Sad but oh so true

The Internet is often thought an egalitarian blessing by those who would hold high criminals accountable, yet the only accounting rendered is online. I don't think the guilty regard this as an unfortunate development. I think we've been corralled into cyberspace, taken as freedom its "free speech zones," and adopted its virtual and vulnerable bantustans as our "domains." (Appropriately so called, since its mastery entered mass culture as a euphemism for masturbaton.) We can win the blog wars, but we may as well have been playing World of Warcraft for all the difference it will make when the power goes out and we lose our connection. The connection for which we may have forsaken many others of much higher worth.

Rigorous Intuition (why didn't I start reading this a long time ago?) replicates the Chaos Marxist aphorisms' stance on niche markets and subcultures. Of course, this crap happened long before the internet, it's just now it's far easy for weirdos to form cliques (note that the whole furry/otherkin/otakukin would have never got going in a pre-internet ages).

Thanks for recent comments. I'm afraid I'm not going to change the comments policy - anyone who wants to partake in the discussion had better have a name, although of course feel free to make one up. My point about "science rather than art or magick" should be seen in the context of the above comments - my problem with the latter two at the moment is that the audience is too small and generally irrelevant.

STILL ATEN'T DEAD

Is there any work out there which makes a serious attempt at reconciling practical individual psychology with the insights of Marxist/Situationist/Frankfurt School materialist cultural theory? It's not really enough to say that individual consciousness is "interpolated" in the structures of late capitalist mass culture. Until we understand exactly how it happens, through what processes, and how to reverse-engineer the effect, the marketing geniuses and media priests will be able to defeat or recuperate any grassroots movement before it properly gets going.

To some degree, I'm fed up with art and magick and I want to start going at this on a proper scientific basis. The urgency of the project is such that dilettante methods are no longer adequate.

ETA: I'm gratified to note that, for something I knocked off in five minutes and wrote for effect rather than meaning, the Chaos Marxist Manifesto (see sidebar) is still being read and linked to by the most interesting people. Welcome, new people.