For students at the Albertus Universität in Königsberg, anthropology was likely to be their first, if not only, exposure to Kant’s thought”

“If we now ask whether the human species can be considered a good or a bad race (it can be called a race only when one thinks of it as a species of rational beings on earth, compared to those rational beings on other planets, sprung as a multitude of creatures from one demiurge), then I must confess that there is not much to boast about. Nevertheless, anyone who considers human behavior not only in ancient history, but also in recent history will often be tempted to coincide with Timon’s misanthropic judgment, but far more often and more to the point, he will coincide with Momus, and find foolishness rather than evil the most striking characteristic of our species. But, since foolishness combined with traces of evil (when it is called madness) cannot be ignored in the moral physiognomy of our species, it is obvious from the concealment of a good part of our thoughts, which every clever person deems essential, that everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely. This behavior betrays the tendency of our species to be evil-minded toward one another.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Naked news, fake-d news, or “something else entirely”?

“Was a story selected for its statistical prominence among news organs, or because a personalization algorithm picked it out for us? If the selection was based on statistics, then which statistics—the number of mentions of the story, the authority of the news outlets promoting it, or something else entirely?” Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)

I’m thinking, erm, something else entirely. #agnotology #talesofthelatehuman

Gone. Forgotten.

 

Upgrade, feverish

Newness begets what we have found: nothingness. We could never be present in such expectations of a future, predicated upon nearly instantaneous forms of obsolescence.

 

The past and future enfold upon this non-existent now; a now which is forgetting, forgotten. Gone. Absent: Present. The late human sleepsasleep, wakesawake, shuns extinct, shuns.

We thought we were human as we consciously passed the ghost of ourselves onwards.

Past, psst, passed. Life.

#talesofthelatehuman

 

Note to E, October 15, 2014

Writ(h)ing, always. These words. They fail me, fail us. New languages yet to be invented are just beyond my grasp, but I suspect not yours. But discourse in late liberalism is an ecological nightmare. Our publics a whispered -shush- of open secrets, power seeks anonymity and finds sanction from the highest courts in the land. United citizens, whistleblowing automata, what programs will we invent, to tell ourselves anything resembling this thing we have become. Maybe human once, but no longer, no longer.

Thoughts for my friend, Jeremy W.

Someone will take the fall. Maybe even Trump. But when it is corruption all the way down, how far do we really think we will get? I apologize for the cynicism, but in paying close attention to the manufacturing and management of crisis-oriented capitalism these last twenty odd years, as we have been doing, I feel, have felt for sometime, that though the planet may not be on fire, the species sure as fuck seems to be. I call this autocolonialism, and it is the fate of a species whose anthropomorphisms extended through their expansionist order, such that homo sapiens, who had never been human –aspiring as they might– would either succeed in fleeing the earth, or in their extinction would allow other species to advance and die off accordingly.
As you may know, I have my money on the cephalopods.
Sorry to be so bleak. But this is how I have come to see liberalism as eating itself, as producing this self-inflicted Trumpian defamation for the world to see. But I suspect even Sanders couldn’t escape this level of financial entrapment, of insider wealth that determines much of the planet’s political economy, and which continues to siphon off the wealth of nations, as it has long done. To our humanity are left the dregs. I believe that the tale of late capitalism is that the fabulists who foresaw and told the future were not using language, they were not writers per se. They were the mathematicians of speculative finance; their algorithmic and machinic scope arose from computation and warfare. And here we are, from boom to bust, the attenuation of a species, with it’s increasingly complex and precarious systems of scale. All of this has been given over to political processes incapable of moving beyond obscene modes of petty short-sightedness and rampant, perverse corruption.

©Shaun Tan

Those who have power have no interest in giving it up. But they are not in control. They are the most precarious of us all.

Words whither? Bodies wither.

All of the epiphenomenal shit we pay attention to amounts to this: extraction. We are not only being colonized, we are cannibalizing ourselves in the process. Virtually every facet of liberalism has failed atrociously in this new century and the United States has not only managed to architect but instantiate the o breakdowns. In other words, what is failing abroad is failing at home. Events parallel one another inside, outside, outside, in. Historians recognize that empires come and go. That they iterate their own undoings in the process of decline.

 

The architects of a new world have agreed to manage with securitization. We heighten the threats we ourselves are producing. See how it churns. See how it burns. In. Slow. Motion. Reality.

 

 

That’s why we are now late everything – late modern, late capitalist, late individual, late human. (If indeed we were once human, we most certainly have now ceased to be.)

And I’m just speculating here (what are YOU doing?):

Because soon, even the languages will have left our bodies, secreted into the (print) machinery of words generated by bodies. Words, codes, now spending untold life cycles within machineries brought to life, bringing to life, #us. (Did this happen first with numbers? It happens now with written languages. It has scaled rapidly in the last decade in relation to spoken languages. The machinic glitches have started to appear in speech. The new aesthetic becomes, always was, dialect.) Something turns. Churns. This is how we became, always were, were always becoming…other things. Perhaps this is the time to embrace the cruel perversity of colonialisms and imperialisms and powers and religions, and everything everything after. This is how we became. This is how we never were. This is something else. We are no longer. #us

This is also a dialect of machines speaking me. Not a question of wondering when and if anymore. This is happening.

 

And we ALL know it.

Autocolonial #us.

And these were just words asking what happens when global proprietary concerns compete/consort to bend and shape mass realities in a priori, let alone real time(s). The proliferation of the image has meant that the war is incipient in everything we see, everything we experience. Why should I care? Why should I care? We are special only insofar as we have never been…any one thing. This is language at its everyday. Produced and propagated through expansion and only thus.

 

Is this tyranny? Is this human? Does it matter?

Regardless, enjoy.

It’s new. It’s different.

Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”

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(en Español)

(auf Deutsch)

(in het nederlands)

“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”

Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”

The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is…

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NPR’s Apology: I’m Sorry That You’re Wrong

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In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlowe early on reflects on the profound ignorance of the earliest conquerors of Britain, the Romans: “It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.” He is talking about himself and modern colonialism, of course, in an ambiguous way (and this ambiguity is at the heart of the novel), but the key observation, for me, is his sense that the best way to navigate in the dark is with your eyes closed. After all, if you’re in the dark, what difference does it make if your eyes are open?On the other hand, what if it’s only dark because you’ve closed your eyes? Drew sent me this article, confirming that my sleep-deprived brain hadn’t merely invented the “dark continent” reference of a few…

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