5 Star Tossers

We discuss two very sad yet important contemporary ideas about how enormous companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon rule over us today. The first is Technofeudalism, a word coined by Yanis Varifoukas, which argues that capitalism has been replaced by a landscape of digital fiefdoms. The second is Enshittification, a word coined by Cory Doctorow, which explains why the apps we can never get enough of (Instagram, X, Amazon, and Facebook) continue to deteriorate while their parent companies make more and more money. 

Sagi insists throughout that whether or not we have transitioned from capitalism to a digital fiefdom, a Protestant ideology, one of labor and manifest destiny, continues to function and serve the hearts of all our beloved CEOs. 

Jack offers us an important history of the creation of Silicon Valley, tying a certain entrepreneurial optimism to a strange conflation of academia and the industrial military complex.

Andy reads technofeudalism as a kind of vampiric disease, where everyone is either becoming their own Dracula, holed up in their castle, or the rats and peons that will soon be devoured.

Jake gives as many examples as he can from Doctorow's book Enshittification, which he highly recommends.

Dear, surviving, audient: how is it hanging?

We\I sympathize.

If you were looking to art as an answer, hoping for some revolutionary frameworks, or just plain ol' solace inside --

            -- I'm afraid most of the pod's going to tell you to keep looking.

In this one we watched 2 "political" movies released this year: Ari Aster's Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.

More generally, the 2 movies raised the question of what it means to involve politics in a movie. Jake took this as an excuse to geek out on Grad school vibes and do a deep dive into Walter Benjamin's attempts to save aesthetics from the khaki schmattes of Communism.

Who said Marx Grudge?

Benjamin does brandish an interesting, rather Derridian, analytic tool in the distinction between allegory and the symbol; which I will anger Jake and summarize here as analogous (allegorical?!) to a movie whose special effects are shot on set with actual props, and the one where the effects are all programmed in (as CGI). Like shooting props, the allegory foregrounds its technicity, while the symbol will claim the harmony of form-function and content. 

Except the symbol doesn't work anymore. Like the pathetic attempt poor Andy had to suffer through, where the reinvented "Superman" is called-upon to white-wash the Gaza genocide (still a western debacle). The symbol rang so hollow it gave Andy bowel issues. 

(Editor's note:) We will NOT be getting into that.

Of course, the allegory's very apparatus makes it susceptible to Capitalist manipulations. This is where we take a more specific tack on Anderson's film: shot and directed, deliberately, in my opinion, as a post-fascist account of how pathetic and hopeless revolutions are, how revolutionaries are either posers or self-deceiving cucks.

And here is Anderson's genius, in recognizing the capitalist tentacles have already infiltrated all discourse -- which is a panicked, exhausted discourse these days (on "the left") -- "over-technicizing" allegory into social media reels and internet memes. His account gives the melancholia of a post-fascist winner looking back at history: disjointed, often accompanied by a (never happy or energetic or really calm) soundtrack, the characters are mostly isolated with superficial thoughts and relationships... it is the sad sigh of a fulfilled Sklavenmoral.

There was more tossed around, of course. Fair warning.

STARS: Marx Grudge (grudgingly); Beast & Sovereign... but really, all the Stars were there: the Il vaut mieux with differance; the Pervs R' Us with melancholy, the WWJD with 'Manifest Destiny'...

P.S. 

We have an official email address ([email protected]), for you, dear audient, to vent; a kind of a complaint/feedback box. We will collect the complaints (/corrections/disputes) to an episode where we address your mirror of our stupidities. 

5ST

We wanted to talk about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. We ended up returning to a question Sagi asked in the last episode (Bowser Bones): how do we talk to people who mean well but don't get more radical ideas? This question is so hard to answer, we meander on all sides of it. We speak about the violence of left and right, we speak about the performative insincerity of so many talking heads, and we think about a kind of psychotic manifest destiny that encourages so many people to embrace whatever is on a sale in the marketplace of ideas.

Sagi asks about the hypocrisy of the "punch a Nazi" idea, and Andy does not condone any violence of any sort.

