bshepard

Thank you for introducing this concept of the "Eternal September" - it has a real archetypal power to it, reminds me of Northrop Frye's genre-seasons: comedy with spring, romance with summer, tragedy with autumn, satire with winter.

Author of the piece here. One reader wondered what it was that make these aesthetics managerial. Think, perhaps, here about how Baroque artwork glorified emerging absolutist monarchy -- through aesthetically pleasing representation of both absolutist figures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_de%27_Medici_cycle) but also through aesthetic pleasing representations of absolutist power -- for instance, consider the way that Las Meninas demonstrates the power of the almost unseen Philip IV. Even though the King is only a tiny figure in the painting, everything in in space of the painting looks towards him.

By analogy, managerial aesthetics produces aesthetically pleasing representations of the "subjects" of managerial power, who are, in this case, nonprofit figureheads, and also aestheticizes managerial power itself. Contemporary art turns everything into material for contemporary art in a similar way that managerialism turns everything into something to be managed.

The parent comment, me, was an American. Yes, the US state offers "protection" to Europeans, gangsters do that too.

This is a life experience, my friend. I don't use Reddit. Anyone who lives in one of the non gamma social levels in Europe knows that life here is better: the bargain made with the metasystem is superior. Only for alpha pluses is the US better, sounds like you are an alpha plus aspirant, good luck.

The success of the US stock market and the US as a society are not exactly related, and may in fact have an adversarial relationship, so continued investment in the US could be wise.

There's a lot of alcohol and drug use in Berlin, but there are not vast open air drug markets like Kensington in Philadelphia or Skid Row in San Francisco.

The issue is, indeed, "over the top."

This is not exactly a financial response, and that was the context of your question, so forgive the somewhat off-topic aspect of the remark -- yet, the negative aspects of life in the US have both real actual costs and possible future risks. All the talk about civil war might be bluff, but it is still alarming.

Hello there, I live in Berlin now and used to live in the United States. My family is there, and I go back to the east coast of the US often. The degenerating and dystopian quality of the United States is difficult to overstate, but almost impossible to capture verbally.

Whatever one cause attributes to the systematic breakdown of the US, it is difficult to deny the realities of the decline -- massive alcohol and narcotic dependency issues, increase polarization of politics, censoriousness on all sides of the discussion, narrowness, a shortening of attention, a loss of standards. I could go on, but it's too depressing.

I came to Berlin first in 2006. Yes, it was very cheap then, but also very monocultural: now there are many more forms of life here, and they benefit from their coexistence. Stay here, make this moderately good place even better.

This part - about professionalization and automation -- feels especially fresh: "This process by which the intellectual capacities of a particular job are turned into processes that could theoretically be subject to automation is also known as professionalization. For Industry 4.0's purposes, which is positioned as a general upgrade of the current world, it is imperative that labor supply quality improves.

Professionalization is a great bargain for many. Wages rise, in exchange for the worker having to become more skilled and educated. The standards of labor rise, thanks to the increase of technique and information available to the worker. The public gets better services and goods.

This also makes the processes of labor vulnerable to automation as a matter of course. A job that you can learn to do, that has set rules, processes, orders, can theoretically be automated. As long as you don't need to use your hands too much, or aren't reliant on snap judgment, the wonderful pattern detection and signal/noise filtering of the human brain, your skills are potentially automatable.

"

This wrong is subsidiary on the the prior moral wrong of kidnapping and caging humans. This practice will look very bad from the perspective of any desirable future. But many futures await with even more cages.

Another passage that really sizzles:

"The world of modern management is a world of continual surveillance and goal-oriented process. It is fundamentally harmonious, and offenses against its harmony are taken with great seriousness. It is a world of decorum, a world of process, a world of evaluation according to standards. It is obviously quite unlike the relationships of people under ‘normal’ conditions and almost all historical conditions.

‘Eurasianists’ see only its origins, and the insults inflicted upon their countrymen and fellow-travelers by it, though they seek to master this system so that they might do the same to their enemies.

Right liberals see its femininity, its lack of active vital principle, and its break with tradition and tolerance of error if it meets with consensus.

Left liberals see its inequality, invasive and exacting demands upon all, and its pervasive and inescapable injustice and lack of responsiveness to pressing needs of the unfortunate.

Theocrats see no god in it, only a worship of power, wealth, and status."

There's seems like the key to the argument:

"But managerworld is predictable, if nothing else, because it is processual, it relies on a heuristic to determine success and failure, to determine what needs iteration and what does not. They all descend from the mad principle of endless INCREASE.

Increase profit

Increase power

Increase prestige

Should any given project under managerial society fail to increase any of those 3 criterion according to the nearest most powerful supervising managers, it will be judged a failure, and cancelled or shelved or delayed."

One more passage to quote: "This is the core contingent of the incipient fourth industrial revolution. It is built on a society that surveils. The surveillance of everyone, at all times, for increasingly petty reasons. User experience improvement is the most typical one these days."

