“Letters to myself”
A philosophical blog about everything
Ethics, aesthetics, society, technology, life, cosmos
“Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.” – N. Bohr
Spiral of progression
Black and white
Something and nothing
Prosperity and crisis
It’s all necessary, it’s all natural… spiraling through itself, thus the eternal motion of the engine of life is realized.
An inner screwing backwards… recoil… a sudden push like aversion forward… some bounce back. Then again…
It’s a circular movement, both sides are essential there, dark and bright, chaos and order; but actually progressing itself forward and higher.
It’s not the place that beautifies the man, it’s the man who beautifies the place.
The same can be said of destiny.
It’s not destiny that beautifies a man or a fortune, it’s the person who beautifies the destiny.
If a person is nice, deep mind, handsome and interesting, truly open and humanistic, then even poverty,
even a hard struggle is good for that person – it makes the image charming.
By the way, the whole essence of progress is suffering and its overcoming…. evolution is a response to worsening conditions. If everything was always perfect and smooth, our most ancient propagators, the most basic microbes, would swim endlessly in their warm bouillon.
Have you ever noticed that in images the hero is beautiful and noble, even though he suffers and is poor and struggles, he does not become less beautiful, but even becomes more lovely?
The world is a very complex, messy and spontaneous place.
We’re human beings, and in our society and our systems of living, it’s even more complicated.
There’s randomness everywhere. Very, very much depends on luck… the wilder we are, the more our system and distribution depends on chance.
But this comes from an observer perspective only. How about a wider view?
To see not magic powerful evil, but confused, twisted, complex systems. Evil is pure human, a cheeky ignorance… that primarily the weakness of an element of a complex, entangled system, not something special. In general, the human world in general is very complex and complicated – it is a real challenge for us as a species to realize and process it all
An attractive inquiry is how perceptible and resynthesizable is the awareness of the complexity of our systems for entities wider than the system – that is, roughly speaking, if we see our world as complex, how could it be seen by say a god or a hyperhuman, an Übermensch…? Such thought experiments help to give some perspective and scales to the recognized
Or is complexity complicated in any case? Definitely not – because if something seems extremely complex to a child, say, the Internet or television, it doesn’t seem so to an educated adult. It depends on the level and breadth of awareness of the phenomenon, representation of it.
However, in any case – keep your mind clear. If the world is complex, systems are complicated, if you know it all and understand the flaws of the elements of entanglement, the immaturity of individual components, if you see and understand it all, you are calm in any case. Just let it be, let it test itself.
In the age of ai and generative tech, creating stylistic craft art has become meaningless – meaning – that is, meaningfulness, the necessity of the common purpose.
Art as development, as play, is one thing: teaching, therapeutic…
The other is the art of the genuine, cognitive plan, when as a researcher of feelings and spectra of the mind you study the paths of the new, the perspective, and synthesize the beautiful… such activity, although it includes particles of the previously (education, therapeutic) mentioned, in the light of the new era, transforms and mutates into something even more narrowly specialized.
In the fields of pure art one should work more deeply, more ideologically, more sensually. That is, to experiment, to work with feeling and ideas… conceptually.
All these “I’ll draw in the style of…”, for example in the style of classical or abstractionism, or make jazz…. – that’s fine if you’re a kid in school or a bored post-traumatic adult. But if you are a real artist, a creator, especially a skilled, experienced, an advanced sensory machine of reflection and synthesis, you can waste time if you procrastinate with craft.
Craft, all routine, tends to be simplified, digested by automation. It’s a middle-management niche and below. . . All labor has a property to automation, and the simpler the labor, the sooner it is automated.
But how can you automate sports, like soccer, or art, for example? it’s human, too human. Routine, patter, background, craft is automated. The genius of the human shines beyond mundane goals.
For basic consumption, background listening, arrangement of cafe walls and all sorts of things – generators generate patterns. In short that is background.
But the machine can’t feel, can’t understand the depth of the human being. Tomorrow’s real creators need to feel the cutting edge of the new, pure feeling and experimentation. To take off this bounds of dry stylistics and bread-and-butter. The brains of the best people will still be the clear best beacon and light for other people’s brains – that is, proximity.
The cult of youth is everywhere today, I don’t accept it.
Young people are mostly inexperienced, undeveloped, some are clearly stupid.
Maybe this is reflexive of trends in capitalism, economics and society? “Pour energy recklessly! who cares about the consequences and perspective, pocket the money while it’s lying around”.
Thirty / forty+ is the ideal age in which the true essence of a person already has time to manifest itself… After all, the young – they are often more universal-basic to see them more accurately.
Gain experience, knowledge, because this is the most important thing in a person – the brain.
Young people are infantile, unripe fruit.
Personally, inside (and maybe socially, outside too) it is always better to distill the negativity abstractly, disperse it – because it tends to concentrate into a point, thus intensifying.
