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Macaes - History has Begun [61cd4b11]

Tags: books

Polemic argument about how america was shaped by television and gives onto it's own unreality

1. Preface

  • "Revolutionaries who have lost faith in the revolution" -> Bayat - Revolution without Revolutionaries
  • Poses the question "can the chinese economy master technology?" Assumptions of neoliberal frame is that the democratic/western/liberal was the king of technology
  • Argues that the US is more addicted to global primacy than liberal values

2. One

  • Cycles of government (ibn khaldun)
  • American constiutional triumpalism as a marker of decline - ben ackerman

  • Does a broad stroke comparison of UK/Europe/American as Romans/Greeks

    • Incredibly orientialist and draws upon lots of bad history
  • US affirmed global primacy against europe more oftan than with it

3. Two

  • past looms large in the american mind

  • Frontier lands and the notions of settler colonialism

    • More and more americans migrated towards "the west", where "the east" was seen as an extension of europe

      • Is this why the "real" american is stereotyped as this conception of midwestern american

  • Toqville comments on how future improvements in america are aimed to make life slightly more convient

    • pg 36

  • Talks about how the united states has blended religion and democracy

  • "echoes of vast asian despotic states"

    • pg 39
    • oddly shallow in meaning

4. Three

  • "Once a relative distribution of power no longer favors the west…the search for a new foreign policy begins"

    • Once freed of european shackles, the US can search for a new future
  • Babitt
  • American society as a theme park, no longer as a home

5. Four

  • Americans were the first visual culture with tv

  • starts to be the appearance of things that matter, rather than the things themselves

    • aesthtics matter more than the actual thing

  • "reality and unreality briged together"

    • pg 71

  • concept that things had become fiction

    • US exports unreality and imports reality

      • arms exports are the ultimate fiction, they largely are for show and not meant to be used
  • "On the one hand,. the unmasking of the bourgious belief in objective reality that any meaningful struggle against reality has become absurd"

  • American life continously emphasizes its own artificiality

    • show that you know how to have fun, not just having fun
    • job interviews show more than that you just know the job, you also know how to interview
    • elements with strong narrative structures

  • Reality is experienced through the fictionalized enactment of the opposite

    • kurt anderson

  • memes as a fictionalized structure

    • before you had to conceptualize the story, now you just have to look at the meme
    • the meme makes complex topics legible and simple topics complex
    • content collapse
    • allows you to avert your eyes from the reality
  • political correctness stands for the shift whereby social actors become increasingly concerned less with the way they live and more with the way they are portrayed in the narrative

6. Five

  • Changing presidents is now changing the TV channel
  • We are larping through the events

  • society is performative, online spaces

    • you need to generate content to be "alive" in the digital space
  • Hannah Arendt -> hitler and stalin generated lies
  • socialism became rehabitiated in this manner

  • trump offers the virtual experiences of a nationalist regime without the real world consequences of one for privilaged people

    • As reality moves on, enchanted by mammon, macheviallan tech workers, authoritarian regimes
  • AOC is inventing a relatiy

7. Six

  • Concept of overlapping circles of religion, freedom, artists, etc

    • With liberalism encompassing everything else
  • Makes the argument aht we miss the promise of unreality, that now that there are no shackles, we can truly explore alternative system
  • Old american: freedom is fine as long as you don't harm someone
  • New american: freedom is fine as long as you don't impose your realities on someone

  • Memes as a storytelling experiments without being reminded of their flaws and incomptetncies

  • "overbearing concern with fostering skeptical attitude prevents us from actually engaging with life"

    • if we are skpetical towards everything (like anti-vaccers) do we reatreat into our own realities?
  • amusing that macaes talks about americanism and TV while constantly referencing westworld

  • American populism is freedom in its own way, foretting the truth

    • alt-right rail against political correctness not b/c they are racist, but because the political correctness esposes a single truth

  • democracy is less the incorporation of values but appealing to values now

    • need to turn out voters instead of growing the tent

  • states do not shape reality anymore, they are mere actors again

  • The religious question is a dead one
  • reconcilation of technoly and political values need to happen

  • paradox of stopping the historical clock looks bad in a progressive society

    • historical clock looks less attractive for those who feel like they are living in a fundalmentally just society

  • liberals like to pretend to fight against the establishment or the oligarchy, but they are fighting religion and technology

    • do whatever you want, but you can't shake the mighty edifice of freedom

  • finance takes on a specific role if the future is indefinite

    • peter theil
    • money as a means to an end vs money as optionality
  • tech VC's and Braben - Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization

8. Seven

  • Action creates reality, liberally manifesting destiny

  • vietnam was where the logs breaks down adn the pathos took over

  • Massive force only works in a few circumstances where the risk of escalation is low

  • Power projection fantasy

    • technology changes in light of desert storm, first televised war
    • war is now santizied, removed from the death for the domestic audienc e

  • kosovo

    • mobilized nato citizens as spectators
    • israel mobilizes citizens to a new level?

  • one belt one road

    • macaes suggests obor is a geopolitical quest

      • even though it's largely patchwork

    • peripheral and absent from all global questions

    • US & Chaina are moving closer as a they move ideaologically apart