Psychopolitics
La psicopolítica es un poder inteligente, sutil y silencioso, que es capaz de penetrar en nuestra psique para explotarla y controlarla sin que nos demos cuenta, seduciéndonos incluso para que colaboremos con ella voluntariamente.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
8mentions
6people
2022–2026years
75% recommend25% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think it becomes more a religious and philosophical question than an economic question. We need to separate economics from the neoliberal religion.
Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitics should be standard text that everyone is discussing right now but instead we will probably do nothing and the future will suffer the consequences of our collective intellectual laziness.
neoliberal ideas vs Marxism is just incredibly intellectually lazy. We really need to think on the level of the way Marx did about the industrial revolution in a new way without being lazy and just falling back on the standard Marxist orothodxy religious ideas.
We don't just need a protestant reformation, we need an entire new religion to deal with this. I think that will be too hard so if I had to bet my bet would be on we do absolutely nothing.
- I recommend reading "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han, and also his "The Crisis of Narration"; in those he tries to tackle exactly these issues in contemporary society.
His "Psychopolitics" talks about the manipulation of masses for political purposes using the digital environment, when written the LLM hype wasn't ongoing yet but it can definitely apply to this technology as well.
- Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"?
I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
- Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on.
Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
- Thank you so much!!!!! I had The Varieties of Religious Experiences on my to-read-list forever but never got to it; I had never even heard of those other authors. Thank you so much!
Another rec: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, on how we can't imagine alternatives to capitalism any more.
Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, on how modern neoliberalism turned us into self-exploiters. There's no 'upper class' suppressing the 'lower classes' anymore, we've moved to self-exploit, to push ourselves as our own horrible boss, without a structure to rebel against, with no chance of escape.
- Further reading: Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han[1].
