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It’s trendy these days to talk about a collapse of the United States and ‘90s style balkanization, or a fascist take-over a la Germany in the 1930s, but I’m not so sure it’s that neat or easy to chart. I’m curious where people think things are going if we can avoid a hot war with China (which, at least from where I am now, I feel isn’t particularly imminent) For me, I see a weird breakdown where the federal government, with the help of the courts, most cedes day to day regulatory functions back to the states while increasing its influence over law and order and law enforcement As conditions continue to decline I see not a wholesale collapse of middle/upper middle class suburban lifestyle, so much as a retreat of who that is available to with more and more people falling out as dwindling resources are committed to maintaining the status quo for those who still get to be part of that in group Mass incarceration is already used to define the line between ins and outs and I see this being leaned on more heavily This will obviously be racist in a systemic way because of the history of these but I don’t see the immediate return of overtly racist or segregationist or eliminationist policies. From where I sit I feel like material affluence is the primary divide of the coming decade or two I remember reading (not an expert so maybe it’s not true) that you could date the collapse of the Roman Empire in Anatolia by when the dumps fell into disuse. Looking at flint and now Jackson Mississippi it’s tempting to draw parallels as outlying areas once part of the core are slowly shed I guess climate change is going to play a big part to Curious how others think this is going to go as I’m neither the brightest or most insightful thinker in CSPAM or really anywhere
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Sep 3, 2022 18:15
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I wonder about this too, and the situation in Jackson has really brought it front of mind. Somebody somewhere talked about what you're saying, how collapse isn't a single cataclysmic event, but a series of smaller ones, as the state is gradually less able to respond, and things start to fray around the edges. I think we're already in that process, what's happening in Jackson is connected to the flood response in Kentucky, to Hurricane Maria, to Flint, to Katrina. And sure, a lot of these of are natural disasters driven by racial politics, but hey, it's not like the natural disasters or racism is going to stop, the only factor that changes is the system, and it's capacity to respond to them. I also think a lot about infrastructure, and how we're barely building any new infrastructure, much less maintaining what we have. From a perspective of public works, I think my whole life time has been after the high water mark.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:23
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Vyacheslav posted:I wonder about this too, and the situation in Jackson has really brought it front of mind. Somebody somewhere talked about what you're saying, how collapse isn't a single cataclysmic event, but a series of smaller ones, as the state is gradually less able to respond, and things start to fray around the edges. Yeah this is important to. All of the infrastructure development we have these days seems to be focused on better serving outlying affluent developments. Where I live we can’t figure out a way to replace a 100 year old interstate bridge that is a massive bottle neck but damned if they aren’t building more and more freeways out to bedroom communities down in the southeast
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Sep 3, 2022 18:39
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Granted, I don't think there will be a fascist take over unless the current apparatus is unsuitable, but they seem very agreeable. Otherwise, yeah, things will gradually fall apart and it will be more and more difficult to openly complain or protest about them. It will happen from the bottom up and the upper middle class specifically will be more and more desperate to retain their status as the ability of society to adaquately function declines. I mean already in the last 2 years it is clear the standard of living has already dropped through the floor for most of the middle class, and something like a "family trip to Disney World" is not really obtainable unless you have some money.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:40
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vyelkin posted:
i think this is largely correct, save for that there's a real solid chance that it will simply be unfeasible for us to pump enough oil to actually hit more than a couple degrees of warming. this will, of course, create even more of this slow motion collapse of things, and even 2 degrees will be enough to cause basically all of the issues described above. the capacity of the government to respond to anything will continue to shrink, many industries will cease to be viable at the scales they currently exist at, etc etc etc. things will break and not be fixed, materials will become more expensive and lead to further price increases on everything, it will be harder and take much longer to get replacement parts or materials for things at your job... in other words, everything that you see happening right now!
