9k:RD/ worker compression (Western-Marxism) (Q38,02)
Main entry
- worker compression (Western-Marxism) -> the motif of claiming that all human beings experiencing suffering or empathy and all workers experiencing working-class suffering are the exact same thing and there are no differences whatsoever between them, such that there is an implication that every single human being is currently a worker.
"Suffering in general"
- universal suffering / a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it (Marx 1844, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) / a class with radical chains ->
oh boy. I am almost positive some people in Western Marxism have interpreted this totally wrong. you have to understand that the concept of "suffering" here means something oddly specific and isn't just any suffering at all, and the reason the statement is interesting is that it's saying that a highly specific form of suffering still applies to everybody.
let's see... hang on... okay I've got a B-side analogy. is your cat a member of the proletariat??? if you were a Western-Marxist talking about 'worker compression' or 'how Jungian psychoanalysis and repression define the proletariat' you'd be pretty much implying that. Marx isn't implying that. - universal suffering -> note: Marx quite literally means the physical bond of capital and what capital is doing as an object. I just rediscovered that today and suddenly felt like "wow, I've been stupid" because I talk about 'chunk competition' all the time but I rarely stop and distinguish how it changes things for it to be refined into capital per se. yes, there's a small difference and it makes all the difference.
Video that prompted this
- worker degeneration (Western-Marxism) / all workers meet the same fate reduced to inert remnants as the system relentlessly consumes and discards them / no matter their individual characteristics ... stripped of agency and rendered into mute artifacts / the flattening and commodification of individual agency specifically in systems that reduce human effort to mere functionality / this series of closed loop systems built around endless cycles of consumption and immiseration
- worker compression leading to crises of capitalism / by treating workers as disposable entities the system ultimately amasses an excess of compressed fragments reaching a critical limit / 3D workers island serves as a haunting allegory for the contradictions of late capitalism
- crisis of capitalism (Western-Marxism) / breakdown of economic systems driven by unchecked accumulation [1] / no matter their individual characteristics they are ultimately subjected to the same reduction ... the relentless drive to extract resources or labor ultimately leads to structural failure as the resulting waste or byproduct becomes too overwhelming for the system to contain ... until the system's foundational capacity to sustain itself collapses [2] ->
this sounds smart on the surface but when you read over it several times you notice that it smuggles in the assumption that capitalism exists — and human populations fundamentally exist — solely to benefit the owning class. it doesn't actually entertain the idea that workers exist for any other purpose than to serve owners. "the system's foundational capacity to sustain itself" = society itself consists of owners, and workers are born solely to bring them products, but as capitalism goes on and society fills up with products that arrangement collapses to the point there are widespread layoffs and unemployed people become unnecessary to society. "the relentless drive to extract resources" = a thing that owners in particular do, because this video isn't taking a meta-Marxist position and it is implied here that workers don't actually do that thing. this sentence says that owners found society out of nowhere (though to be fair that is kind of how the United States started), and all its growth happens because owners were greedy, but although that's true, society breaks down because owners fail to choose to design it differently. the single word "unchecked" implies all of that too. "unchecked" is one of the most Liberal-republican words you could say because it immediately assumes that if there is a problem in society that you can fix it by sending in a bunch of cops. if you wanted to stop an individual business from going over the official line of "being greedy", at what exact moment would the cops come in to order the business to stop growing and to hand its money over to a different industry? you have to be able to give an answer to that question or you can't meaningfully say the word "unchecked", because you have no idea what things being "checked" would look like. and don't say the word "taxes", because "taxes" implies that not having the thing that taxes pay for is a violation but this video says that individual businesses growing to a particular size in the first place is where the violation happens and where it needs to be corrected. where is the actual violation of what is expected? - the software uses resources in the world / workers are an approach to computation (3D Workers Island)
- is degeneration a wider condition or is it a specific outcome tied to Amber alone? -> actual important narrative theme within the screensaver.
- Programming classes are Platonic ideals / Programming classes are Platonic ideals; this is to imply that representing the concept of a "worker" undergoing oppression using a programming class that instantiates worker objects is modeling working-class history using Idealism; this is to imply that capitalists caused capitalism to happen by exerting Ideals on the world
- The world resists coercing individuals into separate coherent classes / Trying to force every messy chaotic thing into the constraints of a class risks oversimplification. It's a tension we see in bureaucracies or attempts to define individuals by the historically constructed boundaries of both their class and habitus [3] [4] -> here the video creator outs himself as not believing classes are real. the word "constructed" is really specific, and usually used to imply that society has arbitrarily put something together that could stop existing tomorrow; "historically constructed" reads as "history made it up", especially right after you said "force into the constraints of a class". do you think being part of a class territory is something anybody consciously wants to do? even owners don't really want to hire anyone, and are forced to do it because the overall layout of a product demands it from them when their Ideals cross over into material reality. I feel like if classes were something people were stuffed into one by one like this suggests, nobody would choose it, owners would just give up on it given how hard it is, and everyone would be an isolated producer. so to me, that is exactly the overall implication of this statement.
