Amalgamated Thought

Or I dunno have someone ghost write a book for him. I didn’t read it and I probably won’t but the shitpost was still in me.

This has been a weird year for internet places. Facebook is taking a bath because no one actually likes the pivot into legless meeting horror. Youtube is seeing declining advertising revenue. Just about every tech company has announced either layoffs or hiring freezes. And… Twitter is well, Twitter.

Twitter was really bad and really good. It was the best platform that I know of for quick gut level reactions to news or gossip. It was the place to go to esoteric shit posts. It synthesized memes. It gave us @dril. On good days it had a magical generative energy of posting and remixing. On the worst days you just had to log off.

For me at least I didn’t use twitter particularly well. I had a mix of low engagement micro blog content and long thread dives into mostly legal or financial topics. These also were pretty low engagement. I don’t think I had all that much to say on twitter. My twitter use changed over time. I specifically chose to only use chronological timeline, follow no more than 200 accounts and, after my first smart phone shuffled off its digital coil in 2020, not use it on my phone.

All of this meant that I had a smaller and more manageable experience. I rarely interacted with massive storms as they unfolded. I followed interesting and funny people. I unfollowed and even muted accounts that continually spouted stupidity without cleverness or hilarity. I curated a list that had a shared a balance of news and commentary. I peeked into and watched a number of different interests from a cool and respectable distance. I am pointedly ignoring the parasocial aspects continually looking through the windows into cool stranger’s lives. I will say that if you have a twitter crush on me you can and should tell me before the rest of world crumbles.

In the wake of Twitter’s disintegration we are looking into all of our options. Tumblr is apparently back. Substack is rolling out more communications tools. I wrote a blog post. And of course every has looked at @mastadon@someinstance and realized they don’t want to understand things, let alone run it. People are nervous that the admin can e.g. read your dms or an entire online footprint can collapse if the admin stops running it or that things are different.

I get it. Running things is hard. If I have some sort of theme to my thought I should hope that you could detect that I care about the effort that goes into organizing and doing things. Building and maintaining systems is time consuming and expensive and no one wants to do it without getting paid. Getting paid means that the money has to come from somewhere. The system requires either impossible charity or (often) tasteless monetization.

Beyond all of that, as things get more complicated there are often state imposed regulations that often requires professional level expertise just for compliance. It hard to build and maintain small scale amateur communities when one of the amateur volunteers also has to develop a data privacy plan. This isn’t just about starting small mastodon instance or trying to some other human scaled tech venture. I don’t have a good answer for challenge of running lean organizations (co-operative or otherwise) that need to comply with a whole slew of complicated regulations. Welcome to industrial society I guess.

Ironically, for all of Twitter’s success it still wasn’t profitable. Now it is extra not profitable. Features (good ones and bad ones) are being shuttered. Half the staff has been fired or left. Nobody knows how it will shut down but I am sure that it will. It may be shut down suddenly for massive regulatory violations. It may hollow out over time like any number of social media. When it does I’ll be sad but I think I will manage. It isn’t good to place so much time and power in one digital space, especially if you don’t have some measure of control. In the meantime I am pulling the weeds out of my digital plot. It is time to spend some time cultivating my own garden.

I am continuing on my ongoing series on Tanya. I didn’t learn and I didn’t post last week because I was afflicted with the non-covid flu. It was miserable. Now I am mostly better. I think. Onwards.

As briefly touched on last week the first chapter of Tanya sets up a series of contradictions that are resolved by existence of not one but rather two souls. The first soul, the נפש בהמית or the “animalistic soul” is the soul of base desires. The animalistic soul acts as a קליפה, a covering of the soul^[1]The קליפה is a very big deal. The concept of the obscuring force is tough to understand without devolving into manicheism. It is not easy to reconcile the notion of an infinite light that is and … Continue reading. The animalistic soul, says the Tanya is the source of four different bad vibes that correspond to the four elements:

1. From the Fire: Anger and Arrogance;
2. From the Water: Desires and Appetites;
3. From the Wind: Empty Praises, Cynicism and Empty Words;
4. From the Earth: Sloth and Despair

The second soul, the נפש השנית or the נפש ישראלית, the second soul or the Jewish soul. This soul is literally a piece of the divine. We know this because of some attenuated body analogies and some biblical passages.

