#961
Post rating: +
#962
Post rating: +
twitter is imo the best representation of what a psychotic episode's stream of consciousness feels like. just a lot of decontextualized thoughts in like one of the same manic style done in like the same handful of structures cycling through and ever evolving list of topics. it's all just decontextualized anger and mania. im p sure thats why every twitter user becomes either conspiratorial, aggressive and misanthropic or hyper sensitive and unable to cope with anything, the medium is giving them all psychosis. this is, imo, the explanation for why journalists have all descended into a group delusion about russia and the reason the normal people generally avoid using it.
#963
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

mayakovfefe posted:

the best representation of what a psychotic episode's stream of consciousness feels like.



it's probably not.

#964
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

mayakovfefe posted:

the medium is giving them all psychosis.



basically prodromal schizophrenia

#965
Post rating: ~
i have two accounts and on one of them i followed tons of people at random. when i'm on there i make semi-popular tweets, get into big arguments with dumbasses like curt schilling, and basically anyone, and have a bunch of followers. the other account is under my name, and i follow less that a hundred people; i have interesting conversations with academics and some researcher people who i've also talked with at greater length in the dms. the small account is a million times better, interesting, satisfying, and genuinely a positive thing. the large one grips you in a nutty swirl of sensation and leaves you dazed and wrung out at the end of a session
#966
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
I think it’s probably a good idea to just say you don’t like the way people talk on Twitter very much instead of pretending that things like depressed people exchanging detached, sardonic in-jokes about suicide are somehow in any way comparable to identifying symptoms of psychosis, which are things like, you have persistent auditory hallucinations of people speaking to you that you literally, not figuratively, believe are being projected into your brain by a machine hidden in your neighbor’s house.

I’d say the sort of overwrought hyperbole that prompts people to conflate the two is something that Twitter encourages, though it’s not about to “give” people psychosis. Like, your average irony-poisoned Twitter user would probably respond to someone telling them they were losing their mind with self-deprecating humor, while your average person with untreated delusional disorder is absolutely dead serious about their hallucinations.
#967
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Okay but I think my remark about sociopathy was on the money
#968
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i'm with cars on this, just because something is socially unhealthy doesn't mean it's causing mental illness. kind of backwards really, more that socially unhealthy things attract people who are mentally ill and they dedicate disproportionately more time to it.
#969
Post rating: +
talking about twitter like a teen who just smoked weed for the first time
#970
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fuck, i fell into the trap of posting in the twitter thread, where all posts are bad
#971
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#972
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Mental illness is fake and gay.
#973
Post rating: +
i implore you all to spend 5-10 minutes going through this thread

#974
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damoj posted:

i implore you all to spend 5-10 minutes going through this thread



i remember there being an SA BYOB poster at the time who posted a parody video of this by saying "i am john galts"



the above video is connected to this one but i don't remember if it's the same BYOBer or not

super important internet detective work of course
#975
Post rating: ~
theres something special about all the posts, all the people posting, its gonna do something, someday
#976
Post rating: +

Synergy posted:

i remember there being an SA BYOB poster at the time who posted a parody video of this by saying "i am john galts"


id recomend forgetting this

#977
Post rating: +
#978
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
probably the saddest thing about DSA twitter is that there's a whole level of online people calling themselves socialists who see a tweet in AD 2018 that links to a story about a Republican candidate who's an open blatant Neo-Nazi and the tweet says like "Perhap this more than a coincidence be?" and the target audience thinks without irony, Wow, what a zinger
#979
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
it's either that or how a ton of DSA "socialists" post every day about how capitalism is wonderful but "late capitalism" is bad and that's why they're voting for Significant Discounts
#980
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Who is patient zero for the online DSA-type pseudo-definition of "late capitalism" as "the bad capitalism", as in, the equivalent of other left-liberals' "crony capitalism", where the underlying message is that capitalism was once pure and good?

