It’s onto something (till the last paragraph, since libs can’t analyze why communism and fascism exist, and don’t know shit about how Russia or China do propaganda)
The post lays blame at the feet of “marketers”, but this could pretty early be translated to point toward “capital” without too many changes. I’m too dumb and lazy to do it myself though
Read “Godel, Escher, Bach” by Douglas Hofstadter and free yourself from this nonsense.
“selling narratives” I could have delivered the same crock-o-shit rant in the 50’s just when consumer marketing was getting huge.
We’ve been sold the narrative of a “white picket fence” and what a surprise, you can buy it all in the Sears catalog.
Looking back, this is the main reason I stopped going on sites like 4chan. People just take a braindump on the site, then because there’s no personal context you can easily see it as some kind of insight. You just end up believing the things you want to believe anyway. The whole place is just a funhouse mirror, where you can interact with a version of yourself that has never felt the touch of another human.
I love Hofstadter and have read that book, how does it relate? Btw, I’m not agreeing with the 4chan post wholeheartedly, just wanted to see how you all would roast it
There are a few books that will lead you to the same conclusion, but for me it was GEB. GEB really drove home for me that these systems aren’t doing anything “new,” they’re just codified versions of our understanding of the world.
Truth is a higher concept than Provability. There are some things that a system, or even an ideology will never understand. Because you can describe that system / decision making process in numbers and words, that system will inherit the same problems our numbers and words have when describing our universe. However many words you make for black, white, and gray, the universe will always be capable of producing a color that is not described by one of those words.
There are things about this world and human nature that capitalism just can’t capture. You know this, it’s why you’re here. Capitalism doesn’t know there’s finite amount of land, or that some people want to be marine biologists and others are scared of the ocean. Even the most subtle inconsistencies can have deep implications for the system. In 2006, we thought everyone who owned a house would keep making payments on it.
On top of that, a system can’t reason about it’s own correctness. If a given system is expected to describe everything, then it will necessarily contain internal inconsistencies. Two mutually exclusive things will appear as true to a given system:
A farmer needs to buy his own food A farmer needs to grow food to sell Many cash crops exist, cocoa bean slavery is the first thing that comes to my mind. What happens now? Does the farmer starve? Does the farmer start growing their own food? Does it depend on the farmer? Capitalism is abstract enough to be a system similar to prepositional calculus. In this sense, we feed it different truths about our reality, and capitalism will describe the behaviour. But we don’t know all of the truths of our world, and some things that were once true might not be true anymore. There is a short term incentive to lie even if you know something is false, and maybe even to believe in something you know is false.
The point is that we can only know about how these inconsistencies are handled after the economic system runs into them like a bullet train hitting the side of a mountain with a painted on tunnel. We see road runner go in the tunnel, and we think we can go in too. The ONLY reason our current economic system is complex is because the last crash had a complex reason. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and with them we lost any liquidity assurance on stock trades. Companies used survey people on what they wanted, people used to buy magazines to know what to want. Now Algo traders trade through FPGAs dedicated fiber lines to make sure that they see the trend first and capitalize on it first. They read in all of the tweets in real time, and look at how people feel about travelling, buying new homes, selling old laptops i.e. the consumer economy. They push ads to people’s phones, place ads on the websites they visit, impersonate opinions
All of the deep dark algorithms this guy is talking about aren’t doing anything fundamentally new because the inputs are fundamentally the same, and the system is still fundamentally flawed.
Thanks for spelling out your thoughts! Very cool connection
Yeah I make a lot of jumps in logic because you said you read the book, I’m sure it reads like drivel to anyone who hasn’t
Nah, I think it’s still comprehensible if you haven’t read it, I read it quite a while ago
Sounds like 4chan. I donno. There seems to be a lot of bullshit in it.
Looks like out of touch nerds. For them it’s easier to wank off to their favorite videogame than accept the contradictions of capitalism. Prospering capital country with nothing wrong my ass. Back when I was a lib I thought something went wrong with capitalism but in reality the exploitation and inequality is a function not a bug of capitalism.
It’s just nonsense with key words thrown in to make it sound insightful.
- Most people are unaware and do no care about gender politics. Because most people are not online dweebs like the people who regularly visit 4chan. The entire world turns without caring about these issues that are most pressing to 4channers.
- Autonomic means something happening you’re unaware of. So they’re saying “most people are unaware of the feedback loops they’re unaware of.” But throwing in autonomic sounds good and they probably read “autonomic intelligence” in some trash rant on /pol/ or some pop sci article about AI.
- Word salad. the unconscious intelligence controlled market is moving to content marketing and that means narratives and narratives are bad because I have a 4th grade understanding of philosophy. Hey, it’s all narratives. A biology book is a bunch of narratives. Materialism is a narrative. Everything we know about the world is a story we tell ourselves. This guy is literally writing a narrative and praising a narrative from a video game while lamenting how everything is narratives.
- Blames the lack of shared cultural narrative, aka lack of homogeneity, and corporate idolatry. These are idealistic conceptions of what’s happening. In other words, they view things happening based on ideology (diversity) and bad religion (idolatry) rather than material conditions. It’s not the profit seeking nature of corporate entities that’s the problem, it’s the individuals who worship corporations. It’s not that the only way to make money creating content, is to create content that sells. And if the desire isn’t there, it’s not that companies create the desire through marketing. It’s the SJWs trying to erase ‘cultural identity’ aka not suck off the Western Canon in every bit of media or artistic pursuit. It’s a child’s view of the world.
- As others pointed out, the “This is why SJW stuff is hitting hard…” line is absolutely stupid. This is someone who can recognize corporate overreach and how media is a problem, but they attribute the wrong causes and even the wrong outcomes. Companies relying on an experiment to predict the markets creates a nightmare of world economies relying on hearsay from dumb machines and everyone having to pretend it’s right just so everything doesn’t come crashing down. Then there’s hypernormalisation (pretending I didn’t get that from Curtis) where world leaders create a false reality rather than acknowledge the real complexity of the world. Those combined means SJW stuff happens? Bananas.
- “I’m not saying it’s going to be Terminator, but it’s going to be Terminator”
- “People have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations” so fucking close to getting it. It’s not even funny. Then hard curve away from class consciousness into absolute ahistorical nonsense about religion being diminished.
- What bizarre way of thinking. Nazis and Commies are fanatics who would be in monistaries living peacefully if we just had a more culturally homogeneous society. And if the world was broken up in to many homogeneous societies. And we had pure capitalism (aka no communism). If we had no communism, a shared cultural identity, no SJW stuff, proper segregation, then of course Nazis wouldn’t have had to do the holocaust like the algorithm told them. They could have been like nice fanatical monks. But the computers that made the false autonomic systems forced them to eliminate all that stuff from their society.
- Muh russia. Muh russia + Adam Curtis + crypto fascism + vidya channer. What a confused individual. This is what happens when you don’t know shit and are trying to piece together a cohesive world view from tons of media. All the while being very careful to not actually learn anything, just memorize a bunch of…narratives that you can string together into incoherent rants about how the world really works.
- Russia has avant garde propaganda. China censors. The US simply has too much information flowing freely. loving every laugh. No mention of one of the largest and most active intelligence agencies/propagandist in the world. Talk about narratives. The US is just too pure.
- “I want mass violence to happen, for the people causing the SJW stuff to be harmed by a mob, so I can watch from my computer screen and feel like I’m in a cool cyberpunk world. Just like my vidya Deus Ex.”
This person is insufferable. The good news is that they probably don’t bother many people with this outside of 4chan.
avant garde propaganda.
oh yeah… give me some of that experimental, eclectic., and uninhibited propaganda
Here you go
