almost finished writing my script for the next @nonserviammedia (will have it recorded by wednesday, promise!) and leftists should read way more lit on military theory
probably one of the weirdest parts of post-post-modernism in a WEIRD country is that we've had the potential for massive reorganization of society using computers but it hasn't happened
this kinda gets brushed aside bc most people interact with industrial era institutions...
... most people experience decentralized autonomous through culture first and foremost and not at work or school b/c social media is the only freedom they have
if you aren't in a job that prizes autonomy u probs have a networked social life and a hierarchical work/school life
anyway the reason why is obvious, networks are corrosive to the powers that be and so they try to limit them
even political movements aren't taking full advantage of the possibilities on offer - part of this is that the tools are expensive to build/test tho
anyway this is where military theory is helpful cuz the people doing it tend to be smart and because they have #skininthegame and so poor strategies tend to die out (especially with low resource insurgents, the us military is pretty rigid)
Antoine Bousquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare and John Robb's Brave New War are both great reads and reveal What Could Be w/r/t networked society amazon.com/Scientific-Way…
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my favorite new media trope of the last couple years is "magical object in a fantasy setting that is very obviously a standin for a smartphone"
can't find a name for this on tvtropes but the Sheikah Slate from BotW is the most obvious example i know of
ideally this would result in the world becoming more fantastical, but alas the west lacks the sort of hardware hackers of shenzhen that will let you customize your smartphone to actually look like such artifacts
this essay by @vgr is interesting because his description of how what emerging management looks likes reminded me of the sort of demands of '68 protestors for turning work to play studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/lands-of-lor…
you can read this as an "appropriation" of radical aspirations by "capitalism" (c.f. goodreads.com/book/show/1166…) but i don't think thats whats going on
simple tales of how neoliberalism won are kinda bad, see for example jesse walker's thing on the messiness of neoliberalism reason.com/2022/02/19/neo…
recent chats with twitter friends has returned me to this point and i think one of the major benefits of twitter as a platform (as far as i can tell) is that the way you form relationships means you can sort for people who share a lot of fundamental assumptions
this makes it a million times easier to have high level discussions because you can just skip all this groundwork / scaffolding that would otherwise be necessary to properly talk about those things
being able to have high level discussions is great! but the basic problems of a lack of shared perspective reasserts itself and communication is on many dimensions harder than more normie disagreements for a variety of reasons
okay someone asked me to do a book thread so here goes
first up is anything by Kevin Carson. Everything after Mutualist Political Economy has a lot of overlap with everything else he's written. I'd recommend Desktop Regulatory State because it has the most Ideas kevinacarson.org/pdf/drs.pdf
next is Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. Sent me into an existential crisis during my time at university. I think its overly philosophical but Terror Management Theory comes out of it and that seems legit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denia…
even ignoring the realms of lit about the broader dynamics that give rise to inequality or empirical examples of stateless markets at scale that were fairly egalitarian (Indus Valley Civ) there's the hot take that price gouging and theft are both good