Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller

Interview with Anthrotechne author Lance Miller at Dangerous:Movement:News

The Sudden Snap of Network Hygiene

Collapsitarian-ism is a new pass time and thing to blog about. Economics and terrorist systems disruptors are working together to end the world as we knew it. Like most, I worry and fret over this. Unlike many, I want the industrial to survive, and many institutions and ways of living to be purged from the world.

There are two such candidates for purging in New York Times articles. Here they are:

1. End the University as We Know It
2. Money for Nothing

The university article muses about what's to be done, offering a paradigm busting restructuring as a solution. I attended undergraduate and graduate schools that were unconventional and created as antidotes to the op-ed author's critique. These schools still managed to cultivate a kind of irrelevance in a large swath of graduates. Social justice had taken on such a powerful a priori that lucid, creative, and innovative inquiry suffered. I am speaking of course about the Janus faced object called Postmodernism and also the New Left. They both are cognitive systems that first reference a history of Anglo-American success in subjugating or simply out-competing other cultures, then the same cognitive systems move on to color every hue of their epistemology and language game to symbolically aid anyone who died as a victim of Anglo-American abuse. Social justice is not served, and resulting epistemologies of the graduates (crap such as time being radial, mysticism superior to empiricism) deem them useless at anything other than psychological shell games. I will say the science programs at my undergraduate school, similar to what the op-ed described in the article, turned out a fine crop of graduates.

A sudden snap is probably needed for this, seeing how even alternative types of schools show a predominant tendency towards little value in their output.

The Worthless Class of the Upper Class is another thing entirely. I am not being a Marxist here, in a meritocracy an uneven living standard amongst citizens is not always social injustice, inequity of outcome is desired. It is a social injustice of the most extreme kind if, in a meritocracy, a Worthless Class is also an Upper Class. Which is exactly what Krugman is pointing out.

So what we need is more social justice within a meritocracy. The surest way for that to be accomplished is more turbulence and wild swings of scale in which zones become autonomous then global again in irregular punctuation. I am not hoping for violent chaos that hurts good people, I am hoping for long overdue network hygiene to remove the useless who sit at the dinner table of our economy.

Anti-empiricists doomed to defeat?

So our faculty in Antioch C3, a lot of New Agers, and a lot the New Age Left, believe we can change ANYTHING through feedforward, to hell with empiricism since thats just derivative of Western civilization.

So I came across this:

"Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America's best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat. " (context link)

Does this mean the Mystical Morons are doomed due to a deterioration of meaningful dialogue?

LEAKED: Antioch University Bold Future Initiative

Chancellor Toni Murdock has commissioned the Antioch University Bold Future Initiative to develop a comprehensive brand that will establish a compelling and distinctive position for the University that will benefit not only the University but each of its campuses and programs. Funded by the Pierson-Lovelace Foundation, as part of its generous and continuing investment in the future of the university, the Initiative will incorporate input from all university constituencies into its deliberative and decision making processes.

Neal King, President Antioch University Los Angeles Lynda Sirk, Director University Communications

Below are snippets I've gleaned from email exchanges and discussions dealing with the re-branding of Antioch for the future.

"America's new President is a welcome reprieve from the Bush regime, but frankly, Obama's embrace of science and technology is useless and alienating for the Antioch agenda. Antioch must aggressively posit an anti-Obama stance, demonstrating our commitment to the inner human that wants to blossom in a world without cell phones or timekeeping devices.
....
Obama wants scholastic and industrial achievement by all. That agenda runs counter to Antioch's anti-cognitivist strengths. Antioch will gain prestige during Obama's tenure by contrasting with Obama's work (slave) ethic by being a light attracting the country's most sensitive, mystically expansive students."