- Degeneration assumes a deviation from an original blueprint; this is to imply that all original blueprints are Platonic ideals [5] -> sure. okay. it doesn't not. but what makes you assume that all deviations from expectations are abstract Ideals rather than material differences between two physical things? if Alice was born with diabetes and Bob doesn't have diabetes, do you tell Alice there is no such thing as a disease and her body was just destined to malfunction while Bob's body was destined to function correctly? do you tell Alice the most intuitive solution is to replace her pancreas? because this analysis of degenerated workers' states sounds like a "replace her pancreas immediately" analysis. do you even know what a pancreas is or how pancreas transplants work? why did they call you in as the doctor?
- Degeneration assumes a deviation from an original blueprint -> oh gosh I only just realized that this statement is really funny in context. it has a second contrasting implication that we shouldn't label the Soviet Union as degenerated because it was actually perfectly normal and the people of the United States simply didn't understand it. is that true? no. is that a hilarious implication? yes.
- Trotsky said that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state, but capitalism did not degenerate from a functioning status so much as contain many "degenerations" inside it in which non-owners would be ground down (degenerated) into materials for use by owners (labor power; created capital; housing buildings reclaimed by driving workers out of housing through competition against workers; housing buildings turned into data centers; spoils of invading Third-World countries to forcefully destroy feudalism and create global capitalism; etc); this happens because the process of capitalism (the "system" of capitalism) is made up of control, containment, and accumulation [??] [6]
- ... control, containment, and accumulation -> the claim being made in this video is such a mess. first of all, Amber doesn't live in the Soviet Union, so Trotsky and the Soviet Union have nothing to do with the screensaver unless you think Trotsky's critique of the Soviet Union is a critique of capitalism. which, okay, Trotsky said stuff about capitalism, so that is a thing you could try to argue, I guess. Trotsky said the Soviet Union stopped being a workers' state; the Soviet Union began to contain capitalism; Trotsky critiqued the Soviet Union and critiqued capitalism. but the frustrating thing is that the video isn't even making a point that intelligent. it's trying to argue that like, the Soviet Union and the screensaver are connected by Moral Evil and that is part of economics somehow, as is very common for Tories to argue but should have no place in academic analysis. so.... I'm going to just assume that the video is saying that the screensaver was a depiction of capitalism and Trotsky was criticizing Soviet capitalism even though that's not what it's saying, just because that's smarter and less stupid.
- Capitalism did not degenerate from a functioning status so much as contain many "degenerations" inside it in which non-owners would be ground down (degenerated) into materials for use by owners (labor power; created capital; housing buildings reclaimed by driving workers out of housing through competition against workers; housing buildings turned into data centers; spoils of invading Third-World countries to forcefully destroy feudalism and create global capitalism; etc); this happens because the process of capitalism (the "system" of capitalism) is made up of control, containment, and accumulation [??] [7] ->
so. the screensaver is depicting the general suffering of capitalism, which creates abusive families. Dave Pelzer was left alone by capitalism and then fed straight into the Vietnam War; we're on track so far. worker degeneration is when capitalism is breaking down and giving rise to either fascism or Stalinism. the art was made in the United States and the United States is the former, not the latter, so capitalism would be breaking down into chunks of people aggressively colonizing over the top of each other and trying to kill each other to maintain the illusion there's enough space without people fighting each other. the video is sort of on track at this point, because it says that "control and accumulation" are problems of capitalism, and when capitalism is turning into aggressive, violent chunk competition they certainly are. the problem is that you can't stop this by complaining about "system oriented around", because the "orienting around" comes from chunks of human beings growing and reproducing; White people push Black people out of towns because White people are having babies, and pushing out other people gives them an advantage at them and their babies being able to survive, while any work they do to create something to use or sell can still be paraded around as hard work they did themselves to help everyone that remains as opposed to something they were able to do more of because they "degenerated" other populations, hence people get mad at you for trying to disturb capitalism including its intersections with racism. so, let's assume the video somehow knows that. capitalism is fundamentally broken because it breaks down to create fascism — or alternatively Bolshevism breaks down into Dengism which then breaks down into Bonapartism. capitalism is fundamentally broken because it requires chunks of people to compete over the top of each other just to exist, even if that would kill other people. capitalism was fundamentally broken and subject to chunk competition the entire time. true! what do you think markets even are but people competing over finite slots to form an arrangement?
