JW Consciousness Stream - 2 December 2025

JW Consciousness Stream - 2 December 2025

This entry represents something like my stream of consciousness for Tuesday, 2 December, 2025. This is basically like a journal entry that I work on throughout the day and then don't go back to correct errors.

Originally published to: https://deliverystack.net/2025/12/02/jw-consciousness-stream-2-december-2025/

Topics in this post:

I started writing something about struggling with my own ego, but I'm not sure it's done and I might be a bit embarassed to publish it.

It's a bit disturbing that, due to "AI", I can't be certain whether this is his voice or these are his words, but regardless, I found some value in this:

I heard somewhere else that he chose to persist with alcohol for something like philosophical reasons may have died from its excessive use. I certainly suffer my share of addictions. I don't want to copy too much here; I recommend the video for anyone interested in this concept.

The addict is a mystic who's lost their way, someone whose soul is reaching for transcendence but grasping at the wrong door.

What if your addiction wasn't a curse at all? What if it was a calling?

what we call addiction is actually a spiritual crisis masquerading as a chemical dependency. It's a soul in revolt against the shallowess of ordinary existence. It's someone whose inner being is screaming for depth, for meaning, for connection to something vast and true.

the substance becomes a false prophet. It promises heaven but delivers hell. It offers a glimpse of unity, of transcendence, and then snatches it away, leaving you more isolated than before.

Sigh. I'm getting so tired of watching the global capitalism situation worsen every day.

Yesterday, my business partner in Doi Saket, where I stay in a room at her sister's house, convinced me to sublet my rental condo in Chiang Mai, since I don't stay there much. I like having a pool and a place near the city center, but I really can't justify the cost. Anyway, we met one of her friends there, packed up my things, and brought them to the house. I woke up relatively early this morning and unpacked. All of this has put a little strain on my injured foot, but it's really not very painful anymore, just a little numb in places, sore in others, and still surprisingly swollen.

I seem to be having trouble focussing on an individual project. I wrote something yesterday about having a battle with my own ego, but I don't think it's ready for publication. The thing I want to write about Marx and capitalism seems to be too big to approach. I started writing a cheat sheet about AI terminology, but that research seems to lead me into infinite rabit holes and I am certainly no expert in that area. Maybe I'm actually trying to avoid writing the "book" that I claim to be trying to write. At least my notifications from and interactions with LinkedIn have really dropped off a cliff, so I'm not wasting as much time there. I guess I need to do a better at prioritization and focus so that I can actually get things done.

It's about 7:30 here now. The power went off for a couple of seconds and the Internet doesn't seem to be coming back. I don't have a working SIM card, so this takes me offline. The good side of that is that it should help me focus on other things. The bad side is that I can't research anything. Hmm, it just went out for another two seconds. Today might be "interesting" here - possibly some construction project nearby is going to interfere with everything electronic. There are plenty of things that I can do without Internet, but with my foot, less that I can do without a computer. The laptop has a battery but I don't like working on the small screen for long.

As if I don't waste enough time, mental capacity, and emotional investment on news already, I finally paid for access to Ground News. If it starts trying to link to paywalled articles, I'll try to get a refund.

It took a few minutes, but the Internet came back. The algorithms seem to be doing a better job of targetting me. Maybe I'm less unique and more predictable than I thought. Today I watched this one, which is actually a sort of introduction to an audio book that I purchased recently and also related to the work I want to do about capitalism:

//TODO: technofeudalism link, transcribe and dig out points, move to Marx resource

the subtitle is "what killed capitalism"

I do fear and think that our generation was unlucky enough to be on the cusp of such a great transformation.

