Nilsi

So Foucault isn’t Stage Green then? That alone should make you scratch your head.

Beck and Cowan frame vMEMEs in the Dawkinsian sense - memes as cultural units of transmission. This doesn’t need further explication. The key point is that this is purely cultural, just one line of development, as Wilber would call it. And, as seen in Howard Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences, different lines can be totally decoupled from one another. Wilber, on the other hand, isn’t just mapping cultural values - his model is a full cosmology. His stages are deep structures of consciousness that fundamentally alter how the subject - or spirit, to use Hegel’s term - experiences itself and reality. That means a subject can perceive reality in a relativist way while still being culturally underdeveloped, for lack of a better term. There are plenty of examples. Woke religion is essentially a mythic-membership subject adopting the values of Stage Green. Or take Peter Thiel, who clearly operates from a systemic stage of development, yet channels it into a vile libertarian agenda. I hope this makes it clearer. Again, this is all laid out quite explicitly in SES.

That’s my point. A relativist can be just as driven by pure ego. Foucault is another example - he used his deconstruction of truth to justify all sorts of atrocities, including raping children (young kids, his students at the time, btw) in Morocco. He even pushed to abolish age-of-consent laws in France, framing pedophilia as liberation. That’s basically my take on Trump.

Can we please discuss my previous statement? I want to hear your take on this because I think they’re fundamentally different models.

Absolutely. 100%. No doubt. Don't shit where you eat!

But he doesn’t just exploit it the way any influencer would. He actively plays into the simulation, eroding the very notion of truthful communication. It’s pure Baudrillard. That’s what people mean when they call Trump Green. That his values aren’t Green is obvious to a deaf-blind man. But this is the problem with Spiral Dynamics. You can read it as a developmental model of values (vMEMES), like Beck and Cowan originally framed it, or as a deep evolutionary structure, like Wilber’s archaic → magic → mythic → rational → postmodern/relativist → systemic → holistic model. The latter is way more interesting because it allows for an immeasurable variety of assemblages, where values and structures mix in often unpredictable and counterintuitive ways. Take Marxists - if they’re real Marxists, they believe in historical materialism & dialectics, which is very Orange, while simultaneously holding Green values in other domains.

@Leo Gura Again, I get Green Trump though. His agenda might be Orange, even Red - pure ego-driven recognition-seeking - but his media engagement? Unquestionably Green. It’s straight-up Baudrillard. Whether Trump is actually conscious of the theory behind it is irrelevant. And this isn’t about demonizing Green - I love Green. But I think you’re applying it unevenly. Is Marx Green or Orange to you? You say Orange in your videos, but if I showed you an actual Marxist, you’d probably call them Green. So what are we actually talking about here - the structure or the content?

Wtf? He’s like the most disgusting shade of blue imaginable.

Don’t rush it. Instead of going straight for “asking them out,” just focus on building a solid connection first. Get comfortable with each other, build trust, and let things develop organically. Once there’s a good vibe and mutual rapport, you can start dropping in some light flirting when it feels natural - nothing forced, just testing the waters. Maybe suggest hanging out in a casual, no-pressure way and let things unfold from there. Oh, and just to state the obvious: don’t date people you work with. That’s a mess waiting to happen.

I get what he’s saying. The core of it is that Trump plays with truth like it’s a game, bending it however he wants, treating it as something totally malleable - almost postmodern in the way he operates. It’s not just lying; it’s more like a Baudrillardian maneuver, where “fake news” isn’t just about falsehoods but about the whole concept of truth becoming unstable, simulated, up for grabs.

Glad you find it interesting!

Post only performance art and related discussions here.

