After Such Knowledge

  Steve Hall’s transcendental materialism captures something essential about the human condition: tragic anthropology, symbolic architectures, damaged subjectivity, and the search for a framework that neither romanticizes nor despairs. Hall’s system is unusually well‑tuned to those tensions. Hall’s position begins with a simple but powerful move: human beings are symbolic-material creatures whose subjectivity is shaped by real structures they cannot perceive directly. The “transcendental” part is not mystical; it’s the structural conditions that generate experience, desire, and meaning. Three pillars define it (everything is coming in 3s): - Material causation — political economy, technological systems, and institutional arrangements shape the field of possible actions and desires. - Symbolic mediation — humans do not encounter the world directly; they encounter it through narratives, myths, fantasies, and cultural forms. - Tragic anthropology — humans are neither blank slates nor ...

Ali Khamain reported dead, but Iran's government has a deep bench. Does Trump want to destroy the state as well? This didn't work in Iraq. You need the bureaucracy. This puzzles  Casagranda An attack on Iran, inside the Lords of the Exchange frame, only makes sense if you treat it not as a military objective but as a strategic lever in the global architecture of circulation. In that architecture, Iran is not a “rogue state” so much as a chokepoint node whose disruption can rebalance flows of energy, capital, legitimacy, and attention in ways that benefit a transnational class whose power comes from managing substitution and opacity. The key is that the Lords do not seek victory; they seek reconfiguration. --- 1. The structural role Iran plays in the Exchange system. Iran sits at the intersection of several flows the Lords care about: - Energy flows — a major oil and gas producer outside Western financial control. - Security flows — a hub for asymmetric networks that complicate ...

Bolsen’s OCGFC and Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. describe the same transnational formation from two different angles. The cleanest way to see the alignment is to treat them as two lenses on a single global operating system—one financial‑structural (Bolsen), one political‑behavioral (Applebaum). How the two systems map onto each other. 1. Core actors   - OCGFC: asset managers, private equity, sovereign wealth funds, megafunds, global banks, and the financial plumbing that allocates capital across borders.   - Autocracy, Inc.: oligarchs, kleptocrats, security services, political fixers, and the global professional class that services them. Mapping: Applebaum’s oligarchic networks are the political expression of the same class that Bolsen describes as the owners/controllers of financialized capital.   OCGFC = the balance sheet; Autocracy, Inc. = the enforcement and political interface. --- 2. Operating logic   - OCGFC: maximize returns through globaliz...

Hey, hombre, instead of focusing on issues, let's focus on how to vote against the very existence of economic power blocs. First, an updated edition on the Anatomy of the U.S. If phrenology is popular again, my "bump" has been nagging me to periodize recent American history. Special emphasis: when oil ceased to be a sovereign industrial power bloc and became structurally subordinate to global finance. Strike "sovereign" - that word has become too popular since the Tarot-tossing Precarians have made compact with the Morrigan. What they're working on is their personal autonomy. Corporations have autonomy. They are also too freaking sovereign. America lacks sovereignty when it comes to granting and REVOKING corporate charters. Ditto the creation of money and credit. Citizens against Civics hate thinking about these. So does Bing. Confusion reigns, at any rate, between legal subordination and structured finance tranching v. geopolitcal-economic subordination. Th...

I've run into one of the strangest asymmetries in my mentor’s afterlife: the man gave us one of the cleanest, most portable diagnostic tools for understanding civilizational decay—"institutional entropy"—and yet the people who invoke his name most loudly tend to be the very types he distrusted, the goldbugs and the p’tit-boos who want a moral fable about “sound money” rather than a structural analysis of how societies ossify. These two, like revolting peasants, are the poster children for institutions that devolve from serviceable to disserviceable, except to themselves. These take on lives of their own, and become self-serving and self-protecting at the expanse of the larger society. Why didn't "institutional entropy" become mainstream? It’s too structural for a culture addicted to agency. My mentor's mechanism is elegant because it’s impersonal. It says: - A social group invents an organizational tool to solve a real problem.   - The tool succeeds.   -...

In 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧, Curtis explicitly argues that Bernays’ techniques were adopted by governments and corporations to manage, pacify, and steer the public in mass democracies, making them more predictable and easier to govern. He does not frame it as a single conspiratorial “purpose,” but as a systemic shift in how power relates to the public. On the subject of conspiracy, I'm more aligned with SDS founder Carl Oglesby: "of course they will; why wouldn't they?" Curtis opens the series by saying it is about “how those in power have used Freud’s theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.” He shows Bernays pioneering techniques that shape desires, engineer consent, and redirect unconscious impulses toward consumption and political compliance. He argues that these methods were embraced because they made populations more governable by channeling their irrational drives into consumerism rather than political actio...