Because the animalistic soul is only consumed with the physical it obscures and crowds out the godly soul. Indeed the purpose of Tanya (so it seems) is to find a way to align or transform the wills of the animilisitc soul into expressions of divinity in the world.

The compiler of Tanya take this one step further and says something so outrageous, so insulting to the euphoria of humanity that it must be rejected outright. This second soul, the godly soul, the soul that is the connection to divinity only exists in the Jewish people.

It is one thing to say that the ways that the Jewish people express their godly soul are qualitatively different than the rest of the world. It is one thing to say that the deeper burdens of Jewish practice are a code for better expressing a connection with the divine.

It is a separate matter entirely to say that the overwhelming majority of humanity are fundamentally incapable of connecting with the divine in any way. Did Adam have a divine soul? If he didn’t then why was he tasked with refraining from the two trees in Eden? It is not succumbing to base desires if there is no alternative. Did Noah have a godly soul? Was the entire project of the ark simply a developed animalistic scheme to survive. (This one is less impressive of an argument. Noah did end up developing a taste for wine after his ordeal). The biblical text has at least 20 generation from Adam to Abraham. And even then Abraham was not his descendants sitting at Mount Sinai. Time moves in a linear fashion. People move through time. People have souls. Why is there a world at all if there is no expression of the godly within it? And if there is an expression of the godly soul before the existence of the Jewish, people why then do they acquire a monopoly on that expression?

I propose an alternative solution within the context of Tanyas two souls. I also propose a second solution based on the soul of action.

Within the two soul distinction of Tanya it is far easier to say that all humans have those two souls^[2]There is an interpretation that there is a third soul: נפש השכלית, the soul of knowledge. This is the soul that delights in the mental pursuit. This is also the soul that understands the … Continue reading. The animalistic soul still craves material affirmation. The godly soul does exist in everyone even those that don’t understand or organize that expression. Whenever anyone, Jewish or not, expressing goodness and divinity in the world they are expressing their godly soul.

I don’t want to imply any sort of gnostic religion here. A non Jew (and even a jew) can set up elaborate theologies that they adhere to stringently. These theologies may have nothing to do with their actual divine soul. It is irrelevant. Whenever someone does express that divinity in the world that is the when that godly soul is expressed. What does it mean to express the godly soul? Well we are barely through chapter 2 of Tanya. I will have a better explanation of how the universal godly soul exists in the world after I have a better understanding of the Tanya’s explanation of the godly soul generally.

My second interpretation is based on the soul of action that I touched on last week. There are not static souls that exist in states of רשע and of צדיק but rather there is a soul that exists to act. In each act the soul chooses and in doing so expresses divinity in the world or it doesn’t express divinity in the world. How one expresses divinity in the world is particular to each individual’s circumstances. In this way, a Jew will express divinity in the world through particularly Jewish actions. A non jew will express divinity in the world through different actions. Each person simply by being human and in the world has the potential to express divinity in the world. The divinity expressed in the world is not better or worse based on who has expressed it.

Next week: The Righteous sustain the world but who sustains the Chabad Movement?

For the last couple of months I have been learning with the new chabad rabbi in Newark. Because he is a chabad rabbi and I am terminally curious I agreed to learn Tanya with him. Since then I have had some thoughts that I cannot keep from welling up inside of me. They are too long and and too esoteric to really express on twitter. I guess this is why I keep the blog^[1]This is a good time to revel in the bloginess of this post. What I mean is that I have no editor and so I have no standards. Sometimes there will be Hebrew, sometimes there will be transliterated … Continue reading.

The last time I tried to learn Tanya with a chabad rabbi it was a miserable experience. I was at Rutgers and fresh off of my time at yeshivat Orayta. I was sharper in certain respects and less mature in others. But even then I went in looking to learn. It felt as if the rabbi who I learned with did not want to teach Tanya but rather wanted to go out to battle the משכילים. The time we spent on Tanya itself was over in the blink of an eye (because of course he had learned it so much that he had memorized it) so that we could get to his pet theories of proving god. This is all well and good but if your belief is predicated on bible codes and Pascal’s wager I will laugh and I will sigh but I won’t be convinced. Eventually we stopped and I did not feel any great loss.

This time has been better. We started with the the introduction and just today we started chapter 3. Since I am playing catch up I am going to break it up into a several separate posts. I will try to keep them relatively narrower and contained.

In the first chapter the “The compiler of the sayings of Tanya” (the בעל התניא, the alter rebbe &c.) sets ups a series of contradictions that will be resolved through his interpretation of the soul. These contradictions are in the tension between for example the pre-born baby promising to be a always be a צדיק never to be a רשע but that even if the whole world says to you that you are a צדיק to see itself as a רשע. At the same time there is a passage that says “Don’t ever see yourself as a רשע”. The entire first chapter is about exactly these types of contradictions with a healthy digression into “The middle type”.

But rather than wait for the extended explanation of the rest of Tanya I set about developing an explanation to resolve these contradictions. I said that there are no צדיקים and no רשעים there are only actions or expressions of צדיקות and רשעות (I am not sure that last is the proper grammar but lets roll with it). When for example the baby promises to be a צדיק this is an expression of potential. At the point where the baby is not yet born it has the potential to express צדיקות in the world. And so on. For each of the apparent contradictions I resolved them by highlighting the impossibility of static determinations in favor of an interpretation based individual actions in the moment.

In doing so I fused the נקודות הבחירה as taught by Rav Dessler, the concept of the purpose of existence as a place for humanity to make choices as the process by which the divine becomes more perfect and the impossibility/ the hubris of man’s determination “good things happening to bad people” and vica versa as brought down through איוב^[2]I had more but I didn’t realize the need for good notes in those first two weeks. A good exercise for review would be to go through and reconstruct what I did.. I am comforted in knowing that Rava is a בינוני and so am I because we each have the same potential to express צדיקות in the world. Needless to say my interlocutor was not amused.

I was doing this partially because I was being given to many cute stories about someone going to the Rebbe (more on the utter theological bankruptcy of the חב”ד movement soon) and got bored. This was partially because the soul of choice and action is more theologically appealing. But I am learning Tanya so I relented.

Next time: “Beyond Two Souls”. I apologize for the terrible David Cage joke.

Going forwards I have at least a couple of posts about things I have already learned. Topics include:

• A rejection of the chauvanist soul in favor of the universalist soul.
• The theological bankruptcy of the חב”ד movement. Note: this is a theological problem not a spiritual one.
• “Forget about כתר”. Buddy, an over-abundance of כתר and a rejection of מלכות is the shortest summary of my theology.

Recently the Facebook Oversight Board has been in the news. Ugh, right? Facebook is an enormous company. It has outsized control over many aspects of its users lives. People’s social lives are for whatever reason on there^[1]And if not there, then on one of its many component properties such as Instagram or WhatsApp. So Facebook set up an internal panel to make sure that its bans and restrictions made sense or something like that.

If you squint a little the board looks like a judicial body of sorts. On twitter (again, ugh) I joked that this was a Montesquieu style reform. This got me thinking about sovereignty. I am not going to try and parse all of what having a judicial body means for a corporation but I will lay out some arguments to see that it isn’t so absurd.

For the purposes of this post I am going to assume 1. That sovereignty is the power to *directly* control the mechanisms of violence and 2. the legitimacy of that first point is not the discussion we are having here^[2]It is an important discussion to have but if every discussion of sovereignty devolved into arguments about its legitimacy no one could ever get to arguments about sovereignty itself. By the same … Continue reading.