It seems to have nothing into do with e.g. Adorno's definition besides vague identification of the term with advertising = bad, so I suspect it comes from the same place as DSA types thinking mild regulatory reform and expansion of Medicare constitute a socialist platform, that is, their concepts of socialism, critique, etc., come from a poverty of exposure to both world history and the history of theory & praxis, and their understanding of each concept is no more than an attempt at mirroring right-wing talk radio & Fox News, and in this case, mirroring those sources' paranoid, incompetent reading of the Frankfurt School. But if there's a specific Vice article they all passed around I'd love to know.
#981
Post rating: +
it's a genuine trickle down of Adorno's definition in left academia diluted into meaninglessness, by people who get exposure to leftist ideas and then re-engineer them into safe platitudes instead of actually integrating them into their brainmeats. the dialectical synthesis of "I can recognize something is wrong" and "but I don't want to put myself at risk acknowledging it." so "late capitalism" became a term that signifies left credibility without going into the no-no zone of being obviously marxist to the average listener, kind of a cowardly reverse dogwhistle.
#982
UNUSUALY COOL
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It seems pretty unlikely to me that it comes directly from the usual pop-culture products of those writers' influence on media studies.

Most of that stuff is, like, a column on how Alien 3 is Problematic but Woke, meaning it does not mention "late capitalism" at all. I have a hard time believing that even 1% of the people who use the term have read any critical theory, so I'm curious if there's a point where some specific writer they favor started slapping the term on everything.
#983
UNUSUALY COOL
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I'm not talking about the banal and obvious generalities of media criticism here... I'm talking about the specific term and how it got where it is now.
#984
mt.real
Post rating: +
it's just the normal everyday term and then people got media studies degrees and went out into the world and used twitter and talked about it and it's a fun thing to say, people have been using it for what feels like ten years now, it's like any phrase that has wormed its way out of some corner. do you think there's really a single point of egress from The People Who Know The Real Serious Definition to Everyone Else
#985
Post rating: +
disheveled detective man connects string to the final pin on wall of newspaper clippings I'VE FINALLY FOUND HIM, patient zero of saying "turn down the AC" when you want it to be colder. you can't run from justice forever, sicko !!
#986
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
*laughs in gbs*... but I mean... it hasn't been ten years, and late capitalism is a weirdly specific phrase. It's less what shriekingviolet is saying, more as though Bernie Sanders supporters had adopted "protracted people's war" to describe superdelegates voting for Sanders in 2016 and you now had a bunch of twenty-something Democrats on Twitter named P.P.W. Tolkien reposting John Oliver Drumpf memes.

If you want to understand the use of ideology against socialist politics, let alone counteract it, it's Actually pretty important to understand the specifics of where aspects of it come from and how, how what's been co-opted has changed over the years and why, etc., the whole "history is kind of important to socialism" thing, instead of just ahistorically pretending in hindsight that you always expected or predicted everything that ever happened just because it wasn't completely shocking to you, or responding to questions like "how did this aspect of socialist critique become commodified" with "socialist critique has become commodified". Like, yeah, we all know that already, that's why I asked... it's just the common ground for asking meaningful questions about it.
#987
lies half the time
Post rating: +
one second into my perusal of an internet search engine results pages i found that the atlantic magazine published an article in may 2017 discussing the burgeoning popularity of the phrase "late capitalism", seeming to document its modern vulgar usage to around ~2009-2010, and exploding during occupy thanks to arachnoanthropologist dave grebaer. it is sadly not a particularly insightful or thorough investigation, but seems a good return on investment for the time (1 second) and effort (none) i dedicated to procuring it for the purposes of this discussion

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/
#988
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +++++
This ties in to something else I notice a lot: one of the things ideology does best, and even better recently than it has before in capitalist media, is to make people feel like they always already knew everything that was going to happen before it did and to prompt them to lazily congratulate themselves for it, because that's a zero-energy way to feel muted, self-satisfied pleasure while consuming media as they currently exist. It's a huge part of what people call "irony poisoning among the left", which to me has less to do with irony and more to do with the ideology people absorb while striking an ironic pose.

I commiserate, because it's very tempting. The reason I have tried to start giving myself reasonable credit for the rare times I actually did see something coming beforehand is because so much of what flows into people's eyes and ears nowadays, including mine, tells us that we always predicted everything, that nothing was ever a surprise, at least beyond certain media-designated "everything changed when..." events such as 9/11, where saying you saw it coming has been actively stigmatized as near-criminal rudeness.

