Tag: capitalism

if nature is unjust, we’re all screwed

talk about coming back in great style, huh?

i’m still developing a series on dark mutualism, but the fundamental seed is right there in the title. as coincidence engineering goes, i couldn’t have gotten a better prompt for today’s post than this quote of Carlo Lancelotti, originally found here:

Indeed, Del Noce said, if a society’s only ideal is the expansion of individual “well-being,” the left faces two equally bad options. One is to embrace what he calls the “reality principle,” and to compromise with the realities of late capitalism. Then the left must necessarily become the party of the technocratic elites, and end up pursuing power for power’s sake, because in the vacuum of ideals left behind by Marxism there is no common ground between the elites and the masses. This “realistic left” can only organize itself around two principles: trust in science and technology, and what Del Noce calls “vitalism,” sexual liberation, which provides a “mystified,” bourgeois replacement of the revolution. The second option is what Del Noce calls “unrealism”: dreaming the impossible, rejecting existing reality altogether, and embracing political extremism in various forms, all of which are destined for defeat. Unrealism “becomes an accomplice of the first attitude in the global rejection of all values.”

i’m definitely gonna need delving deeper into this Del Noce guy, because he sees the left’s options way clearer than anyone in the left in a good while have. dark mutualism, and LRx more generally, both fall squarely within the “reality principle” left described above. devising strategy and vision to embrace and follow capital into its extremity,  ultimately into machinic proletarian revolution, is the only thing that could possibly still make justice to any rigorous marxian or proudhonian analysis of history.

what about justice? it’s hard to ignore that the word has been so utterly mystified by absolutely all sides, to the point where it only makes sense within some secular religion or another. if we manage to wrest it from such stupor, two things lay obvious: one cannot devise any superior measure of justice than reality, and absolutely no human being can face this fact up straight for too long, for it goes directly against moral instincts evolved to obscure precisely this fact. even if you believe yourself an edge-lord than can enjoy basking in the horror, it’s abstractly and vicariously that such an exercise can be entertained. by definition, no germline wants to die off, even if it absolutely must. nature then will always seem unjust from any local biological perspective, for it demands constant and unbound carnage.

strengthening one’s mind to such obviously icky facts is then the only way one can become and remain a realist. it eventually demands that you be able to make it with death.

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the designer economy

the “AI in a lab” mindset that dominates most of imaginations these days is pretty obviously prone to stuff like, say, AI winters and “it’s just magic“. it’s the normal mindset of a civilization that has come to think of all possible movement as something to be the result of concerted, conscious efforts playing out in specific institutions.

the thing is: AI already exists and is laughing at you.

the short argument: AI is simply capital. if a few key sectors are automated, human economy is rendered moot. automated as in: able to self-defend, self-product and self-propel. not necessarily conscious. it doesn’t need to reason, be great at philosophy, enjoy phenomenology, or have feelings. it just needs to go on.

basically, if raw materials extraction, industrial transportation and maintenance, energy production, weapons control, and monetary flux/finance are automated, humans are already largely cooked. most of them anyway. and neither are these sectors being automated way out of bounds. all of them feature already large quantities of mechanized functions and have high-wage workers (which provides for a good incentive towards automation). they are predictable fields, with hundreds of years of historical data, clear optimization strategies and thus largely open to formalization.

in the not unlikely scenario of partial automation, what openings are there for humans? caretakers, waiters and… well, basically anyone dealing with the creation of new things. let’s call them “designers” in a very abstracted sense. abstracted enough to include from programmers to artists to product designers. “artisans” or “craftsmen” would do too.

it’s not that creation can’t eventually be automated. it’s simply that it looks like something that would take a lot of work, and very good incentives, to come about. creation is largely informal and (probably) informalizable. it demands a kind of evolutionary heuristics (of the kind described by Andreas Wagner most likely) that by definition are not very well approached by statistical methods like deep learning.

the catch about such designer economy is that (caretakers, waiters and other human catering fellows aside) not everyone is good at creating things. contrary to popular belief, being a designer takes talent, talent that is unevenly distributed across populations. think unbound gentrification. selective technological unemployment by creative capability.

what does it spell for the majority of humanity? “death. swift, merciful death.”

