0xADADA

Drawing from Debord and Heidegger, this film examines our subjective experience of time throughout history. It reveals how the relentless pursuit of productivity has shaped society and our perceptions of time, creating a perpetual present driven by an autonomous economy and accelerated by surveillance capitalism. The film explores the societal obsession with busyness and advocates for reclaiming time and leisure to foster true human flourishing.

yes, Meg Whitman

Forthcoming documentary film for the essay https://0xadada.pub/2024/05/01/the-disappearance-of-lived-ti...

The Power of ‘No’: Reclaiming Leisure from the Commodification of Time in an Age of Hyperactivity

I have a customer who refuses to migrate away from his Palm Pilot Desktop software Palm Desktop (Windows 7/8/10) last stable release was in 2008. No features have been added in 24 years. The Palm Pilot itself stopped working about 20 years ago. He runs the software in a Windows XP virtual machine.

He runs his entire business off the contact list in the software. Customer has over 50,000 contacts, which the software supports a max of 8k. I got around this limit by using the "Profiles" feature in the software, which allows you to configure multiple users-Each user allowed max of 8k contacts.

I created 10 profiles by dividing the English alphabet into 10 groups based on the frequency of last name first letter in his set of contacts:

Contact Group 1: A, K, T Contact Group 2: B, L, U Contact Group 3: C, M, V Contact Group 4: D, N, W Contact Group 5: E, O, X Contact Group 6: F, P, Y Contact Group 7: G, Q, Z Contact Group 8: H, R Contact Group 9: I, S Contact Group 10: J

Of course, when he needs to search or get data from his contacts, he needs to constantly switch profiles. I can only imagine how mundane that must be, but whatever floats your boat.

The _last_ thing I want more of is news. I quit news in 2020 and I'm been happier.

HotTake: the result of this should be to nationalize Amazon to be the defacto national provider of AWS services, delivery, logistics, and backstopped retail services.

dont' mistake a beautiful map for the territory, you'll find yourself lost amongst lines that aren't a real place.

This outcome is obvious when an ostensible ad-company (the Fox) builds the web browser (the henhouse).

The Alzabo is a monster from Gene Wolfes 'Book of the New Sun' series where it eats its victims and absorbs their thoughts and memories. It then speaks in the voice of its victims to lure the kinfolk of those hes eaten.

Banks also have a MASSIVE amount of CRE Commercial Real Estate (office buildings) that are completely empty, without lease payments flowing in, and since COVID-19 has shifted knowledge work to remote-first in many cities, these office will be empty for a long time.

The CRE bubble is going to burst in the next 18 months as the 5-year commercial office leases signed in 2017+ are all going to come to an end, and the banks will be realizing these losses starting now and the next few years. Its going to get ugly soon.

It is crystal clear no-brainer that municipalities need to disincentivize non-resident ownership of single, double and triple-unit residential properties with massive taxes.

TL;DR If you don't live there, you pay big massive taxes. If you live there, you don't.

danger is a driverless car turning left onto a bridge that has washed away during a flood, mistaking the map for the territory, it drives us off the bridge because we've eliminated the brakes because we think the car is smarter than the human inside it

4. The author advocates a return to prior existence, before all of this stuff ("The Spectacle") started happening: > [178:] A consciousness of history that threatens the spectacle is to discover the force potentially capable of reappropriating space for lived time.

He isn't advocating for a return to the past, or to the structures of the past. For Debord, Spectacle exists independently of humanity; history, however is specific to human beings, as it corresponds to humanity's existence in time, and to its awareness of that existence. He contends that human beings are capable of shaping and determining their own lives and circumstances. Consequently, history, in his view, is something that can be made: we can consciously shape our own existence in time. His critique of Spectacle is that Spectacle has dominated history for its own purposes, beyond the control of humanty.

History, therefore, is not just a retrospective catalog of events for Debord, and nor is it just the discipline of studying such events. Instead, it is a process through which human agents shape themselves and their world, and through which they come to know themselves through such activity. This isn't a return to a golden past, but an assertion of control and emancipation from the existing force of Spectacle that determines history outside our control.

5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence: > [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions.

Here again, he is advocating not a return to some mythic past, but to take conscious control of history, to create meaning in our own lives. I fail to see where he is advocating for a return, nor "what" to return to.

Debord was vehemently against a return to some mythical "Golden Age" and explicitly criticizes Fascism as such a return:

Its [fascisms] strength is how it presents itself truthfully as a violent resurrection of mythic origins—to claim the past as a “Golden Age” and a return to the successes of this golden past. It demands participation in a community held together by mythical archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, and the leader. Fascism is a cult of the archaic fitted out by modern technology

https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-103

Debord wants to move beyond a period where time is made up of clock-segmented moments of equally valuable commodities to a time determined by the creation of events and situations of our own making, with our own values and meanings inscribed into those successive moments.

Translator here, thanks for referring to this one, its one of my favorites

that internet denizens are already intimately familiar with them even to the point of DeBord's perspective as being a bit dated.

Social media, and TikTok in particular, push the limits of SotS which is mainly mass media focused.

it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).

