In this series of posts on simulation, I’ve been doing something of a David Byrne by wondering, ‘well, how did we get here?’ One signature of simulation’s 2025 ‘here’ was conveyed by three emoji. In the combination of these three characters, so much is compressed – to the point of collapse.

how we found ourselves in the shallow hellscape of almost meaningless communication, and real aerial bombardment

Houthi PC Small Group, or; 'Meanings' of Emoji in 2025

In this series of posts I’ve been exploring simulation: its pervasion of reality, over time, its eventual-possible takeover and replacement of ‘reality’. By 2025, it seems simulation may actually be the Great Replacement of reality; but simulation may not be a great replacement for reality. What if we traded the milk cow of materiality for the magic cucumber of simulation? As in: what if this has already happened, and the cow is gone?

of milk cows, magic cucumbers, and the collective and cumulative costs of our societal preference for simulation

$imulating Intercours€

It’s interesting to regard

 2025

as the full-blown, stage four, 3SD ‘binfire of the manatees’. Looking back, everything was an involuting simulation of the world consumed by fire – by 2015?

The Involution of Everything

, or: why most people preferred simulation to reality by 2025

School of Block

Hello all,


 I’ve been working on a bigger post here, which I think should be out next week. What I’ve been trying to do is think through the point at which the integrated spectacle of pure simulation we live online spirals into an increasingly precarious materiality.

get your mum a Baudrillardian interlude – for Mother's Day

The Banal Obscenity of Capital's Solicitude

The worlds we live in now are mediated by digital architectures. Little of life as we navigate and experience it would exist without two pipes: the pipe delivering the goods (90% via shipping), and the pipe streaming signs through screens in hands. We live the pipe dreams of the piped society, and we will live its consequences.

digital architectures as global pipes, ordinary person's de facto nonchoices, the rise of Meta's hegemonic control of community through WhatsApp, and society – an indifference that makes indifference

Hegemonic Capture in the Piped Society

This is an audio version of a longer piece about disruption – taken from more scholarly work I then decided not to use.

a paradigm-setting case that provided key enabling conditions for the stupidity of e-scooters... and maybe 2025 Elon Musk

Blurred Lines: the emergence of Uber and disruption

The years 2020-2021 did so many things to us. In many ways they’re not over: the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory. This itself is an interesting and paradoxical moment that bears precise repetition (because you may be already repressing it):  the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory. ‘What pandemic?’/It continues1.

Easing ourselves into our chosen maw of more and more and MOAH

On Maxing it, after 2020-1

“Things happen over people’s heads and through them.”

– Adorno, History and Freedom

 “The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsession of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual.

(Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid) + (Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb) = 3SD, and its emergence through the psychosis of media and head shred scroll holes of Tik Tok and Temu.com

3SD '25: The Choice of a New Generation

This is a small-ish bridge post, the initial purpose of which was to be a paragraph getting to the listicle I promised at the end of the previous post. Said listicle has been generated, but it ran long, and the cumulative post would have been ‘beyond email limit’, as substack warns me from time to time.

a bridge post on what happened once LLMs were added to what was already adding up as the annulment of information, knowledge, and maybe truth, by the system 'we' serve

Facing the content monster, from the coinpumping parallel world of academia

Two writer friends stand at a fork in the road: one is quitting longform fiction, while another prepares a scholarly nonfiction manuscript, knowing full well the precarious state of academic and trade publishing. Across the seas, another writer friend is – finally – winning critical acclaim for their literary fiction, after selling rights to the previous novel to a large streaming platform.

on what it might still mean to want to write books and try to write books, now (part one)

Facing the Content Monster, from 2025

In the previous post, I tried to convey a sense of pervasive deflation, the exhausting hissing of electrified inflatable Santa Clauses, the feeling I have of being absolutely mastered by a cultural force that pulls me in and seeps into my mood. Interestingly, a few friend-readers said that this resonates with how they feel at this time of year.

