#safe new world

[fettesans]

Top, screen capture from Material Witness OR A Liquid Cop, Ed Atkins, 2012. Watch (ubu is back btw). Bottom, Roman Signer, Wagen, 1998, 120 x 108 x 60 cm. Via.

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The social dimension of pain is thus suppressed and repressed. Chronic pain, a pathological phenomenon of the burnout society, does not give rise to protest. In the neoliberal society, tiredness is apolitical. It is a tiredness-of-the-I, a symptom of the overstretching of the narcissistic subject of performance. Tiredness isolates us instead of binding us together into a We. I-tiredness must be distinguished from We-tiredness, which is the product of a community. I-tiredness is the best defence against revolution.

Byung-Chul Han, from The Palliative Society, 2021. Via.

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Accelerationalism began life as the British cousin of the Californian philosophy of Extropianism, which also began in the early 1990s (as I wrote here). There’s a similar anarcho-libertarianism, hyper-capitalism, worship of new technology and expectation of a sudden leap beyond the human. But this wasn’t California, it was Coventry — and Accelerationism was much darker and more nihilistic than Californian transhumanism. After all, Land’s first book was called ‘Thirst for Annihilation’.

Land has said: ‘I have no interest in human liberation, or liberation of the human species. I’m interested in liberation of the means of production’. In other words, Accelerationism had nothing to do with expanding human potential. This was not Californian self-help. This was about liberating the machine from the human. Accelerationism aimed to push capitalism further and faster, until it’s just machines whirring round in a lifeless universe. Pure Fordism.

The CCRU grew out of cybernetics, and the sense that humans are agents in a world full of other agents — machines, ecosystems, DNA, perhaps demons as well. All these entities have desires. Machines have desires. Why foreground human desires and aspirations? The obvious answer is because we’re human. But that’s not enough for post-human philosophies. For Accelerationists, the aim is the liberation of What Technology Wants. Here’s a quote from a good write-up by Yuxi Lin at LessWrong:

our world, with its cars, finances, AI, and other industrial technologies, has a clear goal of its own: a future dominated by more upgraded versions of these technologies, with humans becoming extinct or irrelevant.

You can come across this idea in Californian transhumanism / Extropianism too. It’s humans’ glorious destiny to be supplanted by AI machines. But transhumanists typically imagine super-intelligent spiritual machines, far smarter than humans. It’s a worship of intelligence. With Accelerationism, at least in Land’s case, I get the feeling it’s more a misanthropic hatred of the human condition and a desire to annihilate consciousness and replace it with the machine. It’s philosophy as modish death-wish.

Jules Evans, from Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip, January 21, 2023.

[fettesans]

Screen captures from Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet, 2023.

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Back in 1991 when the book (Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean) was first published, just over 1% of Americans were using the internet. But Gelernter claimed computing was about to revolutionize life on Earth. “This book describes an event that will happen someday soon,” he wrote in the opening line. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world — the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital — will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”

In essence, Gelernter believed that every aspect of life could soon be modeled in a parallel digital simulation. Everything happening in our lived reality would be tracked and monitored and fed into software “by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables” to create a high-fidelity real-time digital representation of the world and all of its pulsing, swarming and sensuous qualities. This would be like Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse on steroids: our exact world, our very lives, all digital. And you could view, manipulate, experience and interact with this mirror world, like a child with a dollhouse. A dashboard for reality.

These “high-tech voodoo dolls,” as Gelernter described them, “will mark a new era in mankind’s relationship to the man-made world. They change that relationship; for good.” It would be possible, he believed, to not just monitor what was happening around the world, but also to predict what could happen — endless simulations of possible future events would be running inside the mirror world. We could prepare ourselves for any outcome — any future — in the physical world because we would know what was coming. (...)

