Thread by @elleprovocateur

"The erosion of meaningful culture, the domination of corporate & state media [] the loss of a knowledgable audience. And as one sees w/ the Russophobic response to Ukraine, the entire pandemic only served as a precursor to some complete mental collapse."

john-steppling.com/2022/03/dockin…

"And perhaps the best place (or one of them) to start is with ideas of #autonomy, #AI, and #tech (#media). For #automation and the internet have both, in their own ways, contributed hugely to the layers of mystification surrounding everything in the #capitalist west today."

"#AI seeks to achieve the same control over mental processes that #scientific management sought to achieve over physical #labour [in 2nd industrial revolution] through a process of rationalization, fragmentation, mechanization and routinization."

"There is an occult aspect to #AI & its clergymen. And in some sense this was the pessimism that #Horkheimer & #Adorno both felt — that that legacy of the Enlightenment was going to eventually become the [] Brave New World (by way of Frankenstein & #Nosferatu)."

"#socialmedia is a giant mirror of distortion. That may be its essential role, in fact. It is a constantly shifting fun house mirror that makes any attempt to grasp a fixed perspective on society nearly impossible. It has had a direct effect on society, on its shape and form..."

"...the real changes were in the human #unconscious, and in the more extensive indoctrination of the subject. Not the creation of ‘new’ subjectivities, but the repurposing of old ones. Reification remains a cornerstone or bedrock of what #capitalism does."

"The subsumption of society to #capital is well past complete... the effects psychologically, are becoming glaringly obvious. The so called immateriality of #labour has really been more about the hyper reification of labour, & more, the #infantilization of the subject."

"The #Covid narrative included a conditioning for [] a new form of learned helplessness... But here I wanted to point out another aspect of this subsumption, or absorbing of society into, essentially, the mechanics of #capitalism is that #dissent has been subsumed."

"#ecological movements all seem to suffer from a lack of imagination. I can think of no area in which statistical models are so intwined w/ the ethics & goals of the movement. The euro Green Parties are uniform in their near fascistic imposition on personal/individual restraint."

"Like #Puritans the Greens believe Earth will punish those outside the covenant. Transgressors are anyone not acting in accordance with the Book of #Ecology. And of course it doesn’t matter who wrote the book, really. For this, at a certain point, is about #race and #class."

"The #environmental movement is enclosed (subsumed) by technological rationality. Whatever the actual #revolutionary imagination of Paris 68, or the Vietnam anti war movement, the underground press from the sixties, et al — none of it remains. Or, very little, let's say."

"the [] greens are more concerned w/ repackaging tobacco than they are w/ the now permanent state of #emergency or the mass #surveillance that cuts across every country in the EU. There has been a new cyber technology developed by men & women who deeply believe in capitalism..."

"The #imagination of the average westerner is now one that has been exposed to post internet #indoctrination, for almost 3 generations... #screen technologies have brought forth a highly regimented & restrictive moral world view...one that is undeniably amendable to fascism."

"The creators of media today have sampled heavily, aesthetically, from 50s sitcoms... #Apple, #Google, #Microsoft, & all the celebrity billionaires [] are white and uniformly cheering the #fascists in #Ukraine just as they cheer-led the bombing of Belgrade twenty some years ago."