Intellectual loneliness is the condition of having very sharp thoughts in an age that demands all ideas arrive prechewed, sugar-free and emotionally supervised.
Remote
🇪🇷Götterdämmerung
@Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
mastodon 4.3.0-alpha.3
Graphic Novelist / blogs at http://www.hyperboreans.com/heterodoxia / Get Pantheon at https://www.amazon.com/Pantheon-Heterotopia-1-Awet-Moges/dp/1944854045/
590 Followers
162 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 30, 2017
pronouns:
he/him
ideology:
ironic nihilist
vice:
cigars
Replying to
"You need new experiences for your nervous system"
The travel industry has been trying to monetize that hallucination for decades. Wherever you go, your unresolved nervous system remembers to pack itself before your passport does.
"If you want it you can have it"
History is largely the story of people passionately wanting things reality already declined.
The self-help aphorism is a peculiar form of optimism. It cannot tolerate randomness, limitation or tragedy, so it edits them out.
Replying to
These maxims survive by committing the same elegant fraud. Take one observation that's broadly true, amputate every exception, inflate it into a universal law & wrap it in the language of revelation. Nuance is murdered in the first syllable so certainty can pose for the thumbnail.
Too bad reality has never shown much respect for quotable certainty.
"All defeat is psychological"?
Until the building collapses.
Replying to
Every failure becomes mindset. Every disappointment becomes resistance. Every catastrophe becomes a lesson with fantastic PR.
The universe meanwhile continues behaving like a universe: gloriously indifferent to slogans. The most dangerous feature of these quotes is that they're almost true. Just true enough to seduce. Just incomplete enough to mislead.
They mistake resilience for omnipotence, confidence for accuracy, movement for transformation, desire for destiny & simplicity for wisdom.
Replying to
"You could've done what you wanted"
Unless biology, poverty, history, another person's freedom neglects to consult your vision board.
"Purpose cures romantic obsession"
Tell that to every emperor, poet, scientist & genius who spent decades accomplishing history while still making catastrophically foolish decisions over one particular person.
"Develop a strong opinion of yourself"
Excellent advice... if your ambition is to become impossible to correct.
Existential loneliness is the moment you realize the universe is not ignoring you out of cruelty. It just never noticed in the first place.
We are born alone, die alone, & spend the interval pretending our group chats are metaphysical companionship. Society offers plenty of distractions: careers romance brands brunch. Tiny paper hats on the skull of oblivion.
The cruel joke is that we crave meaning from a cosmos that's got the customer service of a dead star.
#existentialism
Replying to
@skeletor@mas.to we spend our entire lives saving ourselves for a moment that never arrives.
Death, with impeccable punctuality, is the only appointment that keeps us.
Replying to
But none of them are wasted. They're all part of the same brutal lil miracle: the hand learning to obey the mind.
That's why I keep my drawings. Certainly not cuz they're all good but they're all useful. They mark where I was, what I tried, what survived & what might still become something.
In art nothing is dead as long it can still teach you.
Proof that Kakokleptocracy has evolved: even the teleprompter operator allegedly found a way to monetize the script.
The ruler supplies the words, the servant bets on them & the public (are we still imagining this is government?!?) pays for the theatre.
Kleptocracy steals the treasury. Kakokleptocracy bets on the dialogue.
#kakokleptocracy
Reposting this definition from a year ago for archival purposes
#Kleptokakistocracy
#HeterodoxDictionary
Replying to
@charliejane Make the art. Promote the art. Let it circulate like contraband hope.
If the world insists on going to shit, the least we can do is decorate the ruins with something honest.
Replying to
And naturally, the Stoic's mascot became Marcus Aurelius: an emperor serenely reminding himself not to be disturbed by life while possessing the legal authority to have entire villages erased before lunch.
Still, the philosophy survives cuz reality eventually humiliates everyone. Disease arrives. Lovers leave. Economies collapse cuz a hedge fund manager developed a coke allergy.
Replying to
Instead of worshiping passivity they recognized the oldest scam in human history: allowing external chaos to colonize the interior life.
Yes, Stoicism can become a tranquilizer dart fired into the neck of the working class.
History has used religion, patriotism, self-help & nationalism for the same purpose. Teach people to romanticize suffering, & eventually they will decorate the cage. But there's another reading. Sometimes stoicism is the final insult hurled at power.
Replying to
Corporate culture especially adores counterfeit Stoicism. Burnout becomes resilience. Wage stagnation becomes character building adversity. Your panic attack is rebranded as an exciting opportunity for personal growth. The machine no longer needs chains, cuz it has podcasts!
But authentic Stoicism was never meant to produce obedient furniture. The original Stoics spoke obsessively about virtue, justice, courage, restraint.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social Even so, prediction markets didn't hollow out the press or defund the civil services. These processes were well underway before Polymath existed. The markets fill a vacuum they didn't create.
