Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

I hate to be all "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" about this, but I'd argue instead that scandal in media is just a kind of pseudo-event that helps smoothe over a problem in the distribution of those media: we don't get 22 minutes of news each evening, or 1 paper's worth, so pseudo-events help bulk up thin editions.
The advertiser needs the client to believe that the spectacle of censorship is deeply felt by the audience. The news office needs the advertiser. And so on.

Most of Bernays' stunts rely on triggering the observable mechanisms of suppression. The Freudian logic, again, suggests that society can explicitly censor that which is deeply felt but innately censored by an individual. To trigger someone, it follows, is to grab them by a handle on the inside that the individual can't even grasp. But again the trick here is in telling a story that the real meaning is that individuals are in a crisis about confronting some taboo.

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.