the problem is "containment". how is "containment" part of capitalism? presumably in business territory owners creating fences to keep capital and other earnings they passively or violently collected from workers. but this video has defined people existing at all and occupying space at all as a form of containment. so, you'd think containment couldn't be an actual complaint here, because if you want to stop stuff like people being pushed out of countries and people losing their houses to data centers, then every time people need houses they need "containment" too. this framing is absolutely ripe for Tucker Carlson stepping in and calling poor people who want houses greedy, I've just gotta say that. this is a problem I've run into with meta-Marxism before, that if you get really fine-grained with your model and mention stuff like corporations growing or territories growing you quickly realize how complicated it is to separate what parts of capitalism are neutral from what parts are bad as long as capitalism still exists. and it ceases to be a big problem if you have room for learning from real historical events but I genuinely wouldn't recommend that Western-Marxists do it, because then you end up here. capitalism is "actually" made up of Subject degeneration. but, that exists day to day because customers latch onto particular corporations instead of other ones and they don't all perfectly sort themselves onto buying the correct things. retail stores choosing one thing to stock instead of another can lead to higher rates of bulldozing Black neighborhoods instead of lower ones. but retail stores choosing one thing to stock instead of another is also one of the big selling points to have capitalism instead of the Soviet Union (pun intended), because it supposedly leads to better horizontal and vertical growth of businesses. the Soviet Union would have the power to cap the growth of businesses and make them stop being based in "containment and accumulation", but to have that power they have to directly be part of it as state businesses. that's the fatal contradiction in this video. it's really anti- Soviet Union but most of the things it says about capitalism are actually arguments in favor of the Soviet Union and not proper arguments against it. when capitalism exists the primary method of control for businesses being "based in" the wrong thing is society choosing one specific business and destroying another specific business, having no ability to operate on all businesses at once. capitalist "freedom" is the ability to destroy and smash businesses. which is the same thing as capitalism being based on chunks "degenerating" each other. when you bash the Soviet Union for being Evil without having any idea what you're doing you just regenerate capitalism, and then end up complaining about how bad capitalism is more or less because of the decision you yourself made. it's projection! you hate your own decision! and then you make other people in other countries pay for it. you should be calling out your own behavior as unacceptable first. so let's rephrase this into its opposite. - As a system oriented around Idealism, capitalism is forced to take coarse chunks of things and smash them in order to try to make all things apparently-good things by destroying apparently-bad things and driving everyone away from them; this need to locate "good" things based on whether they fit into the parameters of capitalism causes capitalism to destroy anything that is not capitalism, which recursively births capitalism and the necessity for some people to devalue other people in order to exist; in order to end capitalism and "worker compression" Idealism has to go away first, because although systems can be designed through unintentional processes or through fine-grained knowledge of their internal structure, systems cannot be created through announcing abstract qualities regardless of whether those qualities are "not Evil" or anything else / Capitalism did not degenerate from a functioning democracy so much as emerge from many "degenerations" inside it which consisted of attempting to operate on various parts of material reality through Idealism instead of Materialism, causing every attempt to fix capitalism to instead regenerate capitalism; this would always happen within a system oriented around aggressively crushing apparently-bad things instead of figuring out how things actually function and how apparently-good things are actually created from the inside out
- It is impossible to design a computer / It is impossible to design a car / Because a computer is a system of interacting parts and systems of interacting parts can only evolve through their own internal interactions, it is impossible for humans to design a working computer from the outside, and it is only possible for computers to evolve spontaneously -> this would be true if it was actually impossible to design systems without already being in them. nobody lives inside a computer, but many people have designed them! they were able to do this because the design was based on the interaction of the small-scale components, not simply based on announcing abstract Ideals of what the computer "feels like" and what it's "bad for the computer to feel like".
Irrelevant points made in video
- esoteric facets of Marxist theory (Western-Marxism) / talking about "degenerated workers' states" is an esoteric facet of Marxist theory [8] -> it really isn't. the word may not be well known but the concept is in absolutely every text talking about the Cold War. if you have ever seen a text talk about "the Stalinist bureaucracy" or "Stalinist oppression", you've seen the concept of degenerated workers' states! you've seen it if you've read Animal Farm. you've seen it if you've watched MLP:FiM season 5.
