I called them Personal Manhattan projects, Peter Diamandis calls them Personal Moonshot Projects - a considerably more palatable as well as more peace-loving sign.
The curious thing is that there are a limited number of them so that if everyone worked for one of the projects we would have tens if not hundreds of millions of people working on the same goal. A lot of human resources! Also we might little by little enrich our world with ever newer aims that would impact the whole of humanity, or its vast majority.
Thursday, 3 August 2017
Wednesday, 2 August 2017
Whose words were these anyway...
Whether a king of socialism plants words into a newspeak mode of language used to re-engineer the society or does the capitalist use language to social engineer its workers. That seems to be the gist of Roger Scruton.
Where is the harm if the capitalist or entrepreneur re-purposes words in a new context? Take 'revolutions' itself. Socialists like Zizek cry of foul play when their treasured symbol the Revolution is used to mean a sudden change in economics created by shifts in technology. The fact remains that technology does alter societies with no turning back, no bottling the invented and throwing it away; whereas social revolutions led by communist ideals often do default back to capitalist societies by the sheer pressure exacted by private interests ie the profit motive.
According to the canon of communism revolutions must, by historical necessity, be achieved through violent means. Knowing is not enough, it seems a communist must fight. People have fought to the sad deaths of the many.
Technological revolutions do bring their own casualties, and maybe even a looming disaster or two that could end the human race's progress on the face of the earth. One hopes that such cost of progress is lower but at over, an estimated 100000000 road traffic deaths just from cars throughout their 100 odd years of accidents the numbers measure up to each other too well. This does not even figure in machine accidents at work, nuclear disasters and attacks, climate change or air pollution, all of which are major killers on their own!
However when you combine the two - social revolutions and industrial revolutions you have an even more potent adversary to humankind's pursuit of peace, love and happiness. The environment is then such that progress becomes more important than an individual and when this ideology is scaled to the whole state - no one stands to benefit from this very promise of progress and everyone tends towards the miseries of anxieties, hazards and accidents. The environment is ruined all the faster the less the people who use it have control over how they are exploited in service of yet more progress.
While the entrepreneurs are busy calling their profit seeking ideas with a new name - the impact motive as it is called now, the worker all but left to seek low paying person-to-person gigs with no pension guarantees will scrape a living for this new economy of impact. The impact is hard! We are all on the line to be impacted. A wish that a could muster a counter thesis of sufficient impact tears into this expose. What an impact it would be if we could instead run an enterprise on democratic principles!
So the reengineering of society and mesmerisation by talking, with these short examples that have been explicated, could be seen as something that happens below the general concepts ruling language by viral means, hence there is cross pollination between both sides of the divide - each others' semiospheres are polluted as well as enhanced by ideas from the other. So are we any the wiser?
Where is the harm if the capitalist or entrepreneur re-purposes words in a new context? Take 'revolutions' itself. Socialists like Zizek cry of foul play when their treasured symbol the Revolution is used to mean a sudden change in economics created by shifts in technology. The fact remains that technology does alter societies with no turning back, no bottling the invented and throwing it away; whereas social revolutions led by communist ideals often do default back to capitalist societies by the sheer pressure exacted by private interests ie the profit motive.
According to the canon of communism revolutions must, by historical necessity, be achieved through violent means. Knowing is not enough, it seems a communist must fight. People have fought to the sad deaths of the many.
Technological revolutions do bring their own casualties, and maybe even a looming disaster or two that could end the human race's progress on the face of the earth. One hopes that such cost of progress is lower but at over, an estimated 100000000 road traffic deaths just from cars throughout their 100 odd years of accidents the numbers measure up to each other too well. This does not even figure in machine accidents at work, nuclear disasters and attacks, climate change or air pollution, all of which are major killers on their own!
However when you combine the two - social revolutions and industrial revolutions you have an even more potent adversary to humankind's pursuit of peace, love and happiness. The environment is then such that progress becomes more important than an individual and when this ideology is scaled to the whole state - no one stands to benefit from this very promise of progress and everyone tends towards the miseries of anxieties, hazards and accidents. The environment is ruined all the faster the less the people who use it have control over how they are exploited in service of yet more progress.
While the entrepreneurs are busy calling their profit seeking ideas with a new name - the impact motive as it is called now, the worker all but left to seek low paying person-to-person gigs with no pension guarantees will scrape a living for this new economy of impact. The impact is hard! We are all on the line to be impacted. A wish that a could muster a counter thesis of sufficient impact tears into this expose. What an impact it would be if we could instead run an enterprise on democratic principles!
