42 Comments

I enjoy your work immensely. This is the kind of perspective I have been looking for with attempting to understand the economic and technological state of the world. Government and corporations have become the same entity and it is the techno feudalism of our times

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Really glad to hear that, and thanks for the support!

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Yep. The retailers, the real estate magnates, tech bros, big oil, and the global military, industrial complex run the world😬

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Well, certainly a decent chunk of it

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Well, every Western government and their allies'.

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Once again you have completed the processing of half-digested thoughts I’ve often had - “Black Friday? I thought that was a day of financial collapse (there’s an irony!). When did that become a thing?” Followed by a period of grumpiness and determination not to engage.

You bring a wonderful affirmation of my instincts and a clear explanation of these digital intrusions that restores my sense of being in touch with reality. Thanks, Brett!

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Thanks for these kind words Richard, and really glad you find it helpful

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Fascinating piece! Reminds me of the magician’s trick of misdirection: we all are entrained to think certain things like elections are the big zeitgeist defining moments but actually it is perhaps the capacity of top down invisible decisions from corporations that have a greater influence on our psycho social lives… I wish you had at least some proposals for ways to escape or evade this… any open source systems we can turn to, any anarcho-tech? Why isn’t Holochain working? Feels so “no exit.”

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Glad you like it Daniel! And yes, I really like your metaphor of the magicians misdirection. I've long had a fascination at the stuff we're not 'supposed' to look at, like the 'boring' back alley behind the big dazzling facade of a building. There are certain things that people get led towards viewing as the agreed-upon things to focus on (like the things you're supposed to take photos of when you're a tourist in a city), and this replicates itself in the global voyeurism around US politics etc, while so much of the deeper stuff that matters escapes attention.

You're right that I didn't include a section on proposals to escape this. I feel that would need some dedicated attention, and I probably couldn't do it justice here. In fact, it would be interesting to explore that *feeling* many people get that escape is impossible - where does that come from? (cue reference to Mark Fisher and capitalist realism)

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Proposal no 1: spend less time on the Internet

(/pay less attention)

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Simple yet radical idea ;)

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And yet somehow it feels like it needs repeating...!

So much of what I've been reading online seems to ignore these really obvious solutions, in order to maintain a sense of drama and hopelessness in the face of an unconquerable foe. This sense of doom quite subtly gets magnified and made consensus and thus mistaken for reality... in a perhaps similar process to what you describe in this article!

Proposal 2: if feeling lost, use the question, 'how can I be more fully human?' as a clue to the next step

Practical solutions are many and will be different for every person in every moment. It's very useful for that particular knowledge to be accessible, and as we don't know what we dont know, there might be a lot of value in finding new pathways and inspiration there.

Yet they are not universal solutions. I'm not sure there are any. The illusion of politics is that our destinies are tied, via a small group of elected officials, to millions of other people who might live hundreds or more miles away. Maybe changes in that oversystem will help. I suspect rather that the changes that really need to happen are in our relation to that system, which is to say in all our relationships with ourselves and the cosmos. But if all our attention is grabbed by stories of trying to change everything for everyone, none is left for the personal, local, small, incremental, particular changes that will need to happen anyway...

3: Learn as best as possible how to live independently of corrupt systems. Learn the skills our children will need to be taught in order to teach their children how to flourish. Culture is a technology

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Thanks for your further thoughts Parsifal. There's a lot to unpack here. The first thing I'd say is that I tend to come at things through a systemic economic perspective, in which we indeed are all tied into a planetary scale system whether we self-identify with that or not. It's true that within that system there are some that have more power than others, but even the characters spoken of in my essay above won't perceive themselves as being corrupt - they're just people doing their jobs.

While I'm all for practical solutions for people, the risk that you face is this: if you individualise the solutions, you can let the system off the hook (this is a classic thing that, for example, conservative libertarians do when they go on about *individual responsibility*). The reality is that our destinies actually are in many ways tied to people who live very far away - witness the fact that almost everything around you comes from people you cannot see on the other side of the world.

In general, the ability to detach from this system really depends on your specific socio-economic context. While there is a sub-set of people who can pull it off (for example, people who have enough income or savings to buy a plot of land to kickstart a self-sufficient agriculture system), there are many people who have very little option but to do urban wage labour, and no option but to use their smartphone all the time. I know there is a tradition of progressive economic self-help (e.g. that comes out of anarchist circles etc), and spiritual self-help (e.g. Buddhism), we need to be careful in just generalising that to whole populations

I guess the question here is who you imagine when you say 'stories of trying to change everything for everyone', because there are radically different traditions of those stories (for example, in mainstream politics there is some of that, but it's also a tradition in, for example, Marxist economics), and also what you mean about 'the personal', because there are a lot of dubious traditions of that too (i.e. the entire economics discipline is built on a story of the personal, as was Margaret Thatcher etc.)

