philosloppy

joined 2 days ago
[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men's Attitudes, is also well worth a read.

I think his ideas on concentration camps/prison camps slot in nicely with Deleuze's ideas about Control Societies and the ways that technology is being used to extend the Foucaultian ideas of discrete enclosures to never-ending enclosures in all aspects of life.

And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich's work. He's another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he's another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 18 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (3 children)

many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze's "Postscript on Societies of Control", which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs.

The real king here is Baudrillard but his writing isn't always the most accessible

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 36 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

there's a lot of mid-century French theorists spinning in their graves right now

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 11 points 21 hours ago

IRC continues to demonstrate the superiority of protocols over platforms. Unfortunately, the modern internet is entirely dominated by centralized platforms and that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

is there currently any work being done to do that though? It's great that that is possible but if nobody is doing it, it's only a cute hypothetical.

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

that's some delicious red herring you've got there

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

but now you can use the magic words that get the morons in the executive suites all hot and bothered

[–] philosloppy@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago (8 children)

the next big industry in software is fixing shitty AI code, screen this