https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-63-the-one-dimensional-man
Part 1: Captialism absorbs everything: even your rebellion against it becomes a published book, which feeds capitalism, and generates pro-capitalists books. In a dynamic system, each tactic has a counter, and this generates (cleverly) more capitalism. A famous example is of Che Guevara’s rebellion sold as a cheap t-shirt: a purchasable identity of rebellion.
Part 2: The On-dimensional man is a book by Herbert Marcuse in the mid-60’s about our wealthy industrial nation orienting citizens into consumerism by developing “false needs” which we pursue. This drains our energy for cognitive activity as well as our desire for rebellion, which is channeled back into social status through material goods. This is a tactic of control by the affluent (the 1%) who increase luxury and comfort only to pair it up with increased exploitation. The dynamic of flattening values to a universal is that we no longer have polarity or dialectic controversy, which is the ultimate form of control. Marcuse says we don’t even question “technological rationality” anymore.
Part 3: Cybernetics is a theory of how systems moderate themselves, taking in feedback and adjusting. Philosophers use these ideas to discuss capitalism in terms of “negatives” and “positives”: the negatives are the check valves or regulating systems that contain or diffuse the positive energy that can get out of control and break things. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the negatives as “territorialization”, such as a fence or limit, and the positives are efforts to “deterritorialize”. Mark Fisher says capitalism now instantly reterritorializes deterritorialization. This is just some vocabulary to help us move forward.
0:00 Intro
1:46 Part 1 capitalist absorption
3:39 Part 2 the one-dimensional man
7:20 Part 3 cybernetic systems theory
10:11 Outro
