Aesthetic Materialism

Seems like, every real movement that happens.... ...Anarchists start it. ...Marxist-Leninists try to co-opt it, and fail. ...Liberal Democrats try to co-opt it, and succeed. ...left-coms complain about it. Anarchists are the only ones with the co-ordination and organization to get anything accomplished. I'm not saying that's how it ought to be, but that's how it is.

  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (CCCP), founded in 1922, in the rubble of World War I and the Russian Civil War, somewhat misnamed because much of it was fought in what is now Ukraine, Belarus and other nations, was essentially the product of a social-chauvinist or social-imperialist "Great Russian" "westward offensive." This was the same year that Lenin, already in poor health (and having been shot in the head in 1918), would have his first stroke, becoming paralyzed on one side and unable to speak.  Over the next several years, the U.S.S.R. gradually established a bloc that reshaped geopolitics, in effect creating a new balance of power that stabilized international relations and thus entrenched the status quo in international politics for generations.

  I love and admire Alan Turing.  I consider him brilliant, admirable, and heroic, as well as complex, and I think his treatment by the UK government was tragic, outrageous, and inexcusable.  He had many great accomplishments, and was one of those rare minds who was at once a technician and a philosopher.  Furthermore, the development of his famous "imitation game" thought experiment, now more commonly known as the "Turing test," is both a stroke of genius and a cute, charming story.  We can cherish it as a great, fascinating, perplexing moment in the history of ideas.  But as a practical matter, it is long past time to put it aside.  It is not only wrongheaded - it is downright dangerous. The Turing Test is a fascinating artifact of a particular period in history.  It was developed during the heyday of behaviorism, when researchers like B.F. Skinner believed that psychology was nothing but the science of behavior, and that "internal ...

One has not grasped aesthetic materialism until one takes it both very seriously, and more importantly, as a joke.  Like the best jokes, its paradoxical structure is beguiling in the sense that it is not - quite - a contradiction.  It is not a contradiction, but it is difficult to see quite how it is not a contradiction.  "Materialism" sounds very serious indeed, but "aesthetic" makes it seem as if it is not quite serious, not altogether serious, that there is some lightness in there, some light in there.  We smell aesthetics coming, and we say, "Just what are you trying to pull, here?"  "Goth" contains, in a single word, all of the same paradoxes.  What is a goth, other than a person who has found light in darkness?  It may seem a little strange to call a goth a materialist, but when one sticks "aesthetic" onto it... well... then it almost seems quite interchangeable to speak of "aesthetic materialism" or "aesthetic spi...