When does a technological process stop and say, “You know something guys, I think you all have had enough for now, a whole society addicted to smartphones, an entire generation of children’s brains fractured to the glow of pixilated screens, internet sensors in all of your appliances and automobiles, tech companies controlling the world; you know something, I just think you guys had enough for now.”
The answer of course is never.
On the far contrary, a global technological process such as the one we are now subject to can only say, “More. You people need more. …
In my view, the two most extreme forms of language on Planet Earth are code and icaros, which are the songs of the ayahuasca shamans in the Upper Amazon Basin.
These two linguistic processes are like the opposing goal posts of human language; all language falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
Code, in all of its various operating systems, is the language that effectively runs the global technological apparatus. Code is ultimately based on a utilitarian capitalist-mathematic logic that seeks to eventually incorporate the entirety of the human experience into its operative logic. …
Where is the power?
Regarding the history of revolutionary or insurrectionist flash points, the goal in such moments was always to seize power: the most obvious example, in 1789 the French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, an institution that represented for them the power of the French state that they wanted for themselves. In other words, the point of such moments is always to seize power away from those that hold it.
But what happened in America in early January, what did the “revolutionaries” of Donald Trump’s America do when they “stormed the Capitol building?”
Did they seize power away from…
In one of my books I named the four major ideological centers in America that now structure global capitalism in its current state, briefly:
1. Wall Street: zero point of capital
2. Silicon Valley: creator of the networks that facilitates desire and capital to move and accelerate
3. Madison Avenue: mediator of the Other’s desire
4. Hollywood: construction of the fantasy frame by which we are permitted to experience social reality
It is undeniable that all four of these power centers overwhelmingly support Joe Biden; it is also undeniable that they despise Donald Trump even as Trump signifies the repressed…
Capitalist globalization is a process of “becoming Same,” it is a planetary process of capturing, not so much bodies, as it is minds, souls, and the human spirit into a network mediated by the synchronization of global capitalism and computational power.
The seeming diversity that we see and hear so much of today is actually an ideological distortion, a distortion that is being forced upon the population by the neoliberal-managerial class to make us blind to the fact that what is being lost today is precisely the reality of the Other and the tremendous, tremendous diversity and potential care that goes along with contacting the Other’s embodied reality.
This is a short film I directed a couple of years ago that I just made public this week for the first time.
It stars the extremely talented actor Jimmy LeBlanc who has been featured in films like “Spotlight,” “Gone Baby Gone,” and “Stronger” amongst others; the Kenyan bon actor Ted Ndinya, and James McCarthy. It was photographed by Jabari Canada and produced by Norman Lang.
The link is here
I think Claudia Conway, the daughter of Kellyanne Conway who has become a recent TikTok star, is making a very strong case for being the symbol of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual devastation that excess social media is having upon the lives of American teenagers and their families of origin.
Unfortunately, much of the American media has uncritically praised her as “a whistleblower” and “a hero,” but in fact this young girl is doing something that resembles digitally pimping out not only her own mother, but her very soul for any click, like, or view she can generate for her…
We are fast approaching a point in the intersubjective texture of American life in which if one does not find immediate agreement with someone else’s discourse or language, it will automatically be experienced as oppressive, violent, and privileged.
This does not point to something simple like, “The problem is we are refusing to really listen to each other and understand,” but rather the fact we have passed the point in which listening to the Other is even possible.(1)
The worst kind of violence, which is always an outward expression of internalized emotional and spiritual dysfunction, does not emerge from differentiation…
The function of the sacred in indigenous communities and archaic societies across the planet was always the power to keep violence at a distance; the capacity to somehow protect the community from the specter of internal destructive violence.(1)
This sacred power was always accessed through ritual, ceremony, and in certain cases, the use of psychoactive plants, a point noted specifically by Terence McKenna in his theory of hominization and the early developments of human community.(2)
Today, the sacred, this mysterious power that keeps human beings at a distance from open violence against each other, is thoroughly rooted in the mechanisms…
The greatest “social justice warrior” in the history of the West is perhaps St. Paul. And the reason why Paul’s words are so powerful regarding equality and justice is because Paul was very much in touch with his own corruption and violence; he knew very well his own weaknesses and his blind spots, thus his words carry so much potent spiritual power.
The Twitter social justice warrior in our present moment, on the far contrary, not only speaks from a place of subjective innocence the majority of the time, but also from an objective, pseudo-scientific viewpoint that draws on the contingent wisdom found in popular sociological texts of the moment.
The lesson from Paul is that a true “social justice warrior” is a person who wants justice precisely because he or she knows very well how profoundly unjust he or she is capable of being.
Brian Francis Culkin
writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist / author of 15 books and writer/director of 3 films. www.brianculkin.com