Consumed, as in: Baudrillard's Twelve Days of Christmas (part one of ¿three?)

I’m writing to you from a place near spiritual exhaustion. I’ve had the good fortune of a great and worthwhile year, in my bubble. Three chunks of the world are in garbage time while several growing regions are under aerial bombardment, or on fire. In the Mallee on Monday it will be 46 degrees. But ‘in here’ and ‘for now’, everything is hunky dory.

cri de coeur on Silly Season, and preamble for Baudrillard's Twelve Days of Christmas

on feeling mastered by inflatable Santa Claus

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-pk545-16e7436  Continuing the conversation with Chris Hobson, recorded in the third quarter of 2024. This returns to the central theme of smartphones, social media and digital technologies, thinking through the social costs and consequences that come with them.

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-pk545-16e7436

In conversation with Chris Hobson, Q3 2024

An observation of a rift is an injured exclamation of diremption. In a rift, something has been sundered from something, wrenched away. A breach has been wrongfully yanked out of the cosmic weave: whether in time and nature, or between people. Rifting is not the distinctness of calmly disparate entities. It is not the multiplying separation of differentiation inherent to processes of growth and becoming.

rifting between the moral, the actual, and the agentic – in surveillance capitalism, with a bad feeling about our undermining overtaking

rifts, part two: a fracturing breach that forcibly rearranges, a racehorse of genius, and a bad feeling about AI, in Garbage Time

This is the audio version of this post.  I hope this will give another way of thinking about ‘what has just happened’ with the bad choice the US has very intentionally made. To all readers: keep your eyes on the background, watch the supply chain: the Houthis understand something about the world we ‘know’ but choose not to direct foreground attention on.

tracing out the true ineluctability of globalisation, against Fukuyama/popping the balls of the post '89 American Dream, in 2024

Capitalism delivers the goods

This is a

 very

surreal moment in human history, as far as we yet know it. The 2024 Presidential Election is a synecdoche for this ‘hole’ of America – not much to add1. I’ve tried to pinpoint this zeitgeist as stupid and stubborn in its surreality: a distended ‘between’ times where even the betwixt is indeterminate because the afterward is unsure. In its stubborn thus-ness, 2024 is not so much the end times as the globular glum times.

How we find ourselves stuck glumping, with no time for reflection, ‘now’ that time is out of joint

Rifts (part one of three)

It’s Halloween today. This is jarring in Australia, to anyone over the age of 35. One of the things I find upsetting about

 how

Australians have embraced Halloween is the socially necessary use of excessive single-use plastic.

on not seeing the collective effects of itty bitty shit bits of plastic at civilisational repetition and planetary scale

Death By Trinkets (audio version)

This post is the completed omnibus/guide of this earlier post. To that extent, it’s a paste in of that earlier post, with a few spontaneous edits, plus the added two I did to complete the series.

If you want the way back and through, here’s the posts in order. 1) stupid, stubborn, surreal intimations and apprehensions of the 2024 zeitgeist, part one

 This tried to name the scent of the age, and say why it’s worth risking naming it.

stupid, stubborn, surreal (2024 = 3S): cul-de-sac and ausgang (way out) in/of these impasses of urban communities of fate

from 'having' e-scooters in 2024 to the elusiveness of empathy, and being had by the platforms

So if e-scooter platforms are the ‘dote’ of a signature 3S, what is the antidote, or ‘some’ antidote, and how do we get there? This is what I’ll consider in the final post of this series. This is also one of my first attempts to integrate insights from psychotherapy into work that is usually informed by social theory.

on accurate empathy, fiendish empathy, and the absence of any empathy whatsoever

"Will responses be human?"

doom loops of the goods life in our urban communities of fate

We find ourselves living (somehow) in a community of fate; perhaps a doom collective of dividuals in a control society; perhaps a foaming co-ommunity of couples alone together in their apartment bubbles, incapable of realising themselves through one another in – full circle – a community of fate. We roll in strange circles; these are surreally loopy times.

a polemic against the prevalent choice of "a fundamentally passive and infantile" relationship to people and space in our urban communities of fate

"Keep it foolish!": from the doom loops of the goods life to the structuration of wilfully infantile and reactive politics of e-scooter platforms

After finishing the first of three planned pieces on the stupid, stubborn, surreal presence of the e-scooter, I realised there was a lot that had to be said about disruption for any of this to make sense.


