February 20th, 2021
- and had a sense of like, yeah, in the context of trying to do observation-feeling-need-request, there's value in having the feeling be relatively meaning-neutral (eg "sad" rather than eg "abandoned") because it's a kind of weak frame and thus avoids a frame battle in the context of trying to get to the satisfying resolution of the request.
- it's very important however to be able to explore and unpack those meaning-laden feeling-words
- both
- internally (doing eg Bio-Emotive)
- interpersonally
- sometimes you notice that there seem to be meanings attached to words even if they're words like "angry"
- like maybe I or my partner have a concept of anger that says "if I'm angry, someone did something wrong"
- a quote somehow related to David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules which seems very related to why crypto no-trust systems won't be enough and vaguely the meta-ness of the meta-protocol
- > We are witnessing a direct clash between two different forms of materi-alized utopianism: on the one hand, an anti-authoritarianism that, in its emphasis on creativesynthesis and improvisation, sees freedom basically in terms of play, and on the other, a tacitrepublicanism that sees freedom ultimately as the ability to reduce all forms of power to a set ofclear and transparent rules.
For the last two hundred years, in Europe and North America—and increasingly, elsewhere—that latter, bureaucratized notion of freedom has tended to hold sway. New institutional arrangements that operate by rules so strict and predictable they essentially disappear, so that one doesn’teven know what they are (such as the physical or electronic post offices with which I began) tend to be put forward as platforms for human freedom that emerge from the very technical contingencies of running efficient structures of power. These arrangements seem to preserve the positiveelements of play while somehow circumventing its more disturbing potentials.
But time and again, we have seen the same results. Whether motivated by a faith in “rationality”or a fear of arbitrary power, the end result of this bureaucratized notion of freedom is to movetoward the dream of a world where play has been limited entirely—or, at best, boxed away insome remote location far from any serious, consequential human endeavor—while every aspectof life is reduced to some kind of elaborate, rule-bound game. It’s not that such a vision lacks appeal. Who hasn’t dreamed of a world where everyone knows the rules, everyone plays by therules, and—even more—where people who play by the rules can actually still win? The problem is that this is just as much a utopian fantasy as a world of absolute free play would be. It will always remain a glimmering illusion that dissolves away as soon as we touch it.
Such illusions are not always bad things. One could make a case that most of the greatesthuman accomplishments were the result of such quixotic pursuits. But in this particular case,and in this larger political-economic context, where bureaucracy has been the primary meansby which a tiny percentage of the population extracts wealth from the rest of us, they have created a situation where the pursuit of freedom from arbitrary power simply ends up producingmore arbitrary power, and as a result, regulations choke existence, armed guards and surveillancecameras appear everywhere, science and creativity are smothered, and all of us end up finding increasing percentages of our day taken up in the filling out of forms.
- I'm collecting non-pathologizing explanations of Trump & Brexit
- book: National Populism
- by some folks who were studying the topic since the 00s
- > It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income?
- Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources:
- investment class: returns on investment
- salary class: a monthly salary
- wage class: an hourly wage
- welfare class: a government welfare check
- People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.
- and basically the non-pathologizing explanations of Trump & Brexit is that the wage class has been rekt since 1970 by immigration and off-shoring of manufacturing, and then blamed for their own suffering
- and Trump invites the same sneering from salary class folks, so even though he has so much money, he feels like one of them
- This one describes 3 distinct class ladders (labor, gentry, elite) that have very few ways to move between them, though some ways to move up within.
- Seems like I'm G2
- keywords: class status ladders elite e1 e2 e3 e4 g1 g2 g3 g4 l1 l2 l3 l4
- it's been removed from the original blog (which is still up) suggesting that maybe its author recanted
- great simple embodied example of human superorganism
- related to the sublinear part - vetocracy as the awful endgame of bureaucracy
- > The crypto solution, which has yet to fully mature, is something like “create structures which it’s impossible for anyone, including the creator, to change”. Seems like a pretty drastic solution. But what would a better one look like?
- relates to crypto no-trust systems won't be enough
- a couple bits reflecting on texas