And the main thing here, causing harm to you first of all, not to the object of hatred…In any situation, keep calm reasoning. How to disperse? Look more broadly at the situation, for example.
In dialectically opposite argumentation, one can assert that negativity and hatred ought to help to strengthen the power of response to evil…Sounds almost logically correct, but this tends to be an illusion.
The power that negativity gives is weak in its perspective and controllability, in other words, even in a situation where hatred or negativity is supposed to bring benefit, it does not bring it, because according to the characteristics of the system, excited by the unpleasantness of negativity, becomes weaker – it loses control and distance of response.
And what prevents from gathering the same power, but without the negativity, by laughing and destroying?
A vivid response can be not negativity, but a bright wit, a calm and decisive demolition.
One of the first music composition I ever created… Moody autumn 2009, while studying audio synthesis on a Linux machine. I started with ambient.
Dictators and authoritarianism, totalitarianism as well as excessive capitalism or even a concentrated ultimate socialism = damaged DNA of the cultural code of the cells of the colonies in leadership. Democratic models can heal such systems with the infusion of fresh minds.
Values are key elements in the DNA chain of the cultural code of subjects of society. Values of the vision to the real quality, will for prosperity, feeling and motivation for the long distance perspective, humanism, understanding importance of freedom, understanding of moral – and all those formed by will as long as it sees the value in those… all the mentioned are of the most important elements in the code to have a prosperous, successful time.
No matter what kind of simulation it is, the reality, i.e. the original from which the simulacrum is taken, will always have a higher value.
This applies to the virtual world, art from ai (simulation of human neurons and feelings), porn, racing games, everything. This experience, it recreates feelings, that is, the screen-surface, but not the atomic, spatial and ideological depth.
An interesting counter-example is video games, simulations of sports matches, say for instance footbal. It’s not really a simulation in the literal sense anymore….. there’s no reality where you control 11 people, it’s a new game, like table-footbal. A slightly new, different entity.
Absolute freedom is an illusion, like if transport in the city moved as everyone wanted it to – spontaneously and without rules. In movement (and life is movement), reasonable restrictions on the flow are necessary, you can’t just let everyone move freely and chaotically.
The same with aesthetics and ethics where limits are needed, they are the primary – framers of style.
And with politics. the problem is not so much that there is a leader with power, the problem is how smart and noble he is, that he is not a scum and where he will lead the system, to collapse if he is a fool and nothing or to prosperity and well-being if he is smart and noble.
Real freedom is found at a higher level – in formulating, realizing, planning and discussing these limitations – i.e., in freedom of speech, information.
Internet is an supra-state entity.
It’s an extraordinary phenomenon in our history, like the domestication of electricity.
After all, who ever said that countries, especially in the decadence of today’s fashion of so called “nations” – actually overgrowth weak bureaucracy/money hunting systems, are something ultimate, finished? Just because it was suitable at some point in our evolution doesn’t mean it will be suitable after that. Mankind is waiting for a completely different organization structure, a one to be closer to the perfection of balance and symmetry.
Let’s say they can even block it, turn it off, but in this way they block and turn off themselves, their economy and growth. The pressure of the technological evolution is quite a serious event, in fact.
In general, all forms of creative art can be divided into two categories: dark and light, i.e., warm and cool, serious deep and lucid – affirming and joyful.
In short, there are two extremes of feeling and emotion, and two extremes of up or down.
Black and white.
Minor-major.
With shades and combinations varying from one to the other.
But categorically no other is possible.
There is also gray: neutrality, futurity, technology, but it’s still a cool essence.
Why just those two? There are things that there is no point in asking questions about… There are and there are, + and -. What’s given is given. We look at the whole – there is yes, and there is no. Literally at the basic level of atomic perception there is a plus and there is a minus – at the level of electric charge, even at the level of energy distribution…
There is no such thing as absolute emptiness.
But there is the idea of absolute emptiness.
How empty is that idea?
I know what emptiness is, it’s when I’m not there… and the mind tries to go back to the place where it wasn’t and realizes it was empty.
So doesn’t emptiness equal absence?
The idea of emptiness is space without thought.
Absence is a relative notion.
Look at unknown people with kindness and neutrality, like you would look at your future doctor.
It is important for us to maintain peace and balance, ethics, aesthetics, decency… Until you see for sure that the person in front of you is an asshole, give him some trust, at least a little.
But never fully believe in anyone. Most people are stupid, lazy and selfish after all. Always keep your privacy and personal security at a reasonable level, especially today.
In the jungles of modern world’s capitalism, in a huge big company… they’re not aiming to make just a good product.
They’re just trying to make a product that will sell well.
Values there don’t aim a healthy, beautiful, prosperous society, but only to fill their own pocket with money, no matter if letting other people die.