Keep in mind that Debord was familiar with Lyotard, but postmodernism had only just recently started when this book was written. That said, Debord specifically refutes postmodernist tendencies in [thesis 179](https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179)

Note that Debords concept of Spectacle had *Three Degrees*

the concrete reality of the spectacle, as opposed to its relatively superficial existence as a set of mediatic and ideological practices, ‘can only be justified by reference to these ^^three degrees: simple technico-ideological appearances / the reality of the social organisation of appearances / historical reality^^’

On the first of these three ‘degrees’, or levels – that of ‘simple technico-ideological appearances’ – the spectacle is simply an ideological and media-driven ‘part of society’: something very much akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’. Seen in these terms, the spectacle is the sector of society ‘where all attention, all consciousness, converges’. This is the level of Debord’s analysis upon which much of the academic work referred to earlier has tended to focus.

Social media, TikTok, Facebook and the issues you discuss concern this level.

On the *second level* of this schema, however, and thus ‘behind the phenomenal appearances of the spectacle’, such as ‘television, advertising, the discourse of the State, etc.,’ we find what Debord refers to as ‘the general __reality __of the spectacle itself’, understood as ‘a moment in the mode of production.’ The concept of spectacle, addressed on this second, deeper level, pertains to the social operation of capitalist value, and to the manner in which society has been ordered to suit capital’s continued operation. On the first, more ‘superficial’ level of this schema, spectators contemplate the fads, fashions, adverts and trinkets that celebrate this social order; on this second, more profound level, they become contemplative observers of their own lives, because their social activity has become so thoroughly governed and shaped by that same order. This is the dimension of Debord’s theory that has been addressed by the best studies of his work. Anselm Jappe’s excellent __Guy Debord __(1993, in Italian; 1999 in English) is of particular significance here, as it deals with this theme in detail.

The second level entails that the concept of spectacle also operates on a *third level*: that of ‘historical reality’. In this regard, spectacle needs to be understood as __a relation to historical time__. For Debord, the articulation of all social existence via capitalist social relations involves the separation of human subjects from their own lived activity. The result is a historical moment characterized by a loss of historical agency; or, as Debord puts it in another letter: modern capitalism has produced the paradox of a ‘historical society that refuses history’. Thus, this third and deepest level of Debord’s tripartite schema concerns a state of separation from history itself. Although we will touch on the first level of Debord’s theory in later chapters, and although we will also discuss the technicalities of its second level at some length, this book will focus primarily on its third, ‘historical’ level.

Well, if you read something like the The Californian Ideology

The Californian Ideology was written by Richard Barbrook, who subsequently wrote a book on Debords tabletop game _The Game of War_.

or its a tech startup that just named it 'Castle' spelled with a K-elo to make it unique

i love this. you now have the honor of making it into my "Tools" bookmarks folder.

I've been using Fraidycat for a year, and its totally changed my relationship to social media. Namely, i dont connect to social media. I connect to people through their own sites.

As it stands, bailouts will reward the most risky investors and speculators, while passive investors, retirees, and taxpayers will end up bailing out these risk takers. Thus, for the finance sector, the Fed provides elasticity: fungible rules around banking, investing, taxation, and bailouts when things go bad. For the rest of the economy, and individuals, we get discipline: massive losses, austerity and cuts to social programs and public infrastructure, moralizing our individual failures as people, and continual indebtedness.

Lemon socialism is a pejorative term for a form of government intervention in which government subsidies go to weak or failing firms (lemons; see Lemon law), with the effective result that the government (and thus the taxpayer) absorbs part or all of the recipient’s losses. The term derives from the conception that in socialism the government may nationalize a company’s profits while leaving the company to pay its own losses, while in lemon socialism the company is allowed to keep its profits but its losses are shifted to the taxpayer.

So the imbalance: Why does the Fed continually save the financial industry every 10 years, but not any other industry? Why does the Fed create and spend 1.5T dollars to purchase worthless and arcane financial instruments, but never spend on public goods like housing, student education, public infrastructure

@all2 : I've written an essay on my approach:

https://0xadada.pub/2015/11/05/a-retrospective-responsive-de...

but to summarize some of its main points:

Responsive design is:

* A process * A relinquishing of the false sense of comfort we get when designing for a “design comp” * An experience-first / MVP friendly approach to building dynamic, consistent and importantly a complete experience that adapts to users context * A conduit for the flow of of communication, and much much like water, it flows into different browsers & devices, flows into robot search engine crawlers, flows into RSS feeds, flows into meta-data (hReview) parsers, flows into printers, flows into read-later tools like Web Clippings, Pocket, Instapaper and FlipBoard

Responsive Design isn’t a set of CSS features, a technology stack or a set of tools. Its when an organization decides to collaborate around a process; with accountability to the user first, to each other second, and to solve the technology last, once all important decisions have been made.

This article proposes a philosophy of working "with the grain" of the web that has become the very basis of my approach to web development.

I put together a comparison of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates on disability rights and accessibility.

Especially relevant to my developer followers who are fellow web accessibility advocates

All that ops automation they were working on finally comes to fruition. Automation creates surplus labor, and that surplus is realized with the elimination of humor labor, reaping profit in the form of lowering costs.

I (and we should all) act as if this could happen to anyone. Essentially that the state can deputize any company to snitch on the digital ephemera that constitutes our daily lives, but especially those that we are deeply engaged: Google, Facebook, Lyft, Amazon.

As such, we should not self-censor, but instead disengage from these proxy-cops and move to more distributed spaces.

Cheaper heroin

any great empire expands until it can no longer afford the maintenance of its own infrastructure, at which point it collapses under its own corpulence.