"Feminism will continue to make the unstoppable gains it has in the last 30 years. Antioch has been the breeding ground for this most beautiful inner core from which the feminine divine overtakes patriarchal privilege. Antioch will continue the unstoppable femme centered world by a new scholarship available to any female student. The qualifications are simple -the female student needs only to write papers giving first nations a revered, higher place when compared to other cultures. The student's papers need to explicitly state that industrial societies are male and ugly, and any non-metallurgical primitive culture is feminine and beautiful. Antioch regretfully recognizes that most brown people in the world are quickly mastering the arts of industrialism, we ask that students discuss brown people as if they are primitive....and feminine, and beautifully divine. We feel this Antioch initiative will attract the niche market of lesbians who worship Native Americans. "

Man-Machine argument on Craigslist/Philosophy

I have a presence on Craigslist philosophy forums as the username ObamaEraCyborg. I started the username on President Obama's inauguration day. I do not "troll" on the forum, I "meme bomb" the forum with a political/social agenda.

Lately I've noticed two fairly long discussion threads in which the original poster mentions my name and my philosophy stance. It seems my pro-technology memes are ruminating in peoples heads, which means my meme propagation project is working.

Ironically, I learned the value of meme warfare from my philosophical enemy: postmodernists, most specifically during my tenure as grad student in Whole Systems Design at Antioch University. That school taught me the phrase "do you want to be right, or be effective?". Postmodernists taught me that it is not by being objectively correct that I will spread an agenda, it is by pure and amoral propaganda. Propagation, with an emphasis on lodging my ideas inside subjects who oppose its propagation. By their mentioning of my ideas/values in a hostile way, they carry my ideas further. A step further up the meta, I recognize that by employing postmodern tactics I am propagated by my so called enemy, and one could say that I am losing the war by being like my opponent. I can obliterate this by reference to the moral sphere, specifically moral consistency. A good warrior does not employ moral consistency. I worship in the church of objectivity and rationalism, but on the battlefield have no problem disregarding the manners and civility I would practice while at church. Whatever it takes to kill off the Luddite, the zero-growth Nature lover, and the anarcho-primitivist. The 19th century was the wholesale destruction of the primitive( no metal use humans), the 20th century exterminated the peasant ( local economy humans ), and the 21st will be something similar for another retrogressive class. My guess the class slated for demotion will be those who think without using technology. My education, and tens of thousands of dollars spent, at Antioch U will help me help the 21st century with its network hygiene goal.

Here is the best thread so far:http://seattle.craigslist.org/forums/?ID=118078118

The New Input Output : Civic Wrangling

Take a look at the photo below, and think about any and every .gov, placing /developers at the end of the URL.

police.gov/developers fcc.gov/developers utah.us/developers fema.gov/developers

Beyond "developers", imagine /wiki, /blog, or Youtube channels ( which allow comments and video response, which makes it as much an input as an output).

Over at whitehouse.gov/blog/ Macon Philips, Director of New Media, writes : "One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."

Listen up: Government for the people, by the people has lept from a well wishing aspiration to something we can truly wrangle with. By wrangle I mean Bruce Sterling's vision:

"Wranglers are the class of people willing to hassle with Spimes. And it is a hassle. An enormous hassle. But its a fruitful hassle. It is the work of progress. Handled correctly, it can undo the harm of the past and enhance what is to come."

--When Blobjects Rule the Earth/SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004

I know a kind of people that dislike "fruitful hassle" -they are the people who shy away from learning something new, understanding the complex, working, and delayed gratification. But these kinds of people are rare. More prevalent is the little bits of this in everyone, or simply life circumstances that make civic wrangling difficult. Time to grow up. All good things, all real things, have a learning curve and require a commitment of time.

I would like to note the passing of a certain social thesis to the dustbin of history. In Better Together -Restoring American Community one chapter focused on Craigslist and asked if online community enhanced/enabled social capital. The authors disqualified online civic activity as a positive.

Bye Bye "Better Together", and every academic or NGO activist invested in opposing online civic activism. Bye, wave bye now, c-ya, bye, bye bye.

