最近一个月终于初步整理完了中国西方的思想史，在寻找当代思想前沿的时候成为了WELL的会员。
WELL，译为全球电子链接，是反文化的领导人物Stewart Brand在反文化逐渐落幕，其Libertarianism思想精髓逐渐被新的网络黑客文化吸收，互联网兴起之后，建立的第一个网络论坛，在建立的几十年里聚集了当代的知识分子。2012年，在网络社区被大众占领，网络时代的商业模式被广告付费模式统治之后，WELL社区成员自行花400000美元，买下了WELL，以会员付费模式运行。
成为会员之后在论坛上游荡了几天，发现这里的讨论质量是我见过的所有的任何网络论坛最高的，很多人都是水平很高的知识分子、作家、音乐家、活动家等等。有经济基础的朋友可以考虑入会，他们有一个论坛是可以公开访问的，可以进去看看，讨论2018年的当代世界局势：https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/503/State-of-the-World-2018-Bruce-St-page02.html
http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/the-dark-night-of-the-liberal-spirit-and-the-dawn-of-the-savage/
Michael A. Weinstein
I propose to undertake a critique of contemporary American liberalism, specifically what is commonly called “neo-liberalism,” from the foundation of a phenomenological reflection on modern consciousness. Liberalism, as a political formula for self-consciously organizing society, is fatefully bound to the continuance of the modern understanding of life and cannot survive the failure to instantiate that understanding into consciousness, to make it the very constitution of consciousness. The current talk about a postmodern historical period appears, therefore, to be an admission that liberalism is a thing of the past. Yet the very term “postmodern” is empty of any positive content, subsisting tensely to signify a craving for its own transmutation into something fundamentally new, a fresh description of the structure of life that would carry with it a transfigured politics. There is also a radical uncertainty in the postmodern mind, a suspicion that there is no transformation on the horizon, that consciousness is incarcerated in the categories of modernity and must face the realization that the human self has at last become fully lucid to itself, that now is the time to learn to live within a final self-understanding and not to escape into new visions. Taken together the craving for radical novelty and the nagging doubt that it is a genuine possibility make postmodernism another instance of avant-garde modernism, perhaps the last one, the final modern irony.
Postmodernism is the modern reflection on the loss of dynamism in modernity, its self-closure, and the inability to get beyond it: postmodern consciousness bounds the boundless, but the “dynamic insight” of continuous change, as Karl Mannheim called it, has been inextricably associated with modernity. Thus, postmodern consciousness is the pure dialectical negation of modern consciousness, locked in an embrace with it, decreeing that it must assent to just what it is most unwilling to hold close to itself, its own being as a static form. Postmodernity is the most acute instance of the “unhappy consciousness,” an empty craving for liberation, for the unlimited, crashing against the success of self-determination. Politically, it is decomposed or deconstructed liberalism, a spasmodic hope for progress unhinged from life by a corrosive, nostalgic doubt.
Postmodernism is the most recent of the “waiting philosophies” that have characterized twentieth-century Western culture, the most profound of which is Martin Heidegger’s effort to open himself to the voice of Being, undertaken within an “interregnum.” I shall initiate a phenomenological reflection on modern consciousness by questioning waiting philosophy, which is constituted by the pure intentionality of a receptive strain towards that which does not appear and the appearance of that which is held in doubt. The intentionality itself cannot be criticized on its own terms: it is a possible structure of consciousness that is not self-contradictory; that is, one can form one’s being-in-the-world according to uncertain expectation. Thus, a critical approach to the unhappy consciousness of postmodernity will have to proceed by treating it as a symptom of an act of evading a more primary intentionality, as a form of neurotic compromise between a judgment of the truth about personal existence and a wish that the judgment was false. The life of uncertain expectation is a form of dissociated existence in which one carries out all daily activities according to the requirements of social function and legal fiction, while experiencing these activities as detached from any unifying significance. The sense of importance is fully transcendentalized into the experience of waiting—the round of life becomes reduced to killing time, whereas inwardness is intensified into a restless tension and dis-tension, according to the vicissitudes of doubt. Such a consciousness wrenches itself into a groundless hopefulness through nostalgia for a lost unity, translating deprivation into craving for novelty. It is the breakdown product of the religious will, the historicized wish for salvation divested of its object and even of any symbolization of a questionable object. The waiting attitude is based on the judgment that it is better to hold on to the religious intentionality than it is to become coincident with life, verifying Max Weber’s observation that the modern life that they had created for themselves was too much for human beings to bear. Postmodern consciousness is the very thinnest, almost transparent veil thrown over the modern understanding of life, a nisus towards the beyond superadded to finite mundanity and, therefore, the most austere of the modern cultural neuroses. As the pure wish for a transformation that is held to be questionable or even, more purely, impossible, it discloses its other, its dialectical reciprocal, without any necessity of interpretation. That other, detached from the vacantly straining expectation, but always juxtaposed to it, is the formed content of modern life itself.
