ca1iban

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"The human being is a face drawn in the sand, washed away by the tide." -Michel Foucault

has anyone noticed theyre taking away what it means to be human

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Havasu Falls (USA) by AndrewH324

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“This meeting of extremely online, self-interested minds was perhaps inevitable, in light of a few trends: Trump’s desperation for personal and campaign cash, Musk’s nonstop penchant for open racism and far-right conspiracism, and the increasing overlap of the duo’s personal and business networks—especially with Trump courting grievance-fueled megadonor funds in the immediate aftermath of the verdict. For Musk in particular, this new friendship of convenience also represents a firm endpoint for a foundational part of his identity as a businessman and public figure—and an unmistakable turning point in how he plans to brand and behave himself going forward.”

— Elon Musk’s relationship with Donald Trump shows he never cared about climate change

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hey, don't cry. 40,000 in small bills in the bag, alright? quickly

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in another timeline wes anderson is a middle school theater teacher bankrupting his art department with the most over-budget production of suessical the musical jr. that suburban houston will ever see

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“Mark Zuckerberg is a monster. He is the opposite of what the tech industry should stand for — a monopolist that deliberately makes and proliferates bad software, and makes the world worse for it. Facebook and instagram are insults to every single software engineer in the world, built to trick and swindle and harm rather than providing a service. This man is a disgrace. This company is a disgrace.”

— We’re Watching Facebook Die

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sometimes you have to choose the neural pathway less traveled in your brain

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Passion gives me moments of wholeness. I want to explode and fly in all directions. I want to live like a submarine, sunk always at the deepest level of instinct and intuition. I mostly know though, that I can never live entirely like that, for my life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living.

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin Volume I 1931-1934 

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The family is where most of the world's rapes take place, and also most of the murders. Nobody has more chances to rob, abuse, blackmail, manipulate, hit or touch you without consent than your family. It would be logical that announcing an intention of "treating you like family" (as many airlines, restaurants, banks, shops and workplaces do) would be considered as a horrible threat. However, to metaphorically be "family" in the eyes of someone, makes you think of having access to something... quite unfamiliar. Namely: approval, solidarity, a promise to help, embrace, and to take care

Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: a Manifesto for Care and Liberation, 2022

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flopunktwe

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« I have the impression, when I look back on it, that my childhood took place in an era of the scarcity of images. Such a characterization would have seemed odd or even inconceivable at the time, for we already believed ourselves to be overwhelmed by a quantity of images never seen since the beginning of the world. And yet how rare they were in comparison to the overabundance we now have at our fingertips. We had to wait for them: wait for the films that were shown once on television and shown again only many years later; wait for the magazines that, once a month, brought a cargo of images that seems meager indeed, now that we can find on the internet, for every object and every desire, about as many images as we could wish.

Images were a luxury that demanded patience. When we had one in our possession, we treasured it; we cut it out, pasted it into an album. From time to time, we went back to it and dreamily gazed at it for a long while. This relative scarcity of images had even made them into a kind of schoolyard currency—a currency now considerably devalued through overinflation. Today, images come one after another, devour each other, replace each other pitilessly, as if to outmatch the boundlessness of our desire. »

— Maël Renouard, Fragments of an Infinite Memory

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Criticism [in a political and social landscape which has lost systemic capacities] becomes another layer of feedback, another thread of information to integrate into adaptive cycles. Instead we must turn to a different form of engagement, one which does not orient in-line with these systems. Tiqqun's _Cybernetic Hypothesis_ refers to this approach as _opacity_. "Establishing a zone of opacity where people can circulate and experiment freely without bringing in the Empire's information flows, means producing "anonymous singularities," recreating the conditions for a possible experience, an experience which will not be immediately flattened out by a binary machine assigning a meaning/direction to it, a dense experience that can transform desires and the moments where they manifest themselves into something beyond desire, into a narrative, into a filled-out body." This is the creation of spaces which do not describe or assign meaning to subjects or to their relationships with objects, and which do not have orientations and inherent capacities. This _opacity_ is the reignition of events and possibilities through escaping the atomization of cybernetic society. A _zone_ of opacity is a setting which cannot be functionalized and does not have distinctly granular features. Its intrinsic character is a form _in spite of_ specifics. Much like the autopoetic unit, a zone of opacity is not an assembly of features which can be understood through time-point observations. The zone of opacity rejects such atomization because its fundamental basis is a rejection of cybernetic information flow. As observing every feature of a cell in successive time points will not confer the meaning of its context or capacities, so the zone of opacity embraces unquantifiable characteristics as well. Since the primary relation of postmodern society is the exchange of information, the zone of opacity is a method of regaining an exteriority – a way beyond and which negates – the contemporary order.

S.R. a.k.a. Meltdown Your Books, 2023. Where does a Body begin? Biology’s Function in Contemporary Capitalism. Berlin: Becoming Press. pp. 105–106.

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However, if we are supposed to take language’s formative and de-formative power seriously, then the parapraxis [slips or slurs of the tongue] becomes the symptom of a non-experienced experience or an experienced non-experience. Usually, what we call a psychological symptom is not a problem because we experience it. Instead, symptoms are a problem precisely because we typically do not experience them. Symptoms only present themselves in the disturbances of the structures of our life. In other words, we know something is off but do not usually know what. Alternatively, if we do know what the problem is, we do not know or experience the whole problem and tend to want to go back to ignoring what is not fully experienced.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

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"I’m not the creator-god of this life, this text. I’m just a made thing, like any other made thing—just one that is curious about its making." —McKenzie Wark, Critical (Auto)Theory

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"By separating environmental critiques on the one hand from antislavery and anticolonial critiques on the other, environmentalism embodies a colonial ecology: an ecology whose function it is to preserve colonial inhabitation and the forms of human and non-human domination that come with it. The environmentalist approach to the Anthropocene therefore reproduces both a colonial oikos and the holds of the world. The lack of dialogue and alliances between these two movements is precisely what fuels the modern fire that is devouring the world, this wildfire.

For the historian Richard Grove, the origins of modern environmentalism are to be found in these colonial experiments far from metropolitan centers of thought, and particularly in the actions of the French missionary, botanist, and spice grower Pierre Poivre. As the intendant of the Isle of France (present-day Mauritius) from 1767 to 1772, Poivre deplored the actions of men guided by the lure of gain, who deforested the island leaving only “arid lands, abandoned by the rains, and exposed without shelter to storms and scorching sunshine.” Inspired by the physiocrats and helped by his companions Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Philibert Commerson, Poivre put in place conservation policies for the island’s forests that aimed at conserving the region’s rainfall. Because of the explicit link between deforestation and local climate change, Poivre is presented as one of the precursors of modern environmentalism, echoing the contemporary fight against climate change.

However, in celebrating the pioneering actions of this botanist, what is overlooked is the fact that this conservation of the forest was fully part of a slave-making colony."

—Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology