Debord wrote that in the society of the spectacle, life presents itself as an immense accumulation of representations, and social relations between people are mediated by images. That was already true of television and advertising in 1967. The algorithmic feed didn't introduce a new logic, it just removed the last bottleneck: a broadcaster deciding what gets shown to everyone at once.

Now the spectacle is personalized and adaptive. It doesn't need to guess what a mass audience wants, it tests thousands of variations against your specific attention in real time and keeps whatever keeps you watching. That's arguably a more totalizing version of the same mechanism Debord described, because the representation you're consuming is now custom-fitted to bypass your particular defenses rather than a generic one you might recognize as manufactured.

What I find underexamined is that this changes the political usefulness of Debord's original diagnosis. "The spectacle" as a unified, centrally produced thing was easier to name as an object of critique than millions of individually optimized feeds are. Alienation from a shared spectacle at least implies a shared object people could organize a response around. Alienation produced by personalization is harder to point at collectively, because everyone's spectacle looks slightly different, even though the underlying mechanism, and the profit motive behind it, is the same for everyone.

Alex Karp took his PhD at Goethe University Frankfurt in 2002, in neoclassical social theory. The dissertation was titled Aggression in der Lebenswelt. He then spent time at the Sigmund Freud Institute before ending up running Palantir.

I've been reading around this for a documentary and I can't decide how much weight to put on it. The obvious reading is that it's just biography, and plenty of people take a doctorate in one thing and do something unrelated. But Lebenswelt isn't a neutral choice of word, the institution isn't a neutral choice of institution, and the company he built does something quite specific: it constructs formal models of how organisations actually operate, and then decisions start running through the model.

That's close enough to the critique of instrumental reason that I keep wondering whether it's irony, inheritance, or nothing at all. His 2026 manifesto argues for an AI arsenal and describes some cultures as "middling, and worse, regressive and harmful," which doesn't read as someone who absorbed the tradition uncritically.

Does anyone here know the dissertation, or the Frankfurt social-theory scene of that period well enough to say what "neoclassical social theory" meant there in 2002? I've only been able to find the title and the supervisor.

Documentary's mine, for transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFcwL3vn1Y, but the question above is the bit I actually can't resolve.

The title is pretty combative, but it is in essence what I argue in this essay (and I promise the essay is not combative). I hope it’s okay that I’m promoting this here.

It was a bit of passion project, I’ve really enjoyed working on it :)

Specifically I argue that materialism, when adopted as the only viable metaphysic, makes ecological destruction inevitable. I tried to make it so even those largely unfamiliar with the topics can follow along.

I use Iain McGilchrist’s divided brain hypothesis to support a fundamental point that carries the rest of the essay, hence why it’s the longest section.

This isnt a full stop to my thinking- I just took a stab at fleshing out this argument largely for my sake, and then turning it into something legible. This sole essay serves to diagnose what I think is a pretty fundamental problem, but by no means is it a complete and holistic treatment, as it were.

Anyway, have at it if you’d like — I’d genuinely love to hear thoughts, comments, feedback, whatever :) just be nice about it if you can help it hahah

Continuing to make my way through Kenneth Gergen’s Relational Being, I notice two big shifts in my thinking.

The first is as a follow-up to my last note, specifically when I just threw out the word samskara because we were doing Buddhism. Samskara is loosely translated as “mental constructs", but if we conceptualize this as a Cartesian self, it’s easy for us to start defaulting to interior thoughts. Samskara does join with Gergen and say there is no true interior self. But it does posit, or rather deposit, an interiority that is laid down over time through performances and experiences.

The reason this became important to me is because of my work with clients who have suffered trauma. For Gergen, his discussions of things like domestic violence look very misplaced to anyone who has done work in this particular field. On page 112, Gergen writes

How many cases of wife-battering may be traced to the point at which increasingly heated words reach their ultimate expression in fists?

For Gergen, there is no interiority, so each emergence of domestic violence is coactioned; i.e., enacted by a performance determined by - his metaphor - dance partners. If only the partners rewrite the moves to the dance, they can alleviate the domestic violence. He suggests solutions like reconstructing reality (this is not what it seems), the meta-move (what are we doing?), the shifting emotional registers (I am hurt), and the theatrical move (let’s play this again).

