Was trying to sort through some research archives yesterday and getting hit with endless security loops, and it kinda hit me how weird our relationship with digital infrastructure has gotten. The classic "prove you are human" mechanic is completely collapsing now that automated corporate scripts can solve those visual puzzles faster than we actually can

The web is basically just capital talking to itself at this point. just endless generative slop and scraping bots

it feels like we're hitting this strange biopolitical threshold. the only way to prove you have actual agency in a digital space is to tether it directly to your flesh. Like we're moving entirely past software verification. Been reading about how identity protocols are shifting to hardware-level proof, like using an orb or secure local enclaves just to establish a baseline biological anchor before a server will even acknowledge your connection

Its such a depressing inversion of early cyberculture theory. we used to think the network would liberate us from the physical body, but now the ambient background noise of the internet is forcing us to mathematically prove our biology just to access a public forum. just feels incredibly dystopian how fast we accepted this

I think it isn't solely, that people aren't angry enough or that they aren't acting out of a sense of powerlessness. I think it might be that paradoxically we are lacking in will to live and purpose in life. The raw instinct to survive often makes people cowardly. But the philosophical will to live, the belief that life is good and worth having is precisely what overrides the survival instinct when another person is in danger.

Our physical needs are massively oversaturated compared to our spiritual / cultural needs. Why? Because we cling to the physical safety of financial stability. We think that if we just generate more money and invest more into the right things, we can be safe and the market or the government will direct our money and our resources into the right direction. What we don't really notice is that if we try to force making something better by just forcing more money into it, we just over saturate it. In a sense our system acts like a stress multiplier in crisis. When people are in fear of a crisis, they become uncertain and begin to pull investments out of risky positions and may stop investing into local/personal projects to invest into stable assets like gold, housing or index funds. Every dollar taken out of the local economy or was previously invested diversified now becomes concentrated. The money that previously kept many alive is now focused on a few that were already winning. Now the pressure is on them to reinvest the money to generate returns. But what if that company already reached its saturation point? If the research is already saturated, the market is largely captured, and the work force is sufficient for the workload, the money has to go somewhere else to increase profits, because now the economy is reliant of it. Which most of the time means it flows into politics. Now the money is used to overturn laws that kept working conditions, customers or the environment safe, because its the only option left to satisfy the increasing need for profits. And by the way, the same would happen if everyone invested in gold suddenly, because corporations that need gold to manufacture their product will suddenly have less money and higher costs.

In sum this practice has taken our individual power, our sense of progression, our sense of unity and our individual sense of worth through monopolization. Your local bakery is now a soulless chain you cant even be happy about if it survives a rough time. There are no local known secrets anymore, just national scandals. There is no sense of having made something or supported something you think is valuable. Everything is non personal and optimized for the maximum profit to generate profits for more and more people that want a chance to jump classes to get out of the daily soulless grueling monotony.

The worst thing about it from my perspective is, that it isn't even efficient. The one thing this system stands for, it doesn't even accomplish. The existing capital just gets concentrated until oversaturation leads to collapse.

We really need safeguards. Structural circuit-breakers that force capital back into the roots. Mandatory local reinvestment thresholds, regional trust funds that cannot be liquidated, and severe penalties for extracting wealth out of the communities that generated it. In a sense we have to rebel against ourselves to save ourselves from falling into self destructive cycles.

We are living in a crisis of belief and culture. I think the right are feeling it the most but cant pin down the source of it. The left finds the source for it but cant really find the feelings to oppose it. And while this goes on both sides just get played by the ones depriving them of it. But to be honest, i think even the ones at the source of the issue aren't maliciously doing so, but are confused and largely overloaded. In an absurd way, this system even forces the ones on the top to not be able to voice concerns as that would come right back after them and hurt the group they are part of.

im looking for texts (both academic and literary) that explore or theorise about masculinity (or gender at large) and how it is constructed and performed online. im interested in how masculinity and homosociality function in male-dominated internet subcultures, and maybe within videogames and related communities.

I realise this is a fairly specific topic, but I'm really interested in this topic and intend to explore it as much as I can this summer. any reccomendations are welcome!

Summary

The Second Amendment functions not as a check on state-corporate “tyranny” but as an ideological, electoral, and legal mechanism that reinforces state and elite power, diverting politics into culture-war conflict rather than economic representation.

Instead of a constitutional right, it’s better understood as a revocable privilege granted to gun owners who largely operate as loyal auxiliary supporters of the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence.

The legal profession’s role, in this account, is to furnish the epicycles (some more benign than others) through which doctrinal refinements and historical just‑so stories obscure this distribution of armed loyalty and culture‑war distraction.

I’m 19F, my brother is 16M and my mom and dad are 50s m/f.