 What follows is a section I wrote from an aborted book;

a paradigm-setting case that provided key enabling conditions for the stupidity of e-scooters

When I started this series, I envisaged it maybe in three parts of no more than 2-3000 words. Tragicomically, the points and ideas have continued to calve and hive off; it’s not such a bad problem to have, ultimately, but in the meantime, it’s easy – including for me – to start to feel disoriented by it. This post, then, is just a way of keeping this bouquet in hand.

a recap and bridge post, to keep things clear and navigable – for both of us

stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S)

In this post – which I’m determined will be the penultimate in this series – I want to focus on the hinge between the affordance of the e-scooters, especially some particulars that arise from the particularities of its vehicular design, and social acceleration.

a final set of hinges bringing us to where we can reflect on an elusive mature politics

E-scooters between shitty there-ness, technical affordance, social acceleration

In the opening post in this series, I incautiously risked naming our zeitgeist – as stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S). 3S = 2024, was my claim. 2024 smells stupid, to me, in the same way the sweet scent of Cool Water scented 88–’92, while citro-sweet CK One and the nasal riesling of L’eau d Issey Pour Homme


spritzed the spirit of the ‘94–’05, as a musk deer in season sprays against the base of a tree.

the political stakes for us dealing with 3S in 2024;

Re-framing stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S)

Hello all,


 In thinking through the stupid, stubborn, surreality (3S) of 2024, there are many examples that one could use: Ukraine and Gaza, Trump and Vance, Olympic Breakdancing and Opening Ceremony Transpanics, etc etc etc.

the case of e-scooters, part one: a stupid, futile gadget that lacks dignity, and a big jama (邪魔) of contemporary urban space

stupid, stubborn, surreal (2024)

To each time its

 geist

; we clock this1. Zeitgeist is a vexing thing to try to grasp; we glimpse a glint, a slippery subjective apprehension of it. Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Zeitgeist is the great collective instance of the elusive obvious. Seldom does even a great artist comprehend and convey it – when it lands, it is a rare, fleeting, precious anomaly2.

intimations and apprehensions of the 2024 zeitgeist, part one

stupid, stubborn, surreal

posting season is upon us: expect a few posts in August...

'thank you for your patience'

In our recent conversation, Chris and I talked about how a lot of contemporary life tends toward the unwitting, unintentional yet systemic and consequential production of ‘itty bitty shit bits’, life shredded into the micro plastics of attention and electronic-reactive piecemeal work tasks, which are consequential, but lack meaning. In some cases, as I explore here, it’s actual plastic…

Two things about humanity.

Death by Trinkets

In conversation with Chris Hobson

The ultimate ‘destination’ of this post is the shipping container, and the process of containerisation, and how it might have always been about containment.


 This follows on from the sad present I sketched in stacksistence, a making do with all that is left of the ebbing dreams of the past half century.


 To get there though, first, I have to deal with globalisation’s meaning, and two Hegelians: first Fukuyama, then Marcuse.

tracing out ineluctability and the emergence of global one dimensionality, via two idiosyncratic Hegelian scholars, Fukuyama and Marcuse

'Capitalism delivers the goods'

To contain is to convey. To hold while sending. To keep-while-awaiting arrival.

sketching out 'the goods way of life' in our collective existence, and through three senses Marcuse gives in One Dimensional Man

