We remain alive also in a dead internet

If someone is nominally trying to convince you of a point, but they shroud this point within a thicket of postmodern verbiage* that is so dense that most people could never even identify any kind of meaning, you should reasonably begin to question whether imparting any point at all is actually the goal here.

*Zizek would resist being cleanly described as a postmodernist - but when it comes to his communication style, his works are pretty much indistinguishable from Sokal affair-grade bullshit. He's usually just pandering to a slightly different crowd. (Or his own navel.)

Quoting from Marx: “An ardent desire to detach the capacity for work from the worker—the desire to extract and store the creative powers of labour once and for all, so that value can be created freely and in perpetuity." That happened to manufacturing a long time ago, and then manufacturing got automated enough that there were fewer bolt-tighteners. 1974 was the year US productivity and wages stopped rising together.

As many others have pointed out, "AI" in its current form does to white collar work what assembly lines did to blue collar work.

As for how society should be organized when direct labor is a tiny part of the economy, few seem to be addressing that. Except farmers, who hit that a long time ago. Go look at the soybean farmer situation as an extreme example. This paper offers no solutions.

(I'm trying to get through Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology". He's working on that problem.)

When debating directions, some of them focused on just never stopping talking. Instead of an interactive discussion (5-15 seconds per statement), they consistently went with monotone 5-10 minute slop. Combined with kind of crappy English it is incredibly efficient at shutting down discourse. I caught on after the second guy used the exact same technique.

This was a long time ago. I have since worked with some really smart and nice russian developers escaping that insane regime. And some that I wish would have stayed there after they made their political thoughts on Russia known.

zizek does regularly do a bit of meandering but damn, does everything need to read like a chatGPT summary?

“That which is dimly said is dimly thought."

It's not the same as getting it from him, of course I asked him questions through the years. But when you talk to someone you've known since forever, you rarely get a summary.

When he passed, his best friend that he'd known since the age of 4 wrote to me. He told me everything about their life together, why my dad made the choices he did, how things tied in with history (war, politics), and mentioned a bunch of other people I knew.