Status Updates From The Obsolescence of the Hum...

In the eyes of someone who, by the sweat of their brow, has finally managed to become a "what" instead of remaining a "who," someone like me --who is still hanging around as a "who" (and even deems this something to be proud of) --will, of course, only ever seem like a ridiculous gnome.
😂🤣🥲

Anders (with a note of sadness) mocks the ersatz nature of camping with mass produced tents, hobbyist activities that emulate, bogusly, a bygone means of production, artists with nothing to say (because their very selves have been eliminated), but by his own dialectical logic things can get much worse and now we are just content to watch videos of campers, hobbyists and artists doing their degraded activities.

One of the hideous implications of Anders' analysis of the cage of ease in which we've trapped ourselves is that war is inevitable. It's a way to smash the cage of comfort, predictability and convenience. Something in us wants the lights to go out and the shelves to be empty.

There are however also truly unprofitable things in nature[..... ], this unexplainable and unliquidable cosmic excess - the Milky Way, for instance - represents a metaphysical scandal. It's a pile of material that was provided without any clear motive, which means that it's existence can in a sense only be explained on account of some cosmic incompetence and lack of business acumen. 😂

mighty

Anders, the ascetic killjoy, performs a sort of brutal "Ludovico Technique" on us, forcing open our eyelids and revealing the sinister aspect of innocuous things like crossword puzzles and chewing gum.

Debord & Baudrillard rendered superfluous in a couple of long footnotes, 15 & 20 years before their respective tomes saw the light of day.(along with a sharp analysis of the way the Surrealistes (Debord's intellectual parents) were largely responsible for the recuperation-by-the-spectscle of the concept of alienation🤯)

"...Some of our contemporaries even regard historical figures as non-conformists --- suspicious eccentrics who obviously seem to expect some sort of special treatment. Instead of living in the present, as all honest people do today, they prefer inhabiting the cave of the has-been...."😂😂

"...Some of our contemporaries even regard historical figures as non-conformists --- suspicious eccentrics who obviously seem to expect some sort of special treatment. Instead of living in the present, as all honest people do today, they prefer inhabiting the cave of the has-been...."😂😂

"Others ( as they prove by their reactions to historical films and the like) deem historical figures positively comical. They treat them as provincials of time - people who didn't grow up in the metropolitan "present" and thus act like the village idiots of history or superstitious backwoodsmen. Every electronic device that had not yet been invented back then is treated as one of their touching defects....."😂

First ten pgs of World As Phantom & Matrix, written 10 years before Understanding Media, render M.M. superfluous.

Although it's never spelled out there are some slight hints in the footnotes that Anders had to work with his hands for a living as a WW2 emigre, possibly in some West Coast arms plant. His description of the promethean shame of the incompetent production line worker must be based on personal experience. Some stogie-smoking Okie foreman yelled at the egghead rookie and inadvertently caused a philosophical masterpiece

Anders' devastating critique of jazz-as-machine-music, which the translator queasily attributes to typical attitudes towards American music of European war emigres, is not only entirely accurate but predicted the destruction of American black music by the computer decades in advance

Never knew shame was so fascinating