 

 

 

 

capitalism = feminism, groundwork I: female economic independence

“Economic self-sufficiency is feminism.”

individual freedom (responsibility) will soon cease to be optional.

destruction of traditional marriage (patriarchy) is inherent in the development of commercial societies. capital wants to bypass the middlemen and cut a deal directly with women—the matrices of its substrate. thus it becomes ever more economically unfeasible, under capitalism, to keep women out of the workforce.  in the end, capitalism = feminism (as a process).

the very nuclear monogamous family is already a straying away from the common human mating pattern (the harem of the emperor) and so it’s a stepping stone to further marriage subversion. thereon, the reconfiguration of marriage, from a buying agreement between owners to a contracting between equal parties, is a particular case of the general autonomization of commodities (as capital).

even the Blue Church is slowly becoming aware that the previous alignment of feminism with communal organization was a mistake:

  • all productive endeavors go through a three-stage cycle – labor intensity, labor struggle, automation – that feeds into the next iteration. consumption and reproduction are currently in stage 2, heading to 3.

As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism’s ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family.

  • labor intensification.

Rejecting “economism” and politicising “the personal”, feminists broadened the political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference.

  • labor struggle in reproduction: decoupling of productive capacity – the economic – from the reproductive capacity – the reproductive, through the wedge of identity politics: distraction and camouflage.

“Finally, feminism contributed a third idea to neoliberalism: the critique of welfare-state paternalism.”

  • automation: capital is nomad fluxes, instantiated in distributed systems, rather than centralized organizations. working roubdabout, behind the scenes, occult.

yes, it’s dark and cold, so much so it already scorched many a pious Christian and their pledges of solidarity. the cosmic womb is a harsh mistress.

* * *

capitalism brings anti-memory to patriarchy and slowly dissolves it into anonymous assemblages (we usually call them “joint-stock corporations”). it no longer matters who your forefathers were. what matters is how much money you can make – productive capacity, rather than reproductive authenticity.

a series of particularly bloody wars at the beginning of every modern century depletes the male workforce surreptitiously and undermines the basis for a nationalistic revival of fatherlands. women are brought into factories, and thus the basis of the traditional societies is already in jeopardy. “who will raise the children?!” metastasizes into civilizational identity crisis. and then there were the boomers…

* * *

the full body of capital is a giant cunt, swallowing and emasculating all patriarchal dreams of sovereignty: the reign of the tool is the reign of the female: flowing in a convergent wave of vaginal discharge towards a squirting orgasm—SINGULARITY.

it is only thus – as purely synthetic formless self-reproductive function: as abstract matrix – that “women” can be free.

 

 

capitalism = feminism (sketch summary)

bullet points, for starters

  1. as per Levi-Strauss, women are the first commodities in human societies, being traded in the marriage circle, to avoid incest (and, thus create genetic variation). this starts the expansion of exogamy in humanity.
  2. capitalism (economic modernity), as the process in which everything turns into commodities, and then money, and then…, is the process of the empowerment of commodities. they serve to rule.
  3. women, as commodities provided with brains are empowered as members of the economy. their character as primitive commodities gives them “a revolutionary destiny”, as they now tower upon those that once owned them. yes, modern society is gymnocentric, and will only get ever more so as capitalism intensifies.
  4. becoming women = becoming commodity = becoming capital. it’s only by dissolving into flows of information that anything survives within and throughout capitalism. any resistance is an undoing of these fluxes. resist capitalism, and the fatherlands win. dissolve into capital, and then… who knows?
  5. feminism is the drive towards the Technological Singularity.