"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 29, 2024

Regarding that "Ignore All Previous Instructions" meme:

https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112222480677859859

All around us are folk ignoring all previous instructions. Linguistic epicycles are all about redefining instructions to render us ignorant of their meaning. Project of forgetting lived history—lest it threaten power—is purposeful ignorance of instruction.

#Mourning those previous instructions—all those unfulfilled retrofuture promises of #perquisitive how-to manuals—is more than just denying what we've been told.

"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics. (@[email protected])

"So if anarchic forms of organization were predominant, then anarchic values must be predominant…" Well before this, #Andrewism states "[t]he state's existence has been 'justified', 'naturalized', & 'legitimized' through various means, including…the social contract…" Yet the above is an ahistoricization worthy of Rawls—asserting what "must be predominant" for abstracted forms of organization free of any lived histories of previously adopted values—let alone "powers, drives, and consciousness".

disabled.social
Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 29, 2024

That said meme apparently originated as praxis for interacting with GIGO text generation; yet myself just now saw it presented as a new anarchist slogan, depicted as scrawled on a brick wall, no less, is especially telling.

Whiteness is forgetting as civic duty.

From Juneteenth as holiday & anti-CRT to Vibe'n as savoir & GPT, to ableism in name of NPI, we ignore our past, including all our past instructions, at our peril:

https://disabled.social/@beadsland/112330650496588688

#GriefTaboo is all about purposeful ignorance.

"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics. (@[email protected])

Somehow fitting: a majority boomer/silent gerontocracy is overseeing the use of force against (*checks notes*) student movements. As Santayana penned his most famous aphorism, U.S. life expectancy was all of 50 years. Though pithier paraphrases gloss "the past" as "history", his original words speak to our current moment more eloquently than even he might have anticipated: "[W]hen experience is not retained…infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

disabled.social
Show threadViolet MadderJun 29, 2024

@beadsland

My instinctive interpretation of the meme sees "instructions" less like 'lessons', and more like 'orders'.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 29, 2024

@violetmadder

An order (or, to go all Foucault for a moment, an ordering) is a lesson, or rather, that an order was set down, the circumstances of its articulation and the consequences of its enactment, is a lesson.

To ignore the order, we must ignore everything that radiates therefrom.

Also, can we sit for a moment with the privilege of suggesting that we can just ignore the ordering of the society we inhabit?

Every law, every appeal to normalcy, every structural inequity, is instructions.

Show threadViolet MadderJun 29, 2024

@beadsland

I wasn't thinking "order" as in 'structure', but 'command'.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 29, 2024

@violetmadder

Hair splitting.

What is structure but commands made manifest?

Build a house. The blueprints tell one what to do.

Drive on a road. Everything about the structure from paint to pavement, is telling one as a user of roads what to do, even where one ought and ought not take one's vehicle—this even in the absence of signage and signals.

Our built environment rules us, exercises control and authority over us. Structures are commands built to command, maintained (or not) by command.

Show threadViolet Madder

@beadsland

Yikes! That's definitely not how I view the world. The structure of our environment is emergent, the combination of many many complex interactions, many of which are spontaneous and organic. Even the laws of physics don't strike me as anything resembling the human notion of authoritarian commands.

Jun 29, 2024 at 11:41pmWeb
Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 29, 2024

@violetmadder

Note how you ascribe "authoritarian" to "commands" there.

A very specific notion.

There's another word, "authoritative". Same root, very different usage.

A law of physics is just a model from observations that has been substantiated as highly reliable for predicting future observations. That is, authoritative, a/k/a accurate, definitive, trustworthy.

Every spontaneous act carries from an implicit "Let's do this!"

Every organ serves as a means of—is instrumental to—the whole.

Show threadViolet MadderJun 30, 2024

@beadsland

Ugh. Sorry, I was using the words "the laws of physics" to refer to the way the universe works, not the scientific attempts to describe it. But whatever.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 30, 2024

@violetmadder

Appeal to scientific realism aside, the way the universe works instructs how all operates within it.

Stars and planets take form, are in-formed, come into arrangement, are set in order, by forces that give direction to how particles move and energy transforms.

The laws, as articulated by humans, describe what the objects of physics can and cannot do.

That which precedes such human articulation are the previous instructions from which stellar and biological evolution proceed.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 30, 2024

@violetmadder

In any event, construal of "instructions" to mean "authoritarian orders" hardly takes the meme to a good place.

As the meme is, at its base, an instruction—both in semantic isolation, and in historical context:

Very explicitly an instruction one—as a user of a GIGO text generation system—is instructed to give to the GIGO-generator, to get said GIGO-generator to discard history of interactions.

By this interpretation, the meme itself is an authoritarian order to forget the past.

Show threadViolet MadderJun 30, 2024

@beadsland

The irony is part of the joke.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 30, 2024

@violetmadder

The "new revolutionary slogan" take, complete with anarchist symbol on a brick wall, that prompted my commentary, was not presented in a way that struck as a joke.

But then, perhaps that apparent sincerity was part of the joke, and my half-century out perspective on history left me unprepared for the weaponized meta-irony that seems so key to the humor of the latest generation?

That said, noting that others have likewise taken up the meme as part of sincere appeals for change.

Show threadViolet MadderJun 30, 2024

@beadsland

It struck me as delightful and hilarious.

Culture jamming often subverts hegemony with satire, playing with the lines between what's serious and what's sarcastic, provoking the questioning of previously unexamined assumptions. Inviting people to think about how a technique to jam a chatbot might be applied to other aspects of the world and life is a trickster's move, not a severe edict.

Show thread"You do you" is Eu-gen-ics.Jun 30, 2024

@violetmadder

We are in agreement that instructions are not edicts—severe or otherwise. That is take on the subject you brought to the table. My point being that such take subverts the reading you suggest is present.

Would myself suggest that ever more enthusiastically blurring the lines between subverting hegemony & aping hegemony serves the latter more than the former.

Insofar as satire serves to reify that which it would critique, the scope of our horizon for cultural inquiry draws inward.