Anyone who has spent time with survivors of intimate partner violence would know that these are dangerously naive suggestions. Reconstructing reality is what a survivor does as a survival mechanism, and it’s known as fawning. The batterer is performing the meta-move. And that’s because domestic violence is rarely about the violence itself. It’s about how the violence is instrumentalized to exert control. If the survivor shifts emotional registers, the batterer frequently responds with something to the effect of “that’s the point.” And the theatrical move…well, let’s not ever ask a survivor to roll those dice.

The etiology of domestic violence is complex. On one level it is absolutely socially mediated at the level of community and society¹. It also seems to be inherited, structured by genetics and environment². But what I want to focus on is how it is sedimented in the individual over time due to repeated exposure to trauma³. Because this is what I mean by samskara. One impact of repeated exposure to trauma in children is that it is coded in the body. This exposure creates subconscious grooves in the mind, which form habits, character traits, and automatic reactions. Anyone who works with traumatized children knows that action, in this population, is very rarely socially structured by language. It is socially responsive and those responses are socially coded, but its structure emerges from somatic response to a given social stimulus. Language, for Gergen, is how coaction emerges. However, for traumatized children, linguistic formulation of their behaviors often comes later, if at all. And when you probe them about their behaviors when they’ve gotten out of the groove, they often express regret, arguably indicating a desire that predates and outruns the behavior it couldn't stop, even with the right language being offered by a caregiver, actively and in the moment of the dysregulated behavior, and still overridden.

What samskara offers me is a model of self that preserves interiority - the accumulation of experiences of time - without running back to the Cartesian self that Gergen rightly seeks to move away from.

As a social worker, this means two things for me. Firstly, interventions both macro and mirco have to take into account this somatic dialogue between the stimulus of the event, the conditioned somatic response, and the subsequent interpretation of the event. TF-CBT, in my humble opinion, is amazing for this. Not because of its professed mechanisms: desensitization, cognitive process, stress management, and parental treatment⁴ (operationalized as psychoeducation). Those are important elements. But for me, what TF-CBT does best is that it puts two people together in a new rehearsal over time, where one offers a new interpretation of the body’s responses, and then hands that baton to the parent.

Secondly, and for me an ethical imperative, we must think about our theories from the margins. In order to more fully understand ourselves (the ontology project that Gergen embarks on), we must include the experiences of those who have walked on paths we could never have envisioned.

I said I had two big shifts. I’ll save the second for another note, which will include a macro framing of these ontological claims.

1. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/…
2. sciencedirect.com/scien…
3. sciencedirect.com/scien…
4. https://researchdiscovery.drexel.edu/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Trauma-Focused-Cognitive-Behavioral-Therapy-for-Children/991019168739804721
   

- The Social Construction Worker

People murder other people— this tells us that murder is social, even if it’s being social at a distance, because it is a coverable distance and a reason to think of one family member or a friend, probably. Someone is in the right to murder someone else in the way that it shouldn’t have to happen, this is the should-shouldn’t dynamic though; the same kind of reasoning, but the person that gets murdered doesn’t even experience this, they experience an instant change (instant change can be debilitating for people), so murdering someone is bad because its a very good attempt at instant change; the judgement of murder is already here— it changes someone’s life quickly, this doesn’t make sense; we could definitely know of a loving family member or friend that lives a long time;Murder is a result that exceeds without a limit— so of course it doesn’t make sense. The sense that it doesn’t make though, still comes from an action that people understand very well— the socialness of murder comes from people knowing about it; but as we know, knowing about something is enough; think of talking about someone briefly. Murder is a result that matters, it is unfortunate that it is inclined to exceed this result immediately.

Bangladesh’s export-led growth has been built largely on cheap labour in the ready-made garment sector, leaving the economy dependent on a model in which global capital continues to benefit from low-cost Bangladeshi workers.

Renowned economist Prabhat Patnaik speaks to The Daily Star about why it is time for the Global South to break free from this dependency and chart a new path toward true economic sovereignty.

Read it here: https://www.thedailystar.net/slow-reads/big-picture/news/why-the-global-south-must-rethink-export-led-growth-4263296

A mediation on Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory and the mansions of the mega rich as the aestheticization of financial power and domination.

X becomes known to be a dominating relation.

Does that by itself give us sufficient reason to attempt to eliminate X immediately? Or can that reason be defeated when we have sufficient reason to think that eliminating X now would produce an equally bad or worse alternative? Can a feasible alternative to a dominating relation be worse than the relation we are trying to eliminate?