This feels like the key passage right here: "The rise of the gig economy post 2008 is not just the sign of the times, it is the sign of the increasing automation of management processes that are relatively simple. Without it, the scale and scope of the gig economy would produce on its own a secondary boom of what used to be temp services, and with them the according managerial level professionals administering the division of labor. In the end, the manager, like the bureaucrat they descended from, is in many places an avatar of process. Managers may yet survive in their role as accommodators, mediators, and exception handlers—but we’ll see." This is what connects this content most directly with the likely readers: the role of managers in a progressively automating future.

A previous posting of this got flagged, but as a co-author, I want to stress the sincerity of the proposal. Outclowning Trump seems to be the only way forward.

Part of what is "cool" about managerial society is how it captures other forms of economy, so that the economies of firms, states, universities and so many other institutions all become subject to rationalization.

Favorite line: "The carrot stays a carrot. The carrot, if anything, gets tastier. And the stick becomes a security camera."

On Bookchin and Kurdish revolutionary movements: https://internationalistcommune.com/bookchin-kurdish-resista...

The pattern of splitting within the revolutionary left is notable, and perhaps similar to similar patterns within protestant christianity. And perhaps just as various protestant consciousness patterns became universalized, so too are the ways of thought of the old revolutionary left.

And perhaps in the vision of society splitting and splitting, there are more revolutionary possibilities than widely understood...(https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/galtzerdiakbolo?s=w)

Here's another way to consider the very deep question: bayesian inference applies to judgments of efficient causation, that is, a relationship between antecedents and consequents. This kind of judgement is very common, and very useful, but there are other kinds of judgement which may be needed to establish the likelihood of an event...specifically, what could be called "contextual judgement" For example, if we're trying to assess whether 9/11 was an inside job, we'd have to have to develop a sense of the context, specifically, the role of deep state false flags, and of secret societies within the ruling class culture of the United States.

But it does involve fields of sense that are bayesian, and perhaps bayesian inference patterns will always obtain in any judgment?

Perhaps not, because you need to have a qualitative sense of context variation, and some contexts/fields of sense are not Bayesian in form - historical understand, for instance, depends on amassed narrative/empirical ...so that, for instance, my knowledge of progressive-era America depends on knowing a lot of facts and stories about different fields/metanarratives -- what Ann Douglas called the "feminization of American culture" --- the managerial revolution (burnham, Chandler), modern imperialism.

Good question. Here's the fable, retold by Wikipedia:

"A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's in my nature.

Also, according to Wikipedia, "The earliest known appearance of this fable is in the 1933 Russian novel, The German Quarter by Lev Nitoburg"

1933 in Russia would be a good test case to see if the article's proposed method of 'probabilistic contextualization' could work - as there's broadly two different historical paradigms for understanding the great purges that began that year, on the one hand, the result of targeted assassinations within the USSR by fascist powers, or, on the other hand, as the result of Stalin's psychotic paranoia.

Could the probabilistic-contextualistic method bring some depolarization?

Surely, yes, but the whole social metasystem does a lot of damage to the planet for the benefit of the few, so why scapegoat one part of the system?

Very deep passage here, thank you: "I asked the other day on Twitter if anyone could come up with a comparable financial asset whose demand is completely artificially generated by narrative. Derivative contracts don’t qualify because I have yet to see a product where if we unwind the stack of underlying we don’t reach some real commodity, currency, equity, or benchmark which is economic in nature. The closest comparable people came up with is the historical practice where the Catholic church in the Middle Ages used to financialize penances for sins into products called indulgences as a means to fund the church’s endeavors. This is indeed an example of a purely-narrative-driven financial asset whose value is purely derived from the Christian faith, albeit a pathological and exploitative reading. If crypto assets have comparable financial products it is that of indulgences, both are purely narrative-driven fundamental-less financial assets that can be created out of thin air and whose market value is purely a function of sign value and fealty to an ideology. The only difference is that crypto assets have a digital secondary market where these neo-indulgences can float and be traded."

"In other words, if superintelligent machines prove capable of everything except consciousness in this enlarged sense, could our descendents become endosymbionts, or sentient organelles, in our technology? Might future humans find that their only purpose and function within larger biomechanical constructs (including spaceships) is their useful capacity for feeling and perhaps higher consciousness or ecstasy? Is late capitalism itself already such a machine? Giger’s world shows us this dark threat of cyborg endosymbiosis: not to be simply augmented by machines (or even simply replaced by them) but to be parasitized and engulfed by them in a kind of numbed ecstasy that somehow masks the violence being done.

"

Perhaps someone reading this might be interested in developing a joint national branding strategy and national development strategy for Thailand. More details here and here:

https://infinitethailand.substack.com/p/the-value-chain-vaul...

https://infinitethailand.substack.com/p/how-to-imagine-the-t...

(email in profile)

"Arsenals radiate lines of communication vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. In addition, transmission relays propagate any line of communication aimed at them. All units must remain in direct connection with their own lines of communication, or be adjacent to a friendly unit in communication. If stranded, a unit goes offline and becomes inert."

"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting."

The Book of Disquiet -- Fernando Pessoa

Naturalism is a metaphysical position; a second order claim about what kind of phenomena count as real. It is different than a methodological committment to only considering a certain set of causal relations -- this methodological committment makes research possible, not the metaphysical committment of naturalism, which is extremely untenable, as it can't account for the most basic aspects of our experience.