Month: August 2024
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The Game is Rigged but It needs More Players
In the wild and treacherous jungle of gambling, the house edge is the kingpin, the big shot with a gun in every corner. When it comes to the lottery, you’re staring down the barrel of a gun with a staggering edge—often over 30%. It’s as if the universe itself conspires against you in the most…
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influencers, podcasters, crypto scammers, and small-town tyrants
One might approach influencers, podcasters, crypto scammers, and small-town tyrants as figures who occupy different positions within the symbolic order, each representing a distinct mode of desire and the manipulation of the Other. Influencers are the epitome of the Imaginary, where the ego is constituted through the gaze of the Other. They craft an idealized…
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The Cheaper The Mortgage
The cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—it’s almost an economic law. When people aren’t crushed under the weight of exorbitant housing costs, they have room to breathe, to create, to take risks. In neighborhoods where the rent isn’t devouring their every dollar, artists, writers, and musicians can afford to be bold, to…
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Film Executive Priorities
In the high-stakes world of Hollywood, film executives emerge as tragicomic figures, navigating a landscape where profit, status, and survival dominate every decision. Their priorities are not mere tasks to be checked off but are deeply embedded in the very fabric of the industry. It’s a brutal game where the sharpest minds, the quickest thinkers,…
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Champions of the Done Deal
Activism, in its most earnest and self-congratulatory form, often resembles a group of people loudly shouting at a parade they believe they’ve organized, while the parade marches on oblivious to their presence. They don’t realize that the band was already playing, the confetti was already falling, and the crowd was already cheering long before they…
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Master Vs Slave/Weapons of the Strong vs Weapons of the Weak
Strip away the polite lies and what do you have? A rigged game, a con job. The master-slave morality—a stale binary, stinking like a two-day-old corpse. These roles, fixed, rigid, like a bad wiretap that feeds back on itself, echoing the same sick tune. But the con, you see, isn’t in the master or the…
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Systems Thinking
Most systems research, it’s a kind of digital voodoo, a techno-shaman dance around the void. They conjure up these phantoms of utility, these spectral promises of a better tomorrow, built on the bones of yesterday’s discarded dreams. It’s a leap into the black, a wager on the unknown, a bet that this particular configuration of…
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Declaration of Economic Independence
When in the Course of financial events, it becomes necessary for one class of Men to dissolve the outdated economic bands which have connected them with the broader Public, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and superior station to which the Laws of Wealth and Influence entitle them, a decent…
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Everything is Subjunctive
Subjectivity Implies Reality’s Contingency: “Everything is subjective” is a performative contradiction, a metaphysical sleight of hand. The assertion of subjectivity as a universal condition paradoxically institutes a meta-subjectivity, a transcendental signifier that grounds the very groundlessness it proclaims. This is the insidious logic of the logocentric, a phantom objectivity haunting the spectral realm of the subjective. The subjunctive, often relegated to…