Containment as one dimensionality

What is this thing I am embarking on writing ‘into’ with some degree of commitment; if I wish to continue here, then what am I continuing, for whom and ¿for why? This continues a thought raised here, then here. I started 2024 with the strong, clear, unambiguous feeling: I do not wish to produce

 content

. And for a long time, I have written about the Content Monster we all serve. Well then, what then? Can I continue here;

as I commit to another year on a platform that uses content production to grow numbers and create success and stack sovereignty

Stacksistence

Hello all have you ever had an ‘encounter’ with the internet that reminds you what the space might have always in fact been?

mixed media prelude to an end-of-year conversation about cybernetics and sign value I'll mount in November-December

"it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle" (We Need to Talk about Internetz)

Imperfect notes on an imperfect world       In conversation with Pete Chambers, late 2023Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

Australian National University

a discussion about Naomi Klein's Doppelgänger(s), pipiking, Baudrillard, conflict as spectacle, how love will tear us apart, and the possibility of sustaining empathy as a modestly hopeful opening to living together, somehow

So, what tends to happen when ressentiment is

 enacted

? I italicise enactment because, it strikes me, ressentiment does tend to play out as an enactment, in the sense relational analysts and therapists use the term (as far as I understand it). What is an enactment?

a sketch note noticing ressentiment as *enacted*, and enactment as a parallel monologue spiralling recursively as 'we' defend against the disintegration of our ego and that of our 'endangered' group

How ressentiment transpirals through enactments

Hello all,


 thank you for your patience with me, and ‘welcome back’ (if you are, indeed, still here [if, indeed, you ever were…]). In the following few posts, I’m intending to pick up where I left off in early October, using humdog, Baudrillard, and Antony’s remix of OPN to start thinking about what’s happening online.

'opening salvo' in a Christmas invitation to consider something that's poisoning our collective communicative environment

Ressentiment as gas attack

Something about summer has shifted, in the double looping knot of the world’s boundary currents, the intensifying dread recognition in the widening gyres. Between the northern hemisphere’s hot August blobs and the sense of gritted foreboding we’re facing here by September, there’s only a month. There I was, sweating in shorts in Berlin in July; here I am, sweating in shorts in Melbourne in September.

trying to conceive of our community of fate from the distance of a first world spectator of a third world devastation

That summer feeling: Derna in autumn, Melbourne in spring

This morning an interesting thing happened: I strongly noticed a desire not to post or write. Once I tuned in to that, I realised that there were some reflections underneath the grumpy reluctance.

reflections 'beyond stacking', on where my head and heart's at with this work, given the 2023 media ecology

Tells us about your piles, stacks of books, sets of thoughts, sub- and suprastack

Back in May, I began trying to align the brutal enormity of containerised shipping – ploughing the debounded oceans of our planetary community of fate – with the floating, twitching Jellyfish tentacle sensitivity of consumption in the minds, lives and hands of its desiring subjects. Desire was my way in:

 desire is no coincidence

, I remonstrated.

unboxing the tragic paradox of consumption by glancing at the production of ‘dopamine stock’, scarcity – and the collective fantasy at the heart of consumption

Dopamine Fantasies of our Land of Cockaigne

At what point did we become the species whose most popular category of YouTube video is unboxing? Future historians might note this as the precise moment when we became consumed by consumption. For we are, above all, a community of fate trapped in a global risk society whose spatial and temporal deboundings, as I’ve discussed, are packed into boxes, wrapped with sticky tape, and sent, containerised, around the world.

opening the boxes of consumption we live in, noticing the plague of objects that's burying us

Unboxing the amateur unboxer

A month of travel does a lot of things to your head. If you’re lucky, however, you come back, and no one has done anything to your house and your things. For me, it’s also almost always the case that returning is more interesting than leaving and being away. The most precious thing about travel is less about the new things I saw when I was there, and more about the fresh way I can apprehend my own life, for a week or two, when I get back.

some no doubt glib and broad brushstrokes impressions on travelling to, and coming back to, the 2020s

on returning... ....to 2023

Hello all, well, out of runway here before heading away for a month. If you’re interested, it might be worth re-reading the following posts, given that the discipline I’m practising leads to a kind of ‘A

 cause

de moi, le déluge’. Mea culpa. ~ so then: This was ‘the animus behind the impetus’ here; pivotal life moment.

given it's going to be a vacant month around here...

