As readers know I am a many minded man rather indifferent to narrow categories of thought. Importantly, working in the tradition of para political research I continue to find the emphasis misplaced in thinking about Covid-19. The Covid-19 crisis is not merely disaster capitalism it is an extermination program for Homo Sapiens and the replacement of man by a synthetic entity built from the former human being driven by A.I. In other language of thought this is the negative Titanic. No benefit future present. We can generate quite a few ideas about coming present moments until they are really lived using computers. Jacques Ellul discusses this phenomena of machines and man. Challenging the taken-for-granted notion of technology as simply an instrument or a tool, as well as the belief in human freedom, the concept of autonomous technology has been at the center of various controversies in the philosophy of technology, where it has functioned in three related contexts. First, it has served to articulate an uneasy feeling that has accompanied the mastery of nature and the fast pace of technological change since the Industrial Revolution. As early as the nineteenth century, stories were written about human beings being ruled by "their" mechanical creatures, which had gained autonomy. Mary Shelley's famous novel Frankenstein (1994 [1818]) is the best-known example. Second, the concept has been associated with those philosophers who stressed the alienating and dehumanizing aspects of modern technology. Examples include Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Lewis Mumford (1895–1990). Finally, third, are those who have popularized the term and made it a central theme in their analyses of technology. Here the natural reference is to Jacques Ellul and Langdon Winner. https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/autonomous-technology
Once Covid came upon us all my political Dystopias confirmed and new biological ones arising. If I write a SF novel about the Reich would it be Israel? Israel is very post-modern. The fiction would be a splinter group of Nazi aligned fanatics captured the moral support of the West. Zionism and Fascism in the Reich were necessary for one another. Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is a 1983 work by the American free-lance journalist, outspoken pro-Palestinian activist and Trotskyist Lenni Brenner. The book makes the argument that Zionist leaders collaborated with fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, in order to build up a Jewish presence in Palestine.
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is one of two works by Brenner on the alleged collaboration between Zionism and Nazism. Brenner returns to this topic in his 2002 work 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.
Freedom of thought and freedom of imagination is to soar from foundations. As a writer of science fiction gifted with a peculiar personality in the the 70’s-and perhaps even to this day I could only remote view the 1,000 year Dystopia as it steamed into the future. Strictly secular rational thought framed imagination.
I discovered atomic war by reading a pretty good SF novel in 4th grade and it was set in 2250 A.D. or 200 years after hitting print. The future was grim but survivors existed and one group sent out an exploratory mission. Discovering strange mutated urban rats large and behaving like a putative primate from 2,000,000 B.C. If I had tried to read Kahn and his ladders of escalation in 4th grade and not 9th where would I be today. LOL. My first major was International Relations. Then I decided Literature. Then history. Then Political Science. And just my last year (12 year plan, round and round and round) Philosophy. Moving to SF on a whim with a cheap place to live after college I never looked back to the same old used to be. Further said the bus of Ken Kesey and here the highway dead ends at the Sea. The end of Anglo-American Western Civilization in North America is 1849. The Gold Rush truly inaugurated the New Age.
Prometheus’ gift of fire allowed humanity to create civilization, it also gave us the means of waging war with one another, thus hastening the decline from the golden age to the present age of iron. In this sense, Jünger suggests that our era of “increasingly perfect technology” may be likened to the myth of Saturn, for just as Saturn devoured his own children, modern civilization devours its own security through its dependence on the very technology that unmoors its foundations.
Why, Jünger asks, does the “craving for security” that pervades the modern consciousness grow in step with technological progress? The answer must be that technology’s advocates have become cognizant of the inherent dangers of the forces they have set in motion. In Jünger’s words, “Modern man wakes up to the fact that the elemental forces he has enslaved in his machinery are turning against him with ever growing, viciously destructive force.”
WINDOW RIGHT The right to one's window. Every man must have the right to lean out of his window and to recreate and reshape his third skin, the window and the outside walls of his house as far as his arms can reach so that he distinguishes himself from his imprisoned neighbours, and that from far away everybody can see: there lives a free man. https://hundertwasser.com/en/original-graphic/846_a_hwg92_window_right_890
I will hazard it is because no one will fight for their window right.
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
The Journal of Lingering Sanity is a reader-supported publication fighting for your window right. Beholden to truth not party. “The time has come," the Journal said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings." Not to mention the insights of Hundertwasser.
I suppose, somewhere, for each tool we have created, be it a road, or engine, or ink pen, keyboard, there is an imaginary list that travels along with the item, that tallies not just what advantage the tool gives us, but also the advantage it takes from us. The road makes the journey easier, but the oak tree and old farm had to be removed, and the pollution the road brings. The engine makes the journey faster, but how much do we miss along the way because of it? How many dead people, cats, dogs, and squirrels run over? The ink pen leaves the plastic shell behind, one more bit of garbage when it's spent of ink, and touching plastic does no one physical good, with its endocrine disruptors. My computer keyboard...another set of hazards, perhaps too many words and not enough deeds on my part. The list, indeed, goes on and on. At some point, we really can't know what we are missing by using so many tools we usually consider to be great benefits. We literally become who our tools shape us to be.