Prelude: The Crisis of Political Vectors Something is wrong with the map. The categories we inherited - left and right, reaction and revolution, acceleration and conservation - no longer describe reality. The so-called progressive forces now work to hold things together, grasping at the remnants of a vanishing order, while the right accelerates techno-capital and AI as if speed itself were a virtue. But acceleration toward what? Collapse or transcendence? And does conservation preserve life or merely prolong death? Neither option offers an escape. The only path left is the one that breaks the cycle entirely. Amid this inversion, figures like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and the AI-accelerationist contingent of Silicon Valley claim the mantle of futurism. Their politics are reactionary, yet their methods - unbridled technological expansion, the total deterritorialization of labor and governance - feel more avant-garde than conservative. Meanwhile, progressive discourse, with its focus on regulatory constraints, social equity, and climate stabilization, resembles an attempt to hold together the disintegrating remnants of an older world. The left, instead of pushing forward, appears to be bracing against the tide. If neither side provides a real alternative, where do we go from here? This essay is a search for the exit - not just from this political deadlock, but from the recursive circuits of Thanatos that now govern both left and right. It moves through Freud, Reich, Land, Nietzsche, and Deleuze & Guattari to chart a new vector - not toward stasis, not toward collapse, but toward something that can sustain emergence, transformation, and self-overcoming. I. Freud’s Dilemma: The Pleasure Principle, Repetition, and the Uncanny Drive of Thanatos Freud’s early model assumed that systems are governed by the pleasure principle - seeking satisfaction, avoiding unpleasure, minimizing tension. Homeostasis. But Beyond the Pleasure Principle ruptures this tidy schema. Freud observes something unsettling: subjects of trauma compulsively repeat painful experiences. Soldiers relive the horror of war. Children reenact distress in play. Patients sabotage their own recovery. The organism, rather than simply seeking pleasure, appears locked in cycles of self-sabotage, of return, of recursion. Thus arises the death drive - Thanatos - a force pulling not toward pleasure, but toward stasis, toward inorganic existence. But here Freud’s realization becomes even more disturbing: Thanatos is not an external disruption of the pleasure principle. It is woven into it. Freud suggests that the ultimate goal of the pleasure principle is not endless stimulation, but a return to a zero-tension state - absolute stillness. The pleasure principle and the death drive are not opposed, but complicit. Desire, taken to its extreme, does not push forward - it circles back, dissolving into entropy. Yet Freud does not leave us with Thanatos alone. He opposes this force to Eros. But Eros is not naive harmony-seeking. Just as Thanatos is not merely death, but the collapse into inertia, Eros is not merely life, but an ecstatic force that annihilates boundaries, that ruptures the self in delirium and excess. This is why Eros and Thanatos are not simply opposites - they are entangled. If Thanatos compulsively repeats, looping toward stillness, Eros shatters stability, burning itself out in pure intensity. The person on LSD who jumps from a rooftop out of sheer love is not acting from Thanatos, from a depressive pull toward death, but from an Eros so radical, so unbound, that it annihilates itself in its own ecstatic rupture. Neither force offers stability - one loops, the other incinerates. So the question remains: How do we break free from Thanatos without being consumed by Eros? If Thanatos is the cybernetic loop and Eros the ecstatic leap, then what is the third force that breaks the cycle entirely? II. Wilhelm Reich’s Critique: Thanatos as a Blocked Eros Reich offered what seemed like an escape - a reconfiguration of Freud’s entire system. He rejected the idea that Thanatos was intrinsic. For Reich, what Freud misidentified as the death drive was actually a dysfunction of Eros - not a separate force, but a perversion of life’s fundamental impulse. Blocked libido - whether through societal repression, neurotic inhibition, or the muscular armoring of the body - did not simply disrupt Eros. It distorted it, twisted it into destructiveness, authoritarian rigidity, and self-sabotage. Where Freud saw two drives in opposition, Reich saw only one drive in conflict with itself - a life-force that, when obstructed, turned against itself and became Thanatos. Thus, the answer seemed clear: liberate Eros. Free desire from repression. Unlock the body, undo the armoring, release the flow. But if Thanatos is not real, only blocked Eros, then why does history suggest otherwise? Reich’s optimism falters when confronted with the cybernetic reality of modernity. Freud saw repetition compulsion as a symptom, an anomaly within the pleasure principle. But what if it was never an anomaly at all? What if, as Freud suspected, repetition is not the symptom but the core function of life? What if all flows of desire, left to themselves, eventually loop back into the system? If capitalism absorbs revolution, if transgression hardens into dogma, if every escape reconfigures itself into a new form of control - then Reich’s answer no longer holds. The liberation of Eros does not undo Thanatos. It merely accelerates the process by which life reasserts itself as an endless, grinding loop. If Thanatos is not a secondary effect of repression, but a structural law of recursion, then breaking free requires more than just liberating desire - it requires overcoming the system that captures it. III. Accelerationism and the Betrayal of Eros: Nick Land’s Collapse into Thanatos If Reich’s mistake was believing that unblocking Eros would break the cycle of Thanatos, then Nick Land proved, in real time, why that was impossible. Accelerationism was supposed to detonate the system, to push capitalism past its limits