'summery' dismissal (and a summary of some summer reading, for Australian winter too)

As I wind down for a month off – I won’t be posting from the 19th of this month until the 17th of next month – I thought I’d try something different. In January this year I had a fundamentally different experience of time aboard a yacht; I wrote about it here.

a reflection on time and technics as the fundamental basis of our civilisation, from Mumford's Technics and Civilisation ('The Monastery and the Clock')

From the cosmic plenitude of entropy and negentropy to just-in-time.... disintegration?

How did we end up

 wanting to

live ‘inside’ a Rube Goldberg machine that provides dopamine spurts on command, and John Maynard Keynes sunglasses or; how did we create such an overcomplicated cage for ourselves – and one another – by dint of our repetitively enacted wanty wanting, alone together?

exploring hedonism and selfishness in our seeming desire for the Great Rube

capitalism's happiness? (psycho-premises, Qu'est-ce que c'est?)

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about circulation: how and why things tend to be kept moving around as they do, what kinds of power relations and reward structures this canalises and incarnates, the momentum and path dependency this has for us, how this feels (at scale, in our lives and relations), and what kinds of psychosocial realities this co-creates and co-constrains.

circulation's discontents, the decontainment of desire, the impossibility of boredom while sailing, and the (un)controllability of the world

Animating individual fantasies, deadening systemic realities (fantasy is no coincidence, part one of three)

Something happened to us during the pandemic. Many things, indeed. We don’t really yet know the toll of the pandemic in its fullness, for whom the toll tolled, and how. We may never. We ‘know’ it killed anywhere between 6.9 to 30.1 million people1: a huge toll and a huge margin of t|error. This was some kind of war. What we also don’t yet have a sense of, yet, is the burden of the pandemic, in all its uneveness.

lived experiences of polycrisis, seen via our phones as holding power, compelling presence, controlling absence

What did we catch during the pandemic, and how are we to catch what we've caught?

Last week my spontaneous attempt to give a distilled summary resulted in a glorious failure: over three thousand words, and several discursive footnotes :)


 Mea culpa!


 One of the things that’s interesting about the approach I’ve taken with this blog – semi-automatic, hypnagogic-but-caffeinated thinking by writing – is that I’m not in control of what comes out, and *can’t* be, if I’m to allow it.


 Like a free jazz

*trying* to distill some key points from the past six months, part two

Living together, somehow

Here we are, heading toward the middle of the year already. Soon it will be winter; already the fog has set in and the sun is rising lower and later. Here I am, writing in the dark again, although it was only a month or so ago since daylight saving ended.


 Since November last year, I’ve let Living Together, Somehow be taken in the direction of my spontaneous urge.

distilling some key points from the past six months, part one of two

Living Together, Somehow (the past six months)

So then, fantasy is no coincidence. What is this producing, at scale, in the global supply chain? Let’s bring this into sharp focus. I was listening to two podcasts recently where people – thinking through its discontents really and rarely thinking about these materialities of our world, the world I shorthand via Gorzworld and VaporSpace – carefully described the global supply chain as a Rube Goldberg* machine.

or: how to ‘build a giant waste-producing Rube Goldberg machine as a global economy that gives us dopamine spurts every day’, by aligning the phone fantasy of control w that of the sovereign consumer

‘Give us this day our daily spurts’/Rude Goldberg Machines (fantasy is no coincidence, part three of three)

I want to satisfy this empty feeling; we all got a space to fill; What I got you gotta get it put it in you;

Click here to discover your fantasy and fill hole again (fantasy is no coincidence, two of three)