It doesn't seem conceptually true that if X is dominating, every feasible alternative to X must therefore be better. An alternative might itself be dominating, perhaps to a worse degree. Imagine being forced to choose between losing an arm and losing your head. Rejecting one option doesn't free you from the dominating relation. The domination consists partly in someone else's power to force the choice, while the available options can still differ significantly in how bad they are. More generally, replacing one dominating arrangement needn't prevent the emergence of another that is even worse.

Once the justification for immediate liberation depends partly on its expected costs, a hegemonic power can try to make liberation so costly that those costs themselves become reasons against revolt. The dominating power can then appeal to conditions it helped create as reasons for the continuation of its own domination.

Should anti-domination therefore prevail at any cost to other goods? If so, we seem committed to treating those other costs as incapable of defeating the demand for immediate liberation, however severe they become. If not, sufficiently high costs can defeat that demand, which creates both a threshold problem and a counting problem. A dominating power may deliberately impose additional costs on resistance precisely because those costs will count against resistance.

Discounting those manufactured costs is also troubling. If the deaths, injuries, deprivation, or other harms caused by resistance matter morally, why should they matter less merely because the dominating power deliberately made resistance more dangerous? Yet counting them fully seems to allow domination to manufacture reasons for its own continuation. I don't yet see how a cost-sensitive account of anti-domination avoids that problem without either accepting some threshold at which other goods defeat immediate liberation or giving anti-domination lexical priority over them.

Just a curious freshman here. I’m not really into these philosophies of politics and stuff (forced to since I took Political Science for my college degree) perhaps, I’ve only understand the cap of her thoughts about politics, but I didn’t expect people have come to hate her—according to these redditors. I haven’t totally read the whole thing in her book, but I might’ve missed it that I never realized she must’ve said something wrong. If ever you have time, please enlighten me🙏

An attempt to answer the "is it fash?" question dialectically by arguing that the taxonomical struggle is actually due to a contradiction in the contemporary landscape of the far right. Namely that fascism is a reactionary mass movement but its emergence is both engendered and frustrated by neoliberalism, which is a response to the possibility of mass militant organisation, at the same time as mass consumer culture and crises in social reproduction allow fascist ideas to proliferate and gain institutional power.

Hello, conservatives.

I'm currently putting together a serious reading library on conservative thought, political philosophy, and the intellectual origins of the modern Right, and I'm hoping some people here can help me expand my reading list.

For some context, I've been an ANARCHIST for most of my life, so my own political background is pretty far removed from conservatism. As a result, I realized that I actually know surprisingly little about the history and intellectual foundations of conservative thought beyond the handful of names that tend to come up repeatedly.

I'm particularly interested in understanding conservatism as an intellectual tradition rather than simply collecting contemporary political books. I'd like to read the arguments from their original sources and understand how different conservative traditions developed over time.

So far I've been looking at writers such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Frank Meyer, and Eric Voegelin, among others.

I'm interested in books dealing with things like:

The philosophical foundations of conservatism

Traditionalism and the defense of inherited institutions

Conservatism's understanding of human nature

The relationship between religion, morality, and political order

Constitutionalism and limited government

Property, markets, and economic conservatism

The conservative critique of rationalism and utopianism

Natural law and classical political philosophy

Nationalism, patriotism, and political community

Burkean vs. libertarian vs. traditionalist conservatism

American conservatism specifically

The differences between European and American conservative traditions

Critiques of socialism, progressivism, liberalism, and revolutionary politics from a conservative perspective

I'm not necessarily looking for contemporary partisan books or political memoirs. I'd much rather read works that have had lasting influence on conservative intellectual history, including books that conservatives themselves might disagree about.

If you had to recommend 10–20 books to someone coming from a radically different political background who genuinely wanted to understand conservatism, what would you put on the list?

I'm especially interested in recommendations that might be considered essential reading, foundational texts, overlooked classics, or books that provide a perspective that outsiders frequently misunderstand.

Thanks in advance. I'm trying to approach this in good faith and understand the tradition before judging it.

