What’s this about?
“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
- Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
History is over, we’ve long been told. To speak of revolution in the 21st century is to speak absurdity. The ultimate deceit of postmodern culture is to cloak within the language of disillusion the most supreme of illusions. The illusion that politics can only mean “support”, the illusion that new must replace old, the illusion that the discursive takes precedence over the material, the illusion that the private stands above the public, and the illusion that to live is to consume. In the end, the effect is the same: people lose sight of their own activity, and thus the world itself becomes less and less real to them. All social relations become filtered through the commodity-form, and world of exchange begins to supplant the world of atoms. This is what Marx refers to as alienation.
But what Marxists after him would come to realize is that this amnesia regarding one’s own life-activity would extend to their own political activity. Atomization, bureaucracy, and consumerism would create a populace which has entirely forgotten how to directly affect their own situation. Politics has ceased to be about actually-existing movements but rather instead about entrusting a mediator to fix problems on your behalf.
But politics is only one front of the social decay: religion has decayed to the point of often blurring with “self-help”, culture has become a continuous recycling of old aesthetics divorced from context, and even technology has come to be designed with the intention of being quickly replaced. The purpose of this blog is to take a step back in all of these domains and begin laying a foundation to rebuild politics and society.
The goal of this blog is to lay a theoretical foundation for this process of rebuilding in the age of the internet. Theology, politics, philosophy, technology, media, doesn’t matter. My intention is not to specialize but to integrate these various angles to undergo an immanent critique of society as is.
Who am I?
I typically avoid discussing myself, since I want this blog to be about the ideas rather than the author. But I would broadly describe myself as a Marxist and an evangelical Christian. My main area of activity is in the field of technology: making use of decentralization and free-software models with the long-term goal of communizing the software space.
Some of my favorite authors:
- Philosophy/Theology: Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and John Calvin
- Politics: Karl Marx, Guy Debord, and Jacques Ellul
(Everything I write is under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. license. Site background is Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky).
Where can you find me?
I usually make a point to keep my presence on federated social media platforms, as linked below. If you need to reach me via Twitter or YouTube, those are also there though.
- Videos get uploaded to PeerTube.
- Odd sketches I make get posted to PixelFed
- Random software/web projects end up on my GitLab
- General contact/updates is handled through Mastodon
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