PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

Another discourse has hit the timeline. Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Is health fascism? Is Ozempic Zyklon-B? Should Gabriel Rockhill have to approve every leftist monograph prior to publication? All this and more, in what what was supposed to be the intro to our episode on collective violence

Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills The business press has pushed the "leftist-outsider-dishevelled-genius" about Palantir's CEO Alex Karp for a decade. This episode we explore Karp's relationship with critical theory and the mythmaking that has produced his significance. NYT pushes the mythology of Alex Karp https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html Adorno and the Palantir Manifesto https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/palantir-flunks-out-of-the-frankfurt Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/moira-weigel-palantir-goes-to-the-frankfurt-school/

The Pill Pod debates the academic and ethics perspectives' following the terminal end of the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal.

Ad-free listens (even with no subscription) at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio are calling The Left strange combinatory insults, such as ugly-terrorists and dark-cancers. We review these old signifying chains and Erik introduces Stuart Hall's explanation from last time this happened, when back in the 60s when they said The Left were all gay muggers planning to rob civilized people on their way home from church.

Socialist are to blame for the Forest Fires. Antifa caused Algae to take over the reflecting pool. Conservatives believe that nature has allied with their enemies to undermine their authority and Western vicilization. We discuss many instances of the opposition of culture/nature in recent news, political theory, and most importantly Twitter discourse. Video essay referenced: https://youtu.be/ZFOSdqhpuaI?si=86JJOjAuxQl7lrhv Join up for more content https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills There's only been about a century of structuralism. It had a day, then in the 80s haters celebrated its falloff. But today, the LLMs designed according to the precepts of structuralist linguistics have proven Saussure's intuitions were more accurate than even he could have suspected. We read the argument from Language Machines by Leif Weatherby (https://amzn.to/4bipjYu)

This week we evaluate a paper written by a Google DeepMind engineer which, in effect updates the Chinese Room Thought Experiment (Searle, 1980) to modern LLMs. Get this episode and hundreds more https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

Join for ad-free and more episodes https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills Hubert Dreyfus loved recounting how he was maligned for his AI skepticism, which was informed by applications of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and turned out to be correct as of 2007. Is he still correct in the age of LLMs and self-driving cars? Link to article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370207001452

All episodes are ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills While many had hoped for a Butlerian Crusade against the thinking machines, the Pope has instead released a lukewarm encyclical asking the mean machine men making automated murder drones to please be nice to us. This episode we evaluate whether Christian Humanism has any juice left. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

More where this came from at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills People have not always had a self, our selves were invented. According to Foucault, our concept of self emerged from religious technologies, genres of writing, and the institutions that perpetuated them. https://amzn.to/4uWyVAg

Hear our Lasch series at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills After three episodes reading Culture of Narcissism we conclude that despite a unique perspective, it's way overrated.

jk it's just fake news that duped conservatives yet again. This viral lie claimed that a remote Amazon tribe fell apart the instant they discovered internet pornography, but in the end it says a lot more about us than it does about the Marubos. go to patreon to never miss an episode https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

This week we inspect the latest form of anthropotechnics, its surrounding moral panic, and American Psycho comparisons (Baudrillard was right about everything). Get hundreds of hours more at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills

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Find all episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills This week we read Sloterdijk's 1999 "Rules for the Human Zoo" (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/docs/Elmauer.pdf) which was the source of immediate controversy and accusations of fascism and eugenics. We see what the hype was about.

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read the eminent The Gift (https://amzn.to/3NAenx3) by Marcel Mauss which is important to later theorists including Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. (originally recorded 08/24)

Find All Episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills. We read Durkheim's Elementary forms of Religious Life (https://amzn.to/4c1ubkB) and try to get a hold on a primordial concept, what for Claude Levi-Strauss exemplifies the floating signifier: it's MANA (originally recorded 08/24).

This is a preview but you can find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we read Sloterdijk's proposal for how to fix Philosophy from The Critique of Cynical Reason.

This is a preview, find all our episodes and other work ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/plasticpills . In this episode we cover Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason and why Philosophy needs to incorporate disrespect, sacrilege, and fart jokes if it is ever going to be relevant again.

Find all our episodes ad-free at https://www.patreon.com/c/plasticpills Peter Sloterdijk wrote a philosophy bestseller in 1983 called The Critique of Cynical Reason . In this episode, we try to communicate what he means by cynical reason. https://monoskop.org/images/7/7b/Sloterdijk_Peter_Critique_of_Cynical_Reason.pdf