semiotext(e)

[linebaugh]

I've seen a fair few people complaining about other online people switching political identities like outfits. One week they're a communist, the next they're an anarchist.

I wonder whether what previously made people settle into an identity was simply that they had no choice but to. We've all dreamed of being someone else at one time or another.

Theres an argument in culture of narcissism (that I think he rebukes but I digress) that says that the rigid rules of public social life in older more traditional society lessened anxiety as there was none of this ambiguity nagging away at you.

 

[linebaugh]

I've seen a fair few people complaining about other online people switching political identities like outfits. One week they're a communist, the next they're an anarchist.

I wonder whether what previously made people settle into an identity was simply that they had no choice but to. We've all dreamed of being someone else at one time or another. Something as simple as changing your username or avatar on a site can become a compulsion. I don't know how many names I had on Discord.

I've decided Georgism is my thing

 

[version]

Theres an argument in culture of narcissism (that I think he rebukes but I digress) that says that the rigid rules of public social life in older more traditional society lessened anxiety as there was none of this ambiguity nagging away at you.

I've seen someone make a similar point re: public debate. They suggested that not everything needs it and today's insistence on debating everything along with complaining about the quality of said debate just paralyzes society.

The obvious rebuttal is that there were massive problems with older, more traditional society and our current anxiety's a case of necessary growing pains. Also, there were people experiencing a lot of anxiety precisely because of those rigid rules.

 

[linebaugh]

Understanding the breadth and intricacy of neuro divergency does seem to be the current hurdle but i think we may be passed the point of growing out of anything

 

[linebaugh]

Understanding the breadth and intricacy of neuro divergency does seem to be the current hurdle but i think we may be passed the point of growing out of anything

Actually this may be a stupid comment

 

[luka]

Nobody 'knew' anything twenty years ago. I think it was Matthew Woebot that talked about the blogs then as being comprised of a small number of weirdos who had dug up and scraped together these idiosyncratic caches of knowledge, driven by idiosyncratic obsessions, and finally had a place to talk. There were about 5 people in England who had learned anything at all, in the sense of having actually gone out and done it themselves. Craner's bete noire Owen Hatherley for instance was really notable because he'd read books that weren't on any curriculum but his own. He'd excavated dusty tomes and assimilated them. Very strange, often very dull things that no normal person would ever think to read. So you would see these people and think how on earth did you get there? How did you assemble that person?

and I think that part of the reason everything now feels simulated is that there were no incentive structures for people like Owen to construct those strange selves, they just did it cos they were weird. Whereas now you can intuit the pressures and incentives that go towards creating the freaks you see on Twitter. On the other hand you get some pretty impressive freaks. I think kantbot is a genuinely exotic specimen and there are others too. Lots of it is bluff but we all bluff, particularly when we are young.

 

[luka]

And obviously yes there's a lot of information easily available now whereas before to really get anywhere you would need access to an academic library. And that means it's easier to bluff now but much harder to ever feel you've got a handle on anything Or have done anything more than take an arbitrarily chosen and incredibly thin sample slice out of the total data lump.

I get around this anxiety by never learning anything at all, on principle, and eschewing all Facts.

 

[luka]

I'm reading a bit more of Gus' Brooklyn Artifact. I'm interested in the way his writing is so violently repellent. That is the quality that makes me come back to it. It is definitely very well written. You can't fault the control and the surfaces. There's something genuinely powerfully grotesque about it too, repellent is really the perfect word because it's so hard to get close to, you don't want to get close to it, it's appalling. But why that is is maybe harder to answer.

 

[luka]

It does share some qualities with Craner's early work but it doesn't have the charm. It's almost spitefully charmless.There is the same provincial fascination with glamour, the rich, the beautiful, the powerful and the same ability to create smooth, hard prose surfaces to mirror that glamour.

 

[luka]

This you could believe was from Citta Violenta for instance


The art of persona: Mona Lisa looks through us and passively accepts our admiration as her due.27 Any it-girl will tell you: the “passive” misleads: take what is yours. Glam as response to mortality, a striving beyond: aged nobility, fraying ele- gance, velvet on the cusp of tatters. Transcendence from person to image, esh to marble. The slated-low shooting high, birthing an aristocracy of family all their own. Parallel hierarchy, di erent ontologies of who matters, theories of existence for the social world. Eyes wide shut to outside games & rankings, a theatre of internal performances & a micro-economy of who’s who, classical & lo- , the grand hall dirtied by a cigarette.

 

[luka]

Of course with craner you get the sense of someone basically sexually well adjusted, a woman worshipper, whereas there s something troubled, rancorous and mysoginistic in Gus' sexuality, which contributes to the repellent quality which is so distinctive and powerful.

 

[luka]

But to reiterate, this is exceptional writing. It's writing of the highest calibre.

 

[luka]

The whole text seems to effloresce around this one splinter. One howl of pain endlessly modulated.


Why sympathize with eco- nomic losers and not for losers of other games, social & sexual—games equally subject to birthright privilege, cap- ital-hoarding, familial inheritance, and marginalization?Ѫ Which have equally profound effects on life satisfaction as economic prosperity

 

[luka]

Which is an entirely reasonable thing to feel aggrieved about. Learning you are fundamentally undesirable is a hard thing to recover from.

As Gus keeps saying here, in various ways, it's not fair.

 

[luka]

Internet dialogue and Internet textures are well integrated into the text too which is not so easy to do judging by how many people have failed.

 

[luka]

i do think it is interesting to ask why k-punk, say, which is also a howl of pain, evokes sympathy and a sense of camaraderie with a fellow sufferer, while this evokes such stringent disgust. this is infinitely better written, which is a contributing factor of course. the clever and self regarding never arouse much sympathy as a rule.

for the record im not suggesting that a failure to arouse sympathy is a shortcoming. its the most interesting feature of the book.

 

[luka]

i used to work in a boutique coffee shop near UCL and it was a very small shop which i worked alone in, maybe there was 4 or 5 inside tables
and we weren't allowed to play music so you could hear everyones conversations and we would get, quite often, students, mostly american, and if not american typically speaking in an american accent, having conversations which were quite gauche, but peppered with references to philsophers and Great Novelists and so on, young, attractive, intelligent and privileged people and i would sometimes feel quite agitated as this went on as i wiped the surfaces down and emptied the dishwasher and so on

 

[luka]

what do you think Oliver @craner ??

 

[craner]

I agree, I am sexually well adjusted.

 

[luka]

He doesn't want to look at your magnum opus Gus, I'm sorry about that. I tried.