J.G. Ballard believed that our surveillance society of unfreedom would soon lead its citizens into the dangerous territory of personal and collective forms of psychopathology ‘in order to enlarge the scope of their lives and imaginations’.1

The future is no longer a fictional site for your dreams, instead in our time the future is nothing more than a DIY Toolkit for your psychopathological dreams: a crowdfunding enterprise for building experimental utopias among the ruins of global capital.

Nicole Sallak Anderson tells us that for any technologically advanced society to move forward and truly become a technically and socially sustainable, we must change the story of our lives from competition to collaboration. She also lists the aspects of such a successful transition will entail universal access to information; decentralization of food, healthcare, education, currency, and manufacturing; decoupling of work and personal definition; universal basic income; servant leadership; and a participatory and cosmopolitan democratariat.

Of…

I haven’t been writing much here and hope to rectify that from here on out.  I suppose that I’ve found it difficult to write in this medium for a variety of reasons in the last couple of years.  Tonight I find myself reflecting on all of the controversies that new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology have generated in the last few years.  In recent years I’ve heard these vectors of thought criticized for supporting neoliberal capitalism to hating humans to asserting the dominance of things over humans.  I’ve always found such criticisms surprising, wondering where it is from which they might come.  What is it about these trajectories of thought that elicit so many passions.  Is there something new here?  I’m not so sure.  This evening I came across the following passage in Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge that speaks to something similar, albeit in a different context.

The cry…

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By Paul Spector RN, EMT-P, CPT. U.S. ARMY Ret.

I worked as an RN in a California State Prison where staged “suicides” occurred regularly. I fought for my patients, know how the cover-up works and have some insights. In 2012, I was hit by a truck, so this paper is done with a lot of help, individuals risking jobs and lives.

Behind badges and Rank, Sociopaths lurk in American prisons. Cameras are their enemy.
With scant information, some of our conclusions will be proven wrong. As more is known, we feel there will be more lies, inconsistencies and abuse uncovered. With more data will come more clarity, but the Code of Silence must be penetrated.

Prison deaths from mistreatment are mislabeled “suicide”, allowing continued abuse and avoiding lawsuits. I’ve spent 8 years trying to stop the practice…

In recent years, the United States has pioneered the development of the most advanced killing machines on the planet. In the process, we have turned much of the rest of the planet into what can only be considered an American free-fire zone. We have, in short, established a remarkably expansive set of drone-war rules for the global future.

Naturally, we trust ourselves with such rules, but there is a fly in the ointment, even as the droniacs see it. Others far less sagacious, kindly, lawful, and good than we are do exist on this planet and they may soon have their own fleets of drones. At the time of Brennan’s speech, about fifty countries were already buying or developing such robotic aircraft, including Russia, China, and Iran. And who knows what terror groups are looking into suicide drones?

As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius put it in a column about…

By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudorevolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws of thought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears in the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

– Guy Debord,  Society of the Spectacle

Do we know how to wait today? In our reactions to the economic problems we are facing are we acting too quickly, full of resentment and anger – allowing our deep emotional lives to fall prey to violent outbreaks that can only end in disaster? Are we playing into the hands of our enemies without even realizing it? Playing by their rules, and allowing them to have the upper hand in a game they themselves created to ensnare us?…

It is not only the continuity of History which is threatened today—what we are witnessing is something like the end of Nature itself.

– Slavoj Žižek,  Living in the End Times

The double trap to avoid is thus, on the one hand, to attempt to “de-ideologize” the issue, by reducing ecological catastrophe to a problem solvable by means of science and technology, and, on the other, to attempt to “spiritualize” it in the sense of New Age mythology. What both these approaches lack is a concrete social analysis of the economical, political and ideological roots of ecological problems. Science is necessary, but it cannot do all the work: it cannot show us how we should transform our lives, because such transformation has to rely on basic socio-political “normative” ideas of what kind of life we want to lead. We have thus to reject as insufficient a series of solutions which…