Modern consciousness may be grasped most generally through the act by which the self seizes itself from within in a declaration-deed; that is, the self actualizes its own being through a declaration. My paradigm here is the Cartesian cogito through which the self is realized partially as a “thinking substance” though not yet as a complete life. Indeed, the phenomenology of the modern mind is a remorseless, uncompromising process of enriching and intensifying the inward center of individuated life until it reaches the limit of its empire, and must then either try desperately to transcend itself or learn to live within the boundaries that it has made lucid to itself. The historical moments of modern consciousness are familiar. From the Cartesian starting point of the thinking ego one passes to the self-legislating will of Kant and finally to Nietzsche’s passionate and personated flesh, best captured by Unamuno’s designation, “the man of flesh and bone, who is born, suffers, and dies.” One of the great ironies of postmodern consciousness is that it recreates the Cartesian starting point through an inversion. When Descartes, frustrated in his efforts to discover certain knowledge that would enable him “to walk with confidence in this life,” finally was impelled to make himself the object of inquest, he seized a thinking ego from which no linkages could be made to his daily life. Indeed, his only connection to the other-than-self was transcendental, was to the idea of perfection. Lacking a bridge to mundanity, he devised a “provisional morality” that enjoined him to live with good will according to the usages of those around him. For Descartes there was hope that genuine and satisfactory connections would be made to the world through rational investigation, so his was a patient waiting. Now with the modern closed in upon itself the waiting returns, only it is desperate and impatient. There is the same detachment of life from spirit, but it is not the pregnant suspension filled with expectation of the unfolding of a new age; it is bitter nostalgia ungirdled from perfection, craving for a miracle: the cogito has become the pour soi, thought has become the manipulation of signs, and only the barest interiority remains at the very margin. This interiority is necessary to express the judgment that interiority is a useless passion or, in a flight of bad faith, a word functioning to legitimate racial, patriarchal, capitalistic, or, most radically, linguistic domination.
其余见文章开始原文链接
This is the lastest development on the hacker movement as a social movement. It has involved open source hardware, open source industrial ecology, blockchain, and more important the clear identification of the adversary --- the global capitalism. But vaguely, I sense it has missed a vision of the society should be, and Amir Taaki is not clear on that. I am still reading contemporary philosophy on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxvwI2r_Sy8&t=2732s
Some notable authors on the subject:
Castells, Manuel Mumford, Lewis Bookchin, Murray Himanen, Pekka Abdullah Öcalan Barzun, Jacques
Last remark. It is not about merely geeks, it is about modernity, and the way out of current broken global culture.
An being updated post on the book
And Montaigne was right. Life did go on. The St. Bartholomew’s massacres, terrible as they were, gave way to years of inconclusive individual suffering rather than heralding the end of the world. The Antichrist did not come. Generation followed generation until a time came when, as Montaigne predicted, many people had only the vaguest idea that his century’s wars ever took place. This happened partly because of the work he and his fellow politiques did to restore sanity. Montaigne, affecting ease and comfort, contributed more to saving his country than his zealous contemporaries. Some of his work was directly political, but his greatest contribution was simply to stay out of it and write the Essays. This, in the eyes of many, makes him a hero. --- How to Live, Guard Your Humanity
Zweig knew that Montaigne disliked preaching, yet he managed to extract a series of general rules from the Essays. He did not list them as such, but paraphrased them in such a way as to resolve them into eight separate commandments—which could also be called the eight freedoms:
Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions, and parties. Be free from habit. Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate; be master of your own life. Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.
Only a person who has lived through a time that threatens his life and that valuable substance, his individual freedom, with war, power, and tyrannical ideologies—only he knows how much courage, how much honesty and determination are needed to maintain the inner self in such a time of herd insanity.
But many passages in the Essays seem rather to suggest that you should engage with the future; specifically, you should not turn your back on the real historical world in order to dream of paradise and religious transcendence. Montaigne provides all the encouragement anyone could need to respect others, to refrain from murder on the pretense of pleasing God, and to resist the urge that periodically makes humans destroy everything around them and “set back life to its beginnings.” As Flaubert told his friends, “Read Montaigne … He will calm you.” But, as he also added: “Read him in order to live.”
五四青年节快乐！
这可能是中国唯一一个向前看的节日。
风雨如晦，Long live the spirits.
