theluddite

Funk music and brownies. I make both often! Very very good stuff.

Always glad to send someone to Marcuse. Enjoy!

This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls "repressive desublimation." From the article:

Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.

Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.

Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it's a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls "industrial society" a "technological rationality," or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it's fine.

There's the old joke that metalheads are nice people pretending to be mean, while hippies are mean people pretending to be nice.

He's really interesting!!! It seems like this awakening was maybe too intense for him, because he basically disappeared entirely and no one has heard from him since. Kind of a bummer of an ending.

So happy to be of service!

There is no way the difference isn’t obvious to anyone who’s ever willingly read a poem, and the authors of the paper must know it.

I'm honestly not sure that they know, unfortunately. I think that the authors might be the kind of people who have literally never thought about the arts in a meaningful way. If you've never spent a lot of time with these people, it can be really really difficult to imagine it because it's frankly fucking insane, but it's disturbingly common. Philip Agre has written wonderfully on this. He was once like that, and that essay describes his awakening.

I had incorporated the field's taste for technical formalization so thoroughly into my own cognitive style that I literally could not read the literatures of nontechnical fields at anything beyond a popular level. The problem was not exactly that I could not understand the vocabulary, but that I insisted on trying to read everything as a narration of the workings of a mechanism. By that time much philosophy and psychology had adopted intellectual styles similar to that of AI, and so it was possible to read much that was congenial -- except that it reproduced the same technical schemata as the AI literature. I believe that this problem was not simply my own -- that it is characteristic of AI in general (and, no doubt, other technical fields as well). This is not to say that AI has no intellectual resources and no capacity for originality. In recent years particularly, the field has made productive connections with a wide variety of other technical fields, establishing common cause through the sharing of technical schemata.

I love how he describes the feeling.

I still remember the vertigo I felt during this period; I was speaking these strange disciplinary languages, in a wobbly fashion at first, without knowing what they meant -- without knowing what sort of meaning they had. Formal reason has an unforgiving binary quality -- one gap in the logic and the whole thing collapses -- but this phenomenological language was more a matter of degree; I understood intellectually that the language was "precise" in a wholly different sense from the precision of technical language, but for a long time I could not convincingly experience this precision for myself, or identify it when I saw it. Still, in retrospect this was the period during which I began to "wake up", breaking out of a technical cognitive style that I now regard as extremely constricting.

I think that we've all experienced minor versions of this, like when you (re)read a difficult text and it finally clicks. It really is almost dizzying! Imagine doing it for all nontechnical fields.

Yeah I'm a fan. I've always had a bit of a niche interest in proto-socialist movements, like the luddites, the diggers, etc., so, at first, it felt like a sorta crazy coincidence that I started writing my blog just before his book came out, but then I realized that it's not. We, like everyone else, are just living through the same stupid shit.

Thank you so much! That's the nicest thing to read because it's exactly the kind of thought that I hope to inspire in my fellow developers.

Capture Platforms might be my favorite post, though it's hard to compare it with the less serious, more fun kind. It's certainly the one that I worked on the longest. I read at least 2 entire books and countless papers, essays, and book excerpts in the process of making it.

I'm really glad to hear that, because that was exactly my hope. It's always impactful to realize that the history you thought you knew was just capital's side of the story. It has happened to me too many times to count, and I'm sure that it'll happen a million times more.

Oh, thank you so much. That's very validating! I can sometimes feel a little bit insane when I read these, to the point where I hesitate to publish because I worry that I missed something obvious.

That's exactly why the series is about papers on Nature.com. They're trading on the prestige of the domain to spinoff various portfolio journals and companies get to go to potential customers saying, "according to a study published in Nature..."

Thanks! And welcome aboard 🫡