This article is long winding. The actual point of the article is very short, but I realized that it would only be interesting for me if I put it in the context of a longer story. It's about a lot of music that I love. I can't tell you what to do, but I can say that the intended way to read this article is by listening to the music linked. You don't have to get through the article all at once.

I try to only link great songs here. On top of that, I can't stress enough that for many of the songs linked, if I give a spiel about the album, I consider the album a near masterpiece. If you like the songs, do make a note to check out the rest of the album at some point. Hell, stop reading and listen to the album and come back later. It was almost painful to not link 8 of my favourite songs for some of these, so there's more where they came from.

A Brief Recall Of My Early Music Days

As a kid, I was always a metalhead. I just thought it was cool, and the complexity and amount of instruments kept the music exciting for me. I think it also had an edginess that appealed to young not-having-the-best-time Spencer. Even now almost exclusively go to metal concerts, finding them by far the most fun. No-one else has energy or mosh pits like that. One of my earliest memories specifically related to finding metal cool was a riff from the first band I saw live: Trivium. I was watching a youtube video of the top 50 metal riffs or something and this one just blew my mind. The band was still young too, which helped add to my excitement. Often people just stick to the proven old-head riffs.

The riff happens at 2:40 in this song

Not having much spending money when I was young, I really had no way of knowing how to find music that people liked to listen to. I had SoundCloud on my phone because it was free, and just listened to random shit. When I heard people liked rap, I started listening to a ton of shitty rap songs. Often, they were bad rappers over more popular beats. I thought these were the more popular songs, because they would name it after where the beat came from. Some of them were pretty good, but a lot of it was forcing myself to try to like something that was in fact shit because I thought other people thought it was good.

Eventually, I discovered actual streaming services, which led to me not only being able to find music that people liked but also me finding my own lane. That lane still varies between mostly rap with some metal, but back then it used to include some dubstep/trap too. I loved the intensity of dubstep and the thematic experience of metal, but the storytelling of rap was unparalleled.

I remember many a late-night walk home from the gym to this song in the SoundCloud days.

A Legendary Rap Duo

As I got more into rap, I heard about a group called Run The Jewels consisting of artists Killer Mike and El-P. These guys are legendary, everyone who talked about them only gave them the highest of praise, and no one said anything bad. There weren't even controversial takes that didn't like them, everyone just loved them. After a while, I gave a song a listen:

Blockbuster Night Pt. 1

I believe this was the first song I heard from them. The lyricism was there. The intensity was there. The thematic experience was there. I already loved Rage Against The Machine, and this seemed like the rap extension of that. The music was hard, the music was angry, and the music was exactly what I wanted and still want.

From there, I dug deeper into their catalogue. At the time, they had 3 albums out. Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2, and Run the Jewels 3. I knew I liked some of the songs from 2 and 3, but 1 didn't quite grab my attention the same way. I still enjoyed it, but found the albums that followed it up to be more in line with what I liked at the time. It was newer, and I was young, so it only makes sense.

Run the Jewels 2 is one of the hardest rap albums ever put out, and the first album I'll discuss that I would consider a masterpiece. The beats on songs like Close Your Eyes And Count To Fuck and Blockbuster Night Pt. 1 hit like a freight train, and both Killer Mike and El-P deliver incredibly hard-hitting and concise verses addressing injustice, but they also know when they can just sit back and say some dope shit. One of the standout bars from Killer Mike in this album is an anti-cop bar. “We killin' them for freedom 'cause they torture us for boredom.” Later in the album where Killer Mike talks about crying on the ground when cops come to his house because he's scared to be murdered in front of his kids, giving an idea of the feeling that generated the line. Here are a couple of songs to give you a sense of it:

Close Your Eyes And Count To Fuck

Lie, Cheat, Steal

Angel Duster

Next in their discography is Run The Jewels 3. This one is much more polished than the (deliberately) rougher RTJ2, but the soundscape is done incredibly well and it still goes obscenely hard. It is more commercially viable without making any compromises on meaning and intensity. The duo also opens up a much more vulnerable side of them. Songs talk about emotions like fear about their views and how they have put them out and gained popularity, knowing that others have been killed for those views. They constantly quote and refer to leaders of movements like Malcolm X, MLK, and Hampton, all killed by the government when their movements started gaining real momentum. While opening this up, they still refuse to not go obscenely hard. My favourite line on this album has to be El-P just flexing: “Brave men didn't die face down in the Vietnam muck so I could not style on you.” Just absurd. But, no sense in just rambling, go listen for yourself.

Talk To Me

2100 ft. Boots (one of my favourite songs of all time)

A Report To The Shareholders / Kill Your Masters

Loving these two albums, I started searching for more music like it, but I simply couldn't find any. There was so much great music, but nothing that was like Run The Jewels. They were in their own lane, and no one could even attempt to join them. A knock-off simply wouldn't work, because part of the appeal was that it was so complete. The rappers weren't young and experimenting, they were older and doing what they know they do best. Still switching it up, but staying in the lane they defined. They had experience, they knew what they were talking about, and they knew how to make damn good songs. More than that, they knew how to keep a soundscape to make damn good albums.

Detour One: Early Covid

The next few years I just got more and more into rap music. In 2019 and 2020 I compiled lists ranking every album I listened to, generally aiming for at least 1 new album a week while I was working out. During this phase, COVID would help the process because I was forced to spend much more time inside, and the music kept things fresh.

At some point in this process, I found a new rap group, Griselda, who I'll likely write an article on at some point soon. These guys were all dropping multiple albums per year and they were all great albums. Some were more mellow, some were more aggressive, and some just had more interesting production. Every album was written exclusively about selling coke.

Dr Birds

Please note that while I didn't review this album, saving it for a different article I'm thinking of, this album is this fantastic front to back. The music video slaps too.

While getting into Griselda, something else was happening. America had another streak of cops killing black people. The outcry rose with each murder until it burst into widespread protests and riots with the killing of George Floyd. Being early COVID my sister was still in the hospital. I was at home in the suburbs generally keeping myself safe and helping around the house. When visiting the hospital, I saw people outside protesting every day. There were calls to defund the police. Police help stop crime, don't they? Some of the people saying this were pretty smart. There was something I didn't know. Clearly, a lot of this stuff was about racial issues, which I knew existed, but not in any real detail. It was time for me to start figuring some things out.

I had finished the first book that I read during COVID, my return to reading after a long break. The book, Shantaram, was absolutely amazing, and I was hooked back intoto books. I needed the next thing, so now was my opportunity to really learn. I also wanted something exciting. My eye turned to the civil rights movement. MLK seemed good, but another one caught my eye. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Malcolm X was a big part of the movement, but wasn't he not good or something? I bought an audiobook, and I went in.

Bringing It Back

The book was absolutely amazing. Life-changingly amazing. Not only did I get a better idea of the reality of the history of black people in America, but I also learned that much of what they were trying to fix during the civil rights movement has not been fixed at all. Many of the problems still exist openly, not even just through specific metrics. That was what people were in the streets trying to change right now.

I also learned that the history we are taught did not happen. Malcolm X was not this insane guy. Everything he did was frankly an incredibly reasonable reaction to the world as it existed around him. Even things which seem strange now, like the Nation of Islam, were founded in large part by Malcolm X as a direct response to how black people were treated. This was a new worldview for me. If I wanted to understand the present, I needed to understand history. Not just a vague semblance of history, but the reality for people who actually existed, dare I connect that to perspective.

One thing really stood out to me. Malcolm X, after going to Mecca, really changed a lot. He saw a way forward for everyone. At this point, he started pushing for unionization and more socialist ideas. This was at the end of the last chapter before he was killed.

“They murdered X and tried to blame it on Islam” – Wake Up – Rage Against The Machine I also notice this now gets a warning for harmful content when I open it

Riots were happening. Black Lives Matter was going crazy. People were angry. I was angry. A rap duo known for making very aggressive music was about to drop an album.

Run The Jewels 4

Before the expected drop date, Run The Jewels dropped their fourth album. You'll never guess what they called it.

The BLM protests were ramping up, and they said the people should just have the music. The album would go on to receive widespread critical acclaim, even getting a Grammy nomination, though it didn't win. Initially, I thought it was really good. The rapping was top tier and the lyrical content was some of the most concise and heavy hitting I had heard. The production on the album didn't initially click for me, however. I still think that it is missing a little bit of something the previous two albums had. The sound was modernized a bit, I think for more commercial audiences, which it gained. The songs are fantastic, but I felt like the consistency of a specific soundscape as a theme was less coherent. Overall, still, a great album that I would highly recommend listening to.

The timing of the release of the album, the growing reputation of the duo, and the content of the album put it at the forefront of the protests. Walking In The Snow, for example, has a notable verse where El-P lets Killer Mike take center stage and talk about cops killing people by kneeling on their necks. If I recall, the claim was that the verse was already recorded previous to the killing of George Floyd and was related to another similar killing, but I have no real source on that. The album spent much of its time talking about racism, prison abolition, police brutality, and trying to be a revolutionary despite also trying to live in the current system. All of these were specific to the struggles of those taking to the streets.

Walking In The Snow

A Few Words For The Firing Squad

Being a face of the movement, Killer Mike was invited onto the news to speak for all the people who had taken to the streets and were protesting for a better world. He had just released an album about his hatred of cops and the system, historical revolutionaries, and how we need to overthrow the system to change it.

Killer Mike told everyone to go home.

Detour Two: The Old Shit

I kept listening to the album and over time gained more of an appreciation for the production, but a different album really stood out at the time. Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist. That album just had obscene chemistry, both were perfectly dialed in, and it was easily the album of the year in my books. I knew Gibbs from some of his older work. He was a coke rapper, similar to Griselda, and is still going strong after being in the game and dropping albums consistently for 20 years.

That got me thinking I should listen to some of the older music from El-P and Killer Mike. I already had listened to a few songs, but it was about time to really digest all of the projects. If I was so invested, I should at least know where it all came from.

El-P is where I started.

Fantastic Damage was El-P's first studio album, produced and rapped by him. This album is absolutely insane. From the opening track, you start to realize that half of these instruments just aren't fully tuned. He was recording everything on broken equipment and succeeding massively despite it. While recording this album he was living in shit conditions in New York and there were so many sirens that many songs were actually made to sound good when there are sirens in the background. The album is unrefined and incredibly crude. Especially being from the early 2000s, it has some edginess and anxiety connected to being anti-American imperialism caught in the immediate cultural reaction to 9/11. It is El-P at his darkest and his most raw but is widely considered a classic in backpack rap.

Deep Space 9mm

T.O.J.

Stepfather Factory

Cancer 4 Cure Is El-P's third album, and the second I listened to because they are out of order on some streaming services. This one is far more polished and much more modern and goes insanely hard. This album has bangers lined up after bangers lined up after bangers, and the rapping is top notch too. This one received less critical love than El-P's other albums due to his rapping being much less intense, but it is still on point. This album might stand a chance of being able to be played for other people. This album goes hard, and I absolutely love it.

The Full Retard

Tougher Colder Killer

$4 Vic

I'll Sleep When You're Dead was the last album to listen to and the second of El-P's albums. This one is crazy. It seems to blend the aggressive cadence and production of his first album with some of the refinedness of his third. Right off the bat, with Tasmanian Pain Coaster, you get introduced to this atmosphere in production that manages to stretch the entire album. He is aggressively anti-war in some of the most insane songs I have ever heard like No Sirs. The off-kilter production hits this perfect point on songs like The Overly Dramatic Truth where he manages to put together a maximalist soundscape but has each sound so clear, creating something much greater than the sum of its parts (despite some edginess which may not be everyone's cup of tea). He brings together an incredibly class-conscious song in The League Of Extraordinary Nobodies that feels incredibly honest not just to the general dynamic, but also to the feel and experience of trying to reach out to rich people. This is included with (maybe not for the club) bangers like Flyentology and Drive. This is easily one of my favourite albums of all time, and I would seriously recommend giving it a shot or two knowing that it will be an extremely difficult listen.

Tasmanian Pain Coaster

Drive

The League Of Extraordinary Nobodies

I was the person who listened to El-P second most of anyone on a streaming service that I only joined halfway through the year. I loved all three of his studio release albums, so I decided to search for more. El-P also has some older songs/projects that I listened to. First I found a song Patriotism from an old project Soundbombing 2. The song is wild and really spits some politics from a young and disenfranchised El-P. Next, I found a project called High Water he did with a jazz group The Blue Series Continuum. This is a low-key record he helped produce, and while it isn't anything particularly crazy, I still listen to it here and there when I'm looking for something lower-key. It's a pretty enjoyable listen.

Before Run The Jewels, El-P was part of some other groups he dropped albums with. One is Company Flow where he dropped a record widely regarded as a classic called Funcrusher Plus. El-P produced this album but does have some verses on it. His sound is very different from now, or even his own albums, but you can get a feel for his production roots if you so desire. The feel of the album is also much more dated. Not bad, but if you're not into' older hip-hop or boom-bap you probably won't get too into it. He also did the production on The Cold Vein by Cannibal Ox, a hip-hop duo out of New York, back in 2001. This is also widely regarded as a classic and has a much bigger name for itself in the core hip-hop community. I listened to these albums around the same time a few times each, and while I didn't love them, they led my deeper dive into older hip hop where I've really learned to appreciate it. Now that I do love older hip-hop much more, I might revisit them soon.

For some optional listening:

Patriotism

High Water

Funcrusher Plus

The Cold Vein

Killer Mike's old work I listened to much less thoroughly.

First I listened to the obvious choice: an album he made with El-P on production. R.A.P Music. This album goes insanely hard, and the chemistry was actually so good that it led to the formation of Run The Jewels. The beats are aggressive and insane. Killer Mike's rapping matches it. His chops here really show why Kendrick Lamar said “if people really liked rapping Killer Mike would be platinum.” He manages a ton of charisma through songs that range from a funny story to actively murdering cops. This album is widely regarded as Killer Mike's best, he spits nonstop from front to back, and some songs go down easily as some of the greatest rap songs of all time.

Reagan

Don't Die

Anywhere But Here

From this point, I knew of a couple other older Killer Mike songs. One was Ready Set Go off of Bangx3, so I gave that a listen and it was amazing. Killer Mike shows himself as a rapper's rapper and he has some hysterical stories that he goes on to tell. The beats are really good, but starting at R.A.P Music may have been a mistake because going from a phenomenal album to a really good album still manages to feel like a downgrade. I revisit this here and there and generally have a really good time.

Ready, Set, Go Remix

The next and final older album I have listened to a decent amount from Killer Mike is Pl3dge. This is where I really solidified most of my ideas of Killer Mike. He is an A-grade rapper and has been for a while, and likely will continue to do so. He is a rapper's rapper. He raps insanely well and has charm, flows, and lyricism that most will never see on their best album. That being said, that is what he does. El-P has given me something truly crazy in that every single album was a completely different experience. Killer Mike may not do that whole sonic experience every time, but I can know for sure I'm about to get some awesome raps. This has a lot of great songs, and potentially my favourite non-El-P related Killer Mike song in:

Ric Flair

Last Detour, Much More Recent (in my life)

So while I was on old music I decided to listen around a bit. I'll restrain myself to just one Atlanta-based rap duo: Outkast, which is a duo of rappers Andre 3000 and Big Boi. I knew Outkast was really good and widely called the best rap duo of all time, but despite knowing some songs, I had never given them a full album listen.

I first listened to what is still my favourite album from them, Aquemini while on a long bike ride. This shit took me on a trip. I listened to it because everyone credits Stankonia as their best but I wanted deeper cuts first. This album blew me away. The rapping and storytelling are top-of-the-line. The chemistry between 3k and Big Boi is unreal. To top it off, the production is incredibly creative and stands out in a field of high creativity that was coming out at the time. To this day, it remains my favourite Outkast album of all time, and in their discography, as it turns out, it is widely regarded as their best rap-specific album for old-heads who like when they stick more strictly to rapping.

Return Of The “G”

Aquemini (title track)

From here I moved to an oldie. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. This is much more noticeably an older song, and took place at a time where that was clear. Atlanta had still not made itself distinct from other musical places. This was Outkast's big start, and has some of my favourite songs from them, but it does show some age.

The title track: Southernplayalisticadillacmusic

Their Christmas song: Player's Ball

We've now visited 5 different records that are from Atlanta and prominent. If you consider what you already know of Outkast (Mr. Jackson, Hey Ya!), we could call it 6. In 2016, trap would come out as the dominant soundscape, but that would also become a wider hip-hop landscape than remain spatial. Atlanta is a place that has been more experimental and flamboyant. This creates some massive highlights, but sacrifices some identity through consistency in its sounds like the west coast with its bass lines or New York with boom-bap.

Back To RTJ

That trap soundscape happened at the same time that Killer Mike linked up with El-P. Killer Mike, from Atlanta, was not a part of that wave. Instead, we were getting Run The Jewels, aka RTJ1, which I got back to after listening to Outkast, realizing that Big Boi was on Banana Clipper. Turns out this album fucking rocks. El-P goes in on production, keeping the raw feeling while creating a great soundscape for their first duo album. What I wasn't able to appreciate initially due its rough style, after listening to older music, I was able to come around and really enjoy everything here. The production, while not as layered as the later RTJ albums, still has a whole lot going for it, both in intensity and creativity. The duo, while still refining how RTJ would work together, absolutely nailed their ability to seamlessly trade bars and glide over the El-P production. This may not be as brutal as the beats on RTJ2 or as layered as RTJ3, but it is still amazing, and a return to it gave me more of my favourites.

Run The Jewels – Run The Jewels – Run The Jewels

Sea Legs

A Christmas Fucking Miracle This one has probably my favourite El-P verse of all time.

Starting To Notice Something

In the last song, A Christmas Fucking Miracle, I picked up on a line from Killer Mike. “Planned Parenthood helping plan miscarriages but I'm lucky mommy already had a narrative.” This line stuck with me for a while. With my love for Christmas songs that are actually good and this containing potentially El-P's best verse, having something that puts me off stood out. Especially for the black radical who consistently raps about how things like pregnancy can ruin lives and how hard it can be for women, it seemed odd to me that he would take the reactionary right wing point. It makes logical sense, he is at least somewhat religious, he's a guy, he's doing well, and he's happy to be alive, but why pose it as the antagonism? Why not just say my mom made the right choice given a tough situation of a teenage pregnancy instead of throwing shade at planned parenthood? This one confused me, but hey, sometimes I be disagreeing with people, so I let it go and continued just enjoying the music.

Then came the first single for his new album rollout: Run. Being the lead single for Michael, this is supposed to show what Killer Mike has been cooking. It opens up with Dave Chapelle, who had recently gone through a big TERF scandal. It's just a spoken-word thing that anyone could have done. Given Killer Mike's very in-your-face politics it seemed odd that he would pick Dave Chapelle as the person to do the speech instead of really almost anyone else at that moment, but hey, sometimes people disagree and maybe Dave has been his friend for a while, so I moved on.

The song wasn't awesome for another reason too. The politics, or the kind of weird lack of it. It starts off with a politically charged message and the hook matches this vibe. The verses come, and it quickly dissolves into flexing wealth without that much more. Wherever it seems to start back up, the message is near instantly squandered. Don't get me wrong, the song isn't bad, it's good, but it just felt like it could have been – and should have been – much more.

At this point, it seemed that the radical image of Killer Mike had turned out to be a little less solid.

Michael

Killer Mike's album came out. His delivery and rapping are insanely good. There are the hard songs. There are personal songs. He comes through with an incredibly Atlanta soundscape that has permeated many albums but made for few good full albums: gospel. He seems to be trying to really lead the way to show that it is a valuable and rich sound; that it can be done in a way that blends with different sounds, being powerful and diverse. This album is truly phenomenal if you're into rap, and well worth a listen to just about any fan of his work, or rap in general. For many, this will be the album of the year, I am sure.