That’s completely wrong because we are all connected, we are all fruits of the same tree – the tree of life, we share the same home – the earth, we share the same roof – the sky.
Value, quality, perspective? All these things are unimportant in the mainstream of capitalism today – just to sell, just to promote, just to hold on to their position.
We live in times of anti-humanism. Money and greed have conquered ordinary people. The sudden ultra-globalization of markets and sharp information revolution has only increased the masses of fools.
Systems and organization of resource and energy fluxes corresponds to the volume and geometric structuring of the environment – that is, what is the composition of the flow of people and their labor, its complexity and depth, so their self-organization and regulation of efficiency.
Today’s model is inefficient… our world is in crisis. With globalization and ultra-productivization, the money-market model of generations before yesterdays – of capital accumulation and distribution – is becoming increasingly irrelevant. As if feudalism were today. Actually what we see, by the way – the profound absurdity, the inappropriateness to progress and the common good of techno-feudalism of overgrown bureaucratic based, authority biased corporations and states.
All these systems work well on a small scale, adaptation is needed when outgrowing them. Laws, society, companies, money…
The next systems to be decentralization, universal basic income, and the rejection of money as the main stimulant of production.
Iran, China, Russia – these are cancer… Maybe some other times they might be interesting cultures, but not today.
That all looks very similar to an organism. Malicious elements sucked in like parasites, destroying everything around them, doing no good, unwilling and unable to leave.
The best people furiously leave those places. Such systems are doomed to decline in the long run. Absolute crap.
Growth for growth’s sake… but what’s the point of your growth, what’s the purpose?
Youtube, google, microsoft, meta, musk, apple, amazon, other similar big junk tech is also a cancer on the society, – as another example of general system-scale wrong-values directed degeneration. They’re all rotten: techno-fascists; we’re sick of paying, the market is monopolized. We should have thought of this earlier. It’s hard now. We’ll have to clean up this mess. Most people are lazy dumb suckers, that’s why all this crap can grow: on the passivity and ignorance of the masses.
Education is not about getting rich and converting science and school into money, as is common today… how utterly pathetic is that! Education is to develop culture and values! To avoid such unfreedom, blind money chasing, general decadence.
Live free or die trying, never obey to the idiots or money. You not a special one, you’re just a fruit on the tree of life, care the general usefulness at first. Anyway you’re going to decompose soon.
America is also stupid, the worst mainstream culture in the world, slaves to money. Drowning in their own problems, bad leader of the planet, trouble. We’re gonna have to clean it up again, build it back up again. That’s fire.
‘The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality’ – Dante
Aesthetically, even if one likes the colorful (for example, in clothes), it is normal and acceptable, and sometimes it might even be good, but one must remember to balance it with the “base” – the garnish – “rice”, “bread”, that is – the simple.
Aesthetically, but also ideologically. Balancing it with simplicity.
Black, white, gray, beige, blue…
In music, by the way, rhythm plays an interesting balancing role in this context
Criminal romanticism (idealization of criminality and everything lower-class – rude, insolent (for example, it’s also inherent in the majority of hip-hop) is deeply and universally spread in Russia (peak – 90s and post 2000s), because the Russian state and its cultural code are very rotten, started even before the USSR, and became especially stinky after the Bolsheviks’ times, today we can see kinda the same disaster, it’s evolution: neo-stalinism (authoritarian idiot-dictatorship with deep passivity of most people, a highly damaged and corrupted set of values that feeds the people who govern and follow orders) – cannibalistic and absolutely useless
For defense and sense, ordinary people unconsciously look for strength and loyalty in seemingly foolish and absurd criminal romanticism (a light touch of peculiar aesthetics also sweetens it).
As a result, the same people who were resentful of their own state and fed by this romanticism come to power in Russia (in modern societies, it’s still randomness that often decides the scenario: very often accidental people come to power, that’s why we need to establish democracy, it protects against over-powerful, over-confident fools), and the state becomes even worse, losts any bits of ideology, spreading just cheap cynicism everywhere, even more cannibalistic, eats its own people and craps under itself. That is, there is a vicious circle, when it is worse, and then even worse.
There is no way and no future, just as there is no good present without humanism and framing of big, good values; criminal romanticism is a sign of a weak, sick system, rotten cancer-alike values, it’s not Dionysus, it’s just an unhealthy degeneration, a dead-end code.
New Iksnx album has been released. Downtempo Acid Tape, Vol. 1 by Iksnx In December 2023, when I was working on jazz albums and beats, among other things and I happened to have an interesting sketch, I added acid riffs to the downtempo groove… and then it was decided to make an album like this.…
Finally I found time to prepare and release the new long-waited DAS album I’ve been planning in my head for over 4 years or so… this is the real sound of DAS – very experimental. It consists of tracks made at very different times, some just recently, some a couple years old demos. DAS by…
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