Jim Cooper

“Techistentialism studies the nature of human beings, existence, and decision-making in our technological world.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“Increasing self-awareness is an intervention in and of itself, and the precursor to making any other changes.”
― David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results

“In a free society, there’s clearly a balance to be struck between the risk of violence from insurgency, crime, or social chaos (nonstate violence, if you like) and the risk of state repression. This was exactly the problem in Iraq, with ordinary people caught between nonstate violence from Sunni extremists, on one hand, and state violence from the Shi’a-dominated Iraqi National Police, on the other. Could we, then, help a neighborhood become self-defending against all comers, making people both safer from nonstate violence and harder for the state to oppress?”
― David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla