moments of production to moments of sustainability and the myriad forms of activity by which the shape, standing, and meaning of objects in the world is produced and sustained
Does this necessarily mean moving beyond a capitalist framework? After all, emphasis on production means emphasis on profit and consumption.
hipbreaking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_Breaker
There's a YA novel called Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi that is about ship breaking and is set in a dystopian, "post-apocalyptic" future. But the reality of our world is that decay and dystopia already exist in parts of the globe (including America, of course).
as many of us are reminded as we watch friends, neighbors, and family members fall out of the hopes, comforts, and securities of the middle class).
Especially poignant now.
are in process of coming apart, perhaps to be replaced by new and better stories and orders, but perhaps not.
This reminds me of Mark Fisher's explanation of capitalist realism-- the inability to conceive of a future that is not late stage capitalism (okay, I probably butchered that explanation). In any case, despite the clear signs of our world being broken, so many are unable to see or acknowledge the need for a radical, systemic change.
an aggressive political lobbying program to support its own pipeline projects over competitor’s solar or wind ambitions.
Seems like Microsoft could have used its clout to insist on other forms of energy aside from Dominion's natural gas.
Microsoft’s operations are made carbon neutral through a company-wide carbon fee to fund renewable energy and offset purchases.
Microsoft has promised just this past year to go "carbon negative" by 2030-- using the same calculus/methods. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/01/16/microsoft-will-be-carbon-negative-by-2030/
virtualize digital information and infrastructure around the world.
I am reminded of advertisements touting cloud technology as a way of eliminating paper work and saving trees, etc.-- there is a sense that the Cloud is environmentally friendly, but only because most consumers never consider or know about the physical reality of Cloud servers.
Instead, they conclude that voters are mostly disinterested in politics, ill-informed about political matters, and likely to make their voting choices based on a set of factors that have no relationship to the proposed agenda and competence of their favored candidate.
Listened to a Hidden Brain podcast this weekend on political hobbyism and the way Americans treat their politics like sports teams-- seems relevant here
ery real advertising dollars.
is it possible to have an internet culture without advertising? Corporate and monetary interest seem to be the source of a lot of issues with the digital landscape.
Masculinity and femininity, imagined in this way, are not social constructs. They are concepts with a fixed, ahistor-ical, essential meaning from which we have deviated over time but to which we can return.
But as Sunden would argue, gender is a broken machine that shifts with every glitch and malfunction!
where the study of individual exemplary historical figures is typically favored over broader his-torical trends in the ancient world.
A conservative emphasis on the individual as opposed to the structural
His task then becomes maintaining frame (or frame control) in interactions with beautiful women and, ideally, influ-encing them so their frames become assimilated to his.
This makes me think of the Tolentino article. Highly individual frames are built into the design of the internet. How Red Pillers see themselves and the world is reified by the websites they frequent and content they consume.
zombified consumer who serves at the altar of the corporate state.
These men identify real frustrations and sources of cultural anxiety but channel it in the worst way possible.
highly fragmented community whose factions can be extremely hostile to each other.
No surprise that a community based on shared hatred is fragmented and hostile.
White supremacy is less easy to retro-ject onto the ancient world, which had no meaningful concept of biological race, as many scholars have shown.8
However, mainstream depictions of race in Ancient times tend to uphold white supremacist ideals-- such as the film, 300, which depicted the Persian army as a monstrous, subhuman horde. How many men on these subreddits have actually read scholarship and how many are simply projecting onto the past in whatever way they like?
evocative of ancient Greece and Rome to lend cultural weight to their reactionary vision of ideal white masculinity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyaftqCORT4
Contrapoints has a great video on how concepts of "The West" have been used by Alt-right nationalists to further their agenda.
“Every form of glitch, whether breaking a flow or designed to look like itbreaks a flow, will eventually become a new fashion,”
This makes me think of the ways in which drag have influenced makeup culture and the straight fashion world at large.
“ideal femininity requires a radical bodily transformation at which virtually every woman isbound to fail.”
Even cis women experience anxiety about gender performance. All women deal with fear that they are not "feminine enough"-- be it breast size, body hair, waist-hip ratio, etc.
It could be a way of staying with glitch
Through this lens, aren't all gender expressions glitched in some way? How can we lean into this idea?
ender-mechanical bodies
ateriality and fragility of new media.
Me every time I suddenly worry I will lose all of my writing to a computer glitch.
implied nominalism of ‘trans’ andthe explicit relationality of ‘trans-’, which remains open-ended and resists premature foreclosure byattachment to any single suffix.”
This is fascinating-- "trans-" is a useful term in the case of this kind of writing, though it has obvious colloquial shortcomings.
imitative systems, and the boundaries between female and mal
gender is learned by imitation-- just as AI is built to learn the same way (thinking of Life Cycle of Software Objects here)
it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digitalspaces are organized
By breaking the form, it reveals the form. Glitch challenges the every day assumptions of normativity.
technological malfunction
Is this an attempt to take language of judgment out of discussions of malfunction?
s s ss sss ss
Does this complicate the framework from the Jeong text that looked at online harassment as similar to spam?
se )s s sss )sss ssss s sss/ sss ss s/ ssP
and this is how we get the incredibly polarized political and ethical landscape we have today!
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I'm reminded of the male users on twitter who tweet out comments like, "Fat women are ugly" to provoke responses from female users in which they post sexy and exposing photos of themselves to "prove the haters wrong"-- who profits from this mode of empowerment? Who is put more at risk?
sss sss
We are meant to be vulnerable online to be trusted or loved, but that same vulnerability puts us at risk.
s ss s s
Interesting to think of how "coming out of the closet" tends to be framed as a story of empowerment, while also putting the individuals who are continually outing themselves at risk.
Mr. Bungle had risen from the grave.
The original troll
Mr. Bungle was a psycho. Not, perhaps, in real life
Interested in how online/offline identity shifts allow for heightened violence and loss of civility
(and only yours)
But what about the case of voodoo, when your avatar is publicly degraded? Blocking only does so much. Familiar arguments indeed...
shadowed
I'm interested in this idea-- that the real world is the shadow of the virtual, not the other way around.
here on the brink of a future in which hu-man existence may find itself as tightly enveloped in digital environments as it is today in the architectural kind
Spot on prediction here-- we're essentially trapped in the digital architecture, now!
horror autotoxicus
As Dr. Sayre would say: "the call is coming from inside the house."
“the self versus the other.”4
Who is the "other" to cyberpunks? And do cyberpunks even exist today? I am used to this term referring purely to genre, but know less about people who think of themselves as "cyberpunks."
Instead,the ethological turn proposes to look at the potentials of objects and askhow they are capable of expression and making connection
Feels refreshing to examine social network technology outside of a moralizing framework. I wonder, what is the "norm" for connection-making and expression today?
Dadaist message,
Nonsensical breakdowns in language on the internet seem to be the heart of increasingly obscure meme humor.
cultivation by other minds.
This idea builds toward what feels like the thesis of the story, culminating in the idea's about personhood near the end -- specifically, Ana's thoughts on Pearson's desire for product vs employees on pg. 72 in the pdf.