The Myth of the One

In contemporary Western capitalist society, the myth of “the one” is pervasive. This is the persistent belief that given a functional socio-economic role defined with rigorous specificity there exists an individual conforming to all preexisting expectations for that role. “The one” is out there, we just need to find them.

That this belief manifests most acutely in those doing the searching is no surprise. “The one” is the quintessential object of fixation for job recruiters and unattached individuals seeking long-term relationships. Because it is a myth, technology can only be expected to intensify the searching, leading to escalating expenditure and waste in true capitalist fashion without leading to resolution.

Organisms Under Threat

To live in the modern world is to exist in a state where every breath is painful and where every motion is inhibited by heavy oppression. It is to have all streamlines, streaklines and pathlines totally and completely circumscribed by a design beyond comprehension and unyielding to compromise. It is to exist in a state where even keeping one's eyelids open is a feat, for the air stings with a painful burn and is clouded by a heavy fog that induces sleepiness, comatose, and death. It is to be an organism under threat.

Those that are not threatened have already crossed the material divide; they are not organisms: they are no longer even living. They are the exalted beings of capitalism: those who have willingly given themselves over to be reformed, recast, and re-implemented as more perfect designs under the capitalist frame. They eagerly await the promised total liberation from materiality: the complete annihilation of the physical¹, capitalism's promise/threat of subsuming the universe and finally extinguishing its insectoid-drive.

The End of Design

In Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art, he describes his assessment of the state of contemporary art: quite simply, art felt like it had come to an end because it had. Danto is clear throughout his work that by 'the end of art' he does not mean that there is no new art being done, or that this art is not good. Rather, he means something more like what many would consider art history - an overarching narrative under which the large body of 'art' proper could be subsumed¹. No longer was there a clear Gestalt into which art could be made to fit, in its place were many small movements: spurious excitations of ecstatic creativity that dissipated with rapidity. What Danto saw in the contemporary art world was one that had followed the trajectory of the art narrative as far as it could go until at last it was extinguished. This is what Danto called the post-historical moment, in which there was no longer a pale of history into which art belonged (Danto, 1997). This is the world of postmodern art - an eclectic mish-mash of styles all with separate narratives. It is a world that we are still living in - no new modernist artistic narrative has come along, managed to take hold and command the art world as was the case in the early twentieth century.

Totalitarian Capitalism

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism form the more familiar forms of tyranny known to us as dictatorships. Totalitarianism is a term reserved for Nazism and Bolshevism, as seen under Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. Arendt stresses that totalitarianism is not to be confused with fascism, and points out that the Nazis themselves were keen to distinguish Nazism from fascism, and looked down with contempt on Mussolini's fascist Italy. While dictatorships have often been driven by totalitarian movements, once they acquire power they seize the power structure of the state. By the very maneuver with which they seemingly take on complete control they straight-jacket themselves; dictatorships are characterized by a complete takeover by the state, but also a containment within the state. They satisfy themselves with the bureaucratic confines and enter into a state of equilibrium. The totalitarian drive is extinguished. Conventional dictatorships are not unfamiliar, and while they are oppressive and brutal, the Western world has never been adverse to dealing with them. Operating as they do within the state structure they offer a degree of stability and predictability¹.

Totalitarianism, by contrast, is what happens when the movement is not contented and extinguished by the state but refuses the structure of the state altogether; it occurs when the movement refuses any structure at all.

Limbic Thinking Extended

Previously I articulated some of my thoughts on a concept I termed limbic thinking wherein I opposed the idea of thought being reducible to language or a language-like thing with the notion of language as merely one type of thinking in a landscape of different kinds of thinking, not all of which can necessarily be translated from one into another¹. Here I wish to sketch out some more thoughts and notes on the concept.

Obsessive Materialism in a Virtualising World

An interesting change began to take hold in the tech industry as the iPhone rose to prominence, eventually dominating the landscape and setting the terms for the way we think about communications technology. In truth, it had already begun with the iPod and was part of Apple’s design ethos at least since Steve Jobs returned to the company. This was a focus on the materiality of the device - the device as object: object to behold, object to be held, object to worship.

Warming Up to the Techno-Fix

In a brief but broad discussion in 2015, award-winning science fiction author and literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin decried the absurdity of those who would turn to the techno-fix to combat global climate change (The Nation, 2018). The expression is a common one: technology got us into this mess, now we want to use it to get us out of it?

The trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of simulated realities so future generations can experience them.

Science and Self-Imposed Limits

If science is, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a language that excludes all teleological vocabulary (Bauman, 1989) - a descriptive technique that avoids purpose or will - then it follows that there are limitations to its reasoning that are built into its interpretive framework. These limits manifest at the innermost and outermost scales - the questions concerning the self and the nature of the universe.

Peak Postmodernity: Peak As in 'Peak Oil'?

The present moment is characterised by peak postmodernity. 'The Death of God', what Nietzsche foresaw as an event that had occurred and yet was still on the way (Roderick, 1991), has come seeping into the culture at large, so that its engulfing damp has become unavoidable. What starts at the boundaries of the organism comes to reside within it, before being incorporated, integrated, and accepted into the body proper. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared as gripping a culture that had begun to realise the 'Death of God' and yet failed to put anything of worth in its place was in full evidence on the Internet 4chan board /b/ and other marginal subcultures that would soon give rise to the alt-right (Nagle, 2017). Within these subcultures nihilism had come to reside as a sort of default, and the appeal of fascist totalitarian solutions began to permeate the consciousnesses of those who feared the spilling out of the attitudes of the Internet onto behaviour in the "real-world".

Ancient Modernity

All my life I've dwelt among the creaking frames of ancient modernity. The world of callous institutional lighting along with the requisite always-flickering-but-never-to-be-replaced fluorescent tubes, paint-slathered brickwork in heavy desperate coats – trying to cover it up… always covering things up – drab brown-brick exteriors and the mediocre monotony of seventh-generation xeroxes of so-called exemplary modern architecture, worn thin by the necessary concessions to cost-consciousness; utopian ideals yoked and made subservient to capital. A world that can only inculcate a vague ambivalence, for feeling too is made hazy and indistinct by the replications of the cultural photoreceptors. A world that is holographic, hollowed out, and made so oblivious by the lobotomization that it cannot comprehend its own irrelevance. A world that can only pantomime to the march of progress in a somnambulant stupor while feasting on the remains of its own rotting flesh.

Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!

You’re Eating The Wrong Political Agenda

Concomitant with the evacuation of economics from the political sphere and the subsequent colonisation of politics by cultural ideology - so thoroughly embodied throughout the culture as the discourse of identity politics - has been the offloading of ethical decision-making by the state and the shift to that of a choice to be made by the consumer. We don’t demand that our clothes are made ethically with our voices and our votes, but with our wallets. And in fact we don’t even do that, as the signifiers of ethical decisions will substitute just fine for the real thing and we settle for the appearance of an increase in justice - a saccharine smearing over of societal problems that enables uncritical enjoyment of one’s daily latte.

The influence we can wield as consumers is ineffectual against the systemic a-morality of unrestrained capitalism, as it reframes ethical decision-making in terms of market exchange when it is precisely the opposite that should be occurring. That is not to say that consumers should not be aware of what they consume, that they should not research them, but all this extensive research for the minutiae of every small transaction becomes far too taxing on one’s time and energy and only further entrenches the capitalist frame.

Our Worringly Undemocratic Future

During a talk on nationalism and globalism, historian and author Yuval Noah Harari makes clear what he perceives as the need for effective global governance. Particularly in dealing with the looming existential threat of ecological collapse posed by climate change, he notes that as it is a lose-lose as opposed to a win-win scenario, there are not workable solutions by which separate national authorities can come to an effective agreement. Harari admits that there is no guarantee that effective global governance will be democratic and that it may end up looking more like ancient China than modern Denmark. But Harari's position is clear: democracy is simply a luxury we can ill afford on such issues (TED, 2017).

Harari is a historian but as evidenced by his writing (Harari, 2015) he is quite concerned with the future. Harari attempts to foresee, at least in broad outline, where humanity might be going and to encourage some thought about what options may be open to us. Harari's recent books have been very large international bestsellers, so for such an influential thinker to be so unimaginative and pessimistic about the ability of democracy to grapple with the challenges of the future is both worrying and telling.

