A highly speculative theory I've got is that Reddit (rabid hobbyism) was born centuries ago within the ranks of British aristocracy to channel need for political freedoms into harmless (sic) hobbies. Post-war, this became the trajectory for masses and valid up till today.

Came back here to say that my optimistic theory is that the world has not descended into night completely yet and we have time until the ai bubble bursting, which will be like a friendly tap on the shoulder to global fascists already or close to being in power.

A strange thing I've discovered recently is the incredible amount of Japanese youtubers either don't speak at all or use text-to-speech on their videos. Subtitles only approach is somehow soothing, while the robotic voices and anime avatars are uncanny.

Ever since childhood, I wondered why exactly TV journalism is of such terrible quality that you could probably get more information from a tabloid op-ed column. Tv news formats seem to rely entirely on the authority of their voice.

It's truly baffling that the greatness of all religions rests upon human craftsmanship of aesthetic objects, the effects of which have been coopted for so long. Truly the best thing to happen to fine arts is that divorce from sacral.

Someone should write about rise of rent-seeking jobs in a rent-seeking social formation as all sorts of labor gets squeezed further by rent-seeking. So influencers, podcasters and other grifter professions are seen as the most prospective career options by younger generations.

Only recently dawned on me that cultural objects do not submit to exhaustive monotonic explanations of their value, role or function. You can't really say "this object is made of this many gramms of expensive materials, therefore" and expect it to explain it's cultural value.

"How do you know this?" is such a fun question: it either unlocks a whole area of philosophy and solves many problems OR it's a question so annoying it will end friendships and relationships.

Often wonder if there was a time when daily experiences in different languages felt differently - due to being built up from different cultural artifacts. But I guess no one would be able to compare different phenomenologies.

Nice diagram by Rescher from his book on Philosophical Dialectic

I see you, and I raise you

Depressed to report that the only really original philosopher of ASD I know turned out to be an IQ peddling crank.

Realistically speaking, I think there are investment people out there reading up on the polycrisis just now and thinking "that's the way forward".

Nations, peoples, races, genders and religions are obviously fake but repression based on these invented categories is real and this violence is what makes these categories concrete.

A deeply annoying aspect of all artistic work is no matter how much stuff you make, write or perform, you're always flying blind. You never know what is for sure the right direction, nor do you know what people really think about your work. Total leap of faith stuff.

Knausgaard essay surprisingly hits on many interesting points regarding enchantment of the world relation to aesthetics and cognitive development. Unsurprisingly doesn't expand on either, taking them as just good literary bits. And the Bridle interview and ending are really meh.

As a distraction from descent into madness, been reading up parts of the current story where one programmer has been acting out a strange dance of first pretending to contribute to a massively popular and important FOSS Linux component (Xorg display server) via largely meaningless but buggy

It might be entirely post hoc on my part, but the idea of the theory-free immediate knowledge of authorial intent connects to Griffith’s theory of palingenetic ultranationalism—pre-theoretically knowing the hidden historical structure of Our Lost Heritage (also the Protestant doctrine of meaning)

Wrote 4k words on faith in a disenchanted world. On what faith means to me in the impossibility of theism. Where I'd go when there is nowhere left to turn. Don't know if this is philosophy exactly. Just thinking out loud about things I've never really thought about. equalparallel.com/void-cloud-l...

The most moral thing to say and do right now would probably be illegal.

Website up again. Hope to put up more recent writing there soon. equalparallel.com

I might say bad things about Adam Curtis.

Interesting, if perhaps excessively optimistic text. Can't quite tecall much writing in the area of philosophy of CLI! Maybe just adjacent in Neal Stephenson's "In the beginning was the command line". echo.orpheusinstituut.be/article/prom...

Every time I listen to a conversation with Ray Brassier, I get a strong desire to read and write philosophy. To pick the thickest, most challenging book. To write things in the most urgent, serious manner.

Social contract theories are probably some of the worst and most naive (and class specific!) ways to read history one can find in philosophy. Truly bottom shelf stuff from the supermarket of ideas.

Did anyone write about fascism in this key more extensively? On fascism as "the cult of violent affect"? Except Theweleit that is and various literature exploring sadism, transgression and politics aesthetically. Quote from Gellner:

I get the sentiment, but this sort of tech industry has never existed in contemporary times. It was always about repackaging someone else's labor sold as improvement under pretense of technological progress. It was always in the way of said progress, just the repackaging got more extreme.

