Gods, Masters, and Clout

During my foray into grad school, one of my favorite professors asked me to write my own manifesto as an assignment. His only instructions were to include a call to action and to "be bombastic." This is a reading of said assignment. My goal here was to put forward the idea that virtual worlds like the Metaverse are not only unnecessary but actively distract us from actual revolutionary activity. In attempting to explain this idea, the reasoning led me to conclude this idea can be expanded to...

Since it's probably going to take another year for me to finish the second episode of the "Fear Inoculant" series, I'm going to repurpose some papers I wrote in grad school into a few bonus episodes of the next month or so. This episode focuses on the Wall Street Bets / GameStop "revolution" of January 2021 and its implications on the politics of technology and the failings of society at large. For citations, please visit the blog post on my website.

Many things in modern life make us fearful. The Fear Inoculant series will explore ways to be less fearful and live a more authentic life. In this, the first of three episodes, we cover a host of philosophical concepts aimed at demystifying reality in order to lay the groundwork for examining social movements in the next episode. We start with exploring how certain Events can seem to change the past and present, Reality itself and a couple ways to quantify it, how Noam Chomsky and Slavoj...

In this episode: Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle, how I escaped a cult, why we must care about others, and how it can all be applied to persuasion, art creation, ideology, and modern life. We delve into some of the philosophical reasons behind what makes one “good” at rhetoric. I talk about how some of Lacan’s, Freud’s, and Jung’s psychological writings can be used to cultivate authority, humanity, and logic. As I explain each pillar of the triangle, I’ll then use that same method to analyze...