TOTW: Abandoning History

Having abandoned history, we have no interest in waiting for the end of the world. We have realized we cannot live our lives except by being the world’s undoing. In the end, there is nothing to wait for and nothing to fear. What’s more, we have all the time in the world to undo it.

We who would like to not be deluded,who hold a certain dis-illusion as a criterion of life, know that everything comes to an end. At least we know it sometimes. Sometimes it is as simple as knowing our friend will die, or that we will die for them.

You know about death because you are surrounded by it. But, even as Everything manages and orders the death that surrounds, it conceals death. It has to do so constantly, and cannot ever do so entirely. And when it fails, you see that you are surrounded by death.

When we spoke of hopelessness, we meant a disregard for everything, but also an attitude toward the certainty of death. When we spoke of fearlessness, it was to distinguish ourselves from everything that lives as though it should not die. So, without fear, without hope, we are playing a game with time and death. Our project, to which we will have been true, will come to an end as well. The game, which comes in several variants, is to know this and remain committed – without illusions.

Commitment to commitment is to know how to communicate the dis-illusion and the game. This is what we are doing when we say: “hello.”

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"Commitment to commitment is to know how to communicate the dis-illusion and the game. This is what we are doing when we say: “hello.”"

Holy shiiiiit! All this time I didn't know...

"“Hello? Is there anybody there?” The invention of the telephone, its invasion and reconstitution of everyday life, changed affairs. It was so unnatural to speak into the machine that people were more inclined to say “Hello?” than “Good day”. Since the presence of another could no longer be assumed, it seemed appropriate to call a question into the void. And that question-call is what we have unknowingly inherited.

The call into the void has since grown to inhabit all of social life. One index of its spread is the fact that the question-call “Hello” is now the most ordinary of greetings. It even has a cute form: “Hi!” “Hello” is the call into the void, the greeting of an era of telepresence, of ghostly pseudopresence. Ordinary greetings for an ordered life of loneliness shared with other people."

This is literally like what walking into the IRC feels like before others' texts pop in.

"...in Everything friendship is impossible."

This is patently untrue. Friendships are everywhere, even if what they mean, or how much they last, does not please you (the rhetorical writer?). Good and lasting friendships are always a rare thing, as is anything valuable. Friendships are easier to form as a child, and become harder as you age. Someone can be so old, callused and alone as to think that friendship is impossible. It's impossible for many, but not for many others. Many people can say they've at least had a friend once.

Being "against everything" does sound like the type of thing to make it harder to keep and make friends. The text sounds like a death cult if you read it the wrong way, it sounds like mumbo jumbo if you read it at a glance too. But I vibed with it even if it sounded wacky and ridiculous. One thing it did well is speaking in vague obfuscated code, it did not mention anarchy or any other common keywords, to its merit and detriment. Wink wink, nudge nudge, we get what you're hinting at. The bit about seduction is an ideal i think is rarer than the friendship. Not seduction as romance, maybe leading to foreplay and sex, but seduction as a veiled playful communication that can entice and interweave a tacit complicity. Wee look i used fancy words, shoot me. What passes as "seduction" is very straightforward and overt, no subtlety. Specially now with apps, very algorithmic and transactional.

Conspiracies among common folxxx (three x's make it good), and adventure (a stand in for "poetry" cuz people think of stanzas and get bored, they don't think of moving deep feelings, most "poetry" is terrible and boring) as everyday life is what's lacking. Conspiracy not as business, but as deeply romantic or platonic, faithful and loval, devoted friendships that are not contractual but...haha lol ideal things are funny, it sounds unreal, feelings are funny chemicals.

" In many places everything depends on being nice. Everything is everyone coming together to suffocate each other. No one may escape the group hug.

Many beg for the crushing embrace to cease, but everyone hears this as a plea for a more complete hug. Someone is always willing to listen, listen, nod, and perhaps give you some pills. In the end, most simply succumb. After all, it is said that suffocation is a peaceful and pleasant way to die.