P.S.
有段时间没发贴了，最近在看Montaigne（蒙田）的相关著作，和社会关系不大，也就没什么要吐槽的。最近来了蛮多新人呐，感觉主要都是学生，大家建设性讨论，期待智慧的人儿出现;)。
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58233.From_Dawn_to_Decadence?ac=1&from_search=true
这本书应该是（目前为止）看过的最叹为观止的书了，后半本我几乎是blaze through（不得不用英文让我觉得我中文好差）。虽然这本书对我个人的历史使命是（几乎）完成对我们生活的时代最后一片拼图(笼统地讲为什么西方以其的代表政府(representative government)为傲，却又鄙视政客；为什么社会主义、共产主义曾经是和自由主义分庭抗礼的理念系统/学（我觉得意识形态是一个故作高深，蠢化大众的术语），却成为类似法西斯的存在；为什么现代派画作充满了颓废的气息；为什么如今民粹主义（populism）在全世界兴起；威权政权存在的合理性等等)以及开始找到结合儒家、存在主义、自由主义、社会主义、技术乌托邦主义、Epicureanism等等新的生活政治哲学——突然觉得打了好多， 但这本书很大程度上能够让人“猜测”未来如何是“更好”的社会。如我之前提过，中国的问题不只是中国的问题，而是一个世界性的所有社会都缺乏方向的问题。举个例子，讽刺的讲，“我们”想要的民主反而在国外有大量的人要反抗，统称为反抗“系统”。
最后做一些备注。可能书很难读，本书旨在综合性分析历史上的文化，因为对提到的哲学、艺术（音乐、绘画、歌剧）、文学（小说）、历史甚至科学技术都是一两句话、或者一两段话概述，不对多数内容有相当了解可能跟不上作者的节奏。
最近听了好多毛不易的歌，觉得这个人太有才了。
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/24/chinas-social-credit-system-bans-millions-travelling/
最近几个月外媒一直报道社会信用系统，但是我看到的引证只有发改委发布的通告，报道里从来不谈被黑名单的人的数据出处，甚至不提undisclosed source，觉得报道不是很可信——外媒一直有恶魔化中国的倾向，很多报道就像中国报道西方一样片面曲解事实。所以有没有人知道数据具体出处？或者真实数据？
from https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/secret-state-of-north-korea/
Youtube播放流畅很多。
来自http://qr.ae/TU8QzQ 问题评论
不代表个人观点，不过也觉得合情合理。
(a) revolutionary romantics - “Another world is possible
(b) hard-nosed, clear-headed, strong-willed practical guys. True Communists, born leaders—the few, the proud, the selected. They don’t care much for “Another world”, they are focussed on the bottomless possibilities of this one. Their ultimate dream is self-realization through unlimited power. these true Communists do not always know their calling beforehand. Yet, when the D-day comes, they instantly realize their destiny, and majestically rise to the occasion. They never go halfway, until their cause is a done deal. Their motto is “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, and transforms into “Only the paranoid survives” once they are in power.
Any catastrophic disturbance of social order, whether provoked by war, or famine, or a natural disaster, or stupid, delusional, corrupt rulers.
It also requires an unusual level of inequality. Which is possible to measure (Gini coefficient), and then you know: when a big-scale calamity happens, which place is ripe for the Communist revolution.
This map shows the budding revolutionaries all good breeding grounds for Communism, courtesy of World Bank.
Key word: Inequality.
