The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms

Empiricism, algorithms and smartphones are out – astrology, art and a life lived fiercely offline are in

‘The 19th-century romantics feared an inhuman future – hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar.’ (Painting: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.) Photograph: IanDagnall Computing/Alamy

Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it. It marked, perhaps more than any other crisis in modern times, a new era, the world of the 2010s wrenched away for good.

What comes next can’t be known – not with so much war and political instability, the rise of autocrats around the world, and the growing plausibility of a second Donald Trump term. Within the roil – or below it – one can hazard, at least, a hypothesis: a change is here and it should be named. A rebellion, both conscious and unconscious, has begun. It is happening both online and off-, and the off is where the youth, one day, might prefer to wage it. It echoes, in its own way, a great shift that came more than two centuries ago, out of the ashes of the Napoleonic wars.

The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms – their true calculus still proprietary – that rule all of digital existence.

READ COMPLETE ARTICLE: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/28/new-romanticism-technology-backlash

Leaked Nashville shooter manifesto shows motivation behind attack: ‘Kill all you little f******’

https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1721545965402726734

Portions of the manifesto belonging to Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale are circulating social media after months of debate regarding its release.

Steven Crowder, the host of the Louder with Crowder talk show, shared leaked images from the manifesto Monday morning. The pages released by Crowder allegedly reveal the intentions behind Hale’s deadly attack.

Wanna kill all you little c*******,” one page from the manifesto reads. “Bunch of little f****** w/ your white privlages f*** you f******.”

The National Desk has verified the authenticity of the leaked images through its Nashville affiliate, FOX 17 News.

 

https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/leaked-nashville-shooter-manifesto-shows-motivation-behind-attack-kill-all-you-little-f-audrey-hale-aiden-covenant-school-march-schooting-louder-with-crowder

a massive collection of prehistoric rock art spanning over 8 miles within the Serra da Capivara mountains

Austin Osman Spare – occultist, avant-gardist and ‘Britain’s first pop artist’

The London painter’s works have become spookily popular of late

Austin Osman Spare – occultist, avant-gardist and ‘Britain’s first pop artist’
Austin Osman Spare at work in his Brixton studio in November 1947 © Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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https://www.ft.com/content/f8ecb986-f1b5-4df0-9c59-0f2aa2b5fd9e

Collectors of the work of early 20th-century English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare have, up until now, been of a type. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin has a notable number of paintings, as did the late Genesis P-Orridge – founder of industrial sound provocateurs Throbbing Gristle. In his memoir, Orridge describes an acquaintance shaking and shouting: “Those paintings, cover them, they’re alive!” One particular work, The Ides, depicting two aggressive-looking self-portraits of Spare flanked by Romanian prostitutes, was turned to face the wall. Months later, after touring overseas, Orridge returned to discover house-sitters had turned the painting around and vanished, leaving rooms splattered with red paint. Spooked, Orridge sold the painting to Chris Stein of Blondie.

LINK: https://www.ft.com/content/f8ecb986-f1b5-4df0-9c59-0f2aa2b5fd9e

Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control by Jesús Sepúlveda

Poetic Reason in the Age of Digital Control

   by Jesús Sepúlveda“Instrumental reason is at the core of the emerging bio-tech paradigm, which is rapidly increasing the social, ecological, and spiritual degradation produced by civilization as a model of dominance. To counter this apocalyptic scenario based on the domination of nature, I propose poetic reason as the foundational matrix to move away from the instrumentalization of life in order to reshape in a more harmonious way the coexistence of human beings with each other, the environment, the cosmological order, and the animal realm.”

LINK: https://badideapublishing.com/

Special Pre-Release Discount for Statio Numero Illustrated

Statio Numero
Statio Numero

Statio Numero

Chapter 3 of the Liminal Cycle

Knowledge of Liminal and Xen, which make up the first two parts of the trilogy, will be necessary for understanding this work.

Statio Numero

A product plan left behind documents the creator’s descent into a parallel world or maybe simply madness. A story about persona, identity, liminality, and voice.

Madness and Religious Experience with Richard Saville-Smith

I’m joined by Richard Saville-Smith to discuss his book Acute Religious ExperiencesMadness, Psychosis and Religious Studies.

Book link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/acute-religious-experiences-9781350272910/

KunstlerCast 377 — John Michael Greer on Magic and the Reenchantment of Daily Life

KunstlerCast - Suburban Sprawl: A Tragic Comedy

#377 — John Michael Greer blogs at Ecosophia, subtitle, Toward an Ecological Spirituality. JMG has been an astute observer of Western Civ’s arduous economic and cultural descent, and is the author of many books, both novels and non-fiction, including Green Wizardry, After Oil, The Wealth of Nature, and Not the Future We Ordered. Star’s Reach, is a novel set 400 years ahead in America’s neo-medieval future, The King in Orange, a meditation on the relationship between archetype psychology and the occult as acted out in politics and culture. Things are getting weird in America, wouldn’t you agree? Even a bit supernatural. To help us navigate through this wilderness of the weird, JMG and I talk about magic and the re-enchantment of daily life in these turbulent times.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Sound artist eavesdrops on what is thought to be world’s heaviest organism

Artist records underground sounds generated by Pando, a huge group of aspens in Utah considered to be a single organism

Pando is made up of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens, which are considered to be a single organism, with the ‘trees’ actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Pando is made up of 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens, which are considered to be a single organism, with the ‘trees’ actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/10/sound-artist-eavesdrops-on-what-is-thought-to-be-worlds-heaviest-organism-pando-utah

When it comes to the world’s heaviest living organism, it is a “forest of one tree” that is thought to take the crown. Now a sound expert is listening into the quiet grove in an attempt to hear its secrets.

Known as Pando – Latin for “I spread” – the 47,000 genetically identical quivering aspens in south-central Utah are considered to be a single organism, with the “trees” actually branches thought to be connected by a shared root system.

The upshot is a vast living entity, thought to be thousands of years old, that covers 43 hectares (106 acres) with a dry weight of about 6m kg, making it, putatively, the Earth’s heaviest living organism. But it is also an organism in danger, with experts warning Pando is probably dying off due to human actions.

Now an acoustic artist has revealed how he has delved deep to uncover fresh insights into the tree.