So the reengineering of society and mesmerisation by talking, with these short examples that have been explicated, could be seen as something that happens below the general concepts ruling language by viral means, hence there is cross pollination between both sides of the divide - each others' semiospheres are polluted as well as enhanced by ideas from the other. So are we any the wiser?
The Lost Class
One could keep on wondering of the potential accuracy of the lost class narrative. Its a story that there are no more workers... yes the industrial revolution is almost over and the information age has taken afoot but workers' conditions have not improved much for a lifetime. They have been transferred to the service sectors and perhaps to mail and logistics for a short-while. But a worker is still a person of no means of production, a have not. Work itself has also not disappeared, that might have been another route to the verity of such a sarcastic statement: "there are not many workers left." Instead the worker is alive, in drudgery and legwork and very much in misery. The misery is in actuality deepened by the fountains of melancholy-making social media behemoths, keeping the workers locked in to their small screens of colorful pictures by regular swipes that give a measured release of dopamine - the soma of the masses, of our current times. So the deeper the sleep continues the longer the people will be sucked dry of resources and happiness by a small number of successful and smooth operators of the mystery engines of capitalism.
To see into this is not a matter of gnosis or an epiphany or a sudden awakening as if from a dream state. It is a matter of historical importance made possible when you contribute to a society that is egalitarian as a priority. Yet it is easy to preach and yet for me a difficult step to take to shed the dream that I could one day become a smooth operator myself. A sweet carrot on a stick remains... and so I am not a Prophet of Awakening from Dreams, I am also a dreamer. Shackled fast to the work.
To see into this is not a matter of gnosis or an epiphany or a sudden awakening as if from a dream state. It is a matter of historical importance made possible when you contribute to a society that is egalitarian as a priority. Yet it is easy to preach and yet for me a difficult step to take to shed the dream that I could one day become a smooth operator myself. A sweet carrot on a stick remains... and so I am not a Prophet of Awakening from Dreams, I am also a dreamer. Shackled fast to the work.
Tuesday, 1 August 2017
cannot be displayed because it violates content regulations
A Chinese man by the name of Zhang Guochen has made a bold attempt that has garnered the approval of the common citizen of the Peoples' Republic of China. He mentions a 'fake life' created by a state sponsored industrialised urbanisation of Beijing is staged for every citizen. More for those who still hope to become a member of the capital's economy.
A light has been shun on this image of a dream, albeit faint in the smog of the city.
Is it the capitals of the world that make for such an ugly transformation of the Asian virtue of hospitable to its very opposite - inhospitable?
What a cost on human existence is the western capitalism exacting on Chinese industry? Is it not with the willing cooperation of the communist top nomenklatura, that such a mechanism to counterfeit existence executes a deathly, ghostly tax on every minute lived?
A time to ask questions from our side of the wall too. Sometimes there is a wonder in societies where information is closed to free press by censorship - it forms a dissident vanguard, another class of the oppressed in the very heart of the bosom of the republic of the free from the oppression of the capital. Yet it also hides a stark reality where every flower of creativity is cut before it blooms and every plant is not let to live its full cycle of life. Finally it is just weedkiller left on the field. On Chinese internet only the criticism of the piece remains forming an echochamber more easily tuned for the state mastered news.
"There are over 20 million people left in this city, pretending to live. In reality, there simply is no life in this city. Here, there are only some people’s dreams and everybody’s jobs." ...an excerpt from the piece Under the Dome
A light has been shun on this image of a dream, albeit faint in the smog of the city.
Is it the capitals of the world that make for such an ugly transformation of the Asian virtue of hospitable to its very opposite - inhospitable?
What a cost on human existence is the western capitalism exacting on Chinese industry? Is it not with the willing cooperation of the communist top nomenklatura, that such a mechanism to counterfeit existence executes a deathly, ghostly tax on every minute lived?
A time to ask questions from our side of the wall too. Sometimes there is a wonder in societies where information is closed to free press by censorship - it forms a dissident vanguard, another class of the oppressed in the very heart of the bosom of the republic of the free from the oppression of the capital. Yet it also hides a stark reality where every flower of creativity is cut before it blooms and every plant is not let to live its full cycle of life. Finally it is just weedkiller left on the field. On Chinese internet only the criticism of the piece remains forming an echochamber more easily tuned for the state mastered news.
"There are over 20 million people left in this city, pretending to live. In reality, there simply is no life in this city. Here, there are only some people’s dreams and everybody’s jobs." ...an excerpt from the piece Under the Dome
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