While mentioning those being left as the train of progress, power and glory leaves the station, I must mention the significant number of anti-computer/anti-internet students I attended college with at Evergreen State College. I especially remember one guy at my last house party in Olympia. He was extremely proud he did not know a single thing about using a computer. A girl in the room was charged with pride of association while say "yeah, he doesn't know how to type in one, what to do at all with one". These kids were usually from higher end middle-class families, raised on the values of 60's counterculture, and were taking the values to a Luddite extreme. I was one of the hot-dog computer science students on campus, often considered uncool or undermining the political revolution by my use of technology.

My government just abandoned those kids. My government just adopted the way I communicate. The Luddite end of the Left lost, and I won. We won.

Technology Uses Us: Humans as an Ecological Niche

An excellent description of modern humans and technology by Maureen McHugh. Original copy of this article here.

More and more we use biological metaphors for our technology. Cars break and are fixed, but computers get infected. Technology evolves, competes, exploits our emotions. We are the ecological niche for technology. And its uses of us may be no more benevolent than our uses of our own ecological niches. Just as we sometimes turn grasslands into deserts, technology can alter us. Our bodies and brains become the ecology affected by technology.

Inuit asked to draw maps could draw amazing accurate maps of the areas they roamed and lived, transferring three dimensional knowledge easily to a two dimensional representation. But they drew the lands they hunted larger, out of scale, because these were the areas that loomed large in their umwelt, or self-world. We are defining our world through not literal representations—maps, chat sights. We have a cyberspace landscape. The result is some comforting illusions about space and distance. California is, in some ways, closer to Austin, Texas, than Burton, Texas, a tiny town full of boarded up buildings less than 100 miles away. I telecommute to California daily. I certainly ‘draw it larger’ in my umwelt. These are people I don’t see, or touch. We are all familiar with the experience of meeting someone we know only from the internet and discovering that they are nothing like what we had expected.

Already, cities and reading and writing are altering our bodies. First generation Arctic Native Americans had myopia rates of over 50%. Their parents, 2%. 70% of mainland Chinese are myopic, 90% of Taiwanese Chinese are myopic. Studies in rhesus monkeys show that it’s not central vision that’s associated with myopia, but peripheral vision—which leads to the question, are cities making us nearsighted? What else is changing us? We have talked since William Gibson’s book Neuromancer about augmenting our brains. We are holding those augmentation devices in our hands—what abilities will we transfer to our tools and stop being able to do ourselves? And if we lose and ability and become more dependent upon say, GPS, doesn’t that ‘benefit’ the technology, insuring it’s continued existence? Reading and writing altered the way people remembered things. People from oral cultures can do amazing feats of recall. But I wouldn’t give up being able to write for the ability to remember my grocery list. What happens as we become dependent on more things outside our brains to do the work of our brains? Is that to our benefit or technology’s benefit, or both?

The industrial revolution produced environmental changes we are still learning to deal with. It is reasonable to assume that technology is changing us—our neural and physical ‘landscape’—in ways that will become clearer over time. The benefits of smart phones, search engines, and ubiquitous memory assists from online tools are way too cool to give up. But rather than wait for a Rachel Carson Silent Spring of technology, we can be mindful that we are causing changes and be alert for them.

-Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh is a Hugo Award winning science fiction writer. In the past few years she’s also written for the Webby Award winning ARGs I Love Bees and The Dark Knight. She lives in Austin Texas.

First I want to praise the writer's treatment of umwelt. This is a good counter to the currently hip preoccupation with bioregions and also drawing maps that more accurately depict the Earth's landmass. We need personalized Earth maps that omit the local town or creek that holds less survival relevance to us than, say, the route our internet data packets go through, or the cities we do more commerce with. Bioregional perspective is relevant for biologically bound humans. Humans, at least all humans practicing lifestyles that enable their likely survival, are not bound by biology.