If there's decadence here, it lies in something subtler still. A civilization begins to decline when it can no longer imagine altering its future, not when it predicts it.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social To interpret this as moral decay is to blame the thermometer for the fever.
One could in fact argue the opposite: prediction markets expose uncomfortable truths that polite discourse suppresses. They reveal what people actually believe will happen rather than what they claim should happen.
But your Tainter argument deserves a real answer. His sharpest claim is that prediction markets accelerate decay. Once a cheap substitute exists, the expensive original atrophies.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social The press stops reporting & waits for Polymarket to update. The analyst stops analyzing & defers to the implied probability. The thermometer doesn't cause the fever but once everyone consults the thermometer, nobody repairs the plumbing.
This has empirical weight. The 2024 cycles saw major outlets treat Polymarket numbers as primary data instead of derivative commentary. A diagnostic instrument that supplants the diagnostician is no longer just a mirror.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social Prediction markets aren't causing decay for they are diagnostic instruments of a culture that has already lost its metaphysical confidence.
There's also a darker more existential thread. Betting on outcomes introduces a subtle psychological shift: one is no longer a participant in history but an observer, a gambler on its unfolding. This detachment looks like decadence precisely cuz it replaces commitment with irony.
Zizek reads as the magnificent & pathetic attempt of a 20th century thinker's attempt to understand the 21st century, in which humanity is no longer clearly the author, protagonist or even intended audience.
Replying to
Where I described symptoms (recursion, stagnation, algorithmic loops), Eugene adds the pathology (consolidation, risk-aversion & the tyranny of scale).
His sharpest line is "slop is the aesthetics of consolidation." Almost disappointingly sober, which makes it even more devastating. When fewer entities control more productions, culture converges more than just stagnate. Towards the safest possible median.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social When citizens speculate on whether their institutions will fail, they are already emotionally disinvested from preventing that failure. Yet even this may be misread: detachment tends to follow disillusionment, not precede it.
The stronger flaw in your argument is the implicit equation of prediction with endorsement. A prediction market that assigns high probability to unrest or instability is not endorsing those outcomes but registering collective expectations.
Replying to
Why make a daring film if shareholders demand predictability? Why create anything strange when strangeness does not scale?
IOW culture did not freeze due to laziness but cuz movement became economically irrational.
Mark Fisher's ghost hovers over both our arguments but Eugene uses him more precisely: the shift from imagining futures to endlessly refurbishing the past is ideological exhaustion. We're not bankrupt of ideas, just lacking the permission to pursue them.
Replying to
If the world insisted on treating him like property, Stoicism became the last border patrol guarding the interior republic of the self.
That's the trouble with every philosophy: eventually the desperate & the powerful start using the same language for opposite reasons.
The modern world flattened Stoicism into motivational refrigerator magnet porn:
Suppress Emotion
Work Harder
Expect Nothing
Die Quietly
Leave 5 star review for the experience.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social Excellent article. You suggest that when a society builds markets around elections or wars it transforms collective destiny into tradeable assets. In this view, prediction markets are symptoms rather than tools.
This critique does echo older anxieties about capitalism's tendency to dissolve meaning into price. When the future becomes a contract, the sacred becomes probabilistic.
Replying to
More than cultural output, they reveal slop as lived environment. We inhabit slop. Even our physical world has been optimized into non-offensiveness. Color, like risk, has been diversified out of existence.
The video improves on my original argument: it introduces constraint. I wrote as though culture chose stagnation, seduced by speed & algorithms. But Eugene argues that stagnation is the rational outcome of precarity. Why buy a red couch if your lease expires in 11 months?
Replying to
What exhausts me is when someone takes every wound & grind it into identity powder, snorts it & labels their high authenticity.
At some point, pain stops being a wound & becomes a business model. But adulthood is the point where your tragic backstory stops being a royal pardon. Suffering explains behavior, not baptize it.
Professionally I trust my disgust. There's a huge difference btw authentic artistic necessity & compulsive content production.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social
Consider the loss of moral teleology. Your discomfort is less about betting & more about what betting implies: outcomes are no longer guided by shared moral narratives but by contingent forces.
In older civilizations (medieval Christendom, Confucian bureaucracy) history was assumed to have direction. Events unfolded within a moral cosmos. To bet on outcomes in such a world would have felt almost blasphemous for the future belonged to divine or ethical order.
Replying to
In this age of sensitive mediocrities your mind is expected to tiptoe thru the nursery of public feeling, apologizing to every stuffed animal it fails to affirm. To think clearly is to become rude by accident. To speak honestly is to commit vandalism against someone's self image.
Intellectual loneliness is what remains when conversation dies & is replaced by consensus with a human face.