Seems to me too many conversations these days start with "at some point there will be a reckoning for x and y" and I think these are very optimistic words missing the point that genocide is now permissible in a kind of an international political and ethical playbook.

Hayek: humanity is a mass no different from ants guided by rules signalled subconsciously, agency is an illusion, there is no escape, liberty is for rules, not individuals Also Hayek: we need to create international organisations to make sure no one slaps the invisible hand uwu

In a sense globalised pop culture has created a vocabulary of emotions and gestures that's close to universal in being a dictionary for all available human experiences. Whether it's descriptive or constitutive. Something that actually was a kind of a beautiful moment.

Weekend plans decided for the whole month: youtu.be/Pfok4B_xyaI?...

What do you call the phenomenon of playing more music from the wishlist than from the owned collection?

So apparently one of Putin's daughters lives in Paris and works in a gallery that works with "anti war" russian artists. Fun times.

"elon was wearing thin" is such a brilliant euphemism. Apparently all happy oligarchies are alike, but each unhappy oligarchy is unhappy in its own way.

Once or twice a year I get a flashback to the time when I first had COVID and suddenly felt the need to watch a tennis tournament. Roland Garros this year is particularly fun cause of Loïs Boisson coming in hard out of (seemingly) nowhere. Really supporting her!

My fav sound art work is the PS2 background main menu (with no disc) ambience. There's plenty of online mythology of how it's been made and whether it is or isnt a field recording. But most importantly it seems to be the sound many, many childhoods: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxk1...

Incredible to me there's a type of guy in 2025 who earnestly holds the belief that deregulation=technological progress.

Everything can be utilized, repurposed, re-reasoned in a different context, turned on its head, turned into an essay etc. - there really are no intellectual dead ends. But there sure are philosophical dead ends,

Found out the music of Jon Hassell. Kind of like Ninja Tune by way of avantguard composers of 20th century (its the other way around ofc in actuality). Looots of very impressive chattering movements going on. Fun stuff www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMWh...

Slightly uncanny and scary feeling this week as multiple people encountered in professional environment are suddenly aggressively pro-ai as a personal and professional consultant, insisting we have to utilize it somehow in our lives.

Learned today that Microsoft has a stranglehold on...all desktop hardware by monopolizing the way software communicates with hardware on the low level and that all Linux systems use a "windows shim" to communicate with chips? What? enaix.github.io/2025/06/03/a...

Time for some autism posting: for years I've dreamt of a device that gives some sort of quiet signals about the passage of time, like a quiet chiming clock. In my mind this could help with being sucked into things like digital routines, so against time blindness. Decided to try

This is so well made and once again makes me think internet visual culture exceeds in construction of aesthetic artifacts built around ugly, disgusting, unpleasant, uncanny in a way that works around the kitsch of "beauty" that pervades internet commercially making the work that much more free.

Sprained a muscle in my face yesterday when speaking to someone about autism and they said "oh, so you're like M*sk!". Now my jaw hurts.

Can't wait for the future when all nations, nationalities and folk identities collapse entirely and if you wish to have one you have to actively be the librarian, scholar and inventor of it's culture.

I sincerely want to write about the idea and practice of aesthetic tourism but am still not sure that sort of thing exists outside my own mind. Not to say people occasionally fall for certain vibes and nostalgia, but what I mean is doing this on purpose, like a tourist.

Despite my overall fatigue with the harmonic ambient music (with it's predictable sentimental medleys stretched in time) I keep coming back to Hiroshi Yoshimura and Green is probably one of my fav albums of all time. youtu.be/Jx7CyMZVhHY?...

Weirdly enough I've held the view that there are no smart and no stupid people pretty much all my life. Realising that talents aren't real as long as we don't mean specific biological physical aspects, this one took longer.

Always had the intuition that IQ measurement and tests are made up nonsense, so I'm glad that it's gradually becoming a popular object of ridicule via exposure of direct connection to race pseudo science. Now we just need to do the same for evo psych.

Trying to gradually switch to Linux for job and personal stuff and the situation with software for writing is a disaster: either learn to love arcane terminal based text editors with fragile plugin scaffolding or learn to love fragile emulations of proper stuff like Scrivener.