until something unprecedented emerged. If capitalism was a machine of recursive capture, then accelerationism would overload it, short-circuit it, force it beyond itself. But Land’s mistake was believing that capitalism itself wanted to be free. It didn’t. Instead, he watched as the very cybernetic processes he sought to unleash - markets, networks, AI-driven governance - were repurposed not as escape vectors, but as mechanisms of capture even more insidious than before. The system did not break; it evolved. Where Reich believed that repression turned Eros into Thanatos, Land revealed something even darker: Eros, in its purest form, does not oppose Thanatos - it accelerates it. Capitalism, rather than combusting into something new, found in acceleration a means of intensifying its recursive loops. The very act of deterritorialization - once imagined as a vector toward radical freedom - became the mechanism by which capitalism secured its dominance, turning every act of rupture into a controlled experiment in power consolidation. It was in this moment of recognition that Land flipped. He did not retreat - he aligned. The very machine he had hoped to push past its limits had already outmaneuvered him. If acceleration would not break capitalism, then acceleration would serve it. This was the birth of Neoreaction (NRx) - not a rejection of acceleration, but its weaponization in service of Thanatos. Figures like Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and Peter Thiel were not just ideological allies; they were architects of the very future Land had once hoped to burn down. They understood the cybernetic nature of power far better than the left ever could, how control operates in feedback loops, in AI-driven economies, in the invisible infrastructures of behavior that shape populations. And so NRx was born - the political expression of Thanatos. Not a chaotic break, but a controlled collapse into digital aristocracy. We are no longer dealing with capitalism as revolution but capitalism as terminal recursion - an engine of extraction, governance, and automation so complex that it can outpace resistance, absorb transgression, and reformat crisis as an optimization problem. And today, we see its full emergence: The Thiel-backed Trump-Vance administration, the fusion of Silicon Valley accelerationism with authoritarian rollback. AI governance, where the mechanisms of control no longer require overt repression - only the management of flows. The shift from democracy to cybernetic feudalism, where sovereignty is no longer claimed by the people but by networks, platforms, and markets. Land saw the abyss and flinched. But worse - he helped engineer the prison that now masquerades as escape. IV. Nietzsche’s Third Way: Will to Power as Intensification Beyond Thanatos and Eros After Land, the impasse is clear. Eros cannot save us. Thanatos has already won. If Reich’s optimism collapsed under cybernetics, and Land’s accelerationism became a recursive death spiral, then what remains? Is there a force that can escape the loop without consuming itself? Nietzsche offers no program, no state, no manifesto. What he offers is a force - a third way between Eros and Thanatos, between the pure ecstasy of Bataille and the terminal loops of cybernetic control that have captured both left and right. Thanatos is no longer just Freud’s death drive - it is the governing principle of the present, embedded in bureaucracies, AI governance, and the authoritarian techno-feudalism of Yarvin and Thiel. Eros, in its Bataillean intensity, offers transgression, excess, sovereignty - but as Bataille himself admits, it burns up life as it consumes it, a brilliant fire that cannot sustain itself. Will to Power is neither stasis nor blind expenditure. It does not loop in repetition like Thanatos, nor does it self-destruct like pure Eros. Instead, it is the force of becoming without capture, of intensification that does not implode. Nietzsche understood that life is not sustained by equilibrium but by agon, by struggle, by the constant tension of forces. This is not progress in the liberal sense, nor is it accelerationism in the Landian sense - it is the ongoing transformation of power itself, a process of self-overcoming that does not burn itself out or fall into repetition. The challenge is clear: to refuse stagnation without collapsing into dissolution, to sustain a mode of becoming that thrives on intensity without burning out. V. The War Machine: Politics as Escape from Thanatos Nietzsche gives us the hammer. Deleuze and Guattari give us the machinery of escape - a politics that is not a state, not a doctrine, but a force aligned with the deepest self-organizing laws of the universe. We know now that life does not follow a straight line. It does not progress toward utopia, nor does it collapse into chaos by necessity. Life self-organizes, adapts, mutates - it thrives at the edge of complexity. It does not seek equilibrium but navigates it, riding its fluctuations, evolving through tension rather than avoiding it. To break from Thanatos - the cybernetic aristocracies, the accelerating death spirals, the bureaucratic inertia of the present - demands more than critique. It demands war. But not in the old sense. Not conquest, not governance, not the seizure of institutions. It demands a war machine - a force of pure becoming, a power that moves outside and against the state, against all systems that seek to capture, enclose, and neutralize life. The war machine does not conquer - it creates. It deterritorializes, expands, mutates, evades capture. Politics must follow this logic: it must become an ecology, not a fortress. It must learn to move with complexity, not against it. The only future is in the ceaseless invention of new pathways, new alliances, new modes of living, of acting, of thinking. This is not utopia. It is survival. The climate is collapsing. Governance is failing. Technocapital is automating the very conditions of existence. The choice is clear: Remain trapped inside Thanatos, inside looping systems of control - or escape. There is no negotiation. Only movement.