- Trotsky disappearing from pictures / they erased Emmanuel Goldstein (fiction) -> this is absolutely the "Marxist framework" from which the video was analyzing the screensaver. the video creator saw 'disappearing from pictures' and "degenerated worker ..." and mentally autocompleted it to 1936. this is absolutely just a cellphone-autocorrect, Markov-chain level analysis of the work....
and I don't hate it for shoehorning in Trotsky for no reason, that alone could lead to a really interesting analysis if you ask me. what gets me is how little it understood the concepts it arbitrarily brought in, or how they relate to the thing being analyzed. - Trotsky disappearing from pictures / it's a kind of containment ... that prevents too many inconvenient truths from surfacing / an architecture of containment; a structure designed to keep its contents sealed away from prying eyes -> is this the main thing "containment" meant here? I thought it was like, literally containing capital into business territories. huh.
- Trotsky disappearing from pictures / the act of suppression resurrects the specter of hidden knowledge [9] / a ghost of unexpressed knowledge / the ghostly traces of something once acknowledged but now purposefully forgotten / a ghostly Counterpoint that both exists and is constantly erased -> I love how we started at Trotsky and then slid over to 1984 and now we've slid all the way over to W.D. Gaster or Dess Holiday. no wonder I looked at Deltarune and started identifying Dess with the concept of Marxist theorists that saw the way out of capitalism, and then made the Trotsky character a reindeer. that is just in the text. that is just in any number of real or fictional books about Trotsky. Gaster is actually a Trotskyist coded character and I am overjoyed I can say that without sounding crazy.
- YouTube AI moderation is just like the Great Terror period / what's left unsaid becomes part of the Intrigue much like how algorithms and moderators shape real-world digital discourse [10] / just before the internet became a site of constant surveillance monetization and algorithmic curation ... a ghostly Counterpoint that both exists and is constantly erased -> I would tell you to stop except that real Trotskyists have really said this exact thing and I wish they hadn't because I think it's misleading. so... this is totally wrong, good work. failed task successfully.
- Trotskyism is the same thing as an opposing Liberal-republican party / an ostensibly subversive alternative ideology [11] -> first the video explicitly connects the people exposing the screensaver to early Trotskyism, then it tries to say the people exposing the screensaver are doing nothing to change it and the cycle continues in the patterns of worker compression and Liberal-republican antagonisms. that is a factual contradiction because Trotskyism is not Liberal-republicanism. that's one thing in the video that is flat-out a false history fact providing negative information.
- possibilities alluded to but not shown ... rereading is a highly rewarding experience [12] -> oh gosh, this. that thing that mildly irks me about a lot of art criticism, where people will act like omitting information is itself profound just because information was left out and it's a great art technique and the lack of information made great art. there are cases where I would let it slide because the critic is being highly literal and is only talking about one work and not a lot of works. but, here? you brought up Leon Trotsky and talked about the Soviet Union at length so I am now obligated to tell you that in real life every ominous event that happens where you only see a small fraction of the total area it was happening in has more primary and secondary sources outside it that you could just go read. having a self-contained mystery with missing links is not a thing. although it could just happen that a few links on a webpage are broken, when you have an event as spatially broad as the Great Terror, or even "child abuse in the United States", it's actually unrealistic for you to just run out of sources and end up having to reinterpret the same stuff over and over. if you are comparing anything to the Great Terror then you have to know that as time went on the overall stack of information collected together from various people around the world talking about it just got bigger and bigger and bigger to where compared to any particular text about as long as 3DWI there is an absolutely absurd amount of additional material to read and get more perspectives. it's like... really reductive to compare that actual library's worth of stuff to a single self-contained work. it would absolutely blow your mind if you were the person who created this video to realize how tiny a single forum or slideshow is in comparison, and how little power any single forum would really have to erase the overall record; erasing all information about Trotsky from an area bigger than England was pretty much physically impossible. and that was a vital part of that period of history and how it progressed. the Fourth International became bold about circulating everything that was happening because it knew that if all the world's Trotskyist parties could stay together long enough they would basically be able to hide the real information from everyone that would suppress it in whatever part of the world it wasn't happening in. like, these people could have invented the internet early if they'd been more functional. the difference between one Trotskyist periodical and the Fourth International was the difference between one webpage and the entire global internet.