I can understand what he means by unlucky, as humanity seems to face more challenges and inequity than ever before. From another perspective, these are very interesting times to be alive, living standards have improved for many over the last century, and I've heard that large quantities of people come out of poverty every day.

capital has steamrolled over the trade unions movements, civil rights movements, labor governments, social democracy, liberalism, even neoliberalism because come to think of it, you know, the 2008 crisis and everything that followed after that was a complete defeat of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was supposed to be the creed that the market knows best. Well, we saw what happens when you leave it to the market.

you had you know the great and the good governments of the west reationalizing or nationalizing in 2008-2009 more sectors than they ever did. So capital triumphed to such an extent. Its triumph was so deep and so thunderous that it actually mutated like a toxic virus which kills the host that keeps it alive. The mutation of capital that I want to talk to you about today has already killed a host which is capitalism. So this is a great contradiction. Capital has never been more powerful than it is today. But it has been so powerful that it killed its host capitalism. And what came in its place? My view, my hypothesis is that a new system of producing, distributing values and power has sprung up and the best way I can describe it is by this term technofeudalism

the previous great transformation took place...was the industrial revolution...the great transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Under feudalism, all power sprang from land ownership. If you owned land, substantial parts of land, then you had political power, economic power, discursive power, cultural power.

if you had property, if you had land, you also owned essentially the communities that lived on that land. You had the political power to send the sheriff in and collect at the end of the harvest uh your share. That's your ground rent.

with capitalism, the source of power shifted from ownership of land to ownership of machines. And wealth sprang not from ground rent anymore but it sprang from profits.

the first industrial revolution, it was the ownership of the steam engines, the railways. Later with the second industrial revolution, it was the electricity grids and the telegraph poles and the telephone systems. and then later on with the vertically integrated mega firms like Henry Fords or Westing Houses and so on.

So when we talk about capitalism, what do we mean? We mean a system where power comes from owning the machines that allow you to retain a residual after you've paid off your workers, your banker for the loans you've taken out, the landlord who o What you retain is the profit and that profit is the source of all power under capitalism. It is this transformation from land and rent to machinery and profit that created the modern world that created the hegemonic power of the United States.

something quite remarkable has happened to capital in the last 15 years 10 to 15 years

call it cloud capital to distinguish it from the steam engines, the plows, the industrial robots that are produced means of production.

allows for the owner of this machinery to engage us

your relationship between you and Henry Ford's capital was mediated via the market. You had an advertiser who managed to convince you

But what does Amazon do? Something very, very different.

it gets to know you and then it finds ways of asking you questions that help you train it better to train you to train it better to know you. And at some point it starts giving you advice. I don't know about you, but when Spotify suggests music for me to listen to, I always like it. Sometimes I love it. Whereas when my best friends recommend music to me, I usually don't like it. The machine knows me better than my friends do. Same with Amazon and books.

I won't buy it from a marketplace. I could just click

It looks like a market but it is not because there's no degree of decentralization...you can't talk to other buyers. You cannot talk to sellers. You cannot choose the sellers. It's a relationship between you and the algorithm, Alexa. So the algorithm has a name, right? So you feel that it is like another human being, but it's not...It trains you to train it to input desires into your soul and then satiates those desires bypassing every market. And why does he do that? Because Jeff Bezos collects 40% of the price you pay for the electric bicycle. He hasn't produced the electric bicycle. He takes it from the capitalists who produce the electric bicycle using proletarian labor

the bulk of the profits are siphoned off the traditional capital owner and that goes to the owner of the cloud capital who is not producing anything. So now we have a new form of capital that is not a produced means of production but it is a produced means of behavior modification.

That is no longer capitalism. Welcome to Technofudalism.

Now it's almost 10:15. I published this:

Some time later I commented on this:

It seems that over time I'm keeping less thoughts in my head, so I have less to express in these daily streams.

Now it's after 2:00. I did some chorse and now I'm working on a piece about the worst mistakes I've ever made. I'm listening to some Alan Watts.

It seems that he never expresses anything with which I disagree. I think his thoughts must have influenced the people that raised me. I'm not exaclty listening, but here are some points I picked up:

It's just after 3:30 and I published this: