.. use your opponent to surpass yourself ..
.. that there's the win ..
"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
- George Carlin
The digital world is infinitely falsifiable.
It has no mass except that which we grant it; just the same as a buck. Or glance out your eyes giving totemic life to some form of thing out there, giving it a little bit of (your) life. Spending time with it, caressing it - aahhh, oodles and oodles of stacks of cash. But alas, all I've got is a pile of tobacco ash. You might have less.
That aside now, we little people, all so tiny in the immensity of the universe (of discourse) - are numbers living in the (computer) books of records. Maybe not the Akashic records, but how about JPMorgan's? We're all one of those financialized data points sitting in some quant's model in a trading floor. Not just that model or those models; actually, it's worse now.
People like spending time with one another, sharing their lives and stories, lunch or dinner - social creatures, right? Digital communications effectively eliminate space. Not only in that I can communicate with someone on the other side of the globe more quickly than I can go pick up my cup of coffee waiting in the kitchen, but also the distances that separate subcultures [Thinking subcultures as more akin to ethnicities, or at least tending toward the formation of an ethnicity] are gone.
Maybe more than that, by eliminating space, digital society has displaced the physical threat that comes against ostentatious displays of "the other" [or the unknown], so things aren't kept cool by the PHYSICALITY of the situation, but can simmer and boil and catch light at the burner.
The voyeurism collapses the distance between (sub)cultures and unlike in tv and the movies there is no well-defined directing moral-aesthetic arc. The "battle" may be in the minds of the separated billions, but it plays on in the figureheads of political life that can gather enough resources of sorts to start pushing people around. And;
A cost of all that universe of discourse that spans the globe with seemingly no-home, just like capital, is it all sits in data warehouses. Under locks and keys controlled by the same sorts of gremlins as those who count people's lives as well as livelihoods as collateral damage. Now, however, it's possible to gobble up all that data, throw it through an AI / LLM system, and come out with a facsimile of YOU (and your friends, etc.).
All the information that has been given to the tech barons will be used to create digital twins of everyone on earth that can be used to simulate whatever scenarios the obviously deranged elite can come up with to test their hypotheses as to what will give them more power. Even if it's only by selling you some worthless crap.
How close will these doppelgängers converge upon the flesh-and-blood counterparts? Well, that might depend partly on how much of the "content" that goes into people's minds is filtered through big tech and presented via screens. One tech company is known to be purchasing untold numbers of physical books to digitize them and feed into their AI training. What do they do with the books afterwards? Destroy them.
Can you think of a better way to enslave the mind of man than by absorbing all the knowledge of the past into an infinitely malleable and corruptible system and to eliminate all the records which cannot with such flippancy be falsified?
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
.. shades ( .. thus named to commemorate his superpower; you see, many years ago, he came to realize that if he just sat with his negative emotional states, sadness, anger, fear etc, well, away they'd fade, like so many shades .. ) reflected on a certain quote by Gramsci which a seemingly increasing number of commentators these daze use to refer to our con temporary malaise ..
.. the sense remains that, as the West in its hegemonic incarnation recedes, we remain as yet in an in-between phase(s), where the greatest danger lies in mistakes & missteps that in hindsight will lead to regret ..
.. we can see this even within the very walls of the hegemon formerly known as empire, with a revanchist neo-con federacy inherently incapable of con structing anything; nay, indeed, it on the con trary defines itself by its sheer capability to destroy as such ..
.. surely this is the epitome of a misstep in the wrong direction, not to mention a glaring anachronism (.. & what even is a monster, other than just that ..?), if only because even an accelerationist authoritarianism has limits to its velocity, & moreover must yet con tend with the socioeconomic counterpart of momentum ..
.. without getting lost in details & particulars, & as per GWF Hegel's dialectical theory of history, it's inevitable, indeed certain, that there will be a movement in the (equal &) opposite direction; the only open questions being what specific form it will take & the extent of its efficacy ..
.. taking a broader & simultaneously a more particular point of view, the challenge will henceforth be to move beyond such morbid phenomena without oneself becoming affected, infected with what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writing in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus refer to as microfascisms, defined as the "desire for fascistic repression and control" that exists within individuals and everyday social life ..
"One who fights with monsters should see to it that they themselves do not become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you"
- FW Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
.. if you don't value your time, don't be surprised if u find others failing to value it .. it's important to real eyes that time is by far one's most valuable resource, & even the most cynical will grant that time is money ..
.. if nothing else, one might well use their time to learn everything there is to know, within their own limits .. better yet, they might accumulate experience, especially of the profound & subtle limits of reality, which might then enable them to put all this knowledge in con text ..
.. Working in this Way, & if & when they're sufficiently prepared, anyone might attain to the gnosis ..
.. use failure as fuel for success ..
.. either way you've got to smile, & sincerely ..
.. otherwise you've @LLready lost the game ..
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