5 Star Tossers

We discuss two very sad yet important contemporary ideas about how enormous companies like Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon rule over us today. The first is Technofeudalism, a word coined by Yanis Varifoukas, which argues that capitalism has been replaced by a landscape of digital fiefdoms. The second is Enshittification, a word coined by Cory Doctorow, which explains why the apps we can never get enough of (Instagram, X, Amazon, and Facebook) continue to deteriorate while their parent companies make more and more money. Sagi insists throughout that whether or not we have transitioned from capitalism to a digital fiefdom, a Protestant ideology, one of labor and manifest destiny, continues to function and serve the hearts of all our beloved CEOs. Jack offers us an important history of the creation of Silicon Valley, tying a certain entrepreneurial optimism to a strange conflation of academia and the industrial military complex.Andy reads technofeudalism as a kind of vampiric disease, where everyone is either becoming their own Dracula, holed up in their castle, or the rats and peons that will soon be devoured.Jake gives as many examples as he can from Doctorow's book Enshittification, which he highly recommends.

Dear, surviving, audient: how is it hanging?We\I sympathize.If you were looking to art as an answer, hoping for some revolutionary frameworks, or just plain ol' solace inside --            -- I'm afraid most of the pod's going to tell you to keep looking.In this one we watched 2 "political" movies released this year: Ari Aster's Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another.More generally, the 2 movies raised the question of what it means to involve politics in a movie. Jake took this as an excuse to geek out on Grad school vibes and do a deep dive into Walter Benjamin's attempts to save aesthetics from the khaki schmattes of Communism.Who said Marx Grudge?Benjamin does brandish an interesting, rather Derridian, analytic tool in the distinction between allegory and the symbol; which I will anger Jake and summarize here as analogous (allegorical?!) to a movie whose special effects are shot on set with actual props, and the one where the effects are all programmed in (as CGI). Like shooting props, the allegory foregrounds its technicity, while the symbol will claim the harmony of form-function and content. Except the symbol doesn't work anymore. Like the pathetic attempt poor Andy had to suffer through, where the reinvented "Superman" is called-upon to white-wash the Gaza genocide (still a western debacle). The symbol rang so hollow it gave Andy bowel issues. (Editor's note:) We will NOT be getting into that.Of course, the allegory's very apparatus makes it susceptible to Capitalist manipulations. This is where we take a more specific tack on Anderson's film: shot and directed, deliberately, in my opinion, as a post-fascist account of how pathetic and hopeless revolutions are, how revolutionaries are either posers or self-deceiving cucks.And here is Anderson's genius, in recognizing the capitalist tentacles have already infiltrated all discourse -- which is a panicked, exhausted discourse these days (on "the left") -- "over-technicizing" allegory into social media reels and internet memes. His account gives the melancholia of a post-fascist winner looking back at history: disjointed, often accompanied by a (never happy or energetic or really calm) soundtrack, the characters are mostly isolated with superficial thoughts and relationships... it is the sad sigh of a fulfilled Sklavenmoral.There was more tossed around, of course. Fair warning.STARS: Marx Grudge (grudgingly); Beast & Sovereign... but really, all the Stars were there: the Il vaut mieux with differance; the Pervs R' Us with melancholy, the WWJD with 'Manifest Destiny'...P.S. We have an official email address ([email protected]), for you, dear audient, to vent; a kind of a complaint/feedback box. We will collect the complaints (/corrections/disputes) to an episode where we address your mirror of our stupidities. 5ST

We wanted to talk about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. We ended up returning to a question Sagi asked in the last episode (Bowser Bones): how do we talk to people who mean well but don't get more radical ideas? This question is so hard to answer, we meander on all sides of it. We speak about the violence of left and right, we speak about the performative insincerity of so many talking heads, and we think about a kind of psychotic manifest destiny that encourages so many people to embrace whatever is on a sale in the marketplace of ideas.Sagi asks about the hypocrisy of the "punch a Nazi" idea, and Andy does not condone any violence of any sort.

Bowser bones is a phrase Andy and Jake came up with after playing way too much Mario Tennis. One afternoon, Jake chose to play as Bowser and easily defeated Andy, who was playing as Princess Peach. He accused Jake of cheating because Bowser's character has more power than Peach. This soon became a question about the assumption that man has more bone density than women. Andy pointed out what a gross fantasy it is whenever men assert this difference. Often times this assertion comes in the form of transphobia and the pearl clutching about trans women in female sports. Is there any way to assert this biological difference without leveraging violence? Sagi was at his honest and most cancellable best. Wondering if there is some sympathy that we need to give to the anxiety caused by sexual difference; its neglect, owing to the Christian framework that constantly polices and represses it, is something that colors current perceptions of male violence and transphobia. Andy looks at Freud's famous essay "A Child is Being Beaten" to help us think about the creation of this fantasy, and the anxiety of castration. Jake extends this idea by looking at Alan Bass who asserts the need to accept difference, while simultaneously critiquing the common narratives of sexual difference as concrete fetishes. We splay ourselves open in this pod, while advocating for love as transcendence of run-of-the-mill gender narratives.

Well, we thought about AI again. This time Andy joined us. Jake, as promised, went Marx Grudge. He read from Marx's "Fragment on Machines," and listed the many lawsuits currently levied against "AI vendors." That said, he also couldn't help thinking about the future of porn. Sagi spoke about the metaphysical utilitarian progress underpinning AI, certain that the only real thing AI can do is solve the stupid analytic philosophy trolley problem. Oh, that and get a high score on an IQ test. Andy introduced the Tower of Babel and helped us think about how concrete thinking is overtaking the younger generation. AI, entirely focused on space, and against time, leaves no room for ethics, for thought, for enjoying petites madeleines. Listen past the end, for a Proustian surprise.