Another area I like in this writer's perspective is allowing technology to disable our biological ability in order to more efficiently perform the task, and also ensuring the technology is protected and kept in existence. Oral tradition culture is mentioned and noted for superior mental abilities, then the writer deftly devalues that superiority, saying she chooses the technology of storing information in print over the biological ability to store it in her memory.

Social Justice

Where I want to go next is social justice. Social justice in the West, since World War II, has increasingly become a supporter of the very ways of human existence which we should be proactively replacing. Up until the 1960's the West unrepentantly embraced the human replacement of a biological bounded existence with a technologically enhanced existence. I am not referring solely to metal and electricity here. Included is literacy. Where there were indigenous people, the Westerner placed an unilateral valuation before them: that a literary culture is both superior and the only route to power as an equal human being on this planet. Being PROGRESSIVE was taking the stance that the less powerful human should be allowed to learn the technologies that would make them more equal and able to survive.

Then along came the postmodern progressive, practicing a social critique methodology that upended the previous progressive march. To the postmodern; the oral tradition is better than the literate, and beyond that every culture with less tech, more biological boundaries, is better. The postmodern progressive perfected a powerful rhetorical maneuver: their social critique is the only social critique, all others are retrogressive or impaired by cultural blinders.

But outside of academic or political games of my-critique-is-better the reality stands: a biologically bound, illiterate, non-technological human is always powerless and the first to die. How will they die? Not by the genocide campaigns of colonialism or Darfur type warfare, but by ignoring. This "ignoring" is not an un-Christian abandonment. It is the intrinsic behavior of networks as an UMWELT.

Time for a neo-progressivism, armed with the reflection that we are altering ourselves with technology, and reengaged as social justice activists who offer a unilateral stance to all: to say no to technology is to explicitly choose extinction, please choose technology, I will help. But for me to help, or even keep talking to you, you must see your biological existence without technology as both undesirable and a less enriched life.

Mandate to end Postmodernism

Referenced documents:

A President Forgotten but Not Gone
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 4, 2009

Highlights of Accomplishments and Results (15MB PDF)
- The Administration of George W. Bush

Frank Rich's NYT column A President Forgotten but Not Gone is an analysis of the last marketing campaign of the Bush Administration. Rich focuses on the GWB regime's exit interviews, a greater number of interviews than any previous President. In all the interviews, Bush/Cheney/Rove have ( with a straight face ) put forth a glowing review of their tenure. Add to these interviews the regime made headlines as the most environmental president ever with the Jan 5 announcement of the largest marine sanctuary in the world (Grist).

Contrast this with the rhetoric of Obama. He is an engineer, a social and cultural engineer. Our tribal subjectivisms are duly noted in his speeches, and he asks us to transcend past them to make a more robust, wealthier, healthier, and inventive society. In his world view their is work to do, criteria, and success or failure upon reflection. In his world view, we can't just make shit up.

The GWB Regime, by contrast, is entirely contained in its tribal subjectivisms -serving its base, ignoring or gunning for the rest. The GWB Regime was the greatest achievement of postmodern tactics. This week, with the view provided by Frank Rich, we are seeing Postmodernism with one foot in the grave, touting itself as forever relevant, so oblivious to empirical data that it will not know its lights are about to go out forever till its lights are out forever.

Within the Postmodern semiotic, tribes echo chamber their values within, and attack the tribes that are opponents. Since sometime around the George Wallace presidential campaign, and Nixon's swooping up of those voters with his southern strategy, Republicans have not been a coherent policy in the least, choosing rather to attract tribal subjectivists who do not measure real world goods but rather make symbolic gestures to express their hatred for all things urban. While the Republicans made this unreal world of incoherence, the countercultural left was fast maturing past 60's recreational subjectivism and by the early 70's were creating a big economy via publishing and academia. Subjectivism ceased to be recreational, old hippies got professional about their psycho-somatic methodologies.

Republicans ruled Washington (East Coast), and Dems/counter-cultural left ruled the storytelling worlds of Hollywood (West Coast) and books.

