Anarchy Bang: Introducing Episode Seventeen - Memes, egocom, and their discontents

From Anarchy Bang

This week… The Situationists used something like memes in their posters and comics. They are interesting because they can contain layers of reference for the initiated, or make us laugh out of random absurdity. What happens when an image, along with a short phrase or two, replaces the effort (and enjoyment) of opening a book?

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That is a question for Anarchy Bang and for any nihilist and/or egoist to answer on the show, please? As morality (they claim) is a subjective perspective, I would also like to know if any of the nihilists and/or egoists believe it was neither or that it just happened, so what!? Similarly, rape and pedophilia: there is no' morality' to be found in these here? How does the postmodern egoist nihilist respond as, according to this perspective, everything is subjective: neither good nor bad: it just is. Can rape, pedophilia, the holocaust just be perceived as a 'neutral' or even positive/good? Or, does this egoist and/or nihilist have to admit there such a 'thing' as morality: objective morality: that the perspective of (personal) subjectivity is flawed? If any of the above three can be seen as morally good, positive etc, please explain why. I say they are morally bad, negative because I wouldn't want it done to me. Causing pain, suffering and/or death is not a morally good positive perspective. I may have explained the nuances very well, hopefully, you all get the gist of what I'm trying to explore.

bad meme

there’s some morals for you

It should be obvious that someone thought/thinks that the concentration camps were morally good. Hence, subjective morality.

yes.

Does not make it wrong or validate right and wrong, it simply means that human bodies and minds have likes dislikes and disgusts. The holocaust disgusts many people, this does not make it wrong.

Who told you nihilists and egoists are amoral? They're as moral as hell and think concentration camps are evil. You're thinking of psychopaths, serial-killers and psychopathic dictators who plan holocausts and mass murder. Maybe THEY are the really TRUE nihilists?

It’s very telling how this should be the topic that would face the most prompt and blatant attempt at derailment.

The story of the holocaust is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive. Compared with the holocaust, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Weeeeell, like they say, culture is Auschwitz and vice versa. Within the States own moral compass its ok to reduce 180,000 women and children to ashes in a split second. Using terms of doublethink, justice becomes crime, retaliation or painless death becomes legal, patriotism becomes heroic greed becomesso virtuous, so yeah, in the grand narrative of life on Earth, the State is The Grand Criminal. We all know that, we are anarchs are we not.

^This was a question for the op with the long ramble about holocaust

i would describe those situations you mentioned as causing immense pain or suffering, as someone wanting to dominate or hurt another person. but i don't feel any need to call them "wrong" or "right". some people would say cheating on your taxes or a test in school "is wrong", so how does adding a "wrong/right" label describe anything more clearly? for me, those words don't add anything that i can sense or feel or understand more deeply, so i don't think/talk/describe in that way.

Those well versed in “internet culture” or the art of memery know something that is sometimes lost on the beginner, or otherwise chronically oblivious:

EVERYTHING IS A MEME

It’s important to establish that before coming forward, since the premise starts off on the wrong footing, by saying:

“What happens when an image, along with a short phrase or two, replaces the effort (and enjoyment) of opening a book?“

Memes are not merely the juxtaposition of text over an image. A book, for example, might be a meme. A website, or an event can be a meme. An ideology can be a meme, and many often are. A person can be a meme. An argument can be a meme. A soundbite can be a meme. Memes can be audiovisual, olfactory, culinary, tactile, etc. Concepts, ideas, categories, can be memes.

Memes are not new, but calling them memes is.

A running gag, an inside joke, a trope, a cliché, the subversion, remixing and inversion of tropes and clichés.
Parody, self-parody, mocking, distortion of content and form through subsequent mockings. Earworm melodies of thought and appearance. The building blocks of cosmologies, retroactive microcosms manufactured as byproducts of languages and cultures.

History as it’s taught in schools is often not much more than a string of memes.

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing. Therefore memes are currency and there is a meme economy. Please remember what we already established, that memes can be anything and everything, so that the previous sentence is not trivialized.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Therefore the most prominent memes are images, but the spectacle itself is a meme, as well as the man who named it. The unity of the hoarding invasive encroaching expanse of the consolidated spectacle imposes a memefication of everything, as the the standardized production of the world in the image of its meme ideologies, therefore its parts are memes, its totality is a meme.

Meme.

I'm not merely or even principally referring to the meme know as "meme economy" (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-economy), or to the subreddit /r/MemeEconomy (A place where individuals can buy, sell, share, make, and invest in memes freely. You'll also get updates on the market, and be able to collaborate with other fellow meme traders), though of course it also does include that. But rather the meme "Meme Economy" is fashioned after the "Economy" (which is a meme), that includes things as mundane as agribusiness, and as esoteric as the stock market dealing with intangible assets and exotic derivatives.