neither 3DWI nor this reviewer seem to actually understand that. the Fourth International of 1938 was not a Mystery. it wasn't really hidden at all. it wasn't found because it was hidden, it was found because it was everywhere and it was almost inescapable. that's the point of a Communist International, actually. it's like if you tried to make your keys un-loseable by making your keyring stretch around the world, which doesn't make much sense and would be a bad idea because someone else would find the path to them first, incidentally a lot like the Fourth International; Stalinist states and Liberal-republicanism always moved faster and caught them. Trotsky's story may read like W.D. Gaster lore but it wasn't supposed to. the way it was "supposed to" go was the Fourth International would make it impossible in practice to maintain an environment like the 3DWI forum because everyone would realize very quickly that it wasn't the whole world and they'd turn around and face the rest of the world and the world would win. it really says a lot that today people look at a self-contained work like this and think "this feels just like the internet" and they can't even see the difference between the internet and a single webpage such that they don't realize that the webpage operating like there are only two webpages on the internet is an actual plot hole that might count as writing the narrative wrong. this story about the early internet is bizarrely anti-internet, and I never would have thought of that at all until somebody brought up Trotsky in relation to it and used him wrong.
honestly. not to brag about this in a serious way but I feel like even if you were to look through this wiki, you'd see a great variety in what links there are and a distinct impression that there are a whole lot of separate domains and publications on the internet. if 3DWI is meant to act as a good model of discourse on the internet in general (which I don't think it was) then it's a terrible attempt at that. it simply doesn't do the thing that this person thinks it does. - is it a story, a screen saver, a forum, a website, a webcomic? the word "thing" resists the reductive impulse to impose a tidy framework or genre on on to the work -> I don't like how this sentence vaguely sounds like praise. not in a context where it gets directly tied to other things the video says or implies about applying class analysis to reality being the thing that causes capitalism to implode somehow, and capitalists having "invented" class analysis. he doesn't even know the difference between the Soviet Union and capitalism and he thinks Trotsky is right for totally wrong reasons because Soviet evil infected the United States in 1700 and Trotsky called out Evil. this is not even Marxist critique at all, it's actual postmodernism.
- the reductive impulse to impose a tidy framework / this raises doubts about the reliability of any single viewpoint / the work suggests that meaning thrives [mental associations and explanations emerge] not in tidy revelations but in prolonged communal [adversarial] entanglement / every attempt to impose meaning feels like an act of intrusion pulling us deeper into the work's unsettling ambiguity / the explicit connection between worker degeneration and the audience's theorizing suggests a deliberate critique of how interpretive communities impose frameworks / flourishing collapse and reconstitution / nuance (situation of forcing multiple interpretations to exist to avoid an incorrect answer) -> stop. you can't save Trotsky from Stalinism or capitalism if you're this quick to invalidate his viewpoint just because you see another one.
- the question of whether the patterns I see are intentional or accidental is part of what makes 3D workers Island so compelling ... the human mind much like the system running 3D workers island is a black box -> and here we have the tried and true "you can't predict The Subject".
if this concept is really a form of postmodernism that's troubling. that's to say that there's no correct answer to who other people are and what they're thinking and you ca just endlessly argue about what another person wants because they're equally likely to get mad at you on any prediction of what they want. how do postmodernists have friends?? how do they stay functional psychologically when they think like this?? - this collapse eerily mirrors the inescapable collapse of the screen saver itself ... what began as a space for curiosity and Collective inquiry devolved into ideological infighting choking out meaningful discussion until the entire structure could no longer sustain itself -> this line suggests the video creator actually recognizes the inability to form coherent narratives is a genuine problem.
- an additional layer of discursivity -> discursivity. this is one of those words that even if you've read a lot of texts you never hear except out of specific circles of academics. the kind of word that puts a particular ominous "stink" on whatever you're now reading that it's probably not going to get better and probably about to get worse. I feel like normally you would just say "discourse" or "discussion", or in the context of fiction, maybe "outer narrative" or "metanarrative". but it's as if Foucauldians have already made such a big deal of "discourses" that they need more words for "discourses" just to be clearer about what they're talking about talking about. maybe this person is actually afraid of the word "narrative" because that word is too modernist and not postmodern enough? I have no idea.
sometimes the entire concept of "discursivity" feels like it's just two academics talking back and forth about their previous conversations and being surprised that they're also part of the world along with everything else but also stunned by the previously self-evident fact that even though they're part of the world they're also deeply isolated from everybody else and they can see two other people talking back and forth without the ability to influence it. - intersubjectivity / collective struggle and perpetual reconsideration -> there, I think we've got it. I think there's strong evidence of an intersubjectivity theory in all this stuff about adversarial viewpoints supposedly being enough to achieve "reconsideration" although literally speaking it's only the person who sees everything in the story collapse from a distance who ever learns anything. this seems like a very anti- intersubjectivity story to me honestly, because the island peeling away into nothing after Amber did the same thing many many times can't be a good thing, and yet it just keeps happening and nobody ever finds the answer of "how to stop it". which would be a relevant question if the "Stalin's government suppressed Trotskyites" point actually applied. in that scenario the red balls are Trotskyists getting shot. so, like, even if you had no idea who Trotsky is it would be beyond obvious to you that he wants to end that.