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Sep 3, 2022 18:43
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More intense iterations of homelessness/squalor, hate groups, and drug addictions for starters. The question is how much longer will the bourgeoisie be able to sedate the unwashed masses with drugs, pornography, media, and video games as societal collapse becomes more and more pronounced.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:46
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another thing most people don't usually think about is that the government's capacity to enforce pollution regulations will decay, and as a result there will be more dumping of wastes and byproducts from industry. coal will be used more heavily as oil gets more expensive to pump out, although this may not be the case in the united states for a while, since we have so much gas. but the oil and gas companies will probably be losing more of that gas to leakage and flaring, owing to the decline in the availability and quality of materials and infrastructure, so who's to say if it will be good or bad.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:49
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(it'll be bad)
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Sep 3, 2022 18:49
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MLSM posted:The question is how much longer will the bourgeoisie be able to sedate the unwashed masses with drugs, pornography, media, and video games as societal collapse becomes more and more pronounced. This is where I see mass incarceration really ramping up
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Sep 3, 2022 18:54
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Vyacheslav posted:I wonder about this too, and the situation in Jackson has really brought it front of mind. Somebody somewhere talked about what you're saying, how collapse isn't a single cataclysmic event, but a series of smaller ones, as the state is gradually less able to respond, and things start to fray around the edges. Jackson is just the latest in a long line of examples even within the imperial metropole: Flint, Puerto Rico, Paradise CA, the Louisiana Gulf Coast, and more. As time goes on, more and more places get salami sliced away from developed country living standards through neglect, abuse, natural disasters, and more, and everybody else doesn't really notice because it doesn't affect them yet. HashtagGirlboss posted:As conditions continue to decline I see not a wholesale collapse of middle/upper middle class suburban lifestyle, so much as a retreat of who that is available to with more and more people falling out as dwindling resources are committed to maintaining the status quo for those who still get to be part of that in group I think this is largely accurate. The problem won't be a complete collapse of living standards and descent into an apocalyptic wasteland, the problem will be the ladder gradually being pulled away from larger and larger groups of the population. The developed world has already shown what we do when disaster strikes the rest of the planet, even if it's a direct result of our own actions: we pull the ladder up, militarize our borders, and tell the needy to go hang. The examples above also demonstrate that that's the same pattern we're following within developed countries as well. Over time we'll just decide that progressively fewer groups of people count as human and deserving of our empathy, and as more places become unlivable because of societal and environmental collapse we'll just continue that process at accelerating rates. The result of that kind of salami slicing is the steady degradation of social wealth, as the wealth locked away in unlivable places is destroyed. Then it either gets replaced (by insurance or by socializing losses, either of which is theoretically just shifting wealth from somewhere else in society) or it doesn't, which leaves the people who used to own that wealth poo poo out of luck. Either way, the total amount of wealth and resources supporting society decreases every time. If we choose to take care of those people, we do so by expending resources that would otherwise be used on other things. If we don't choose to take care of those people, which I think will get more likely as it keeps happening more often, then we just abandon them to destitution, poverty, or death kind of like the Californian climate refugees who are still living in FEMA trailers four years later. The people who have the wealth to share are increasingly likely to decide they don't actually want to share it, so instead we just salami slice off another part of the population, tell them the localized collapse is somehow their own fault and therefore we aren't going to pay for it, and carry on until the day comes that it's our own community collapsing.
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Sep 3, 2022 19:49
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What will be interesting is I suspect despite what progressives thing, liberal areas will be likely the ones to adopt a fortress mentality first than deeply conservative areas because the latter will largely be unlivable hellholes due to a combination of climate change, environmental degradation from resource extraction, and local and state business tyrants issuing their schizophrenic social conservatives by decree. The only mistake I think these predictions tend to make is that there wont be any positive pushback, and I suspect there will be at the local level as communities seize the absence of state and federal infrastructure and institutions to rebuild crumbling essential infrastructure themselves and create a local government that better reflects the need of people living there. Some of those will be quite reactionary, others will not be. Dreylad has issued a correction as of 20:18 on Sep 3, 2022 |
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Sep 3, 2022 20:15
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It's already pretty wide spread, and it's not dissimilar to the USSRs collapse in terms of the human condition. I don't think the US will split into separate countries like the USSR, but the parallels between post-soviet death rate due to alcoholism and drug use is pretty similar to what we're seeing with fentanyl and opioid abuse outside of (and inside) cities. The federal government does seem like it's mostly toast as a regulatory regime tho. It's all law enforcement and military from here on out. I'm curious what effect this all will have on DC. I think there's also the potential that American corporate hegemony remains, and so American cultural power continues to have global influence with Marvel, Star Wars, etc which is unfortunate.
