I hate my job with a passion. That is sad.
I still wonder how I do for a fraction of what I should be compensated, on a dead-end job with absolutely no future and no respect. What happened to you, Pouya?
Will I ever get the courage to leave this job?
We have some preferences that manifest themselves in our choices when we are making new things. Say for example that you are making a cafe. There are many decisions to be made, and you are empowered to create the things which you so much love but you never find elsewhere. For example: say you dislike a certain chair, and believe that one very specific chair is the one and only one chair that is “right”, wherever you go the chairs make you angry, and then you have the opportunity to fix this issue, but only in one place that is your cafe.
By this, world becomes evolutionary. There are newer and newer cafes born everyday, each with a new DNA of choices, and in a Darwinian sense (Maestro Darwin), only the competent survives—which in this context result to others taking that choice and not thinking about it.
This is a very interesting topic in itself, but today I am wondering, if this is continued for an extended time, will it result in more and more choices becoming the “optimum” and thus, at a point, arriving at something that leaves no room for further thinking? Will there ever be a cafe template that every cafe around the whole world adheres to as is?
This then moves beyond this to my theory of “Great Contraction”. Where I would argue that if that be the case, there will be more and more “right” templates, some of which will concert the cafe. And if that becomes a possibility then a Cafe and a Restaurant, and even possibly the Kitchen will shrink and merge and so on into the singularity. Thinking about it is fascinating.
Adorno gives a very short description of the “Zeitgeist” that characterizes the specific dialectic of enlightenment. Here he talks about the “Identität von Intelligenz und Geistesfeindschaft” the ‘identity of intelligence and enmity against the spirit’, if translated literally, a little less literally, the identity of intelligence and anti-intellectuality, or even less literally but maybe more to the point: the identity of intelligence and idiocy. A very contemporary manifestation of this identity of intelligence and idiocy is ChatGPT: it’s a contradictory synthesis of highest intelligence and complete non-intelligence. In the context of this technological identity of intelligence and idiocy.
Adorno and Horkheimer […] say: “Enlightenment understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world, it wanted to dispel myth to overthrow fantasy with knowledge”
Following Marx, Guy Debord calls this kind of extreme consumerism a type of alienation. Alienation is a classic notion going back to Hegel and Marx, and Marx thought by not collectively owning the means of production, and the products that they produced, workers were as a class alienated. They didn’t own what they made, and the means by which they made it. Now, Guy Debord thinks that by turning all our life into a show, the society of the spectacle alienates us as well from our direct life experience. He says: “the spectacles function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation”
Guy Debord is influenced by French post-structuralist thinkers of the 1960s like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers talk about signs and signifiers that construct meaning not so much as representation of something real or of real objects, but in relation or in specific difference to other signs. In order to understand the meaning of signs or images or language you have to understand the discourse, the game within which they construct sense and not the things they may somehow refer to.
Guy Debord relates this critique of appearances to Marx’s critique of religion as opium for the people that is, it’s creating addictive illusions, and they are false consciousness. Guy Debord says by creating a world that is apparent, the spectacle has now taken on a similar function as religion traditions, and he writes: “the spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion, as a secular or post-religious religion or cult. It makes the false appear as real. The spectacle becomes paradoxically a real illusion that which is really real has been replaced by a paradoxical reality that is unreal”