Bill Anderson
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band.myatproto.social
Bill Anderson
@band.myatproto.social
400 followers 500 following 310 posts
I am not the droid you are looking for.
I am also an open access advocate and inveterate punster.
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band.myatproto.social
from a neighboring social:
white letters on an orange background with fires and a pot underneath: "I was told there would be a handbasket."
January 31, 2025 at 9:55 PM
band.myatproto.social
yesterday's mood:
from threads: @girl.on.books I tried screaming into the void but it was full. What now?
January 29, 2025 at 3:38 PM
band.myatproto.social
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #2,309,467!
September 17, 2024 at 3:10 AM
band.myatproto.social
Shoshana Zuboff points out how hard it was for people to comprehend totalitarianism. I feel that here in the USA we are struggling to comprehend what is happening in politics and society:--
from Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalsim, p 366 in the print edition: [Carl] Friedrich was among the first scholars of totalitarianism to address this experience of improbability, writing in 1954 that "virtually no one before 1914 anticipated the course of development which has overtaken Western civilization since then... none of the outstanding scholars in history, law, and the social sciences discerned what was ahead... which culminated in totalitarianism. To this failure to foresee corresponds a difficulty in comprehending."
June 26, 2024 at 7:12 PM
band.myatproto.social
I am reading Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and she refers to Carl Friedrich's observation about the difficulty in comprehending totalitarianism. What is happening now is also difficult to comprehend.
[Carl] Friedrich was among the first scholars of totalitarianism to address this experience of improbability, writing in 1954 that "virtually no one before 1914 anticipated the course of development which has overtaken Western civilization since then... none of the outstanding scholars in history, law, and the social sciences discerned what was ahead... which culminated in totalitarianism. To this failure to foresee corresponds a difficulty in comprehending. Not even the most farsighted of the early-century interpreters of industrial society, thinkers such as Durkheim and Weber, had anticipated this murderous turn. Hannah Arendt described the defeat of Nazi Germany as "the first chance to try to tell and to understand what had happened... still in grief and sorrow and... a tendency to lament, but no longer in speechless outrage and impotent horror."
March 7, 2024 at 7:55 PM
band.myatproto.social
rain snuck up on yesterday's walk:
February 4, 2024 at 6:13 PM
band.myatproto.social
Some other-than-hope thinking from @annakornbluh.bsky.social, Immediacy, or The style of too-late capitalism (), pp. 18-19:
Too-lateness as a condition for climate affect and cultural style heats up the present, but, were we to dialecticize our relation to time, this extremity could ordain action rather than resignation. Every past deed of oligarchic malfeasance now come to light, every terror come home, every threshold exceeded nevertheless admits the possibility of more amelioration. Too-lateness pegs the hopelessness that contrasts the hopefulness pinged in "late" capitalism's anticipation of an end. ... a kind of radical hopelessness that dares refuse the old promissory and progressive logics of capitalist growth could open political horizons. Such openings need not be novel: old forms, outmoded institutions, and residual constructs still have more to offer. Diagnosing too-lateness as it materializes in the style of immediacy shouldn't be an invitation to melancholy so much as an incitement to collaboration: it's not too late — things can still be less worse.
February 3, 2024 at 2:56 PM