Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:
this is a very boring cover of the original very good song in my humble opinion
e.g., i doubt i'd have started reading marx out of the blue if i weren't exposed to people who actually did that and thought it was ok to do that — a kind of person that at that point in my life i knew zero of IRL. so speaking purely for myself, the long-term unemployment was for sure a material condition that had me ripe to question prevailing paradigms, but '09-era LF gets some credit for being a community that facilitated certain lines of inquiry, making them seem less outré. i think that probably counts as "material" to my course, too, no?
similarly, i credit my early experiences on twitter with helping to expand my readings and cement anti-imperialism as the core concern it's become to me. of course, that was most of a decade ago, now, and i've found it less and less useful in that way over time. but that may also be a measure of my own increased familiarity with the Discourse's various beaten paths
i fully acknowledge that i could well be an outlier, but i've definitely brachiated in essentially positive directions online, and i've also worked (often in very hostile environments!) to help others do likewise. but even if we're prepared to take the most dismal view of it as perfectly and unimpeachably one-sided in its function, then why wouldn't we still want to do every small thing in our power to harry and sabotage that? why cede struggle-territory to social- or brute fascists?
aerdil posted:i have to disagree, i can't help but think that if it wasn't for the internet & posting exposing me to radical viewpoints, i'd probably be a normal democrat liberal with a successful career, a beautiful wife, a subaru outback, and a $800k mortgage
Let's be honest, you would only have the 800k mortgage and a Warren sticker on your Honda civic
The internet doesn't sever the individual from reality, the internet is a reflection of the ongoing destruction of community and its replacement with postmodern personal identity.
It’s possible to understand online things as mechanisms of social control without ascribing the same near-supernatural difference to them that the lamest open-source cultists did in the 1990s.
liceo posted:this post is harder to find than the fossilized rib of a nineteen million year old fish and it only took 0.000001 seconds to happen.
Wrong. The fossilized rib of a 19-million year old fish will almost certainly never be found. It will never be added to any body of information. This is paleontology 101.
Your post will not only be found, it will be added to multiple systems sifting information for specific purposes including targeted advertising, national policing and the overlap between the two. Denying this is naive and potentially dangerous.
pogfan1996 posted:The internet doesn't sever the individual from reality, the internet is a reflection of the ongoing destruction of community and its replacement with postmodern personal identity.
One thing I see now is people talking to through their avatars, or I see people as their avatars, which is not how I interpreted posts when I first got on forums, people would just use random images. I also see more anime avatars with endless variations of political or religious ideologies integrated with them. The material structure in which most of these people live are giant cities where everything has been privatized and people atomized from each other, but their traditional identities are updating and synchronizing with that material base through this interface.
liceo posted:we are not really talking because if either of us stopped, the absence would be completely unnoticed in a matter of seconds
what is your reason for labeling this "not" a conversation, rather than simply a qualitatively different sort? to my mind, the difference highlighted there arguably applies to all epistolary discourse in some measure.
it's pretty much just pen-pals
cars posted:Your post will not only be found, it will be added to multiple systems sifting information for specific purposes including targeted advertising, national policing and the overlap between the two
not to mention cars' extensive excel speadsheet with all the embarrassing things every poster had ever said
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:is ANY connection in this space "Good"?
'space' is never a homogenous totality, but rather demarcated, contested, owned, rented, threatened, abandoned, stolen ... each area put to different uses .. accumulation, production, abuse, incarceration, indoctrination, education, etc.
spaces have defined constraints / histories / weather / etc.. and as much as the internet is entirely dependent on the physical reality of its data-centers, 'distributed/networked communication' is not so much a space as an idea, which when manifested through capitalist production becomes an 'inhabitable' ideological apparatus.
the platforms and protocols we inhabit (or that increasingly inhabit the spaces between us) may selfpresent as the true and optimal incarnation of 'network / connection / knowledge / sharing / community'... but i think to anyone here could see this is no different than how capital presents its cities, science or history.
the idea of a 'personal' computer or the ergonomics of how our bodies must bend in order to interact with devices are as arbitrary manifestations of ideology as a shopping mall or viagra. how do these delimit our understanding of the possibilities/purpose of 'architecture' or 'medicine'?
we live in their cities, eat their food, are born and die to their doctors. all of these are legitimate sites of struggle for survival (if only psychically) but also for reaffirming that what these manifestations are is pure capital, we are swimming in it, ingesting it, reproducing it. and most importantly that the hopelessness comes from believing a false projection, that there is no outside, no alternative, no agency, no imagination. but it's paper tigers all the way down.
