July 4th, 12pm High Noon MST Live Stream
Full Thunder Moon Lunar Eclipse

With a partial eclipse on the way I've been contemplating alignments, both hidden and revealed. In particular, Hawk and I have been ruminating on The Transparency Society by the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han, so I'll share a few excerpts here:

"Today the word “transparency” is haunting all spheres of life—not just politics but economics, too. More democracy, more freedom of information, and more efficiency are expected of transparency. Transparency creates trust, the new dogma affirms. What is forgotten thereby is that such insistence on transparency is occurring in a society where the meaning of “trust” has been massively compromised.

Wherever information is very easy to obtain, as is the case today, the social system switches from trust to control. The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but a society of control.

If everything becomes public right away, politics invariably grows short of breath; it becomes short term and thins out into mere chatter. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible. A vision directed toward the future proves more and more difficult to obtain. And things that take time to mature receive less and less attention.

As total communication and total networking run their course, it proves harder than ever to be an outsider, to hold a different opinion. Transparent communication is communication that has a smoothing and leveling effect. It leads to synchronization and uniformity. It eliminates Otherness. Compulsive conformity proceeds from transparency. In this way, transparency stabilizes the dominant system.

Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s immaterial relations of production, more information and communication mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast, secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communication without borders. They are to be dismantled in the name of transparency.

Transparency makes the human being glassy. Therein lies its violence. Unrestricted freedom and communication switch into total control and surveillance. Social media are also coming to resemble, more and more, digital panoptica that discipline and exploit the social.

In disciplinary society, the occupants of the panopticon were isolated from each other for more thorough surveillance, and they were not permitted to speak. The inhabitants of the digital panopticon, on the other hand, engage in lively communication and bare themselves of their own free will. In this way, they actively collaborate in the digital panopticon.

The digital society of control makes intensive use of freedom. It is only possible thanks to voluntary self-illumination and self exposure. It exploits freedom. The society of control achieves perfection when its inhabitants do not communicate because of external constraint but out of inner need—that is, when the fear of giving up a private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display shamelessly.

Transparency is an ideology. Like all ideologies, it has a positive core that has been mystified and made absolute. The danger of transparency lies in such ideologization. If totalized, it yields terror.

***

Today’s society of control possesses a distinct panoptic structure. In contrast to the occupants of the Benthamian panopticon, who are isolated from each other, the inhabitants of today’s panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency. Above all, the particularity of the digital panopticon is that its inhabitants actively collaborate in its construction and maintenance by putting themselves on display and baring themselves. They display themselves on the panoptic market. Pornographic putting-on-display and panoptic control complement each other. Exhibitionism and voyeurism feed the net as a digital panopticon. The society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame.
***
Trust is only possible in a state between knowing and not-knowing. Trust means establishing a positive relationship with the Other, even in ignorance. It makes actions possible despite one’s lack of knowledge. If I know everything in advance, there is no need for trust. Transparency is a state in which all not-knowing is eliminated. Where transparency prevails, no room for trust exists. Instead of affirming that “transparency creates trust,” one should instead say, “transparency dismantles trust.” The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails. In a society based on trust, no intrusive demand for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence. Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more. As the new social imperative, transparency is taking the place of a moral instance that would break new ground.
***
Today the entire globe is developing into a panopticon. There is no outside space. The panopticon is becoming total. No wall separates inside from outside. Google and social networks, which present themselves as spaces of freedom, are assuming panoptic forms. Today surveillance is not occurring as an attack on freedom, as is normally assumed. Instead, people are voluntarily surrendering to the panoptic gaze. They deliberately collaborate in the digital panopticon by denuding and exhibiting themselves. The prisoner in the digital panopticon is a perpetrator and a victim at the same time. Herein lies the dialectic of freedom. Freedom turns out to be a form of control."

~ Byung-Chul Han

I'd also like to recommend the documentary HyperNormalisation. Clicking on this link will take you to the video hosted on the ThoughtMaybe site.

HyperNormalisation wades through the culmination of forces that have driven this culture into mass uncertainty, confusion, spectacle and simulation. Where events keep happening that seem crazy, inexplicable and out of control—from Donald Trump to Brexit, to the War in Syria, mass immigration, extreme disparity in wealth, and increasing bomb attacks in the West—this film shows a basis to not only why these chaotic events are happening, but also why we, as well as those in power, may not understand them. We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. And because it is reflected all around us, ubiquitous, we accept it as normal. This epic narrative of how we got here spans over 40 years, with an extraordinary cast of characters—the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, early performance artists in New York, President Putin, Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers, Colonel Gaddafi and the Internet. HyperNormalisation weaves these historical narratives back together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created and is sustained. This shows that a new kind of resistance must be imagined and actioned, as well as an unprecedented reawakening in a time where it matters like never before.