- the red house sits in quiet defiance of our desire to know -> bear with me a moment. now, I remember from the memory of watching this video years ago that this creator said "A Stalinist regime of discourse" at some point in time in some video that I am 95% sure was about 3DWI. but here's the thing about that — one actual thing you'd see in a Stalinist regime of discourse in real life is Stalin's government creating a border around the country that Trotsky doesn't even want to be there. Trotsky wants the United States' borders wide open to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union's borders wide open to the United States regardless of how much any two random people in each region might hate each other. that's how early Trotskyism works. Stalin's government wants to keep secrecy around things normal people supposedly aren't ready to administer, NKVD included, so the United States won't learn how to destroy the Soviet government, fling every individual citizen into extreme poverty, and physically invade the country for oil or business territories or some other resource it thinks of. but the person who created this video says that collections of people being opaque and unreadable is normal. he thinks being opaque is the human condition. he doesn't think there's anything unusual about being opaque. so how can he even tell the difference between a Stalinist regime and a normal state of things?? wouldn't it all just be the same to him? how does he even know what level of opacity is normal and what level of opacity is oppressive?
- possibilities alluded to ... / the reductive impulse to impose a tidy framework / the explicit connection between worker degeneration and the audience's theorizing suggests a deliberate critique of how interpretive communities impose frameworks -> I'm pretty sure early Trotskyists would be a lot more upset by your refusal to interpret them and depict them, if we're going to be honest. they win when there's a great number of correct interpretations going around. that's the win condition. that's how they escape the Ominous Red House. what are we even doing here?? it's like you're playing [redacted] and trying to get the worst ending.
- class (programming) [13] / class (object-oriented programming) -> I should be excited to add this Item but due to the context it came up in my reaction is just, "oh god, another definition of class that's actively being equivocated with all the others?"
- worker (programming) [14] / slave process (programming) [15] [16] / workers are an approach to computation (3D Workers Island; generic)
- Programming classes are Platonic ideals [17] / Programming classes are a fundamentally Platonist concept -> honestly? I think this is actually true. I never thought about that. but, yeah, you have an abstract Ideal disconnected from reality and then it actually generates instances directly from itself in a way that doesn't really happen in material reality. that's Platonism. it really is.
- Programming classes are Platonic ideals / Programming classes are Platonic ideals; this is to imply that representing the concept of a "worker" undergoing oppression using a programming class that instantiates worker objects is modeling working-class history using Idealism -> no... it has programming classes right but it doesn't have the original concept of Platonic ideals right relative to the year 1900.
programming classes are abstract Ideals, but they aren't noumena. which is a really important distinction because there is a barrier between those two things. Plato thought that abstract Ideals and noumena were basically the same thing (the Platonic ideal), but since modern science that's not really something people maintain any more. today, people who still use the concept of a noumenon tend to assign that concept to specific physical instances of objects that because they are physical happen to limit complete knowledge of them through the limits of physics itself, while physics transmits information about objects as phenomena. there can be a material idea which is a model of a noumenon based on phenomena, but due to being made of information that material idea is basically just a more perfectly-copied phenomenon. the material idea can become exactly the same as the noumenon for all practical purposes right down to the fact you can't physically touch it, but the one difference is that the noumenon contains matter, and it contains a solid chunk of spacetime. the material idea cannot create the noumenon itself, because everything that makes the noumenon what it is and how it functions is inside the noumenon. noumena don't need Ideas to function at all, they only need actual physics that happen to repeat over and over across space which we choose to refer to as mathematical Ideas because that's convenient to us. objects exist before humanity, Ideas including math and Platonism and particular formulations of the scientific method are a social construct.
you know what all that means? it means that the video creator has thought and matter switched around. he doesn't understand Materialism. he doesn't understand the simple concept that if Trotsky ever said "Platonic ideal" unironically he wouldn't even mean the same thing Plato meant. he'd mean a material idea that models the material world but never actually creates it, and that's simply what "Platonic ideal" would then mean. it wouldn't mean that capitalists' Idealism directly spawned classes, or whatever it was the video creator meant. I feel like I keep accidentally coming up with better hypotheses than he did just trying to explain what he said. - A programming class is similar to a corporation; an object which is an instance of a class hides the internal workings of the object and closes them off from the outside -> good observation. the shape of a corporation (a class territory) and the shape of a programming class are bizarrely similar — to the point that there is literally a well-known category of programming classes called "factories". that much was probably a coincidence but the use of object-oriented programming probably does trace back to a commodity-based society which is full of purpose-built objects.
