Prestige Machines

[atreestump]

In the 1930s people believed history could be controlled.

In Germany Adolf Hitler imagined a world where nations were living organisms each struggling toward a hidden destiny. Germany he thought had a soul wounded but not dead. If only someone could awaken its mythic will the people would march together into greatness.

At the same time across the Atlantic wealthy American industrialists were inventing a new kind of power. The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations quietly funded universities professors and research institutes. They believed that ideas could be planted like seeds in the minds of young elites and that decades later these ideas would govern the world.

Two projects very different. One used spectacle myth and force. The other used networks prestige and patience. Both were built on the same dream that history has a center and someone can find the lever.

Hitler built his machines in stone and light. At Nuremberg Albert Speer designed colossal cathedrals of searchlights that carved the sky into vertical walls. The crowds stood beneath them tiny but unified as if absorbed into a higher purpose. These were not just rallies. They were acts of theatre designed to dissolve the individual into the collective and to make people feel not think.

Today the machines are different. Now the spectacle is subtle. A TED stage. A magazine cover. A blue checkmark. Curtis Yarvin a programmer in Silicon Valley believes that modern power hides in these signals. If you capture the institutions that define what is high status the universities the media the cultural gatekeepers you control the reality everyone lives inside. Yarvin calls this prestige. It decides who matters. It tells us what is true.

The cathedrals of light have been replaced by cultural factories. They work in silence producing meaning.

But something strange has happened. The Rockefeller strategy worked. Their ideas spread through universities and media until they reshaped the Western world. But they did not stop there. They mutated.

The same networks that envisioned a rational orderly liberalism also birthed the counterculture of the 1960s radical individualism neoliberal globalization and eventually the algorithmic chaos of today. Soft power works but it does not obey commands. Ideas slip the leash.

Meanwhile Yarvin believes the liberal machine has grown fat decadent and weak yet somehow still untouchable. Silicon Valley billionaires he says are rich but politically powerless. They dream of disrupting the world but when faced with the status hierarchies of elite culture they retreat. Their institutions their magazines their think tanks their universities barely exist. He imagines a new network of patronage seeding outside prestige. A parallel hierarchy that bypasses the old one. A quiet revolution.

But there is a problem. Prestige only works if everyone agrees on who has it and that consensus is breaking apart. Universities are losing authority. Legacy media brands are collapsing. Social platforms fragment reality into billions of personalized feeds.

The cathedrals of light worked because everyone saw the same light. The Rockefeller networks worked because everyone wanted the same credentials. Now no one agrees on what matters. TikTok teens live in worlds unrecognizable to their parents. Memes become political movements. Alternative realities bloom and clash online each with its own heroes its own myths its own truth.

The prestige machines are breaking and nobody knows what replaces them.

This is where another vision appears. Alain de Benoist a French philosopher writing in the 1980s rejected the dream of one universal destiny. He saw a future not of empire but of multiplicity a world where different cultures traditions and myths coexist without collapsing into one grand narrative.

It was a provocation because for centuries power has depended on singularity. One flag. One story. One destiny. But now fragments multiply. In this world no single elite can decide the meaning of history. No leader can awaken one universal will. No institution can monopolize prestige.

Instead power circulates. Myths compete. Futures diverge.

This vision is unsettling. Hitler promised clarity through unity. Yarvin promises clarity through networks. Both whisper the same thing history has direction inevitability meaning.

But the deeper truth may be stranger. There is no center anymore. Meaning is dissolving into a thousand experiments small worlds built by small groups each inventing its own myths and aesthetics each creating its own stage where its signals matter.

The future may not belong to those who seize the machine but to those who step outside it.

And yet the temptation remains. To find the lever. To believe that someone somewhere still drives the story.

But what if history has no driver.
What if it never did.

[kFoyauextlH]

Amazing! I'll edit more into this post. Oh, maybe this will be a more hidden part and then the new post afterwards will be the more exposed part! I might just make a new post then. I also checked and it appears that edits don't show up there yet.

I like going back and filling up posts and threads sometimes to make more of each post without bumping certain things too much or to place it earlier in a sequence fir when I or anyone else might ever go back and read or see it. I think for older threads I haven't touched or altered the records except for the first posts to edit titles and sometimes to preserve the older titles that are being changed by putting them in the beginning of the first post.

