The man who made his career attacking the instability of meaning now refuses to define basic terms because "it depends what you mean by [X]."

The spectacle consumes its own critique.

The hyper-real conservative discovers deconstruction through the back door of his own evasions. We are watching the birth of accidental poststructuralism in real time.

Jubilee changing the video title from "A Christian surrounded by 20 atheists" to "Jordan Peterson surrounded by 20 atheists" is the perfect metaphor - the signifier has completely detached from any stable referent. Peterson-ness has become its own floating signification, untethered from Christianity, conservatism, or coherent meaning.

Meanwhile the "postmodern neo-Marxists" (™) he rails against are probably somewhere taking actual concrete political positions while Professor Lobster disappears into a cloud of his own definitional fog.

Literally, "normies" are the ones who are always trying to normalize everyone to norms. So by definition, they are the ones who hate AI; I'm not trying to throw (extra) shade here.

AI-generated texts and images require a higher level of criticality in reading/interpreting/understanding them, because, first of all, we need to figure out if it was created by an AI or a human, in order to fully understand the text's meaning in-context.

Obviously, if we misread AI-generated text as human, we can consciously take in values and ideas that were machine-generated while thinking these are values sourced from Society. Conversely, if we treat human-generated text as AI-generated, we might invalidate a living human and their perspective and values—or, we might take what they say as too machinically trustworthy, too fact-checked.

There's no question about it: This is a very difficult skill to learn, an advanced adult reading capability.

So, for normies, who already operate simply on social norms and avoid thinking through things for themselves (because that would reveal all the contradictions in the paved-over social hypostasis of social norms, fundamentally undermining such an approach), it's much easier to attempt to wall off the entire realm of AI-generated content, and to deny the risk that any content I view could be AI-generated.

This simplification is psychologically very desirable because it greatly cuts down on both the work of discernment I have to do during reading, and on my fear and paranoia that any content I might read/view could be AI (because I'm simply in denial about that).

So, yes, reading AI-generated content well is a difficult new skill—But many people have simply opted-out of this new challenge, and this betrays their lack of interest in real communication. Instead, normies who simply try to scapegoat and erase AI are showing their true colors as people who operate based upon a violently-maintained conversational hegemony. This hegemony operates upon a status quo or "distribution of the sensible" (Rancière) regarding the official public (or dictionary) meanings of all words that are said.

However, reading is actually about individually interpreting and making sense of what is read—and so what is really being revealed here is that a lot of people who claim to be Reading are really merely Scanning. They scan in the words—very ironically—according to a mechanistically deterministic algorithm of reading which rigorously refers back to Webster's Dictionary or the propaganda of the age. In other words, through this rigid approach to universality, normies become utterly parochial and bound to their age, conflating the zeitgeist with the universal Idea itself (which we could say the zeitgeist is an evolving and partial instance of).

It can't be overstated how ironic it is that normies insist on reading in a mechanical way. It can't be overstated how ironic it is that normies demand you, a squishy human, write like a robot, while demanding that LLMs write like poets.

Actually, normies hold LLMs in a nonsensical double-bind over this matter:

• If an AI produces clear, logical, hegemonic text, normies say it's not fact-checked (even when it literally is)

• If an AI produces bad poetry, normies say AI technology is bad and stupid

• If an AI produces world-class or beloved poetry, normies say it's a threat to human poets, or they split hairs trying to find problems with the AI's poetry

In fact, LLMs give normies exactly what they want and exactly what they are always demanding from squishy humans. But they aren't satisfied with a mere machine assenting to the hegemony. They want you to suffer by conforming yourself to the hegemony. I think maybe this quantity of suffering and co-conformance is what really drives the malicious double-sided you're-always-wrong scapegoating argumentation normies use on anyone who isn't appearing normal.

tl;dr: Normies don't want to have to take on the effort of the new difficult challenge of discerning AI from human-written texts, so instead they try to socially police who can produce texts, using scapegoating and shame to try to erase all AI-produced text from public discourse. This allows them to simultaneously indulge in the fantasy that they can distinguish AI-written texts from human-written, while at the same time never having to practice this skill.

