Tag: all communication is manipulation
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Fool’s Gold (Notes on Lodge 49), pt 2
Last time, on Suspended Reason…. Prophetic revelation involves for both the prophet himself and for his followers… a unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated and meaningful attitude toward life. To the prophet, both the life of man and the world, both social and cosmic events, have a certain systematic and coherent…
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Against “Self-Expression”
This is the tenth installment in a ten-part series. Information and emotion ripple across the social, transforming members’ attitudes and behaviors. Stress breeds stress; anger transfers; to paraphrase Buddha, the only moral imperative is spreading good vibes. This is the idea behind the phrase “all communication is manipulation”: to emphasize the effects of utterances—and similar…
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Girls S2: Lip Service
This is the ninth installment in a ten-part series. “How can I be manipulating you if I don’t even know I’m being manipulative?” This, out of Hannah Horvath’s mouth after asking her father for a loan. This is the question of the Girls S2 finale. What does interpersonal manipulation really look like? Can we manipulate…
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All Is Well E28: “My Hands Are Tied”
This is the eighth installment in a ten-part series. Timestamped link to clip under discussion, beginning 16:05 in. Su Mingyu has recently been released from the hospital after an assault by her brother, Mingcheng. Now, as the right-hand man of President Meng—head of her consulting firm—she has been assigned to do Meng’s dirty work, firing…
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All Is Well E28: Functional Railroading
This is the seventh installment in a ten-part series. Timestamped link to clip under discussion, beginning 5:30 in. Shi Tiandong, love interest of protagonist Su Mingyu, is sitting in the restaurant he owns across from Su Daqiang, her father. Daqiang has been living, after the death of his wife, with his second son Su Mingcheng.…
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A landscape of communication
This is the sixth installment in a ten-part series. Sure, we can bite the bullet that communication is manipulation—but what does that actually look like? We’ll time-travel to the early 2000s, check out a day in Spendo’s life circa elementary and middle school, narrating the day as a series of communications. What is important to…
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Response to Simpolism on ACiM
This is the fifth installment in a ten-part series. Simpolism has kindly written two posts in response to my own recent barrage—the first, “Is Communication ‘Manipulation’?” investigates his gut reaction to the idea that in communicating, he might manipulate others; the second, “On Behavioral Hermeneutics,” tries to figure out what kind of claim ACiM is.…
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ACiM is a natural extension of cybernetic theory
This is the fourth installment in a ten-part series. At the core of cybernetics is the idea of agents—synthetic and organic, human and machine and animal—as servomechanisms, or “servos.” Servos are machines which use feedback to correct their actions, using some sort of sensory system and built-in encoder to monitor their environment, and ensure their…
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All Communication is Behavioral Manipulation
This is the second installment in a ten-part series. I want to establish, from the get-go, the uncontroversial, borderline tautological aspect of what I mean when I say “All communication is manipulation.” As a recap on what I mean by “manipulation,” I define the word as “the alteration of an agent’s behavior.” When we sum…