Bowser bones is a phrase Andy and Jake came up with after playing way too much Mario Tennis. One afternoon, Jake chose to play as Bowser and easily defeated Andy, who was playing as Princess Peach. He accused Jake of cheating because Bowser's character has more power than Peach. This soon became a question about the assumption that man has more bone density than women. Andy pointed out what a gross fantasy it is whenever men assert this difference. Often times this assertion comes in the form of transphobia and the pearl clutching about trans women in female sports. Is there any way to assert this biological difference without leveraging violence? 

Sagi was at his honest and most cancellable best. Wondering if there is some sympathy that we need to give to the anxiety caused by sexual difference; its neglect, owing to the Christian framework that constantly polices and represses it, is something that colors current perceptions of male violence and transphobia. 

Andy looks at Freud's famous essay "A Child is Being Beaten" to help us think about the creation of this fantasy, and the anxiety of castration. Jake extends this idea by looking at Alan Bass who asserts the need to accept difference, while simultaneously critiquing the common narratives of sexual difference as concrete fetishes. 

We splay ourselves open in this pod, while advocating for love as transcendence of run-of-the-mill gender narratives.

Well, we thought about AI again. This time Andy joined us. Jake, as promised, went Marx Grudge. He read from Marx's "Fragment on Machines," and listed the many lawsuits currently levied against "AI vendors." That said, he also couldn't help thinking about the future of porn. Sagi spoke about the metaphysical utilitarian progress underpinning AI, certain that the only real thing AI can do is solve the stupid analytic philosophy trolley problem. Oh, that and get a high score on an IQ test. Andy introduced the Tower of Babel and helped us think about how concrete thinking is overtaking the younger generation. AI, entirely focused on space, and against time, leaves no room for ethics, for thought, for enjoying petites madeleines. 

Listen past the end, for a Proustian surprise.

Hello there audient,

How's life?

So, for this summer of lovely weather and lovelier news the Tossers bring you the first of a two-part series of pods dealing with A.I. It'll be fun and light, much like this summer!

This one was just me and Jake, as Andy and Jack are (surely) having the time of their lives elsewhere.. and we discuss so, so much.

What is AI? Sagi argues it's not deserving of its name, giving a bad rap to intelligence, assuming we can indeed create it, that intelligence is within our grasp to make. What we get with AI is a probablistic imitation of reason, minus all the pesky desires (except of course behind the AI scenes), which has its uses... not all of which are necessarily healthy or sustainable.

Jake evokes the area of teaching and learning, writing and reading, as an area particularly vulnerable to AI exploitation, as more and more college students use ChatGPT to pass their courses (and more and more teachers use ChatGPT to grade their "students"). He sees this as what Derrida called absolute ash, the dead burying the dead...

Ensuing is a debate we took through Stiegler and Kant, through Hegel (and Jesus), to Silicon Valley metaphysics (and its shoddy, responsibility-shirking nature). 

Far too much to recount. And there's more to come...

...let's just hope Jake doesn't make it all Marx Grudge

P.S.

Pay no attention to the man behind the bleeps.

Stars: Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; Marx Grudge (see we already did it!..); WWJD; Beast & Sovereign.

As promised, our fun episode: pets! Did we end up keeping it G-rated and uncritical, no! Did we find a way to critique the adorable perfection of our feline and canine friends, yes! We also talked about sweet-16 Ponies, crazy cat ladies, imperialism, and Lacan's Imaginary.

Hello audient! (Jake says we have one more but I know it's still, as always, just you...)

So we did an episode about fracking. Missing Jack on this one...

We had a lot to say. But it was all pretty depressing. Still, as someone else had probably already said (#nocuck), if you don't open your eyes in the dark they could never get used to it (and see the little light that's left).

Fracking is a technology meant to extract oil and gas, not from underground repositories or "pockets," but from rock; to penetrate inside the rock, to take what the rock had locked away within. The process involves (ab)using a great deal of water, making it irrevocably toxic, and shooting it at high pressure, within the rock, so as to break its integrity; widening cracks, and keeping these cracks open for more pressure to break them down further. The toxin in the water serves to capture the released oils and gases in a way that is more effectively extracted. It also proceeds to seep into the ground, poisoning water supplies, plants, animals, causing cancer...

...and all with a certain impunity. It is this impunity that we are (angrily) tossing towards. Yes, in both meanings of the word. 