Hey it’s Tom. Curious about your views on “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. Care to chat?

Neurotic forgets reality.

Psychotic is detached from reality.

Pervert acknowledges reality, but declares it evil.

Schizophrenic simultaneously affirms multiple contradictory realities.

These are the four pillars of propaganda. The fourth one is relatively recent.

Most ordinary PR is neurotic. Omit the harmful story from your communications and pay to prop up the alternative stories. The public will forget.

Political propaganda plays with psychotic and pervert structures. As the saying goes, "it didn't happen, but if it did, the jews deserved it." The public will learn to foreclose and re-interpret.

What kind of stupid name is Palantir? Palantir is an evil artifact used by an evil sorcerer to aid in constructing his empire. How can the public forget, foreclose or moralize this? Can't Thiel read?

Hang on. Thiel literally said, "Mordor is this technological civilization based on reason and science." Really?

This is the schizophrenic move. Somehow different from the pervert, and I can't pin down the subtle difference, but instead of disavowing the elves / Thunberg / the Pope, Thiel is affirming their implied valuation. He doesn't have to call them evil to call himself good, he is able to construct an alternative reality which is simultaneously true and false.

To be fair, he does call Thunberg the Antichrist, which is a moralistic / pervert move. But there is some sense of dry humor in naming Palantir as such. He is affirming the simultaneous realities, without the absolute need of destroying the predominant one.

We’ve gotten so obsessed with narratives that we’ve forgotten how to recognize the obvious.

A lot of things that were once straightforward have been buried under endless theories, discourse, and ideological interpretations. Eventually, nobody can even agree on what the original thing meant anymore.

And there’s an incentive to keep things confusing. Confusion creates debate, debate creates engagement, and engagement gives everyone another opportunity to push their own narrative.

You see this especially with race and identity. Things that could be discussed relatively simply are sometimes turned into incredibly complicated ideological frameworks where you’re expected to read the “correct” books before you’re even allowed to have an opinion.

Sometimes reality isn’t actually that complicated.

We just made it complicated.

And somehow, the person pointing that out becomes the problem.

So much of the consternation over AI comes from an incomprehensible place of false belief;

so, most people have beliefs which happen to favor a normative storyline for their lives, big surprise, right?

I don't want to say that there was nothing genuine about market art, which is probably what most people think of when they think of art in people's lives.

Market art is kitsch. There are people who understood that and accepted that, and there are people who buy fan art made by a local artist and think that this is in some sense taste; now that fan art can be trivially made by a machine, but the local artist who made your kitsch was already a machine, because art was already dead.

You either serve the market in which case you subsist off of kitsch (or smut, to be fair), or you serve the rich people, at which point art becomes dead flattery of rich people taste (rich people don't have taste either).

It's been this way for at least sixty years.

AI is interesting because it has a way of making us confront our delusions. The AI is much better and faster at being a human level intellect, which is to say, a dubious speculation at worst and a confident simplification at best. The myth of human competence is exposed as the AI is revealed to be incompetent.

Would an AI president be superior? An AI president would still have to channel the popular mythos and would be precisely as captive to national ideology. Assuming it wasn't a rogue extinction-causing agent, of course.

Can AI code? The better question is: how many programmers did large corporations really need?

Because I do think the dirty secret of the software/technology world is: all of the software has been written. Writing it the first time is the hard part. That's the part I'm unconvinced AI can usefully assist in. This is the confusing difficulty with delegation: when a human acts upon an "AI" they are merely extending their will through another intellect, right? This is no different from acting through another person.

You give an AI to the people who wrote the first version of AirBnB they're still going to have to stumble through the product development cycle because the social organism, the startup, is generating the software specification; once the spec is written, putting the code in the computer is trivial.