The first leap we have to take is that as a practical matter the sovereign cannot directly administer every individual expression of sovereign violence. Therefore the sovereign creates a mechanism for directing the sovereign’s violence.^[3]Again we aren’t discussing the legitimacy of these mechanism. I am also certainly not suggesting that the process of mechanisms makes the sovereign more or less legitimate. Eat your heart out … Continue reading. Again as a practical matter this takes two forms.

The first form is mechanical. Laws are expressions of circumstance. Whenever X happens the sovereign has decided that Y is the result. Don’t drive through red lights; If a person drives through red lights that person faces a penalty. Pay your monthly protection money to the Don; If a person doesn’t pay their monthly protection money to the Don that person faces a penalty. There is a rich discussion to be had about law, custom and enforceability but all of that is outside of the scope of this piece here today. The point is that even as dense and voluminous as laws are, they don’t touch every form of social life.

The second form is through delegation. The state grants out the power to invoke the sovereign. This comes in two ways. The first is the private invocation of mechanical laws. I offer to give you five dollars tomorrow for a hamburger today. You give me the hamburger. The next day arrives and I do not give you the promised five dollars. You invoke the power of the sovereign to compel me to give you five dollars.

The second is through the granting of sovereign license. This creates a space. Obviously there is the sovereign, supreme in its domain. But as we established above the sovereign is not directly involved in every facet of human life. This space is where the licensed domain of the demi- sovereign.

Here are some examples of demi-sovereigns to give you some flavor: The Don’s trusted lieutenant has the power to speak for the Don under certain circumstances. The sovereign wants a region to be administered properly so it gives a governor/ governing body the authority to oversee it^[4]In modern america we call these “Municipal Corporations”. Yes, your local government is a corporation. No, this is not a big deal.. The sovereign wants commerce to develop so it allows an organization to pool resources in a way that a single individual couldn’t.

What is tricky is that the demi-sovereign’s power and existence is often sketched out through the mechanical form discussed above. Demi-sovereigns are bound by whatever license the sovereign grants but otherwise they have free reign. The sovereign of Delaware has granted a license to Facebook to… uh exist. Facebook has to comply with the rules of Delaware and by extension the laws of its federation agreement^[5]There are a lot of laws to comply with. Which is why lawyers get paid so much. But often times very complicated systems are rooted in very simple concepts. That doesn’t mean the minutia … Continue reading.

What is amazing about the power of the demi-soverign though is that the same problem recreates itself in miniature. The demi-soverign, as a practical matter can’t… and so on. So the demi- sovereign creates mechanisms and sub-demi-sovereigns and the process repeats. The sub-demi-sovereign is bound by the mechanisms of the demi- soverign. Presumably if any of the conduct violated ran afoul the sovereign the heavy chain of accountability would weigh on the demi-soverign but that is different longer and scarier problem.

The whole point of this exercise was to show to compare sovereigns and demi-sovereigns without getting too caught up in the trappings. Sure a private profit seeking corporation derives its sovereignty from a different set of mechanisms than a municipal corporation but they are still both demi-sovereigns. It shouldn’t be shocking when the a demi-sovereign of the corporate profit variety adopts the mechanisms of its parent sovereign to try and manage itself^[6]I have deliberately not talked about the structure of the sovereign because I don’t want to get drawn into the legitimacy debate that I mention above. But, corporate governance owes many of its … Continue reading.

For me, the desire to draft polemics ebbs and flows. This explains why there are not that many posts and just about every post acknowledges the lack of posts.

Nevertheless, in the last few months I have adjusted some habits that make space for the blog to have a little more care and attention. When I got a new phone in late October of 2020 I decided that I was not going to use it to access Twitter. Twitter is a place to put spare attention. I would scroll it as a break at work or for a not insignificant block of time before and after work.

