Just finished, great vid.

Just seen so much alarmist commentary about THE DEATH OF BOOKS and such.

I feel that, I haven’t figured out how to have a stable/consistent conception of anything, really. Like when I’m consuming current events and media it feels like everything’s gonna fall apart, the world’s gonna end, whatever. But then reading history, it’s never not been like this. On a vibe level feels like things are simultaneously getting worse and have always been this way.

Like an illusion that implies some sort of trend or trajectory but never actually changes. Gonna come off as deeply unserious but kinda like this lol:

https://www.tiktok.com/@dylang626/video/7330377691239091461

Thanks for the share, this video looks interesting. I’m gonna watch it instead of watching tiktok instead of sleeping.

Big bestsellers have been popularly viewed as slop and yet hugely popular since probably like, the 1980s, right?

Skimming the wiki page for Pulp Magazine suggests it’s been a thing for at least a couple hundred years. People have always liked stories, and with increasing literacy and the growing capitalist tension to commodify everything, it makes sense that creativity would be homogenized, thrown on an assembly line, and sold as cheap entertainment. And we get to live in a culture where that process has been heightening and looping in on itself for over a century.

Tangentially, in the above article there’s a link to Newgate Novels (“novels published in England from the late 1820s until the 1840s that glamorised the lives of the criminals they portrayed”) with an interesting paragraph:

The 1840 murder of Lord William Russell by his valet, François Benjamin Courvoisier, proved so controversial that the Newgate novel came under severe criticism. Courvoisier was reported to have been inspired to the act by a dramatisation of Ainsworth’s story.

Nothing new under the sun

Lol people are gonna die from this

Nah not at this point, unless maybe he’s some sort of social minority. You’ll spend hundreds of active hours and thousands of thinking hours trying to convince him and coming up with talking points and arguments, and it won’t matter. White middle class workers aren’t class conscious, but their material interests aren’t far enough removed from the bourgeoisie, not relative to the non-white and global proletariat.

If you don’t want to cut him off, think of some canned responses or get some from here. But above that, your finite time and energy is better spent elsewhere.

typical fash dance with signifiers, they don’t need to have internal consistency

CTE take my energy

The implied meaning of “life is meaningless” is “there is no grand universe-encompassing [Christian] narrative to ascribe to”. Because the literal interpretation isn’t true. We’re making meaning right now. Every social interaction or relation is a meaning-making machine.

I think the problem for those of us that struggle with this is the way our society instills in us the idea of a grand externality or objectivity, usually through religion but not necessarily. So we may try to step beyond our religion or whatever grand narrative, but the architecture of our mind is still organized around it, like there’s just a void where there used to be meaning. Our consciousness is still oriented around a false expectation of some universal truth.

But this form of pure objectivity doesn’t exist.

The way I usually see people approach existentialism is a pendulum swing into pure subjectivity, a retraction into the self, “you create your own meaning”. But this isn’t any more true than a grand objectivity (and can be more harmful).

What we have is a network of overlapping subjectivities. The making of meaning is a dynamic process that takes place in each intersubjective space, so meaning exists locally to wherever it is produced. There’s meaning between you and a friend, a shared understanding of certain aspects of the world. There’s meaning within your culture or at your job or among people with similar interests.

Importantly, there’s meaning between you and the media you consume, between you and the larger cultural narrative, which is dominated by bourgeois subjectivity (often disguised as universal objectivity). This is another way we might feel alienated from meaning, because the dominant social meaning is discordant with the meaning we’re producing locally. As a class without consciousness, without organs, we struggle to create meaning that aligns with our reality.

Dreaming Spanish is great. Also a bunch of podcasts that are good for when you can’t watch videos. Cuentame off the top of my head.

Moved to the Chicago area and haven’t driven since. Just got rid of my car. Public transit is good.

Wasn’t really feasible where I came from, although biking was okay (albeit dangerous because 30% of cars were lifted trucks)

It’s not true but the fact that people believe it still shows how bad things have gotten!!

Movies like Beau is Afraid, with a lot of themes and symbolism to dissect that rewards repeat viewing.

You might say that all movies have themes and symbolism, intentional or otherwise, and I agree. But what I mean and why Beau might be a good example is a lot of people call it self indulgent and meandering and way too long, and that’s exactly what I want it to be.

They may not always be coherent or even have any substance behind all the smoke and mirrors and layers but I still enjoy the vibe.

I get that, I slowly cut off most of my friend group during the BLM protests for similar reasons. Then sealed the deal by moving to a state where I know zero people lol

There’s potential within certain structures to coopt or utilize a person’s power without associating with or empowering them, but it’s a very fine line and I am not nearly experienced or smart enough to navigate that. I recall reading or listening to something by an auto union organizer in the 70s and his experiences having to deal with reactionary nonsense among the very coworkers he was trying to organize and advocate for, all the way up to literal white nationalists.

We live in the belly of the beast and idk exactly what to do about it really

That’s just a choice between the prophet and his disciple

My last chapter was like half ML (with others quickly becoming ML) so it def varies on a local level.

Was it ever intended to be successful as a company? Seems like it’s just a vessel for research so that the (incredibly high) costs can be externalized.

This sort of pattern has been playing out for centuries. Capital extends itself into new frontiers, extracts any and all value, then flees leaving everyone else to deal with the fallout.

Choose your favorite podcast and make it Rowing Time Only.

yeah sacrificing your social life on the altar of performative internet leftism isn’t it

i know because i regularly sacrifice my social life on the altar of performative internet leftism

there’s def a synthesis out there for people more socially gifted than i

that’s probably the type of person who ends up being an asset lol, look at alex jones

but yeah i can’t really tell, sometimes the nonsense spewed by this type seems locally rational (like I can sort of see the connections they’re making) but other times it can feel much more deliberately crafted to hit certain talking points or come across a certain way to its intended demographics.

Like a difference between bottom-up home-grown organic brainworms versus top-down focus-grouped psyop brainworms.