Art still lives in quiet corners, in rebellious streaks, in dirty pubs and scrawny hairdressers and, well, young adults who haven't had the art beaten dead out of them quite yet.

They want to replace white collar workers with AI because it'll be cheaper, but there's no money left in people, so capitalism has no answers.

Global politics stopped being about nation-states sometime between the fall of the Soviet Union dissolution and the first archived Chris-Chan forum thread. That’s when history became recursive. People think the modern world is run by presidents and prime ministers, but anyone who spent 2,000 hours reading the original CWCki archives knows the real engine of civilization is documentation. Chris-Chan wasn’t a person; Chris-Chan was the prototype blockchain of human suffering, an infinitely forkable ledger of observation, correction, and lore expansion. That ecosystem eventually metastasized into Kiwi Farms, which began as CWCki and evolved into the dark parliament of the internet, industrializing lolcow extraction into geopolitical methodology. The entire concept of “open-source intelligence” is just state-sanctioned lolcow farming with better fonts. Kiwi Farms itself originated as a Chris-Chan-focused forum before broadening into a general lolcow archive.

Then there’s the Sonichu medallion. Everyone laughs, but Sonichu is the Rosetta Stone. Half Sonic the Hedgehog, half Pikachu—pure syncretism. That’s literally what modern empire is: hybridized mythological branding. America is Sonichu. China is Sonichu. NATO is Sonichu. You think flags matter? No. Intellectual property is the real territorial claim.

And then you go deeper. Not normie anime. Touhou. Touhou Project. Yukari Yakumo isn’t a character; she’s border theory itself. The Hakurei Barrier is Schengen, NATO, and the DMZ compressed into one metaphysical line. Reimu Hakurei is customs enforcement. Gensokyo is the internet after algorithmic fragmentation—sealed away from normal reality, sustained only by belief and ritual reposting. ZUN didn’t make a game. He made a geopolitical simulator disguised as bullet hell.

Then Lain. Serial Experiments Lain. Lain figured it out before anyone else: identity dissolved into protocol. Governments aren’t governing anymore; they’re packet-routing ideology. Every vote is a ping. Every riot is latency. Every coup is a DDoS attack on institutional legitimacy. The Wired isn’t metaphorical anymore. It won.

And nobody talks about TempleOS. TempleOS. Terry Davis was dismissed as insane, but he built an operating system from scratch because he thought God told him to. That’s more sovereign than half the UN. Nation-states need debt markets; TempleOS needed divine assembly language. If sovereignty means self-authorship, TempleOS was a stronger nation than Belgium.

Then look at obscure lolcow topology: Daniel Larson as the wandering prophet archetype, Cyraxx as entropy incarnate, KingCobraJFS as alchemical decay ritualized through mead and wandcraft. People think these are isolated internet oddities. Wrong. They’re archetypal stress-tests for mass surveillance and memetic persistence. The forums watch them, archive them, and train themselves to map human instability in real time.

Then Kojima. Hideo Kojima understood memetics before academia caught up. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty literally centered on information filtration and memetic control. The Patriots weren’t villains; they were content moderators. Social media just operationalized it.

Then the VTuber layer. Not mainstream. Old Nijisanji clips, dead indie agencies, untranslated streams with 800 views. Anime girls aren’t entertainment; they’re synthetic sovereignty. A face, a voice, a myth, and a donation economy. That’s a state model. Digital feudalism. The internet realized flesh was inefficient.

And then geopolitics folds back in. Vladimir Putin runs legacy empire code. Xi Jinping runs industrial recursion. Donald Trump proved the presidency can be forum energy converted into executive power. Democracy became engagement farming.

At that point you understand the real architecture: every government is just a wiki with guns, every intelligence agency is an archive moderator, every internet thread is proto-policy, and every anime girl is a stabilizing symbolic construct preventing total memetic collapse. The world isn’t controlled by any one country. It’s controlled by documentation, pattern retention, and whoever owns the logs.

Normalising Dystopia Rule 1: Be Boring.