One function this serves for the bourgeoisie is that if nothing is new and we all know everything already, it's water flowing downhill for people to conclude that they already agreed to everything that "happens to happen" next and to decide there is no point in seeking alternatives. Another function it serves for the ruling class is: if you think you predicted everything, and feel you have to pretend you did to look competent, it veils the means by which you accurately anticipated future events when you did, and to my point here, where you might have looked to find the information that allowed you to do it.

If you ever wondered why right-wing conspiracy talk radio is so effective at preserving, not challenging, the liberal status quo—even as it declares to a mass audience that status-quo leaders are monsters planning to put them in death camps and whose murders are absolutely justified in self-defense—this is the main reason why: its ever-shifting, never-ending just-so stories form an adaptive, self-congratulatory amnesia offered to people who know full well they cannot trust most mainstream news sources. Through consuming those conspiracy theories as serial best-selling narratives from other media, they now "know" everything; they "see the truth" everywhere; they are always on the cusp of some sort of apotheosis that never comes, but is always just around the bend.

This is one of ideology's crucial and most thoroughly realized elements today, and it's increasingly homogenized with no regard for the ostensibly differing functions of media sources, e.g. to entertain vs. to inform. It's a big reason, for instance, why so many Hollywood movies are planned around "shared universes" now, with "easter eggs" designed for Wikipedia junkies and endless clickbait articles & videos identifying those tidbits for people who already know they're there. This doesn't just advertise other products in the "universe" to you during the ostensibly non-advertising portion of the spectacle. It actively congratulates you for having anticipated and consumed other products under the same brand, as though your washer/dryer combo gave a little speech praising you for using Tide, Downy and Bounce for a single load of laundry (something like that is probably coming soon).

At the same time and as pioneered by companies such as Buzzfeed and Vice/Virtue, Western news media, and especially U.S. news about U.S. government or corporate policy abroad, have adopted this same structure, with bigger, older players such as CNN, the NY Times, etc., eventually following suit. This adapts ideology to digital media and compensates for the nominal reduction of barriers to non-mainstream or genuinely critical positions reaching a much wider audience. It turns reading the news each day into the presentation of new events through the same trivia quiz regardless of content, with the "correct" answers being the same every time (Putin is gay for Trump, DPRK is a mysterious Oriental jail-state and its people all want their leaders to be assassinated by foreign agents, and so on).

And in that context, I think pretty much everyone who posts here would agree it's relevant where Vice's money comes from, or that the company was founded by booj, Flatbush-style semi-ironic Nazis, and the same for all the other vectors for ideology. Where and how this stuff gets here matters, people know that in their gut, and that's why it's a little disappointing to me when I'm like "how did this happen?" and the response is, "because it fits with what I already accept about the world." I mean... I was waiting on a dunk check for a tire a few years back and I found out it fit with what a well-dressed woman next to me thought about the world that she should yell at her son on the phone for an hour about how he needed to drive into the mountains before a comet flew past Earth and Obama mobilized MS-13 to murder their family, before she drove off in a new-model F150. It's not really an answer and it's kind of the opposite of one.

Edited by cars ()

#989
Post rating: +
oh, occupy and graeber make sense yeah. That Tracks
#990
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

ialdabaoth posted:

one second into my perusal of an internet search engine results pages i found that the atlantic magazine published an article in may 2017 discussing the burgeoning popularity of the phrase "late capitalism", seeming to document its modern vulgar usage to around ~2009-2010, and exploding during occupy thanks to arachnoanthropologist dave grebaer. it is sadly not a particularly insightful or thorough investigation, but seems a good return on investment for the time (1 second) and effort (none) i dedicated to procuring it for the purposes of this discussion

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/



thank you for your service.