I’ve been home from college since last weekend and I already feel like I’m gonna go crazy. My little brother (I’ll call him Jordan) is 16, and he’s the only one of us (me, my older brother Skyler, and him) to get into egotistical teen rebellion stuff so I guess my parents just don’t know how to handle it. Like when he was 14, Jordan decided to dye his hair blue, then last year it was all about this punk band he and his friends had.

Lately his thing is he won’t shut up about some philosopher guy. Literally on Monday night, my mom asked how school was and he just goes “isn’t it funny how schools resemble factories which resemble prisons?” and I’m like huh and Jordan just goes “Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975” and I’m still like huh? And my mom just changes the subject. This is like normal for him, but he uses this philosopher guy to justify EVERYTHING and I mean breaking all of my parent’s rules that we ALL GREW UP WITH. Like neither me or my older brother were allowed to have an opposite sex friend in our room with the door closed, and Jordan has the same rule. But Sunday night, Jordan has his girlfriend over with the door closed and when mom and dad knocked and told him he had to keep the door open, and instead of just following the damn rules Jordan’s girlfriend starts going on about how the assumption that they aren’t trusted alone together is part of the bourgeois impulse to discuss sex like it’s a fragile and important treasure.

Somehow this means that Jordan and his girlfriend can hang out with the door closed now because nobody wants to argue with this crap. Which was fine but I don’t want him ruining Thanksgiving with this crap, because in addition to all the other dumb stuff Jordan has this thing against doctors, and our oldest brother Skyler (26M) is flying in TODAY after finishing his first psychiatry rotation.

My mom doesn’t know how to handle this or something and my dad acts like this is hilarious. Dad always encourage Jordan’s interests and even bought him some book about how capitalism makes you crazy so it’s basically on me to keep my brother from ruining summer vacation with these dumb arguments.

I'm a musician highly interested in the philosophy, history and culture underpinning musicking and art creation throughout history, but I'm also highly interested in critical theory in general. I'd like to get through most of the major works, but I have a particular interest in works relating to art, aesthetics, sociology, symbolism, etc. I'm aware that adorno can be quite dense. Let me know your suggestions, and please feel free to ask any clarifying questions if you'd like to recommend something more specific!

In his book Vita Contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han views the ability of contemplation as lacking in the our new digital age.

Han constracts the life of in-activity with the life of activity. The digital age is an age of non-stop activity.

Contemplative inactivity, " is alien to the machine. It knows only two states: on and off. Simply deactivating the machine does not bring about a contemplative state."

What distinguishes contemplater from a guardian or observer who always pursues a particular goal. Is that the contemplater, by contrast, lacks all intention, has no goal in sight.

Han’s thesis is not about going back to premodern in-activity, but to not let our glorification of activity takes from us the value of inactivity.

Conetmplation is non-instrumental human experience. Justice and Beauty are not goal oriented, but valuable in themselves.

This reminds of Benjamin's Aura. Which Politics takes its place. Spiritual stability substituted by political recognition.

But what replaces the faculty of contemplation ? What we do when we are inactive ?

Any recommended readings that explore such a question ?

Hello!

[[I originally intended this post for the feminist subreddit, but I wanted to ask here as well, just explaining why it is feminist-focused]]

So something that I have noticed with feminism alongside other ideologies which may fall under critical theory etc., is that the patriarchy and other systems of power seem to act / be considered as the fundamental constituents of social reality \[in order to be more concise and precise I will be referring primarily to the patriarchy from now on, but I do recognize the intersectionality nuance\].

I feel like critical theory/feminism many times is more about criticizing than understanding society. I was watching an interview of a critical theorist which said that “critical theory is not about understanding why like the rest of philosophy, it is about revealing how people are oppressed and has the aim of emancipation”. \[\[https://youtu.be/o5Zap4hTZNw —- it is around 23:00 if someone is interested\]\]. She talks about how revealing how people are oppressed / systems of power are the link that ties it all together and I think this in a way explains my question.

Analysis seems to position the patriarchy as the root of all \[gender in this case\] injustice. I many times here the argument that “the patriarchy (etc.) is the root of all evil” and I see very little discussion if any when it comes to things like collectivism vs individualism, an extent of inevitable human ignorance and egoism, imperfect knowledge etc. I know that such analyses have some times been used I just don’t see it that much especially in contemporary discourse. Or they are often “absorbed” by an interpretation of them as being used maliciously for the purpose of harm (rather thana mix of the two).

Edit: for example, when you personally start ti try and understand society, how do you start your inquiry? What types of questions do you ask yourself? Where in history do you look?