liceo's post on this, the collapsing of past and future into a psychically obliterating present that requires a constant connection, says it better.
in response to virtuality maybe departing from the material, the body, can be an approach to learn and redefine our atomized relationship to tech/internet/www666 that begins to reclaim a bit more agency. at least that's how i've found a way to act on very similar feelings. that path feels closer to how one might deal with other questions of the body, such as care for ones health, shelter, physical relationships, or irl struggle. despite the shit we manage to sustain life, carve out niches, reach out to others and gain strength.
trakfactri posted:tpaine was before my time but when reading through old rhizzone threads of topics of interest to me i'll come across artifacts that someone else clipped and posted, like some kind of scavenger uncovering lost knowledge, possessing some kind of terrible power
kinch posted:he left because this forum is full of ess jay double you bitch boys
"SJW" insult is Nazi propaganda and we don't use it on this forum because we don't do the enemy's work for them thanks.
toyot posted:Acdtrux posted:
(expenditure of surplus enjoyment)
nice, i'm reading accursed share now
Did someone just mention Bataille?
Unrelated, I've been thinking about the internet lately in terms of positive feedback and social volatility. Like how "random" phenomena online like the Q book getting recommended to people en masse on Amazon can be related to people's confusion, anger and hostility in the real world. I know you can game recommendation algos, and news sites generate stories from Twitter activity to not miss out on ad revenue from a breaking story, but there's something to the way that people perceive the information displayed on their screens that might be complicating things. Like its the world coming light speed right at me. I don't have anything to really say about that other than I find it curious. There's something to it...
toyot posted:paraphrasing what roseweird used to say, it's just a big comms network. it is agnostic. it could be used for anything, but in capitalism it's used for this. billboards could display art but they display ads. social control media could do more than inspire vanity but
Also, been lamenting how cut off most people are from the potential of the internet. With all the possibilities of networked computers it seems unfortunate that ISPs basically only want us on port 80 reading websites. Like if it was required in 6th grade education to set up your own minecraft server I wonder what the internet might look like.
I've actually just been lurking on the zzone and not posting for a while, and I would like to echo the few other self-congratulatory remarks and say that the zzone is the best website/honeypot online. I wish you all the best. So tpaine never made it out? Hm.
Right around then, a noticeable proportion of the people who were involved seemed to start posting less and less, and a couple stopped altogether, a significant number given the active posters here even at this site's peak. I understand their decision & sympathize with it personally & it was probably for good reason, because they were busier than before with more important stuff & because the conversations they were having elsewhere began to put some of the ones here into sharper relief. I've said it before, most of the people I've worked with in that same context offline are just like most of the people I work with to pay my bills, or pretty much everyone else in my life—they wouldn't have any interest in the tone or type of conversations in the average thread here & they probably never will, even if they're directly invested in the topic. I thought that would change as I got older, as both the job and politics put me in rooms with younger people, but it didn't really. It's one of the reasons why this is such a fun place for me and I have it up on my phone so much every day. But it does force the comparison when discussing those same politics are part of this place.
If you're not involved in politics in the way I'm describing and you post here, this site has always accommodated that from its beginning, with people's reasons ranging from reasonable to arguable & argued to very very stupid. Saying that's fine is liberalism so I'll just say it's real. The site goes through cycles where the amount of people directly engaged in its own political context waxes and wanes, where the posts and Your Posting and posting personae are more or less informed by those politics.
But the current cycling away from those involved posters, and I know they're not all gone I see you in the cut... it still kind of sucks in the moment for some of us who remain. It sucks because the 100% Online approach to "leftism" is objectively social-fascist and dominated by social-fascist voices, and it's like another darn planet from the conversations we're having right now when we can!! conversations we know are important ones, at least in our own personal worlds, at least if anything can be done at all in the world by any of the people around us. Dragging the forums away from those conversations & toward that other slop, just absorbing and repeating what's found in the post-atomic mutant wastelands of single-site social media, that's not only bad, it's boring.
By that I don't mean like, don't repost funny pictures or links to articles from those sites (though you should think about both & not just copy those sites' chain-letter, mass-tested-algorithm-shaped behavior, because we don't have the budget for the test cycle). i DO mean the stuff where the whole point is that you DON'T think it through, or you have to pretend you don't for it to serve its purpose. Parroting the language & manners. Adopting the posture that those sites' trends are, or SHOULD be, a body of knowledge mastered by people posting here. If this site becomes too parasitic, it will die from posting starvation. That approach offers nothing that can't be had elsewhere in a prettier red-light district. Because like, a filter of detached old-school forums sarcasm between this site and those places' own top brands doesn't do a lot of things, but it does make this place less redundant.
