iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Seeing that notification like Shrödinger’s text.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/nyti... I mean, as I was saying. An average $1000 increase in rent prices is a bit of an issue.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Of course, sometimes we are the precipice, like the Cuban missile crisis. But regardless, a huckster has every incentive to tell us we just need to wait a moment longer for things to pay off one way or another.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The best grift is a millenarian saying some disaster or salvation is just around the corner. Keeps people in a perpetual state of panic and frenzy, glued to your feed.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The numbers from NYC are odd because the average for Studio ($3400!) to 3 Bedroom ($3600?) is $200. But this isn't discriminating based on neighborhood. So maybe there are more larger units in less desirable areas?

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

BTW: This is for Studio Apartments:

Text reads:
Rental market summary

The average rent for studio properties in San Francisco, CA is $2,695.

Average rent
$2,695

Month-over-month change
+$100

Year-over-year change
+$445

Available rentals
423

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

This level of income inequality is just too much. Like, you can't be paying these people this much money.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

You want to get Angry? (Ignores replies) Zillow: What is the average rent in San Francisco, CA? Updated September 8, 2026 average rent for all property types in San Francisco, CA is $4,720. Average rent $4,720 Month-over-month change +$220 Year-over-year change +$1,040 Available rentals 1,413

Graph showing the average rent price in San Francisco comparing last year and this year. The price has gone up over 1k on average.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Getting ready to board my flight home after an amazing week in Mexico City. I walked 55.6 miles over 5 days. Here’s me at Lucha Libre last night

A selfie with a stadium in Mexico City behind me, there is a ring for Lucha Libre

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The top of the Monument to the Revolution

A photo of me in front of Mexico City, stretching out below

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Having eye glasses prescriptions expire seems like an absolute racket.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

And so Wittgenstein and Baudrillard perhaps share some common ground in their linguistic analyses, which both see meaning disappear in mis-application. In obsessive games played for invidious reasons.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

There is no relation between that 'signified' fire and the poetic substance of fire analysed by Bachelard. That log fire is a cultural sign and nothing more; it has value merely as a cultural reference. Thus, the whole of advertising and modern erotics are made up of signs, not of meaning."

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

At any event, one should not confuse a formal and allegorical combinatory of mythologized themes with the discourse of the Unconscious, any more than the artificial log fire should be confused with the symbol of fire.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

what does speak merely refers on to psychoanalysis as it is established, integrated and 'recuperated' today in the cultural system. ...the sign function of psychoanalysis, as something culturalized, aestheticized, mass-mediafied.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

“It is neither Desire nor the Unconscious speaking, but the psychoanalytic culture, or rather subculture, which has become banal and commonplace, has passed into ordinary commercial parlance. It is second-level affabulation; strictly speaking, it is allegory. Id (the Unconscious) does not speak ther

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Similarly, Baudrillard speaks on the perceived role of psychological tropes to describe erotic advertising. For him this psychological speech is just a cultural signifier and not real analysis:

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

And it happens even with theories and modes of analysis. Ideas that were initially revelatory, like the language of therapy, trauma and abuse become rhetorical sludge. Like a conservative cynically using them to decry the oppression of wokeism. The words are weapons because they cultural impact.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

All things enters into a new kind of language game, a meta game, a metaverse, where ideas are toys and Batman fights the Cyclops. All signs become just so much talk. Like our AI creating fabrications based on mathematical associations of words, not their connection to things that happen.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

A shirt isn't simply a shirt, a shirt means something in opposition to other shirts. What brand it is. Things become less a function of what they came from in their organic context, and become markers of distinction. You don't wear *this* shirt to stay warm, you wear it to look cool.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Baudrillard's philosophy similarly speaks about things becoming divorced from their symbolic function and become a pure signifier with no meaning. This is part of modern consumer society. Our society of simulation.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

This is like asking if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it makes a sound. Or asking the meaning of being in general. The questions are devoid of meaning, in the sense that sound and being are like pawns and knights, and we’re asking how they would move in a game of checkers.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

And he says that philosophers tie themselves in knots when they take a word from the game it is used in, and deploy it in a way it wasn’t originally intended to be used, so that they ask essentially meaningless questions. Or as he says, they commit solecisms, grammatical misapplications.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

The basic idea Wittgenstein’s theory of language games is that words are like pieces in a game, they have a function. When one word is deployed in some context it affects the world in such a way as to achieve a goal. I say “fire” so that you run to safety.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Going to do a long post. It is mostly because I'm just working through some of my own ideas, rather than looking to get off a real banger that'll do numbers, etc. etc.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Just got back from a great discussion at the Oakland Public Library with @ahjohnson.bsky.social on his excellent new book, How to Sell a Genocide. It’s a really strong work of media criticism, and Adam is just as sharp in person as on @citationspod.bsky.social

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

we are a society that both loves and despises the only fans model, one that has created the parasitic only fans model “manager”, embodied by Tate and others. With some of the same people condemning Epstein while lauding Tate.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

(The Consumer Society)

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

“For above and beyond the advertisers, who 'play' the sexuality 'card' so as to sell more products, there is the existing social order, which 'plays the card of sexual liberation (even if it condemns it morally) against the threatening dialectic of the totality.”

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Some interesting thoughts on sexuality from Baudrillard that seem relevant to this, our age of the incel, sexless film discourse, and the trans-panic.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

“Sexuality, ceasing to be a factor of cohesion and shared elation, becomes an individual frenzy for profit. Everyone is obsessed with it and thereby isolated. And, in a characteristic feature, as it is exacerbated, it also becomes anxious about itself.”

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Hell yeah, I was just happy to be part of such a worthwhile cause

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I phone banked for El-Sayed and have been a bit worried because the attack ads really did affect some voters. I listened to people really struggling with how they were going to vote. But El-Sayed has a winning message and I think Michigan is going to come through tonight.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Very much enjoying reading Baudrillard again.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

(Baudrillard, The Consumer Society)

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

“…the truth of the mass media: it is their function to neutralize the lived, unique, eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such, are homogeneous one with another, signifying each other reciprocally and referring back and forth to each other.”

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

In this sense generative AI is the logical conclusion of consumer society, it is just a game, nothing serious. It takes everyone and everything and makes it into a kind of toy to play with.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

The creations of generative AI, the slop, are created by taking the signs of things and removing any relation to what they mean. They are pure signification, just a system of signs mathematically related to each other but with no relation to the real world.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Most people are nice, for the record.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Was doing some phone banking for McKinney in Michigan and a young lady asked me if I wanted to fight. I said no ma'am, but she had already hung up.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

“Growth is therefore, by its social logic, paradoxically defined by reproduction of a structural penury. That penury no longer has the same sense as primary penury (a dearth of goods)…” (The Consumer Society) (2/2)

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Put more succinctly by Baudrillard: “Now, there is a necessary, sociologically definable relationship between privilege and penury. There could not (in any society whatever be privilege without penury. The two are structurally need linked.” (1/2)

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

So, today we have both greater income inequality than the gilded age, but also less starvation. More finite needs are met, but social markers of difference and privilege have increased.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

In fact, as finite goods are more available, new forms of privilege are needed for the powerful to distinguish themselves from the masses. Humans are social animals and meaning is, like language, a social phenomenon. We deeply desire success in the group.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Needs would be finite hungers which can be filled, like food, and heat and different kinds of entertainment. But privileges are unlimited, because they are distinctions in the social hierarchy.

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Joseph @pelops.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

In answer to the endless discussion of the “vibe-session”, which is the idea that the economy is good but people perceive it as bad, there is a possible answer from Baudrillard. There are two orders of consumption, needs and privileges,

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