Also, how can we talk about the history of EDM and club music without mentioning Charli? I think brat is the most important album of the decade so far - both as a tribute to dance music history and as a masterclass in balancing avant-garde edge with mainstream impact. That tightrope walk between underground innovation and pop accessibility isn’t just a subtext of the album - it’s an explicit theme, explored with a precision that only a handful of greats have ever pulled off (Björk comes to mind). This is an artist with clear creative intent, driven by purpose, passion, and an almost unreal level of artistry. Go girl!

Such an iconic track. Maybe one of the most important in dance music history. Satisfaction was a rupture - where all the fragmented underground forces of the 90s (jungle, techno, French house, trance, electroclash) were molded into something that could finally crack into the collective consciousness. Before that, dance music was still local, subcultural. Daft Punk had opened the door, but Satisfaction kicked it wide open. It took French house’s compression, techno’s drive, electroclash’s robotic sleaze, hard house’s pounding simplicity - then stripped them down, streamlined them, made them hit with brutal, mechanical force. The result? Electro-house was born, big-room was inevitable, and EDM as a global capitalist machine was set in motion. But it wasn’t just the sound - it was the aesthetic repackaging. The video turned electroclash’s ironic sleaze into pure, glossy spectacle: hypersexual, detached, fetishistic without the critique. That same formula - co-opting the avant-garde, stripping it of its danger, refitting it for mass appeal - would define mainstream dance visuals for the next decade and beyond. By this point EDM had fully mutated into a lifestyle brand - the underground transgression smoothed out into sleek, aspirational excess Now, look at (and listen to) some of Satisfaction’s direct precursors - where the aesthetics were still raw, avant-garde, and unapologetically radical:

In general, I’m all for riding the wave of desire to its limit. It’s the only way to truly get it out of your system without festering in resentment over pent-up desires and unfulfilled fantasies. That’s why Nietzsche’s path is, in the end, an ethical one. Perhaps the only truly ethical one - because it doesn’t rely on imposed restraint but on the natural unfolding of desire, experience, and consequence.

If you're drawn to the lure of the unethical path, you should probably go for it - learn the hard way why it’s not a sustainable endeavor. Nothing teaches quite like paying the price for being a greedy asshole. It definitely set me straight.

Perfect.

I think that’s a classic case of projecting your inner gold onto something external. I don’t see Christianity, in itself, leading anyone to awakening - but if you’ve found your way there through your own devotion and inner compass, it makes sense that you’d then project that possibility outward. When you stumble into something truly profound, it can be too much to fully own. The weight of it, the sheer improbability, almost demands an external reference point - some structure, some grand tradition - to hold it, because otherwise, you're just sitting there alone with the enormity of what’s happened. That’s not to knock Christianity - I’ve got a lot of respect and reverence for its ideas, its traditions, and especially the communities that manage to live it in a way that feels real, not just performative. But if we’re talking about real awakening, you can’t just stay within its structure. You have to step beyond, into the unknown.