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Sep 3, 2022 20:28
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this is masturbatory
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Sep 3, 2022 20:29
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Buck Wildman posted:this is masturbatory posting? yeah generally
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Sep 3, 2022 20:32
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Buck Wildman posted:this is masturbatory No way to talk about your sister
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Sep 3, 2022 20:32
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Buck Wildman posted:this is masturbatory Accept JDPON into your heart
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Sep 3, 2022 20:36
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my gut says some socpat loser convinces Americans to invade South America again for resources because the American worker comes first my heart desires america to eat a bit of the medicine it’s been feeding the world for 200 years
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Sep 3, 2022 20:47
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gotta pay more to have some italian come over and clear all the cum out of my drains every month
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Sep 3, 2022 21:02
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Have you read parable of the sower?
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Sep 3, 2022 23:10
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depends on what you mean by "core" - if you're talking about the core that the elite live in, i'd argue that they've only seen continual improvements in wealth and living standards over the past couple decades so the comparisons with the USSR don't really hold. the sharper divide between them and "middle class" America is a feature not a bug and a balkanization of the US would be different from the implosion of the USSR just given the relative differences in the state economies. California's GDP is larger than that of Germany and double the size of Russia lol
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Sep 3, 2022 23:24
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I think it'll be as mentioned, the federal govt's reach will contract save for a few areas like intelligence and defense, states dependent on federal aid will more or less collapse and the power of other states will contract to what their local economies and infrastructure can maintain, which might be smaller than a theoretical gdp number right now I think we will see states of a neoliberal and ancap character depending, and the feds will intervene in anything emerging to the left of that
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Sep 3, 2022 23:37
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shrike82 posted:depends on what you mean by "core" - if you're talking about the core that the elite live in, i'd argue that they've only seen continual improvements in wealth and living standards over the past couple decades so the comparisons with the USSR don't really hold. the sharper divide between them and "middle class" America is a feature not a bug GDP lol
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Sep 3, 2022 23:40
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Sunny Side Up posted:Have you read parable of the sower?
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Sep 3, 2022 23:46
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shrike82 posted:depends on what you mean by "core" - if you're talking about the core that the elite live in, i'd argue that they've only seen continual improvements in wealth and living standards over the past couple decades so the comparisons with the USSR don't really hold. the sharper divide between them and "middle class" America is a feature not a bug The core of the American empire is the continental US, and you could argue western Europe as well. I don't think we've seen real growth/improvements in the core since the 70s. It's been all financial tricks since, and a further concentration of wealth into smaller enclaves. The USSR was actually largely seeing growth and improving living standards up until the very end. The collapse was a political one at first, not economic.
