The Teaching Machine.

[luka]

It's probably a necessary part of any functional libidinal economy. A bit of giggling at the back of the class. Putting a whoopee cushion under the teachers chair.

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

The machine sets it up well to be a game too. exactly like playing a computer game. You can feel yourself getting better at it, knowing which buttons to push. That illusion that you're getting sharper, quicker, cleverer.

 

[WashYourHands]

This stuff has infiltrated work hugely recently. Like on Microsoft Teams there's a constant pinging of "reactions" from your colleagues. The machine is telling you relentlessly whether your colleagues "like" you. Whether they agree, whether they find you funny.

I mean we cannot deal with that emotionally or spiritually really can we ? We know it's fucked. We're not set up to be able to deal with this constant invasion of others thoughts and judgement, condensed down to half a dozen or so basic "reactions".

Validation programming. Teams is a cunt.

 

[shiels]

As chairman of the The Campaign Against Likes and Lads Whatsapp Out I do get it. There’s a good balance at the minute though. American theory bros trying their hands at banter. Idiots trying at theory. There are lots of funny people and we’re often being balls out pretentious cunts so there’s so much opportunity to take the piss but I do get insecure at times and think I may be undermining the potential for brilliant conversation etc, it is better when I/we get a bit more considerate and put effort in

 

[luka]

Yeah it's all your fault Shiels I hope you feel ashamed of yourself

 

[shiels]

You know what I mean though. This place is a serious board for proper stuff

 

[luka]

Yeah it is, but as with anything you are trying to cleave to that mystical and mist shrouded middle way

 

[luka]

Start being too determined to be serious and you wind up stiff and pompous. And no one can keep it up all day. But equally as you say it's not a banter board we are trying to figure stuff out for ourselves and compare notes. Its a real project, an active investigation.

 

[shiels]

Look I love you all and learn a lot from this place. I’ll do everything in my power to keep the fruitful misinterpretations flowing. If it means being less craic then so be it, I’ll bear that cross.

 

[luka]

You were hardly the worst offender when it came to banter. In fact I blame it all on @version . Any banter I've engaged in was all his fault

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

It's the machine's fault. There's no personal responsibility here

 

[version]

I'm a big proponent of banter. Love it. Absolutely love it.

 

[version]

It's interesting when you look at how the different platforms 'teach' you. They're hitting the same buttons, but they each have their quirks and idiosyncrasies. Instagram encourages different behaviour to Reddit, for example.

 

[luka]

well the people matter presumably. certainly on dissensus we have some of the usual features, like button etc, but i'ts us who do most of the pulling and kneading and manipulating.

 

[entertainment]

dissensus also has its gravitaional field but a huge difference is that it's a personal and self-enclosed space where individuals actually have agency in negotiating the atmosphere.

 

[entertainment]

I think twitter deserves a lot of analysis. When I say I hate satire, it's not because I sense some great act of evil inherent to it, but it's because the satire rhetoric is emblematic of a fundamental large scale drift away from the good way of engaging with each other happening right now. I think it's the last thing the word needs right now because twitter has weaponised it with this internal mechanism whereby it is able to spread like a virus demanding all form of opinionated conversation conforms to its rules.

 

[WashYourHands]

All my problems started with Word. Spelling check red lines atrophied my own recall for a bit. Subtle process. What you gain you lose, with obvious brain fails of words used frequently (dementia pending). You're not really conscious of it at the time, because this is the 21stC and the world isn't going to wait for you. You're on-board, flying, soaring, new vistas and panoramas. Inserting tables. More programs. Cosmic, this shit. No seat belt though. Fuck it. No breaks? Check these stunts then cunt. Franz Klammer's watching amazed.

Then you try and send a text on a Nokia225 and keying 'conscious' suddenly takes on an agency all its own. Those questionably ambivalent s's and c's. I know one of them is fibbing. Do things have an -ly or -ley ending? 'Proceed', 'procedure'. You fucking what mate? Where's it gone, that recall function to spell English?

Bill Gates and his goombah's bad trip world. That's where.

 

[luka]

Yeah perhaps the trainerless training is on the scale of the socios, the macropsychic system, but the training on the scale of the individual, the psychic system, can be figured as having a trainer, if even an incorporeal one. The Big Trainer. Its as if the macropsychic system is bootstrapping itself by means of a collection of individuals who operate as if they are being trained, perhaps? The individual is trained by their reality.

yes, the individual is trained by their reality. this is the teaching machine. this is the purpose of the Mcluhan quote about Wyndham Lewis

"Earlier, you see, the Symbolists had discovered that the work of art is a programmed teaching machine. It’s a mechanism for shaping sensibility. Well, Lewis simply extended this private art activity into the corporate activity of the whole society in making environments that basically were artifacts or works of art and that acted as teaching machines upon the whole population."

the individual is trained by the feedback they receive. this was the purpose of this anecdote.

I remember the first ever time i done acid me and my friend were sitting up on some balconies overlooking Auckland University quad and there was a lad down below singing and he hit this note that energised people and made the crowd go woooo! and you could see him swell up and realise, oh, ive found something there so he done it again but leaned into it a bit heavy, and so soon after the first one the effect was diminished so you the woo was very half hearted but you could see/hear the feedback learning relationship in real time. that's an example of how the same processes operate peer to peer in the 'real world'

 

[luka]

Absolute value. Both positive and negative collapse into a single vector that measures quantitative distance from zero, and zero must attained before we can really mobilize any higher order project.

this would be a vantage point over and above the conditioned self. this would be the result of having climbed out of. the point at which you see how you have been trained and the cues, rewards, punishments, positive and negative reinforcements you have been conditioned by. this is what the zero would represent here.

 

[luka]

this would be a vantage point over and above the conditioned self. this would be the result of having climbed out of. the point at which you see how you have been trained and the cues, rewards, punishments, positive and negative reinforcements you have been conditioned by. this is what the zero would represent here.

assuming stacked systems, this is a lifting out of one training machine and into another, not the breakthrough into total freedom and the decondtioned self.