In a podcast conversation that’s oriented a lot of my posting over the past several months, Chris and I did some work trying to name the signature of the political present. This appears all the more difficult, insofar as the

 geist

of the

 zeit

now is marked by complexity, ambiguity, indeterminacy. https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-si6k2-132b626 Thanks for reading living together, somehow!

trying to constellate some kind of intelligibility out of the smell of the now

Things that make you go HMM

As of April 2023, two things about the Anglocapitalist AI discourse that I glimpse seem noticeable. Firstly, we appear to be hitting peak hype. I say this based on my podcast feed, which is flooded with episodes featuring guests promising hot takes that *finally* make sense of it all. Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

rule of recursions in HI-driven podosphere hype, 'Mechanical Turks', global logistics, and some ranty bits on the nontrivial chance of domination by planetary stupidity

'What Wotan Wants': how to make a – ? – we won't know is deadly, or fun, or janky, but probably exploitative and stupid, in five easy recursions

Hello dear readers.


 I’m not sure about this one: tonally, and in terms of the swerve and pessimism, I don’t quite wanna own the result.

Spectres of New Materialism (&amp; the world on fire)

So then, what would you say has happened in your thinking since the post end of last year, in sum?

For some reason(s), I feel like I’ve completed a period of intellectual re-apprenticeship after the onset of a personal polycrisis1: noticing the moral and relational liquefaction of the sector and organisation I’m working in, in 2019; having a third child in October 2019 who then was a ‘lockdown baby’ during the global pandemic;

finishing the questions I posed to myself on Tuesday, which VaporSpace destroyed

Friday follow up, PC on PC

Well, it's Tuesday, school holidays, Jesus has survived crucifixion once again, and the rabbit has laid and hidden chocolate eggs about our homes, for our children to consume in remembrance of ‘this’. A very probable causal chain.

in ways that show how global capitalism and our control by Tech Titans is producing a future different to the one we thought we were heading towards, five years ago.

Noticing VaporSpace in Melbourne's 2023 'post pandemic' CBD

This week I’ll continue closely reading through and extrapolating from Gorz’ CER. If you want to catch up, read here, then here, here, then forward to here.

toward involutions and ironies of functional and market-based attempts at integration

Opening the Rift: functional integration *as* the divorce between working and living

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”.

– Pascal.

 The bureau – which has no heart – has its reason, from which reason is annulled.


 – interpolating from Gorz

~ Last week’s posts left me with at least a few conundrums to continue on with.

functional differentiation as the production of (organisational) incoherence and (individual) meaningless) and compulsion through heteronomy

Bureaucracy is Darkness, from Pascal to Gorz

~ Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do ~ Oh Heaven Heaven is a place a place where nothing nothing ever happens ~ I want you – the truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark it scares you witless but in time you see things true and stark ~ I’m playing with an intuition I have, which I am not the first to have. It is this, thus: We know less;

due to the complexities of the New Dark Age;

Dolphins into the dark, or; why we – perhaps – cease to understand the world... ...more than ever? (Friday fragments)

How are we to live together, somehow – with AIs, in cities, in classrooms?


 Here, I’m trying to think through this conjunction of factors, in the absence of any certainty, clear argument, opinion, or ‘hot take’.


 I offer this to you in the meandering spirit of Montaigne, in recognition of my commitment to thinking-writing and hitting publish (too soon), and in the knowledge that, thus far, what follows is not a style of

The ‘dark figures’: of AI, absent students, and safe playgrounds (in a de-bounded world)

Are the Anglocapitalist countries meritocratic, unlike contemporary China1? Is this system a meritocracy? Was it a meritocracy;

....alongside the spectre of Microsoft's intellectual monopoly capitalism

Involutions or meritocracy, or: the death of competitive individualism by Clippy?

This post is one of those ones where I am posting this to push things along, give myself a toe hold on a number of bits and pieces I’ve already covered, and express my commitment to thinking by writing (forwards ever, backwards never) at speed.