There have been times where I like to catch a certain time stamp, since I look at the numbers and they remind me if certain themes and ideas, and also wanting to keep certain post counts for a while so then I go and edit into posts like these for a future reading experience.

I guess I could put the main new writing as a new post and other stuff I don't mind not showing up on the other site in this post, if ever, but I'll also be more aware now about stuff in edits not showing up there yet, as I've been editing and adding a lot to posts. I'm alright with things being a bit further for searches and hidden potentially due ti the kinds of things I may be saying in these modern times. I'm interested in what I might say about this too, this whole piece was full of inspiring and fascinating ideas that really activated my imagination.

I may put more provocative things in edits, and things to attract people to the forum side into the things they are more likely to see on the main site.

Do you check the forum version too? I check both, but the main site probably less than this one since I've been gradually bumping old topics until most or all will have new writing in them. Once that is done and I've found all threads that I have the first post in and have re-purposed them to refer to some titular theme and theme set under the name of an entity, I'll possibly start making new threads also. Plus I'll likely go back, re-read, and maybe eliminate anything that sounds too provocative, problematic, or toxic, as one never knows what might ever become a problem at any point but some things may be more likely to, so I may go through and remove references to certain places and videos about things going on, putting them on the more private site instead if anywhere, and maybe that might make me feel less tense about anyone seeing that stuff and bothering me about it, however unlikely such an encounter may be, but it still makes me tense. It is a balance between wanting to vent due to being so disgusted and frustrated and demoralized and angry, and causing potential stress or paranoia about being connected in any way to things becoming increasingly scanned for and censored, like an upgrade to America's Patriot Act and other things they were supposedly up to so long ago.

This site seems to show that even though I was always similar, I never thought much about the current situation or the specific *ssh*l*s that are causing lots of problems everywhere, until they started making a bigger and bigger stink, that has now reached all sorts of people who never thought about them or the issues, even though they were being criminals before too.

I was going to bring them up and that issue here in this post in relation to what is written above since I noticed a difference in the appeals being made, like what each faction points to as having the prestige and being authoritative, even though that also seems annoying since this should be a core issue that needs no authorization from anyone to verify or validate that it is clearly and blatantly what everyone should know without doubt or question is absolutely evil and wrong, but people still say "such and such organization or experts have proclaimed that this is some negative word with meanings that mean it is very bad", and then the factions of evil people doing evil things says "Who cares, no, you're nothing, and what we are doing us not evil, and look how you can't stop us, because you aren't anything, you have no authority, power, or prestige".

So there seems to be this element running through right now in several ways, especially how people have rallied together worldwide, possibly like never before at such a scale, and that the wrongdoers compare it all to the N*z* rallies even though most people don't truly dislike them like that even, giving them passes more than they would anyone else on Earth due to successfully making them out to be extra special and different because of years of propaganda and brainwashing and cultural stuff being used from even before the victimization narratives and proof, which they are risking ruining so many years of work creating good will from people and overcoming all kinds of negative press from thousands of years of people finding them super annoying and problematic. They managed to convince modern people that everyone was always just randomly bothered for no particular reason, just xenophobic liars, and now are making a number of people look back at the Nasz people and think twice, which is not a great thing at all either of course.

The closest thing to the people coming together based on emotion have indeed been these rallies and growing sentiments in the face of atrocious evil against human beings, and at the same time the academics are being brought up as validation and verification against whatever a tiny minority of people prolonging what just about everyone else is against is doing.

The situation is mad and actually pretty much unprecedented. Though it has similarities to the much more hidden H*l*c**st, this is also not like it in a number of ways and is even far more crazy, since so many people see this, are against it, and it us being fueled purely on a tiny group, meaning the world's politicians included, just doing it anyway to a very big population that is connected to an even bigger population that also has most of the world's sympathy, and has the academics and their prestige and prestigious organizations saying that it is wrong and should stop, and it keeps getting worse and no one can intervene or make a move out of pure t*rr*r at what will then happen if they do and all the trouble a bunch of b*st*rd t*rr*r*sts will bring upon them.

