Autodidact, polymath, flaneur. Interests in Philosophy, probability, science, finance, political intelligence and large libraries.
Ocala, FL
Joined January 2012
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The Anti-Mimetic Man retweeted
The pro athlete "post-game interview" on camera embodies the Mediated Culture. There is a character that they are supposed to embody—with specific gestures, phrases, and a vibe they are meant to emulate.
That is why, when one of them breaks script for even a couple minutes—whether it's Allen Iverson talking about "practice", or the recent hockey goalie about how he can't think too much—it goes viral. Anything that feels like breaking out of the mimetic matrix!
Obviously, the same has worked out for some politicians, including Trump in 2015-2016—until he simply formed a mimetic vortex of his own on the New Right, and even small deviations are noticed.
It is just shocking how much the gestures, style of rhetoric, and tactics are mimicked—consciously, and unconsciously.
There's an interesting paradox in liberal societies. The more freedom and prosperity people enjoy, the more trivial their grievances seem to become. We've reached the point where a cartoon toasted bagel can generate moral outrage. zerohedge.com/political/mean…
Back in the day before the age of mimetic feminization of the entire culture, that Brewers catcher would have been steamrolled Ray Fosse -Pete Rose style.
The Anti-Mimetic Man retweeted
The problem isn’t that AI is intelligent. It isn’t. The problem is that too many adults (but not all) are at once mechanistic, imitative, unimaginative, stupid, formulaic, influenceable, & gullible, arrogant beyond their skill set, & too expensive to maintain.
Socially acceptable narratives police the boundaries of permissible thought. Truth is optional. Belonging requires compliance.
Climate alarmists in power: Reduce fossil fuel consumption! Shut down refineries! (which they do), Tax the drillers, tax the oil companies, shut them all down!
Same Climate alarmists (when not in power): Outrage! look at those gas prices!
The government objective to improve the lives of citizens is first order thinking. The second order effect is the citizen becomes more subservient to the state, for god's sake!
We've seen the outcome of that bullshit a million times.
“To BEGIN regularly, we must consider the idea of causation, and see from what origin it is deriv’d. ’Tis impossible to reason justly, without understanding perfectly the idea concerning which we reason; and ’tis impossible perfectly to understand any idea, without tracing it up to its origin, and examining that primary
impression, from which it arises.” - David Hume
The Anti-Mimetic Man retweeted
"I was happy not because of any particular book, but because I was surrounded by books."
Marcel Proust
We used to imitate people. Now we increasingly imitate the statistical shadow of other people’s behavior.
The machine does not need desires of its own. It only needs to discover which human desires are contagious.
"Recommendation algorithms are not merely neutral mechanisms for discovering consumer preferences. Pomella uses René Girard to argue that platforms have effectively industrialized mimesis. They observe imitation, quantify it, redistribute signals of desirability, and thereby stimulate further imitation. He calls one consequence “mimesis without subjects”, because algorithmic infrastructure can mediate mimetic processes without requiring a particular human model to initiate each cycle." journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…
The Anti-Mimetic Man retweeted
An impressive book, in crisply and succinctly setting out the scale of the decline in reading, and how the chaos of information in our uncurated and fragmented world causes many forms of decline in human flourishing. Ironically, of course, it will be mostly readers who read it.
If you care so much about egalitarianism, give up everything you have homo. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.
Billionaires are largely the outcome of the distribution, not its original cause. They may exploit and reinforce the system, but they did not create the century-long financialization of the global economy. That architecture was built by the interests that captured government, rewrote the rules, and fused political authority with financial power.
Today’s extreme wealth concentration is not evidence that government lacks authority. It is the unintended consequence of authority accumulated drip by drip, bureaucracy by bureaucracy, crisis by crisis, until the system became too captured to correct itself.
But keep voting for the same duopolistic bullshit. In four years, they will change the costumes, recycle the slogans, and sell you the same hyperreal system as reform.
When a society loses the capacity to understand complex systems, it does not stop looking for causes. It starts looking for culprits.
Politicians of the spectacle continually manufacture fantastical narratives of impending catastrophe, throwing one after another into the public arena until something resonates with their tribe. Once a narrative captures attention, it is repeated, amplified, and transformed into political identity. The spectacle becomes self-sustaining: fear substitutes for analysis, narrative substitutes for causality, and tribal affirmation substitutes for evidence.
It may be the most successful illusion in politics: convincing people that participating in the spectacle is the same thing as understanding the system.