really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 5 ratings

"Pg 232 "we just need enough data basically"

1. Register on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net conversion of energy.
2. By means of the registration of energy converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load.
3. Provide a continuous inventory of all production and consumption.
4. Provide a specific registration of the type, kind, etc., of all goods and services, where produced and where used.
5. Provide specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record and description of the individual.
6. Allow the citizen the widest latitude of choice in consuming his individual share of Continental physical wealth.
7. Distribute goods and services to every member of the population.

Other key points to the original definition of Technocracy include,

-Private property would be eradicated altogether. Everything would be owned in common by the Technate and controlled by them.
-All price-based currencies would be abolished and replaced by a system of Energy Certificates.
-Energy Certificates would be issued at the start of an accounting period, and expired at the end of it, preventing accumulation of savings for future needs.
-All conceivable human needs (food, housing, transportation, medical, retirement, etc.) would be met by the Technate at their sole discretion.
-Traditional systems of government would be abolished, including Congress and state governments.
-A continental board of Technocrats would manage all economic and societal affairs according to Functional and Service Sequences, defined by and run by themselves.
-Education would be transformed into human conditioning to prepare students for a lifetime of work chosen for them by the Technate.
-Science and the Scientific Method would be the sole guide to decision making throughout the Technate, based on collected data."

3.75 avg rating — 713 ratings

"In 1946 Orwell, summarized Burnham's managerial revolution and outlined the geopolitical landscape of Nineteen Eighty-Four:

"The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of 'managers'. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established."

“The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.""

3.98 avg rating — 2,135,654 ratings

"-The Use of Technology to Control Society
-The Consumer Society
-The Incompatibility of Happiness and Truth
-The Dangers of an All-Powerful State
-Individuality
-Happiness and Agency

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/braven..."

4.20 avg rating — 5,693,507 ratings

"
-The Dangers of Totalitarianism
-Psychological Manipulation
-Physical Control
-Control of Information and History
-Technology
-Language as Mind Control
-Loyalty
-Resistance and Revolution
-Independence and Identity

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/t..."

4.16 avg rating — 252,223 ratings

"-The Fallacies of Rationalism and Utopianism
-The Artificiality of Culture
-Paralysis of the Conscious Man in Modern Society

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/underg..."

4.32 avg rating — 1,313,104 ratings

"-Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
-Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
-Science, Wealth, and Empire
-Human-Caused Ecological Devastation


https://www.litcharts.com/lit/sapiens..."

4.33 avg rating — 35,855 ratings

"Fear-driven social alienation

" This alienation manifests in many ways, with the people described as feeling they are disconnected from one another and the society they inhabit. At the beginning of the text, Solzhenitsyn describes the life of a free person in the Soviet Union. These people may be free in that they are not in prison, but they are not free to express themselves. They are scared and suspicious, as they are unsure whether anyone they speak to might be an informer. They are forced to guard their words and shy away from speaking too loudly on any matter out of fear of being sent to the Gulag. People therefore become suspicious of one another and socially distant, unable to form meaningful, lasting bonds with one another because they cannot bring themselves to trust anybody.

The alienation also manifests in an institutional sense. Solzhenitsyn describes the structures which ran the Gulag and mentions how the bureaucrats and the guards were too scared to make decisions for themselves. Any wrong decision could see them demoted or sent to the prison camps. They became paralyzed, dwelling on indecision."

https://www.supersummary.com/the-gula..."

4.23 avg rating — 38,068 ratings

"-The relationship between power and knowledge is central to Foucault's work. Discipline and Punish essentially charts the reorganization of the power to punish, and the development of various bodies of knowledge (the human sciences) that reinforce and interact with that power.

-The body as an object to be acted upon, but also as the subject of "political technology" is present throughout the work.

-The Prison and Society, Foucault's argument that we cannot abolish the prison, because our ways of thinking about and carrying out punishment will not allow it. The prison is part of a "carceral network" that spreads throughout society, infiltrating and penetrating everywhere.

-The History of the Soul, Ideas such as the psyche, conscience, and good behavior are effects created by a particular regime of power and knowledge. For Foucault, examining that regime is a way of looking deep into our souls. His history of the soul is also a powerful critique, because it makes us confront what we have become by excluding and marginalizing certain elements of our society.

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy..."

4.08 avg rating — 14,904 ratings

"“I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness” –M.Foucault

What does it mean to be mad, insane, crazy, do these things even exist outside the realms of reasonable discourse? If they are unreasonable how can they be understood by reasonable means?

What if long ago the mad lead better lives than they do today? What if fools were closer to kings? We think of science and medicine including psychiatry improving over time but is this really the case?

Or as societies shift and change do we just create another kind of madness?"

4.02 avg rating — 26,472 ratings

"From faith to medicalisation-
Scientific discourse mixed with the form of confession has shaped our discourse on sex. Subjects were expected to confess, to divulge their darkest secrets, and these confessions were codified into a quasi-scientific form.

Sex as truth, shadow or -
Foucault asks how it is that we have come to see sex as the key to explaining us, the answer has to do with the relationship sex has with power and knowledge in fields such as religion/ethics, psychology, psychiatry in the behavourial/social sciences and evolutionary/biological sciences and genealogical histories.

Sex and knowledge power-
We think of sexuality as our essence, as the thing that makes us what we are, when in fact, it is just a social construct that makes us easier to control.

Queer theory-
The intersection between politics, gender, and sexuality. Its main thrust is to refute the idea our identities are somehow fixed or determined by our gender or sexual preference.

https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy... "

4.12 avg rating — 37,699 ratings

"-Our sense of "Good" was constructed.

