Jean-François Lyotard and the (“(colonial pipelines)”) “””hack”””
smash that mfin play button every section has a track, don’t you dare skip the music
We’ve been over this format in the past blogpost, but I’m going to introduce you to a small facet of a complex thinker’s work, set out a series of facts about a current event, and then make my argument about what matters. There’s an infinite amount of stupid things you can say about everything online, but these blogs are about indicating what things are productive.
In that spirit, I’m going to start by listing things that I am thankful to God for before my blog posts. I am often negative, and focus on detracting or revealing or critiquing, and I am truly blessed in my life. I am thankful to God for my daughter, for my fiance, for Randy, for my friend who came over this morning and spoke to me face-to-face. I am thankful to God that there are diapers in my age, that I am able to speak to so many bright minds with such ease. I am thankful that my Twitter still hasn’t been banned, and I am thankful for you, dear reader.
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Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
“de-realization of the world means the disintegration of narrative elements into ‘clouds’ of linguistic combinations and collisions among innumerable, heterogeneous language games.”
(All quotes are from this book)
I don’t know anything about this guy’s personal life, and I don’t really care to find out. What is important is that he is a French Marxist with a lot of very interesting things to say about language, verification of knowledge, and the synthesis of metanarratives.
Basic argument: Technology and the impact of scientific thinking, coupled with capital’s ability to co-opt resistance as well as the late-stage capital state, have brought about shifts in language-games. There is a language game going on all the time, there is a meta to the game, and the current meta for language games is a little wonky. Since we are impacted by these language games, their wonkiness is problematic.
“A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island… young or old, man or woman, a person is always located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits. One is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass,” (15).
It’s very easy to get lost in the weeds when it comes to French intersubjective literature, and I don’t think there is any need for us to go too crazy here, because we are lazy thinkers and prefer to think about the State.
Lyotard argues that institutions use their power to coalesce the power of the people (what does the State do buddy, no shit I like roads), and also to place “constraints [which] function to filter discursive potentials, interrupting possible connections in the communication networks: there are things that should not be said,” (17). The state is explicitly attempting to change what you think and say is possible. The state, the CIA, the FBI, whatever agency you dislike the most, uses language as tool. A weapon. Replace advertising with “the new york times/the washington post/verified twitter accounts/forced youtube ads about the vaccine.”
Now I’m going to cite a friend of mine whose twitter account was banned, because just like I always say, institutions tend to interrupt possible connections in the communication network.
Lyotard actually has something interesting to say with regards to breaking out of the state/corporate/what’s the difference-imposed language prison, and it isn’t revolution! It is a personal intersubjective prescriptive! Each subject is referred to as an atom, and the dynamic of interpersonal communication between the atoms is one of ‘perpetual motion.’ “Each language partner, when a ‘move’ pertaining to him is made, undergoes ‘displacement,’ an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee and referent, but also as sender,” (16). This happens when you go online, all the time. It happens when your grandma asks you about the vaccine, you displace your views to a more tolerable iteration, you respond within these linguistic bounds. This changes how I am as a person, who I am as grandson, family member, etc. The issue here is that the vaccine conversation has been state-saturated by control-language that talking to a person, actually talking to them not just rattling off buzz-phrases to one another, about the issue is borderline impossible. There are no lateral moves in the linguistic game they have set up for you. COVID is scary, but the vaccine’s side effects aren’t. Yeah it wasn’t tested for long, but it was extensively tested. There is no move on that board.
So what do you do? (What do I do?) I poast.
“That is why it is important to increase displacement in the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected ‘move’ (new statement),” (16). You poke the bear with a stick, whatever stick is sharp enough to make it do something new. You say that aliens brought COVID to earth, just to find see someone react genuinely to what you said instead of recycling phrases from State-Media-Phrase-Factory_CNN. Poast the word Cum 30 times, say you’re “at pub” for 4 years straight in a giant thread. Get out there and Poast.
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“wow man that is just so crazy that the pipeline attack occurred immediately before the introduction of Biden’s infrastructure bill, which focuses on spending obscene amounts of money on (((climate change))) which is a real issue because the CIA and Big science told me so!”
I don’t know if you guys know what a Bitcoin is, but I can give you a quick summary.
>bitcoin is a bubble
>bitcoin is a store of value
actually, bitcoin is more like spiritual indulgences. if you don’t have btc, they won’t even bother to run you in ancestor simulations. Martin Luther = fuming nocoiner — Hakan Ratmwort
So the Big Bad Hackers were technically adept enough to shut off the pipeline, ask for BTC, evade tracking for the duration of the operation, and then just Slipped on a Technical Banana Peel and put all their bitcoin into ONE WALLET in SOUTH CAROLINA. Then, the FBI, because they are our heroes, saved the day and let the Spice Flow.
The “hackers” were the FBI, colonial was in on the entire operation, the FBI put the BTC on that PC, the FBI made another excellent little press cycle for themselves where they get to dress up as both Hackerman and Superman. A 20% budgetary increase for you, good sirs.
Oh here’s the part where you want to say “oh where are your sources, why don’t you verify this, what are the details, where I can I get him?” Here’s a sick trick: I don’t fucking care at all about the sources look it up yourself and forge your own world of the information you yourself forage. Figure it out bucko, I’m not gonna MLA cite this like a research paper like some sort of NERD.
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Application!
There are going to be 30 more “Colonial Pipelines” in the next month. We’ll only talk about 2 or 3, then we’ll go onto the next thing. What I’m trying to do here is give you the tools to find out what is worth saying about the Next Big Thing.
subpoint 0 : Dasein what are you talking about when you spell post “poast.” Posts are letting your friends know that you are heading to the coffee shop, and to go ahead and get the discussion started without you you’ll be there in a few minutes. Poasts are vital, energetic, disturbing. Like a sir francis bacon painting, they demand to be stared at. I’m about those Poasts big Dog.
1) Is your “poast” increasing or disorienting displacement? Is it something that is going to cause the person who sees it to wake up out of Silicon Valley Dopamine Tik Tok Drooling Trance Mode. Will it make them think.
2) Stop caring about what is true and what is not. Truth is a psyop, same as Zero, same as Infinity.
There are sub-specialities in the Truth industry. Being a guy who is obsessed with being right is like being a guy who collects Funko pops: yeah, you have all the right ones, but you feed your soul into a corporate machine for years to get them. There are White Supremacy Truth Companies (SPLC, ADL), there are Cultural Truth Companies (Polling Companies, the New York Times), there are all these little factories filled with people that you hate, and they are chugging out Truths™️ at a prodigious rate. Stop buying them, stop caring. You make the truth.
3) Talk to human beings. Talk to them while looking them in the eye, watch how the purest iteration of mankind is not alone on the mountaintop, but alongside their brothers and sisters. We are all waiting for you, just outside the door. We’ve missed you.
4) Please stop worrying so much. Matthew 6:25–34.
