Online Group Discussion and AMA Bookchat Today: Look through the Looking Glass

A reminder, there is an AMA Bookchat today on the blog's Discord group (invite code: Zy9XVad or https://discord.com/invite/Zy9XVad). This is a weekly text chat where I talk with readers about technology's legacy in the early 21st century, in the form of red-pilled history. My definition of red-pilling is here. The bookchat is part of my work while I write my book-in-progress, Inside the Potemkin Village.

Everyone is invited to join the discussion. Friday, 17 July 2020. 6-9 pm Eastern (10 pm-1 am UTC).

Theme: Shadow Banking, AI, and Cryptos

• Swap lines and the shadow banking system.
• AI's pandemic applications. 
• Twitter hack and Bitcoin's bad reputation.

Go to the room marked hashtag #bookchat. The blog's Discord was established as a free, mutually-supporting community.

Pandemic Chats in the Darkness 7: Welcome, Comrade

It’s Just A Mask (12 July 2020). Video Source: Youtube. Mirrored here and here.

I have a new Patreon subscriber blog post up, in which I argue that the pandemic reveals how Millennial politics is not about left-versus-right ideologies, even though it is presented in those terms. The opening section here provides a preview to the Patreon post.

Welcome, Comrade

As in the video above, the pandemic is pushing politics past normal left-right divisions into the realm of chaos. There is a lot of confusion about this chaos. It pits red pills against blue pills, but there is little mainstream understanding of what those terms mean as Millennial politics evolves.

Take the red pill 🌹

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2020

The media - like the New York Times in their ill-conceived response to Elon Musk's red-pilled moment in May 2020, have completely misunderstood red-pilling. The NYT viewed red-pilling in an ahistorical, 20th century light, as a type of racist online conservatism, which attacks mainstream liberalism. This is not what red-pilling is. Red-pilling can be anti-liberal, but it is not fundamentally so. Red-pilling is anti-systemic.

A Lockdown Poem

Image Source © LC Douglass (2020) / Instagram.

Recent discussions on this blog's Discord group have focused on alchemical colour symbolism used in relation to artificial intelligence and the pandemic. For example, at the start of a great transformation necessary to produce a magnum opus, black must be pitted against white. Does this sound familiar?

I have a new poem about the lockdown which explores alchemical colours, just published on Vocal Media. It is an ode to unpacking all my mum's artworks.

Up through the Pink Light