The madness of America is not an isolated national pathology. It reveals how communication synchronises ordinary human vulnerabilities, reproducing antagonism, institutional authority and collective irrationality.
Tag: poder
El populismo no depende únicamente de quienes lo explotan. Los sistemas de comunicación favorecen mecanismos que amplifican la polarización, la desconfianza y la inestabilidad política.
The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.
Every attempt to secure one part of the world changes the conditions of security for everyone else. Endlessly.
Much of what capitalism conditions us to fear in communism is what concentrated capitalism already does: centralise power, narrow freedom, restrict opportunity and preserve poverty as structural necessity.
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the strange ontology of power
Extreme wealth is not independence. It is an unusually successful dependence upon everyone else.
Categories
status hierarchy: role-play
Perceived importance is simply the output function of an ongoing game of organisational status hierarchy, social roleplay and meritocratic make-believe.
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irony age
Every age reaches for old stories to explain new realities. The irony is that most stories survive not because (or even if) they are true, but because they are easy to transmit, to remember, to tell.
Neurotic bureaucracies do not resist autocracy; they often rehearse for it.
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epistemic pyramid scheme
This is how a system built to produce knowledge becomes a system for reproducing the conditions under which its existing knowledge remains authoritative.
