The Spectacle
Hello friends,
I hope you are doing well today. I highly recommend you attend the Chapel Perilous event tomorrow. It is designed to help with our cognitive flexibility during these crazy times.
Tomorrow’s events:
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie.Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Chapel Perilous w/ Rebecca Fox. Every Sunday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Mediation Campfire w/ Jason Snyder and Jared Janes. Every Sunday @ 3:30 PM ET. RSVP here.*
***
June 13, 2020
… the decline of being into having , and having into merely appearing.
That is Guy Debord talking about the spectacle. The spectacle is very scintillating and spectacle game is the game our current social media ecology incentivizes us to play. Thirsty for the likes, the shares, and the comments, we are put on a never ending hunt for the dopamine.
Trying to win at the spectacle is a losing game, those who appear to be winning are only winning at appearing. They sacrifice being for appearing while riding the dopamine high. Stoics do not fall for this shit though, and it is time to do the bait and switch, and it is time to sacrifice appearing for being.
The Stoa is not here to be used by the spectacle, it is here to use the spectacle. This is where others have failed and this is where I sense the Stoa has a chance at succeeding. As mentioned before, this steward has adopted a minimal viable spectacle approach towards stealing the culture.
I disabled all of the YouTube comments, and nuked the Facebook group, and I am debating on nuking the Facebook page as well. I am annoyed at the expectation that every fucking conversation has to be recorded as some memetic artifact to be consumed. “Fuck off” is the unstoic answer I want to give everytime somebody asks: when are you going to upload the Daniel Schmachtenberger video?!
I do not want the Stoa to have any social media platforms at the moment. The blitzkrieg of culture war noise, and memetic tribal colonization, occurs on platforms that mainly operate with asynchronous communication. I do not want memes to fester on these platforms and I do not want our archived words to become weaponized.
I imagine the Stoa’s presence in the spectacle will grow, which is an unfortunate byproduct of being awesome, but being seduced by the spectacle’s dirty promises is deeply unwise. It is wise to be sneaky here, so let us sneak our way to communitas.
***
Gift Economy / The Stoa currently operates through a gift economy. We are offering the Stoa as a gift, for people to freely use during these troubled times. If you are inspired to provide a gift to The Stoa, email thestoa at protonmail dot com. Your gift can take the form of money, support, services or ideas. If you wish to gift money, you can do so here or here for ongoing gifts. If you would like to gift directly to our lovely facilitators visit this page.