The dream of a digital twin is to bypass the averages and biases and develop a personalized and predictive form of healthcare that is built around a person’s specific physiology and pathology rather than vaguely representative historical data. “The idea [of the virtual human] starts from the premise that modern medicine isn’t really that modern in scientific terms,” Peter Coveney, a computer scientist and coauthor of “Virtual You” (2023), told me over Zoom. Coveney worked on a project to digitally twin the entire 60,000-mile-long circulatory system of a deceased South Korean woman named Yoon-Sun who had donated her body to science. Cross-sections were taken from her frozen cadaver to help trace the network of vessels, arteries, veins and capillaries. Once mapped, they created a digital simulation of how her blood flowed by feeding 200,000 lines of code into a supercomputer.

Joe Zadeh, from A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life - Digital twins offer humankind the ability to command virtual replicas of forests, oil fields, cities, supply chains — and even, maybe one day, our very bodies, for Noéma, March 21, 2024.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

[claret-ash]

Happy New Year all-!!! I hear the fireworks are excellent in Dornogal! 🎆✨🎆✨🎆✨🎆✨

[fluffylord]

Look how far I went, for fear of losing you.

[erinwantstowrite]

im glad your burce is a good person (or at least a good dad)

it's insane how bad of a person bruce can be in some of the comics.

ig bruce is such a hard character to write good that dc themselves can't do it 😔/j

i feel like they meep making bruce a bad father because they keep hiring writers who don't know him like at all nor the core values of someone with a good heart. like yeah humans make mistakes, but you know what heroes that people should look up to don't do?? beat their children, harm their children, belittle their children, etc etc. i think batman's most valuable trait should be the gentleness in which he treats children, especially his own. give me a Bruce who is so nervous about his kids doing anything that his flaw is him being overprotective, not *abusive.* because an abusive Batman is not Batman, and he's not a hero. if he is written as an abusive person, then he is no longer written as a hero. they can't have it both ways!!

[scoriarose]

Baby that is not an enrichment activity

Baby... Baby no you... Child...

I know you like to play with crinkly things but...

Aaaand into the messenger bag she goes.

[nelkcats]

Ghost Train

It was no secret that the trains in Gotham were damaged, whether it was from all the explosions that flooded the city on a daily basis or the fact that the rails were broken wasn't completely clear. At that point, what was once a train station was nothing more than an empty place used by some homeless people to sleep.

Or that's what it was supposed to be, because while the station was damaged and underneath the city, it was actually active. It just had another kind of train, a slightly more interesting one.

In Danny's defense, he was extremely bored and there was an abandoned train station he could use to play with. All it took was calling in a favor from Technus and a fully functional ghost train connected the Infinite Realms to Gotham.

The ghosts, of course, used this for fun. Fighting each other, chasing each other, celebrating, having concerts. It was a way to go to the human world without anyone causing trouble for them, not that anyone was paying attention anyway.

Or at least, no one was supposed to be paying attention, because Waylon was dumbfounded at the sight. He had escaped to the old rails when he had no other choice, his sewers were compromised and he needed a way out. He didn't expect to walk right into a party, or be offered a sandwich with a smile instead of a shout.

He could also observe a clearly glowing train and the fact that everyone there was glowing. They could be metas, or another completely new creature, but Waylon didn't care, they gave him food and he wasn't a snitch.

[fettesans]

That is why information is tending to disappear, being replaced instead by alerts. The informer becomes a transmitter, an alert vector in a permanent and generalized system of alerts that is tied to the political, economic, social, and ecological state of the world, taken in its entirety. And the information itself is always more alarming, always more terrifying, and supported by data concerning the ongoing destruction of the world. Isn’t that inevitable when the viability of the world—and of the multiple worlds composing it and giving it its consistency—is everywhere under threat? We aren’t informed about parts of the world anymore but are on permanent alert about the general state of the world. The effect is debilitating. All the scenarios, all the simulations and hypotheses that result, whether catastrophic or not, force us to think in terms of worlds, to “globalize” even the most minute data. And that is where the junction between the actual world and SF occurs, independently of the fictional stories, as if the information concerning the present state of the world were nothing but a succession of stories anticipating its future state.

David Lapoujade, from the introduction to Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick, translated by Erik Beranek, in e-flux, July, 2024.

