#Dark Enlightenment

[erbodd]

I draw sometimes

I'm not good, but I try hard. Some are scenes from Dark Enlightenment.

The others are my current obsession : Erik Danielsson.

[jarvislover]

here it is.. the rein raus edit ive been talking about,

dark enlightenment inspired edit??

@erbodd i hope an edit works instead of a drawings because drawing has become such a struggle 😭(because i still remember when you asked me to draw something from the fanfic AND I FELT BAD FOR NOT DOING IT SO 😭)

[foolofworms]

developments in late capitalism in 2024

[altwritewegner]

In Zeiten »anarchokapitalistischer« Staatsoberhäupter, aufstrebender US-Nachwuchspolitiker mit betont illiberalen Ansichten (etwa J.D. Vance, Blake Masters oder Vivek Ramaswamy) und dem Wirken nicht nur wirtschaftlich, sondern auch kulturell und politisch disruptiver Tech-Milliardeninvestoren wie Elon Musk und Peter Thiel kommt oft die Rede von einem neuen Feudalismus oder gar einer »Neoreaktion« (NRx) auf. Was genau soll das sein?

Alles geht zurück auf einen hochbegabten, aber arbeitslosen Informatiker namens Curtis Yarvin (alias Mencius Moldbug) und den antihumanistischen Philosophen des »Akzelerationismus«, Nick Land. Mit meiner kleinen ideengeschichtlichen Analyse kann der deutschsprachige Leser nachvollziehen, wie Yarvin ab 2007 um seine persönliche Auslegung der europäischen Geistesgeschichte eine »Cloud« hochintelligenter Autoren und Denker voller Skepsis gegenüber Demokratie und Liberalismus scharte, und wie der ehemalige Philosophiedozent Land fünf Jahre später darüber den Horizont einer »Dunklen Aufklärung« aufspannte. Ich präsentiere die wichtigsten Figuren der digitalen Reactosphere, erläutere die zentralen Begriffe von Cathedral bis Bioleninism, stelle NRx in den Kontext der intellektuellen US-Nachkriegsrechten und zeige, in welchen Phänomenen wir im Jetzt und Hier das Erbe von Dark Enlightenment und Neoreaction sehen können.

Wer herausfinden möchte, ob überall, wo »Reaktion« draufsteht, auch Reaktion drin ist, und ob das überhaupt erstrebenswert wäre, der sollte spätestens nach der Lektüre von »Neoreaktion und Dunkle Aufklärung« im Bilde sein.

[erbodd]

I'm blessed to have found you 💜 Thank you so so much for your work. This artwork is stunning and gives just the right vibe. It illustrates this moment from the second chapter :

His warm and corrosive breath was so close to Christian’s neck that it made him shiver. It also made all this very real. For support, Christian reached for Niklas’ waist and held it. With another deep breath, he put the edge of the glass in contact with Niklas’ marred skin. He applied pressure gradually, unsure of how much would be needed to break through. When the skin gave way, Christian gasped and his hand on Niklas’ waist stiffened. He darted his eyes to Niklas’ face whose eyes were rolling into his skull and mouth half open was letting out a sigh. He felt slightly uncomfortable, like he shouldn’t witness this ; to him, this act has always been something very personal. He hesitated to continue but something told him that Niklas would be angry if he stopped. He steadied his hand and cut the skin open, stopping only as he reached the same length Niklas made himself earlier. He probably cut deeper than he intended, a thin stream of crimson fluid already running down Niklas’ arm.