One thing that HAS changed since the birth of this site is the sharp rise of Marxist-Lite-branded social-fascism as a widely marketable posture in the English-speaking world. I don't mean the phenomenon of revisiting socialism, whose causes extend far outside of this topic. I'm talking about the discourse that attenuates that phenomenon. It developed very much on the Internet, and it belongs very much to those sites now.
So the way to look cool within purely online "leftism" is defined through the ecosystem that creates it. It's defined through indirect effects, and sometimes direct ones, of specific tools and use of those tools, tools for information management and intelligence gathering by the bourgeois government of the United States. We all know that, and I don't mean "on this Web site". Even most of the people who deny it acknowledge the body of facts behind the conclusion, and they selectively apply the conclusion too. It's not QAnon or flat-earth or whatever deadken is getting paid to pretend he believes to entertain The Nation readers on Earth 2. It's something that's regularly trotted out to grab people's eyes with headlines, all across the political spectrum, even if different groups would rather sub in some sector of the bourgeoisie or some deluded cipher for it as self-defensive synecdoche.
But discussing those tools as a reality, a body of material facts with implications for a process in constant motion... if you want to do that and if you're Posting In The Thread you probably do... that's tough, it's complicated, you will end up arguing with people who thought you agreed with them, because they're thinking in idealist ways. You end up with opponents on all sides of you because you have to deal with something mutable & permeable, something that can be deployed by ideology in all sorts of partial ways, and there's every chance you've missed something yourself. In this case, right here and now, the topic is also the medium for the discussion. It's like stage actors putting on a play about stage acting where they have to play characters improving their acting abilities. You can start to think about what you're doing in ways that can mess it up, and that's maybe also how you get at some important truth about it, but no guarantee there. It sucks!!
If you want to discuss the material reality of the Internet as a product of capitalism, it can't be the end of the discussion, nor do I get rhetorical points by saying, "it's really the beginning". It's the middle of the discussion, and it's always the middle. Because the bourgeoisie owns a lot of things, people's homes and cars and the streets they walk on, and it doesn't mean that if you touch them your politics bar falls to 0. It does mean, if you're engaged in politics, you should acknowledge the Internet is a product of bourgeois social control, talk through what it means and get other perspectives on it, while not fixating on it unnecessarily. Make sure you don't think it makes everyone around you eternally corrupted, a hidden enemy (which isn't any saner if you think the same thing about yourself).
That's not an effective rallying cry. But it shouldn't be, that would work against its benefits, and one of the real problems with online social-fascist discourse is that it suggests everything must also be an effective rallying cry. The medium in which it happens suggests and cultivates that, with its controlled, regulated, capital-oriented form of two-way discussion, presented as a route to pure, free, liberated one-way fame, where everyone's seen as an audience in an auditorium, ducking in and ducking out all the time at their leisure.
It's a big reason to call out that, yes, people really do miss other people who post here when they're gone. Because in a lot of ways it's comforting to think that we can come and go unnoticed by systems of information control, but not only are those systems built specifically to prevent that, to parse that mass of information and use it for specific ends, it's in any case not a sort of ghost-like "freedom" we should pretend applies to all interpersonal interactions. Nor do I think most people really want that.
And that is going to be part of politics. You can't even Kurzweil-pop-culture-technofetish your way out of that, it was part of politics in the darn Matrix movies, because they needed the audience to believe in their events for an hour or two. People have to get together and talk in a situation they can't escape without someone, at some point, noticing their absence.
So yeah it does matter to me & probably other people, if conversations here are or aren't informed by involvement outside those tools of social control. Not everyone has to be, but the conversation should be, because it's part of what kept this place alive and makes it different from louder sites with bigger crowds. It matters even when it's a time of plague, like... it matters when the tools owned by the bourgeoisie are used for the reasons that a lot of people in this thread acknowledge are reasons NOT to treat everything built by them as totally coopted and corrupted. That is, when they're used as a means to an end that's more directly involved with activity that extends outside of them, including a means to political ends that most people here would appreciate, even grudgingly sometimes. So I think it's good to keep an eye on that and really, to privilege it, at least until we collectively decide masturbatory sex magick has more impact on the world than material conditions or something.
Mainly I care about this because I like to post on tHE r H i z z o n E and read the posts here by posting pals. I'd miss this place if it turned back on itself, copied its degenerate inheritors and became le epic redditposts about how idpol SJWs oppress the White Working Class, if it broke the pentagrammatic seal and crushed itself to death under a herd of mustangs.
sovnarkoman posted:TRUNGOS