I can't get into it. This happens for albums all the time. I don't get an album, or it just falls a bit flat but I can tell there's something there. Usually, I set it aside to revisit on another day, knowing that it will likely have its time, or maybe the album just isn't for me. This one, on the other hand, I do get, but I think the issue is something else.

Just 2 lines.

1. > Niggas talk to me about that woke-ass shit (Yeah) > Same niggas walkin' on some broke-ass shit > You see, your words ain't worth no money, I ain't spoke back, bitch > All of you niggas hang together on some Brokeback shit

2. > Niggas wanna move like rap niggas, me, I wanna move like Rob Smith > Fuck that rap and trap shit, I'm a landlord, bitch, pay rent, pay rent

The first one calls his fans woke, broke, and gay. For someone who is a revolutionary, yes? I figured that was a large part of your target market? The second cites a black billionaire as inspiration then turns to something I didn't even think could happen: landlord rap.

I can't really say much more about the album than this. It should be great from almost every single angle, but for me, the entire experience is so tainted by these two lines that I can't even listen to the rest without thinking about them. That's what this article is about. It's all I really had to say, this whole thing could have been 1 paragraph.

My Frustrations

When I read Malcolm X, he warned multiple times of a certain type of black man who will come into the movement as a black man but will always make decisions in favour of the status quo, reinforcing the anti-civil rights movement. This was one of the things Malcolm X stayed looking out for most, alongside the (still continuing) Nation Of Islam. They have no margin of error for people who are in it to sabotage their movement. You can be in a different stream of the movement, but the leadership should be 100% committed. He consistently said that if a white person existed in the leadership for a demonstration of civil rights it was already over. Consistently, this happened. Consistently, the demonstrations were shut down as soon as they got close to actually getting at something valuable.

Malcolm X mellowed down after he visited Mecca, and learned that you could be more accepting of more people, but was still much more adamant about ensuring the commitment than most. This was my literary introduction to leftism, and as such I think a caution about the movement being sabotaged has been taken to the core of my ideology. The movement needs to be aware of it, especially while trying to bring other people along for the ride.

I think this makes me particularly nervous when it comes to Killer Mike. He is a big name and is considered a legend in hip-hop. He constantly talks about various major black figureheads and how he ideologically continues what they were standing for. He constantly brings up leftist talking points and tells stories that leftists generally identify with. Yet, when push comes to shove, he seems to cave. I think he could be a good ally if he backed the movement, but I can no longer trust him to lead, which is what he seems like he aesthetically attempts to do.

The peak of this to me is the bank Killer Mike so called owns: Greenwood Bank. “Banking For The Culture.” This is pitched as being a bank that will help black people with their needs, and it's black owned, so black people will benefit from more business. More representation is good right? It isn't a real bank. It is an app that acts as a front for Coastal Banking Solutions. An actual bank. Also, a white-owned bank. It falls into the ultimate pitfall of black capitalism: that there are two ways it tends to succeed. One is reliance on white capital. The other is exploitation of black working people. When he asks you to buy into it, he is asking you to buy something HE OWNS. it will profit him, not the community. It will not solve the underlying issues, but it might help a few black capitalists in the process.

There was also some extra drama surrounding Killer Mike doing an interview where he talked a bunch about the “bootstraps” thing. His advice to impoverished black Americans was to “live below your means” and “invest in property”. Telling poor people to live below their means is funny because they already do, they are forced to. Telling them to invest in property just comes as more out of touch because property as an investment is directly related to increasing the cost of living. This is Killer Mike. “Kill Your Masters” Killer Mike.

Why Would I Expect Different?

Killer Mike's music has a long history of being about getting the bag as well as revolutionary politics. Killer Mike grew up in a harsh environment (at least from the stories he tells) and has been able to get out. Killer Mike has seen reward for his extremely hard work and talent. Killer Mike has been able to successfully sell his views on the world and gain larger support. He has succeeded massively in this system, it only makes sense that to some degree, he would back it. I can't really expect someone not to in that position, it's only human. Something works for you, you made it, if other people find what works for them, they might be able to make it too. Sure there's some luck involved but no system is perfect.

Maybe I expect too much. Maybe he is a revolutionary trapped in the system and, alongside a couple of slip-ups, is genuinely trying to give advice and trying to help people survive the system until it changes. Maybe I expect too much perfection from idols. Maybe he's only human, navigating an extremely complicated world that he doesn't agree with as well as any human can. Maybe it just makes me paranoid because I have looked up to him for a long time and I'm in a phase of skepticism towards people I have spent a long time respecting.

The politics of his music matters, and his politics matter too. It affected my enjoyment of his music in a positive way before, and it is affecting my enjoyment of his music in a negative way now. Maybe I can get over it. Maybe I don't need to. Hopefully, if he continues to put out good music, I can get into it again in the future. Maybe it will contain more of the politics I do like. Maybe that politics will help grow and strengthen the music. Maybe having that politics performs my anti-capitalism for me. Either way, there's a lot of good music I can listen to.

Hopefully, this article gave you guys some more good music to listen to.

---

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 🎼 🎵 🎶 ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ 🎼 ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ 🎵 🎶♪ 🎵 🎶♫ ♬ ♭

---

Oncle Spencer

Overview

This book was amazing. It was the most theory dense in the first chapter, which was pretty short. Here Anand talks about change-making as a system and goes into detail about how it has been co-opted and changed. All chapters after that are really just the same thing but more. We already understand the core of the argument from the first chapter, so he moves into telling stories of other people who have arrived at the same conclusions. These stories all go to point out specific aspects and dynamics that come with the theories of the first chapter, or natural extension and connections to the theory. This not only makes sure you thoroughly understand it by the end, but also makes it much more personal and entertaining.

I think what is most impressive about this book is that Anand Giridharadas seems to really know what books do. Harrison once posted an article that said books aren't information transfeer devices, but subjectivity merging devices. Anand keeps the strict facts to a small section at the start, then proceeds to give multiple extremely interesting and personal accounts of other people's subjective experiences that relate to the facts. This made it an absolute pleasure to read, and also made it so that if you have read this summary, which is just a quick list of some of the facts, most of the experience of the book is still left for you to discover by reading it.

Abridged

I'm just using my presentation notes so this will be chapter by chapter.

BUT HOW IS THE WORLD CHANGED?

The way we make change now has shifted from using central structures to create systemic change to using markets. All capitalist parties are complicit in this change. Capitalists who want to do good fund change and in return get good optics and more potential investors and workers who agree with it. This ignores that it now lets the wealthy decide what change can happen and more importantly what change cant happen. They fund change only as far as it doesn't go after them. It also puts change under the umbrella of business ontology. This business change and business optimization has led us to where workers don't see the positives from productivity gains and have no say to make that happen.

WIN-WIN

Business change happens in the context of win-wins. People make a positive impact, and as that positive impact spreads, their business grows. This fails when the positive impact is subjective and limited in scope, and the wins come out lopsided. Doing well by doing good tends towards more doing well than doing good. Many win-wins come out with workers as a whole seeing no win as the help for them only goes as far as what would make them more efficient for their employer who swallows the benefit.

REBEL-KINGS IN WORRISOME BERETS

Venture capitalists see themselves as people fighting the system when they are the system themselves. Since they all want to start their own ventures, they only manage to take on smaller issues without addressing their systemic roots where real change could be sustainably made.

THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER

There are thinkers and thought leaders. Thinkers do large-scale real analyses of conditions and reach conclusions that target why issues exist. Thought leaders take these issues and turn them into victim-focused, perpetrator light, issues. Feminism turns from how structures hold women down. Now it is how women can adapt to those structures.

Ththought leaders present ideas of change to marketworld. A mindset where only markets exist, only businesses can present the solutions, and everything must be done through business means. Everything melts into business/market speak, and if it doesn't appeal to that, it doesn't present itself as an investment, and it isn't worth time. Radical ideas get turned into a commodity that can be purchased in the marketplace of ideas.

Rich people who fund all change don't care to hear how they're the problem and don't pay to hear it. They don't want to hear about inequality, which relates to their extraction, but they want to focus on poverty, which they can donate to fix quickly. They constantly hear that they are fixing these things and turn to ignore people saying it is getting worse. The only way to get put on stage is to affirm them, and the only way to get heard at all is to get put on stage. Its a trap

Arsonists Make The Best Firefighters

Consultants hire people who are really well versed in trying to actually appreciate other cultures, which are people who struggle to find jobs elsewhere. From here, they give them a real cookie-cutter method of change-making that they then expect everyone to apply. This then turns the people most invested in culture and moulds them into people who push things toward capital. This creates a “Trying-to-Solve-the-Problem-with-the-Tools-That-Caused-It issue.”

There is also a problem with optimization. Companies try to optimize for profits, but in doing so only optimize to make the lives of the workers worse. They have completely forgotten that on the other end, there are real people. They want trained workers but refuse to train them. They are destroying the environment they need to proliferate. In growing globally, they forgot that people are spatial.

GENEROSITY AND JUSTICE

People used to be skeptical of giving because of the power and extraction that came with it, but the world has been deliberately pushed to accept it. Rich people have created an environment where they spend on poor people instead of letting poor people spend for themselves, which means poor people have their lives crafted by what the rich give to them.

There are people that try to get through to the rich, but they can only do it on the terms of the rich, who ignore all substance and just try to take notes on the core bits they want: where they can get tax discounts or improve productivity. Some rich people want to change but they're stuck in the current of their surroundings with no idea how to stop it, so they try to donate right and end up doing almost the exact same thing as all the others.

ALL THAT WORKS IN THE MODERN WORLD

Elites don't go to public change events but instead meet nearby public events behind closed doors. They are invite-only, and at least 3 steps removed from normal people. They meet to talk about issues like feminism and anti-globalist populism but don't invite feminists or the people they mock. They say everyone else just needs to be educated, but others know their lives are getting worse, and the elites don't.

There is a new class war. The global vs the locked-in-place. Bill Clinton and his CGI were a powerhouse of this trend. They pushed global change without consulting those impacted, creating the place to be for getting connections as the ultra-rich. People saw this and hated it, with it ultimately being a factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in 2016. People hated those making changes for them without having any say in the matter, and they rejected the embodiment of that in a candidate. When asked why they lost, the Clintons blamed the right and called them uneducated and dumb, not seeing what they saw. All this while the CGI never asked what the others saw.

“OTHER PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR CHILDREN”

It usually takes a major event to make people want structural change. It is hard for wealthy people to have this because they moulded the world for them. Tying to push for change in the right way is just as hard as trying to push it worse. Paying taxes is easier than dodging them. They can do it, but when it pops up they just call it complicated.

B corps are an example of someone trying to make structural change. Creating a market of good companies within the market so people can see them and we can push for change so everyone would be like them. Despite having all the right people and all the capital, it has remained hundreds of companies in millions, a tiny amount. Something else will have to happen.

Acknowledgements

Anand takes some time here to express that the reason he knows all of this is that he at one point made a career out of being a marketworlder. He found himself more isolated from those he wanted to make change for, and more influenced by those he was trying to appeal to. That inspired him to find more people feeling similarly and to write this book.

Final thoughts

Anand Giridharadas is wild. He did the audiobook himself and is a great speaker. Good voice. Good looking. Smart. Some people just got it all.

A Change To Us

Smartphones have already effectively made us cyborgs. As people, it has gone further than us being expected to have our phones on us to use as a tool, but now we expect humans to be capable of doing what smartphones can do at all times. For the first time in history, I can request someone send me a picture of something and receive a response within seconds no matter where they are in the world. There is no consideration of how they send the picture, everyone I know is now able to send pictures, and I can expect this from them and everyone new I meet. Phones also act as a limb. Not having my phone means I am missing something that is a part of me, and there is separation anxiety associated with not having a phone on my person. That ability of instant global communication is lost. Losing your vocal cords deprives you of the ability to speak in at a personal range in the same way that losing your phone deprives you of the expected ability to communicate instantly at a global range. You are left unable to complete an expected human function.

We have integrated the phone not just as a tool for work or entertainment, but absolutely. Phones have triggered a new relationship with information. Humans now have the ability of information recollection with nearly no delay, changing our dynamic with thinking itself. We no longer need to worry about fact recollection, including facts that we don’t already know. This lets us think exclusively in more dynamic processes and connections. This effectively means that the smartphone acts not only externally as a limb, but also internally as a part of our brains.

The changes don’t stop in the personal. Previous generations used to need to see people to have a relationship with them. There were some pen pals, but this was usually only after meeting or reserved for unusual cases, like in fame or career. Now, it is normal for people to have multiple friends that they have never seen but only know online. These people are met in online spaces, talk in online spaces, and play in online spaces. People no longer need to physically go somewhere to meet or see people. While this has increased the number of potential friends we can have and facilitated faster connections to friends, it isn’t all good. This could be an entire project in itself, but just to mention a couple of things, this format stunts trust and depth of connection. When not confronted face to face, it is easy to act much more hostile without consideration of the other person’s response. A great example of everything that could be talked about here is breaking up over text. You are clearly close to the person; you are communicating with them, but it is still so impersonal that is leaps well past the boundary of bad manners into the realm of awful. If online relationships were the same as in-person relationships, it shouldn’t be that out of line.

Additionally, in time spent alone, people spend their free time engaged with online content. After spending a day on computers at work, to relax and be social, we rely on computers in a different context. Social media often replaces group experiences with group chats, messaging, or calls. If we don’t want to be directly social, we scroll through social media that provide us with content that we engage with socially. We see jokes or messages from others that find their way to our pages and host discussions based on those posts. Like-minded people find communities, and those communities have shared experiences while changing dynamically as their users do.

Parasocial relationships also permeate the social experience. YouTubers, streamers, and podcasters all create a type of social relationship that is predicated on one side making money from an almost friendship of the other side. This dynamic turns friendship and enjoyment into content consumption, which is transactional. One side needs the other to make money, the other side knows this and engages because it feels personal despite the money-making side not knowing them individually. One side is individual, and the other is a group of unknown. There are arguments that this is weird, mostly older people seeing young people paying to engage with others online. There are arguments that this is normal, that it is the new equivalent of paying to watch TV. Either way, the constant portable accessibility to normalized parasocial relationships is a new social dynamic available only in recent years.

All of this goes towards giving us a new social experience. The way we interact with ourselves and others has changed. The number of avenues for different types of social experiences has increased, and the number of specific experiences possible in each of those avenues has increased dramatically alongside it. This change has happened rapidly and had many impacts beyond what people originally expected as they introduced the new technology.

Changing The Environment That Changes Us

As social beings, this change to the human experience of self and others has sweeping impacts. As we become more dependent on social media, our social experience gets heavily impacted by the social media algorithm and what it expects us to like. This is effectively the social media experience, ie the new social experience. Interactions demand an environment of interaction. Where before it could be the weather, where you meet, or any other spatial aspect, now the environment is that of the platform that mediates the social experience. This platform is the same for anyone anywhere. Communication moves from spatial and global, to personal to impersonal.

This is reliant on the digital matrix. We develop further capabilities for digital tools, increasing how effective they are as tools, and in turn, increasing our reliance on them. This is not new, it happens with just about any common tool throughout history, but what is new is the limitation of the new development. Older tools, say a hammer, became popular, improvements were made to form and material, and they became more popular as they became better. With technology, development changes. Phones are no longer limited to using their form or material to dictate our new interaction with them. This instead is augmented through software. More tools become accessible through the same tool, and the importance of the physical tool is diminished in the eyes of the user. In the information age, people are often valued more for their intellectual capabilities rather than their physical, which allows this new model of evolution to thrive. Our physical bodies seem limited, but physical augmentation has proven to have massive potential. Our minds seem much more elastic, but thus far, mental augmentation has not proven very effective.

So if we mould computers into the all-encompassing tool for modern life, and those tools in return have moulded us, and so on and so forth, where does that leave our current evolution? The most recent major evolution seems to be short-form content. With the explosion of Tik Tok onto the scene, short-form content became the new way to engage with content online. All social media platforms have now adopted their own hosting of short-form content. This style of content consumption is also interesting for how much it surrenders to being a raw and unfiltered interaction with the intentions of the algorithm. This gives the algorithm massive amounts of power to adopt the human experience, as it effectively takes choice out of consumption.

Short Form Content

Short-form content is the purest interaction with the algorithm we have, and it has gained success, permeating all social media spaces.

Before short-form content, the algorithm would feed users content that they could choose to engage with or not. Feeds would provide snapshots of content: a thumbnail and title of a video, the first few lines of a text post, or the title of a website. Users would choose what content they wanted to engage with based on the information it gave them and select to engage with its full content. This model has persisted for a very long time. It is very reminiscent of the newspapers, where people could read the headlines and then decide whether to further engage with the content. While its evolution has led to some flaws in the online space, with clickbait becoming almost necessary to draw any attention, it was still a structure that reinforced some semblance of choice for the end user.

Now, in short-form content, the algorithm provides content without regard for the choice of the end user. If the content you receive is not the content you desire, your only real choice is to scroll to accept the next one. Instead of selecting different content, you hope that the algorithm can select better content for you using statistics based on your usage. The algorithm is then able to classify you based on your interests and create a model of you and your desires to recommend content you will like in the future. If it is successful, this model of content delivery is extremely addictive. To the benefit of those who own enough data on users, the algorithms are incredibly effective.

To be successful, the algorithm needs to know what people want before they want it. To achieve this, it uses user statistics based on big data. Data are taken in that help create profiles on all the users based on their interaction and retention rates on all posts. From here, the algorithm is fine-tuned to deliver what they want based on their consumption. This can be directly or through shared common interests. As the velocity of data increases, so do results. The more data acquired on people with very specific interests, the more the algorithm will learn how to appeal to people with those specific interests. With millions of users consuming nearly constantly, the algorithm can become extremely effective and extremely addicting. Users of Tik Tok cite this as the appeal of the app. Within an hour of starting, it is already recommending them content that they love. So many people use it, making it incredibly effective at locking you into what you want to see near instantly. From here, addiction makes it difficult to leave without feeling like you’re missing out.

Big data can work so effectively in this space because it is results-based. It does not matter necessarily what exactly people want at that moment as long as overall they will continue to engage and consume. It does not matter that there is a human on the other side of the screen, what matters is there is a consumer that can be appealed to. From this end result, profit can be derived. This can happen through a few avenues, the most important being advertising, having a user consume a product based on content seen, and the other being data selling. Other companies also want to have more end-user engagement, so data can be bundled and sold to these other companies. The purchasing companies can then use the data to try to target people who are most likely to consume their product. In terms of corporate interests, both parties benefit from the mass harvesting of this data, and the economy is doing what it needs to: drawing more consumption. Purchasing the data is a transaction that adds to the economy, and the data itself can draw more consumption that adds to the economy. The ultimate economic win-win. This is great for everyone.

This is Bad For The People

Mental health is a known issue with social media.

The goal of a content creator is to get someone’s attention and then hopefully retain it. We already know from trends like clickbait that this model creates a weird way to generate initial interest. In short-form content, this seems to be through being loud and in your face, often alongside very quick cuts to keep the stimulus high. After this, the challenge becomes holding people for as long as possible. This is often so intense that it feels like an assault on the senses. Bright images, loud sounds, high emotion, and a constant feed of more in case one isn’t good enough so the next can try its shot at grabbing attention. The first few milliseconds are everything, and the first few milliseconds don’t give a person enough time to realize what they are watching. It is all about gaming impulses.

