A homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something.
Clipping
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books > The Humans (Haig, Matt)
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books > The Humans (Haig, Matt)
Magazines are very popular, despite no human ever feeling better for having read them. Indeed, their chief purpose is to generate a sense of inferiority in the reader that consequently leads to them needing to buy something, which they do, and then feel even worse, and so need to buy another magazine to see what they can buy next.
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books > Alien Clay (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
The greatest privilege of power is being able to overlook that you’re even wielding it.
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books > The Fifth Science (Exurb1a)
All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. One is inseparable from the other. No system of knowledge can avoid this limitation. Numbers are not the true face of measure. Words are not the true description of things. The world is the explanation.
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books > The Fifth Science (Exurb1a)
The core of heroism isn’t bravery, or even self-sacrifice. It is a commitment to what one knows to be the virtuous course of action, despite whatever the consequences may be.
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books > The Fifth Science (Exurb1a)
Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.
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books > The Fifth Science (Exurb1a)
“I do not want to take any more photos. I don’t like photos. I don’t want to remember any of this horseshit. What the fuck are we doing with all this? Trying to make celebrities of ourselves, everyone screaming down everyone’s throat and no one stopping to shut up. I don’t like photos. I don’t want any more taken of me.”
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clippings > Content feeds have turned us from hunters into farm animals
[https://slate.com/culture/2024/10/me-movie-don-hertzfeldt-arcade-fire-taylor-swift.html]
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
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clippings > Marxist take on pornography
For the millionth time: You don’t get to jerk off to filmed rape under socialism.
Every socialist state that ever existed has banned porn.
Yes, porn is coercive as every form of wage labor is. But it is not just any wage labor, but labor involved in the social production of art - in this case reactionary art.
Why is it reactionary? Its ideological content is. It objectifies - or more precisely, commodifies (primarily female) bodies. It dehumanizes women. It is the reason why you have white people going around fetishizing Asian women.
Porn fits into the capitalist superstructure which reproduces the institutions of patriarchy, and by extension, of capitalism itself. It has no place in a socialist society. The suppression of pornography then isn’t simply the suppression of commodity production, it would be similar to the suppression of any other reactionary cultural product (music, films, etc…).
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books > The Fifth Science (Exurb1a)
Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers and musicians have described it, love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.