#991
mt.real
Post rating: +
ok so it's "commodified" to say "late capitalism" out loud now?

i am picturing the exceptional revolutionary traction i'm gonna get now that i know the correct praxis is to drag around a suitcase full of documents expanding on the proper usage and definition of terms just in case someone says them around me

"actually according to my readings adorno intended that term to carry the weight of *door politely but with constant angular velocity closes in my face with a well-oiled click*"
#992
Online
Post rating: +
i usually see people using the term late capitalism as in like capitalism is what has brought us to this absurd point, look at this absurd condition or situation, that's the fallout of being in the later stage of capitalism and having capitalism so unrestrainted up until now, when it's gotten quite late
#993
Post rating: +
god damnit look at this mess, we need stricter OHSA guidelines for the Twitter Containment Area
#994
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

drwhat posted:

ok so it's "commodified" to say "late capitalism" out loud now?



it's bourgeois ideology to use it to mean "the bad kind of capitalism, as opposed to the good kind". I don't think the term should be abandoned just because of that, the same way that "emotional labor" is still a pretty good and important term to describe a certain type of exploitation of workers in an era where minimum-wage big-box stockers, highly-paid white-collar types and Craigslist escorts are all told to "follow their passion" in accordance with policies of squeezing surplus out of them, even though it's a stunning victory for ideology that "emotional labor" has been widely repurposed by Online left-liberals to mean "I deserve to be paid by the minute for every iota of human interaction that has not yet been directly commodified." For "late capitalism", we shouldn't abandon the Frankfurt School's concepts of culture because those concepts have been misused, but because they were all cops.

#995
Post rating: +
abandoning a term as unclean because its use has been popularized is useless politics of retreat, but it's still good to hash out how these things happen. i think it's fair to say that the meaning of the term is contested and that liberal hegemony wants to absorb it, and I Too Am Annoyed at the connotations of "late capitalism" as some DSA types use it, but that shouldn't make us treat the words as radioactive.

people aren't deterministically pigeonholed by the words they use and lots of people in the west are new to left politics (because it's blowing up! shit is great right now!) so it's natural that they'll glom on to easily visible popular language, every single person who says "god damn late capitalism is awful" isn't intending to say that only and exclusively late capitalism is awful. they're just using the terms they hear other people use, and if you're not being a goober in conversation you don't have to Well Actually every time you hear it
#996
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

ilmdge posted:

i usually see people using the term late capitalism as in like capitalism is what has brought us to this absurd point, look at this absurd condition or situation, that's the fallout of being in the later stage of capitalism and having capitalism so unrestrainted up until now, when it's gotten quite late



that definitely seems to have been the intermediate stage leading to what I see more and more now, where the prefix "late" is used to mean a special sort of Dark Capitalism that allows liberals to call themselves socialists while giving themselves enough room to back-pedal into full-speed denunciations of socialism. a lot of people are probably still there, just like how there are still people who use "self-care" to mean reasonable and wise attempts to reduce their own stress levels instead of using "self-care" to mean having to log off when they accidentally slip on a banana peel and endorse the blood quanta chart from the Nuremberg Laws.

#997
Post rating: +
I don't think that's a specific campaign to subvert "late capitalism" so much as the frantic instinctive scramble of liberals to cover for the painfully visible total failure of their politics by pretending every single political jargon term belongs to them. It's like when you see a crushed ant and one of the poor little guy's legs is still twitching on its own, typing into a tiny keyboard:

Oh Hey, didn't see you there, just happened to be sitting here thinking hard about "Late Capitalism," a term popular with the kids these days but I think you will find that I have actually been using it this entire time,
#998
Post rating: ~

shriekingviolet posted:

god damnit look at this mess, we need stricter OHSA guidelines for the Twitter Containment Area


mods????

#999
Post rating: ~

shriekingviolet posted:

I don't think that's a specific campaign to subvert "late capitalism" so much as the frantic instinctive scramble of liberals to cover for the painfully visible total failure of their politics by pretending every single political jargon term belongs to them. It's like when you see a crushed ant and one of the poor little guy's legs is still twitching on its own, typing into a tiny keyboard:

Oh Hey, didn't see you there, just happened to be sitting here thinking hard about "Late Capitalism," a term popular with the kids these days but I think you will find that I have actually been using it this entire time,


i think this is close to the truth. compare with the term 'deep state', which while used by some marxists does not have marxist origins, and which has now been massaged by liberals to be a thing that's true for those messed up oriental states over there, but crazy to say of the good old US (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/world/americas/deep-state-leaks-trump.html )

#1000
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

shriekingviolet posted:

I don't think that's a specific campaign to subvert "late capitalism"



I don't think that would ever happen anyway. That's not really how ideology works.