Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013)
opendemocracy.net
opendemocracy.net
I've watched this (plus your basic purity spiral) more or less destroy a couple of forums. It's depressing and it solves exactly nothing.
The worst part is the constant gaslighting by elites who keep repeating the sermon about how the pie can be made bigger; while they themselves are laser-focused on expanding their extractive moats. They're even building moats around their moats by monopolizing the media and public communication channels (via algorithms) to shift all opportunities towards themselves... In an environment where they already have so many opportunities that they can't even read their own inbox!
The average elite's idea of 'spam' is the average person's idea of 'opportunity of a lifetime'. The inability of the elite to facilitate opportunities due to the complete saturation of their attention bandwidth may be the biggest waste of opportunities and human potential we've ever seen. That's why we need decentralization and why we need to move away from a monetary environment which artificially facilitates infinite wealth compounding.
Regular people aren't even talking to each other now. The free market is dead. Everyone is too busy trying to score some funding from elites who keep ignoring them. Why are regular people so focused on raising money from elites instead of getting together and bootstrapping? Because they know what's going on; they know it's the only way to succeed!
Because the pie is shrinking and the only way to get a tiny piece is to ask someone who has a huge piece to share theirs.
On the other hand, accepting that we live on a planet with limited resources, in a biosphere (not “environment”) which can only take so much destabilizing impact before it becomes unliveable, is important.
Our minds seem to embrace the former and refuse the latter.
This perfectly characterizes my concern with Elon Musk - he cosplays as a fighter for the proletariat while clearly pursuing goals that aren't guaranteed to help the average person in any time span. "Maybe eventually it will be good for everyone", but with no clear plans to get there or safeguards in place to guide the system.
Cheaper space access means every useful thing done in orbit becomes more accessible.
The "in principle" part is what concerns me. Cars that are cheaper and more reliable are definitely good, but if that's taking resources away from public transit (or worse by using the Boring company to delay and sabotage public transit options) then it seems like definitely a net negative for most people, sold under the guise of helping them with technology
I really hope he does truly want to help people and is just making mistakes right now, but it keeps seeming more malicious over time
That aside…
I did find this aspect something appealing.
> such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance
Someone involved in the education system in my area recently said something unwise.
They apologized, explained themselves in detail.
A few weeks later they finally resigned after a lot of pressure.
The response to the resignation by the folks opposed to this person was “Well he is not alone, I bet the other people on that board feel the same way.”
I couldn’t help but wonder then, wouldn’t it be better to have someone who sincerely apologized and discussed their words openly on that board?
If the whole shaming/ calling out can only end in some level of ostracizing, won’t people just be better about hiding those things? Does that do us any good?
I have trouble with all the shaming / calling out if there isn’t an endpoint/ no chance for anyone to be better.
> They apologized, explained themselves in detail.
> A few weeks later they finally resigned after a lot of pressure.
TLDR: If you're ever the target of a mob, your chances are innumerably better by simply refusing to resign. A non-zero chance of keeping your job (by not resigning) is infinitely better than the 0% chance of keeping your job (by resigning).
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In all the high-profile cases of people targeted by cancel-mobs, apologising only increases the pressure the target experiences. Apologising is taken as an acceptance of liability and admission of guilt to much more than what was originally accused.
If the target apologises, and then resigns, then they lost their job due to their own actions and no individual in the mob can be pointed out as the person perpetuating cancel-culture, and the mob feels vindicated: After all, they wouldn't have resigned if they didn't say/do anything wrong, would they?
If the target resolutely ignores the mob, and refuses to resign, then someone has to fire them, and that someone has to at least pretend to have investigated, and that someone could still be on the hook if the mob was wrong anyway.
RIP Mark Fisher.
He enjoyed his privilege so much, he killed himself.
He was a great writer and thinker (I read Capitalist Realism) but clearly he had his blind spots.
"Like so many other things, identity politics is deployed by elites in the service of their own interests, rather than in the service of the vulnerable people they often claim to represent."
It seems bitter and in a way and anticipates a lot of the cultural grievances that are now being talked about all the time, so it's prescient if anything, but I think in reality he's just bitter that his focus on class and disregard for 'moralising' wasn't going anywhere.
He's way too harsh on the critics and way too generous to his friends, in particular what he's saying about Russel Brand here has aged horribly. Looking at the rabbit hole Brand is going down these days the criticism of him wasn't wrong.
The best critique of Brand is that he's an entertainer, and entertainment is not a vessel capable of carrying left politics forward.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/all-hail-va...
A more detailed critique is available here, if the above is too light on specifics:
https://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/vampires-...
Nine years later, Mark Fisher is in the grave, and his proposed great voice of the working class Russell Brand is hawking crank nonsense like anti-vaccine conspiracies [1] and the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 [2].
I think it can be quite comfortably said that the essay hasn’t aged as well as some would like to imagine.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34zd9/russell-brand-ivermec...
[2] https://www.bigissue.com/culture/russell-brand-interview-loo...
I don't follow what this means? How does one 'use' intersectionality to promote interests? I thought intersectionality was the idea that intersections of identities have different experiences than the components.
Ex: Black women have experiences that are unique to that intersection of identity, which aren't experienced by people who are only one of women or Black.
The same way as any other idea/concept/framework; one finds arguments which it supports that promotes the interest one wants to promote. What's so strange about that?
Like, I wouldn't say that I 'use' 'asymptotic complexity' to promote engineering priorities over product management. I read a lot of nefariousness in that phrasing, but I guess that's not what was meant.
That is a rather smug way of putting it. Fisher’s suicide was a tragic event caused by lifelong depression. The fact that he killed himself doesn’t make the essay age better or worse. Bringing it up as some kind of “own” against him is pretty disgusting.