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Macaes - History has Begun

Tags: books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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