We wanted to look at fracking as the technological manifestation of a certain logic that... "inspires" let's say our political and ethical assumptions. This logic, once understood, can be seen everywhere (as well as its results): the ret-con of lovable stories and characters (until all the love is sucked out and all the fans feel betrayed); the abuse of language/discourse by/in Social media (punishing empathy with toxicity - this is deliberate and done by innumerable bots); austerity measures leading to social collapse (by way of undercutting/humiliating local values)...

Blaise Pascal wrote a line in his 'Pensees' that Levinas liked to cite: "'That is my place under the sun' is how the usurpation of the world began." Thinking of other belief-structures, non- or pre-Monotheist, we offer a critique of this quote insofar as it assumes a Christian 'I'. It is this I's possession that usurps the world. 

And we do see fracking a doing just that. John Locke shows us the logic of this possession: claiming the land as 'private property' gives me absolute power over it. Just like with the industrial revolution's effect on the climate, and with the same impunity. This is a metaphysics, an understanding, that did not occur before, or outside of, Monotheism. 

And it is dangerous because it is only a totality - human, all too human - but armed with claims to infinity. 

Fracking doesn't wait for time. It has no time. It follows a logic of hunger, but a desperate hunger, the resentful hunger of the slave. This hunger will even suck the marrow from the bone. Fracking, not just literally, leaves no stone unturned.

That is how the usurpation of the Earth began.

This, pathetic, impunity has no honor. it is the impunity of the starved and desperate; the impunity of ressentiment, of the shit-eating grin. Even when it rules, as it does nowadays, it has no power to call its own, no pride or anchor. 

It sees no future (like a Bull seeing red..).

There was so much more (and less) in the pod, if you have the mental fortitude. We had Derrida, Bataille, and even Israel made an appearance..

 Too many Stars in this episode.

Today we shared 4 of our favorite quotations and discussed them on their own and in relation to each other. We quoted Dorothy Parker, Lex Luthor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Marvel Comics, Richard Rorty, Moby Dick, Ru Paul, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. 

Greetings, audient!

This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal.

The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before contemporary dictators started slamming it down more forcefully (bullies invariably go for the weaker targets). In this episode we try to think of the university through the prisms of  democracy, political economy and, not least, metaphysics. 

The university today is seeing more and more threats to its relevance (and a fortriori, funding). The younger generations see this establishment as a "waste of taxpayer money," as something best left alone or left to Automated Intelligence (AI) devices, or left in the past. We try and trace this scarcity of the university as the stronghold of learning and teaching as a value in itself, one facing towards the future with hope and pride. 

Sagi takes the university to task for their theological roots and the Christian, metaphysically anti-Judaic ethos of Truth that has come to pervade (and pervert) it, for being anti-Judaic compels us, foundationally and methodologically, to value truth over justice (which comes, as Nietzsche had already pointed out, to a radical devaluation of value as such). 

Andy shares with us his bittersweet travels through ivy-league woke Humanities departments, the various petty egoisms that animate it in a kind of pathetic posturing and grandiloquence that settles for crumbs of value and importance. He brings up wokeism as a kind of rot that has taken over the Humanities. 

Andy's dog shared his sentiments.

Addressing these issues requires, as Jake reminds us, being slow and careful. For, though it may look like the academic jobifications and woke-rots that proliferate today mark the closure, the end of the university's horizons (especially when "debated" on 'social media'), the need for critical thinking, for creating and enriching discourse and understanding of life and experience, are still at the core of this institution. Jacques Derrida, that many see as supporting an oblivious gutting of the university's functions and ideals, is actually an example of responsibility; to trace our current experience to where the university's original, however fantastic, ethos still holds sway, power, pride, and can still nourish value.

Jack, out proud representative of the STEM disciplines, points out the lack of co-authorships in the Humanities, following a capitalist logic of branding that turns the scholar humble. Jack calls it a humiliation ritual, and Sagi was quick to interject Max Weber's critiques of the professionalization and "rationalization" of scholarship, and the Bildung they inflict on the scholar: the latter trains the scholar for hopeless work, churning publications as a vehicle for promoting one's brand, making scholarly experts follow a logic of monopoly and "cornering a market (of ideas)" rather than enriching the understanding or cross-pollinating with other university discourses in order to think differently about life, the universe, and everything...

There's much more, of course. Dare a listen.

Stars: WWJD, Pervs 'R Us; Marx Grudge