So when we call “hello” – is there anybody out there? – we do in the midst of a crushing mass of bodies. We do so with what little breath has not been squeezed out. If the cry is weak, it is because everything muffles it.

You can’t be friends with everyone. To be true to another is to be an enemy of the group. To have space to breathe, to think clearly, to have solitude and silence, one must make space. And to make space one must destroy what takes it up. Only then there is anything worthwhile to occupy by oneself or with a friend.

Grasped beyond moralism, violence, like love and sorrow, is ultimately a passion suffocated by the demand for mediation and pleasantries. "

I feel this part, so hard. The hug part. When anyone who will hug you is someone you must keep your full defenses up against and not slip up. When hugging is a tense stiff moment of "Yep, we're doing this." And I like hugging, but real hugs, not polite keeping appearance hugs. Hugs should be a moment of mutual appreciation and enjoying each other's company and proximity, not a showcase of being hypocritical little shitbags.

It's a tenderness that many are lacking that others prey upon. The most benign being the opportunists in the emotional labor and sex work sector of the economy, the most horrific being cults and sects like all the internet boogeymen that pop up; feeding on resentment and need of validation and purpose. Normal jobs and the state feed on that as well, of course, but that's the default that most are unsatisfied with, and leave em looking for answers elsewhere, usually through consumption, but sometimes more deviously.

And to wrap up another ramble comment, i would end by saying that we get it, it's a text, but can we talk in normal speak now for a while, speaking in code gets tiresome. We can go back and forth, to escape the trappings of whatever ties us up in ordinary speak, but yeah, the back and forth is necessary.

Calm down, now. Nobody's after you... It's only you and a screen. While that was a rich and diverse immersive diatribe, I don't fucking get which text you've been quoting here.

Just make sure to take your pills next time before posting.

...no, not the meth pills.

this was the second thing I read that LBC published, i felt that i could really relate to a lot of it, and as anon 17:16 pointed out, it's cryptic in some pretty comical ways. I've always assumed that "Everything" was meant to be some sort of mesh of "society" and "nature", alluding to the fact that we can no longer really tell the difference between the more artificial things that humans do and what life was like before there was such a thing as "society".

I assume that "commitment to commitment" is a veiled criticism of senseless/superfluous actions like saying "hello", perhaps that's just what living in this universe is? Something that defies all sense of philosophical/activist "purpose"?

The pamphlet is most clearly speaking the language of alienation, and IMO a fun way, it's as if this is the start of some sort of nameless cult. One of the biggest issues i've had with my life is raw feelings of frustration and confusion with why other people think the way that they do and do the things that they do, and lack of ideas for better connecting with them. That's why i've found it to be more refreshing just to give up and let the connections and friendships materialize on their own, with zero expectations except the expectation that they won't fuck with me unless i'm "asking for it". Very standard don't-tread-on-me logic but it's better than pretending to care about everyone equally.

Let's talk about obscuritan anarchist texts more often everyone! It's fun.

it's a tiny pamphlet that you can fit in your hand, or atleast that's the state that I received it in a long time ago...

another one that's interesting to me is tiqqun's "exercises in critical metaphysics", there were a lot of strange things in there that i didn't really grasp, much more confusing than Hello, in part because my philosophy vocabulary is not very high.

bagh...tiqqun. yes, there is something similar in the language used in "hello" and "call". something about the times and situation or something; trends.

tiqqun/appelists main defect is they're not any good.

the cybernetics one they did seemed to have interesting stuff, but its bogged down by bad writing and bad ideas:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis.

the stuff that's interesting because they are referring to things that are is better referenced elsewhere

"the stuff that's interesting because they are referring to things that are is better referenced elsewhere"

reference or it didn't happen.

thing is, i'm expressive a subjective evaluation of things i vaguely remember reading

even if i did remember, posting the texts in question will not be evidence that what i say is "true" since anyone can disagree, and evaluate them with their own criteria

but what i'm pointing out is that the topics the touch upon are things many have written about, it's not some really reduced niche with one or two texts, so there's a lot to choose from, and theirs doesn't stand out in terms of insightful info or clarity imo

you're not even saying what "topics they touch on," not even just the ones you're referring to.
you're saying nothing at all.
"i liked better what some other people said about some things."
c'mon.

