From the last day of May in 2021 until the last day of May in 2022, we’re going to use this Substack to write a book called “Deep Socks.”
This book will enable the reader to see the worlds around them - the social world, political world, work world, psychological world, and spiritual worlds - with greater depth.
Throughout this whole “book” process, the metaphor of shallowness and depth repeats, at many scales. This is because shallowness is the greatest threat to our collective human survival. If our perception of the complexity of the realities we occupy doesn’t intensify significantly, that is, come to possess many more layers on average than it currently does, we will likely commit (accidental) collective suicide.
It’s organized into four seasons. The first is called “Shallow Winter.” and is about the complete failure of all existing political or social frameworks to grasp our metasystem.
Each “season” of the book is further divided into three “months”. In the case of “Shallow Winter” the first “month” is “Managerial Society in Winter” and tells of the secret revolution which put managers in charge of an emerging world state and of the social conditions which make that emerging world state unlikely. Each “month” in turn, is organized into four chapters, and each chapter into three sections.
I. SHALLOW WINTER
Comic Interlude: A Simple But Deep Theory About Drugs and Postmodernity
MANAGERIAL SOCIETY IN WINTER
Introduction: The Manager Fractal
Comic Interlude: World War 3 and the Unknowability of Elon Musk’s Drug Habits
Chapter ONE: Managerial Society, The Invisible Revolution
The world we live in is not capitalist. It is its child, this is for sure. The profit system didn’t go away. But Adam Smith would be horrified at our world. As would John D. Rockefeller. The fact is our society has progressed to a new stage of political economy, which is reaching an inflection point in its development. This is the story of the Third Industrial Revolution, and how to describe it in terms of political economy.
Comic Interlude: Hunter Biden 2024
Chapter TWO: The Fight in the Board Room
The big shift, the great reset, the great replacement, the frogs are turning gay--something is happening between the managers of the world, and they're arguing, and we can hear it all the way in the mail room. This week will focus on the lines of the conflict, and the tensions and sources of conflict.
Comic Interlude: Interview with Seek-Cheap Bolo
Chapter THREE: Three Postmanagerial Futures
We take a moment to envision the road before us, now that our fairytales are exhausted, our attention spans shot, and our nation-state representatives holding guns at each other’s dicks. We envision the world of the Singularity, the world of the present continuing on forever, and the world of new social techne that may enable us to live better.
Comic Interlude: Our Second Modest Proposal: Gun Control
Chapter FOUR: Millennium Prize Problems of Management
We examine the three most pressing and difficult problems facing managerial society, in our estimation. Why is infowar a solved problem but meatwar still a catastrophic and existential threat, no matter how hard the powers that be try to hold it into one scapegoat country? Why can hospitals make us sicker, no matter how much money pours into medicine? Why are we unhealthier than ever, and why can’t or won’t doctors help? And last, why are people resigning en masse from jobs, even as we are freed from the office? How can management extend into the home, without driving us all mad?
The Second Millennium Prize Problem of Management: Iatrogenesis
The Third Millennium Prize Problem of Management: Spaces and Resignation
Comic Interlude: GOAT KYIV
EMBERS OF FASCISM
Introduction: The Coals are Still Red Hot
Interlude: Going to bat for the King
Chapter ONE: The Political Gorgon
Fascism petrifies the mind, at least the modern mind. Fascism inspires terror and fear and objective thought regarding it is seemingly impossible in modern discourse. But this is far from a unique phenomenon. This exact problem was encountered amongst the restive and impotent European left of the 1900s. Their profound failures in the anticipation, understanding, and countering of the far right in the 1930s give us an object lesson. We must approach fascism as an object of paranoia and fear, seeing it through its reflections in the liberal mind, in the paranoid thoughts of antifascists, and the reflexive paranoia created in the objectified ‘fascist’ of today, and search our dreams for a cure.
Comic Interlude: Anime: Picture for Proof
Chapter TWO: The Right in a Sea of Media
Fiction Interlude 1: Postconsensual Chapter 1
Fiction Interlude 2: Postconsensual Chapter 2