In case you are still guessing, Mao is self-evidently (1.b)
Another contribution from Dima, Oct 3, 2017:
If you want to feel like a real communist, you must do all the right things, in the right order: Read the classics and be able to answer the question: “What are the three sources and the three integral parts of Marxism?” Join a local Communist cell, or form your own and establish a contact with other local cells, in order to organize yourselves and propagate the ideas and practices of the Communist transformation of your society Take side with the subjugated working people in your neighbourhood and at your working place, use every opportunity to explain to them how their lives will turn to the better once the political power is taken by you. You must organize strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and other forms of civil action that disturb the bourgeois political life and reveal to the working classes the deceptive nature of so-called freedom of speech, freedom of association and other myths of bourgeois ideology. Never flinch from use of violence, including use of weapon, in fighting the oppressing classes. Their past history of subjugation and exploitation, as well as their future crimes, vindicate civil wars, mass shootings, taking of hostages and concentration camps. Never yield to the myths of bourgeois justice or morality, they exist solely for perpetuation of class exploitation. Once you triumph, you’ll introduce a new, better proletarian justice and proletarian morality. Once the oppressing classes lose their political power, you must immediately nationalize most, or all of the means of production. Anything larger than the ethnic grocery shop at the corner, anyway. You shall not forget the shop for long, though, because the small-bourgeois instincts of its dark-skinned owners in the long run inevitably produce the most reactionary forms of large-bourgeois ideology. Political rights of the oppressing classes must be revoked. No voting rights, no right to establish political parties etc. All bourgeois media must be confiscated, any attempts to spread bourgeois propaganda punished. Introduce a strict censorship. Keep a strict party discipline. Some of your comrades will inevitably get wrong ideas about confiscating bourgeois homes, shooting saboteurs, torturing organizers of subversive actions, and other necessary measures of class struggle. These comrades must be censured or purged from the party. If they persist in their erroneous small-bourgeois ways, they must be treated in line with the worst of class enemies. Revolution must be able to defend itself. Establish a large, well-armed defense force and an omnipresent, highly efficient secret police. Once the oppressing classes in the entire world are eradicated, you may consider to abolish your Communist state. But until then, these will be inviolable guarantors of your victorious proletarian state. From here, using your well-deserved power of the armed proletariat, you use your own discretion for further advancement of the Communist cause. This is well-tested many places and worked perfectly in Russia, China, Cuba and many other places. Don’t listen to what the detractors say about so-called crimes and demise of Communism. The Korean communists have been holding their ground for 70 years. Maybe, you are the one who one day finds a way to beat that record. This is what it’s like to be a true Communist!
过年好冷清啊，都没有帖子看。最近终于找到社会主义失败之后的政治哲学线索了，给大家推荐Murray bookchin这个人，零几年刚去世，正在看他的传——ecology or catastrophe: the life of Murray bookchin，初步感觉这个人是现代意识形态的先驱，我们时代的自由主义的洛克或者社会主义的马克思一定会受其影响。
诸位新年加油，It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
https://www.edx.org/course/citiesx-past-present-future-urban-life-harvardx-urban101x?utm_source=email&utm_medium=partner-marketing&utm_content=email-harvardx-course-citiesx&utm_campaign=harvardx
哎，人类进步任重道远啊，觉得Star Trek里共和国和帝国的斗争可能永远会持续下去，苏联解体之后美利坚也是堕隋啊。
Chinese Police Add Facial-Recognition Glasses to Surveillance Arsenal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-police-go-robocop-with-facial-recognition-glasses-1518004353
和很多立大圈子里的同学和学者一样，我也（曾）是一名自由主义者，但liberalism，这一自由主义的直译，从19世纪就逐渐被西方抛弃，被各种各样的新主义代替progressivism, Libertarian socialism, etc而仿佛现在中国的自由派，公共知识分子还在刻舟求剑，想要建立自由主义式的民主自由。可能我了解得并不细，但部分至少说明他们不成体系，没有认识到这个时代的根本问题，仅仅需求复杂问题的简答答案，而这种简单答案往往只能是历史倒退到更蛮荒的时代，而不是促进进步。没有出现新的证据之前，我也会一直保持这种观点。现在我只能说是一个自由主义同情者。同样，我也是集权国家的厌恶者。
承上，现在我觉得中国的问题不仅仅是中国如何取得民主这一问题，而是世界如何建立新的ideology的问题，近些年的trumpism, isolationism, polutism都是表现，所以一直在留意世界各地的动向，并期待建立或找到新的哲学。这篇帖子主要想要分享这篇采访，这是我看见的第一例，以建设性（constructive）的方式，尝试在混乱、集权的地区尝试以新的ideology and technology来建立一个新的社会。
关注比特币的朋友也推荐，Amir的观点是我目前为止看见最中肯的。
不过，我也还没有仔细研究这个人，和叙利亚的事件，所以也可能这是一个坑，请自己有判断能力。
Anarchist hacker Amir Taaki says bitcoin’s boom means it’s on the verge of a collapse
https://qz.com/1192640/anarchist-cryptocurrency-hacker-amir-taaki-says-bitcoin-is-in-a-speculative-bubble/
今天整理了一下中国现在的“天网”监控筹备报道
并没有完备整理，只是把今天看到的搜集起来了。
多数文章都是这篇文章里的链接 China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone
The Great Firewall of China: Background A project to inform people about the Great Fire Wall
Beijing police have covered every corner of the city with video surveillance system In China, Beware: A Camera May Be Watching You
China’s Tech Giants Help Beijing Spy on Its People Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020) China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning For Americans
Europe Is Back. And Rejecting Trumpism： https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/business/europe-trumpism-davos.html
刚发现本书，贴在这
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4793069-the-vocation-lectures
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2018/01/17/politics-in-china-weighs-heavily-on-business.html