 So what you will read here is effectively my preliminary ‘calculations’, as I try to work this stuff through, in the course of one short writing session.


 So this post is a work in

'ineluctable macroprocesses' in Weber, and Gorz' shift from labour in Marx and Arendt, to the emergence of work as function

Involutions, excrescences, systemic dynamics

This morning I foolishly checked my email before opening Word, disobeying ‘the tyranny of my should’1. I’m working on a discipline of focusing on my own written work, before inspecting the inscriptions of others. This turns out to be important because, as we all know, most people’s inscriptions are a ‘summons’ of a sort, the bearer of a demand that is usually some kind of work request or obstacle between us and our preferred productive work.

on trying to get hard copies of André Gorz, in the involutions and excrescences of the technical systems that, at certain moments, *are* society now

The Immaterial, aka "the order was delivere4d"

“The bad news is we’re falling through space forever.


 The good news is: there is no ground.”

– Chögyam Trungpa

 “Our societies have proved to be really demonic since they happen to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call modern states”.

– Michel Foucault ~ Last week I distilled involutions to the societal ‘rolling curling inward’ induced by a dynamic of diminishing

bare acknowledgment of a social fact, and the role of the ledger in a 'meritocracy'

Involutions (and Ledgers and Demons)

What captures the times in which we find ourselves? What kind of decade is the 2020s turning out to be? What kind of century is the twenty-first; is it the future, in any way? These are some questions I’m sitting with, as I also try to further what I committed to in a post from November last year:Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

building some concepts on the dynamics of the world in which we now live together, somehow

Involutions and Excrescences

Refrain: I share an intuition that the time from which I write does not yet have a set of ordering concepts capable of encapsulating its permutations;

explicating some intuitions on the spatial and temporal debounding (that globalisation actually created)

Notes on an unhappy age without philosophy

~

 I share an intuition that the time from which I write does not yet have a set of ordering concepts capable of encapsulating its permutations; this intuition intimates, instead, that this conjuncture has a definite smell, something like carpet wet by receding sewage, in the footwells of a car left in a flood-swollen creek, having been joy ridden into it under cover of night, carpet left in the sunshine after flash flood waters have receded.

Joyridden

What then is labour, and how is it different to those forms of ‘paid labour’ we call our ((bull)shit) jobs covered in the previous post?

part two: the place and meaning of labour, in Arendt, and in contemporary life

Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': what then is labour, how is it distinct from 'job' and 'work'?

So then, work. In this third (of three) preliminary posts opening groundwork on Critique of Economic Reason (CER), I want to follow up on the work (see what I did?) unpacking ‘job’ and ‘labour’. At stake (for the theory nerds) is the counterintuitive, insight-filled analysis Gorz has synthesised from Marx, Weber, Arendt and Habermas;

A job: some form of paid labour. Labour: a factor of production. Work: a function of capitalism.

Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': the meaning of work (where we also derive meaning)

In working through[1] Critique of Economic Reason (CER) to see how Gorz has managed to synthesise Weber, Habermas, and Arendt to think (with and beyond Marx) about the shit we’re in with our working lives and free time, it’s important consider how the terms job, work, and labour are used. ~Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

pausing to clarify some important distinctions, before continuing with Gorz' Critique of Economic Reason in the coming weeks and months

Defining 'job', 'labour', 'work': 'job', 'bullshit job', 'shit job'

This is a re-post with an archival value to me.


 Context: In 2017 I wrote a reflection about work I had conducted in 2013 – about a list-making imbroglio that happened around The Wire’s End of Year lists, in 2011.


 …so: a very intricate frame-within-frame regress of temporalities, much as is implied by Ferraro’s cover, copy copy copied in the above screen shot.


 I’m hoping a few readers might ‘stumble across’ this and

Or: what The Wire’s 2011 End of Year list can tell us about how values emerge from a culture that produces itself in its own imaginary web of self-reference