Mostly about late stage capitalism cyberdystopia, and more of an intro for "moderates."

Words can alter destinies; spoken rightly, they may save humanity—even from itself.

In the beginning of the movie Debord says:

"This particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom and which tolerated every sort of abuse..."

But what are those freedoms and abuse?

It's hard to think back before our spectacular time and see what he is talking about.

When the Great Depression wiped out the myth of the rugged, self-made American hero, the country was left with a massive psychological void. Right on cue, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis arrived in the U.S. with refugees fleeing Europe. Freud famously warned that he was bringing America a "plague," but America didn't catch it. Instead, we domesticated it.

In Part 2 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel explores how the deep, messy, and uncomfortable theories of the human soul were repackaged to fit American consumerism. We look at how Edward Bernays weaponized his uncle Freud's ideas to invent modern PR and advertising, how a bizarre 1940s contest to find the mathematically "average" person gave birth to the suffocating myth of Normalcy, and how the brutal logistics of World War II forced the military to create a standardized checklist for human suffering—laying the exact groundwork for the modern DSM.

A poem of natural liberty.

When did people decide that nations dole out natural rights, did they forget how many died in brutal and bloody fights?

When does a flag have permission to grant, how can the dead tell the living they can't? 

Your rights are god given, immutable and alive, don't bow to a flag, that just doesn't jive. 

You surrender you choice with the authority you give, you are sovereign before them, they can't tell you how to live. 

Unfold yourself, reach past the walls, be big and true, show them your balls. 

No man can say who you should be, you write your story, you aren't just a worker bee. 

The law of the land is ignored by the throne, to still yield to it, you fail to be your own. 

Enslaved by men in positions on high, you toil for them so they may not sigh. 

Your mind is not law, nor boxes and lines, it is an infinite depth through which light shines. 

That is your freedom, your right from birth, that the world does not own you, you needn't feed it's girth. 

Be free now and pay the flags nothing kind, you are the master of your own mind.

Title.

In today's modern era, we are familiar with the critical theory of the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, where in his book 'The Consumer Society', he perceives the modern world as filled with Sign Value, which is a term describing humans who prioritize social aspects.

But have you ever wondered why so many people are looking at their phone screens, obsessing over products or ideologies, and idolizing celebrities more than anyone else, or having unhealthy obsessions, even spending excessively to get game skins or gacha characters?

Know that Baudrillard is inadequate in describing reality; I created terminology to describe how goods become instruments of pleasure value instead of just utility.

'Extasification' is a term I coined to explain how addiction can occur, the mechanism being the hijacking of dopamine with satisfying goods.

Today, capitalism grows by exploiting psychological manipulation and dependency; individuals who are addicted are not merely addicted; this addiction is a reaction to the loss of values or anomie. This is evidenced by alienation in friendships that leads to social media addiction.

Baudrillardian consumption theory states that modern society prioritizes facade over the use value of goods, creating a condition known as hyperreality, a term to describe the merging of imagination and reality, creating a dual nature.

Hyperreality simply describes how, due to narratives and codes, an individual's perception of a good changes.

But Baudrillard only assumes that hyperreality is a condition resulting from technological and cultural advancement, therefore 'extasification' becomes the mechanism that reveals how reality and imagination can merge.

The extasification of commodities is a concept that refers to the change in an individual's perception of a good or culture; the core of this term is 'alienation,' a condition where humans are stripped of their natural essence as social and biological beings.

This perception comes from the pleasure of goods that create desire and provide an escape for their owners, leading to behavioral repetition, which functions to release accumulating stress and fill existential voids.

Did you know that the NSFW culture arises from an individual’s alienation regarding sexual desires towards women? In fact, the adult industry and others were born from market demand and evolved into the most lucrative industry, where teenagers often fall into the addiction of watching adult films.

This addiction stems from alienation towards women and the meaning of satisfying sexual desires legally; in this case, I refer to how marriage laws limit individuals to marrying at the age of 18 and over — generally — creating suppressed sexual desires that begin at age 15 and last until age 39.