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Thanks Brett. I think you're right in all of this. I'm mostly just trying to call for balance, and recognising the effects on thinking of the vast gravity well of attention, that in my own life feels like it's constantly pulling me away from the realities of body, in the here and now, towards distant abstractions, and what happens when those abstractions start to control the story of what is real, even just by the mechanism of repetition...

It's not so much that those systems aren't part of reality, more that I think they have a massive blinding effect, which makes the effort of looking for ‘solutions’ that are based in that same limited (yet powerful) reality, somewhat overwhelming and probably futile. And the tendency to speak from the ‘we’ - for sure it can be valid, and at the same time, it can feel like a huge part of the problem, to try to think on that scale. Part of the madness is that we are lumped into these huge political units (and now recognise we are part of even huger consumerist blocks across the world, similar in all sorts of other cultural patterns). Systemic thinking can really help, and is necessary to make sense of this, and I also think it's really important to be able to situate the 'I' in all of this, which feels harder and harder.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Perhaps - but if the house is built on mass illusion, then understanding exactly how those illusions are created is very necessary. But in order to dismantle, we also need to simultaneously be building something new, and for that we want different tools.

Thinking in terms of fixes on that systemic scale tends to ignore a lot of the reality of the billions of people and relationships and things which make up the system.

I think this is part of the essence of your offering - to help us understand what those relationships really are and the mechanisms by which they get hidden. Understanding that is perhaps a necessary step to seeing that there might also be different choices of how to be within that structure, and possibly also move away from that structure - which is the closest I feel you get to any kind of ‘solution’, at least as far as I've seen.

And given that the systems you describe exist not just in the material but also very much in thought and idea, just reading your work means one's relationship to them must have changed…

Yes, very different choices are available to everyone, which is why I feel that it's only on a spiritual plane, or at least the dimension of relationship of self to other, that we can approach anything like universal solutions, or at least wide-scale ones. And it feels that the effort to find other solutions - political, economic, etc - whilst also important, can also be used as a way to avoid one's own personal responsibility, and power.

So I think, at the same time as all the other conversations, it also really bears repeating again and again: the less dependent on these systems an individual (and community…) is for their sense of safety and resources, the stronger they will be, and the less powerful the systems, which derive their power, ultimately, from our fear. And that sense of safety spreads. This isn't easy work, those systems have a very strong hold over us, but to me it feels essential.

Let's do this at the same time as working on other scales. To remember, collectively, what it could be like to live in a different way, means each individual taking their part. It also feels like these incremental steps are like planting seeds which will take many generations to grow - a type of thinking which feels very hard to do within the very immediate reality tunnel of the dopamine economy.

What's really hard is finding the balance!

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There's plenty of such anarcho-tech — rest assured!

My Fairphone runs on a great operating system (e/OS) that is completely free of Google or Apple, for example. It also automatically prompts me to uninstall apps or remove their permissions if I haven't used them in a while — it was an actual shock to have my device's OS be on *my* side in this way!!

The devices where I use Windows rather than Linux have no search box on them of the type you describe (courtesy of Open-Shell). Thanks to UBlockOrigin I forget that the internet has adverts...

All completely free products too. Hit me up if you ever want some pointers on the relevant Free and Open Source Software, Brett. All they require of us is the enthusiasm to learn some slightly different software from that foisted on us. And I think you're building that nicely!

The devil is in the default.

ps Careful though, the first I'd heard of the twinkle emoji (which I use a lot) becoming associated with AI was on reading this piece!!

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Thanks Shaun, really interesting. I've actually long been meaning to get a Fairphone. I've also got the UBlockOrigin, and a laptop that runs Linux, and you'll note that in the screenshot at the beginning of the article I'm running various open source software apps (GIMP, Libre Office, Thunderbird etc).

