The open future of the Tao

In Hunger Mountain, David Hinton describes the Taoist cosmology as it developed in ancient China as a “spiritual ecology” in which the Cosmos is divided into two elements: Presence/Being and Absence/Nonbeing. Presence is simply the empirical universe, which the ancients described as the ten thousand living and nonliving things in constant transformation; and Absence is the generative void from which this ever-changing realm of Presence perpetually emerges, although it should not be conceived in a spatial sense, as if there were a pool of emptiness somewhere in the universe.

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I finished a wooden mallet today with some scrap leather on the ends. It’s very amateurish but I am an amateur.

Okay I’m turning on this activity pub thingy that links to mastodon in some magical way I don’t understand. A few of the folks I used to talk with on Twitter several years ago are on mastodon now. (If you’re one of those and don’t recognize me, I used to be @eatingwords.)

Ted Gioia’s eight techniques for evaluating someone’s character. A solid list. Perhaps the most interesting to me is his first: “Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.” Also, his second and fifth are common enough ideas but I believe that’s because they are indeed revealing.

Paul Kingsnorth on conscientious objection to the Machine

Paul Kingsnorth, saying something similar to my post from yesterday: The alternative [to living for the Machine] has always been the same, for millennia, across the world. The alternative is self-denial. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it wants. It is planting your feet on the ground, living modestly, refusing technology that will enslave you in the name of freedom.

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Refusing Empire, telling a new story

One of the main goals of the functionaries of Empire is to bring everything and everyone into the imperial system. Totalization is, in fact, the motivating impulse behind Empire. Empire has a remarkable ability to assimilate threats to the system. Protest movements turn into think tanks. Rebels become a marketing segment. Empire will validate your criticism as a healthy expression of free speech and award you with a position guaranteed to shut you up by paying you off.

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Three great apps I learned about from the micro.blog community that I now use every day:

  • Ulysses, for writing and sending posts to micro.blog
  • NetNewsWire, for RSS feeds (including YouTube channels)
  • Raindrop.io, for bookmarks

Sam Kriss:

Everyone now knows that the state is an instrument, a pointy stick which one group of grudgeful weirdos can use to poke at another, and democracy is when the biggest group of weirdos gets to hold the stick. Usually it’s not even about bringing a desired form of society into being; instead, the point is simply to remind your political enemies that you’ve got the stick.

New motto: Anachronism forever!

So Cory Doctorow’s new book is about an accountant?? I’m in. To be fair, it’s a book about a forensic accountant, those Humphrey Bogarts of the accounting world that the rest of us can only admire.