what years of culture war do to the human mind

As somebody active in the politicization of tech workers, I see this as a great challenge to the stale narrative that tech workers are selfish, childish, passive. Both Luigi Mangione and Aaron Bushnel are tech workers and they are enough to prove a point.

I’m Italian. We had a long season of leftist terrorism with popular support. People started feeling alienated when they kidnapped and killed the centrist prime minister because he wanted to ally with the Left. Kneecapping dozens of CEOS just won the terrorists more and more support.

Also sympathy to causes is different from power. We should be concerned less with how an action impacts public opinions and more on how it impacts power structures, potential for action and mobilization.

At that age I had similar ideas. This didn’t stop me from turning as leftist as it gets. Anyway it is all irrelevant. He did firebomb the walmart, he did the redacted and that’s enough to absolve him from any leftist sin. Don’t you dare turn this into yet another culture war.

We are in agreement here on the premises. The work of Nunes is the most rigorous critique of contemporary “spontaneism” (you call it organic growth, but it’s the same in this context). If We Burn is the more pop version of it, but the idea is the same. I’m also very hostile to prefigurative politics and any kind of escapism. The politics must be done rooted in the here and now. There’s no outside. Nunes says “the history with the subject inside”.

We disagree on the conclusions though and that’s what gives the title to the book. “Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal” means that a lot of people, to escape the failures of spontaneism and horizontalism (or the trauma of the '68) take refuge in older forms of vertical rigidity, like the traditional party form. This is a false dichotomy, that is paralyzing the left. They are just different, ineffective, coping mechanisms. The failures of one doesn’t justify the other, and vice-versa.

The party justifies itself by being a conscious organ Here we go into metaphysics of organizational theory, but I would argue that a party is conscious on the same level of any assemblage of more than two humans. They just perform their consciousness differently. Nunes takes like two chapters to make this argument, so I won’t repeat it here. See it as like the same difference there is between human intelligence, action and decision-making compared to the intelligence of mycelium networks, forests or other forms of non-human agency.

collect knowledge, theory, and practice under one roof

In today’s world, this is a weakness, not a strength. Centralized knowledge is slow and world around us is slow. This was less true in 1917 or it is less true at the periphery of the empire, where party forms still deliver the goods. Being slower than your environment means not only that you can’t act effectively within your environment, but that you also lack the tools to observe that this is happening. That is one of the arguments for which I said before “the party form is unfit”. Decentralization and localism is for sure fetishized by many as “more democratic”, and I don’t necessarily believe that’s true, but decentralization is necessary because it creates faster and more flexible systems, that can match capitalistic structures in speed.

That said, you also see it as complementary to what happens outside the party, and that’s already good ecological thinking in Nunes terms.

That’s what a socialist party might aim to do, but it’s probably not the best tool and for sure it’s not main reason why such a thing would work. One core part of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal is to deconstruct the narrative that the Bolshevik party was the main driver of the Russian Revolution, as if Lenin had a blueprint emanating from the center of the party that was executed at the periphery and then in the struggle itself. Nunes attributes the success not to the party form or how it was operating (the execution was good, but that’s not the point), but rather to the culture of mediation between conflicting powers that the party and Iskra were promoting in their political ecology. This clearly wasn’t framed as a protocol, but it had the same role.

The party form was a historical accident, that at the time was fit enough for the material and social conditions, for the culture, for the informational infrastructure of the time. Nowadays, it is very clear that parties are unfit for whatever they are trying to achieve and every battle is uphill, while in different conditions in the past they proliferated and grew.

One core tenet of the book is that organizational forms should follow the goals, strategy and environmental conditions and should be picked accordingly. It would be a mistake to start with the idea of building a party form and then find a problem to apply that form to.

There are no leftist parties in Italy. You could only pick between mild neoliberal, full neoliberal, old-school liberal and a few different flavors of proto-fascists.

Unions in Italy are the only bastion of the left wing, especially now that Landini decided he’s not a wishy-washy institutional moderate anymore and he wants to enter Valhalla dying in battle.

If Israel is a colonial project, any relationship fueling its economy is supporting the war. This includes touristic activities, investments, any kind of business.

The BDS movement worked against South Africa because it was totalizing and any chance to suffocate the Israeli colonial project must go through the same strategy.

any public space that intermediates people attention is eventually going to be spam by bots, proportionally to the number of people present. Lemmy doesn’t do much to avoid this. The public internet has no future and the fediverse should be building tools for federated community spaces rather than public spaces shaped in the image of attention-harvesting machines.

Purpose in life? I’m not American, sorry

Why do you think there’s a true self if you’re not close to it?

This is a terrible take, but saying it doesn’t work in the comments of a news that says they work makes it even worse.

I’m sure an overworked rider struggling to get to the end of the month has time and money to spend on this just to get a basic right protected. Individual solutions to systemic problems never work.

I don’t keep anything relevant on my machine. It’s just a way to access data hosted somewhere more safe. Also files and folders are terrible ways to organize anything, even remotely like Google Drive or similar stuff. It’s Microsoft’s and Apple’s brainrot outliving the 90s. We should move forward.

Definitely Instagram.

While Lemmy is slowly making a dent in my reddit participation, it doesn’t do much for other things. I’m involved in IRL politics, food, and the clubbing scene, all stuff that is almost completely absent on the fediverse, especially the American-dominated side of it.

A full wallet among other wallets, perfectly disguised. Somebody left it there a few hours before. It was a guy from Scotland on a trip with his friends who went shopping for party clothes. He answered on Instagram (after much stalking) at midnight when I was already inside a club and they were on their way to the club too. So we rendez-vous at 6 AM after clubbing because they had a train at 8AM for another city. They left some joints at my place as a thank you. Also offered some ketch for a, I shit you not, “crunchy landing”.

I track everything private and professional on Notion.

I have dedicated databases for

• tasks, divided by type (reminders, activities, chores), by domain (job, household, politics, writing etc etc), by client, by status
• calls and meetings I have to set up
• credits and debits I have open
• classes and workshops I’m hosting

Me, 404media or Zuckerberg?

I made it! It wasn’t that hard, the API was quite straightforward.

fixed, sorry