Proliferating Replicants

In Blade Runner 2049, the technologist and mega-corporation CEO Niander Wallace is obsessed with improving upon his creation of artificial humans - called replicants - by imbuing them with the ability to reproduce of their own accord, to give birth. This is a deficiency of all replicants, and the film's plot revolves around the miraculous discovery of a replicant birth. In the real world we find ourselves also awash with replicants, and while these replicants proliferate - more and more of them arrive everyday - they are also seemingly unable of being a source of real originality.

Creeping Capitalist Subsumption of Values

Cold capitalistic logic is everywhere. It drives the engines of the global economic infrastructure. Further, as capitalism continues on its relentless march, devouring the political arena and supplanting the social superstructure, capitalist logic has infiltrated its way into the common sense of morality and justice.

Mind Children: A Terrifying Future and Our Present Roadmap

Written in 1988, Hans Moravec's Mind Children is an at times breathless exultation of the march of cybernetics and an exhortation of techno-humanism. Thirty years on from its publication, it does not appear as a curious detour in thinking or terribly outdated in its claims. Instead its values seem to have encroached further into the culture, taking deeper root within the echelons of power in Silicon Valley and disseminating themselves through the technology used by millions of consumers. We find ourselves living in the future so predicted, part of the transition phase toward species-wide extinction. After a prolonged dark age, artificial intelligence has produced startling breakthroughs and is now being deployed in the service of mindless capitalism, threatening to eliminate whole sectors of human work while virtual worlds grasp for ever-more-accurate replications of reality to reassure us of falsehoods as we do next to nothing to solve our looming ecological crisis. Mind Children remains an instructive introduction to the destructive thinking that underlies much of the development and investment unfolding today.

Some Rough Notes on a Moral Theory

A little over a year ago I started sketching out some rough notes towards a theory of morality. These notes were done without any research into moral and ethical philosophy on my part and as such seem quite unlikely to prove of much interest to someone well acquainted with the relevant fields. At best they point to some possible avenues of investigation that I could revisit after becoming better educated on the topics. While I initially left them incomplete and unpublished with the thought that I would further develop them, I am instead publishing them now as a snapshot and as noted a potential reference.

A Simulated Hypothesis: Thoughts on Nick Bostrom's Simulation Argument

This piece is actually quite a long time coming. Back in August of 2017 I had recently completed reading Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and became interested in seeking out his Simulation Argument for myself. I did so, and found it to be rather less sound than I would have expected given the attention it has garnered throughout the years and eager proclamations of the non-scientific that "The Matrix is Real". I sketched out my thoughts then, but considered them incomplete and shelved them and am only now getting around to pulling them together.

Bostrom lays out his position in a short paper (Bostrom, 2003), which argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) humans will go extinct before reaching a "post-human" stage (alternatively, no such "stage" is likely to ever occur, with or without extinction, although this view is not expressed by Bostrom), (2) any post-human civilization is extremely unlikely to run any significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history, and (3) we are living in a computer simulation.

2017: Year in Review

2017 was very much a year of writing for me, well, of reading and writing. Having been accepted into studying illustration at Camberwell, I put aside working on my portfolio and decided to work more on further developing my ideas. I returned to the manuscript that I had aimed to complete in November and set about finishing it.

To be sure, not all went to plan...

On Brutalism

Brutalist buildings are stark, dramatic, and austere. They are striking, stunning even. And how could they not be? Brutalist architecture exists not so much within its environment as it is opposed to it. It rejects the natural, replaces it with exacting artifice and confidently opposes all of the processes that made its own existence possible. The natural world is the natural enemy of brutalism, and by extension, so are humans.

The Optimistic Dystopia of Brave New World

Reading Aldous Huxley's classic Brave New World I was struck by how utopian his dystopia is. Huxley does not present a world that is obviously wrong from the inside, since the inhabitants suffer from the same corruption that plagues their society. It is only from the perspective of an outsider, or someone imperfectly adjusted to the system, that one can see just how out-of-sync the society is with human nature. This makes for an interesting angle and a welcome contrast from other dystopian fiction where the systemic problems are apparent to all yet the characters feel powerless to do anything about it. However, from the perspective of a prediction of the future, Brave New World comes across as overly optimistic. It should be noted however that Brave New World takes place so far in the future (around the seventh century A.F. - After Ford, Henry Ford that is) that any assignments of optimistic or pessimistic are in truth entirely useless. All is speculation, beyond that there is little we can say.