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Zero is Immense
An Assemblage of Internet Randomness
6.13.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
Thanks for being a subscriber to <Technolalia> Newsletter. Last week’s Newsletter can be found below, as well as some of the things I’ve been reading lately:
Zero is Immense
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
“Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such suffering - the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colorful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest.”
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Our Modern Society - if there is such a thing as a “society”- finds itself in a deep double bind. On the one hand, the effects of the “Death of God” have “liberated” from the dogma of that time certain traditions and values, all of which, to one degree or another, stifled the ability for “progress.” Now it’s important to isolate what we mean by progress, as many would understand that progress in a particular domain such as economic growth, technological advancement, etc. A positive connotation should not always accompany it. For the most part, this has been the case; because of advances in certain fields due to the enlightenment, the average person gets to partake of pretty decent well-being.
On the other hand, since the Invention of the Atomic Bomb, the view of science, to one degree or another, has changed. The atomic Bomb showed that this same procedure for uncovering the natural world could/will lead to our undoing. It is deeply Promethean. But this leaves us with the prime condition of the modern individual—one with the deep longing for the fortitude of the soul. Now, I will not go into defining the soul as it would be a separate post in its entirety, but by soul, I do not mean some Metaphysical substance or component of our nature or some form of essence. Soul ,loosely defined, is the spirit or that satisfied by “appetitive virtues.” For if the mind is in optimal alignment when it is closest to reason and the higher virtues and the body is in optimal alignment when it is satisfied with the bodily pleasures. The Spirit is satisfied when it is in optimal alignment with things like glory, virtue, and meaning.
The a priori stance of modernity and late post-modernity is that of Nihilism. Everyone lives in a constant state of ironic distancing. If nothing is sacred, then everything is permitted. From the standpoint of theory, the schizophrenic character is the average person's mindset under capitalism. Capitalism is that which erodes long-standing traditions, values, and customs, presents this as natural or normal, and expands in a territorializing way, a Subjective Imperialism, if you will. It creates new regimes of order until these too are eroded and overcome by the following set/wave.
This state of Nihilism can ultimately lead one to seek meaning in the most mundane things, such as commodity gratification, ideological affirmation, and more. The most common of which tends to be ideological affirmation in consumer spending and habits. In a Nietzschean register, this mindset of creating one’s meaning of this “memefied” notion of the will to power has been captured and incorporated into capitalism’s mechanism of capture and expansion.
The current slave morality is that of an individual who seeks to remedy their Soul but approaches this either by shopping for a community, shopping for actual commodities, shopping for friends, etc. This is a critique of capitalism but, more recently, a critique of Web3 and its gross appropriation of spirituality.
Nihilism is interesting because it is not something that is to be avoided but it is also not a value or point in which one is to remain at. “Zero is Immense” because its infinitely abstract, there’s a point in which by negation nothing, and everything are one in the same, where the symmetry of 1 and -1 collide, and that collision is in 0. This is where Despair and Joy cross into attention to grace and gratitude.
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
To most the mantra of technocapital is to accelerate to just push past that of the old and to make way for the new and the novel and that this is inevitable. But this is modern slave morality at its deepest. For it commodifies ones soul and subjectivity in the search for that which brings about endless production, the new as the transcendent, novelty as god. If one to be a true critic of transcendence as many of these accelrationists claims then they would realize that true salvation comes with being with those being afflicted, as SImone Weil herself understood. Revolution is not found with a political party or ideology, one must side with the afflicted, for nurturing Virtue is the only way we can nurture the soul.
The truth of the matter is that most people affirming a traditional vitalistic mantra of the “will to power” are those who have succumb to the tendrils of techno capital, for they are already dead. Despair doesn’t blackpill us because the only way from -1 to 1 is through 0.
~Podcast
07 - DECODE - Strategy of Deception: In this episode of Decode, Yung and Cute dive into the work of Paul Virilio. As they uncover the current strategies of the state, they examine the contemporary phenomenology of war, from Geopolitics to Cyber-warfare.
~Links~
“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
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-C.N.
I found this statement very interesting and I'd love for you to elaborate if you can:
"The truth of the matter is that most people affirming a traditional vitalistic mantra of the “will to power” are those who have succumb to the tendrils of techno capital, for they are already dead. Despair doesn’t blackpill us because the only way from -1 to 1 is through 0."