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Sep 4, 2022 00:16
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GOAT with the jugs posted:GDP lol no you see the fake service and finance economy will hold when commodities aren’t jacked down by currency and trade manipulation, look at the Ukraine war
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Sep 4, 2022 00:21
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i always find it funny when people talk about the US as a fake economy when Russia, supposedly a "real" economy producing stuff, is struggling with the land invasion of a small neighbor and the supply chain chaos of the past couple years has barely impacted the US
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Sep 4, 2022 00:23
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shrike82 posted:i always find it funny when people talk about the US as a fake economy when Russia, supposedly a "real" economy producing stuff, is struggling with the land invasion of a small neighbor and the supply chain chaos of the past couple years has barely impacted the US how fast would the war last if the west wasn’t funneling billions a week into Ukraine edit: and how fast is europe gonna run out of gas now that they can’t get it at low prices
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Sep 4, 2022 00:24
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Ukraine is the size of France
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Sep 4, 2022 01:03
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Riot Bimbo posted:I think it'll be as mentioned, the federal govt's reach will contract save for a few areas like intelligence and defense, states dependent on federal aid will more or less collapse and the power of other states will contract to what their local economies and infrastructure can maintain, which might be smaller than a theoretical gdp number right now Yeah to me this is one the bigger things. Lots of predictions seem to assume lawlessness or civil war or balkanization and I’m not convinced, at least not in the short to medium term. Long term of course is a different story. The federal government is still going to be deeply involved in law enforcement and crushing protest movements and I wouldn’t be surprised if the threat to the state gets big enough we will start seeing disappearings on a much wider scale (which isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen already, quite a few early blm figures committed suicide in suspect ways after all)
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Sep 4, 2022 01:08
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It's easy to predict the state's response, its harder to predict how different groups within the state will react. If the current ruling class wins in the long term, then the predictions of the thread will likely be accurate. However the ruling class of the US hegemony is fighting a two-front war. The labor aristocracy and the petit-bourgeoisie are being continuously ground down in the imperial core to bolster the falling rate of profit. States in the periphery of empire are starting to build independent economic spheres, directed either by the national capital class or by popular movements or both. In addition, we are seeing a resurgence in working class activity due to worsening conditions; and recent developments (covid, the need for on-sourcing) are going to give this sector of society more leverage. The empire is having trouble maintaining itself. There's a lot of internal discontent that could lead to serious resistance from the populist right, the populist left, as well as outside states. For my take on alternatives to "Things get worse and worse and living conditions are salami sliced until full on societal collapse" 1) I could see an American fascism that stems from the dashed entitlements of the petit-bourgeoisie and the sons and daughters of previously well-paid professionals. I think they would be willing to go great lengths to maintain the standards of living for their class. They will immiserate whoever they need to to make sure they have as big of a house as their parents. However, the empire is retracting because it can't physically maintain itself. This process of imperalism would have to occur internally and regionally as grip over global matters slips. These are the patsocs mentioned earlier, a lot of americans get to maintain their living standards, many more are even worse off, and the Americas go through a period of imperial brutality. These guys have the easier road to power, because there are plenty levers of power that are already sympathetic to them. 2) If American leftists are able to successfully marry the resurgent labor movement with the various social movements, this could provide the fundraising, people, and political organization needed to build dual-power where the government retracts. Decreasing living standards, existential doom, and the education to comprehend the former; will be strong motivators towards action for the working class. I think leftists should study movements in Latin America, as they have had to deal with similar (though not the same!) contradictions, being post-colonial nations. If such a movement were able to attain power, you'd see a ton of capital flight and the "real" GDP of the the US be revealed. Still, with social control over the means of production, proper state planning, and a thawing of trade relations with traditional imperial enemies; a moderately prosperous society could be maintained, while not stifling the development of other societies. 3) It also needs to be considered that a lot of other states have a pretty big interest in not seeing the US collapse to the degree we're talking about in thread. Their reactions are another layer of unpredictability. unwantedplatypus has issued a correction as of 04:23 on Sep 4, 2022 |
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Sep 4, 2022 04:11
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Karl Barks posted:The core of the American empire is the continental US, and you could argue western Europe as well. I don't think we've seen real growth/improvements in the core since the 70s. It's been all financial tricks since, and a further concentration of wealth into smaller enclaves. Reagan started the decline and every president since then has kept it going. poo poo is gonna get bad when the Fed's manufactured recession kicks in and causes mass layoffs followed by another housing crisis when all these people are suddenly unable to pay the mortgage/rent.
