12/17/2020 - The year is slowly coming to a close. We’ve made it through a long period of isolation, and hopefully, the new year has some “goodies” set out for us. I’ll skip on speaking at length about the Covid-19 vaccine since I find it quite banal.
I’ll lay out what to expect in terms of immediate content in the following weeks. To start, this Sunday the latest episode of Wicked Lyotard. Episode two will dive into chapter two of Libidinal economy so if you haven’t heard the monster of an episode that came out last week, take the time to support it by clicking the embedded link to Cooper’s podcast.
For this issue of the Substack there will be a Blogpost on my Medium, please go show some support by just keeping up with my posts. If you want to have the fastest updates on my posts outside of the email every Friday, consider following me on Twitter. I’m really active on Twitter and a lot of my “pilot” content is always going to be published on Twitter first.
Next week I will be taking a Christmas break. This means no new Medium post and as of now no Substack newsletter as well. You may still want to check your email for some “quirky gift” but that’s all I can say at this time.
Happy Holidays if I don’t see you next week,
-C.N
Indebted
This next section is more a self-reflection on how “indebted” I am to Mark Fisher. I’m writing this to point out how much his thought has impacted my personal trajectory and way of thinking. There are many people online, especially on my side of the Twittersphere who really like Fisher, although at times it can be quite obnoxious. On the other hand, some may be a bit overcritical of Fisher, stating how derivative of other thinkers he is, or how he’s just stating simple or rudimentary insights with “flashy” or “poppy” style. There is definitely room to criticize Fisher in some of his work. After all, there is no such thing as a perfect set of works, but I do think that being hypercritical of Mark Fisher for not being rigorous enough is honestly not understanding the task of his projects as trying to be easily accessible works that mix high and low concepts. This stylistic sampling of concepts is both a reflection of Fisher as a writer/cultural theorist, particularly when it came to music, but was also a reflection of the type of theory you’d expect from a Capitalist subject.
I appreciate Fisher’s work less from a theoretical standpoint and more from a literary. I don’t want to say that Fisher was some genius writer but he was definitely terrific. His work is something that helped me understand writing/philosophy not merely as some academic exercise but as an act of expression. I think this is where Spinoza and Deleuze’s influence on Fisher is evident. Fisher’s work is riddled with an understanding of affectivity, it understands that one of the most powerful tools produce change is via the passions. This is one of the biggest themes underlying Capitalist Realism. If Capitalist Realism can be understood as some hazy malaise that permeates everything including our subjectivity, then what kind of effects can we collectively produce to propagate real material and social change?
I don’t want to pretend I’m picking up where Fisher left off. I just felt like I needed to point out that in a lot of ways, I’m incredibly indebted to him.
Non-Time
“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” - Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher
If you’ve been keeping up with my previous blog posts you may have realized that a lot of them have to do with Time. In all honesty, the idea of time is one that I find particularly pressing. In “Acid-Communism: The Struggle for Free Time” I mention how the pursuit of free time itself can be characterized as a class struggle. Free time is produced through technological innovation that liberates individuals from time spent doing labor. (continue reading…)
Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy: Cuck Philosophy released a new episode on The Simpsons going over many themes that I thought tied very well to the Medium post linked above. This includes Post-Modernisms self-referential logic, Jean Baudrillard's, and Mark Fisher’s notion of Capitalist Realism.
If you’re interested in Bitcoin and DIY projects, this video shows 8 Raspberry Pi 3’s With CPU Miner Installed Hooked Up To A 5 Volt 20 AMP Power Supply. I’m not exactly sure what the Hash rate is for this setup or if it’s particularly profitable but still found this interesting. Here’s a different cluster as a follow-up.
What if we Nuke the Moon? - it’s pretty much what you think.
This might be the funniest thing Sony could have done regarding Cyberpunk 2077 being abysmal on Console. To boil it down, SONY removed the game from their online store and offered refunds.
Song of the Week: This is probably my favorite track on the most recent Gorillaz Album. I grew up listening to Gorillaz and this might be one of the songs in a long time that actually got me excited for new Gorillaz music earlier this year.