i'm not gonna read the thing for you, nor re-read it in order to make you the cliff notes.
i read it when it came out and moved on.
i forget things i don't need.

i didn't ask you to comment. but you did. with a statement of opinion that means absolutely nothing. and rather than explaining yourself, you divert and then say it's not worth talking about.
all you did was signal that you're too good for tiqqun, with no fucking information or back up or evidence.
#sad

*non-sequitur*
all your points are well taken, thanks!

thanks.
non sequitur
non sequitur
non sequitur

lol, i guess a zine becomes a pamphlet if you shrink the page but not the font.
and 2013 was not a long time ago!

like i have...

yup, and in reference to the other comments, there are many different ways to say the same thing, and making it very roundabout with long words and codes is violating the concision found in actual good writing...read what fauv wrote down there 3 times and you will benefit more than the majority of reading tiqqun's garbage!

that i don't fully grasp O.o There's once again the somewhat boring tension between "communism" and "individualism", which to me is something pretty odd and superficial. I would hope that communists would eventual change their reliance on entities like the state, and i would also hope that individualists would see the connections between individuals to the end of...perhaps feeling less lonely and persecuted? Idk, loneliness is both a blessing and a curse...

http://theanvilreview.org/print/notes-on-the-context-and-positions-of-he...

Same as its diametrical opposite, gregariousness.

Even as an individualist doomer I gotta admit how the ultimate wealth is having friends. I guessed that when I was like 8 years old or something. Having lived on and off in a city that's both a major hub for capital yet lacking an actual ultra-rich establishment (like, say, NYC or London), you end up realizing how money is not the primary object of people's drive for power, but relationships. Having friends is assimilated, unadmittedly in most cases, with accumulation of capital. Vice versa means the same. Like that young dude from a very prole background who ended up buddying with the wealthiest people around, by working on summer jobs at golf clubs. That's the power of networking, for power. That's also what gets you free coffee in the morning and free collective meals some evenings. This is where marxists and other progressives are betraying their own anticap stance, revealing how it's really just a war on the battlefield of AESTHETICS.

https://youtu.be/U0Cb54oV5IY?t=56 (a scene of Fauv observing the coming world in the late '90s).

Anti-gentrification? Anticap? Rev? Insurrectos? All an aesthetics thing, below the bottom line. You got your kind of normies you stand by, and those normies you despise. Punk or bland suburban, it's a game of conformity. How's it gotta do with groups, herds, communes, and their tension with individualism? Everything.

Methinks the dichotomy, not matter how "superficial" it looks, it is unfortunately unavoidable even in real-life relations. The commies/socialists and maybe also some individualists make it into a political stance of sorts. In the real world, of course we're all just individuals and we could maybe relate to another regardless of those *capitalized* friendships, but hey ho... you wanna maintain the "stranger vs friend" dichotomy, right? You just don't desire it, you desperately need it. As your Friends boat would likely hit these rocks on the coast and sink!

My stance is somewhere else, in the awareness that people are strange, when you're a stranger. When people connect to another they feel like they connect to someone they know, but is it really the case or just the same old spooky relation of identification?

Identification patterns is what allows for conformity to happen. Of course fighting them means to be fighting windmills, but still this is how it works. The reason why I came to anarchism and especially individualism is inherently due to my hatred of conformity and conformism. Yet I hit a wall when I realized that even anarchism was made into an object of con-form-ity...

"Methinks the dichotomy, not matter how "superficial" it looks, it is unfortunately unavoidable even in real-life relations. The commies/socialists and maybe also some individualists make it into a political stance of sorts."

yeah i would say there's something good about refraining from all "positions" or "stances", that they are just things that tell me about the person speaking so that i can either better avoid them or interact with them in the future...i only say that's its superficial because even with individualism you get morons like dr. bones and alex jones...