...

June 29th 7:00pm MST Live Stream
Jupiter-Pluto Conjunction

We’re bookmarking this astronomical alignment in this acoustic journal. Some kind of alchemy is underway, on so many scales.

Scales. Running rhythm and scales has been the balm for our information saturated minds, and the energy pulling us out of the lulls.

Mercury is also in Retrograde, or so it would seem.

But does it mean anything?

If anything, it's just that we'll play what feels good to play, more than thinking about what sounds right.

June 5, 2020

Full Strawberry Moon

History's rhymes are on my mind. Can tides be turned or can we only surf the waves?

It's not just on the screens. People turning on each other, turning in on themselves. Escalation. Systemic cascades. These aren't just words.

What's the point of music now? The Spectacle Itself seems to be running the show. But the Spectacle Itself has no sentience. It's just feeding and growing on our fears. I fear what it's going to take to shake enough people out of complacency, of clinging to business as usual, for longer than the span of adrenaline fueled crises.

Music is not the point. Our emotions are not the point. This writing is pointless. Still, we play, we talk, we write. What is it we're doing here?

Derrick Jensen wrote this observation almost two decades ago:

"Our culture's deep foundation of competition creates waves of rage and hatred. Not only does the anger get misdirected because it's easier to express it against the powerless, and not only because we are routinely pitted against others of the powerless, but , most especially, because, if we were to focus on the real sources of that rage and hatred, we would soon find ourselves questioning our very identities.
Because so many of us have identified ourselves so deeply as civilized, as producers, consumers, workers, engineers, soldiers, policemen, teachers, we have forgotten that we are human beings.
And what does it mean to be a human being? We have no idea.
To identify so deeply with the system of production that permeates the deepest recesses of our bodies… is to identify with the founding processes of civilization: conquest and repression.
To recognize that our lives are based on these processes would - if we reject them instead of embrace them - set us adrift in unknown territory. Who would I be and how would I live if I were not a part of this system?
If we were to truly turn our rage and hatred.. toward the right targets, we would find ourselves questioning the basis upon which anyone holds power over anyone else. We would find ourselves questioning the basis for our own privilege..."

Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, 2004, pp 506-507

And then there's Hazrat Inayat Khan, who said that “There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life. ”

What's bullshit and what is true? What matters most to us?

May 21, 2020

The second broadcast of Infinitesimal Dialectic:

An interview with Hawk and Eric Francis of Planet Waves, around the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan, coronavirus, the immune system, body odor, internet protocols, and the function of memory:

(the first <3 mins of audio are sampled from the film Twelve Monkeys, by Terry Gilliam)

May 7th:
We will be broadcasting a live music stream of consciousness every full moon, at 7:00pm MST

Full Flower Moon recording:

Temperatures are rising and we're feeling a bit of the blues. Seeds are planted, the sage is about to bloom, and we miss others dancing the music to life with us. The world around isn't as still as it was a month ago, but fear still hangs heavy in the air. Even the birds seem to be holding more distance.

For a while I've been captured by the minor keys, while Hawk keeps circling from dirge to jig. The timing will suddenly shift. Melt into him dancing, or rush through my fingers. That feeling, of melody piercing the dissonance. That moment on the roller coaster right before the drop. Your whole body feels it.. Sometimes the notes go off the rails. Sometimes they don't. The sour notes, the in betweens - all part of it. Undiscarded. Woven in.

We feel a song on it's way to us. Until then, we'll bounce and weave the notes, some jarring, some gelling. Every day now, there's a few more moments of light.

April 30th:
Hawk's first conversation of The Infinitesimal Dialectic, with Derrick Jensen - derrickjensen.org

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April 4th, 2020, Jupiter-Pluto conjunction:

Thanks to those who joined us for our first live stream at aspenchant. Here's the recording of our musical reflection of the world-at-the-moment.

Most of the speaking samples woven into the music are the voice of Dr. Zachary Stein, author of Covid-19: A War Broke out in Heaven.

Here is a wonderful video discussion about that article.

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