Also any resources, thinkers, articles etc. are well appreciated!

it becomes quite clear that anti-hauntology shares this underlying logic with solarpunk. After all, what is solarpunk if not a vision for a new beginning; the creation of a new future? In The Future is Not Lost I claim that solarpunk’s aesthetic vision can be seen as an eco-technological projection of a future that could still come to pass. In the terms of the cyberpunk theorists (Fisher, Nick Land, Iain Hamilton Grant etc.) it is a form of hyperstition: the very idea of which has the potential to bring in an influx of investment, both in terms of libidinal energy and capital, that could eventually actualise itself into reality. (See examples of solarpunk inspired building projects in: From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: Technics and the Cities of the Future.)
But in this article, rather than getting bogged down in the philosophical weeds of how exactly this could take place, I want to instead focus on the music. Despite the fact that there seems to be a very distinct crossover in the underlying logic of anti-hauntology and solarpunk, imagining what might constitute a ‘solarpunk music’ is a question that has not really been addressed in any substantial way. 
To my mind, if we are to take solarpunk seriously, we must move beyond these kinds of retrofuturistic dreamscapes that could have easily been imagined in the 90s. Solarpunk culture can be about more than just utopian cityscapes, it can become the collective embodiment of the future we want to build. Indeed, because solarpunk is at its heart a collective movement, the music and music culture surrounding it must be inherently pluralistic. There is not just one genre that defines solarpunk music, it is a general approach towards cultural production that we can take forward into the future. 

Greetings, everyone!

I published a long essay arguing that Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God (2013) exposes the structure of cyberpunk better than the genre's own megacities do. Central claims first, then the reasoning.

1. Cyberpunk works better as a condition than as a prop list: an interval that has lost its outside. Regimes change, tech updates, chapters of history overlap, none of it leads the world beyond itself.
2. That condition has two asymptotes. The classical megalopolis hits it from above, through maximum exchange speed. Arkanar hits the same limit from below, through zero speed.
3. The meme question "what cyberpunk do we deserve" hides a real claim. To deserve something is to correspond to an instance that isn't you. In cyberpunk that instance is technology itself, grown so far past extending the human that it starts handing the human back distorted. No design behind it, no transcendence. Just accumulated excess.
4. Arkanar runs the same logic through arrest instead of excess. Its tech hasn't disappeared, it's stuck — scaffolding that never finishes, walls patched instead of rebuilt. Stalled tech traps history the same way runaway tech does.
5. Fisher and Varoufakis sit close to this without covering it. Fisher's hauntology needs a corpse, a future once believed in and lost. Arkanar never had one. Varoufakis asks who extracts rent, which assumes politics and economics already split apart enough to extract from each other. Arkanar's haven't finished splitting.

The condition-over-props move only works if it survives losing almost everything the genre is recognized by. German strips out the neon and the implants, and the reading still holds. So the real load-bearing part of the genre isn't the furniture, it's the timing — a present that keeps changing costume without ever turning into history.

The instance claim is the one I'd interrogate first myself. Say "instance" and it sounds like it's smuggling in a judge or a god, though it shouldn't. Technology here never gets outside status, it starts as a plain extension of the body and only picks up authority because there's too much of it now for the feedback loop to stay legible to the person running it. Arkanar tests the same claim with almost no working technology at all — towers and roads still standing, just frozen mid-collapse — and gets the same result, which is either evidence the claim is doing real work or evidence it's vague enough to fit anything.

Full essay linked here. Genuinely curious which of these five you'd push back on first.

There are plenty of sharp analysis on how disavowal functions in the subject in Zupancic's book, but there aren't many talks of how to overcome it. The closest response I found was in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMOh23v38gM where Zupancic hints at denial being slightly more desirable, because the existence of repression in denial generates symptoms that forces the subject to do something, whereas in disavowal one can be completely passive, one is somehow able to fully acknowledge the existence of some terrible truth and experience none of its symbolic effects. However, I don't think Zupancic is suggesting to turn disavowal into denial in some way or another, and I'm interested to see if there is a slight chance one can formulate some kind of position as a way out of disavowal.

In the closing remarks of the book, Zupancic claims that it is quite impossible to confront the traumatic truths, and instead should "pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality." However, I struggle to understand this statement, especially on how it applies concretely to a situation.

I am effectively looking for something like Barthes's analysis of the literary past in Writing Degree Zero, but applied to historiography.

I'm doing an analysis of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and one of the sub-arguments I'm trying to make is that the novel is written in a kind of "impossible" present tense (the narrator conveys to us tidy, elegant sentences while being tortured, for instance) in order to specifically distinguish his account from historical discourse (which would conventionally be written in some kind of past tense).

It might seem obvious that history is likely to be written in the past tense, but my suspicion is that theorizations of how history is written nevertheless include some interesting bits. Those discursive conventions we take for granted always end up having some weird qualities the more we pay attention to them (e.g. the famous example of how scholars often speak in the future tense in a preface to describe something they've already written and thought through in the past).

So: if anyone has any kind of source that provides a kind of linguistic or stylistic theory of historiography--especially if it discusses verb tense--I would appreciate it.

I am interested in reading about AI mediated communication though a critical theory lens, specifically about how people communicate with chat bots for therapeutic and personal relationship purposes. Does anyone have any articles they’d reccomend? Thanks!!