Then on Sept 11 World War III broke out. Washington responded with the largest , longest barrage of subjective making-shit-up the world has ever known. More powerful than 1000,000 of the original atomic bomb. Through 70's and 80's Repubs and Dems had toyed with casual Postmodernism, with the most adventurous being on the left side in academia or popular books. But on Sept 12th, the Bush Administration pulled a Postmodernism out of a research hanger at the Heritage Foundation that simply made history and science melt away.

This Postmodernism kicked ass, mowed down opponents like they were grass. Except for real opponents. Oh yeah, that thing the hippies and the new Repubs forgot about -objectivism, realism, empiricism. You can make history and science melt away, but reality does not melt so easily. You, the subjective, will melt first.

A survey of what is hot and what is not: 1960-2008 Making-shit-up in your head and finding others who agree was the new cool. 2009-? Engineering and empiricism are in, making things and finding other to help make it better is the new cool. Rest in Peace Postmodernism, the head trip was fun till it became an addiction.

Finding the Fascists

In my reading of news articles spotlighting Obama's selection of Mega-church Pastor Rick Warren, I came across this outright lie:

People for the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert told CNN she is "deeply disappointed" with the choice of Warren and said the powerful platform at the inauguration should instead have been given to someone who has "consistent mainstream American values."

Wow, I guess the name of the organization, combined with what Kolbert said lets us know their agenda: to take what a minority of Americans believe or embody or support, and cast that as The American Way. I'm a liberal inner-city Seattle resident; and Ms Kolbert; your way isn't an American Way; it is a way that won't share the stage with others in the same country that you have little in common with. Ms Kolbert, your values and message are the problem. The Huffington Post [link], in contrast, discusses more transparently that, yes, most of the columnist's friends support gay marriage, but the columnist recognizes their opinion was a minority in the California vote on the issue. What a fair and balanced dialogue when compared to The American Way proclaiming their minority agenda as the national identity.

Maybe clusters of ideological purists like The American Way, or zero-growth environmentalists, or bio-regionalists, or any other radical departure from global industrial-information-transportation economics can be found out during the Obama tenure of the White House. The reactionaries who exploded with declarations of intolerance for Warren ( and his America ) have provided the archetypical behavior. These radicals can then be labelled what they have been all along: intolerant, self-righteous fascists attempting to impose their world view on the rest of society.

I was once in a graduate program operating with The Center for Creative Change ( a.k.a C3). Over my year and a half as a student, I slowly began to realize the horror of what they intended: to impose their anti-industrial, anti-intellectual agenda on the world. The faculty explicitly stated that folk ways were better than scientific/professional experts, that non-linguistic cognitive processes were more powerful and legitimate than the literate functions of our brains. Since my eyes were open to such stupidity marching self-righteously in lockstep, I started this blog and other writing projects to alert the world of these scumbags. I am so grateful for the Obama Presidency. It is going to be a true flashpoint in which these fascists get found out by their intolerant screeching being aired in national media.

Die, fascists, die.

• Embrace What You Have In Common With Rick Warren -Huffington Post
• Rick Warren, Obama and the Left -WSJ
• Obama Selects Evangelist for Invocation -New York Times
• Choosing Warren represents diversity

My post at Salon[link]:

Rick Warren is as mainstream as it gets.

White, middle-class, Protestant, heterosexual suburbia IS the mainstream in this country. It is wrong to leave them out of ANY national event.

I say this not as a right wing troll. I am an inner-city Seattle liberal that voted for Obama, and the choosing of Warren is a good civic moment gay rights supporters should easily recognize.

The orthodox, entrenched, fascist left should stop trying to recast 'America' as a place without white, middle-class, Protestant, heterosexual suburbia.

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F_ck you Antioch University

2004-2006 I was in the Whole Systems Design program at Antioch University in Seattle. In the summer of 2005 I took a course called "Visual Literacy Studio: Capturing Mental Images for Creative Thinking" in order to get enough credits to graduate in the standard target time of two years enrollment.

