Technology – Rock Salted

“In short, a master can exert domination only if he ‘bribes’ the servant by way of throwing him some crumbs of enjoyment. This enjoyment has two opposed main forms: I directly enjoy the very subordination to the Master whom I serve and this subordination provides a kind of security and meaning to my life; or, the Master who controls me discreetly allows me to violate his prohibitions when I am out of his view, knowing that such small transgressions will keep me satisfied . . . .”

Slavoj Žižek, “The Libidinal Economy of Singularity”

See also:

“To work, the ruling ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploited majority will be able to recognize its authentic longings. In other words, each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least two particular contents, the authentic popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation.”

Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”

Bonus links: Read My Desire (Chapter 6) and Le deuxieme sexe [The Second Sex] (“To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal—this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide women-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance.”) and “The Appeal and Limits of Andrea Dworkin” (“Offering close readings of now-forgotten but influential memoirs by right-wing women with titles like The Gift of Inner Healing and The Total Woman, Dworkin demonstrated how the religious right provided women what seemed like a workable set of rules through which to navigate male power and the threat of male violence: ‘For women, the world is a very dangerous place . . . The Right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.'”) and “Brazilian ‘Interdependence’ and Imperialist Integration” (“sub-imperialism” involves peripheral economies collaborating actively with the imperialist expansion of core economies like the United States, assuming in that expansion the position of a key nation) and “Malcolm Describes the Difference Between the ‘House Negro’ and the ‘Field Negro.'”; and on the other hand T.A.Z. the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism and transgression

Mertonian CUDOS-norms

Link to Robert Merton’s four norms that constitute “four sets of institutional imperatives taken to comprise the ethos of modern science… communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.” (CUDOS is the acronym):

“Four Mertonian Norms”

(contrast that with this: “Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Celebrity Salesman for the Military-Industrial-Complex”)

Sharon Nelson – Yes, Alexa Does Eavesdrop on You!

Link to an article by Sharon Nelson:

“Yes, Alexa Does Eavesdrop on You!”

Iishana Artra – Is 5G Worth the Risks?

Link to an article by Iishana Artra:

“Is 5G Worth the Risks?”

Bonus links: “Controlling 5G: A Course in Obstacles” and “Group Calls on Citizens to Blow the Whistle on Motorola Cell Phone Safety Studies” and “How Big Wireless Lobbied Governments to Build 5G For Citizen Data Collection and Surveillance”

Geoffrey Dutton – Talking Trash

Link to an article by Geoffrey Dutton:

“Talking Trash: Recycling Inches Up, But Problems Remain”

Curiously absent from this otherwise excellent discussion of the present-day facts about recycling practices in the USA is why municipalities are expected to submit to a “market” rather than intervening directly in it or circumventing/modifying it (as governments often do). Why shouldn’t municipalities create their own recycling entities and manufacturing facilities to bypass markets, or engage in more far-reaching bans (like banning all materials that are not provably and practically recyclable)? The article simply tacitly accepts that municipal governments should look to private businesses and markets in significant ways, or simply treat private profitability as the uncrossable horizon of municipal politics, as if this is self-evident, which is precisely the goal of all political propaganda—“to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation“.

Bonus links: “Recycling Crisis is Capitalist Business as Usual” and “It’s Time to Break Up Capitalism’s Love Affair With Plastic” and “Humanity Is Drowning in Plastic”

T.J. Coles – Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Celebrity Salesman for the Military-Industrial-Complex

Link to an article by T.J. Coles:

“Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Celebrity Salesman for the Military-Industrial-Complex”

Note that this identified deGrasse Tyson as an old-fashioned shill rather than part of the “idiot pool”. Anyway, this article doesn’t explicitly reach deGrasse Tyson’s secular humanist “scientism” ideology which is really what drives his sociopolitical status quo boosterism:

“The relevance of these practices is that they account for Tyson’s scientism as a tactic in a culture war. I’ll lay out some principles of Tyson’s apparent culture to show how the conflict arises. Tyson’s all-business impatience with philosophy and his allusion to progress indicate that he stands not just for the supremacy of science, but for the modern institutions (capitalism, private industry, democracy) that have exploited scientific knowledge. The liberal values (freedom of thought, environmentalism, admiration for underdog scientists) and inchoate pantheism that surface in his series, Cosmos, show that he stands also for secular humanism. Put these together and you have a culture that reduces to neoliberalism, an ideology that’s analyzed thoroughly by Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Neoliberalism is the rebirth of the social policies that led to the Great Depression, which rebirth was made possible by some propagandists’ mastery of the double standard. Neoliberalism is what powerful Republicans and Democrats have in common, the understanding that capitalism runs counter to democracy, but that a semblance of the latter is needed as the noble lie to sustain the magic of the former. Thus, neoliberals are both populists and technocrats, depending on their audience. In any case, in so far as Tyson despises philosophy for being useless in contrast to science, he must approve of the modern applications of science—not just the medical breakthroughs and technological advances, but the egoistic, materialistic mass culture of consumerism that bankrolls the loftier work of scientific inquiry.”

Benjamin Cain, “Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Scientism and the Scapegoating of Philosophy”

Bonus links: “Book Review: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science” (“Capitalism portrays science as a purely objective phenomenon and considers any attempt at understanding the political implications of science to be an intrusion of ideology into the sphere of objective, scientific neutrality.” *** “‘Positivism’ refers to the rejection of philosophy in favor of adopting an (often oversimplified) understanding of natural science as the basis for all theoretical and practical activity.”) and “Where Is the Rift? Marx, Lacan, Capitalism, and Ecology” (“modern science is ‘untrue’ insofar as it is blind to the way it is integrated into the circulation of capital, to its link to technology and its capitalist use, i.e., to what in old Marxist terms was called the “social mediation” of its activity.”) and Making Peace With the Planet (“Since a standard represents a point on a scale, its practical meaning depends entirely on the nature of the scale. Although the position of the pointer is simply a number and therefore objective, the choice of the scale and therefore the meaning of the number is entirely arbitrary. This creates an opportunity to disguise self-interest as science, for the scale is readily manipulated to govern the apparent meaning of the standard.”)