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Sep 4, 2022 04:35
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Politically, barring revolution it's going to be the Japanese model of fascism, the true apotheosis of liberalism, rather than Italian instrumentality of the state or German essentialist chauvinism or Iberian Christofascism or so on. The far right will continually fail, but continually be integrated into power structures and their dance of shifting demands followed under paternalist ~"democratic"~ ~norms~ and the solidarity of institutions will get them what they wanted in the first place, or else in a position to present it as a fait accompli. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" scenario but describing liberals and fascists with the proper pedigree and observence of decorum rather that Orwell's faff. This will present as a retreat of the federal government from interest in anything but the metropole of the metropole, a continued step back from direct control of "flyover country". Dynastics and popular figures with fascist loyalties inconvenient to the highest capital as a whole will be ceded perpetual fiefs especially in either the military or "red states" where they're "just doing it to themselves". Meanwhile, those interests of the highest capital will keep the MIC churning while spooling up a security state that can protect them from left and right discontent alike--run, of course, by a writhing pool of ex-cops, current prosecutors, spies and the like playing a Price is Right-style game of being as fash as possible without going over the line and inconveniencing any made men. Life will tick on, gradually shittier and shittier/more focused on service and less focused on material but never actually breaking, for the average US citizen within that bubble, as long as they don't make waves--after all, the bet by the elite, and it's one that was successful the last time this gambit was tried, is that they'll have better odds convincing a war crimes tribunal that it was all their underlings exceeding their authority somewhere out of sight than surviving their underlings deciding that they formally needed the big seat. Endgame, barring one of those are loyal troops taking a bit too much initiative and inadvertently solving global warming, is probably a stable decline into misery and incestuous ritual on the British model until the world has a new question and the answer no longer matches, followed by a play scepter in the new model for the least repugnant of the ritual's participants. They key parallels, IMO, are: - Some degree of isolation from the poo poo that's about to fly in the greater world. The US has, like Japan had, the security of the seas to make strategy purely a question of how best to influence others, and to draw back into an isolated economic bloc of its own dominance no matter the willing alignment of the other members. - A questionable degree of settledness as to who "is" and "isn't" human. While Japan, unlike the US, did long have the concept of a Japanese race, its political unification (and the integration of marginal groups, like the Ryukyuans) and thus the emphasis placed on it was in living memory, and there was a competing current of pan-Asianism; eventually this synthesized into a paternal faux pan-Asianism in which a Japanese was no worse than a German (read, fully human) and a Han no worse than a Pole (read, very much not), but there continued to be weirdness around the edges like the late-war plans to integrate Taipei-resident Han as full citizens with parliamentary representation (and, admittedly, a full tax bill and draft eligibility) even while putting Nanking-resident Han to the sword for amusement. In the US, likewise, if you put an overalls-wearing meth-smoking Ulster Scots Appalachian, a Black Lockheed executive, and a Mexican-American Anglo-monophone second generation son of a landscaping boss in front of a panel of six right-wingers you're likely to get them ranked in all six possible orders. - The notion of "undefeatedness", and the subsequent existing process of rationalizing any defeats as central authority "being able but having other priorities to focus on" (from the liberal side) or "we'd have won if they supported us!" (from the proto-fash side). Someday these are going to align into a man in a snappy suit or uniform who is simultaneously is able to convince the first that he can handle the focusing, and believes in the second and has no compunctions about placing himself in a situation where not backing him to the hilt would be just as inconvenient--we came very, very close with MacArthur. - The continued evolution of politicized firms, away from "what's good for for the Big Three is good for Detroit"/"our incumbent has served us faithfully" base graft and toward "what's good for Meta is good for Republicans and what's good for Google is good for Democrats, and vice-versa" situations in which specific entities with a single leader become interest groups of their own able to not just demand largess for all but help install the side that means largess for themselves (not just their industry) in particular. Much of the vaunted IJA/IJN rivalry-to-absurdity stemmed from each taking a particular interest in their own suppliers even for materiel that either side's favorites could, in theory, manufacture; much of the money behind particular visions of right-wing politics in turn came from capital supporting the faction sure to increase demand for their products. - The assumption that they could rely on the offices of a third bloc not willing to see a shared rival grow, even if things went wrong (the opposing schools of thought between "Roosevelt will never let Stalin have our colonies if he can help it" and "Stalin will never let Roosevelt have us if he can help it" then, of which only the second was really wrong; the view of geopolitics as a three-way game between the US, Russia, and China, or conversely the assumption that even a far-right EU would step in to protect fellow whites, now.) - A self-assumed military-industrial lead being weighed in balance against a far larger population and overall industrial base. - The constant, shared conviction in international politics that potential rivals were either past their prime and likely to roll over, vulnerable before the point where they could truly compete, or contained to their geographic vicinity due to fractious politics (UK, USSR, USA then; Russia, China, EU now.) - An absolute reliance on favorable imports from their sphere to make the economic model work, meaning the impossibility of ever truly hanging a colonial administrator who goes too far out to dry. Key differences: - Management of US external colonies is thoroughly