In the course instructor Farouk Seif imposed an anti-rational, anti-literate, anti-language point of reference when he said "in this course, and to be a whole systems thinker in general, we need to access a pre-language portion of ourselves to truly create". It was at that point I knew I was screwed. I have no memory of movement in my visual memories. I have only faint and infrequent memories of still pictures. When I remember a visual of a place I've been, there are no people or moving things in the visual.

I've been researching my autism more intensely these days. One cool thing occurring in the community is a pride, and slogans such as "neurological diversity" that contend that autistics are just another way of thinking, and there is also a growing opinion the asperger autistism is a good mental disposition for internet technology jobs. In my reading on autism I came across this:

"I don't think in pictures. I'm a kinaesthetic thinker, a systems thinker, a musical thinker. Mine is a physical and sensory world of pattern, theme and feel. My mind is like a mosaic, my conscious thoughts intangible until I experience them after they've been expressed- usually through arts."
-Donna Williams
(prolific autistic writer of many text books now used in special ed courses)
http://www.donnawilliams.net/about.0.html

One thing they talk about at Antioch is diversity. Almost every portion of dialogue is framed to allegedly respect diversity. Unfortunately, Antioch is an old institution fighting a specific cultural war, and have hardened into an orthodoxy that can only pursue the overthrow of Anglo-American business-culture and heterosexual hegemony to free any 'people' who are under-represented or repressed by that hegemony. But my own under-representation in mainstream dialogue was not one of the "types" Antioch cared to enable a creative or professional development for, nor even acknowledge. I had spent years identified as a great performance artist in my hometown, and moved on to accolades in the music scene of Seattle, but when I arrived at Antioch I was constantly treated by students and faculty as a "computer geek" and prone to too much logic.

Antioch is famous for providing the underground railroad with volunteers, getting many slaves out of the South and on to freedom in the North. Now they provide an underground railroad, and the cars are jails of orthodoxy in which no minority, either in skin color or neurological type, is well served. It is no wonder that most African-Americans that enroll in the C3 programs at the Seattle campus drop out within the first year. I wish I had been that smart.

Asperger's Self-Discovery Chronicles: Cultural Evolution

In previous postings (here) I have grappled with trying to explain myself as dependent on a certain cultural and environmental ambient. Basically I had claimed we are on different evolutionary tracks.

That claim about different evolutionary tracks gets a little more subtle, and loses connection to racism, by adding the ideas put forth in a Kevin Kelly blog posting (here). He brings up a central thesis of Joseph Weizenbaum's book "Computer Power and Human Reason", which basically argues against embracing computer use due to society eventually becoming overly dependent. From the book here is the general form:

"The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of computers into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most "progressive" elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping."

-Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum

Kevin Kelly goes on to do a semiotic experiment. In the above text and reasoning process he replaces "computer" with "printing". He then goes on to do the same with "writing" and "the alphabet". What emerges from these word replacements is that societies have committed this act of transformation many times over the last ten thousand years. (Think of the US Constitution, it has "freedom of the press" in its forefront assumptions of human enterprise.)

Now let me place myself in this historical narrative: If I was plucked from this electronically networked, literate, secular, and morally ambiguous society I operate within....I would become of these :

• dead ( excuse the drama-agitprop )
• become less effective (which could escalate into less employable or divorced)
• become politically evil/malicious as a fight response to less positive environment.

No wonder I'm so sensitive about where I live, and when I think back to my earlier years in the Bible Belt south I was a less effective and politically evil person. Since moving to Seattle, with a few years also working in Alaska, I have felt a deep sense of coming home. The city has a default literacy ( highest per capita of bookstores in the US), computer proficiency, secularism , and love of big nature (mountains and ocean) embedded into the cultural ambient. The ubiquity of these defaults works in my favor, and I contend that I was born with some hardcoding that depended on these defaults.

