flâneur

Rex Ledesma

4 followers · 4 following · 895 views

on the atlas — 14

highlights — 33

  • The shift is telling. If marriage is composed of a set of tasks or projects—a career, parenting, keeping a home—its failures can be displayed as extrinsic to the question of how spouses connect. Levi’s diagnosis is something like: these people have different priorities. This means that their lives can succeed to a greater extent than their marriage does. What was, in Bergman’s hands, a horrifying picture of the limits of human contact becomes, in Levi’s, a set of increasingly independent journeys of personal growth.
    The Problem of Marital Loneliness | The New Yorker
  • “God is clearly democratic, he distributes brain power universally, but he quite justifiably expects us to do something efficient and constructive with that priceless gift. That’s what management is all about. Management in the end is the most creative of all the arts, for its medium is human talent itself. The real threat to democracy comes from under-management. The under-management of society is not the respect of liberty, it is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality. If it is not reason that rules man then man falls short of his potential.”
    Government in the Future
  • Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place.
    Government in the Future
  • Similarly, the vanguard party is a soulful party. In both cases those who urge that men submit to the rule of these benevolent autocracies may, I think, justly be accused of wishing to make men into machines.
    Government in the Future
  • It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, technocrats, a vanguard party, a state bureaucracy, or whatever. Under these conditions of authoritarian domination, the classical liberal ideals which are expressed also by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized.
    Government in the Future
  • At least in its ideal form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts of possessive individualism that are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. It seeks to eliminate social fetters and to replace them by social bonds, not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by corporate empires, state or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to me, therefore, to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism.
    Government in the Future
  • One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position is in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Limits of State Action” which was written in 1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view the state tends to, I quote, “make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends, overlooking his individual purposes, and since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a profoundly anti-human institution.”
    Government in the Future
  • Reading is unique in being a form of production that resists monetization and the logic of structural incentives. It produces things like experience, knowledge, discomfort and communion.
    In Praise of Not Not Reading | The Point Magazine
  • A colleague of mine recently remarked that he wished he could apply for a semester of leave just to catch up on reading, without the expectation of producing anything. He was acknowledging that our universities, like the larger culture that supports and depends upon them, do not have the structural wherewithal to recognize the work of reading as work.
    In Praise of Not Not Reading | The Point Magazine
  • There is an underlying assumption that at some point there will be a return to the ‘normality’ of self-regulating markets of private actors. But bailouts without structural change keep us on the path of ever-increasing losses for the public just to sustain the basics of life
    Gareth Fearn | Ransom Capitalism · LRB 30 August 2022
  • Authenticity articulates something that never was as something supposed to be always already lost, in order to promise you are on the cusp of reclaiming it, as if naming it was the first step toward embodying it again, and doing away with your need for the word.
    Mass authentic – The New Inquiry
  • ” The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. “We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”
    The Last Time Democracy Almost Died | The New Yorker
  • “There’s so much pressure on artists to commit to being one thing, or to restrict an album to exploring just one subject or sound. But my life isn’t like that, and so my music can’t be like that either.”
    Nick Hakim Interview: ‘WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD’ - DJBooth
  • I think it’s “good” in the eyes of the system that controls us, you know? It’s like conforming to what that means for us. For me, the word “good” comes from the systematic way of thinking: a good student, a good citizen.
    Nick Hakim Interview: ‘WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD’ - DJBooth
  • Neither of these pure state- or market-based approaches provide real ways to either incorporate collective input or build toward collective outcomes.
    To Fix Tech, Democracy Needs to Grow Up
  • The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress
    Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
  • The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life. When art does transparently aim at moral guidance or social progress we dismiss it as dogmatic, pedantic and servile.
    Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine
  • As Haider puts it: ‘If the builders of technology are transmitting their values into machinery this makes the culture of Silicon Valley a matter of more widespread consequence’.
    On Neoreaction
  • As Haider puts it: ‘If the builders of technology are transmitting their values into machinery this makes the culture of Silicon Valley a matter of more widespread consequence’.
    On Neoreaction
  • But would you realize What you meant to me or was it mystery?
    Tom Misch – Movie – Lyrics
  • The most basic thing an NFT does to interrupt this process is make that image a far more explicit commodity, rather than dishonestly and implicitly suggesting it is digital ephemera with no value. (If that were true, memes and virality wouldn’t be such a big concern for corporate marketing departments.) Rather than letting that cultural object be exploited by opportunistic platforms, in principle it makes its digital objecthood explicit.
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • Yes, it arguably challenges the notion of digital abundance, but it also challenges the individual, with more emphasis being put on the object than who made it.
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • this new sense of individual consciousness also produced a new sense of class consciousness as society began to transition out of feudalism
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • In this sense, what we are witnessing is arguably a replay of individualism’s initial emergence.
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • As our communities thrive and share and support one another, we focus less and less on the fact that the land we’ve developed through a kind of digital agriculture is not ours and never has been. As online life becomes increasingly dystopian, it is about time we updated our vision of what this place can be.
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • I firmly believe in the joys of digital abundance and its ability to connect people. It’s about cultural production, pure and simple
    NFTs and Open Access: Power in the Age of Digital Individualism – xenogothic
  • If it is possible to design and program my own institutions, laws, administrative services, etc. from my home desk, to find an unchallenged ideological home in a cloud community of my own choosing, then it is no longer necessary that I confront myself with conflicting truths and values.
    Katrin Becker on Lex Cryptographia
  • these ideas suggest that a connection to the institutional structure we are born into or move into is no longer necessary; that, much like our territorially bound and corporeal dimension, the institutional structures are burdensome heteronomous constraints that need to be overcome.
    Katrin Becker on Lex Cryptographia
  • A democracy is characterized by the fact that it ensures a continuous coordination between the institutionally staged and implemented values, ideals, etc. and the values, ideals, etc. of its citizens. It constantly readjusts the institutions’ orientation to changing imaginaries among its citizens
    Katrin Becker on Lex Cryptographia
  • The social imaginary – and here a distinction must be made from the concept of imagination, which refers rather to the mental capacity of the individual – is central to the formation of a community: a group of people who happen to share a territory only becomes a cohesive society once they agree on a corpus of ideas, values and ideals, when they create common narratives, myths and images which constitute their identity.
    Katrin Becker on Lex Cryptographia
  • there seemed to be a tendency for increasingly more technocratic approaches to prevail
    Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion
  • This was felt from the part of financial institutions and projects seeking alternatives to mainstream finance through more decentralized proposals – many authors came across similar, and now widespread, narratives where the emphasis is on how the technical and security features of the system would allow for better financial supervision and secure financial operations.
    Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion
  • Satoshi’s uninterested position, anonymity, and unspent bitcoins feed an imaginary of altruism and pure technical genius that seems to allow for a moralization of this character as good, and an identification of some projects’ morals with that capacity to make things right. So, as a form of reasoning and faith this is not new, but it appears so when applied to a particular technology and the crypto-community.
    Inês Faria on Crypto as Ritual and Religion