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. Think of patented strains of grains, of breeds of dogs like pugs. Think of a recipe so overdone and so automatically reproduced that its image and nutrition is close to interchangeable with its emoji. Food products as icons first and foremost, to be traded for what they represent.

The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. This is epitomized by the meme as a shareable image/joke shorthand, and emojis, reaction gifs etc.

you guys are bad at memes unless you're unintentionally memeing yourselves. y'all do produce a great number of lolkey lolcows tho. the person talking about the nazis think they checkmated all you moral anti-realist nihilist lords of edge with 'was the holocaust good or bad?' reeeeee

One can object to the Holocaust, or any other catastrophic event, on entirely aesthetic grounds.

Don't mock my aesthetic insurgency it has no relationship or relevance to human catastrophe, only natural ones.

I AM A REFORMED NIHILIST AND I ATTACK YOUR ABSURDIST CAMUSIAN ASSUMPTION AND REQUEST THAT YOU SPEND MORE TIME COMPOSING YOUR DESTRUCTIVE NEGATIVE PSEUDO-NIHILISTIC COMMENTS CONCERNING THE HOLOCAUST!!!

regarding paedophilia and rape! All three are disgusting and wrong. This also makes me wonder whether an anarchist world is ever possible. We know a non-anarchist world is soon to be doomed, however, an anarchist doesn't appear to offer a viable existence either. Humans have had their opportunity and have blown it: by living our differences and not our commonalities.

Its sad when the topic of moralism and the Holocaust come up in discussions about almost anything in the world. You know, like David Attenborough might be talking about the mating habits of the blue whale, or the migration paths of the white geese, and someone will just say something stupid about the ethics involved in the Holocaust. :(

was a good idea...some thought it wasn't....many more were indifferent...amoral perhaps... like the nihilists and egoists perhaps? Reminds of that poem:
First they came for...
...then they came for the nihilists and egoists but there was nobody left to help me!

I don’t see how morality and anarchy mix quite frankly. All morality is is existentially expressed disgusts that are given unwarranted asubjective preferences. Like hate the holocaust all you want but don’t bring the loaded terms of right and wrong into the equation.

pss i’ll bring my loaded terms wherever i want

moralist

you kinkshaming my categorical nomothetical statements?

Cause morality with anarchy makes stupid. By all means write what you want though, I’ll simply call it what it is.

You probably think lame is a problematic word to. OK then. Don't see how benign disutility insults are moral.

says the moralist

question: why is Stirner your favorite moralist?

We need a sense . A zen of things. Indications, not Directions.
A trace, a mark to make things emerge. Memes can be Stratified.
Memes can Stratify probing openings as to explorations.
This cuts off opportunities to choreograph autonomous Zones ,
Where our speculations and eminations can have a safe and productive
Nurturance. Expressing our creativity, always one step ahead of the latest
Subjugation. The Tao within and without. We need to get it on as to exploration
And explication. A Praxis of Hope, joy, affirmation and interaction.
Building blocs, not walls of estrangement. Sentiment and sensitivity Flexibility, not the straightjacket of Ideology. Let’s get it on , always with taste, mixed with a hint of the
sublime. Let’s leave those lame memes behind.

I

about censorship in general...for example, the chinese government doesn't often erase subversive comment criticizing the state, but focuses their attacks on criticism of the censors themselves. Can't say i admire this approach, and in my experience i find the choices of censorship on here to be bizarre. It seems like they don't have a sensible guidelines, it seems they just delete stuff on their egoistic aesthetics and whatever threatens the narrative non-narrative they try to promote...

the enemy of the censor is the creative semi-troll, and maybe even the censors.

Oh come on, in light of the grossest crimes against the biosphere and its indigenous existent, how can anyone really be disgusted by one insignificant genocide between the members of white neocolonialist Empirez. GET YOUR PRIORITIES IN ORDER ANARCHS!!!!

So according to Anarchist News the only "news about and of concern to anarchists" for this week is that Aragorn's new call-in / talkback radio show is on, John Zerzan has a new episode of his radio show online and Warzone Distro uploaded some new zines? Seriously? Fucking laughable.

what gets posted is what’s submitted (apart from their in-house stuff), so submit what you’d like to see

Submit what you like to see. Enjoy it while it stays up. Curse bitterly after the admins take it down.

or just skip the middleman, make your own blog or site and spam it/promote it everywhere

The one thing that i've learned from anarchist media projects is...sincere conversation is way better than all of the above...

I skip the middleman (sorry ladies) by deleting my own posts. I delete them even before I write them. That saves EVERYONE alot of time and effort.

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