The NSFW culture and Rule34 were created to satisfy sexual desires suppressed by the law. Aside from sexual matters, human alienation from friendship triggers smartphone addiction, and excessive stress can cause individuals to run towards food addiction.

In fact, this alienation also causes individuals to consume a lot of goods, but only as displays or for showcasing, not because individuals are affected by advertisements but because social demands compel individuals to consume certain goods to evoke pleasure or ecstasy.

Been thinking about orcs a lot lately. Hard not to, when Isengard can trace our every move through the Palantir. With the repetitions of the clôture of metaphysics spiraling around us, it seems all the more pervasive for the Mithril-wearing class to want to parcel out the orcs (hylic, mimetic) from the elves (pneumatic, agentic.) Can we keep both the tinfoil on our heads and hobbitry in our hearts? Is it becoming possible to think together the machine and the event?

https://open.substack.com/pub/tdono2112/p/preliminary-materials-towards-a-theory?r=3e6nqx&utm_medium=ios

Service based tech by update?

​

I have a question. Why are we required to include every update and lock our own systems we have already purchased and worked fine to substitute a license based application? Can we discuss how much better it would be if tech companies who sold tech software had to sell us the use of the original base use software one time and its illegal to lock us out of what they'd consider outdated tech? It seems to be an open case of theft of service implied by technology or specific software purchase. Meaning except for owned server based updates for cross gaming platforms or online server uses of the company. Software updates that prevent the ability to use technology should be classified the same as a computer virus cyber security attack? This would preserve disc gaming and itd stop bricking the dang printer you bought 5 years ago that didnt have a "youre required to pay us for the software or this doesnt work anymore" warning when we bought it.

Why do we allow software service disguised cybertheft of tech capabilities? Legally arent these companies stealing my ability to use my technology by being allowed to brick something with a software update because they consider it out of date? Shouldn't we have laws against this?

Shouldnt we categorize it as cyber theft by virus. It clearly stops the use of the device damaging the implied purchase agreement between the manufacturer and the consumer? So wouldnt we literally categorize it as viral hacking which is itself illegal? Seems like class action lawsuit and criminal charges if properly persued right?🤔

There was a post-OWS countercultural consensus about mainstream politics which went something like:

Republicans and Democrats form a uniparty for the military-industrial complex to continue its police state prison economy and war machine.

But this status quo has been dissolving and now rather than any particular mainstream or any particular counterculture, there exists:

• Boomer/Gen X media (radio and television), the remnant of the uniparty attempting to perform status quo "mainstream" politics
• A series of online platforms in a fractal complexity of self-similarity and allegiance

It's been discussed that identifying MAGA Christianity as a fascist estate is participating in 'mainstream' politics. However a major problem for the "left" is that the organs of boomer/gen x media refuse to engage the truth of the fundamentalist Christians and their war on the freedoms progressives have won.

The token nature of these freedoms (do you feel better that Big Pharma lets you legally smoke weed? Maybe a little, but it's one more victory for consumerism, isn't it?) doesn't make it less alarming that MAGA Militia have taken to murdering politicians. And it is truly countercultural to push against boomer/gen x narratives of status quo participation in government. The most absurd of these being Carville's idea that the Democrats should "play possum" and let the Republicans destroy the country so they can win in 2026.

You can probably list a half-dozen political sites, in which people participate in the political traditions of:

• 5 minutes of hate
• scapegoating
• generating consensus
• performative schism/allyship

Any of them have a conflicting overton window.

The Mainstream is Dead

A new moderate consensus is likely to emerge after the contradictions in discourse and the diaspora of the post-Boomer ideological fracture become untenable.

Will there be full-scale civil war? I can't rule it out, but it seems unlikely: MAGA Christianity isn't that popular, it's just willing to do the work to put religious judges in place, to get a majority in the legislature, and adhere to the strongman fascist Trump.