Even now I think that Twitter is a good place to find out about breaking news and gaffes as they happen. I am just not sure that the cost of my time gives a good enough return. By cutting down my Twitter usage in my spare time I have renewed my interest in my RSS reader. I also have returned to my roots and make sure I always have a book within arms reach.

But when I even as I praise the weblog I must acknowledge the rise of Substack. It seems that everyone has a Substack these days. For good and for ill. An earlier draft of this post was about how substack is for cowards. I still think so but that is a nuanced opinion that requires some development. I have some spicy opinions on the division of labor. But alas, I will leave it for another day.

In the mean time I have to catch up with a couple of months of intentional media consumption day. If I don’t post about it has it really happened?

Yes.

Life exists outside of online discourse. And though I haven’t been posting about I have been intentionally consuming some media.

Which of course ¹ I am going to post about. Coming up in the next few posts:

• The Chimes at Midnight (a meditation on friendship and eating scenery)

• Acca: Thirteen Territories Inspection Department (So you want to do a coup).

• 20 Million Miles to Earth (what happens when a movie exists to justify its special effects?)

Stay tuned for some C O N T E N T.

1: I say “of course” as if this isn’t a treadmill of not posting and then only posting self-flagellations for not posting. At what point to I give up on blogging and only focus on “meta blogging”?

First, I cannot believe that I pushed off this weeks Intentional Media Consumption Day for the presidential debate. I watched it. I regret it. I will watch the next ones out of some deep self loathing. I don’t know why I willingly choose pain.

Moving on to a much more interesting topic, the first IMCD was a rousing success. I ended up reading a Memory Called Empire in one sitting. I went into the evening thinking that I would read until I hit a good stopping point and pick up the novel either over the weekend or on the next IMCD. Instead I pushed forwards and went to bed a bit later than I should have but happy that I did.

As a bit of housekeeping before I start gushing, I will be speaking sort of generically when I review things. I want to do this because I want to preview the feelings and the themes that go into these works. I am very concerned with story beats and the minutia of writing and narrative. But IMCD is not about that. I don’t want to write only for people who have already consumed whatever media I have just seen. Also, spoiler warnings suck. I would rather take a step back then throw up big warning signs in order to go into the weeds. Onwards!

Space Opera rises and falls with how internally coherent the world seems. Even though we understand a fraction of the galaxy through the narrow lens of our characters we simultaneously know how enormous the world is through how they treat it. What makes A Memory Called Empire so compelling as a space opera is that it is concerned with the metropole of the empire. From the point of view of empire (in the generic sense) the colonies or the hinterlands or the everywhere that isn’t the capital, doesn’t matter. That is not to say that they aren’t important. People make their fortunes in the colonies. The tea merchant is concerned about stability in India, the oil trader with the middle east and so on. But empire is about politics and control and culture and everything happening all at together.

Even as A Memory Called Empire shows all of the terror and glory of Empire in full swing the novel is concerned with an ambassador from outside the empire. Not just outside the Empire, directly in the path of the Empire’s ever expanding sphere of influence. Empire expands not just through military conquest but through culture. It is ironic then that we are shown one dominating alien culture through the lens of another equally alien culture.

As much as A Memory Called Empire is concerned with empire it is just as concerned with memory and identity. Because A Memory Called Empire is still a science fiction novel this is taken literally. Memories can and are implanted into other people. Notably, this isn’t used to play some of the drawn out cyberpunk memory tropes of genuinely not remembering something a deleted memory of you did. Instead it is a meditation on institutional knowledge. How do institution’s preserve their identity even as the people within them change? How do you pass down knowledge to future generations without creating an oppressive structure to follow?

And sure some plot happens and it is good. As a sort of youth, I especially liked the parts where the various youth fall back on the habits of youth. But as I mentioned above I don’t want to get bogged down in the weeds of plot. I recommend you (dear gentle reader) take an evening or a day, however you set aside time, to read it.

This week I am watching GoodFellas. It turns out that I haven’t seen it. The Goodfeathers from the Animaniacs can only get me so far.