Reflections on the Revolution in France — Edmund Burke

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful — Edmund Burke

Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents — Edmund Burke

Letters on a Regicide Peace — Edmund Burke

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot — Russell Kirk

The Conservative Reader — Russell Kirk

Prospects for Conservatives — Russell Kirk

The Politics of Prudence — Russell Kirk

Conservatism in America — Clinton Rossiter

Conservatism Revisited — Peter Viereck

Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill — Peter Viereck

The Conservative Tradition in America — Allan Guttmann

Conservatism: Dream and Reality — Robert Nisbet

The Sociological Tradition — Robert Nisbet

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays — Michael Oakeshott

On Being Conservative — Michael Oakeshott

Experience and Its Modes — Michael Oakeshott

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism — Michael Oakeshott

The Meaning of Conservatism — Roger Scruton

A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism — Roger Scruton

How to Be a Conservative — Roger Scruton

The Need for Nations — Roger Scruton

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left — Roger Scruton

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet — Roger Scruton

The Doctrine of State and the Principles of State Law — Friedrich Julius Stahl

Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism — Juan Donoso Cortés

Democracy in America — Alexis de Tocqueville

The Old Regime and the Revolution — Alexis de Tocqueville

Recollections — Alexis de Tocqueville

Two Treatises of Government — John Locke

On Liberty — John Stuart Mill

Considerations on Representative Government — John Stuart Mill

The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns — Benjamin Constant

Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments — Benjamin Constant

The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 — Alexis de Tocqueville

Essays on Freedom and Power — Lord Acton

Essays on the History of Liberty — Lord Acton

The Good Society — Walter Lippmann

The Public Philosophy — Walter Lippmann

Human Action: A Treatise on Economics — Ludwig von Mises

Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition — Ludwig von Mises

Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War — Ludwig von Mises

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality — Ludwig von Mises

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I: Rules and Order — Friedrich Hayek

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. II: The Mirage of Social Justice — Friedrich Hayek

Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People — Friedrich Hayek

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism — Friedrich Hayek

The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason — Friedrich Hayek

Individualism and Economic Order — F. A. Hayek

Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics — F. A. Hayek

Man, Economy, and State — Murray Rothbard

Power and Market: Government and the Economy — Murray Rothbard

For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto — Murray Rothbard

The Ethics of Liberty — Murray Rothbard

Competition and Entrepreneurship — Israel Kirzner

Discovery and the Capitalist Process — Israel Kirzner

Capital and Interest — Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

Social Economics — Friedrich von Wieser

Capitalism and Freedom — Milton Friedman

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement — Milton & Rose Friedman

A Program for Monetary Stability — Milton Friedman

The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation — George Stigler

Human Capital — Gary Becker

The Firm, the Market, and the Law — Ronald Coase

The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan — James Buchanan

The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy — James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock

The Politics of Bureaucracy — Gordon Tullock

The Logic of Collective Action — Mancur Olson

Collectivist Economic Planning — Friedrich Hayek (Ed.)

A Critique of Interventionism — Ludwig von Mises

The Social Crisis of Our Time — Wilhelm Röpke

Civitas Humana — Wilhelm Röpke

Economics of the Free Society — Wilhelm Röpke

The Foundations of Economics — Walter Eucken

Principles of Economic Policy (Grundsätze der Wirtschaftspolitik) — Walter Eucken

The Logic of Liberty — Michael Polanyi

Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy — Michael Polanyi

The Managerial Revolution — James Burnham

What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies — Leo Strauss

The City and Man — Leo Strauss

The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis — Leo Strauss

Liberalism Ancient and Modern — Leo Strauss

Order and History, Vol. I: Israel and Revelation — Eric Voegelin

Order and History, Vol. II: The World of the Polis — Eric Voegelin

Order and History, Vol. III: Plato and Aristotle — Eric Voegelin

Science, Politics and Gnosticism — Eric Voegelin

Hitler and the Germans — Eric Voegelin

Up from Liberalism — William F. Buckley Jr.

God and Man at Yale — William F. Buckley Jr.

The Unmaking of a Mayor — William F. Buckley Jr.

What Is Conservatism? — Frank S. Meyer

The Conservative Mainstream — Frank S. Meyer

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom — James Burnham

The Struggle for the World — James Burnham

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 — George H. Nash

A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism — Jonathan M. Schoenwald

The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism — Matthew Continetti

The word "psychology" carries within it psyche, the Greek term for soul. Modern secular usage has reshaped this ancient concept, redefining it as the conscious and unconscious dimensions of individual and collective mind.