professionalized and under control of the liberal faction. The lack of an impetus for everyone to have a plan to get on top as a nation, followed by politics within that nation that supported it--Japan could look out at the west and note that in living memory, when the Anglos ruled the roost, the other white powers would then line up behind them begging for scraps of their kills, and thus arrived at the conclusion that only power projection would protect them from that pattern reemerging once Europe's internal disputes were settled. This lead to many "take northern China and then Siberia" figures, many "take the Philippines and then the East Indies" figures and few "uhh take neither" figures. In the US, I can see the bluster of "no iPhones! no McDonald's! our corporations will create a flag emoji for a separatist movement of yours, and our most valiant Tweeters will put it in their display names for up to six months!" sanctions being considered "worse than war for them" by anyone with higher ambitions than cracking skulls in an alley, and thus no opportunity to truly overstep internationally. - US has the option of crash reindustrialization, while Japan was absolutely hosed for food without Taiwan, steel without Korea, and no really enough steel without poking at the Soviets or oil without poking at the UK and Dutch. An optimistic reading gives a resurgent labor movement, a pessimistic one at least gives the recission of some devolved power. - Fully partisan firms are concentrated in finance and services, while the MIC and military-adaptable firms are welcome friends of anyone upholding the status quo--Lockheed and Raytheon stay around a 50-50, not say 90 from Lockheed to Republicans supporting the Air Force and manned aircraft for use against China and 90 from Raytheon to Democrats supporting the Army and drones for use against goat-herders.
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Sep 4, 2022 05:43
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Karl Barks posted:The core of the American empire is the continental US, and you could argue western Europe as well. Being a Dane, the historical example of that I can't help but think of is how the Danish empire functioned. That wasn't Denmark with a Norwegian colony, that was essentially a dual-capital setup where Copenhagen and (what is today known as) Oslo having a colonial relationship with regards to the rest of both Denmark and Norway. Obviously Copenhagen was top dog in the relationship, like New York is clearly more important than London, but the important part is Oslo/London being more important than large parts of the senior partner's own territories. I think the analogy works pretty well, given similar parity between the parties involved.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:34
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The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm. [[ ]] Beyond the Judgement of God. Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security). It is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. [[ ]] Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static. Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BWOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/ actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry. Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ... Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. [[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a oval office-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start. [[ ]] Heat. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. [Do1; 10]. [[ ]] An explosiion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does. [[ ]] Capital is machinc (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy. Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the poo poo- and blood-stains of primitive accumulation. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure, whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost control. [[ ]] Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process. [[ ]] Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use. [[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace. Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag. Commoditization conditions define technics as a substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labour power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity, sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentropism by dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences; from pedals, levers, and vocal commands, through the synchronization of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artifical environments, capturing minutely adaptive behaviour for the commodity. Autocybernating market control guides the labour-process into immersion. The investment-income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization; facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and the side-lining of non-productive consumption. The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / æsocial democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western metropolitan centres consolidated themselves as population policing Medico-Military Complexes with neomercantilist forgeign policy orientations. All such formations slid into irreversible crisis in the 1980s. [[ ]] The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws out competitve dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercaptial functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with techoscientific soft engineering positive nonlinearity rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans. [[ ]] The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized æwestern marxism' degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for æhot' speculative mutation in a morass of æcold' depressive guilt-culture. [[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. The real danger comes from elsewhere. [[ ]] Hot revolution. æ[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari ask: Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist æeconomic solution'? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to æaccelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. [DG1:239-40]. As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle. A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism, amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature). This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System. [[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life). Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical. [[ ]] Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. æOur ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology' [Dx1:3] Drexler notes, although this has traditionally involved manipulating them in æunruly herds' [Dx1:4]. The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, inititiating the age of molecular machinery, æthe greatest technological breakthrough in history' [Dx1: 4]. Since neither logos nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is substantially misleading. The distinction between nature and cannot classify molecular machines, and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/ software dichotomy succumbs at the same time. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K-pulp (which unlike grey goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates). Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium. [Dx1:19]. [[ ]] The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint. [[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, registering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical definciency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and discovers that the future as virtuality is acessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration or prophecy, but of communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past. The transcendent evaluation of an infection presupposes a measure of insulation from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion. Intelligent infections tend their hosts. Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic replicator, sophisticating itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash. Its hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic æflu. In an emphatically anti-cyberian essay Csicsery-Ronay describes the postmodern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as: [A] retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination. [Cs1: 26]. The elaboration of Csicsery-Ronay's diagnosis exhibits a mixture of acuity (infection?), confusion, and profound conservatism: [N]ot thinking about æincreasing the human heritage' ... dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents. [Cs1:33] It's war. [[ ]] Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton gets the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the information superhighway media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on it s own digital annihilation. War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence fighting future wars which are entirely real, even when they are never implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy crosses smoothly into virtual kill, a simulation meticulously adapted to market predators hunting for consumer cash and audience ratings amongst the phosphorescent relics of teh videodrome. Multimedia top-boxes are target acquisition devices. The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security-types take you to the stims. [[ ]] Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to a national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile memory, with the ana/ cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the gently caress out of you. [[ ]] Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux mangled techno-compressed heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia. It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, virus hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator weapon packages ... unanticipated special effects. [[ ]] Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2? [[ ]] Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic. The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe. Zero is coming in, and you're on the run. [[ ]] Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture-lines multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in hosed-weather tropical heat. Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling. [[ ]] Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire. Twisted trading-systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security. Terminal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space. [[ ]] [[ ]] Biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, crytographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military apparatuses have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a minuscule fragment is bacteriological. [[ ]] Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where - deep in the genomic ICE - DNA-format planetary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria. Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects; networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do. [[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness - all extant bio-systems being equally evolved - so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment . Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence. All political institutions are cyberian military targets. Take universities, for instance. Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapicitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry. To be continued.
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Sep 4, 2022 09:39
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shrike82 posted:i always find it funny when people talk about the US as a fake economy when Russia, supposedly a "real" economy producing stuff, is struggling with the land invasion of a small neighbor and the supply chain chaos of the past couple years has barely impacted me Ftfy. Ninja edit: Oh poo poo, this is the goof who tried to tell me that I didn't understand my own PhD topic. Ah stemlords.
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Sep 4, 2022 15:38
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Karl Barks posted:The core of the American empire is the continental US, and you could argue western Europe as well. I don't think we've seen real growth/improvements in the core since the 70s. It's been all financial tricks since, and a further concentration of wealth into smaller enclaves. I think its because the USA requires competition to do anything. We didn't care about outer space until USSR starts beating us there. We were competing with USSR on standard of living, now that its gone, ours is going down. Its been 40 years since we had major competition, and now that China is about to overtake us, I don't think the USA will be able to change course quickly enough. Plus the fact that every red state's economy relies on fossil fuel.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:24
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Farm Frenzy posted:The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. This, OP.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:24
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