This is to say that the algorithm is not made to be good for people. It is made to game the algorithm, which runs off of data that is a results-based indicator of retention, not quality time. There is creation and consumption, but it exists in a post-human state. Making something that people like is not the goal of content creation, but making content that becomes rewarded by the algorithm and fed to people is. Instead of creating something informative and fun, the aim is to get the exact amount of time watched to get the algorithm to start putting the video in other people’s feeds. You can hear this in music as well once short-form content started blowing up. There are compelling songs and there are songs designed to have a specifically catchy or relatable 10-second sound-byte to be extracted and played over media. The song is not made to be listened to, it is made to be fed back into the algorithm to generate more streams. This also shows a different trend of people copying what they saw, given to them by the algorithm, then copying it only to put it back into the social media space where the initial content came from. This generally comes with the goal of wanting to blow up on social media, read as someone wanting the algorithm to recommend them to others for doing something that was recommended to them.

The human experience is no longer the focus of the engagement, the core of activity surrounds an appeal to the algorithm, with people only being a secondary thought. We are effectively lab rats in a digital space, given minimal input that tests for our specific reactions, adjusts slightly, then does so again. Short-form content is akin to a skinner box built by social media companies where we swipe a screen and get rewarded with video after video. Even well after the reward is clearly gone, and we no longer feel entertained by the content we continue to swipe a screen over and over for the hope of the feeling coming back.

There is a major cost to this rapid-fire inhuman production and consumption in mental health. I feel safe in saying that everyone is aware that short-form content is horrible for their mental health. Most people I know frequently talk about trying to quit again due to how bad their mental health deteriorates from its consistent use, but its addictive nature always brings them back. Mark Fisher has an analysis of depression where he states that it does not stem from a lack of stimulation, but rather when there is too much stimulus. Another analysis of depression states that the opposite of depression isn’t happiness but connection. If these hold water, short-form content is an incredibly efficient depression-producing machine optimized almost perfectly to crush mental health. Short-form content is not only multiple different stimulating videos back to back with minimal input between them, but each video is often multiple extremely stimulating. This is incredibly stimulating, killing our reception for the less stimulating real. Additionally, since social media consumption has replaced much of our social lives, more addicting social media serves to isolate us further. We shift away from real communication to an appeal to the algorithm. This is not simply a transition away, but a hostile takeover. The short-form content algorithm is designed to maximize consumption. This means more time spent on screen, which means less time spent off-screen. The goal of the algorithm is effectively to replace real-world relationships with digital parasocial relationships and communities. Community is transferred from real people you do know to digital people you often don’t know.

The question now becomes why would the algorithm be so set on doing something to destroy mental health. The answer to this comes back to the motive behind all social media companies: profit. These algorithms are not designed to push content that is good for people. It could be, but this would garner less engagement, which draws fewer user statistics, which is worth less grouped as data, which lowers profits. As long as the algorithm is designed to generate more profit, it will use any trick it can to ensure people stay addicted. Now, with every platform having its own short-form content, it is nearly impossible to avoid. Whether you accidentally click on it once or see something cool that draws you to it, it is designed to be as easy as possible to drag you in and keep you watching. There is no regard for the human on the business end, just the consumer.

The Sludge

We moulded social media by adding short-form content. Short-form content, after its early chaos, has now moulded a way to capture people even when more intense stimulation is no longer enough.

Sludge-form content is best loosely defined but widely recognized. On one part of the screen is an audible video about something just barely interesting: a comfortable show like Family Guy, a story from Reddit, or a podcast like Joe Rogan. A second video, unrelated content that comes with some satisfaction but no real engaging theme: Subway Surfers, foam squishes, soap cutting, Trackmania, Minecraft parkour, or a physics-based car simulation on a course. Lastly, there is often some simple and recognizable audio, like the sigma grindset song. This all comes together to make content that isn’t worth watching. There is nothing that truly demands your attention. There is nothing to learn. Nothing unexpected happens, and there are no high-octane moments. It is just easy to watch, maybe even multiple times, before swiping again to roll the dice on what comes next.

Sludge form content is not completely new, the concept is easily modelled after our lives. The rising rate of dopamine hits necessary to maintain a state of entertainment in young people’s brains has already caused us to sludge ourselves. If sludge form content at its core is having multiple forms of media presented to you, then its existence from one source is a mere convenience rather than anything truly new. Whenever we do something that is considered not thoroughly engaging, we listen to music or podcasts. With phone games, videos, and social media scrolling, we entertain ourselves in times of static waiting. People already throw on TV or YouTube and then pull out their phones to watch other content. One form of content may as well be able to provide that entire experience, it is only a natural progression. This would also cause sludge content to provide an experience of familiarity. If when we are relaxed we allow ourselves multiple forms of content at the same time, having multiple forms of content at the same time might be able to trick our brain into providing a feeling of relaxation.

It could also be that where previously we needed to have some form of connection to the digital matrix to feel safe or comfortable, we introduced our brains to a near-constant form of multitasking, which is now expected to feel that same comfort. Before, we had our real existence and our digital existence, both of which have to constantly exist at all times. Now, we need multiple points of contact to the digital in order to satisfy our needs. The constant state of multitasking between the real and the digital has expanded into people craving multitasking while in the digital. Instead of doing something real while listening to something digital, sludge form content is consumed alone, no longer relying on having alternative distractions, so it offers us multitasking all on one platform. The real no longer needs to be relied on, we are allowed to overindulge in the digital without any immediate negative reaction. In the same way that someone may find comfort in eating too much candy here and there, sludge form content allows us to consume too much media at once. Where eating too much candy may cause immediate physical negative effects, sludge form content comes with longer-term negative mental effects. The feeling of being able to freely indulge ourselves without judgement comes with a purely internal negative externality.

Short Form Rest Stops

Sludge form content is the algorithm’s way to give temporary relaxation from the assault of stimulus that is itself while also providing even more stimulation. Less intensity, more volume. You can take your break from short-form content in the form of a new short-form content: one that doesn’t demand you engage in consuming it, as long as you are still consuming it. It seems to have taken the space by storm, but not without recognition. Many people question why it’s there, but still manage to notice how they’ve watched the video multiple times and can’t explain why. It manages to fascinate without standing out too much, creating a new form of consumption of the same product. The consumers must abide by the algorithm and what it feeds them, but now there is a new style of presentation.

There is something widely discussed in the comment sections, or at least there was when I first saw short-form content. Most people were able to recognize it as post-human content. Something that does nothing for anyone, but somehow still manages to drive extended engagement and often multiple rewatches. Noone finds it interesting, yet it seems to captivate the brain just enough to consume it more. This engagement means that the algorithm has been able to pick it up and distribute it to people as a new form of extremely popular content, yet no one likes it. It is designed to be rewarded by the algorithm. It copies in hopes to be rewarded by the algorithm. It is not burdened by a commitment to actually providing what the end user wants from a platform. With it being so easy to mass produce, almost certainly being made with bots, we arrive at another layer of the post-human interaction of short-form content. Bots produce for the algorithm, and the algorithm distributes. Bots know what had a higher engagement, prompting them to produce more. Still, humans engage in this environment, and it continues to mould us.

With its lack of aggressive stimulus or calls to action, it seems that short-form content can provide rest in the blitz of stimulus. Every individual piece is low energy in itself, and all pieces generally come together without breaking that low energy state. They are all also low commitment, if one isn’t the right kind of stimulus for a second, the consumer can switch to another without any action on their part. You won’t have missed anything important by changing focus. Still, as a whole, it may be just satisfying enough to get the user to watch the video again just to double-check the other parts to ease their mind. Especially in the case of satisfying or ASMR videos, these can be watched multiple times with the same result. They do their job, being visually or audibly pleasing without breaking the hypnotic state. Since there is never a change from the expected, multiple rewatches change nothing. The user is able to just relax.

So short form is a stressor, but now short form is also a relief. To consume short-form content is now to live in a submitted state of relying on an algorithm to supply you with just the right amount of stimulus as well as just the right amount of relaxation to drive the user to be able to consume more content. As both the stress and relief are part of the same entity, you end up in a relationship with content that is oddly like an abusive relationship. That which harms you is the one that comforts, only to later harm again, addicted to the source of the harm. With it being of a relationship with the algorithm instead of a human, it leaves us in a breakdown of reality where we are social beings in an antisocial relationship, looking for the comfort of a relationship of some kind, only finding depressing hyper-stimulus that we cannot escape due to socially normalized addiction. This addiction is necessary for businesses as it generates data and profits.

Seeing as the profits will be chased, this is also oddly reminiscent of the market cycle. The market has a bipolar boom and bust cycle, giving euphoric highs followed by crippling depressions. These depressions bring reforms and the promise of better to keep us invested in the next euphoric boom. Short-form content issues us booms of stimulus with some content we can share with friends, followed by a depressive real-life state where we are under-stimulated. Addiction brings us back to short-form content, where it refers us to sludge content to prime us to go back into the next doom scroll. This keeps people addicted, which is great for deriving more interaction. These moments of euphoria and great share-worthy content, just like market booms, keep us addicted, as we want that feeling again.

Panopticons And Power Dynamics

Companies have control over algorithms in the grand scheme of things, but when it comes down to the end user, users have surrendered all control to the algorithm. They can tune the algorithm to their liking, but they can’t evade it and still consume short-form content. In the end, no matter what tinkering they will do, there will be a core of the algorithm that is prioritizing profit above all else, and it will find profits wherever it can. The algorithm knows us well, but we don’t know it. We just receive the content at the end and don’t think too much about it. Naturally, this makes me think of the panopticon.

First, with the acknowledgement that big data can detect about us even what we don’t recognize about ourselves, big data goes in the center tower. This is the true source of control: what is all-knowing and what monitors us constantly. Outside would be not necessarily us, but our souls. As we scroll through the short-form content, there is very simple information that can be gathered. Our retention, speed of swipe, how often we go back, and information on the video including who made it, what its contents are, and other statistics like engagement. The algorithm can provide us with insights inspired by big data. Based on how we respond, big data doesn’t just learn what we like or want to see, but it gleans more information than we can immediately know about ourselves. We may not have wanted to watch a certain video two or three times, we may not be actively interested, or may even actively dislike it, but if we are engaged, that is information that the algorithm will be able to adapt to under the guiding hand of big data. In this scenario, that with control over all of the data gets all of the information and manages the control, and the users simply engage and have their data read.

Users on the outside have some form of image of each other. They see the content that others produce as it gets filtered through by the algorithm, but they don’t actually know or see each other. In order to engage with each other, they must act solely through the filter of the algorithm in the center. They don’t need direct social interaction with each other. Human interaction is effectively monetized not by end users paying for a service, but by giving up control. Their information and digital existence are subject to constant monitoring which provides data to be sold. Monetization does not care about the end users, the people. Their function of existence becomes consumption from the algorithm for the purpose of monitoring.

This may model the data business, but that is not the only power dynamic at hand. Another panopticon that could be created is based on user control over each other. In this case, the users create a collective consciousness that acts as the guard in the center. On the outside is each individual user. Due to being social beings, the collective us, creates a levelling field. We moderate ourselves through means of others like us existing on the platform. In the panopticon, the algorithm would act as vision. We can get sight into what the collective us is through means of seeing what the algorithm recommends, and as we adjust our behaviour. We create for or engage with similar content to become part of the community. We feed back into the collective us. We see what individuals are engaging with, adopting, then putting out more content to draw further engagement. We do not go too far against what the algorithm provides us because it would draw on the risk of ostracization from the community. As social beings, we avoid ostracisation, even though we are in this case already ostracised in that we may never directly see anyone in the community. Entire social communities exist completely without real social behaviour. All social experience exists on the platform, where they can be tracked and monetized.

Under this more psychopolitical model, this us would effectively be the big other. The realm of believable that knows our desire and wills for us, that we individually appeal to despite not fully grasping at what its specific desires are. We may not individually directly want it, but as the algorithm rewards us for wanting it, the algorithm can want it for us and we will follow. We want to be perceived as correct and not stand out so much in the community as to go against it, as that would be antisocial and against our instincts as social beings. For any one person, it may not be their perception, but it does not matter, as the wider perception will approach the wills of the algorithm on a grand scale.

This is also a benefit to capital, where they can rely on psychopolitics as a means of control. Communities moderate themselves without investment in actually having to moderate the platform. Being platforms of community content, this means that the platform pushing or hosting something bad can absolve itself of any real blame. Any controversy can be pushed onto the end users, making it a safe investment. All improvements made can then also be seen as generosity or change-making in the world, despite it only existing as a response to the problem created by the platform model.

Surrender

In a psychopolitical model, we have already effectively surrendered to technology.

Skynet from the Terminator series is the go-to pop culture example of an AI takeover of humanity. It stands as the threat that our technological advancements, led by AI, could take over society and leave us fighting to survive under its power. In this setting, we know that AI will take over. We know that it will use repressive techniques to do so. This works under a biopolitical model of power, but under a psychopolitical model, it holds less weight. Why enslave and eradicate humans when you could trivially influence them to do what you want?

Everything we do is based on perspective, built on the core of our experiences. At this point, we have integrated our experience of being with the digital matrix, allowing it access to everything we do (working towards everything we think with brain implants in the works). People are also now connected to the digital matrix from birth, never having an experience away from it. One could argue before birth, since parents will be using the devices beforehand, and the devices will impact decisions and activities that will influence a baby pre-birth. We are exposed to the power dynamic of the algorithm deciding what we see and think from the very beginning, making that experience absolute. People don’t know what they don’t know, and the belief that people will be able to just separate from the digital matrix is shallow at best given how people who actively try to separate from it still fail.

If we only experience life through the will of the algorithm, then the algorithm can manufacture our consent. The algorithm can decide what we do and do not see. An algorithm that has the intention of maximizing usage for profit will do just that. This creates a massive filter, a filter against content that will actively reduce engagement. If engagement is reduced in a small group based on certain content, that content will be phased out in favour of other content that increases engagement. Nothing else matters.

Here, we arrive at capitalist realism as experienced through the algorithm. The algorithm can’t reward the non-algorithm. If the algorithm tries to discredit its own existence, maybe by saying that it is bad for the world, it is only able to do so in a way that increases engagement on the platform, by extension ensuring that more people use it even as it says it should not be used. Consistent efforts to drive people away will become absorbed by the creation feedback loop: trying to reach more people to tell them to stop using the platform. This means trying to get more people to consume. When people consume it, other people create more similar content to reach more people telling them to do the same. It becomes a trend that draws further engagement. Fighting against it on the platform will only work in its favour, as it will become an aesthetic that people will be absorbed into consuming. Not using the platform would mean isolating yourself from it and limiting your reach to only the people who have already removed themselves. If anything, posting content against it bolsters its position as it ensures that those who are against it have a home where they feel digitally and socially welcomed by a community on that platform. Their anti-algorithm ideology is performed for them by the algorithm they are against, and all they have to do is consume it.

We create the environment, the environment creates us. We create social media, social media creates a new paradigm of social existence. We indulge in that paradigm, and optimize it to do more, and in doing so, it forms a greater part of our social habits. Spending so much time on it, we add more and more entertaining content, which we then become dependent on for entertainment. Maybe it's time we start slowing down and really thinking about the implications of what we introduce.

---

滑入泥浆的东西，海面可能会上升 从蜂巢和污泥的各个侧面进行现场报道

---

Oncle Spencer

Being younger I knew that people had different experiences to me, and tried to accommodate people who may be going through something, trying to be kind to them. It wasn’t real though. I mean, it was something I did, and something I understood. I was raised to, but it wasn’t really real. I knew to do unto others only what you would walk a mile in your own shoes. I knew the outside world existed. I knew, but perspective wasn’t real yet.

Swing And A Miss

I almost figured it out once.

High school sucked, I hadn’t figured out how to be social yet, even less talking to girls. I know now that my family knew from my childhood that I was going to have a rough time. Therapists had told them it was coming and to be ready. I had a childhood book called Leo The Late Bloomer about how it was ok to be behind everyone else, eventually you will get there. These days I am able to embrace that I am Leo. Back then, I had no means to cope with the confusion as to why I couldn’t make anything social work.

I switched schools a lot, each time with lessons and growth that could be brought to the next. Each time with new people and new stories I could tell from my other schools. At one point, I left a school and returned to it the next year, and was first confronted with the reality of perspective. No one knew who I was. They knew I existed, but before, I didn’t talk. Now, I made class guides, worked out, and could find weird opportunities to have fun in random situations instead of disappearing into my own nerves. I now existed to them in a way that was different from before.

Behind the scenes, there was a lot going on. Up to this point, I had two groups of people, those who I saw at school and those I saw outside of school. Despite not being social at school, I had always been social. I had relationships come together and fall, friend groups build and dissipate, and a consistent friend group that I would have fun with for the entire time I was silent around those at school. When I left the school I was silent in, I moved to a school where all of my friends were, and my social life instantly thrived. There was a lot of cool stuff happening everywhere, parties, alcohol, and drugs, but eventually, it became too much and I had to make the return.

I knew the perception of me had changed, and had moments where I thought about the differences that people saw, but I just kind of continued on. Similarly, people who had known my name before, I became good friends with. They likely never questioned my experiences and how everything came to be for me. I had changed, I was kind of cool for the first time, but it just kind of happened. Now I realize that it provided the building blocks for me to confront perspective at a later date. The concept of perspective was unavoidable in that it existed and was impacting at that time, but it just wasn’t addressable yet. At this moment I needed to not retreat back to overthinking everything, I just needed to have some fun, and that’s what I did.

38 Slug

My parent’s marriage wasn’t doing too during high school. Arguments increased in frequency and intensity until there was an off-the-books divorce. The actual split wasn’t bad for me though. It meant not only the arguments stopping, but I was able to enjoy each of my parents more as people. The concept of parents as knowing guides was broken, and the dynamic had shifted to accommodate that, letting me be friends with them in a way that didn’t work before.

Around this time there was another major event. Some of my friends were on a hockey team together, and they invited another friend over than usual. We were hanging out in my buddy Davie’s backyard, and he came up to me and asked if I knew how to talk to girls. By this point, I had started to realize that girls were actually just people you could talk to, so I went over and started talking to the key player in this story, Julia.

Julia is awesome. One of the guys in the friends group had a crush on her but it didn’t work out, so many of the guys stopped seeing her much. I kept talking to her and now I consider her one of my best friends.

At home, I was adapting to the new life of being the man of the house. It was me, my mother and my sister. Things were going alright. Could be better, but I kept on keeping on, learning what I needed to do to fill the void. There were some major changes, but I never thought about it too much and just followed the flow. With my mom needing help herself and trying to learn what she needed to do to help us at the same time, I learned that I needed to really rise to the occasion and actively help her while I helped myself too. We all became a very tight-knit unit, which evened our family dynamic out. My mother was no longer strictly a parent, but a close friend, and more than anything else, human.

After a few years of this, that dynamic became normal instead of new. While at this point my father had moved away and lived elsewhere for years, he was still a dad who had left recently in my mind. I saw him often enough, even if it wasn’t that often.

One day I saw Julia and the topic had somehow come up. She hit me with an “I’ve never met your dad.” This hit me to my core. She was the first person who hadn’t known me and had seen this whole story, knowing my family and the changes. Where I saw myself as someone whose father had recently left, I was confronted with another person’s reality where I had, in their experience, never really had a father. This difference in perspective rocked my world.

Confronting Perspective Directly

This provided a moment where the only way I can express it was I was confronted directly with the real. Before, I knew that different people had different experiences that changed what they did. At this moment, I learned that different people had fundamentally different realities. The divorce, a moment that had defined so much of my life experience, a moment which had split my life into a before and an after, was not the only reality of my life. To someone else, my existence only took place in the after.

Julia's statement also changed my own experience with the divorce years after it had happened. Someone in the position where they only knew me after was in a place where they could only see the version of me that existed after. To others they may have known my experiences leading up, when it happened, and how I moved on as a continuous process in different instances of the now. To people that met me after, they only know of the divorce as going back in time, remembering what once was.

