Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

By selling clients on the view that consumers were exercising self-expression, advertisers are actually selling them on the idea that metrics like sales figures are profound expressions of meaning-making from below rather than statistical noise or sectoral indicators. Advertising is meaning-making from above, for clients, but with a modicum of displacement.

The big innovation of Edward Bernays is to provide slogans that are actually heuristics that make aspects of social reality (eg women smoking) legible to modernist instruments of social sense-making (the news).

It doesn't really matter whether public relations are influential. The advertiser creates the capacity for observers of society to perceive new categories of behavior. The advertiser sells the capacity for self-regard, via modernist media, to their clients.

If I had to boil Freud down to a single proposition, it would be that some methods of self-control run so deep that a person never becomes aware of all the impulses s/he is regulating, BUT (to add a 2nd proposition) we CAN observe the impulses that are unobservable to individuals through society's symbolic matrix of prohibitions et al.

The US flag is an incredible piece of design and the only reasons to not admit this are petty and dishonest.

I believe that people need to know more stuff. People don't know enough stuff yet. Knowing stuff is not common enough at this date.

What do you call the compulsion to explain personal behavior to others? "Insecurity" is the emotional base but it doesn't touch on the defense mechanism. 🤔

Welp I'm off to go change all my passwords to foo+SolidGoldMagikarp

Televised competitve keepy-uppy, played in an indoor playground

That your soul will grow nobler as it softens -- yes, even amidst war and cataclysm.

The message of these novels is that the greatest human ambition is to be known and needed, and the best men and women are inestimable sweetie pies.

I will admit that I appreciate the commentary of, "People debauch their most profound commitments because they are bored as shit and they will self-destruct because they crave passionate self-definition more than pleasure or security."

Die

Die

Wishing a very sincere "fuck you" to every young cavalry captain who tries to swoop the earnest ingenue in every Russian novel.

This isn't happening to me at the moment, but it seems kind of psycho to try to snowball people about a big unplanned setback in their working lives. This attempt to therapize people in advance seems like it's rooted in a mis-estimation of what a worker-employee relationship is.

I push buttons for X, X sends me a fraction of the dollar value I add. If X is not going to send me dollars, I'll stop pushing buttons.

I'll work out the emotional details in my own time.

dimwit: You're fired. Collect your things and go.
midwit: "The tides do not only pull the ocean to the shore, but also pull it away. I believe that we are shaped by those tides of both connection and emancipation. And therefore it is with great personal conscientiousness that I have drafted this message to inform you of a great tidal shift within our bond as a working unit. In the words of my personal icon, Martin Luther King Jr..."
topwit: You're fired. Collect your things and go.

I feel that it's weird that my life has mostly been defined by Type 3, a little by Type 2, and I've barely had much of Type 1 at all.

I think this is mostly due to my authoritarian upbringing. I tend not to doubt the teachers and I am very very slow to develop a spiteful relationship to them.