Nietzsche gives a thorough but speculative account of how he believes our complex moral codes evolved over time. He explains different dynamics when occasionally in human history, the victor of a competition becomes the victim of mutiny. The group decides that there ought to be certain types of abstract restrictions on human behavior to make the game more "fair." In Nietzsche's argument, nature is that which dictates the rules, rendering man's judgment nothing but selfish wish fulfillment.

-Today's "Evil" is closer to natures "Good."

What Nietzsche might view as "true Good" would be something aligned with nature's views of good and evil. For instance, in business, say, underhanded tricks and dealings are regarded as 'evil' or 'wrong,' but in nature such tricks are rewarded and passed along to future generations. So therefore, if we are animals, nature seems to have sided with the victor, not the victim. The view that "Good" is that which defends the defenseless is to Nietzsche, nothing more than a bad joke.

-Ascetic ideals aren't true ideals.

Asceticism is the religious process of restricting one's access to pleasure and reward, as a sacrifice in the pursuit of a goal. Nietzsche uses the term to mean any selfless attempts to attain some sort of virtuous ideal, not necessarily moral—for example, he comments that the same need for ideal exists in the arts, in philosophy, in religious and in nature itself—but still, Nietzsche explains that in his estimation, ascetic ideals are nothing more than a human's wrong belief in some kind of divinity made manifest in their discipline.

In later works these ideas develops
Into the Nietzschean concept of amor fati or "love of one's fate" used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound.

“What does not kill me makes me stronger”

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind”.

“I was in darkness, but i took three steps and found myself in paradise, the first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.”

https://www.gradesaver.com/on-the-gen...
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really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 17,326 ratings

"-A simulacrum is an image and/or symbol that is supposed to represent reality, or a representation of reality that is taken as real, so it cannibalizes the actual thing.
-Hyperreality is a representation of something real with no preceding model or representation of the “real” thing, but it’s taken as real because there’s nothing to reference it to render it fake.
-A simulation is a suspended representation of reality that is overtly distinguishable from it, it’s not taken as real.

Baudrillard is quite cheeky, he knows the original is not "artificial" or fake, but is essentially saying that at the level of publicity or propaganda the one thing is substituted too glibly for the other. Baudrillard theorizes that the lack of distinctions between reality and simulacra originates in several phenomena.

1. Contemporary media including television, film, print, and the Internet, which are responsible for blurring the line between products that are needed (in order to live a life) and products for which a need is created by commercial images.
2. Exchange value, in which the value of goods is based on money (literally denominated fiat currency) rather than usefulness, and moreover usefulness comes to be quantified and defined in monetary terms in order to assist exchange.
3. Multinational capitalism, which separates produced goods from the plants, minerals and other original materials and the processes (including the people and their cultural context) used to create them.
4. Urbanization, which separates humans from the nonhuman world, and re-centres culture around productive throughput systems so large they cause alienation.
5. Language and ideology, in which language increasingly becomes caught up in the production of power relations between social groups, especially when powerful groups institute themselves at least partly in monetary terms."

4.03 avg rating — 4,755,096 ratings

"-The Corruption Of Socialist Ideals In The Soviet Union
-The Societal Tendency Toward Class Stratification
-The Danger Of A Naïve Working Class
-The Abuse Of Language As Instrumental To The Abuse Of Power
-Power always corrupts
-The Failure Of Intellect
-The Exploitation Of Animals By Humans

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/animal..."

4.18 avg rating — 659,747 ratings

"-Consumerism, Perfection, and Modernity
-Masculinity in Modern Society
-Death, Pain, and the “Real”
-Rebellion and Sacrifice
-Repression and the Unconscious Mind

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/fight-c..."

3.97 avg rating — 1,674 ratings

"- An overall sense of loneliness and lack of social connections and bonds
- A lack of meaning—unsatisfying “bullsh*t jobs” that don’t offer purpose
- Free-floating anxiety and discontent that arise from loneliness and lack of meaning
- Manifestation of frustration and aggression from anxiety
- Emergence of a consistent narrative from government officials, mass media, etc., that exploits and channels frustration and anxiety

In addition to clear psychological analysis—and building on Hannah Arendt’s essential work on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism—Desmet offers a sharp critique of the cultural “groupthink"."

3.89 avg rating — 374,930 ratings

"-Technology & the Body (limitations of body & devaluation of body)
-Identity & Personhood (what is it to be a person e.g. AI, digital reconstructions, reality)
-Self-Interest vs. Human Connection (things vs relationships)
-Addiction & Dependency (drugs, sex, technology & real past traumas)
-Reality & Perception (blur between virtual & real worlds)"

4.22 avg rating — 5,875 ratings

4.48 avg rating — 1,057,307 ratings

"Based in the fantasy world of Scadrial posits interesting questions and has interesting magic system of Allomancy & Feruchemy & Hemalurgy and the talented Mistlings, Mistborn in the population. Also any technology is indecipherable from magic so fantasy metaphors can apply to technological systems.

-What if the hero lost and the dark lord won? (e.g. good doesn't always win)
-What if a totalitarian regime ruled a two tiered society. (e.g. metaphor for class inequality)
-What if a priestly class (Steel Ministry & Inquisitors) existed to enforce this will. (e.g. anyone wielding social privilege and control)
-What if these systems had total control? (e.g. metaphor for no class mobility)
-What if that was your world?



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