Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

I think one of the biggest ways I'm alienated from the rest of humanity is that I think sports are a massive waste of attention. It's like a category error to emotionally invest in a contest that you can't influence and that has no impact on your life beyond your self-identification. Caring about a sporting event that you're not in is simply a mistake, in my view.

Incidentally, this reminds me of the emphasis that early modern republican-liberals placed on the "virtu" of a people (Machiavelli) or concerns like character, judgement, and temper (Washington). I think they were responding to the claim made in favor of autocratic rulers that autocrats (queens, kings, Medicis, et al) had the human sensibility to deliver more humane judgments -- as opposed to the flat, committee-drafted policies pronounced by impersonal deliberative processes.

So it seems to me that rules are more likely to be promoted and extended and applied based on their topicality, abstraction, and synergy -- but that these qualities are independent of human judgment or the informed deliberation of the greater good. Judgment and deliberation are supposed to be holding the reigns, but you know how these things go.

The most bizarre thing to consider is that rules themselves take on certain inhuman alliances with other rules. A rule that promotes ABC is compatible with rules that promote AB, BC, & so on. They will Velcro onto each other without anyone's intent to do so.
I think this is what Deleuze was getting at with his work on machines. I think this kind of memeplex is also what many postratd describe as an egregore, but I could be mistaken on that point because I've never been comfortable with the term.

Furthermore, every extant rule can become extended to new situations for the simple reason that it does not require such an explicit change as the creation of a new concept or the deliberation of one approach over the other. If there's a rule that's already on the books and it's close enough to the situation at-hand, then you can save everyone a bunch of arguments and make an existing rule more generalized. This is a choice justified by ease of process but not quality.

Think about the Peter Principle. People get promoted beyond their level of usefulness. But people leave positions and change ensues. Rules, by contrast, never expire and can be adapted to changing situations by being entrenched in layer after layer of compensatory sub-rules, exegesis, or selective enforcement.

Here's the most anarchy-positive thing I think I can sincerely argue: I find it to be probable in the abstract that any particular rule X has been extended beyond the situations in which it is more useful than any alternative. Or to shave some words and some subtlety, if you want to tell me that some rule doesn't make sense then I'm likely to agree with you.

Whether you call it psi or libidinal investment or influence or attention, it's all backfill lore for a story that advertisers are selling to clients. It is essential, above everything else, that the clients believe that advertising has causal force. The advertiser must be understood by the client as a rentier selling access to a hydraulic system of coercion.
When the advertiser gives the client some metrics and some spectacle, the client must believe that the spectacle caused the metrics.

You really have to start wondering about the metaphysics in some of the Freudian stuff on mass psychology. It describes groups lending their libidinal force to dictators. This implies some kind of psi that flies in the face of all other natural scientist. This is invented as backfill for the hydraulic metaphor: people are pipes, so there must be some effluvium running through the pipes.

It's no wonder that Herbert Hoover, the engineer, was enamored by this approach. It's all based on an impersonal, hydraulic treatment of humanity: put this in the press and sell 32.7% more cigarettes, eg. There's fundamentally no interest in any individual person as an autonomous source of their own meaning. To be interested in that, for Hoover, would be like respecting one inch of pipe among others.

There's a lot of phony arguments that are made in support of the advertiser's lore. Sure, you can point to the libidinal base for lots of personal habits. But it remains to be demonstrated that those habits are responsive to stimulus, that they're responsive to the specific media being applied, or that they're responsive in predictable ways.

When someone like Walter Lippmann says that the advertiser's lore (unthinking masses triggered by the manipulation of deeply felt taboos) should justify a new technocratic elite to control the mechanisms of media, he's really just adding a layer to the lore and helping clients believe that they're accessing the control room of society.
The dull reality, of course, is that advertising clients are simply accessing the the production inefficiencies of media technologies.

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.