[caitlinjohns77]

[fettesans]

Nada, Amore Disperato, 1983

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The capacitive touchscreen is a mystifying veil over the rational kernel of the computer. To touch a touchscreen is an oxymoron: you believe you are tapping a button but you are feeling nothing at all. What is feeling is the screen, abrim with energy and sensors. In fact, the screen touches you.  The human body is electrically conductive because we are filled with fluid, and our cells filled with conductive ions. So a layer of conductive material is placed upon a screen, which generates an electrical field. When your finger approaches, this electrical field is drawn upward to touch your own. The screen’s highly sensitive capacitors read this disruption in its own field: capacitive coupling. The device’s processor analyzes the location of your gesture on the screen. It then decides how to react to you.

Touchscreens proliferated with the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007. The iPhone revolutionized the technology industry and subsequently the world, as Marx predicted. People now spend more time than they ever have before engaging in labor and economic exchange through smartphone apps. Such apps are designed to supercharge any person’s ability to participate in the economy, operate as a small business, purchase and sell commodities, or labor to produce data, content, and attention. This quantitative leap causes qualitative transformations in the social fabric, dialectically rippling outwards from Silicon Valley to the far reaches of wireless networks. The smartphone reorganizes social relations, disrupts and re-creates new modes of production, and exploits and dehumanizes “users” across the globe. Flusser says it best: “the hands have become redundant and can atrophy. This is not true, however, of the fingertips. On the contrary: They have become the most important organs of the body”.

Kat Kitay, from The Dialectic of Doomscrolling, June 24, 2024.

Nada - Amore Disperato

[sh1-n0bu]

i fucking knew americans were dumb

edit: i have found out thru tiktok that books such as ‘great gatsby’ ‘handmaidens tale’ ‘to kill a mockingbird’ ‘lord of the flies’ and such are going to be banned in the us and the white house is demanding a recount/revote. those of you who are in usa, do what you can do, stock up on your medications if you can, engage in community that you’re a part of, create a safe space for yourself and those you know. learn about legal issues and ways to protect yourself if the project 2025 does end up happening, educate yourselves on legal rights and your human basic rights and which law protects it in which way. this may have disappeared in the tags but if you support trump or have voted for that thing get THE FUCK off of my blog

second edit: those of you who gave your votes thru an email or online voting, CHECK YOUR EMAIL AND MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL IS TRACEABLE. there has been news of emails being unable to be found, identified or traced back to yourself. check and check again. if there are any issues, file a complaint

[destielmemenews]

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[ciaomarie]

GIF by lousolversons

What do you do when the person who has unknowingly shaped your dreams and then made you part of his dreams disappears? And he's two feet away? I'd fade, too. I'd scream my grievances in a dumpster and wonder if I simply expected too much of someone. People die and leave you. People find a girlfriend and leave you. People are dealing with issues and leave you. And... maybe they were never really with you in the first place?

[ovrrdogg]

Hfjone au where instead of kidnapping people for his reality show he accidentally discovers twitch and starts a stream and becomes the most popular twitch streamer ever. People love tuning in to watch forest man and his wacky antics. They love the “larp.” Twitch keeps trying to get him to come to cons he can never attend. People make wildly popular edits and gifs of him to share on stan twitter.

Instead of getting people to entertain him, he works to entertain people.

[phonification]

weird hsbc adjacent ii au doodles ,,

[sagelessichor]

You know what my fav hc I've ever come up with so far is? Apollo has to take shots of alcohol in the morning every day so that he can keep up the dumb blond act.

Cause like, you're telling me the god of poetry, education, logic, art, music, and so many other things just writes shitty haikus, is an ignorant, arrogant, self-absorbed shitty person? Hell no! This is literally the god of education, logic, and truth we are talking about here okay.

But on the flip side: imagine what would happen when Apollo doesn't take alcohol in the morning and after years of only interacting to people while drunk to keep up the dumb blond act, they now have to meet soberpollo who takes no shit and is just a no-nonsense guy. The whiplash would be absolute gold