This is apparently going to go on until so many people have been permanently and irreparably ruined, and this should end, unless people are complete morons, which they are being brainwashed into thinking that they and everyone else truly is, any thought that the people constantly positioned to be selected to be placed in positions of authority and power can ever be trusted or relied upon.

Conditions seem ripe for something like a major upheaval, but the people now are so downtrodden and afraid, clinging to life, that the experiment in pure evil being broadcast could easily be imposed upon just about any population in the world now, and people would just starve to death, fearing being sh*t down and being sh*t down regardless all throughout, and then even being too weak to lift a rock or swing their arm or make a fist.

The extreme things are necessary now more than ever, but it appears that such really not appearing means mankind has died, not so long after God.

[IndieAgora]

Amazing! I'll edit more into this post

Thanks. You may as well post again as I'm not sure if edits also appear on the other site.

[kFoyauextlH]

Moved to Minthara:

viewtopic.php?p=3349#p3349

[kFoyauextlH]

Do you think that the idea of pseudo-material or non-material value markets and value sense fits in this thread? Otherwise you can move this post somewhere else, but this whole thing sounded nuts:



This thread has a sense in it of some kind of mystical or esoteric valuing process and vicarious empowering that goes on by association, proximity, or investment. These kinds of processes or "fan" activity seems to be a major feature of culture and all known, mainly now European and Europe-originating forms of human organization (governments and ideologies) which are increasingly filling in spaces related to "cult", which was never necessarily dominant over "culture" and governments or hierarchies anyway, except for certain recluses, pariahs, and people keeping themselves mostly apart from markets and market activities in population concentrating centers.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choo-Choo_Charles

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After the first trailer was released in 2021, it went viral on the internet, provoking reactions on websites such as Twitter and Reddit.[1] This led the game to receive a spot in Time's list of most anticipated 2022 video games.[2] The game received mixed reviews from critics.
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Eisenbeisz has stated that while the corruption of childhood joy and innocence is a popular theme in horror, he wanted Choo-Choo Charles to be unique in that it is based on a popular children's TV show; namely, Thomas & Friends,[4][10] starring Thomas the Tank Engine. This was his favorite kids' show when he was young.[10] Choo-Choo Charles was largely inspired by the 3D horror animation Thomas Feeds by Tom Coben[10] which depicts Thomas the Tank Engine as a monstrous spider-train hybrid. The animation was published in November 2020 to Coben's YouTube channel. Inspiration was likely also gleaned from Charlie the Choo-Choo, a 2016 children's book written by Stephen King (under the pseudonym "Beryl Evans") as part of The Dark Tower series.[11]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_the_Choo-Choo

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The book was first revealed at San Diego Comic-Con, where a limited edition of 150 copies were given to attendees. Actress Allison Davies participated in a book signing at the event, portraying the fictional author Beryl Evans.[2]
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So embarassing.

https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2 ... -modernism

https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2 ... bjectivity

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Towards the end of last year, Edgar and I both read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. It was an enlightening read, even if the physical object of the book was uncomfortably stiff due to the glossy pages and weak binding. Berger’s meditations on painting led me to consider the nature of prestige and the arts, and I have some thoughts after mulling them over and discussing them with my writing partner.

Every era seems, to me, to be at least partially defined by a singular “prestige medium” which dominates the discourse and shapes the thinking of the era. In some ways, this is connected to the issue of Protagonization that I mentioned on this website almost a year ago, which is (in turn) rooted in how we structure narratives around a singular viewpoint.

Berger mentioned that, during the Early Modern Period, the prestige medium was the painting. It served as an extension of the logic of commodification that had begun to dominate the era. It was possible, at that point in time, for someone to own the image of something. As such, it was possible to – by proxy – lay claim to something immaterial and impossible-to-grasp. While it was often real, material goods which were thus laid claim to, it was also quite possible for these paintings to depict, metaphorically, things like female sexuality, innocence, wisdom, and strength.
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Of course, there is another half of an equation: an art form that is both easy to make and easy to enjoy becomes devalued: consider the status of the image macro in contemporary society (what most people call “memes”.) Anyone can make them, and the vast majority are ignored. This doesn’t mean that image macros aren’t necessarily art: simply that they are not a prestigious form of art due to the difficulty of competent works to gain traction.
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https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2 ... st-for-art

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But for novels in the 19th Century, there was a perfect storm of qualities that allowed them to gain prestige: they were difficult to create, and easy to enjoy. The same was true of paintings in the Early Modern Period and film in the early 20th century.

