Gabriel Ortiz > Recent Status Updates

Raw Dogging Deleuze and Guattari end to end has by far been the greatest exercise of mental fortitude in my life.

On its surface it feels like a joke. Like an elaborate shitpost of a schizophrenic philosophy PhD. It’s almost paradoxical. Like he’s saying nothing and everything at the same time. Maybe that’s the point
Is it pretentious? Perhaps. Masochistic is a word I’d use.

So far a good classic foray into the art and philosophy of statesmanship.

Aristotle: “Todays Subject: Slavery”

Intrusion Trauma - an interesting conflict resulting in the compartmentalization of Eros and agape… the fear of aggression results in the fear of desire.

“In our consumer society, novelty is key. The obsoleteness of objects is programmed in advance so that it ensures our desire to replace them. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.”

So it goes…

Bless Angus

It’s hard getting through this book. Not because it isn’t good. In fact, the writing is quite brilliant. Kingsolvers meandering prose is something that really brings out Demons character. The Appalachian English is also pleasant to the eyes reading in the page. It’s not often I get to see this setting.

It’s more so the brutal tragedy that is Demons life. The lows are low. And it’s hard not to feel for him

“Boomers are a destructive generation who’s work is not over yet”

“The same boomers who chanted hell no we won’t go will emerge as the most martial generation in recent American history. They will risk enormous pain and consequence and demand their youth to fight and die in ways they would not have tolerated in their youth.”

Incredibly prescient comments of emerging crisis. Many interesting analogies to the Trump presidency era and the subsequent years.

From the perspective of a Zillenial, Strausses predictions hit home, an all fronts. However, it is also easy to extrapolate much of past history into infinity, as he also criticized from the linear perspective at the beginning of the novel.

“There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted, but that’s an awareness we suppress”

Cascading systems failures at all levels make it difficult to debug one issue without first tackling it at another. There is no root trace back. Rather the challenge is pruning an ever blighted rhizome.

In the case of blockchain:Proof of work just consolidates power in the hands of the savy and rich. Proof of stake just consolidates compute in the hands of the rich.

This is a problem which compounds on building a better exchange network as has been proposed to an alternative to open-market mechanisms by Pentland.

“Corporation and Governments have computational capabilities far beyond what is available to individuals, and this imbalance is quickly becoming a major source of inequality.”

Cloud has only consolidated power further. Sure, any user can scale a number of instances on AWS, but in the end it’s Amazon who owns the compute. The same goes for the data brokers like Google and Meta.

Incredible experiments in social engineering at scale. If this was possible years ago with an MIT budget imagine what is possible nowadays. Take the Pokémon go phenomenon for example. A group of game developers at niantic were able to engineer a mass of users to wage territorial battles in real space using social incentives and a mutual love for a franchise.

Think about what could be done with an ideology.

Rereading

The amount of rationalization the MC goes through to justify his actions are incredible. But it goes to show how we can logic ourselves into our own delusions. Some of the brightest, like Ted Kaczynski forged narratives to justify their actions. The value of life weighed like currency, to expend towards one’s own objectives. Not quite a direct analogue to the MC, but I think one worth mentioning nonetheless.

Dostoevsky explores self interest and motivation in an incredibly palpable way. Prescient as usual.

“Being realistic may have once meant coming to terms with a reality experienced as solid or immovable. Capitalist realism however entails subordinating one’s self to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment.”

A punch in the gut so far.

“Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp — and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.”

“Students inability to connect deficit of attention to future failure is more than just a lack of motivation”

Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

“In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.“

“The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were collectively less intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking.”