This comes with some ramifications that I have never been able to truly digest. If other people’s perspective of me is completely different in a way that can only be expressed as being a completely different reality, that must also mean that my experience of other people is a completely different reality to theirs or anyone else’s. Not only in terms of what anyone sees or hears but also feels emotionally. The way I look at Noah and Kaitlyn for example, just looking at their faces, will never be the same as they look at each other. I may be able to mimic the same angle at almost the exact same time, but we still essentially see completely different people. We might focus on different features, but also the emotional weight is completely different in a way that we can never share.

This became a kind of obsession for me. When I look at someone, I struggle to simply look at them. I manage to compel myself to look at someone while considering the perspective of myself that I experience while looking at them. I see a person who is presenting a book, and I wonder what the experience of that book is. I wonder how, when they read it, it connected to ideas of their life that I haven’t even heard of despite knowing them as a person so well. I can see them as them, but I can also focus on a part of them. Their hair is done a certain way. Sometimes hair is done nicely and worth noting, but sometimes the sky is just blue, and sometimes the hair is just hair. It is there, not to be shown off, but just because it is there. Its being there is the product of not only the person who has done it to some degree, but also the person who last gave them a haircut, and their life experiences that led them to do that style haircut. They may have never thought of that, yet here I am having never met them or knowing of their existence, but seeing the unavoidable reality of their impact on my life in some form.

Then comes more. I am self-conscious about smells. I can smell incredibly well, I know when things are going bad days before other people. Do I smell bad? I ask myself this question multiple times per day. What if this person is self-conscious about their hair. Could my looking at their hair and noting that they indeed have some hair be getting received subconsciously as some sort of judgment on hair? Maybe there is something they don’t like about their hair and they worry that I’m noticing it too. Did they spend time doing their hair to look like that? It’s normal to me, but maybe that normal only exists in the sense that it is a cover-up for something someone is self-conscious about and it is done every time.

I will never experience what they experience when they look at themselves in a mirror. To look at one’s self is a uniquely personal experience in that it can only exist for you. No one else can look at you with a shred of the experience you know about yourself. But is it truly unique if every experience of looking at you is not only unique but based on its own reality of experiences that are experienced only with you? You are only able to see yourself in your own perspective, the same that anyone else can only see you in their own perspective.

It can be rather over-stimulating.

Perspectives Of My Father

On May 5th, 2023 my father died of brain cancer. His death prompted more thinking of perspective, especially since changes with the existence of my father brought about this whole perspective thing.

About 8 months earlier, he started bumping into walls. His personality started changing. He grew tired faster and started to make mistakes in certain things that he otherwise did thoroughly with ease. All of this happened while I was away.

I visited once and noted that he had a tremor in his leg and was a bit thinner than usual, but I thought maybe this is just a sign he is starting to age. Surely if something was consistently wrong he would do something. He told me I needed to see him soon, very soon, but I had no idea what that meant. I was not able to glean his perspective. He knew something would soon come to an end.

Other people around him, coworkers and family, also noticed things going wrong. To one person, he stopped being as loud and got exhausted very fast. To another, he was driving very slowly. To another, his naps became more frequent and longer. To another, he seemed to lean a certain way, kind of tipping to the side. Some had said he should see a doctor, and he said he’d get to it. He never did.

There were many perspectives of him, but he lived a weird life. He was staunchly against vaccines and the medical system. He had a big ego, and always knew what was best for him. He lived at work, and he almost always saw different people separate from each other. While many perspectives from people could guess something was wrong, it seems that people were not able to create a larger perspective, one that supersedes the individual to become a group perspective that everyone had noticed something, and there was indeed something larger wrong that couldn’t be explained by an illness, hip pain, or being particularly tired. A bunch of atomized perspectives failed to come together to create a compelling narrative.

Even if the narrative was formed, it seems unlikely anything would have changed. Eventually, he collapsed and was unable to resist being taken to the medical system any longer. He was brought to the hospital where he would perish 5 weeks later with a perspective moulded by a tumour that now encompassed over half of his brain.

Weird Perspectives Of The End Of My Father

Since the events, I have found multiple specific perspectives that I find weird.

I have my own perspective, which given the events is confusing. He made money to support my family but was never there. When my sister was in the hospital he didn’t show up. Did he support her, or did he not? I showed up, and his work provided my ability to show up as I did, so does that count for anything? He probably still should have shown at least here and there for 5 minutes. When he was in the hospital, we all showed up. He said my sister should have never taken drugs in the hospital and that it caused issues. He took them when he was there. We supported it. Did he deserve it? Was it the right thing? He spread lies about my sister’s condition. One piece of me wants to say rib bozo #packwatch, but another knows that anger and dismissal aren’t how I want to handle trauma these days. Another side of me wonders how traumatic this event was, given that I have already become my own father figure in the time that he had left. In my mind, he had already gone more than once.

This was contrasted in the form of a friend from high school who I fell out with a long time ago. His father had left when he was young, and my father was a father figure to him. His perspective puts my father in a position of not necessarily being my father but the father of someone else. I heard a lot about how great he was to everyone and how he could step up to help him in his life. A reality that starkly contrasts the reality I lived. It was the same person at the same time doing the same things. Somehow in these conditions, two completely opposite opinions formed. He said that my father went down like a top g, just working resiliently to the end where he went out on his own terms. My perspective does not agree. Does one of these hold more weight? It is time to be positive or time to stand by my convictions. Does it matter? Is one of these perspectives worth more than the other? I know mine is to me, I imagine he feels the same of his own.

Then comes Julia’s perspective. I can’t know what she thinks, but in my perspective of what her perspective could be, I have always been fatherless but am now newly fatherless. She is sympathetic to me but has no stakes when it comes to my father. I am close to my father (or am I), and I am close to her (or am I), but she doesn’t have anything more than an idea that I had a father somewhere and now I don’t. I am an image so close to and heavily impacted by my father without an actual direct connection to her. This can be taken further in that when I told her and her family that my father had died, they were devastated, shocked by the news, seeing my life would change forever. In a strange way, the presence of my father became more real to them at that moment. In a way, I now am more impacted, almost having more of a father than before, through the complete lack of a father. He existed more through no longer existing to someone who he never really existed to.

My first Father’s Day with no father. Another Father’s Day as someone fatherless for years. Someone else’s first Father’s Day without my father as a replacement for their own father. A weird day.

---

Somewhere out there there's a perspective of me that exists only at Eddie's wedding after a minimum of 6 shots. That sounds so cool.

---

Oncle Spencer

Podcast Linked Here

Main components of the campaigns:

• Housing: Cost as well as type and distribution
• Transportation: transit, traffic, active transport
• Crime: Policing, drug policy, funding
• Social Justice: reform, climate action, racism With added factors of:
• Personal: cool things about them or notable past
• Vibes: general description of how I feel about them

The Candidates

Bahira Abdulsalam

• City Planning: hit on the main points but very vague
  • Net zero planning but missing true model
  • Smart cities but doesnt address getting there w/out megacorp overlords
  • sustainable transportation and medium density development maybe? a bit vague
• Social Goals: structural racism to be addressed because it hurts the economy. Playing both sides so she comes out on top here
• Personal: lots of talk about institutional racism, correct but marketworld doesnt like
• Vibes: Extremely good, got that motherly warmth but tough because engineer who stands for something
  • not the best public speaker, not the worst

6/10

Emmanuel Acquaye

“I am tired of ranting on TikTok, so I am running for the Mayor of Toronto”

• City Planning:
  • government owned temporary housing to help with homelessness
• Social Goals:
  • doesnt like how the police interact with people
• Personal:
• Vibes: immaculate
  • not a politician, you know politicians
  • “I got sick and tired of the homeless population as wel as the TTC services”
  • MAYOR ALERT!!! youtube video
  • second video already apologizing for lack of uploads
  • draws on a whiteboard and points at it

The best 3/10 great vibes and young but nothing really in terms of a real platform

Blake Acton

• City Planning:
  • Free TTC
  • More affordable housing
  • removal of bike lanes to make things safer for cyclists?
  • policing: wants to do a review with no intention of defunding
• Social Goals: says he supports LGBTQ
• Personal:
• Vibes: about as good as you get for a middle aged white guy corporate culture warrior type

3/10 has a platform but it misses the mark on anything and comes out as just watered down reactionary while trying not to say anything too bad

Sharif Ahmed

Taxi owner-operator, heart of Scarbs

• City Planning:
  • Traffic control officers at intersections during rush hour (?)
  • No property tax increase on seniors
  • wants developers and construction companies to pay for going over budget
    • sounds good, doesnt pan out the way you want it to
• Social Goals:
  • name drops love for LGBTQ, disability, faith and no faith
• Personal:
• Vibes: intermediate

2/10 Seems like a good guy, his policies just dont seem to carry much weight

Asadul Alam

“ALL SPORTS TEAMS WIN”

https://www.asadul-alam.com/toronto-mayor-election/ whole table of issues –> impact –> budget –> source that is just empty

• City Planning:
  • city wide wifi
  • climate control bus stops
  • “zero waste (or get fined)”
  • “cell phone on TTC” like service on subway?
• Social Goals:
  • no bullying
  • no drugs
• Personal:
  • website is pretty weird
• Vibes: seems like a highschooler runnning for school government

3/10

Gru Jesse Allan

Gru for mayor also website looks so dope

• City Planning:
  • paying corporations to do city work is a waste
  • gardiner gone and replace with boulevard
  • raise vacancy tax rate
  • reduce profiteering in housing development
• Social Goals:
  • fund communities, defund police
  • demilitarize police and focus on crisis response teams
  • actually evidence based, lines up with Ruth Wilson Gilmore
  • solving homelessness actually seems like a good plan
• Personal:
  • ex homeless bike courier
  • some website design choices could use refining
• Vibes: I love this guy

9/10

Atef Aly

I could not find anything meaningful about this candidate

Dionysios Apostolopoulos

I could not find anything meaningful about this candidate

Darren Atkinson

9 for the 6ix Platform

• City Planning:
  • use existing dwellings as affordable housing
  • ban airbnb and new taxes on foreign development
  • TTC gets more road space
• Social Goals:
  • loans for retiring in place at home
  • meaningful indigenous reconciliation through letting them make parks
  • revive live music in Toronto
• Personal:
  • politcal cartoon
  • soundcloud song that kind of slaps
  • campaign platform link dead
• Vibes: Its never been more real this guy is hysterical

4/10 funny and I like some ideas but overall missing the bedrock

Jamie Atkinson

Honey, I shrunk the beurcracy.

Too many people complaining about not having enought houses. Thats a math problem. You know whats good at math? Computers

• City Planning:
  • private consulting, just name drops a bunch of random tech companies
  • elevated bike lanes
  • adaptive cruise control on all cars in 2-7 years
    • more cars move people faster
• Social Goals:
  • steamlining services to shrink bureaucracy
  • everything uses the uber model but remote work
• Personal:
  • used over 900 software programs in lifetime
• Vibes: someone gave a tech bro a website and said make a mayor platform
  • all images are AI generated and weird

2/10

Ana Bailão

• City Planning:
  • make the province pay for the DVP and 401
• Social Goals:
  • uh
• Personal:
  • this person may not actually exist, major psy-op vibes
• Vibes: Everything reads like clickbait
  • fearmongering taxes then saying nothing
  • 15 second video clips that suck

0/10

Jose Baking

Cant find anything

Ben Bankas

Comedian running as a joke but forgot to be funny

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • anti woke
  • woke policy makes it worse and we've been too woke
• Personal:
  • says noone wants to vote for a cop
  • a bunch of no-names
  • sad that people dont get his humour in the PC world
  • rebel news
• Vibes: Jesus this sucks

0/10

Claudette Beals

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • police reform
  • climate justice
  • prison reform
  • restructuring city council for better representation
  • mental healthcare
• Personal:
  • daughter had seizure and police threw her off balcony, we remember this story
  • reactionary anti-saunders
• Vibes: OK

3/10

Glen Benway

• City Planning:
  • anti bike lane
    • fundementally does not understand traffic and induced demand
  • Helping TTC
    • only through mass surveillance and doing nothing else?
  • Scrapping vacant property tax because some people may not have internet?
• Social Goals:
  • reducing homelessness but with no plan, just complaining about it
    • just keeping more of them in shelters
    • no structural analysis
• Personal:
  • risk consultant lmao
• Vibes: if you own multiple investment properties and want to see less homeless people (not have less homeless people, just not see them around) this is your guy

1/10

Eliazar Bonilla

Cant really find anything

Brad Bradford

Could be replaced by Johnny Sins and not many would notice

• City Planning:
  • finish the gardiner faster by making construction 24/7
  • complains about a 10 lane bottleneck LMAO we dont need more lanes bro
  • wants to accelerate 1 housing development plot for housing
• Social Goals:
  • the last thing toronto wants is activists
• Personal:
  • no real platform, I had to read like 8 articles
  • city planner
  • says he enjoys craft beer
• Vibes: nothing stands out, just some dude like what if we did the same construction but faster

5/10

Chloe Brown

The Edmonton City Plan of Toronto Mayors

• City Planning:
  • housing first inspired by real actions of other cities
  • better wages and emergency response
  • top tier city planning
  • urban farming
  • community owned housing
  • ISP cooperatives
  • worker coops
• Social Goals:
  • night time economy is absolute kino
  • internet mesh networks (noahpilled)
• Personal:
• Vibes: So good. The best Ive seen by far

10/10

Brian Buffey

only exists in facebook posts of his signs and complaining about trudeau

• City Planning:
  • nothing
• Social Goals:
  • nothing really
• Personal:
  • wont take a salary
• Vibes: facebook culture warrior

0/10

Celina Caesar-Chavannes

• City Planning:
  • housing cooperatives
  • general improvements to TTC
• Social Goals:
  • mental health response capacity
  • more involvement of indigenous and black led organizations
• Personal:
  • Seems like social justice advocate first, which is cool, but I would like to see a bit more on core city planning (unless I missed it)
• Vibes: I like her, website looks a bit medical sometimes though

6/10

Mason Carrie

wants to build a giant gundam

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
• Personal:
• Vibes: execute this weeb immediately

0/10

Roland Chan

• City Planning:
  • bike lanes even in winter
  • snow ploughs shouldnt build up snow in front of driveways
• Social Goals:
  • more police especially on TTC
  • more investment in poor communities
  • food before feelings
• Personal:
  • facts dont care about your feelings type
• Vibes: mild ick

2/10

Matti Charlton

site looks like the printhouse

• City Planning:
  • taxing undeveloped properties more
  • higher taxes on multiple property owners
• Social Goals:
  • harm reduction for drugs
  • more indie music
• Personal:
  • autistic queer transgender
• Vibes: fine, just kind of a general queer mayor without too much more

3/10

Danny Chavalier Romero

didnt see anything

Olivia Chow

I like how the popups work on her website

• City Planning:
  • publically owned rental housing
  • build houses ready for the climate crisis (LMAO)
  • more transit infrastructure
  • luxury homes tax
  • triple tax on housing speculation
  • no traffic policy
• Social Goals:
  • community crisis teams instead of just police
  • better library hours
  • empowering arts and festivals
• Personal:
  • wont use strong mayor tactics
    • libs failing to control the narrative
• Vibes: Average, seems like a reasonable front runner

7/10

Logan Choy

(truth) opposition has to work for God I'm just happy to be his servant I love my job helping people

The truth about Logan Choy the mayor his eyes are beautify lol blessed Torontonians

has a youtube channel and the audio quality is non existent on what I saw

0/10

Kevin Clarke

couldnt really find anything

Sarah Climenhaga

still trying to get rid of vaccine mandates

• City Planning:
  • drop TTC fares for seniors then everyone
  • working together for housing!!1!
• Social Goals:
  • eliminate paperwork for city enhancing activities
  • Not relying on the police force, getting to root causes
  • more resident participation in decisions
• Personal:
  • antivaxxer
• Vibes: Ron Dunn but a white woman antivaxxer

2/10

Gordon Cohen

talks about just kinda making things better together because hes a good businessman

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
• Personal:
  • real estate developer
• Vibes: minimum donation is 100 dollars

0/10

Paul Collins

The crypto bank specialist

• City Planning:
  • $1 TTC running more frequently and 24 hours
  • subway out to the zoo
  • TTC more expensive to those outside the city
  • people who take trains get the TTC for free
  • keep the science center where it is and just build another water park there
• Social Goals:
  • police marches
  • we love raccoons
• Personal:
  • author
• Vibes: all good spare police marches

5/10

Frank D'amico

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
• Personal:
  • Catholic School Board Trustee
  • so much more!
• Vibes: seems to want to win on just being him with no platform

1/10

Frank D'Angelo

ADS ON GOVERNMENT WEBSITES

• City Planning:
  • Tolls on main arteries
    • what about the now busier sidestreets
    • tolls during peak hours
    • charge more for parking
• more bike lanes
  • make sure they work in winter
• Wants TTC to pay for itself
  • this is a horrible idea and is not the point of a service
• Create green zones where climate change is the number 1 priority
• more affordable housing
• sell off excess government land
• bringing ads to government websites
• Social Goals:
  • We waste too much money on consultants and reports
    • capitalist realism and winners take all pilled?
  • police as the default social solution
    • guess not, but he still wants to train them for mental health or something
  • Lottary for the homeless or something? holy based
  • youth empowerment zones
    • stop kids from joining gangs
    • in areas of high crime
    • i love the term “youths”
• Personal:
  • not a politician, but a concerned citizen
• Vibes: most based so far

palpations/10

Rob Davis

Running with decades of experience alone

• City Planning:
  • landlords need to supply air conditioning
• Social Goals:
  • school officers should stop violence
• Personal:
  • Vice chairman of TTC
• Vibes: ??? you do the TTC talk about the fucking TTC

1/10

Phillip D'Cruze

Visual platform hype machine

• City Planning:
  • fines to landlords who dont repair houses
  • 20% reduction in rent and cant change for 3 years
  • use empty land for housing
  • firing high positioned TTC employees
  • replacing gas stations with bike stations
• Social Goals:
  • distribute wasted food
  • more youth involvement with government
• Personal:
  • knows the basics of 52 languages?
• Vibes: lovely

3/10

Samson Deb

Has toronto's next mayor in his linkedin bio

does not have a website

0/10

Habiba Desai

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • high-school students looking to learn about civilized guerilla warfare using non-violent techniques of drama and music
    • coopting revolution to make it nonviolent
• Personal:
  • just generally grew up and got into politics
• Vibes: I am so angry

0/10

Cory Deville

Can we Throat Punch in Politics, or is that toxic in 2023?

• City Planning:
  • 0 TTC fare
    • cites math but its laughably bad, calls the math drunk
• Social Goals:
  • non-violent police de-escalation unit
  • promotion of fitness and minimum living standard to reduce healthcare burden
• Personal:
• Vibes: looks like a sigma grindsetter

3/10

Simryn Fenby

cant find aything

Monica Forrester

no website but does have reports

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
• Personal:
  • 2-spirit trans
  • queer events
• Vibes: apperently good, I wouldnt know that much

1/10

Anthony Furey

• City Planning:
  • removal of bike lanes
  • ending land transfer tax
• Social Goals:
  • more police
  • ending safe injection / drug use
  • getting homeless out of parks
• Personal:
  • Big with Jordan Peterson
• Vibes: might be the worst platform I have ever seen. It is ALL actively bad. Like actively hostile to humans on every front. I want to call it a joke but the funniest part is that its not. The reality of such a shit platform existing and getting votes is funnier than any joke I could make about it. If your goal is to maximize suffering, this is your choice

0/10

Scott Furnival

could not find a website

Isabella Gamk

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • Active protester in the skreets for homessness
• Personal:
  • Trans converted at 56
• Vibes: dont have much to run off of but she seems like a real one

1/10

Feng Gao

• City Planning:
  • free TTC
• Social Goals:
  • No Election. More erections. Sexy @ work. Juicy in bed. Keep in Touchi, Power 2 Pussy / P2P.
• Personal:
  • thinks olivia chow is a terrorist
• Vibes: terrifying (funny)

0/10

Xiao Hua Gong

had the first signs on the streets

• City Planning:
  • free TTC for old and young
  • $1000 less in taxes per property
• Social Goals:
  • lunch subsidies
  • more police in schools and TTC
    • police as a blanket solution
  • huge on web3
• Personal:
• Vibes: atrocious

0/10

Adil Goraya

• City Planning:
  • All neighborhoods in toronto will need to have some affordable housing
  • tax on ulta-luxury housing
• Social Goals:
  • tough on crime
• Personal:
  • lawyer
  • does it for his daughter
• Vibes: not notable

3/10

Brian Graff

• City Planning:
  • end waterfront privatization
  • stop some transit developments
  • replace the city plan (ok)
  • review existing bike lanes (sigh)
• Social Goals:
  • Full employment, closer to job guarantee
  • more economic equality
• Personal:
  • reading list includes Ha-Joon Chang, Picketty, Micheal Hudson, and much more
• Vibes: cool economics head, I have a couple books for his ass
  • very HTML website

6/10

Ari Grosman

• City Planning:
  • bike guy
  • designated bus lanes on all 3+ lane streets
  • increase vacant home tax
  • more high rises faster
• Social Goals:
  • better phychologist school programs
  • pro lgbtq
• Personal:
  • needs a website
• Vibes: seems good but inexperienced

5/10

James Guglielmin

cant find anything

David Gulyas

• City Planning:
  • collective housing
  • improved public spaces
  • right to work
  • more public beauty and entertainment
• Social Goals:
  • anti corporate colonization
  • government being bad means corporations can convince us they are better (which they arent)
• Personal:
  • open lefty
  • Just wants more lefty representation
• Vibes: Chill guy, get his ass to theory night

5/10 nothing bad just not there to win

Thomas Hall

cant find anything meaningful

Peter Handjis

https://electpeterhandjismayoroftoronto.ca/

• City Planning:
  • not just repair but upgrade infrastructure
  • snack shack and cafe spaces to be rented in city parks
• Social Goals:
  • subsidies for low income
  • More laws for safety in high risk jobs
  • help with addiction services
• Personal:
  • tall ghoulish picture for empowering businesses
• Vibes: idk man just doesnt feel thorough

5/10

Heather He

website down

Toby Heaps

• City Planning:
  • dog friendly city parks
  • less salt usage in winter
  • expand public transit hours
  • cooperative home ownership
    • benefits and fast tracking for this model
    • forcing developers to finish building on time regardless of market forces
• Social Goals:
  • one time pet licensing
  • raising taxes on massive corporations to help small business
• Personal:
  • Running with their dog Molly
    • doggos make politics more human
• Vibes: a little too reddit core for me

6/10

Monowar Hossain

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • homelessness should not exist
  • more space for music
  • no more property taxes, wants to consult to slim budget
• Personal:
• Vibes: oh no just someone who wants to make cuts and have it magically solve broad issues

1/10

Mitzie Hunter

Hell, its about time

• City Planning:
  • publicly owned housing
  • better subway hours
  • more greenspace
  • better washroom availability
• Social Goals:
  • More opportunity for responsible drinking in parks
  • has fully costed budget
  • childcare
• Personal:
  • everything is a 3 point plan
  • too many articles it sucks
  • 26 dollar minimum donation
• Vibes: she seems like a good frontrunner

8/10

Sheila Igodan

As a mayor, l will ensure I m on time and at work every day.

• City Planning:
  • better parking systems and more active transport
• Social Goals:
  • auto insurance?
    • aims for insurance transparency but that will never happen unless its public. The industry exists on opacity
  • more fitness programs in parks
• Personal:
  • entrepreneur (eyeroll)
• Vibes: fine ideas just not enough of them

6/10

Daniel Irmya

Cant find anything

Syed Jaffery

• City Planning:
  • accessability
• Social Goals:
  • subsidies for tuition
  • when asked about racism talks about mental health
• Personal:
  • People's party
  • peanut shaped head
  • biomed
• Vibes: weird in the way where he says one good thing then nothing else and is peoples party

1/10

Michael Jensen

didnt see anything

Patricia Johnston

“This bill is nasty” – her third quote, no bill specified`

• City Planning:
  • affordable housing
• Social Goals:
  • almost mentions class, says affordable housing is being taken from us
• Personal:
  • getting fairly old by the looks of it
• Vibes: great vibes honestly

2/10

Walayat Khan

didnt see anything

Serge Korovitsyn

• City Planning:
  • uber and lyft will solve transit issues
  • reduce property tax
  • look into expanding island airport
  • thinks we should have more companies to compete to reduce hydro prices
• Social Goals:
  • all city contracts will be published for public viewing
  • all union negotiations made public
  • no welfare checks, replace with emergency solution center(?)
  • all people should be able to live in their community. Not about money, about people (?)
  • everything should accept crypto
  • private education
  • more sports for kids
• Personal:
  • Libertarian party
  • Born in Soviet Union
    • how far he has fallen
• Vibes: Seems kind of nice but just doesnt understand the reality of his views

3/10

Michael Lamoureux

• City Planning:
  • More subways
  • more parks
  • says mixed use housing is only good for 40 years?
  • does say we need to stop tax cuts for developers
  • city should sell off all commuity housing and unused space to go to paying rent
    • This kills the city does it not
  • we need to build underground subways
    • no fares but charge way more for parking to pay for it
  • Cap roads at 2 (maybe 3) lanes per side and use the rest for bike infrastructure
    • admits he has no clue what to do with 401 (weak)
  • Higher taxes on investment property
• Social Goals:
  • wants there to stop being more people (LMAO)
  • says about 20% of people cant afford a house?
  • using cruise ships for extra housing if needed
  • just getting mental health issues in houses
  • City budget needs to be drastically reduced to core function
  • decreasing taxes if people go green for climate change
  • stop and search for guns (this will totally not hurt minorities)
  • reduce pigeon and raccoon populations
  • getting rid of graffiti
  • no drinking in parks (1984)
• Personal:
  • This guy wrote a whole lot and made it sound like a huge opinion piece sometimes. Kinda cool I like informal but I feel like it could be made more concrete
• Vibes: Austerity me harder

4/10

Kris Langenfeld

Hello folks people dont want to think about what government is doing

• City Planning:
  • replace luxury building with affordability (but only 5%, dont we already have this?)
  • reel yellow belt from 4 units back to 3
  • retrofit old warehouses to house homeless
  • traffic is getting worse... (doesnt say his plans)
  • Peg property tax to inflation (this is an idea I have never thought of)
• Social Goals:
  • improve accessibility
  • wants opinions to be heard
  • I can fix her (the system)
  • social programs to reduce crime
  • not only relying on police as bandaid for all
  • Add guards to TTC
• Personal:
  • not a politician
  • not like the others
  • wants to fix it all then get out
• Vibes: I can fix her attitude is lovely

5/10

Rick Lee

“It's like a bucket list thing” $200 deposit got random people to sign “I want to be a Wikipedia entry”

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
• Personal:
• Vibes: you cant hate on someone for living their best life

2/10

Mark LeLiever

Get toronto moving (but get rid of bike lanesd)

• City Planning:
  • removing bikelanes downtown to help traffic
• Social Goals:
  • property tax freeze
• Personal:
  • not a politician
• Vibes: moving but no bike lanes is so fucking dumb

0/10

John Letonja

http://johnletonja.ca/

You open his site to a grainy photo of him in a van? with bad lighting KINO

has his home address on his site

“I am here to respect taxpayers and fix all issues by overhauling city hall and get rid of the red tape on all infrastructures without delay saving taxpayers money and not wasting taxpayers money and definitely making new money to pay for Toronto needs without taxing taxpayers”

“Now for our Economy and housing I am going use vacant land in city parks and open spaces for more farming growth for the people so we the people can have free food all the time even in winter just save your vegetable seeds or any seeds that you have when shopping for groceries and plant them on your yard or in your apartment or in your home at least you will be happy to see something grow and eat fresh food or give your seeds to Toronto to plant food so we can  give it to the food banks so people that can't afford food can have free food”

• City Planning:
  • “cutting red tape” and building as fast as possible
    • build as many cheap units as humanly possible, no unused properties
  • filling potholes with garbage (I think?)
  • use vacant land for farming
  • no tax raise for investment housing or developers
  • put a cover ofer Scarborough RT if weather causes issues
  • fuck the gardiner it is expensive and an eyesore
  • synchronize all lights and immediate towing of any breakdowns
• Social Goals:
  • making a new sport called fastball
    • toronto owns the team
    • keeps on this for a while and says to text him if you want at 647-785-5055
    • I think this is a scam?
  • Make a Toronto 50/50 lottery ticket
  • Free food all the time
    • also tax breaks for grocery stores who give out almost bad food
  • Therapy and social services instead of relying on hospitals
  • “hangman attitude” on crime
  • wants cops to have constant facial recognition and distance electromagnetic scanners
  • cops can carry tranq guns
  • let people just do arts stuff anyehere with no permit
• Personal:
  • not a rich man and knows how to live on a budget
  • thanks people for voring for him as point 11 of 15
  • if you think of any other issues, call or text him personally
• Vibes: Heaven and Hell

2/10

Norman MacLeod

cant find anything

Giorgio Mammoliti

Families before politics

• City Planning:
  • affordable housing
    • public private partnerships (starting to age out but still the dominant practice)
    • rent assistance
  • eliminate bike lanes
• Social Goals:
  • closing shelters and moving to permanent housing solutions
  • root causes as crime prevention
  • addresses cybercrime
  • no real alternative to police outlined
  • Law enforcement on TTC
  • welfare reform: hand-ups not hand outs
    • training for those on welfare
    • streamline process to make it more accessible
  • Abolish property taxes for seniors
• Personal: city councilor for 30 years
• Vibes: Career city councilor vibes

4/10

Steve Mann

• City Planning:
  • free public transit
• Social Goals:
  • stronger privacy rights
    • open source as standard
• open source as standard – savings!
  • tuition free university (can he even do that)
  • introduce analog currency (?!)
• Personal:
  • professor who does a lot with wearable tech
• Vibes: cool tech I want to chill with him, what the city doin

3/10

Cleveland Marshall

couldnt find anything

Josh Matlow

• City Planning:
  • more transit funding
    • lower fares too
  • LRT in Scarbs
  • more active transit
  • move gardiner to ground level
  • more bike lanes to improve traffic
  • protect greenbelt with indigenous leadership
• Social Goals:
  • open up schools in evenings as community spaces
  • more library hours
  • more investment into arts and festivals
  • more taxes on owners to pay for more services
• Personal:
  • uses facts and evidence and is a doer
• Vibes: most normal

7/10

Faizul Mohee

• City Planning:
  • lots of electric car infrastructure
• Social Goals:
  • reduce property tax by 10%
  • more police
  • lots of cuts everywhere
  • stop the bad violence!
• Personal:
  • not a politician
  • needs a website, stop relying on massive twitter posts with too many scattered words
• Vibes: get farther than twitter, at least addresses a bunch of things

2/10

Bob Murphy

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • pro union
  • wants to fix ODSP
• Personal: Wants to bring back the spirit of Jack Layton!
• Vibes: like a culture warrier but NDP, just twitter yelling

1/10

Michael Nicula

Campaign of new ideas! first idea is law and order

• City Planning:
  • affordable housing is useless, let the market decide
  • expand transit for traffic and climate
  • free transit downtown
• Social Goals:
  • Law and order
    • city cant do it alone because liberties, so wants to bring in OPP and RCMP
  • we need austerity
  • why cant people afford anything???
• Personal:
• Vibes: Heavy fascism vibes from this one

1/10

Jamil Nowwarah

cant find anything

Anthony Perruzza

plan of a thousand news posts

• City Planning:
  • 1000/mo homes
  • no property tax or rent increases
• Social Goals:
  • free afterschool programs
• Personal:
  • started as a carpenter, jesus reborn?
• Vibes: I dont want to read a thousand articles to decipher a campaign

3/10

John Ransome

cant find anything

D!onne Renee

• City Planning:
  • free TTC
  • better transit
  • increase green space and aesthetics
  • more extensive preplanning before doing things
  • cooperative housing
  • vertical farming
  • dutch road design
• Social Goals:
  • End racism
  • structural accessability
• Personal:
  • cheese yet addictive song she does alone in a video
• Vibes: shes got the spirit

6/10

Willie Reodica

The “Booming” Town of Whitchurch-Stouffville needs a New Mayor. A good one!

• think this is old

Walter Rubino

• City Planning:
  • free TTC with increased service
  • tolls for non residents
• Social Goals:
  • more arts and cultural funding
  • marijuana patios
  • alcohol in parks
• Personal:
  • does not like Doug Ford
• Vibes: sounds like a guy who just wants some slight social changes

2/10

Chris Saccoccia

• City Planning:
  • high density development
    • emergency measures to do so
  • rent to own pubic private partnerships
    • is this not just a worse public housing/mortgage thing?
  • Expand public transit and make it cheaper
    • more subways using pubic-private partnerships
    • private investment to make subways
• Social Goals: – anti government
• Personal:
  • proudly not a politician
  • serves truth
  • they try to silence him
  • culture warrior
    • antimask, antivax, covid denial
  • bennet has an article and a tweet
• Vibes: Just gives me off vibes. Like shark tank but greasier

1/10

Lyall Sanders

• City Planning:
  • affordable housing
  • transit safety and affordability
• Social Goals:
  • school safety
  • reduce property tax
• Personal:
  • teacher
  • metis
• Vibes: seems like an alright guy, just has no details on his platform

1/10

Mark Saunders

• City Planning:
  • anti bike lane
• Social Goals:
  • strong safety net (does not elaborate)
  • says policing isnt the solution but also grills anyone wanting to defund police
    • also says more TTC cops, but does say train them in mental health and accessability
    • Prevent loitering on TTC (!?)
    • more cameras at all transit stops
• Personal:
  • generally just talks about how scary it is out there a lot
  • former police chief
• Vibes: cop doing cop things

0/10

Rocco Schipano

couldnt find anything

Robert Shusterman

cant find anything

Knia Singh

• City Planning:
  • TTC
    • you must be in a decent state to ride the TTC
    • positive messaging as well as instructions on how to react to assault on intercom
    • fare increases
    • wants to do 1 person train operation but also have more people for redundancy?
    • Is this whole plan his or is this just a copy of TTC documents
• Social Goals:
  • addressing class division
  • identify cause of violence, immediately looks to gangs (california did this one...)
  • mental health counselling for PTSD
  • 24 hour crisis hotline
• Personal: noone is reading a 90+ page document of TTC numbers and you cant rely on that to take you anywhere
• Vibes: cmon man

2/10

Partap Dua Singh

• City Planning:
  • 100,000 green housing units within 6 months
  • more public washrooms
  • free TTC
• Social Goals:
  • dismantle and replace toronto police
  • direct democracy government
  • addressing inequality
• Personal: a bit bold to redo democracy in 3 years but I like it
• Vibes: ambitious, i like that

3/10

Raksheni Sivaneswaran

cant find anything

Erwin Sniedzins

• City Planning:
  • wifi on TTC
    • badges to those who do the right thing in tough situations
  • public private partnerships to develop housing on unused land
  • replace LRT with busses
  • congestion fees at peak hours!!!
  • better separated bike infrastructure near highways
• Social Goals:
  • reduce property taxes
  • provide off-grid education resources to parents?
  • says government needs to take blame when contractors go over budget and behind on time
• Personal: video looks like those AI Reagan says something videos
• Vibes: cold war

4/10

Sandeep Srivastava

People lost their jobs, no jobs, medical health issues, got kicked out from landlord, no money to rent apartments

• City Planning:
  • dedicated bike infrastructure
  • reach net zero by 2040
  • widening all major roads
  • more subways
• Social Goals:
  • public daycare
  • property taxes below inflation
  • cut red tape to get toronto back to work (?we never stopped)
  • 4 year tax freeze
• Personal:
• Vibes: wants to build everything everywhere for everyone and eliminate all income to do it
  • fuck off

0/10

Meir Straus

Meir is definitely a real man and NOT three raccoons in a trench coat.

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • address issues including:
    • raccoons
    • weed smell
    • god
    • labour
    • street preachers
    • hipsters
    • use of the word muck
  • Says that it is too expensive for some people to live, so he will make it too expensive for all people to live
• Personal:
  • 18 years old, named Meir
  • Rhino Party Prime Minister (of high school club)
  • starts video starting with definition of city
    • called 18 year old bozo
    • says mayors should be of greater size and importance than a regular person
  • The video slaps
• Vibes: funny

0/10

Weizhen Tang

Who want to be mayor of Toronto who care Toronto most

• I could not navigate anything
• only goals I saw were signing up
• all else mandarin

Mitcchell Toye

• City Planning:
  • public housing
  • rent to own
• Social Goals:
  • land back
  • get rid of slum lords on indigenous land
  • UBI support
  • support for disabled
  • go after greedflation
  • raise corporate taxes
  • address media fearmongering
  • direct democracy
• Personal:
  • has a bunch of writing prompts under
• Vibes: looks clean, could have more aesthetics

2/10

Reginald Tull

• City Planning:
  • work with nonprofits to make affordable housing
  • ferry service to take traffic off of gardiner
  • toll for people driving into toronto
  • better bike lanes
    • banning ebikes from bike lanes???
  • expand ttc
    • more TTC coppers
  • open things up for more tow truck companies
  • greener parks?
• Social Goals:
  • hold landlords accountable for bad conditions
  • more jail for firearms
    • job training in jail
  • more police in streets
  • peg city workers wages to inflation
  • 2 more festivals
• Personal: lots of pictures
• Vibes: seems like a happy guy

2/10 lots of ideas but many are just weird?

Jeffery Tunney

Mr. Tunney’s hands came from a set of great grandparents that everyone in Toronto, prior to 1980, had a glass of milk in anywhere of the cities’ restaurants.

Once I am in office, my team will begin its work by going over the budget, stripping the budget

• City Planning:
  • better city and park cleaning
• Social Goals:
  • awareness and naloxone for addiction
  • call center for those using dating apps in case someone goes missing?
  • no property tax increase
• Personal: very brief, just kind of talks around everything
• Vibes: not great, doesnt feel very personable from the site

1/10

Kiri Vadivelu

• City Planning:
  • more publicly owned housing
    • give city first right of refusal
  • free public transit
    • expanded
  • expand active transport
  • parks over parking lots
• Social Goals:
  • repeal no camping bylaw
  • vacancy tax
  • public land ownership registry
  • fix schools
  • food for all
    • public grocery stores
  • defund, disarm police
    • spend money on ways to make people not turn to crime in first place
  • economic democracy
• Personal:
  • socialist
  • website is bad on the eyes
  • his chart of socialist vs incumbent vs wannabees sucks
• Vibes: like its too ambitious but a lot of this stuff would really challenge how some things work so I have to give credit where it's due for thinking outside the box. He touches on everything, has a solid plan with research for it all, and overall did a great job bringing a real plan together.

