My life as the "real world Zootrop" (Zoot Allures/detrop)

Hi all!

I know that was an annoyingly positivistic greeting for something that is supposed to be as grim/somber/darkly humorous as an ILP post, however, as the great John Popper once sang, but anyway…

My first ever appearance on ILP was, IM(NS)HO, a “whopper”: First Metaphysics, by Dennis Kane (geocities.ws/dkane75/phil.html. I guess I wrote that essay just a little after that first post of mine.

My first interaction with Zootrop went, as can be seen, about as well that first interactions can possibly go. Back in those days (roughly 11.5 years ago, as of March 2017), you could very much say that me and him were pretty much the same dude (he is a mere 7 months my senior). Besides some very superficial coincidences (such as periods of extended homelessness), however, our life paths could not have diverged much more radically than they have.

We both needed to become successful left-wing radicals (revolutionaries?) in order to be able to find a place for ourselves in this wide, weird, wonderful world of ours. We both, in other words, needed to be able to “change the world”, because deep down inside each one of us, the idea of allowing the world to change us, was utterly and completely unthinkable.

Now, we all know the fate that has befallen Zootrop. Starting with an ego as big as Olympus Mons as an early 30-something, yadda yadda yadda, he is where he is today as an early 40-something.

Now, who am I?

I am, plain and simply, “the peace guy”. In this world, truth is not any longer the received wisdom of Encyclopedia XYZ, but rather, the first page of a Google search query. In many ways, that first page of results (google.com/search?q=the+peace+guy) is my true form of identification. After all, driver’s licences and even social security cards can be – given enough patient craftmanship – faked, but an entire life’s work as chronicled by Google (the foremost authority on world-scale applied A.I.) over the span of more than a decade is not quite such an easy thing to make up.

I am claiming to be the “real world Zootrop” in the sense that I have been able to – in living reality – accomplish the first step (I can rightly claim that at least one step has been accomplished; I might have actually accomplished more steps) in order to be able to build the kind of post-neo-liberal world order that the detrop-era “Zootsie” would have whole-heartedly agreed with as a fairly agreeable (or at least somewhat bearable) system of human affairs.

To make it abundantly clear, I am not here simply to raise the spectre of a beloved member of the sacred ILP fraternity in order to elevate my own status. I am here to accomplish something much, much more profound. I am here to get something that we may call a “post-technological” (or maybe: post-post-modern?) philosophical tradition actually started in the USA, and perhaps in the wider world of the the “civilized Western democracies”.

This is only the first post in what I hope will become a very lively and welcoming thread.

yuk, sounds like farming with deer antlers for ploughs. if you lived in the times when we did live like that, you like anyone else would have been glad to advance beyond that.

What’s your age, Amorphos, 982? You were a farmer?

Dennis, it is a good idea to live your philosophy to the best of your ability. What is your philosophy?

Hmmm… it’s pretty funny that rereading the opening post only makes me want to dive into some Sartre; not because of the content, but rather because of the dipshitty way that it all comes across. I quite enjoy being my cocky self, in the moment, in a public location, as a means of trying to engage real people in real discussions, but I very much do not enjoy seeing my cockiness reflected back into my own eyes, in a written form. Given that I am fully aware of who I am “deep down” (…or am I?), I can only imagine the reactions of people that read this kind of shit who have never even seen me, much less met me. The funny part is that detrop-cum-Zoots was such a hardcore Sartre disciple way back when, while I could not have been more in the Heidegger camp. I’ll think I’ll start looking deeper into Sartre’s thoughts as a way to get a clearer understanding of just how the world sees me, and I might revisit this thread with some of those concepts rather than just trying to naively defend my own first-order cockiness.

I guess this is all about trying to find my own “writing voice” …or at least to fully come to terms with the cocky dipshittiness of it.

Writing-voices are great - I myself have three of them - but reading eyes are scarce.
As we have seen in the example of health care, a very bad 160-page documents beats a 3000-page document of any quality.
What I’m asking is:
Can you show me what you’re on about in a walnut-shell? If I like it, I’ll tackle the coconut above.

I take your point. Being a country boy I have worked a bit on farms and in construction, so I can imagine what any of that would be like without metal tools. Not to mention that that kind of labour [poor tools] wont produce enough food for 7 billion people. History tells us how bad things used to be.

Yes I agree, being concise and actually saying something is paramount. This is why a wall of text is a wall of text.

Amor,

7 billion people do not have access to food.

In much of Africa, people only eat one meal a day.

Why do you think that I advocate for a stone-age mentality, reversion to inadequate tools? I advocate for dialing back mass production of luxury items, waste in general, frivolous consumption, and needless progress into natural resource expensive technologies.

Majoritively they do, but the point holds anyway because that just means we need more progress and not less.

If they exist they are surviving, and hence have ‘some’ access to food. - but that sounds callous.

I agree with your principles, but I think we will make machines which can reuse carbons endlessly. There is a lot of quartz in granite rocks etc. Everything can when the tech arrives, be broken down into its constituent elements, which can be reused. Automated robotic houses [like those designed in my head] won’t waste anything, and will self-clean/sanitise.

In my mind, there is a line, and when we progress past it, most of the earth’s current issues will be surpassed.

That Christian God fellow wants us to have as many children as we can bare, I wouldn’t want to disappoint any deity, although the earth mother might be feeling differently. I intuit a resolution whereby a balance can be struck. I think Thor would also disapprove of abject failure!

_

Amor wrote

The point I was making is that we have the food, but no good will to share. “Let them eat cake!”

Your next comment was heartless.

There is a line and it is called hard limits regarding natural resources which science and industry deny.