Yet neither of these shitty clowns (like Dr Bones or Jones) actually got a grasp of what individualism is, and instead rely on ideological spooks that allowed them to attract so many accomplices they abused over thr years.

Having rich individualist ancap friends is how Muhrican capitalism came to dominate global markets. Its not rocket science, its just being a selfish greedy person without empathy, or psychopathic to certain degrees.

Yes, and democracy allows for the congregation of these types to organize their monopolization of production and capital.

In its rawest definition, democracy is a euphemism for conformity.

I was like also "wtf" about this rollover pic... this feels like watching Annihilation or something.

Future history must be written by the sovereign individualist!

Is it possible for these two to discuss and debate history, present and any future humans may have? I have just listened to Mr Flood's perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2mnbFe0I8I.

Flood appears to believe that what got humans into this mess: mass society, pollution, population explosion, diseases, eroding freedom the more bloated it gets etc is to keep on doing the same, perhaps even accelerate the pace with technological fixes (which got us here in first place!) Flood harps on and on about the billions who will die off if 'we' don't continue on the techno path, failing to realise it's the techno path including agriculture which has got us to this point: population rising, wildlife disappearing or already extinct with domesticated non-humans (cows) being the largest biomass.

We are slaves to domestication: the domestication of plants and non-humans takes a lot of time and energy etc.

I have also just listened to James C. Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO__r8Q0bmU explaining how grains domesticated us which was very interesting indeed.

Flood believes technology will set up free! Zerzan believes the opposite. It would really interesting to hear these two debate each other (without them getting personal). The more bloated this thing gets; the bigger the crash which Flood appears to dismiss.

Flood simply relies on classical anarchists who believed in technology and mass society with the key difference there would no capitalism. Even without capitalism, it still takes just as much 'resources' to keep people comfortable with their modern conveniences: the cost is till extraction, wildlife extinction, work, industrialism etc only there will no bosses (in theory at least).

Maybe AnarchyBang could host such a debate with a phone in? Yes, I know Aragorn! and JZ have their differences but Aragorn! has the platform for such a debate/discussion/phone-in to take place. I hope my idea will be considered and hopefully, with good faith, will happen. Thanks

uh, you know...how about that terraforming Mars? Doesn’t sound so unfeasible now compared to what you’re proposing! XD

Joking aside, maybe you could just call in next sunday and summarize Flood’s and Zerzan’s arguments counterposed to each other.

ps. you posted under totw thread, instead of abang thread

Without falling for his mass societal ancom solution. I too like symbolic thought for instance and don't care to see some type of Pol Pot type 'anarchy' in action.

The word I use for myself is archaicist not primitivist. I'm actually fine with surplus and excess so long as it's not based on a continuing machinological facilitation with controlling apparatuses abound. I think the key to integrating anarchy and psycho modern species being is to have a continuing neotenous and ludic existence in the context of surplus and excess so as to not have a singular reality or world to rule it all. Keep controlling apparatuses and reified institutions at bay.

In terms of what to do, I take up the psychiatric concept of tapering off. I think tapering off of civilization via insurrection and uncivilization is the best way to go about it. It will not be done in a single world building bound and it will be a region to region to subregional to small scale and individual sort of affair. The Dark Mountainers have a fairly good set of ideas written down. I also think that fulfilled desires and excess in the current fossil fuel context of being and becoming can also be a part of this as well. Just have some fun and fulfillment in the short time you have hear.

The key is to not give Leviathan, History and Civilization anymore reified models to build on. The 20th century was a disaster in this regard. What's needed is good acute effective cynicism in the neo-classical sense(deface the fucking currency). Remember it's all single steps in a thousand generational journey with incremental bridges in between. If anarchists and anarchs can achieve what the Masterless Men of Atlantic Canada achieved that would be a fine enough achievement indeed.