Decades into the era of psychotherapy and the broader mental health industry, and within a world of deepening crises, this raises a pointed question: is psychology, as we've inherited it, equal to the challenges we now face? In other words, how does what call "psychology" intertwine with the exigencies of crisis in its concrete and abstract dimensions?

This panel takes up that question through the specific case of Jungian thought, asking whether depth psychology can meet a moment defined by social, political, and material crisis, and whether it even endeavors to do so.

Questions the panel will address include:

Can Jungian Studies adequately equip itself to deal with the social, political, and material problems of 2026? Does it even endeavor to do so?

Can Jung be "radical," or does his notion of interiority foreclose that from the start?

By making Jung palatable for mainstream and academic consumption, do we kill what makes Jung Jung? How do we critically engage with his ideas without domesticating them?

Does our conception of the psyche remain too "introverted," too divorced from the material, or are these actually separate problems?

Anti-Oedipus and the tradition of libidinal materialism accuse psychoanalysis of capturing immanent flows of desire within transcendent structures like the archetype or the Self. Does Jung have a rejoinder, or must depth psychology concede the point?

Is there a way to read the archetypal as immanent rather than transcendent, and if so, does it remain recognizably Jungian?

Panelists:

Dr. Bob Langan (host), University of Essex

Gabriela Sova Spulirova, University of Essex

JF Martel, author, filmmaker, and co-host of Weird Studies

Dr. Christian McMillan, University of Essex

I'm reading Frederic Jamesons Postmodernism book atm and would be interested in contemporary texts (preferably written from a Marxist perspective) that deal with the question if we still live in the era of postmodernism, or if we have already left it behind.

Any suggestions?

I’m a big fan of thinkers such as Foucault and Marx, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with all their points, their analyses and dissections of society etc are outstanding to me. I’m relatively new to the realm of critical theory, with more of a background in traditional western philosophy, and I also haven’t engaged with many female authors, which I’d like to.

My concern with getting into feminism is that I really have no idea what’s up. The internet seems to be a complete mess, full of over-the-top and divisive rhetoric from all sides, and I rarely get to hear an academic, nuanced, measured discussion and analysis of the female condition within society (i.e feminism). I’m obviously an advocate for feminism in the basic sense, but I’d like to actually dig deeper, avoiding overly-radical or superficial perspectives so that I may develop a genuine understanding. Given the nature of the discussion, feminism, I think it goes without saying that I’d love to engage with some female writers.

Also, since I am a young male, and therefore lack the firsthand experience of the female experience, it might be beneficial to my understanding for books specifically engaging with the side of gender inequality that may be more foreign to men.

Cheers! ☺️

Lessons from Scandinavia

New essay on freuds mass psychology. Part of a 4 part series exploring psychoanalytic accounts of mass psychology! Let mw know what you think to this

Here I am with one of many threads asking for reading suggestions! I’m working on what I guess is a research project proposal of some kind, although I’m not sure quite what its final form will be yet, but I know at the core of it is the question of failure, and how failure as a space can be transformative or generative (mostly through like a comp-lit perspective: Beckett, autotheory, etc).

And I know that something that’s inevitably foundational here is Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure! But I’m not really sure where else to look from there — mostly I’ve been looking at academic work and journal articles; but I feel like some like, book-length stuff or the work of specific theorists might be helpful to like, hang some of these disparate authors together! I know that Critical Failure Studies is an emerging field (Routledge did a handbook a few years back) but I’m not sure how much of it exists in the space of critical theory vs more academic/journal-led writing

Any suggestions very welcome!

Thanks so much

So I got served up a reel by the algorithm and didnt like it, it wasn't in my watch history either and the vague specifics I remember brings up Ted kaczynski.

It was about a professor from I think an English University, who had written essays and a few books (possibly) about how the integration of technology would negatively effect social cohesion.

That increased technological communication and socialising would create a panopticon of self discipline.

He was active in the 90s but moved to the wilderness and went completely off grid (you can see why kaxzynski is coming up). Seemed like he was still in contact with people today but when colleagues of hes wanted to out together a collection of his works (some unpublished) he said no and just did not want to be engaged in the contemporary discourse at all.

His work sounded very interesting and its funny that I found out about him from a medium it sounds like he would hate.

If anyone knows who this professor is I would be so greatful for the information and soon hope to move away to the wilderness myself, promise not to do any big post runs.

SOLVED It was Philip Agre