- Functional programming is dialectical in shape -> I have no idea if this is true or not. I'm going to have to come back to it later. what I'm feeling right now is that this isn't the case, because whenever you define a function, any kind of outward structure you define however small can turn out to have the same perils that class instances do and force you to redesign the whole function later. I would know; I've used functions a lot in Lisp programming and on this wiki and I've had to grapple with designing them all in as minimalistic a way as possible to ensure I never have to change them once I've put down thousands and thousands of calls to the same thing and then would have to update all of them one by one. to me it seems like programming classes and functions both have the same problems.
- Joe retreating to water flowers -> now that is an image. it might be the most relatable fraction of a second in this whole analysis video. I'd rather compare that to the Soviet Union than all the stuff going on in the forum thread, because sparse as it is, it almost feels more accurate.
I feel like I'm living in a B-side chapter right now. the chapter is about a Western-Marxist and a Trotskyist arguing about a thread about a screensaver ostensibly about Marxist discourses about conflicting Marxist theories about the Soviet Union, so that the story gets even more absurdly meta than it already was.
every single webpage or online thread about 3DWI accidentally turns into an unofficial sequel to it under the right conditions. it's like the blockbuster follow-up to "4′33′′" that's better than the original because it generates entirely coherent stories. yeah. one of the only good things about postmodernism is it's better at generating stories than generative AI. - Ambiguous narratives are more accurate to reality than narratives containing certainty -> well. that's kind of true. that's a "some occurrence" statement. but that isn't just true all the time. there are specific reasons it's true when it is! reality contains oppositions or antagonisms that often happen for senseless reasons. so, it's often incorrect to collapse them to one or the other arbitrarily. Harry and Gryffindor versus Draco and Slytherin feels nonsensical because in reality it's rather unlikely anyone at a boarding school would actually be pure evil before maybe 16-18 years old. but that doesn't mean that ambiguity is the single go-to way to represent senseless antagonisms in art. that seems like a very reductive way to view art, to just go, ambiguous art is better than all other art and unambiguous art is bad. I feel like this video unintentionally generated irony by going on for a long time about how bad it is to interpret art and how that alone practically squashed Amber all by itself (the video actually claimed that, I'm not even exaggerating that), but also at the same time being postmodernist and invoking interpretations and intersubjectivity and saying that it's best when there are a lot of approaches to things all coexisting side by side and layering onto each other to produce an answer. there is a real tension between that and saying that it's bad to interpret art or perhaps make art and fail to have ambiguity in it. doesn't postmodernism only work when people are putting forth a circle of real actual answers, so some of the answers can sift to the top and then be real answers? wouldn't it not even work if everybody said "my answer is going to be ambiguity"? like, what would even happen if everybody went to a presidential election and decided "having a specific interpretation of antagonisms is wrong so I vote for ambiguity for president"? I can see how if you've lived in Liberal-republicanism all your life you would think "elections are great" and then take the concept of an election and apply it to absolutely everything. but it should only work if everybody collectively actually votes for something instead of nothing. they can't all vote for ambiguity. so it seems utterly inevitable that you'll get factions and fierce antagonisms in that if you want it to deliver an answer at all, as is in fact the purpose of doing it. if the purpose of promoting multiple interpretations and collecting as many as possible was not to land on a particular answer, you'd quite literally want to abolish democracy because in practical day-to-day life democracy would become impossible. and if ambiguity was always the best answer, it would then be acceptable to forcibly discard all answers that aren't "I vote for ambiguity", which blatantly violates one of the stated purposes of postmodernism, to get rid of oppression and promote freedom in the specific sense of lack of oppression. some days I feel like I can defend postmodernism better than any real postmodernist can even though I'm generally against it, while postmodernists themselves seem to want their system to fail so they can abdicate responsibility for it either succeeding or failing and pass it on to someone else. I begin to get the vague impression that postmodernism is actually some weird form of fraud where people attempt to put out false promises, do nothing, blame someone, and collect money. is that why I thought postmodernism was part of early Trotskyism for a period of time? because all the real corruption going on in the Soviet Union where people would make deals and walk away from responsibilities kept spawning it? I'm just joking. I have no idea whether that's true. but it's hard for me to not think of these things when a philosophy aggressively fails to make sense as hard as postmodern philosophy does and turns into a self-defeating paradox every time somebody tries to explain it. if the purpose of postmodernism is to promote ambiguity I genuinely don't get what it's for or why anyone would bother to listen to it or remember it. why is postmodernism so determined to say, as it in fact does in every actual example, that ambiguity is the only correct interpretation of things and you have to accept the narrative that there are no correct narratives?