Replying to
The result is worse than a monoculture in the old sense: a standardized plurality where everything is technically different but spiritually identical.
My old metaphor, the ourobouros, suggested self-consumption, but Eugene's framework suggests something meaner: a factory extruding endless, identical snakes, each pre-positioned to eat its own tail on schedule.
The examples (grey cars, interchangeable cafes, franchised aesthetics) may seem trivial but they're quite damning.
Replying to
Cuz what I'm watching is process collapsing into performance. Creation w/o apprenticeship. The costume of art w/o the long, humiliating apprenticeship of becoming an artist.
And yes the images piss me off. The faux polish. Instant gravitas. The prefab dream sludge. But the deeper itch is moral.
It is the mismatch between suffering & self-awareness.
I can tolerate hurt people. Most serious artists can. They built half the museums & wrote all the good songs.
Replying to
The Romans adored Stoicism cuz it transformed suffering into etiquette. Why revolt when you can journal? Why drag the aristocracy into the street when you can simply reframe your anguish as a failure of perspective? Rome discovered the first luxury sedative: a moral composure for people trapped beneath the wheel.
Replying to
Definitely not dabbling, nor "content." That's monk work, digging a cathedral out of your own rib cage one panel at a time.
Esp with something philosophical, mythological, where the art is the worldview wearing skin.
Then someone drops in from the sky with a sack of autobiographical pain & feeds it into the machine, staples some ai images to it, pukes out multiple books in record time & stands in public wearing the twin crowns of Artist & Martyr.
Naturally my eye starts twitching.
Replying to
Where Gunn built a comic book playground, Snyder built a myth with migraines. That's the difference.
Man of Steel treats Superman's existence like an event that would rupture history, religion, politics & human psychology. Of course the world would be terrified. Of course he would be lonely. Becoming Superman isn't a matter of putting on a cape. It's accepting a life sentence. That film asks what it would actually cost to be a hope in a species that treats hope like a clerical error.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social But that diagnosis confuses symptom with cause. Prediction markets don't erode moral order. They emerge in its absence. They're the tools of a civilization that traded conviction for calibration, destiny for probability.
The deeper question is why the future no longer feels like something we can believe in rather than just price.
Replying to
You can strip anyone of money, freedom, dignity, citizenship, even their teeth. But if they refuse to let you govern their inner life, then somewhere deep beneath the machinery, the empire still has failed.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social What is new is the scope: entire political systems are now priced as if legitimacy itself were a derivative instrument.
But that's the first fracture in your argument. Prediction markets don't create uncertainty or cynicism. They formalize it. Societies have always speculated about outcomes. The market simply records that speculation with unusual clarity.
Replying to
That's why it lands harder. Mythology should never feel like a corporate ice cream social.
Gunn's film is delightful. So is a great Saturday morning cartoon. But Man of Steel has ambition & ambition is more interesting than competence with a grin. One film says here's Superman, please adore him. The other says here's Superman, now deal with the existential fallout. That is cinema vs brand management.
Gunn made Superman fun again. Snyder made him matter.
Replying to
And the most uncomfortable suggestion in the video is that slop reflects us, our "mediocre imaginations of how to use godlike technology." A cruel thought cuz we prefer to believe we're oppressed geniuses rather than well-entertained mediocrities. But there's a certain honesty in admitting that when handed infinite tools, we chose to generate infinite variations of the familiar.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social In his framework, late-stage civilizations shift from symbolic culture to technical civilization, from myth to measurement, from destiny to probability, from faith to forecast. Prediction markets fit neatly into this transition. They are no aberration but a consummation: a phase in which intuition & belief are replaced by aggregated data & incentives.
From this angle, you're half right, but for the wrong reasons.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social Prediction markets OTOH operate on a radically different premise. They assume no inherent justice in outcomes, no guaranteed alignment btw virtue & success, no teleological arc to history. This is where your accusation of decadence gains genuine philosophical traction. A civilization that no longer believes in meaningful destiny may indeed begin treating its future as a stochastic game.
Oswald #Spengler would recognize this pattern immediately.
Replying to
@Daojoan@mastodon.social Prediction markets may signal this condition cuz they reflect a consensus that the future is already constrained, perhaps even predetermined by forces beyond collective control. In that sense, they are less like casinos & more like oracles except that the gods have been replaced by liquidity & data.
Your claim does capture a genuine unease: the sense that something vital has been lost when a society starts pricing its own fate.
Replying to
In those moments, Stoicism offers something almost criminally useful: the possibility that your mind need not become a hostage to circumstance.
Which brings us to Epictetus, the inconvenient witness for the defense. He was born enslaved. Not metaphorically enslaved by email or spiritually enslaved by consumerism. Actual chains, actual ownership. For him, Stoicism was no wellness retreat for burnt out CEOs, but psychic guerilla warfare.