Vibes Shift, and So Should You
People seem to forget that we’re in the postmodern era. “Neoliberalism” is a fashionable term and gets at a certain angle of the times. Certainly social services are seeing their budgets cut in favor of government investments in private corporate interests, though it’s probably wise to highlight that those investments include the support of transnational institutions. Effects from this include intensifying misery almost across the board as people find that when they invest themselves in capitalist systems they succumb to cruel optimism.
What I want to focus on, though, is another effect. This liberalizing of the political economy, as one might imagine, leads to loosening up hardened and stratified relationships. Things created in earlier periods, like the post-WWII boom in the US, are getting fractured and recombined. That’s seen in modes of operation like fracking or intensified data mining, as well as new conceptual frameworks like intersectionality. It’s helter skelter out here.
All this shuffling around is what so many postmodernists first saw and continue to theorize, complexity scientistsstudy, artistsriffon, and financiers profit from. To succeed one needs to get with the program, or lack there-of in this case.
“This,” Deleuze and Guattari write, “is how it should be done:”
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a BwO. Connect, conjugate, continue: a whole "diagram," as opposed to still signifying and subjective programs.
One great concrete example of folks doing this are the Economic Space Agency, advised by several of my own teachers. The rise of side-hustles which people want to turn into lifestyles is another. It’s extra work to make this work, but it’s not like we’re going back to the way things were. Time to put up or shut up.