8/10

Jack Weenen

cant find anything

Yuanqian Wei

cant find anything

Jody Williams

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • seems to just be an activist for environment and healthcare
• Personal:
  • every item in the store is just called im a product lmao
  • megaphone picture goes hard
  • wants to address things and raise awareness. If you are the mayor, you are in the spot to do things and have a plan
• Vibes: good vibes, just not mayor vibes
  • unsure if this person exists

0/10

John Winter

• City Planning:
• Social Goals:
  • lowest tax rates possible
  • increase funding for libraries, education, childcare
  • work towards net zero
  • maximum prices for landlords
  • replace police with expanded TTC security
    • defunding the police
• Personal:
  • philanthropist
  • Harvard 5 times at the start of the article
  • take no salary
• Vibes: A little pretentious off the bat but seems to care beyond that

2/10 no city planning

Nathalie Xian Yi Yan

5+ hours of video with minimal written policy spare policy for Hamilton where she was against LRT

• City planning
• social goals
  • bring back traditional chinese medicine
• Personal:
  • lived 30 years in china 30 years here
  • cried when talking about poverty and wanting to give back it was adorable
  • struggles with english communication which is OK personally but tough when running a government position
• Vibes: I really like her, she seems to genuinely care so much
  • 5.8 hours. If everyone did this it would be over 600 hours. I guess she didnt know how many people would run but I cant do all of this im so sorry Ive spent over 3 days dawn to dusk reading these platforms

1/10

Winner: Chloe Brown (Mitzie Hunter is the Shrey Pick)

Second: Gru

Third: Kiri Vadivelu

Backstory

One time a bit back I had wanted to go rock climbing and a good buddy of mine said we should go, we set it up that afternoon. We decided to walk to the Boiler Room from 40 Elm and we always talk good so good did we talk. I had mentioned my aspirations to write and potentially do more academia to get some more cred in that lane. As someone who had done some of the arts, he told me a speech he once heard from a prof.

I believe it was a prof welcoming grads or PhD students. She said that many people go into academia with the idea of tenure or job security. Stable job and retire with great benefits. She shut that idea down. Not only are jobs becoming more scarce and competitive, but with the restructuring of academia, everyone is getting paid less and less, with shorter contracts that offer no security. The ratio of professors to adjunct professors is getting lower, and given the political climate, it is unlikely to stop.

The professor said that it seemed the boom was over. We don't know if this interest in language and the arts was something important for a short period of time historically during the golden age of capitalism, which has come to an end. People have lost interest and value it less. Given its lack of necessity for industry, it is not seen as important in the real world.

This got me thinking.

Some Initial Thoughts

As a Mark Fisher head one of the immediate things that stuck out to me, maybe I invented it while listening, is that the interest in language and the arts seems to be waning. I find this particularly interesting because it speaks to the idea of the illiteracy of capitalism. Workers do not need to read to produce or consume. This means the capitalists don't focus on it, which means it gets no coverage, which makes it less desirable. Adding onto this, the working class is getting poorer, receiving none of the gains from the productivity booms of the last 50-odd years. To keep up, you need the most in-demand jobs, which are based in the tech sector, which means the arts are not a big focus.

It also got me thinking about if arts is being killed. It makes sense for the arts to be killed in this political climate. Not only in the sense that it doesn't generate enough profit for capitalists but also in that the arts stand as a fundamental challenge to the existence of capitalists. Almost all real academic writing and thinking at this point is clearly against the current capitalist system and its operation. Making sure people can't really read and don't really understand that system is the most effective way to make sure they don't start sabotaging it.

The other thing that stuck out to me was just this simple idea of it all being a boom. We talk about the golden age of capitalism all the time, its strong unions, worker protections, welfare net, and massive growth. I so far have generally stopped there, what the structures were and how they impacted people's conditions. What I never really thought of was the wider implications of the boom in itself. How do values change in that type of long-term boom, when could it have stopped and how it could be prolonged, as well as how values change based on the general condition of shit being so good at the button factory.

For a second I thought this was a very rare time where thinkers could just go ham. We have a lot of history and not so much history of great minds. Maybe we are at the tail end of this whole enlightenment phase where we have thought up most ideas, or maybe I am so used to absorbing ideas that I struggle to think of new ones. I frequently think I think of new ideas, but they have almost always already been discovered. Is the well of what we can think about starting to run dry? We can analyze things we know using new methods we already know to come to some slightly new conclusions, but it is all within this self-contained body of ideas that we know.

Maybe it is valued less because there is less new value in it. How many truly great philosophers are there right now? How many truly new methods of analysis are yet to come out that offer a truly new perspective that changes the way we look at things? Is the future of the arts just academics spending 10 years learning what other academics have done to repeat it to other concepts looked at by yet more academics to create an intersect of a new academic to become part of that process again?

Sorry comrade Montgomaire, like all of your favourites, I am not answering or solving anything, but I will get to my actual question.

Just Which Boom Is Fixing To Bust

With the idea that academia was a boom that was coming to an end, started thinking about that more widely. Academia wouldn't die alone. There needs to be a much wider change, a shift in thinking, that explains this with much broader visible implications. What if the boom and bust isn't academia, but the whole structure?

We constantly see the term late capitalism thrown around. Not only does it kind of feel right because of the uh... you know... what it's like out there, but there is also a lot of evidence to back up that we are at one of the last stages of capitalism as it may exist. First, capitalism has consumed the entire world. There is no longer a larger space to expand out to, which means for capital to accumulate, the goal of it all, it must turn its eye to the inside of its borders. Where there used to be a massive new market to capitalize on, there is now an internal concentration of rising inequality. As inequality rises, so does unrest. This cannot last forever.

I must also add the fact that being global means there is no longer a competitor. The USSR acted as an alternative to capitalism. Why would workers settle for no ownership when they could have ownership, especially during a time when revolutionary politics was common and violence in politics was accepted? The capitalist system had a massive head start on the communists, and they were able to give workers enough to act as a bribe to stop the workers from starting a revolution. Changing systems is always a messy time, and if it works enough right now and I feel well represented, why burn it down for an unknown I hear bad things about on the news? Once the USSR fell to the side, capitalists no longer had to compete to keep things good for the workers, they were free to start making things worse as there was no reasonable alternative to escape to.

Something else that I thought about recently is that the developing nations we relied on for cheap manufacturing are trying to turn that cheap capital into their own better development. They are starting to demand higher wages and better pay. This will raise prices down the line, and in the vvest, where wages are not increasing, poorer people will start being challenged by higher prices. They will be priced out of their own existence, which is never a good sign for stability.

Additionally, capitalism has no solution for climate change. It is clear that we cannot innovate our way out of this or we would have already. 2 degrees of warming will cause a chain reaction that will very likely bring 5 degrees of warming, which will mean likely the mass extinction of everything. We have already invested in fossil capital to push us beyond 2 degrees of warming. As these targets get closer, violence to stop it will only become more and more socially acceptable. When things are ok people are fine with doing nothing, but as the reaper comes closer and closer, people will grow more and more content with the idea of burning it down.

To add one more to the pile, neoliberalism has failed. Markets are toted as the solution, but if we leave the markets, all you get are scams and schemes. 2008 showed that if we were to leave the markets alone, they would consume and ruin every single basic necessity and destroy the system in the process. It is bailed out and kept alive as a walking corpse for now until the next thing comes along as a competitive alternative to replace it.

So, maybe the boom was capitalism the whole time. There are no more external markets and it is tearing itself apart internally.

So What Next Then

The way I see it, there are a few ways that this will work out. I'm getting tired so I'll just jot something short off for each of the major options.

Devolve into fascism, which collapses and the next thing takes over. This is what I see as the most likely option. Capitalists will do everything they can to defend themselves, the culture war will get stoked to an inferno, and fascists will fight to maintain everything they can. Unfortunately, capitalism would be what they are defending, and it will be dead at that point. Even if they win at first, it will only lead to more collapse of capitalism until it crushes itself. Fascism is also unsustainable in the best of times, in the worst of times it won't stand a chance to replicate long term.

Strasserism is another play. The identity politics and culture wars go on strong, but this time with a much stronger worker angle to it. Because it is born of working-class unity to a degree, this could do much better at self-replication, but it has two major pitfalls I see. First is that the culture war people hate communism and this is communism. I don't see them being particularly logically consistent, but at least a large portion of them will hate this and it will lead to yet more clashes making it much weaker. The second is that most socialists are for real justice and worker action. This is inherently anti culture war because that attacks other workers. I believe that both of these flanks would be able to really shut down the bulk of the strassterist movement.

Socialism seems pretty popular these days among young people. Whether people are liberals with some socialist tendencies or actual socialists, I see a lot of young people falling in line with some form of socialism as it is fairly easy to digest and solves a lot of the contradictions of capitalism. It also has some real ways to compensate workers for increasing costs of the global economy becoming more level (thinking of other nations wanting more from the West in terms of compensation). Most people are also on board with at least a decent amount of real climate action, which given better material conditions, they may be able to back up better.

China may get their break. I can't claim to be an expert here, but a lot of people have been claiming for a long time that China is challenging the US for global hegemony, and capitalism shaking in its boots may give them a real opportunity to win. Maybe world socialism is a more realistic goal than we think.

Lastly, I think there is a solid chance of something we can't even imagine right now. Every system comes with its challenges, and maybe we get some cranked-ass system that I can't even reasonably think of right now as a person who doesn't have that many truly unique ideas. Through the chaos and struggle, whatever rises will rise, and given all of the challenges of the future, maybe we get something else entirely that could be purpose-built for say tackling climate change as an external threat.

---

他们要鼓吹分离 他们会鼓吹恐惧 现在让我们继续前进

---

Oncle Spencer

One thing that has fascinated me as I have learned theory is just how much it applies to my childhood. I could not express or understand the complexity given the knowledge I had, but I could understand that something was wrong. My experience was unfulfilling. I was searching for something that meant something to me. Given so few outlets to do something meaningful, depression, boredom, and loneliness defined my experience. As I have grown and found my love for learning and reading about cities, self-help, and the political economy, many of the problems have become clear. Here I will address one aspect of the world that drives me the most insane: the sanitation of everything. No one can do anything interesting, and everyone is discontent with whatever bland existence they have.

Cheated From Childhood: Sanitation of Young People's Lives

Helicopter Parents

When I was in high school, my parents were fairly generous with what I could do. If I was invited to a party, I could drink with no worry. If I drove and later decided I wanted to drink, I could text my parents, say I would sleep there, and they would say sounds good. All they needed to know was I wasn’t driving drunk. I could smoke in my backyard because it meant we wouldn’t get harassed by police when we went to the park. While that meant the places I would be were often more limited, there was something to it: I could do what I wanted when I wanted to do it, and had my space to do it where my parents would not interrupt unless something serious was happening.

I noticed my experience was very unlike many of my friends. This was what introduced me to helicopter parenting. While I could have some freedom to do things and have some places for myself, I know many people who couldn’t. Any alcohol or weed was too dangerous. When we went out at night, we would have to hide because their parents would come searching for us to make sure we weren’t smoking. They had to have other people smuggle their alcohol to them, and there were areas to avoid because other parents created a network of adults dedicated to snitching on kids. These are kids trying to just get away from their parents for a few hours.

This never resulted well. As I have grown, I have seen a general trend around me where those who had the strictest helicopter parenting have grown differently from those with more freedom. I see a lot of resentment toward their parents. They remember their parents not as people who helped guide them, but as people who penalized them for any fun they tried to have. Most of them also have a distinct lack of experience and ability to just do things in the larger world. They have missed out on some of the core experiences of learning independence, and making serious decisions seems to be much more stressful for them. I hear often from my friends that there is extreme anxiety around transitional periods, like leaving school or having to rely less on parents as they grow. Taking care of themselves is not a point of pride, but a looming stressor that is approaching. The inability for them to form their own experiences as a child has grown into difficulty in forming their own life as an adult.

The worst part about this to me is that as someone who is close friends with many of my friends’ parents, I hear their stories from when they were young. All of them did all the things that they punish their kids for, and those are often some of their favourite memories. They were all out drinking, smoking, having sex, and loving it all. They laugh about it with each other while their kids are grounded right inside the house. They sanitize their kids’ lives, and they seem completely disassociated from their own experience. The parents have ensured the kids have had no fun, and in doing so, hurt them in the long run too.

Social Media

Another major factor that I think contributes to the sanitation of everything for young people is social media. In this chapter, I’m kind of the old man yelling at the clouds, saying that kids these days are always on their phones and never go outside. I just have to embrace it. I don’t think social media will go away soon. It isn’t all bad, but I think it has been a contributing factor to the issue at hand.

Social media, by the definition of its existence, requires less in-person activity. People can communicate and hang out purely online. There are also multiple types: social media where you post something and it sticks around for anyone to see (think Facebook), group chats where conversations can come and go (think Signal), and more on-the-fly social media where you usually drop in and out, hanging out in a more specific time than the others (think Discord). Since it has these types of interactions covered, it means there is less necessity to see people in person. Games are great, but when used as the primary method of interaction, you lose out on some of the reality of face-to-face interaction and real physical adventure.

Another aspect of social media is people doing something specifically for social media. Instead of trying things for themselves, it is a cycle of either creating something purely for it to be rewarded by the algorithm. Often, people are copying something that the algorithm has already rewarded, just to post it back to get the algorithm to reward them too. Both sides of this interaction with an abstract algorithm more than experiences with other real people. The nature of this appeal to algorithms designed to increase engagement for a company is incredibly inhuman. It takes away from adventure and discovery which is a major part of just having fun. This is especially devastating for people who have an addiction to social media. The Skinner box of content is very overstimulating, and we know it is just awful for the brain.

Social media even comes with outside risks for people who do go out and do stuff. Some things happen in life which you don’t want to be shared. It is part of growing up. With so many cameras and so many people constantly on social media looking for more engagement, more and more get posted, and the content never disappears. This can add anxiety to experimenting and trying new things because of the fear of being an idiot on camera. If you do something terrible, there is also a culture, especially in progressive spaces which demands moral purity to exist as a figurehead (dare I call it cancel culture). Things can follow you not only for your personal life but extend into negative repercussions for your career if someone uploaded the wrong thing. There is an argument to be made that people should not do terrible things, and it’s a fair argument. The main issue arises if a person does something terrible when they are young and regrets it now. The internet will be slow to find the regret if it does at all. To demand purity is just naïve and ignores what happens as people grow up.

Social media creates an environment for children not for experimentation and discovery, but a more isolated environment with less new thought alongside a crippling fear of doing the wrong thing. Instead of pushing people to become more social and do more things more often (one of the early perceptions of it), it has sterilized much of the social bedrock of growing up. This makes the experience much more bland. People see others’ lives as exciting but find themselves constantly bored in their own life. Instead of doing something about it, their brain goes back to the same social media that causes the issues.

School

They sleep for longer than adults because that’s just how it works. They get tired later than adults and sleep in later than adults because that’s just how it works. Somehow, despite this, we all collectively demand that they go to a building first thing every morning and spend the next eternity learning so many subjects per day there is no way they can meaningfully retain anything. Luckily, we have strategies to help them learn, such as bringing back a bunch of homework to do more exercises in every course. Maybe that will drive the point home! Well, maybe not, but it sure makes for a bland existence.

From the moment the average kid figures out that objects exist outside of their immediate sight, we ship them off to an institution and lock them into a giant building that was probably directly inspired by a prison. They will spend their next 13-odd years here. During this time, kids are told to think for themselves and think outside the box to be the best and smartest person they can be. Interestingly enough, they have to stick to strict timetables, strict work structures, and boring lesson plans the entire time. Being creative and discovering new things was almost always immediately shut down. I remember doing manual integrals in grade 12 and discovering a shorter way to do it. I worked hard on finding out exactly how it worked and showed it to my teacher; later the teacher banned me from using it in my homework and tests. He had me redo that day’s homework because apparently, we were going to learn it two lessons later.

In summary, exhausted kids are stuck in a position where they must learn constantly, but they simultaneously must not think too much. They are told what to do, what experiments to run, how to run them, and what to complete at home. This takes away from some of the magic of experimentation that could help inspire curiosity or act like real-life dynamic learning. It is a high-thought, no-thinking environment that is exhausting, and with as few risks as possible. Most memories are just breaking the rules and things outside of school that just coincided with the years spent there. The schools themselves are an incredibly sanitized environment that rewards just about nothing and serves as a limbo for the young to exist in. It could be so much more, but adults decide once they’ve done it, it’s not worth the time and money to change.

Learning could be interesting and meaningful, we just decided we don’t want to do it. We have designed our schools as a daycare where some learning happens instead of a space for learning that also serves as a daycare. Students’ sleep schedules are all kinds of messed up, their social lives are all kinds of messed up, and their hormones only make it worse. It would be hard to build something worse for mental health and live an interesting life if you tried. There is no physical creation and nearly no real-life skills to be used. Other places use a model that includes these qualities. In Finland, they are incredibly proud of it. The students fare better mentally, learn better, and be more productive. It seems we just can’t think for the longer term.

Adding on, as a student, there is no proper way to provide for yourself at this stage. As you are locked in the building, you are just along for the ride while someone else provides your basic needs. This gives you little in terms of a feeling of actually doing something yourself and can make you feel guilty if your provider is struggling to provide. Any cool new thing you get is the product of someone else’s work. You do this for 13 years. When it causes students to feel isolated and disenfranchised, and confused, we call them out for them having a problem with their brains. They end up being told they have some sort of attention disorder, some sort of depression, or, if they don’t know, some sort of anxiety or spectrum disorder.

Maybe if the kids could meaningfully learn, create, and feel a sense of accomplishment, most of these would just be seen as quirks of being a different person. Instead, to maintain a sanitized environment, it is straightened out with a drug of some sort, and the students are told to go on and do the same thing. If we were to care it could be so enriching, but sanitation seems to be the norm and works well enough for adults (notice how it’s not the kids) that no one changes it. No wonder so many sold weed and smoked themselves out constantly. It was the best way to make a bit of money and deal with the lameness of the whole thing.

Sterile Structures: Building Something Bland

Architecture

We live in a time where we can get more of any specific resource to any specific location faster and cheaper than ever before. This means we could build beauty into regular buildings that people couldn’t have even dreamt of before. Every development could challenge the Gothic, Victorian, and Renaissance in their design. People could work with their favourite art style and communities could be incredibly vibrant and colourful. Well, they could be I guess, but instead of the best being made in more places, we got mcmansions, asphalt concrete sprawling streets, and brutalist buildings.

Somewhere along the way, all the artistic value got moved to the wayside. In search of cheaper productions, we got cardboard cutouts which will barely stand for a few years. Instead of building on the best of older communities and making them even better with new design techniques, utility improvements, and technological advancement, the path taken was to build the least space-efficient, most distant, bland, and boring housing developments in all of history. Maybe farms contain fewer people per square kilometre, but that at least grows something. Car-dependent suburbs use an obscene amount of water just to maintain grass, something that not only produces nothing of substance but also provides no real meaningful ability to play in. Killing bees is just the cherry on top. These places are damn near hostile to the existence of people, communities built to harbour no community. There is an argument that we can use the lawns for kids to play in, but that rarely happens compared to how much space they take, and it is nothing that a community center in a better neighbourhood could not replace.

This housing development fuels the next bland existence. Traffic. Since these neighbourhoods are built to be housing only, everyone who works will now likely have to take a car to get to work. The jobs are all in industrial sectors or downtown tech, so they all have to go there and they all get stuck in traffic every morning of every day of every week of every month of every year. To make this existence more comfortable, cars got built not only larger but more engineered to distance everyone from the outside world. This also means being distanced from each other. The suspension and height of the vehicle make the ground farther away and the bumps disappear. It separates people from the environment, makes them less likely to be meaningfully aware of their surroundings, and makes it harder to see other people in their cars. Compared to walking or biking to work, it is a lonely environment devoid of human interaction. Just an in-between place going from a sterile house to equally bland destinations.

