Well this has been fun but I think if I keep jerking I'll rip my dick off

As soon as I heard of that blog post he made as a plea to stop ridiculing nerds, I thought to myself, dude, everything feminists are criticizing neckbeards for are different flavors of the same sexist shit feminists have been calling out Chadbros for. Belonging to a geeky subculture doesn't make their views about women any less abhorrent.

Ditto. I very distinctly remember [this Magic the Gathering card](http://static.starcitygames.com/sales/cardscans/MTG/WTH/en/nonfoil/Peacekeeper.jpg) was the first time I saw a coded traditional African person depicted as a figure of authority and respect. It was seriously a formative moment for my young mind, helping me realize that all people in all societies have their own sorts of cultural coding for that sort of thing. I actually think this is why nerd culture was one of the first fronts in the modern fight against fascism. It’s one of the few spaces in mass culture where “different” people has room to imagine themselves as real, fully realized people. It’s fantasy! Of course we don’t need to take gender dynamics, colonialism, and white supremacy for granted here. But evidently this was grievously offensive to sheltered White dudes.

Ah, but you see, that's exactly the problem! Those were the only girls the nerdy boys had a chance with, and now feminism has *ruined them* by telling them that they deserve to be respected. An absolute travesty, to be sure

This is all really good but I'm still skeptical that our solution is technologic. There is a big part of me that thinks the technology *is* the problem, or at least a significant part of it, as it exists currently. Modern Marxists are dinosaurs, but not in the way you mean. Most people who call themselves Marxists today have more in common with religious reactionaries than anything meaningfully socialist, and it shows in the way they organize their movement: they venerate a lost age, elevate individuals for their martyrdom, and are perpetually calling for a return to form. The actual *material* analysis, the part of Marx that was worth saving, has been lost in this retreat to myth-making and hero worship. When people valorize a figure like Lenin, all I see is the abandonment of Marx' project, which was about capturing history itself and bringing it into a general philosophy. Even the name, Marxism, is itself a misnomer; it should be called what he called it: historical materialism. I don't think more technology, or even better technology, can do that either, because the process of capital production is inherently atomizing. The sickness at the center of all this is alienation; the process by which individuals are cut off from themselves (as pieces of time) in service of the production of capital. When an individual produces, they are functionally converting time into an object, and alienation is the result of that time then being appropriated as capital stock, rather than used as a consumable object. That's the core of Marx, everything trickles out from there. The reason Marx advocated for organization was that only through organization would there have been a massed power large enough to reclaim control of the capital and close the gap opened by capital production. But I'm not convinced that even that could work at this point. Seemingly in 2018 one of the core problems with technology is that although it helps us connect better than ever, this connection can still only be deployed in service of perpetual atomization; telecoms so we can work from home, cars so we can live dozens of kilometers away from anything of note, the media-industrial complex so that we can replace authentic interaction with voyeurism and psuedoactivity. In Marx' day the prescription was obvious because there was one clear class interjecting themselves into the capital production cycle, and so he falsely believed removing this class would solve the problem. But it looks like he was wrong. The soviets (or the Chinese) certainly seem to be smashing up against the same issues we are, which is that industrial society tends toward totalitarianism. We have that now, the totalitarianism of a society wholly mobilized to increase the global capital stock at all costs; human life, human time, the environment, our sanity, our sense of decency and dignity, all of these are up for grabs if it means a +1.2% growth each cycle. And even questioning this process of perpetual capital stock growth will see you pushed far to the fringes of the system; the only debate left is whether we try to meter this process through green technology or if we go full Blade Runner. To quote Mark Fisher (rip), it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. What is capital? An object in the production process, either raw resources, currency, or tools. And what is a tool, really? Our problem is that in this moment we only understand tools as capital stock, not as extensions of a human conscious, which is what they truly are. Aside from the continentalists, I know of nobody trying to liberate the tool from it's position as capital stock. I'm extremely skeptical that more tools in their current form will help us socialize our way out of this problem. Our tools are how we got backed into this corner in the first place. Also, we are not even close to the bottom of this pit. The model of the industrial world is truly the machine, a series of unique parts, each with it's own purpose, each completely useless unless in concert with the others. This is also how we organize our social interactions; workers, managers, departments. Alienation, again, this time in the form of biopower and hyper-specialization. A worker in the modern professional class trains for that position for almost 25 years. And then they spend another 10 years signalling loyalty, building up a reputation, and generally getting "broken in". They spend almost as long training and preparing to be a productive consumer, which is the gasoline that makes the machine go. By the time they're in a position of institutional influence, whatever revolutionary spirit was in them has been crushed. Breaking that programming should be the first priority, and not in the way neoliberals want to break it, wherein the atomized worker becomes truly interchangeable: geographically lost, technologically in perpetual retraining, and spiritually dead. We need to break this programming in a way that encourages people to become generalists again, to push back against alienation, if not at the object-level, then at least at the level of *how* production occurs. Bring back the renaissance man. I've been trying to make it big in the big city for 6 years, and I'm about done my tenure, leaving here within a few months for a smaller arena and then to who knows where. I'm leaving because I am sick to death of the nightmare that is trying to live in a big city, and I'd rather take my chances "outside the walls" than watch my spirit drip out, drop by drop. We're at our most communal when we cook together, when we sleep together, and when we have days where we do nothing together. We're at our most alienated at a work party. That should tell you all you need to know about where the problem is. What I've concluded after 6 years is that the future for the left is something like [solar punk](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SolarPunk), deploying high-tech in concert with our natural surroundings, not for growth, but for suspension and eventual (natural) de-population. We need to take the concept of a tool and rip it away from the concept of capital stock production; tools need to be returned to their proper place as extensions of human consciousness, rather than exploitable external objects that individuals use to harness other's time. That is the way out of alienation, and probably the only way to save the planet. The alternative is Blade Runner. Can we do this with existing telecoms technology? Maybe. But before that must come good old-fashioned legal action. Before 2008 the internet held revolutionary potential. Centralizing the majority of traffic onto a handful of privately owned websites was a terrible decision, both practically (look what's happening in America) and as part of the larger revolutionary mission. The only way to break this hold now is to either destroy the whole thing or to leverage state power to shatter these monopolies. So I think that is a good place to start. Otherwise anything we cook up on the side will be equivalent to Zion beside the Matrix. As it exists right now, telecoms is a mix of a telescreen and soma, an amazing tool that keeps people more atomized than ever. Breaking that spell should be priority number 1 for the left, at least in the developed world.