To neo-archaic anarchy then.

accumulation, which is also a good idea for anyone who takes these ideas seriously, a therapeutic tapering off from institutions is something i will thoughtlessly be a "sycophantic SE dicksucker" of, lol.

STIRNERIAN PHILOSOPHICAL HYPER-ACCUMULATION NOW!! NO COMPROMISES!!

i like to come back to it every once in a while, it poisons my brainwashed mind!

here's music i've had up online since '10. The album with the sumac bushes on it has lyrics very similar to war pigs, ultra-cynicism with my own stirnerian and green twist...some anarcho-pedogogy for sure!!

https://calvinsmith.bandcamp.com/

i didn't pay attention to you lyrics, but your voice and guitar sound nice, great audio quality too
funny how every other troll on this site is some kind of polished artist

Yes lovely timbre to your vocals. Amplified with bass and increased tempo would have it shaking the walls of the building I reside in. Work on the primal notes and you are capable of inducing head thumping trance moods. Keep up the good work champ!

people liking the lyrics is way less to me than people liking the music even though i'm a perfectionist about both. I'm working on a 3rd folk album that will go on the site.

@LeWay: i've considered making electronic music, but i don't know where to start with software and equipment, any recommendations? wrong forum for this lol

Electric guitar, effects peddle including wah wah. If you're on a shoe string, steel string guitar, bottleneck, but really, amplify, but if metal isn't your genre, that's cool.
OK, off topic, so this will be deleted anyway.

but the ultimate issue is that it makes you deaf overtime if you play in a band...i had a death metal band a while back. Plus yeah im more of the chill music type.

but yeah you bring up a good point, if you like an instrument, just fucking play that instrument, don't get distracted! There are some days when i've played guitar for 6 hours, not too many activities i spend that much of my attention span on.

It's just because the kids yet had to find out that on any noisy workplace you need to fucking protect your ears, so to make ear plugs available for everyone involved. It's kinda like when hippies or lefties go into construction, farming or other intense labor... they got the worse safety practices imaginable.

by Perlaman. I'm listening to the book read by Woodwose Recordings. Ariel and Aragorn! have mentioned this book during thier chit-chat and JZ claims it is one hell of a read too. For me, it is difficult to follow. Would ANews or The Brilliant consider reviewing this book so as people like me can get some traction and get through it taking in the message as well as the story? Lots of talk of worms threw me. I enjoyed and understood the "Reproduction of Everyday Life."

My take on AHAL: it is a long-form prose poem of the counter history of civilization. Perlman references stories from the bible & ancient history so reading Herodotus & Thucydides is a place to start. Lol, actually wikipedia is the place to start. Ur is an actual place. He is retelling history. Just know that what he is talking about is fleshed out elsewhere in case you want the official version. AHAL is more about what history means and Perlman's view can be gleaned from the text without knowing all the history he knows, imo.

Wow, you had me there for a split second, then I saw the "Lol." Anyway thanks for the comment.
I am thinking that Wrangham's Catching Fire (calorific intake increase changing homo brain etc) along with Quinn's Ishmael (population increase), Scott's take on taxing grain and surplus; mix this with AbdelRahim's predatory mind and Mason's telling of an Unnatural Order: an overview of the some above along with Ria del Montana's writings, not forgetting Perlman's Against His-story and there is a comprehensive coherent history to be gleaned starting with Homo-erectus getting to grips with fire.
Could it be that humans are addicted to cooked food? It was fire, cooking food, eating flesh, population increase, organised hunting, domestication of plants and non-humans, surplus, coming of organised battles etc etc?
I shall continue with Perlman's book although it may take me some time!

Its actually, " Against His-Story, Against Leviathon" in reference to Hobbes's story about the leviathan of civilization and its evolution through his historical lens. Perlman cleverly fused 'his' and 'story' to parody the subjective analysis which Hobbes uses in his philosophy.
But for the convenience of the common layman, Against History, Against Leviathan has become the dumbed down title.
Just sayin' ;)

don’t use sacred winky face to say pedantic things like that! >: (

instead use winky face to flirt with Nettle ; )

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