In the last year I've started putting the pieces together to understand my neurological type ( Autistic: Asperger's Syndrome). I am starting to understand why some places, and some ideologies, can make me extremely comfortable and happy or extremely uncomfortable and go on the offensive/defensive.

Starting in 1996 when I was in places ( Antarctica, Seattle, Alaska) that offered the ambient culture/environment for my neurological type to succeed, I did. During my tenure in schools (Evergreen State College and Antioch U) where an anti-intellectual and eco-anarchist Primitivism strongly informed discourse, I became many kinds of unhappy. While I support any type of lifestyle choice, most of the discourse in these schools was embedded with real intent to topple the technologic, rational, intellectual and literate world and replace with something more biologically bounded.

Eliminate me in the process. Eliminate my neurological type in the process. Eugenics.

I remember an experience in class with the instructor, Farouk Seif, pursuing an incremental part of the program to eliminate my neurological type. He demanded that our projects to be turned in for the class reflect a certain criteria for creative process. That process needed to access a pre-intellectual level. A place without language ( thus by implication without logic ), a place totally visual and fluid. I do not have moving images in my head. My memories are totally void of movement. When I remember places I've been, I remember the buildings, hills, trees, streets without people, because people move. I also have a blank in my memory concerning time. I have a diminished sense of sequence or duration (my wife noticed this in how I do not know the last things agreed upon in a group discussion). For me, the use of logical constructs is essential in managing reality. It is also key in being creative, I mix and mash-up things based in logical categorization, without this I am as lost in creating as I am in interpreting reality. My instructor, who had a political agenda in which all this anti-cognitivism served, was trying to turn back the clock on humanity and our technological dependencies, and kill me in the process.

No wonder I wrote a meme designed to kill Primitivists.

Forget the Frankfurt School

"Dialectic of Enlightenment, is the pivotal, fundamental textbook of Freudo-Marxist Critical Theory explaining the socio-psychological status quo that had been responsible for, what the Frankfurt School considered, the failure of the Enlightenment, a defeat represented most dramatically by the events of the Holocaust."
-wikipedia

"Culture industry is a term coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), who argued that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Adorno and Horkheimer saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. Herbert Marcuse was the first to demarcate true needs from false needs."
-wikipedia

Paleo-hippies rallied around memes that , by their spreading, would weaken the stronghold of mass culture and rational thought.

With those memes a wave of euphoric freedom is expected to be felt, a new perspective in which the magical and unbounded are available. What can be purchased in the capitalist system is then seen as dirty, caged in, tired and ridden with guilt for the lack of stature of the workers at the origin point of the goods.

Magic, creativity and freedom are enabled.

The second class human emerges. One that can be easily owned and manipulated. Disengaged from symbolic analysis of the corporeal world, the magical class are not easily herded from without but will strongly bind to an inner mission statement or religious icon.

In their minds forever the victors of a war with Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle and any cultural artifact that has an association with the building blocks of the Holocaust. This is the class which suffers recurring defeats in contests with any foe that wields technology powered by symbolic analysis of the corporeal world, but they never perceive themselves as defeated because the use of symbolic analysis of the corporeal world is either beyond the grasp of the lower ranks or taboo for the leaders.

The old joke "Question: Why are so many trees in France? Answer: Because the Germans like to march in the shade" describes the situation for magical and mystical cultures quite well.

Progressive means moving on from caring about this news story. Every day the mystical emerge defeated, with the news that their modus operandi has succeeded once again. All have styles of broadcast for scenes of their martyrdom, and a path for money to follow to reinvigorate their self-image.

Let's spend our money on an iPhone, let's create more wi-fi networks, let's build robots to fight war, let's constantly improve symbolic analysis of the corporeal world.

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• My definition of symbolic analysis of the corporeal world
• Arc of activity called humanity (a compatible writing without the Frankfurt School in mind).

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