Guillotine Watch: weighing the pros and cons of keeping your art collection on your super-yacht.
I prefer to keep mine on my space station. The proles have much more trouble getting at it that way. Just one glance from a commoner can reduce the value of a piece by $100K, easy.
This post is saying nearly the same thing I attempted to discuss the other day with my own overly-abstruse bit about subsumption into algorithmic nightmare land.
People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence. They are speaking, that is, algorithmically rather than subjectively, and at this point it is not only the extremely online who are showing the symptoms of this transformation. They are only the vanguard, but, as with vocal fry and other linguistic phenomena, their tics and habits spread soon enough to the inept and the elderly, to the oblivious normies who continue to proclaim that they “don’t like reading on screens,” or they “prefer an old-fashioned book or newspaper,” as if that were going to stop history from happening.
Historically, we are at an unusual moment that only occurs once every few centuries. There’s no possible path back to the past without massive death and dislocations, but the future also can’t be and won’t be more of the same. We are trapped — or rather, have caught ourselves — in a snare where struggling and thrashing will only make the line grow tighter. Something will have to be given up, to be lost, to keep moving forward. What will it be?
The above is the massive societal-level cogitation occurring now and though most people aren’t aware it’s being contemplated, that doesn’t matter. It still is.
Louis CK’s Politically Incorrect Comedy Didn’t Change. You Did.
Times have changed, mostly for the better. I was never a fan of Louis CK. His jokes were both obvious and unfunny, and the ones that were funny were stolen. This is another very good example of social change occurring that nearly everyone insists isn’t occurring.
New personal deadlift record of 310 pounds this morning! I am not going to lie, that was a struggle. But I did it.
I am starting to run out of weights to put on the bar. Here’s what the bar looks like on one side loaded for a 310 pound deadlift (none of these are bumper plates):
We do have another set of 45s but they are holding down the squat/pull-up rack so are inconvenient to move.
People are having a great deal of trouble recognizing societal changes occurring because we had grown accustomed to direct technological change reconfiguring society so that is where we now look. You know, the arrival of computers, of cell phones and then smart phones — that sort of obvious introduction and adoption of a discrete physical good.
But we’re beyond that now, and that’s what’s causing confusion and the absurd claim that no change is occurring. To return to the ideas of the cybernetic philosophers, we are not being directly affected by the technology itself (contra and also moving beyond McLuhan) but rather the now-exponentially more complex cultural and cerebro-cybernetic reconfigurations that occur and can occur in this ever-expanding realm of informational combinatorial explosion.
So, everywhere everyone is looking for new technology that is not arriving and conclude the world is not changing. But in a sense, we’ve reached a plateau where the tech that used to be physical and available for inspection as an entified object has now been completely subsumed into and instantiated in a virtual realm where its unfolding is less apparent but no less instigative of effects and alterations of the mind and of the world. Rather, it’d be accurate to state that this virtual realm and the world are now selfsame, and that lack of comprehension of this momentous reformation of how we gestate ideas culturally is what is responsible for a large part of the befuddlement.