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Raindrop.io

Software that uses Raindrop.io API

Social Media Message Format

description, url, folder, tags, created, cover, highlights

Example Highlights
Highlight:Poulos believes that the advent of electricity destroyed Europe but supercharged America; digital, in turn, threatens to do to us what electricity did to Europe, and in fact is well on its way to doing so. He wants us to avoid this fate (and he essentially ignores Europe, in its current form and state, presumably as irrelevant to the future, which indeed it is).

Highlight:reify

Highlight:The digital swarm tends to destroy authority, and more broadly, to disenchant all things, most of all God and humanity. Thus “digital catastrophe” has resulted in “hostility against memory and the remembered . . . in the hopes of salvation through fantasy.”

Highlight:We, or the First Generation rather, must not abdicate responsibility, but grasp it, in order that we all may continue to lead lives worth living.

Highlight:This is a call to ensure that men realize their responsibility to initiate boys into manhood, to restore continuity in the storm of discontinuity, in the teeth of the digital swarm and the collapse of authority that permeates modernity. The swarm demands the young create new rites of passage.

Highlight:Poulos asks, if the bots, the swarm, are inevitable, as they seem to be, who will catechize them, such that they will adopt, or act in the interest of, right belief, and transmit that right belief onward?

Highlight:To do this, they must erase the combination of memory and humanity, the chain of transmission to boys becoming men. If they succeed, the catechists will get their desired New Men—not the new Soviet Man, but the disenchanted, deracinated, New Digital Man, divorced from his past and from his fellow men, eager to consume, to live in the pod, to eat the bugs. They will like that. But we will not.

Highlight:The ethereals would have us abandon memory of our humanity to the machines, while we progress to some nirvana, some union with the quasi-divine light.

Highlight:refusing to abandon America to the tender mercies of decentralized “monks or pirates or mafiosos” or to suggest America would be better off defeated and destroyed by countries that are still run by real men.

Highlight:where our rainbow flag is used as toilet paper in ever-more areas of the world.

Highlight:those who rely on the various forms of fakery on which they base their power will reform their ways and join Team Reality, or starve, or commit suicide, driving themselves into insanity as lonely digital cripples.

Highlight:Moreover, it is quite clear that what Poulos calls the modern instrumentalist project “has inevitably debased people by trying to satisfy their appetites.” Perhaps this is what seeking to improve man’s estate always and everywhere comes down to, even though the swarm is sold as a way to re-enchant the world, a means that “can or does deliver the goods of our highest longing.”

Highlight:Why should we, for example, permit “dating” apps at all? Their costs very obviously grossly exceed their benefits.

Highlight:Certainly it is true that if we will not restrain ourselves, if we will not exercise self-control in the service of virtue, digital will inevitably consume us.

Highlight:“What is foisted on us under pretext of reset is in fact half acceleration—from cyborg to posthuman future—and half retardation—setting us back still further from our living memory of human flourishing and the agency it alone catalyzes, and rearing our failed ‘elites’ back so far as to claim enough runway to launch themselves safely into oblivion.”

Highlight:Regime credibility is fatally compromised and the regime is crumbling; there is no way for the regime to use digital to solve this problem, and all efforts make the problem worse. That’s the good news.

Highlight:I suspect reaching a future of human flourishing, in which digital is our chained servant and those who would use it to enslave us have been cast down from their thrones of power, will feature a lot more of warfare, both spiritual and physical, than any of us would like to admit is likely.