🚷 cybernetics of protesting

Artwork by Keith Tilford

i have to admit there’s a kind of material textuality, semiotic grit or frankness to laruelle. it’s like the words are unambiguous bricks, like he’s building a house with incredibly simple tools even if they’re cumbersome-looking or heavy-seeming or overly combinatorics.

laruelle’s argument for the generic victim, or the victim-in-the-last-instance, which resists representation, resonates with me as the defense of any and all victims who might go unrepresented but are victims according to the real (anthony braxton might say “realness of culture”)

consistent with spinoza’s assertion, “we do not know what a body can do” (Ethics, IIIP2 Note), just as pointed out in history that black children were studied by psychologists but at a certain point, when they were outperforming their counterparts recording of their output ceased: who(se/’s) nothing?

in my view, “we stopped paying attention” as an explanation to the end of history falls flat; the point is “we” refused to pay attention and the question is what motivates that refusal, that refusal to relate, and gave up our role to transform and live by metaphors of the rulers

the rulers, then, have co-opted or “bought” the mediators, translators and purifiers, on the whole, while most of us are embattled with people who talk about “owners”, “buyers”, “sellers”, “investors” and “shareholders” all grounded on metaphors of exchange, storage and stocks

while dunking on people like musk or bezoid and talking about smashing banks or criticizing politicians, etc is warranted and necessary, these entities are not the mediators, translators and purifiers, at least not formally in the crisis-engine, lawyers and salespeople are

this may connect with bitcoin: if bitcoin is a “silent protest” for ancaps, we can debate about that semantics and framing all day. narratives all the way down. but if it is a protest at all, or primarily that, it’s like being allotted “designated protest” areas: the very language of protest is subverted by the rulers. no one can say “it would be better if we protested over there” (e.g. at the evental sites of the mediators and friends). badiou might say we’ve been arrested as militants of truth in this regard: our language has been seized.

it’s nevertheless true that if you protest in a group, you will be unindividuated, just as bitcoiners are. you are an “anonymous collective” (the lyrics apply here). but the cybernetic reality is upheld: you have been herded, you are doing a “financial protest” in the “district”