The one complexity for me here is that I try to some extent stay in the mainstream, because if I was living in the alt-tech world I couldn't keep track of the mainstream vibe. I face a similar issue in writing about finance: I write pieces about big finance, and I get people in the alternative economics community saying 'hey, write about all the alternatives', but the reality is that - for the average reader - understanding the system they're immersed in every day is sometimes more relevant to them than trying to understand systems that a relatively small sub-set of politically activated enthusiasts use. It's true that in the last couple years I have been leaning into the darker systemic vibes, but that doesn't mean I don't care about the great work being done in alternative econ and tech circles, and at some point I'll lean back into that

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Hey man,

Glad to report that I got my second-hand Fairphone 3 four years ago, and it's still going strong (and fully supported with security updates etc) without any issues. I was also reminded recently that corporate phone users are prevented from the very useful ability to simply carry a spare battery! So if I were you I'd check Ebay etc for a second-hand Fairphone 5, which came out earlier this year. They plan to support that for a decade.

But yes, I'm not surprised at all that you're a fellow enthusiast for such explorations. And totally get why it fits for you to also stay in touch with the mainstream in support of the critically important work you're doing.

I'm on a different track where it gives me great satisfaction every time I completely fail to grasp a pop culture reference! All solidarity, my friend.

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Hi Dark Optimism! I have a Fairphone. How do I find and install the OS you have? Can I still do this if I've already got Google stuff everywhere? It is sooo frustrating being a digital immigrant! I really want to have everything clear of Google, MS etc but it's such a struggle for me to work it all out... Thanks!

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Hi Helen, here's the website for /e/OS:

https://e.foundation/e-os/

I followed their installation guides and found it fairly straightforward (though I did have the fear that if it went wrong I wouldn't know how to fix it!)

Their forums are friendly and helpful if you ever need assistance too. It looks as though they haven't released an easy installer (that's software that does most of the process automatically for you) for Fairphone 5 quite yet, but for Fairphone 3 or Fairphone 4, here you go:

https://e.foundation/get-e-os/

That said, I did it when I'd just got the phone, before putting my data on it, so you'd definitely want to back everything up first! Maybe ask on the Telgram channel or in the forums there about your situation, and someone should be able to assist :)

Here's the Fairphone-specific forum:

https://community.e.foundation/c/e-devices/fairphone/

Good luck!

ps Since it sounds as though you might appreciate it, here's a beautifully straightforward guide to better web browsing, whichever device/OS you're using:

https://help.riseup.net/en/better-web-browsing

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One partial solution , is to not get pulled into thinking that a computer is obsolete when it’s only 2 years old or the minute a new version. I’ve never bought a new Mac and usually keep them going until they actually won’t physically work anymore. The advantage is that the newer softwares/browsers won’t run on older machines so the sidestepping of a great deal of attention grabbing top-down stuff is cut out for you.

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I heard about talk like a pirate day because the language learning app Mango Languages literally has a "Pirate" section in its English course. That was several years ago. I generally ignore the things in the search bar unless I hit them by accident. Black Friday, etc., is also ignored because my family thinks it's insanity, so I guess the solution is to surround yourself with people (usually older people) who can remind you that these things aren't "real."

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Very good advice

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Another incisive meta-observation (sorry 😉) that reveals an important aspect of the cultural water we swim in. Bravo! I have just one bone to pick: your tendency to dismiss bitcoin and lump it with the 99% of “crypto” that are scams.

Bitcoin is not a platform; it’s a protocol. It’s not (can’t be) owned or controlled by any person or organization. There’s no CEO, BoD, or HQ. (Btw, Jack Dorsey says he regrets letting Twitter become an app rather than a protocol. He is now a champion of Nostr, a protocol designed to defang the social media lords.) As a protocol, bitcoin follows a set of rules nobody gets to break.

Speculators get loud every four years, but that’s just noise (generated by and benefitting profiteers). The signal is the inexorable growth of a bottom-up, decentralized, censorship-resistant means of value exchange that can’t be captured by any person, corporation, ideology, or government.

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Thanks for your comments Maia. My views on Bitcoin don't come from an outsider perspective - I was involved in the early Bitcoin community from 2011 and have a long history of engaging with it. I know the official story about Bitcoin, but my critique of Bitcoin goes very deep, into its shadow politics, its monetary design etc. In fact, there are many people in the Bitcoin community that actually agree with my perspectives on it. I have no problem being critical about Bitcoin, because it deserves critique, but that is not the same as me saying it hasn't been successful, or isn't good at doing what it does

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Great piece, Brett! I'm feeling embarrassed, because I'm a Take That fan :). And simultaneously smug because I never pay any attention to "Black Friday" whatsoever. Also, "A Wizard of Earthsea" was one of my favourite books as a child.

Today is apparently World Cassowary Day. So good to know.