What we have seen in the past twenty years or so, is that the barrier of entry on enjoying television series has lowered. With the emergence of streaming services and on-demand playing, people have become conditioned to viewing television series as something akin to a vast, multi-volume film, carved into half- and one-hour chunks.

While there were definitely television shows that made use of overarching narrative structures before this period (see: V, Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, The Wire, Carnivale, many soap operas) the turn towards serial drama as a major medium in the last ten years has been a major driving force behind the emergence of “prestige” television. It’s no surprise that this has been roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of the smart phone and ubiquitous internet: you can plug into the invisible stream of everything-that-ever-was and watch Friends anywhere you have enough cell signal. But why would you want to?
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We still tend to act like movies and books are the prestige medium, though. Sorry, I mean film and novels. Sorry, again, I mean cinema and literature. The fact of the matter is that some parts of these media are well-respected, but they have become so rarefied and inaccessible that there’s effectively multiple media in each of them. I mentioned Parasite earlier. I think that it’s a great example of film, but it isn’t a movie in my head: for that, you need whatever the latest Avengers movie is (I think I once referred to it as Avengers: Who Gives a Shit) or similar. Likewise, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code are both conspiracy stories, but the former is definitely literature and the last is definitely a book.
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The rarefied, genteel iteration of the medium retains its cachet, but there’s not enough prestige for it to cover a significant portion of what’s produced. Indeed, I think you can see it happening with movies in real-time: the American Film Industry knows that its prestige is slipping, and is retreating into the safe territory of crowd-pleasers, but now the field is so crowded that even those can’t make money. Each one is so demanding to produce that they begin to look the same. Now, it seems, the only movies that are in line for Academy Awards are custom-made Oscar-bait movies, which are often the MFA-fiction of film.
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https://www.brokenhandsmedia.com/blog/2 ... n-overview

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Which brings me back to literature. A cottage industry has sprung up to produce high-prestige fiction. It is only for this reason that it makes sense to talk about MFA fiction. They all fundamentally work the same way: a plotless, character-centered maundering that terminates with a revelation about a character, custom-ordered and meant to be served up in the New Yorker or similar. Even genre fiction isn’t immune: apart from the MFA types who try to play with genre tropes, the Clarion workshops serve much the same purpose in the speculative fiction community, which leads to a convergence of styles (“The X of its Y-ing” as Edgar points out, after a common stylistic device, and now I can’t unsee it.)

But this is a squeeze: I think that, among younger readers and readers that don’t fit the middle-class-white-professional stereotype, MFA fiction is looked down upon as an attempt to siphon more of an increasingly small pool of prestige. As the convergence continues, the siphoning grows more and more insistent, and the pool smaller and smaller.

Instead, I feel that many of these readers are turning to other sources. There are many competently-written works online that are available for free or cheap, and it is here that we find the condition of the abased medium – anyone can enjoy it but, also, anyone can make it.

Now, a caveat: I’m using “abased” here in contrast to “prestige” – I don’t mean to imply that I think that these artists are unworthy or that they’re doing bad work that isn’t worth reading. But, as someone who wants to be a working artist at some point, it does mean that it’s a lot harder for me to make the transition from amateur to professional, and I’m sure that there are many other people in the same boat.

The ideal situation would be that anyone who can’t bring themselves to not create would be able to support themselves this way (barring, of course, some sort of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or whatever the meme is.) The fact of the matter is that there’s far too many producers in the Attention Economy, and not enough consumers (Or, I suppose, the audience is the Attention Producer and the Artist is the Attention Consumer? This metaphor is a mess.)
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There has to be a middle ground between “no one can release anything without a corporate co-sign” and “everyone can release, but no one can gain an audience.” There must be a pathway for different media to gain prestige and different artists to participate.
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