[divider created by @sister-lucifer]

COMMISSION for @erbodd for her NiklasxChristian fanfiction (which is beautifully written)

Thanks for commissioning me 🧡

[whimseysthrone]

Megacorp Nobility, cyberpunk & feudalism brainworm

Cyberpunk megacorps are feudal hierarchies… or at least they’re close enough that we can map one to the other. My brain wandered into this realization a few months ago, and now I can’t stop thinking about cyberpunk stories and fantasy or historical fiction through this lens. If I’m stuck with it, I might as well share it with you. A set of feudal class assumptions are baked into many cyberpunk…

[goopsnoot]

The Dark Urge and Lump the Enlightened are getting married, and YOU are invited, gasp! There will be dwarf served. Take that as a warning or a perk depending on your Tav lolol. (Yes I ship this)

[ejoym]

It's the monster smash! Featuring Lump with that thick ogre rump. Redraw based on the oil painting La Femme Damnée, 1859 by Nicolas François Octave Tassaert. Pictured below!

[spookysalem13]

I'm on a journey of growth ✨️ and rebirth.

[erbodd]

Dark Enlightenment

Dark Enlightenment Chapters: 5/10 Fandom: Shining (Sweden Band), Bandom Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Niklas Kvarforth/Christian Larsson, Christian Larsson/Niklas Kvarforth, Erik Danielsson/Niklas Kvarforth, Niklas Kvarforth/Erik Danielsson Characters: Niklas Kvarforth, Christian Larsson, Andreas Larsen, Original Female Character(s), Peter Huss, Ulvhedin Hoest, Kristian "Gaahl" Espeda, Erik Danielsson Additional Tags: Masturbation, Light Dom/sub, Orgasm Edging, Consensual Harm, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Fluff and Angst, Drug Abuse, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Knifeplay, Blood Kink, Consensual, Mental Health Issues, Group Sex, Minor Violence, Come Swallowing, Master/Pet, Friends With Benefits, Ritual Sex

Summary: The pitter-patter of soft paws on the wooden floor approached. They saw Katze coming towards them and jumping on the couch to give Erik a greeting sniff, receiving pets from him in return. She settled on the back of the couch, her tail rested close to Niklas’ head, making him smile as he looked at her.

[divider created by @sister-lucifer]

[allanodyne]

holding on to hope is a different kind of pain

by AllanOdyne

[srisrisriddd]

Anger

Q: I'm enlightened fuck off

A: Bro, did enlightenment fucked off your anger - Dr Devang H Dattani

Good Morning

Quote / Poem / Poetry / Quotes Of 

Bhagwan Sri Sri Sri

Doctor Devang H Dattani

Infinite SriSriSri DDD

Posted By TheBlissCity DDD Team

See The Media Photo Video For

Quoteoftheday

God Morning

#enlightenment , #bliss , #TheBlissCity , #philosophy , #mindfulness , #DrDevangHDattani , #nature , #awareness , #InfiniteSriSriSriDDD , #quotes , #life , #art , #zen , #awakening , #quote , #spiritual , #photography , #Video , #meditation , #psychology , #poem , #poetry , #motivation , #inspiration , #quoteoftheday , #love , #words , #thoughts , #joy , #pun , #enlightenment , #health , #mental health , #consciousness , #volcano , #god , #landscape , #life , #video , #fuck off , #fucked off , #thoughts , #nirvana , #tantra , #yoga , #anger , #lava , #photooftheday , #panorama , #smoke , #mountain , #erruption , #volcanic eruption , #fire

[altwritewegner]

ES IST SOWEIT! 🤩

Musk, Thiel, Trump und die rechtslibertäre Versuchung: Viel ist in den vergangenen zehn Jahren über die sogenannte Neoreaction mit ihren Galionsfiguren Mencius Moldbug und Nick Land geschrieben worden. Für den Jungeuropa Verlag durfte ich nun die erste deutschsprachige Einführung und Klärung zum Thema verfassen – vorbestellen kann man ab sofort, erscheinen wird das schöne Stück im Februar!

https://www.jungeuropa.de/detail/index/sArticle/378

[not-a-kaleshi-saanp]

Jab tumhe realise ho ki bhenchod ye to degree hi galat hai....but just in the 3 rd year 💀🤡😭

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[rontra]

pietà