The Opportunity of Nihilism

The nihilist-to-post-nihilist move is an evolutionary and cognitive mutation of a species that has been too drunk by its own desire-infused semiotic feedback loops for far too long. We have been intoxicated by all the stories and the successes they allowed since the beginning. Now excess and abuse of those same stories and practices can finally help us hit rock-bottom and confront the consequences of our addiction to ourselves. We can now change. We can mutate and become immune to our ideological successes in order to confront our practical failures.

Those of us no longer hung over from God’s colossal wake are content only in forging new worlds while others seek new intoxications that might allow them to cling to their principles, axioms and nostalgia. Our species does not need more ‘isms’, even if its coated in the soothing logic of norms and predicates. What we need is a perpetual disillusionment that fosters brave new pragmatisms and animal becomings. What we need is post-nihilist praxis.

Source: The Opportunity of Nihilism | synthetic zerø

Did humans create the Sahara Desert?

New research investigating the transition of the Sahara from a lush, green landscape 10,000 years ago to the arid conditions found today, suggests that humans may have played an active role in its desertification.

Source: Did humans create the Sahara Desert?

Austerity Kills. And Then Some.

The best metaphor I can think of is: Austerity is like bloodletting in the Middle Ages, only with a lower success rate.

Source: Austerity Kills. And Then Some. – The Automatic Earth

Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge

James Mattis’ unpublished testimony before a Senate panel recognizes a threat others in the administration reject or minimize.

Source: Trump’s Defense Secretary Cites Climate Change as National Security Challenge – ProPublica

Disengage from the Spectacle

If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference.

Source: Disengage from the Spectacle – Resilience

Aftermath

I also think a turn to the personal realm, to cultivating deep friendships and family relations and the aesthetic and spiritual domains of life, can be a critically important way to stay sane, despite the apparent madness of the external world. This is a strategy intellectuals and other free-thinkers have adopted when living under oppressive regimes throughout history, sometimes creating masterpieces that emerged later on.

We should by all means all continue to work in whatever ways we can to nudge the external world in more positive directions, despite these now massive headwinds, so I’m not at all advocating withdrawal from collective affairs, but I think moving one’s center of gravity a little bit more inwards, in a quest for whatever long-lived, time-tested beauty, meaning and truths one can find, can bring some solace in hard times, and can actually help us in the very challenging struggles we are bound to be facing in the next few years.

Source: Aftermath – Medium

You Got This

Become invincible. Allow yourself to experience joy at every available opportunity. Yes, things are really bad.

But you got this.

Source: You Got This – Aeonography Part 4

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

Source: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds – The New Yorker

In the opening sections of Das Capital Karl Marx would utter the strange and terrifying truth about capitalism: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” We are mere cattle upon which the machinic assemblages of Capital cannibalized and expulsed as excess and extraneous waste. The notion of sleep has been used by poets and Gnostics alike throughout time as the leitmotif of ignorance, bliss, and innocence. Asleep in one’s ignorance goes the saying. To be asleep is to be so immersed in the normalization process of the worlds ubiquitous systems that one no longer has that critical acumen to be able to step away, step back, step out of one’s environment and see it for what it is: an artificial construct within which one is imprisoned. All the Zombie films from Romero’s classic to the latest edition have one theme: the mindless hunger and desire of the consumer for its next meal ticket, the endless feeding frenzy of a mindless horde in search of filling the emptiness of its depleted flesh, its desiring machininc life. Like sleeping zombies we move to the puppet strings of invisible codes and algorithms that supplement, decide, and program our lives within a 24/7 dreamworld constructed to fulfill our deepest desires.

Without even the slightest thought we are being slowly but surely integrated into a machinc civilization that will in turn feed on us until it has no need for us at all.

Source: southern nights | An artist is a creature driven by demons —William Faulkner

The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” – Gary Kasparov

Source: The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers | Collapse of Industrial Civilization