The place people go most often is their workplace. This is probably the most sterile environment, people are forced to do one task repeatedly for hours on end for decades of their lives. To make a profit, employers put as little money into the environment as possible. Interactions with customers are always reduced to flowcharts. Interactions with coworkers are dumbed down to avoid drama, which could get you fired. Interactions with employers or higher-ups are reduced to bootlicking to chase your own higher position. When the customer is first, the customer-facing workers are reduced to punching bags who can’t stand up for themselves. There is no personal growth in most jobs, they are dead-end jobs and the only growth comes from becoming a better worker drone or corporate bootlicker. The goal is to make as much for your company as possible without being a liability on their sheets. The perfect recipe for a place that lacks creativity or adventure.

Since they are growing in popularity, I will address the privately owned public spaces. These are spots that seem like open spaces where you can just rest, but they are owned by a corporation. They may seem inviting, but they are purpose-built to add to the purchasing experience, and if you break any rules, private security may kick you out. The sheer volume of small rules and regulations that must be abided by to simply exist in these places is astonishing. The best part is they aren’t necessarily always enforced, but they give companies the ability to remove anyone for any reason they can find if they don’t want that person there. Businesses maintain these places to be some sort of relaxing stimulant. They exist to allow people to get a sense of relaxation, even though they are being bombarded with advertisements and information, constantly telling them to purchase what is around them. Based on the rules of the place, it might even be a requirement to purchase something or else you may be loitering. It is a deceptive reduction of a place that could be great for meaningful gatherings to a generic corporate-washed consumerist quick rest. The goal is not to provide places to meet. It is to flush out environments of purchase. Almost always, these are places with a few chairs and some trees that aren’t quite enough to block out any logos. There are no activities and nothing to do but consume more. If you try something else, security will have a word with you.

This does not absolve publicly owned public spaces. Where movements like the city beautiful in the past put a lot of emphasis on public spaces, the trend today is to say that they act more as a liability than anything else. Another expenditure on the budget that doesn’t bring in any business. They rarely develop into something truly nice. One litmus test I like to use is skateboard ability. Skateboarding is extremely simple and something that anyone can pick up with a few dollars. The environment doesn’t need to be complicated. A ledge, a little ramp, or some stairs are all it takes to make a spot for people to learn and do something cool. It would be easy to build into as well, add a little metal edge to a few surfaces to grind on, and that’s where skateboarders will congregate. Instead, these spaces are specifically actively designed to have nothing cool going on. Rails have balls welded onto the top, stairs have cracks designed to trap wheels, and any ramps have railings beside them (this is a good accessibility feature, I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but maybe some non-functional ramps just for fun would be nice). More often than not, public parks are purpose designed only for sitting and nothing else. It’s a shame because it would cost very little to have just a few features to spice it up and give it more life.

Overall, most spaces are reduced to being for one type of activity. Be it living and only living in this house, driving and only driving in this car, or sitting and only sitting in this park. This gets rid of the whole blend of activities that bring places to life. It’s exciting to see what different people are doing in different hobbies, and communities are built off of people being able to find avenues to pursue all of their hobbies close to their homes. When you kill that, it all just becomes so bland. The sense of adventure leaves, and you end up with a generic sanitized environment with nothing to do to make the space alive.

Insurance

Insurance is the functional source of so much of the sanitation we see today. When insurance is legally mandated for so much, it gets a vice grip on all cash flow and intended use for everything. Since it must control the amount of damage to make itself profitable, anything that is potentially damaging gets regulated away. The people who purchase the insurance have to abide or else their lives will simply become more expensive. It is a brutal one-way street. Too often, one notable incident will get new rules created for everyone. If those new rules end up being bad, it takes a monstrous amount of work to get it undone.

In their essence, insurance companies are designed to be as all-encompassing as possible and make sure that nothing exciting or new ever happens. They are a completely soulless and stagnant existence that intimidates everyone into not doing anything for fear that if anything new happens, they will have to navigate a hellish amount of bureaucracy just to likely be forced to pay more in the end. With this result, the person not only pays their insurance but also must pay doubly because they have to pay out of pocket to fix any issue as well. Each time you try to get something from them, it is expected to spend hours if not days on the line, completely wasting yet more time just sitting still and waiting. This is not a satisfying existence. It may even be the least satisfying existence. There is an insane drive to not go through this, so there is a drive to not do anything that could make it happen. As such, insurance companies make sure nothing ever happens.

Insurance is a part of the issues mentioned in the architecture. It may be the reason behind so much of it being so bland. If a company wants to allow something interesting to happen on its property, it must make concessions to insurance companies and pay more to allow it. This means that they are paying more to insurance to pay more to build something to pay more to maintain it. No private company is going to do this. The existence of insurance companies ensures that any private space will be as sanitized as possible because allowing for more actual excitement creates a potential financial downside for the insurance company if they don’t charge more.

Another thing that I have seen all too often is insane people who just sue over everything. I knew a girl that slipped while running at the pool in a gym and twisted her ankle. Her parents sued. This wasn’t an injury, just slightly hurt, something that would fully recover in a few days. Each time something like this happens, a new rule is put in place to determine it never has to happen again. For fear of hiring lawyers and the costs that come with that, businesses will ban anything from happening on their property to lower their risk. There is no decision-making or ideas for new fun, instead, each activity has a prescribed list of things to do as well as an extensive list of banned activities. This makes every encounter feel like a husk of itself. A more limited experience compared to what it could otherwise be, because it literally is. If there is room to sue, some insane person will, and it will get written and regulated.

Bureaucracy

Insurance operates through an extensive bureaucracy, so this chapter, while separate, often can act as an extension of the above. I made another section to generalize it as it exists outside of just insurance as well. Bureaucracy is like the eldritch terror of sanitation. It takes every single thing and turns it into a massive stack of paperwork to where once you’re done with it, you’re sometimes left unsure whether anything even happened.

Bureaucracy essentially diverts any proper decision-making to the result of decisions made in the past. This is why you hear about things like court cases setting a precedent. Once the first decision is made, all other decisions just simply get referred to that as the default state. This removes thought from handling complex tasks. There is no independent thinking or problem solving, simply just referring to what is relevant, then deciding based on it. This sterilizes complex situations into their core, which hurts the people in those situations. In a hospital setting, the word for this would be that they cannot get a personal plan. The paperwork demands it gets treated like someone else, and if new situations arrive, there is often a fear of having to make that final decision, and instead a new situation gets put into a box of old treatments for other things that go on to not solve the core issue.

It also hurts the people whose job it is to provide the solutions. These people often hear others on the other side of the line and see that they are a human who is struggling, but their company will not let them help in the way they can for fear of being penalized. The lack of ability to do decision-making sucks the soul out of work so there is no genuine pride or care for work. Instead of it being an involved process, which we have more than enough productive time for, it created the most bland environment where it is impossible to take any pride in your labour. People know they aren’t helping, but they have to continue to keep food on the table. The biggest example of this is call centres. No one likes them, not the people working there or the people calling in, and the managers know their job is evil and they often are just toxic people. Unfortunately, it is just accepted as the most evenhanded way to go about things to check the boxes, so everyone goes along. There is a game to navigate it that anyone can do if they try hard enough. The workers are fine with helping, but it’s such a mind-numbing game that people don’t because it’s so dreadfully bland to do.

It also generates the real core of sterilization: it is built to shut down any fun. You cannot do anything special or new without a monstrous amount of paperwork. If good things don’t have all the paperwork, they get killed. If bad things have the paperwork, they will stick around for far too long. If anything happens too fast or is too exciting, there will be a boatload of paperwork to catch up on that will remove all the excitement one slow hour after another. It is the most awful, bland, and sterile way to go about things.

Politics and People: How The Corpse Remains Animated

Politics

The world of politics has also been sanitized, and as such, all it produces is sanitized output. I know Fukuyama’s End of History is a meme at this point, but when you look at what comes out of politics it really seems like it. Things still change, but it always ends up incredibly watered down, and the language used to describe what is happening is so dumbed down that if you know anything, you realize it means nothing.

Moving into the neoliberal era, the ability of politicians to not only be intelligent but also communicate those ideas to people was eviscerated. Where people used to come out with complex policies and plans, and the masses would listen and see what they liked, now there are only empty slogans that people might recognize and vote for without thinking. There used to be housing policy, development policy, and problems of the times to be attacked. Now we get cheating husbands playing a family man, career politicians playing the outsider, and rich capitalists trying to appeal to their image as a worker. All the caricatures really mean nothing, but it just gives some generic image for people that they can vote on without having to think critically. When people inevitably don’t like the policy plans of the politicians they vote in, specifically the policy plans that they either never read or were never published in the first place, they start to accumulate reasons to dislike a politician. It may be only a few negative things through a pile of good to normal things, but the news will focus on it for the drama. From here there is the cycle of voting a politician out. Whether it be that another politician is more galvanizing and the old one can’t rally the same excitement anymore, or whether people change votes, it is a vibe-based result. Instead of getting real analysis or a true replacement where we realize some things are better or more important than others, it just gets stuck in a party cycle that really goes nowhere. The person who gets voted out gets replaced with a person who has no policy, and the cycle continues.

This voting people out is a perfect spot for the rise of populism. I know that populism is fundamentally fine; it is the circumstances of this populism, dare I say, the sanitation of its actual meaning, that makes it so annoying. Having the masses rally against the elite is so off-putting when the people doing it are the conservatives, who are definedly FOR the elite. Instead of populism being the actual divide in classes rallying for their interests, it is just everyone wanting to be in their own perspective a marginalized group, then complaining whenever anyone points out that their self-image is completely off-mark from any sense of reality. Populist movements are no longer rallied on class lines, but through vague slogans that may or may have nothing to do with the stated goal. You cannot be against the people who run things behind the scenes and vote for a more right-wing capitalist. It is simply disconnected from reality.

All of this creates a politics that is sanitized and soulless. Images are cleaned up, depth is lost, and pretty faces and talking heads go farther than any actual plan could ever hope. Since politics still dominates decisions that are made structurally, it means that democracy and the structures our society is built on are also just eroding into this pretty imagination of what they could otherwise be. We want democracy but don’t care to read policies to vote on. We want better politicians but refuse to force them to actually make a plan. We want improvement but refuse to learn what improvement would look like. It has been replaced with something that looks good enough but has no core and no basis in reality. The meaning has been sterilized, and the husk of itself only exists to replicate its own previous power.

Personal

Being a person is also not the same as it used to be or could be. People are simply not allowed to exist as people. They have to exist as a sanitized image of a person who would likely not exist if not for the modern structures that surround them. The goal of being a person is not to improve yourself and chase personal goals that help to support and enrich yourself as well as the people around you. The goal is to create an image of yourself as a successful person in the society you navigate.

One of the biggest pushes for people in the modern day is productivity. Mental health and physical well-being exist not in the sense that they allow you to achieve personal fulfilment, but they exist in the sense that will help you out just enough for you to work more. They are investments to reap a return. It is to make you a better machine-like worker, able to push through human flaws to increase production. It takes any deviation we have as people and turns it into an issue. Going through tests to check for neuro-divergence doesn’t show whether anything is actually wrong with you as a person. It simply shows whether something is wrong with you as a vessel for labour-power extraction. We could have a productivity that reduces how hard we work to let us chase other goals that make life more exciting. Instead, all it does is ensure we sit in a sanitized workplace for even longer.

Not only are people told that there is something wrong with them, but the blame for that something being wrong gets put onto the person. People are expected to check so many boxes just to become a new image of a normal person that it makes me feel like they want the normal person to not be human. When mental health suffers from trying to conform to the productivity boxes, the expectation is that pushing through that grind will make them better. People need solutions fast so they look to meditation and mental health, but the push for those is so awfully misinterpreted that you end up with people literally trying to purchase inner peace and good health. This does not work. Dare I even call it a sanitized imagination of mental health? This again seems to put yet more blame on the worker, but it’s the problem of the rat race they are stuck in. They desperately need help and they need it now, and since real meaning is not valued, it would only make sense that money should be able to get them out of the awful situation they are in.

This leads to a weird version of what we interpret as good. Good is not doing what is fulfilling and joyful, good is making money. With a lack of worker ownership, this money doesn’t even belong to you. You must be constantly producing for someone else, and any downtime is not good. There is no value in taking time for yourself to meditate or improve your mental health, and there is no value in taking on personal projects to do just because it is fulfilling. This is only good for you insofar as it helps you work, which stands to take away from any accomplishment you make. Right after, you will be back to the same as before.

To cope with this, people create a persona, an appearance that they use to navigate the work world that is separate from their personal reality (at least for the first while). This helps them navigate that life but also creates people devoid of any actual depth. Interactions in the workplace are just two people putting on surface-level costumes, letting nothing else on to keep the production moving along. The relationships are fictitious and only exist to have an appearance of health. This creates a whole new level of exhaustion, however, making people more tired of trying to act with such a strict separation between who they are and who they want to be seen as. It’s kind of like teenagers who want to be cool, but instead of being cool, it is being easily digestible and dumbed down, and it happens constantly instead of just in certain situations.

Overall, the personal productivity mindset alongside corporate world personalities is a sanitized version of people that cannot allow humans to exist as actual humans with their differences. Most people recognize that the corporate world is so bland and sterile, and many have trouble navigating it because of that. There is a negative reaction to the sanitation. A natural reaction to something so inhuman that they can’t force themselves to accept it. The thing is, it’s not unhealthy. They would be fine if the world was designed for humans to have experienced. Since it isn’t, we continue living as the most sterilized versions of humans, potentially ever.

Capital

As a massive Mark Fisher fan talking about an issue, it only seems natural to conclude that capital is the root cause of the problem. Everything that has currently developed has developed through capitalism, so even if other political-economic systems could have issues with something like bureaucracy, the current problems we face related to bureaucracy are specifically capitalistic. The sanitation we experience today directly results from capital and capital alone. It has moulded the world and decided that to maintain its replication, this bland existence is what it wants. It is best for increasing its profits and ensuring that nothing gets too disruptive to the system.

Capital as a system is designed for accumulation. The theory is that what people purchase is a method for rewarding what is good for human behaviour. If places are bad for human behaviour, they just wouldn’t go there. If people didn’t like bland spaces and items, money would go elsewhere to places people would have more fun. Unfortunately, this does not work. Especially since capitalism has consumed the entire world, capital can’t expand outwards and instead must accumulate internally. This has increased wealth inequality, which means people have less money to spend. Add inflation onto this, and the vast majority of people simply must go to the cheapest option possible. The cheapest option is the most sanitized, so the most sanitized is the one that wins in the market.

The market is not designed to reward human behaviour and well-being. It is made of many corporations that all act in their self-interest to optimize their moneymaking potential. To have an environment that is built for humans to live enriched lives involves people being able to do more of what they want to do for free. No barrier of entry, just experimentation. People who want to do things for free will purchase nothing, so it is no use for a company to provide services for free. Historically, that has been a major role of public spaces, but with their diminishing role, we are left with places that will always push to do the bare minimum. Humans are not just made of money. It may seem like that on a company spreadsheet, but that is part of the sanitation. Treating people as such makes life bland. As long as markets dominate, sanitation will continue.

Capitalism and free markets also inevitably lead to crises. That is how it is built and how it reproduces itself. These crises are later legislated to prevent or at least slow the specific cause (not the root cause, which would be capitalism) from causing another crisis. The legislation adds another layer of bureaucracy. Add this to lawsuits that do it at another level, and it just ends up producing another stack of rules. This has gone so far that at this point that the whole legal structure is just a monstrous ball of duct tape that takes a degree plus further education to even begin navigating. There is no way to exist without breaking laws, and if laws are made to not be broken, then living as a human is more or less illegal.

Companies do not care about negative externalities. We are currently dealing with a climate change crisis built on the back of oil companies learning the truth from the science and then paying to suppress it and muddy the waters to ensure profits keep rolling in. The housing crisis of 2008 was built on maximizing profits while ignoring the fact that people would lose their houses because of it. Companies will never care about the negative externality of the sterilization of existence. They will keep buying further into it and trying to block legislation to stop it for as long as they can. History has proven this time and time again. This time is no different. If we let it continue, companies will guarantee further sanitation to keep their profits. The crisis is not as explosive as others, it just presents itself as depression, which we have collectively blamed the individual for and tried to solve using drugs. Under the current system, we will never solve the problem of sanitation.

It is nearly impossible to just go out and have fun, and we see the results. Depression is on the rise, suicide rates have increased, young people are getting into fewer relationships, anxiety is going up, and addictions to social media are so common it is just assumed that people have it unless proven otherwise. It kind of sucks to exist at this point. I feel that in our lives we have effectively seen the last steps of making almost all fun illegal. Nuisance party bylaws have meant that having a few friends over and playing music lands you fines in the hundreds of dollars. People sunbathing or going for a run during the pandemic were fined during COVID even if they weren’t around people. Kids are isolated and unable to find free space to learn for themselves to grow up. Adults have to face a constant barrage of paperwork that sucks the soul out of existence. Work underpays and traps you into wage slavery for the majority of your life, leaving you too tired to exist after.

This is the part where some of you would complain that I offer no solution. IDK read State and Revolution or something.

---

Written in ~24 hours. Editing on top of that. Let me know how you found it, and let me know if there's anything you find specifically wrong, I just kind of wrote as I thought.

---

Oncle Spencer

Review

The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter is a book about how to fix your sleep. The Author ran a sleep clinic for many years, and after having similar odd experiences happen frequently, such as people claiming they haven’t slept in years, he published a book to clear up common misconceptions about sleep and offer solutions that will work for most people. It was a fun read; the humour is entertaining and well mixed in. Concepts build on each other nicely, and the chapters are not so long to get boring, but are enough to cover everything in sufficient depth.

One thing that impressed me about the book was its navigation around hard sleep issues, soft sleep issues, and non-sleep issues. There are extremely few people with hard sleep issues, actual disorders that prevent you from sleeping even when you are asleep. Those people will need a sleep study. He says this right at the start, but says to read the book first, because almost all sleep issues are soft issues, which doesn’t mean nothing is wrong, but it just means you can probably fix it on your own with a bit of effort. There are also some non sleep issues, where he outlines people who think they have poor quality sleep, but there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just an attitude problem. There is lots of information for each of these groups, and I would recommend giving the first half a read if you want to understand sleep better. It's just good advice on setting up and improving your own sleep. Don’t have time? Fear not, I’m back at it talking about this book to yet another victim (you).

Abridged

Before Getting Into It

There is a lot of advice in this book. If not following it works for you and you feel good, don’t fix what isn’t broken. There is no reason to make changes if you think it would harm your sleep.

Different people need different amounts of sleep. They say the average is 8 hours, but depending on age, activity level, body type, etc, it can vary. If you stay awake and function during the day, you get enough sleep. You may read about sleep cycles that people say are 90 minutes. You don’t need to time these. Your body can do that for you if you’re consistent.

Poor sleep is bad, but it’s not that bad. Old doctors used to work two straight days, sleep 6 hours, then do it again for weeks on end. They survived, and they did OK. They could have done better, but they did OK. If you have poor sleep, try to improve it, but it’s not the end of the world. Everyone sleeps. It is a primary drive, like eating and breathing. If you don’t do it, your body will force you to or it's joever. The issue is never that people don’t sleep; the issue is that they are dissatisfied with their sleep. That is an important distinction to make, because if someone claims they don’t sleep, they don’t understand what the problem is, and won’t be able to find a solution.

Sleepiness is when you want to fall asleep. Exhaustion is physical exhaustion. These are different, but often grouped into being tired. Similar, but not quite the same. If you are not sleepy and are trying to sleep, it’s like being full and forcing yourself to eat. Sure, sometimes you have to do it, but your body is saying you don’t need it. Listen to your body.

There are many reasons you may be sleepy or exhausted. If you’re tired but your sleep is fine, it may be something else. Could be diet, exercise, thyroid, burnout, or anything. Focus not only on sleep as the source of all your issues. If you are experiencing a temporary disruption in your everyday life, or if you have had a brief bout of poor sleep, that’s normal. Don’t make mountains out of molehills.

