Tootfinder

There's a word at the beginning and end of Dawn of Everything that feels self-referential right now: Kairos.
> We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
> Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
Reading this as I write something very inspired by this work feels especially serendipitous, especially at this time. When they wrote the book, I think that kairos felt more serendipitous itself. But as the frequency of opportunity increases, the veil between realities feels more malleable... that perhaps we can poke a finger through and open a portal to a completely different future than the one we've felt locked into for such a long time.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/the-coordinated-swarm-lyhr

There are 3 fundamental freedoms outlined in Dawn of Everything:
(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings;
(2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and
(3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
I think these can all be captured in one statement when reframed as a system constraint: for a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.
People must be part of *some* system. Even individualistic survivalism is itself a system (if not a very good one). Then there is a corollary as well: any system that is not free, that is not optional, can turn optional systems into mandatory ones, and thus (adopted from the MLK quote) un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Edit:
I'm gonna drop the #Philosophy tag on here because apparently that's where I went with it. Challenges and push-back welcome.
Edit:
Aaaaand Its a blog post
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/an-algorithm-for-liberation
As usual, comments, typos, and questions are always welcome.

Blue Lights, Insurmountable Debt, and the Affordances of its Erasure
https://ift.tt/BQ3vU6g
By Justin Martin In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), anthropologist David…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Blue Lights, Insurmountable Debt, and the Affordances of its Erasure
By Justin Martin In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), anthropologist David Graeber and Archeologist David Wengrow set out to offer a new way of thinking about the human orig…

We all know Trumpism is an illusion, a facade, a game. His cult is breaking down as they continue to be confronted with the ever widening divergence between their perceived reality and his claims. I feel as though Dawn of Everything provides a useful lens through which to both understand this and to dismantle the ritual violence this cult is carrying out. Perhaps we can even extend this to ourselves to disentangle ourselves from the cultish elements of capitalist modernity.
Authoritarianism itself is ultimately a complex illusion, thus this analysis, the recognition and dismantling of illusion, should inform all elements of those who wish to express anti-authoritarian resistance.
#USPol #50501 #NoKingsDay #Portland