- the reductive impulse to impose a tidy framework / there is no one way to fight this system -> that might be the case, especially when you're conflating three different "systems" together because they look similar as with this, but is there any way of assembling all the ways that exist that works? that's the real question. that's the actual problem you've posed and left open for people. and in terms of movements, the answer has generally been "no". people have all flocked to "intersubjectivity elections" and they've never produced any successful answers, in practice making them moot. is there a moment when we can admit that postmodernism simply isn't an appropriate method for what it's stated to do?
- MatPat ... it was a byproduct of the structural incentives of platforms like YouTube where engagement, virality, and monetization reward definitive, digestible theories -> what a startling moment of lucidity. this is fine, it's just utterly shocking to see seconds after seeing blatantly postmodernist statements.
here's the problem. human beings have finite attention. when presented with a lot of options, they can hardly even look at everything much less consider it. promoting postmodernism and collecting as many interpretations side by side creates agoras, and agoras immediately create these incentives to flatten the overall array of options as fast as possible so that one of the options that must inevitably compete to even be heard can win and end the competition. the very minimum correction you can do is realize that not flattening the competition is impossible, and all instances of postmodernism have a purpose of picking an answer, you only get to choose how the answer is picked.
he can see that capitalism is bad and somehow he can't see that small capitalism and small producers all creating parallel things side by side for money or no money are direct precursors to capitalism. postmodernism births capitalism about as surely as leaving out bananas brings in fruit flies. why do the equivalent of obstinately leaving several bananas in your room and getting upset when one of them has fruit flies because the flies were "supposed to" infinitely buzz around the room?
Compressing petty bourgeoisie back into workers
- worker compression (ironic) / worker compression (Trotskyism; international Marxism) / worker compression (motif of petty bourgeoisie or formally unemployed getting "compressed" back into workers; ironic connotation, not original connotation)
- A layer of tiny contractors which has successfully been "googlized" or "Amazonized" will eventually get squashed back down into an owner and a proletariat
Related
- 3D Workers Island [18]
- world where Trotskyists invent the internet
- intersubjectivity (Edmund Husserl) [19] [20] -> so, apparently the phenomenology guy was one of the first people to write about intersubjectivity.
I hope there aren't 10 different practical definitions of intersubjectivity that make it hard to learn what it actually is. but I fear there are. - Why are there media? (postmodernism) / If one of the easiest things to observe about society is that it can't be explained by narratives and is primarily characterized by ambiguity and resistance to mental compartmentalization, then what is the point of having The Media at all? -> "intersubjectivity" is apparently the obvious reply, but it's not a real response to this question given how 3DWI and the commentary video have already illustrated that intersubjectivity can utterly fail to consolidate onto any answers whatsoever, to everybody's peril. you can't just respond with "intersubjectivity". so, why not just stop having The Media? if all the people funding news stations and academia and a few other things suddenly started shutting them down tomorrow, what would you do? assuming that explanations are worth anything and postmodernism hasn't made them useless yet, what would you even say?
- [redacted]
Ideologies, topics, or genres
- / meta-Marxism
- / Trotskyism
- / Communist party aesthetics
- / Communist manifesto (1848)
- / Western Marxism
- / Western-Marxist distortions
- / 3D Workers Island
Wavebuilder combinations
- : forms result [Item]
- IV
/the Revolution Betrayed
( / IV)1
-1-1 - along with [Item]
- IV
/Trotsky disappearing from pictures
( / IV)1
-1-1 - forming from [Item]
- IV
/Trotsky disappearing from pictures
( / IV)1
-1-1 - worker degeneration (Western Marxism) ( / Fy)1
-1-1 - IV
/the Revolution Betrayed
( / IV)1
-1-1
- IV
/the Revolution Betrayed
( / IV)1
- worker-compression (MDem scrap)
- FinalClass01 - bot log; is the proletariat really the final class of humanity?