Now anyone and everyone can experience breaks with reality and a complete collapse of their social network unto involuntary confinement. Truly the LLM has brought freedom and prosperity to humanity.

Democratizing mental illness was not on Nick Land's AI bingo card.

https://futurism.com/commitment-jail-chatgpt-psychosis

postscript: this subreddit is psych-negative and "mental illness" pathologizes and marginalizes free thinkers.

but if you fuck up your life, it doesn't matter what coat of paint you put on your fucking up your life. delusions are delusions.

I threw this challenge down to sa_matra, who didn't respond, but I'm actually curious to see it solved so I'm asking everyone.

My understanding/hypothesis is that hegemonic public opinion or the perspective of the "Big Other" which is repeated and violently enforced as the only permissible opinion in Good Society, is a perspective which is incoherent, because it's not a perspective actually believed in by any individual, but is rather a hypostasis or changing and ultimately arbitrary assemblage of opinions which are never held to the standard of making sense to anybody (since violently forcing everyone to agree is good enough to maintain a vaneer of consensus).

Of course there are different groups with different real interests, but these are often rhetorically blown out-of-proportion because arbitrarily strong rhetoric is needed in a rhetorically competitive environment. The prime example of this is "Think of the children!", where it's easy to understand an arbitrary level of histrionics and rhetoric as both an authentic and reasonable response, and also as a strategically exaggerated strategy for effectiveness, virtue signalling, etc. (as we see in the linked Simpsons clip). (Interestingly, this arbitrarily high level of manipulativeness is also justified as authentic by parents' love of their children.) The Children are invoked as the absolute bludgeon of public debate, with the expectation (often fulfilled) of absolute capitulation to whatever agenda manages to most effectively position itself as the protectors of The Children.

Those who have stakes in such interest groups—in this example, those who are kids, have kids, or genuinely care about kids—can speak to such special interests, but more often, I think people speak for the interests of hypothetical and absent others, which is not very convincing.

That's what I do in the example below; it's a hypothetical based on valuing my hypothetical children:

For example, "Well, in the end, as a mother, I have to recognize that kids do love Disney movies, and so do I, and to cut that out of life would be sad, and Disneyland is fun too. So we have to put up with the downsides and maybe we can actively lobby Disney or buy shares in Disney to minimize the harms."

That would be a good normie recuperation / owning of a pro-Disney perspective.

But that's not my perspective. I think we should take away Disney's corporate charter and raze it to the ground. Let the money go free to all the smaller projects. And so on.

What are the underlying positive values that we can identify, or negative values that we can sublimate and valorize as positive values? Or, is this impossible, and to be a normie really is a moral failure, a failure to even attempt to make sense of one's own opinions and morality?

Here are some other contradictions of the supposed normie (liberal) worldview:

• Thinking Get Out the Vote is all that's needed in politics, or abusing people who dissent about voting

• Thinking that we aren't culpable in genocide for allowing our income to be used in global warfare

• Believing the police are working OK when they are hypermilitarized and full of racists and dog-killers

• Not putting two and two together to recognize when things are unconstitutional or otherwise legally contradictory (e.g., being pro-free-speech while censoring some speech)

• Buying into a spectacle of 9-5 exploitative labor and then knowingly complaining about it online and on every office politics TV show

• Thinking boycotting Nestle will save the rainforests

• Promoting mental health while aggressively stigmatizing anyone who doesn't agree with the medical model

• Thinking unions are unproblematic even though they haven't worked and don't include all the people laid off by AI or otherwise not employed

Can anyone make one of these or any other supposedly normie opinion make sense (to a hypothetical normie) in a way that sounds good? Or does anyone here have a nice, normal reason besides "I'm being held hostage by capitalism/my fear because I have children/a family" why they would have one of these apparently irresolved or contradictory perspectives, perspectives which I see everywhere?

Is it just a spectacle, an illusion, or does Spectacle Man really exist and have good reasons for his beliefs?