Setting Up Better Sleep (If You Need To)

First is the place where you sleep. Your bedroom should be for sleep: as dark as possible and as quiet as possible. White noise and night lights are unnecessary and often harm sleep. Your bedroom should be a colour that is calming and gentle on the eyes, and should be set up to be as comfy as possible for sleeping. You spend 1/3 of your life sleeping and it helps with everything, treat it like such. Your bedroom is for sleeping and clapping cheeks/getting cheeks clapped. Some of you may be in university, so you can’t have a purpose-built bedroom, but that’s how it’s best done. If you use your bedroom for more, like work, try to come up with a clear separation of spaces and don’t spend time in bed unless you are sleeping or smashing.

Wake up at the same time EVERY morning. If you got blasted at the Toucan, had a fire, watched a movie, stayed up late, etc you may need a nap, but do your best to wake up at the same time. This helps your body time everything, and not doing that messes up your body’s rhythm. Go to sleep at the same time too based on how much sleep you need. If you don’t know, go to bed 6 hours before you wake up. No napping. Stay up the whole day, then keep that schedule for a week or 2. If you are sleepy every day still, move your bedtime 20 minutes earlier and repeat. The goal is to be tired to guarantee efficient sleep, but if you are exhausted, it is not enough sleep, and you should adjust your schedule for more. There’s a whole popular thing about sleep debt, don’t worry about it. A few days of regular sleep and you’ll be back to normal.

No phones. zoomers and millennials, I swear to god, this is one of the biggest issues. Fast-paced content keeps your brain awake and wired, and bedtime is when you want your brain to be slow and sleepy. Blue light also signals to our brain it’s time to be awake, which you don’t want when it’s time to be sleepy either. E-readers have some light but to a much lesser degree. Turn off all screens ~1 – 1.5 hours before bed (well, ideally 2, but I know you won’t do that). Commit to it, and trust me, it is worth it. There will be nothing worth seeing on social media. There never is. If some piece of content is that worth it, it will stick around to the next day. Need to do something productive like work? Tomorrow’s problem. If it is 100% necessary, fine, don’t sweat it, but just do your best to make sure that situation is uncommon. You can almost always postpone midnight work to the next day. Before bed you can read, journal, plan, meditate, etc. There’s a lot to do that’s healthy, but note that indirect soft lighting is the softest on the eyes and best for the brain as you get closer to bedtime if you pick reading.

Stress is a real killer. You don’t want poor sleep, so you stress about doing things right, only for that stress to keep you up, giving you another poor sleep. This is a negative spiral that can single-handedly create all of your poor sleep. Do you sleep way better in motels or unfamiliar places? Chances are you’ve had this spiral and, in a trauma-like way, your brain now has associated your bedroom with poor sleep and anxiety. If this is the case, switch things up in your room: repaint it, move things around, get some new pillows (I recommend a pregnancy pillow, they are a game changer), and just try to break some of that negative association. If you know you are still stressing, just realize that your sleep is OK. You are still getting through the days. Even if you are more sleepy than you want to be. Improvement is a slow process that comes with setbacks. Bad sleep one night? Try again the next night. Just keep putting in that extra effort, keep to good habits, and it will pay off in the long run.

This leads to one of the last big points: identity. Some people are complainers or poor sleepers who make sure someone knows it. A study found that how people express their sleep has a bigger impact on how they feel during the day than the actual quality of their sleep. Fake it till you make it. Someone asks how you slept but you had your 7th poor sleep in a row? You actually slept fairly well last night! Woke up feeling like death? You actually had a cool dream! Can’t remember it well though :/ just that it was cool. Keep working on your sleep, but also try to create a more positive image of your sleep. You might kick some of those anxieties, and you might seem like a happier person as a bonus.

With that, I think you have the tools you need. Consistent schedule, no screens, and just keep at it. If none of these can help you, get a sleep study. A real in-person sleep study, not a fake at-home one or an app.

Extra Snippets

Resting, just lying down but staying awake, is great in the absence of sleep. Sometimes it is even equivalent. If you really need sleep but can't quite fall asleep, a bit of rest is better than stressing that you can't sleep.

No research has confirmed any sleeping pills help you perform better the next day and most do have negative health effects over long-term use. They have some role with jet lag, but there is no major benefit to them. If you use them as a placebo, maybe try replacing them with a caffeine-free tea with honey, which is connected to some slight benefit (potentially, he said it but I didn’t look it up). You should not be relying on anything to help you sleep.

Modern society is the root cause of so many sleep issues, and they sell pills to us to fix them even though they are ineffective. It’s literally the “feed us poison” meme.

Narcolepsy. If you constantly feel the urge to sleep and just curl up and sleep just about anywhere, even after a good night’s sleep, get it checked out. The vast majority of people with narcolepsy just think it’s normal and never seek help.

Shift workers have negative health consequences from having no internal consistent time. The negative health consequences are worse than some diseases or even parasites. Society does not need shift workers, but by using shift work, capital can have fewer workers and a more precarious workforce at their disposal. That’s kind of messed up. Also, capitalists people spend so much optimizing their sleep it’s unreal. They do all that just to avoid what they demand others do every day.

Think of what I said at the start: People sleep and sleep is a primary drive. These rich fucks who say they get a 4-hour sleep and work hard all day every day are lying. When people have slept that poorly, as the doctors mentioned earlier, their body forces them to sleep, they pass out on the job, and some even fall asleep while doing tasks.

---

We went from childhood dreams And end up just like ‘em I’m finna catch some Zs

---

Oncle Spencer

Note: This is the second book in my productivity guru series. To read the first, Building A Second Brain, the article is linked here.

Book Review

David Kadavy comes through with another book for all the people who want to be productivity gurus. This one is less wordy, cutting down on all of the stories that appeared in Building a Second Brain, but also does often leave things a little open-ended. I was expecting a book on how to make a digital zettelkasten but instead found myself reading a book on how to generally improve your experience with productivity once you already have a zettelkasten. As someone in that position, who has one but was feeling like something needed to change to make it fun and approachable, this was useful. To people who are looking into ideas for taking better notes, you might want a different starting place. That being said, it's worth coming back to and will help once you have a start.

The book was an incredibly easy read, only taking me a couple of days. It was entertaining, light, and chapters were kept short, which helped me feel like I was consistently progressing through the ideas without any of them requiring too large a time commitment. You could power read it as I did, or spend 10 minutes a day casually reading, and either way, the book progresses naturally. This is probably its biggest stylistic strength and is something that many authors could use some help replicating, especially in the modern day.

Core Concepts

The book does talk a bit about making a zettelkasten here and there. The idea of keeping notes small and concise. The different types of notes: fleeting, literature, and permanent. The workflow of processing ideas. But the strength of the book lies in its flaw: it doesn't dwell on it much. He gives some ideas of the core values, but acknowledges that you can find in any Youtube video that is guaranteed to tell you about how the word zettelkasten comes from German for slip box and how Niklas Luhmann used it and was productive and cool. Instead, most of the book is talking around your zettelkasten.

So what does around your zettelkasten mean? Kadavy knows you can set up a zettelkasten with more up-to-date information on what applications are available on Youtube, so he decides to talk about the longer term aspect: your interaction with productivity and how that relates to your zettelkasten.

In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of the book. Burning out is the death of productivity. It must be avoided at all costs, including short-term productivity. No strategy will work if it doesn't accommodate periods of particularly low energy or if it instantly consumes periods of particularly high energy. If you want to be productive long-term, you need to have a strategy that is mentally sustainable for you and not too rigid to allow variation based on internal or external changes in day-to-day life.

This relates to the zettelkasten because, if you design it to be, it is a long-term sustainable note-taking style. Given a book, you can decide to not take notes (read it purely for fun), take a few notes, take notes but only as pertains to a specific topic, or take full notes. Each note taken in this system is tiny. As you read, you can highlight the parts you find noteworthy, then you add your interpretation or turn it into your own words, give it a name, and you're done. The note can now freely connect to anything you want it to, and you have a pre-digested idea that you can put into any project if it ever comes up. It requires no further organization or maintenance, you can just move on. Furthering this, in one chapter, he even breaks down body position and how he likes to read in certain positions, make notes in others, and think in others. From lounging to lying down, to sitting up, to exercising, each one means a different step in the creative process to help create mental associations with those positions to break it up. You don't have to do it all at once, you can do different steps based on what kind of mood you're in. If you have a setup that works for you, you'll get to it eventually, and the result will be atomized long-term notes ready when you need them.

My Setup

Here comes the part of the article where I talk about myself a bit. I use a zettelkasten for my notes, and it took me a while to get it working. Here's where I'm at right now.

First, I decide whether or not I'm taking notes on something. If it's audio, I generally don't. Maybe a note or 2 here and there but it just takes me out of it too much. If it's a book, I chuck it into my e-reader so I can highlight it and make notes. Then I decide how much I want to learn from it. This book? I said a couple of ideas. Golden Gulag? I want a lot of information. In cases where I expect to take a lot of notes, I generally listen to it as an audiobook without taking notes first. This is for my enjoyment as well as to get a sense as to what the book is about, and what the overarching themes are across the chapters, helping me identify what is fluff or talked about more later. I generally don't rewind when I listen like this, I just go with the flow since I'll read it later (unless I think something is fascinating or I connect it to a specific project, in which case I jot it down in my notes, which I'll process into becoming a Zettel note later).

As I read it in my e-reader, I might find something interesting or cool. If that's the case, I highlight it, then in the highlight write why I think it's cool or what the idea connects to. Whenever I have time and feel like it, I import all of those notes, then leave them in a long list to process into a 'Zettel notes.'

Each Zettel note has the following template, and gets thrown into a big folder called Zettelkasten, which you can see in my previous article:

Note Title

>[!quote]
>
>>[!note]
>>

---

## Backlink: 

## Topic tags: 

## Contextual phrases: 

## Timestamp: {{date:YYYYMMDD}}{{time:HHmm}}

Now I will show you a filled-out note that uses this exact template, then tell you how I fill it out in order: – In Obsidian, I have a hotkey that allows me to make a note with the blank template to fill out nearly instantly. This drastically speeds up the process.

Travel For Activism Costly For Poor


>[!quote]
>prisoners’ mothers taking an unpaid day off work and contributing from their slim wages toward the $1,000 charter cost.
>>[!note]
>>Extremely hard to afford activism or even just support loved ones for the working poor

---

## Backlink: [[Golden Gulag]]

## Topic tags: [[Activism]][[Poverty]][[Transportation]]

## Contextual phrases: 

## Timestamp: 202303112206

I make highlights and write something about each highlight as I read it in my e-book reader. The highlighted part goes into the quote section. This is not absolutely necessary, but for academic writing, I like to have a direct quote. This also means that later, I can change it or make another note on the same quote. It also means I can quickly find it in the book if I want a citation.

Note: could be an insight or a rephrase. This helps retain information, and also helps me recognise what I was thinking was useful about it when I read the note. I generally only write down my immediate thoughts from when I read the quote, but sometimes I can revisit it if I think there is more meaning to be found.

This is the entire note. 2 sentences, both incomplete. There can be more, if I find something particularly inspiring, it might get a couple of sentences. If it gets longer than that, it can almost always be made into smaller notes, but sometimes I even get up to a very specific small paragraph.

The back-link is simply a link to the page I have dedicated to the book. That page will generally just have a short high-level summary of the book in case I need a quick 2-second summary to jog my brain.

Then the tags. This is optional. Since it talks about activism and poverty, I chucked a tag on to connect it to those. I remember quickly thinking 'travel costs are the barrier here', so I chucked a transportation tag on it. Who knows, maybe at one point I might write about how activism is difficult or issues of not having cheap long-distance transportation lines. If I ever do, I'll be able to find this note connected to those topics. If you aren't sure, you can also find this note using the search features on whatever app you use. I put about 10 seconds into this step. If I think too much, I just move on.

Timestamps are auto-generated just to put a date to it. Contextual phrases are almost always empty, but if I can immediately think of another way to phrase the title to help with searchability in another context that I'm writing about, I put it here.

After this, I think of a title. The title is generally just a trimmed-down version of the quote or the note. I put just enough information that if I were to read it, I could decide in a second whether that note may contain useful information on whatever project I may be working on or not.

Once I am done reading the book, I delete the page that has all of the quotes and notes, since they are now all turned into Zettel notes, so I don't need them anymore. I am left with a page that has the book's name, who wrote it, and a summary, as well as a ton of little ideas connected to it. I have all the information I want to take out of the book, and it's in my second brain, so I can just move on without having to worry about missing anything.

That's my process.

Additional note: You do not need tags or contextual phrases at all. I just have them because it gives me a second to try to connect them to other ideas, which I find fun, which makes it more mentally sustainable for me. You can have a different format. You don't need to have a quote attached. Maybe you want a different section, you can add it. I just find this template is so lean that making new notes is not daunting, which is how I make my note-taking more mentally sustainable. Make it work for you.

---

I'll be lampin on Lamphere Standin on the curb With some very close friends

---

Oncle Spencer

Overview

Building a second brain is a book that is a product of productivity gurus, by a productivity guru, and for productivity gurus. It succeeds in its goal of communicating note-taking systems to help people organize their lives better, but while it has drip in its core, it drowns in what can only be described as surplus productivity making it into the book. The information management skeleton is intuitive and concise. It strips information management down into its core and helps you build up your personal structure from that core to make it work for you. Information is broken down into 4 categories, and the production pipeline is broken down into 4 steps. This keeps things short, simple, and clean, so where did the other 100 pages come from?

This book has two types of padding that likely triple the length of the book. The first is the less egregious of the two: over-explaining. Multiple times, the book explains a concept well, then immediately has another chapter that is much longer explaining the same concepts again. While I would claim it was unnecessary and the book should have cut some of the explaining, I will say it as less egregious because it is overall productive to understanding. People using this as their first gateway into note-taking may find it useful, whereas those reading to increase understanding won't miss anything by skipping it.

The second type is where the book becomes a slog: anecdotes. Throughout the entire book, there are constant anecdotes ranging in duration from a paragraph to an entire chapter. They detail how people have been generally helped by having any form of note-taking system, from Einstein to random people the author knows with only a first name given. Where this could have been productive and an opportunity to go into detail about how that person sets up their notes, giving ideas to readers as to different ways to personalize their note-taking experience, it usually ends up at a dead end that simply states X person took notes and it was good. At first, it was interesting and motivating, but by halfway through the book, I found myself saying “that entire chapter didn't need to exist.” It seems that the author wanted to flex the memory that their notebook can contain, and show off how many people they can remember because of their second brain, but forgot that being able to use your second brain to produce more content doesn't mean it makes a good book.

At this point, you may be asking yourself “But Oncle Spencer, you said the core was good but have done nothing but complain, what is the good in the book?” Well, let me tell you.

Abridged

Our brains are great for a lot, but constantly remembering everything isn't their strong suit and can get stressful or annoying. Leaving this to notes, which are great at retaining information, frees up your brain to simply not have to worry about any of that. To organize everything from what you've read to work to personal projects, Tiago Forte recommends 4 core categories for notes that will make up your second brain:

• Projects: Active projects you are working on. This can include work, school, personal, or anything that you need to keep track of as you do it.

• Areas: Things you're generally working on, but are much more abstract and larger in scope. Where a project may be “make my meal plan for the week”, an area might look something like “becoming a better chef.” A project should have a definitive start and end point, where an area is more akin to an area of improvement long-term.

• Resources: Pieces of information that may be useful down the line. Sometimes the right information is at the wrong time. Maybe you read a book with some great information, but you're currently busy with other things. Take that information, put it here, and maybe down the line you'll come back to it and find it useful.

• Archive: A place for completed or stale projects. When a project is done, you may want to revisit the resources you used to make it, but it is very rare to revisit that project itself. When a project is complete, move it here. If a project is delayed or becoming stale, with little new development (or little involving you), you can also put it in another folder here, to come back to without letting it fill up your active projects.

  • As a side note, try to have some form of meaningful celebration for project completion. The time spent completing the project is near zero whereas the time spent working on it is significant. Celebration helps motivate you to work towards something, and makes completion more than a moment to move to the next task.

If you are just looking to get started and are wondering how to bring all your old notes over, any current project notes or very important documents can be brought over, just throw anything else you want into your archive in a file called 'old notes.' You can also just leave them. Don't let converting old notes be a giant project, it will only discourage you or burn you out before you start. Chances are you won't need to go back much if at all, and starting something fresh with a good structure can be freeing, letting you get away from the slog of old, messy, or rigid notes.

Forte recommends using this new second brain for the production of something new. You can take in random information and store it, but that doesn't make it useful, and can become tedious over time. When you produce something with the information you have, it makes your second brain useful instead of just serving as mass storage. The production pipeline is generally two parts: gathering information and refining it. Forte breaks this down a bit more.

• Collect: Gather useful information as well as information that seems meaningful to you (This is the intake information into your second brain)
• Organise: Organise the information you have gathered (This is the structure of your second brain)
• Distill: Making the information concise and usable outside of its original context. (This is refining notes that you take instead of just copying whole articles into your notes)
• Express: making something with the information you have.

As you make projects, the recommended strategy is to make a rough draft and then build it into a full project. This can generally be done by some slightly personalized method of the above. One thing he does stress is you do not delete information. If something seems like it shouldn't be there despite being related to the same topic, keep it at the bottom of the rough draft just in case. Sometimes connections are made that will make it useful, and sometimes you forget something you just had that would be useful now.

Where to take notes

Forte has a website that helps people find what tools to use for their note-taking experience. There are lots of note-taking applications, and they all work. Don't stress about finding the perfect application. Find one that seems around right, then mould it to work for you.

My recommendation: Obsidian. Obsidian chads are yet to take an L.

Their recommendations based on archetypes:

• The Architect. Someone who wants to plan, wants to create something, and wants to be able to create structures and stay organized: Notion, Craft.do
• The Gardener. Someone who wants to work 'bottom-up', gathers ideas and lets connections between ideas emerge organically. These are based more on linking ideas together. Obsidian, Roam
• The Librarian. Someone who wants a straightforward structure for collections and easy retrieval. Evernote, Notion
• Students. People who have short-term priorities and just need to get things done pretty quickly with information mostly coming from new sources. Forte recommends Apple notes, Google Keep Notes, but I recommend just doing the same thing in any other app and then collecting them all in a 'University Archive' file that gets thrown into the archive after. The PARA structure will likely help with university work in the long run.

My Setup

Just in case you want to see my personal setup for some ideas.

My PARA structure

The numbers are just to sort it in a specific way. I made it three characters because I thought it looked cooler. – Files: Stores things like screenshots, PDFs, templates, etc for use elsewhere. This is a utility folder – Projects: This is for things I am currently working on – Resources: This is for my research, it is full of all my sources, with different folders for things like articles, documentaries, courses, or theory. This helps me separate what I can use as a primary source in an academic paper vs what I have heard and can look into farther – Archive: Old, completed, or stale projects – Zettelkasten: I use this to store lots of small specific notes that I take away from my resources or think up on my own. It's kind of just a throw box for all of my ideas and things I've learned to come back to later. I believe Forte would put this in resources, but I personally separate it just because it makes sense to me. – Home. This is just a place that more or less mirrors the folders but is just more visually appealing. It is a place where I can jot down quick thoughts to process later, look at all my projects, and quickly see each of their closest due dates

Other Setups

There are a ton of people who have setups all over YouTube or other blogs that are useful to check out to help you get started. Just remember to start with a bare-bones skeleton and add what you need from there. Other people's ideas may have something that works for them, but may just not be the right fit for you. The goal is to make a long-term note-taking structure that is suited to your needs. Don't sweat getting it right at first, you won't, just get started and adapt your note-taking as you go.

---

Walking through the pale moonlight phone tapped, I think and my minutes is hella low

---

Oncle Spencer