sewercake
Joined 12 years ago
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Member since
Nov 26
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Comment · 4 years ago
` / ][p
Comment · 5 years ago
Patricio Guzman's 'Nostalgia for the Light' is a wonderful documentary 'about' Atacama. It cuts between the scientists using the telescopes and a collection of women who have been scouring the desert for fragments of the bodies of loved ones discarded during the pinochet regime. Both are using the space to probe history, just very different kinds and at very different scales. Very powerful and instructive exploration of the (dead) body, grief, and the necessity of 'witnessing'. Highly recommend it to everyone here!
Comment · 5 years ago
depends.
I get used to things. I have spent hundreds of hours using modern laptop computers to develop software, read articles, mindlessly consume social media content, watch porn. Because of these hundreds of hours, when I come to interact with my laptop computer, a set of pre-established affordances, feelings, and thought patterns immediately present themselves.
This goes away if I write in my notebook or type on my alphasmart, where a whole other host of feelings and thought patterns immediately appear. Usually, these are feelings and thought patterns that are localized to what I'm writing about, which makes writing (and thinking) much easier.
Comment · 5 years ago
There's a lot of 'political' content on instagram. do a quick google search for 'politigram' and you'll see what I'm talking about. That being said, there are definitely per-platform affordances that may change the degree and extent to which its expressed (and, crucially, to whom).
Comment · 5 years ago
While I'm not sure where I stand on this ruling, there's a flaw in this form of reasoning. Namely, I don't think this is merely (or at least usefully) reducible to 'efficiently editing a series of frames'. The ability to do so has emergent effects, and that should be taken seriously!
Comment · 6 years ago
It's interesting, many people in this comment section are pointing out other places, like greece, the caspian sea, the black sea, where cats are found all over the urban environment. What all of these places share (including istanbul) is their proximity to water, and presumably, ports! When I was in istanbul, I remember someone saying that the cats, historically, would help tame the massive rat populations that often plague both port cities and the hulls of ships. I don't have a source to back this up, but its some food for thought!
Comment · 6 years ago
Better Place was an early attempt at this strategy that ended in disaster, though I don't think you can attribute it to the underlying strategy. Here's a post-mortem on the company https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
Comment · 7 years ago
Are you thinking of guifi?
Comment · 7 years ago
Btr
Comment · 7 years ago
Could it be that people aren't _just_ becoming more sensitive, but that aspects of modern society are _causing_ mental health issues to appear at higher rates? I won't say 'capitalism is making everyone mentally ill', but it does seem that a large blind-spot in most discourse around mental health is environment. In this sense, 'medicalising' everyday does, in fact, provide a useful lens to examine mental illness.
Just food for thought.
Comment · 7 years ago
'nothing to do with profit' is a pretty strong claim. I think Marxists (and others) would argue that the two are stochastically linked. Decreases in the value of a good (the amount of labour-time used to generate it) roughly tracks with a decrease in the price (and thus amount of profit that the producer gets for each item) over longer time frames. I think that's what the author was implicitly referring to but I may be wrong!
As for financialization and profit: I think contemporary labour-value theorists, and even Marx, talk about fincancialization as 'fictitious capital'. The 'value' of financial instruments comes from the claim on future labour-time, and is thus generally parasitic for a well-functioning economy. Cedric Durad is a recent example of this. I'm stepping into territory I know very little about though, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt / generously.
Comment · 7 years ago
While there might be some puritanism in there, I think the implication is these theoretical errors lead to erroneous conclusions. I.e: Bastani is using certain conclusions from Marx, while changing certain premises, and not doing the work to then argue the conclusions still hold. I didn't read the piece closey enough (and my Marx isn't strong enough) to really go in-depth there though.
Comment · 7 years ago
Haven't read the book, but here are two (notably harsh) reviews:
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17006_fully-automat...
- Bastani claims scarcity is the central question in economic thought. This is a neo-classical formulation, and is not in line with the central questions of political economy that Marx's writings (who Bastani obviously references liberally) grapple with. This leads to some theoretical and historical errors
- Bastani does not have a strong grasp on the labour theory of value, or at least doesn't subscribe to it in Marx's formulation. Bastani believes you can have profit without human labour input, where, under the labour theory of value, the exchange of labour is _the_ source of all profit.
- treats the move from late-capitalism to communist utopia as inevitable, and doesn't really grapple with strategic concerns, building class-consciousness, etcetera
https://theecologist.org/2019/may/29/climate-communism-and-a...
- The project is part of a long line of Marxist 'technologically deterministic' theories and proposals. Basically that capitalism will lead to its own demise through the internal contradictions that define it.
- the reviewer is skeptical of technological solutions to climate change, and Bastani's work relies on this heavily
I like the line at the bottom of the second review that describes this book as 'soft science fiction'. Something to shift the Overton window, but not something that provides much actionable insight.