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Every day should be World Cassowary Day :)

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These are the nuances we all experience and yet not able to make sense of it because of poor articulation.

Thank you so much to write so well.

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Thanks Anvesha - I appreciate the support

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I loved this piece! Cultural Malware reminds me of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

I always love finding ways people try disorient top-down incursions. One example I like is the Karrabing film collective, a group of Aborigine Australians, who recreate their shared experiences of engaging with the Australian state’s invasive governance. Their films re-enact police stalking community members, miners destroying their land, and government agencies harassing members for housing issues. These works were really a refusal to have the collective’s way of life eroded by the settler-colonist Australian government, which diverted Aborigine cultural funding to European project.

I think we are all faced with top-down narratives that try to envelop and unify us under a common idea. But people are exposed to different aspects of those unifying concepts, so we experience those ideas/narratives/systems differently. Meanwhile, top-down incursions try to make us feel like we all have something in common. Like we all are part of ‘Cyber Monday’, or all 1.5 billion windows users have the pleasure of talking like a pirate for a day. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with finding common causes, I don’t believe top-down incursions respect people’s differences. There’s a contradiction between how different people experience life/systems/ideas and how we are convinced we all collectively experience it. I think engaging in personal and everyday projects of meaning making, both material or immaterial, that highlight this contradiction is the best way to challenge those incursions.

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Thanks so much for this thoughtful comment Tim. I actually have Debord's book on the shelf, though it's been quite some time since I looked at it - thanks for reminding me.

I took a look at Karrabing - really interesting. I'll try watch their films soon! But yes, there's a really big (and fascinating) tension between the fact that we live in a super large-scale interconnected system that projects various top-down narratives, and the fact that people experience localised versions of that, or sub-systems that give them different bottom-up perspectives (or different angles on the same top-down narrative). This is a theme I was also hinting at in part 7 and 8 of my Econ Life series (https://www.asomo.co/p/intro-to-econ-life-8-economic-numbness), though that's more from the perspective of different economic classes

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Thanks for writing so well about these cultural impositions that affect me greatly.

It was a coincidence that your Microsoft Pirates post was published today, the same day I had rescued myself from a brief, accidental exposure to Microselft Edge browser's depressing landing page -- a nightmare to encounter, replete with every headline, image, and thought I want to avoid. I close that window as fast as I can and cover my eyes while doing it.

Your sentence sums it up perfectly for me: "functioned as a prescription that I should care. ... It becomes like cultural puppetry, and yes, I do get irritated by being puppeted."

Being bombarded by unwanted stuff is tiresome and unhealthy.

I've cultivated habits airmed at saving my brain.

Habit 1: I always try to observe and note violations so I'm aware of how ecompassing the problem is. Including:

Mood music in movies to manipulate emotions;

Crap music in short videos;

News aggregators pushing headlines;

Newspapers pushing headlines;

Advertisements everywhere, including on walls and uniforms of sports stadiums.

I also minimize time spent watching movies with special effects, rather than older movies where I can actually see products, clothing, and scenery that existed in real life.

Habit 2: Forget television altogether. Do not wade through social media posts. Let someone else do it and curate. Selected authors, from selected websites and publications, make many worthwhile recommendations; friends can, too.

Habit 3: Turn off as many features, functions, and notifications as possible on phones and computers. Use Duckduckgo browser, for example, or any others that are aware of the problems you describe; Duckduckgo and Proton email remove trackers.

Vigilence pays off.

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Hi Corb, thanks for this list of suggestions - really appreciate that!

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“This plays into my general morbid fascination at how arbitrary decisions made by a handful of people can get amplified, embedded into our culture and stuck there for good.”

Gee, I wonder what the proliferation of a _completely unregulated_ technology has allowed this to be possible?

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I now wonder if there's a pipeline between the teenage readers of Wizard of Earthsea and becoming a marxist(ish) tech/finance worker.

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It might be a small pipeline, but I'm sure it exists!

In my case though, I only got to the Earthsea series a couple years ago - before that I'd focussed on her sci-fi

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Propaganda works.

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Excellent. You have a good marketing bone in you.

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Now it’s tech, back then it was Christianity. Just one dude (assumingely, because women were even excluded more than now) wrote a couple chapters, called it the Bible, and look where we are now 🙄

but yes, tech is the new god. “And the people bowed and prayed

To the neon god they made”. That song is more relevant now than ever.

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Apparently it's now Black Friday Week according to Amazon.

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Some companies have black Friday month lol

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Sep 24
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Well put!

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