just rapid re-acculturation—to a new hierarchy, a new set…
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210931
I wonder if anyone’s done a good treatment of “space” or “breathing room” as high-level, abstract patterns or metaphors—in the sense of lacking density/airiness, freedom of movement, reconfigurability. Perhaps starting from the level of physics—gas vs. liquid vs. solid—then moving up to organisms, psychology, sociology. Open spaces and evpsych. Claustrophobia. Start-ups vs. ossified bureaucracy, toeing…
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Barry Lyndon, pt 2: The Duel
Last time: It is selection games and debt, all the way down. Nora has been “flinging” herself as an option to “every man” in the area, but none have selected her. Barry owes his uncle a great deal, and his uncle owes the bank a great deal in turn, which puts both into obligation. This…
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Surrogation, or why we can’t have nice things
X: Representation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Y: True, but but anything before that probably couldn’t be called the human race.
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Pfeilstorch Progress: Games, Dialectic, Spirit
I launched a [Discord server with a] small community of friends, which has this year, 2021, evolved into an online forum. Our mascot is the pfeilstorch. We’re interested in the inexact sciences, and moreover, in the rigorizing pipeline that got us from natural philosophy to biology, or alchemy to chemistry.
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Year In Review
Bla bla bla, 2020 was a big year for me. I started off doing philosophy of language and ended up at “strategic interaction.” For the uninitiated, think game theory meets microsociology, or check out a slide deck. Add a side plate of institutional theory, debt, and philosophy of science. Though our press, Not Nothing, was…
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Kaitlin Phillips as PopLit
It was spring, around 11am and cold; we had teas with condensed milk in a small Malaysian place in the Lower East Side and I held up an AbEx painter book that was on sale and you made a joke about the page layout. For about a week the prior May I’d wondered whether or…
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Re-engineering “taste”
One way I’ve found helpful to think about “culture,” at a more manageable scale, is through the metaphor of an unending variety show, with many theaters and stages (think music festivals—GovBall, Coachella). This neverending show presents a class of problems to any audience member attempting to grok an act, or to any act attempting to…
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The telephone effect, and the reciprocity of perspectives
In F. L. Allen’s Only Yesterday, a history of the 1920s published in the early 30s, Allen writes about the revolution in manners and morals that began to pick up in the early years of the decade: Like all revolutions, this one was stimulated by foreign propoganda. It came, however, not from Moscow, but from…
Suspended Reason 