Notices by 🇪🇷Götterdämmerung (gotterdammerung@glitch.social), page 2

Tech literacy escalates each gen: what was wizardry for Boomers became competence for Gen X, baseline for Millennials & oxygen for Gen Z. Falling behind shifts from quirky to disqualifying.

Boomers: clicking "Allow" is courage. We sigh then forgive.
Gen X: knows enough to fix it or find you. We don't intervene; we value self-preservation.
Millennials: if it spins, they rage. If it syncs they breathe. Baseline or bust.
Gen Z: interface is destiny. If you can't navigate you can't participate.

The immortal line by Margaret #Thatcher:
There is no such thing as #society.

The Iron Lady's Hallmark crad for Late Stage Capitalism. A slogan so bleak it makes Hobbes sound like Mister Rogers.

She envisioned us as pathetic little atomized consumers, free falling through history, bumping into each other only to exchange currency or germs. If we're lucky we die alone due to climate change, clutching our reusable tote bag, whispering "at least I offset my flight to Ibiza."

Under her gospel, collective action is a fairy tale & your only real neighbors are Amazon Prime & depression.

The fire department is just a bunch of heroic individuals who coincidentally showed up at the same burning house.

Thatcher didn't kill society. She just outsourced it to the private sector & sold the corpse for scrap.

Leave them hungry. Step away long enough for absence to sharpen desire.

Then I return in a flurry. An eruption of work like I'd been conjuring it in some unknown temple.

The master of this was this italian artist-muse I knew. Incandescent in person, a walking hallucination. But she'd vanish into deserts on drug fueled pilgrimages, into studios where she bled oil paint on abstract canvas, into the offline ether where no one could reach her. And when she reemerged, she was feral, luminous, magnetic allover again.

#DailyLaws July 26
Know When to Withdraw
Withdrawal is only lethal if you've already carved yourself into their memory. Intensity first, absence second. That's the coquette's goal. After a season of deep entanglement, step back & their imagination fills the gap with fire. They remember the highs, forget the flaws & start chasing your ghost harder than the flesh ever demanded.

I do this with my art. I disappear, stop sharing, go dark & let silence ferment into curiosity.

@tenthousandisopods

#DailyLaws July 5
Stir up the Transgressive & Taboo
Seduction w/o sin is just polite conversation. In a world choking on its own permissiveness, where everyone pretends they're free & open-minded, the real thrill lives in shadows. Your job is to drag them there. Rip open the seams of their comfort zone. If they're holy, you play the heretic. If they're pure you be the corruption they didn't know they craved. If their family would disown them for touching you, make that risk irresistible.

I once tangled with this black butch stud who sized me up & didn't see a man but something worse. Something dangerous, silver-tipped fingers & untouchable. I kept pushing, teasing, till the tension snapped & we ended up tearing into each other in the cramped back seat of her car. Her body was pure sculpture, marble & muscle, a masterpiece of flesh. That she loathed men only stoked the fire. No one ever believed we hooked up. Their disbelief made it sweeter.

I barely have to lift a finger. Just steer the debris field when it drifts close.

Sometimes it's a slog. Like being trapped in a confessional booth with a narcissist. But most of the time, it's a revelation. I say little but I lace those few words with hooks. Barbed, quiet missiles that lodge in their brains, echoing long after their babble's been forgotten.

Power is never loud. It's surgical. Speak less & mean more.

#DailyLaws June 22
Control What You Reveal
In face to face meetings I let silence sit like a loaded gun on the table. Most can't handle it. They squirm, fidget, start tap dancing with their mouths. Trying to kill the quiet before it swallows them. But not me. I wait, watch & listen.

They'll crack first. They always do. Filling the void with nervous trivia, personal leaks, petty monologues. And that's when the gold spills out. Insecurities, weak spots, tells.

#DailyLaws May 29
Nothing Personal
You know the type. Maybe you are the type.
He's professional at the desk, sure. But step off the clock & he's a mess of wounded pride & grudge match monologues. He doesn't read power plays. He feels them. So he absorbs every email, every omission, every tone shift in a meeting like it's a personal betrayal, a scarlet letter pinned to his fragile identity.

He's green, like all of us were. No profession truly train you for the cold war of office politics.

So you enter soft, raw & stupid. Expecting merit to matter & decency to win.

He never outgrew that. Never learned that most insults are just tactical jabs not truth. That alliances shift. That people say one thing & maneuver another. He clings to their words like gospel but ignores their patterns. Their history. Their moves. That's what cooks him.

He burns from the inside, outraged that the game isn't fair. That it is a game. He can't detach. Can't rise above.

So he drowns in emotional debt every time he steps into a room where someone once slighted him.

The fix is ruthless detachment. Seeing the workplace not as a family, not as therapy but as chess. Let them talk. Let them posture. Watch what they do. If he learns that, he'll be untouchable. Until then, he's a martyr in a war that always bleeds him slowly.

TL; DR: The moment we stop taking power plays personally, we become immune. Emotions are for journals. Strategy is for the room.

But internally, think like a heretic, move like a thief, & remember boldness isn't just a choice. It's the only weapon worth carrying. Every day, I relearn this or die a little.

That distance, that disloyalty to the mob, lets me spot the lies they all swallow w/o question.
Bold moves work. Every time I gamble with action over hesitation, results crash in faster than my own chicken-hearted imagination ever predicted. The catastrophe scenarios my mind conjures are cheap horror stories compared to reality. Lesson learned. Be agreeable only when it's tactical, when camouflage is survival.

#DailyLaws April 25
Enter Action with Boldness
Timidity isn't natural. It's hammered into us by this neutered democracy of "getting along to get along" where mediocrity gets a gold star just for showing up. It's the slow polite death of creativity. The more agreeable I become, the less I actually think, the less I live.

So I shove myself the other way: hunting heresy, courting the freaks, seeing the world through the cracked lenses no one else dares to wear.

#DailyLaws March 13
Creative Endurance
The mind doesn't work in isolation. Creative endurance is physical endurance. I've felt that first hand when I was sketching at a breakneck pace, I was also moving. Walking everywhere, pounding pavement out of necessity, burning through energy but somehow making more of it. No car, just momentum. My body kept up, so my creativity did too.

Now? Not the same. The stamina's faded. The long hours at the desk feel heavier.

So weekends mean walking again, short bursts of exercise. But that's not enough. If I want to meet the deadlines coming, I need to ramp up, train like I used to, push past the slump. Creative work is a marathon & right now, I'm out of shape. Time to fix that.

Ted Gioia's "Aesthetics of Slop" is a takedown of modern culture's love affair with half assed disposable junk. Art, music, literature, once the domains of skill & effort, have been overrun by laziness masquerading as authenticity. Why polish your craft when algo driven mediocrity gets more clicks?

This thread will be the counterpart to #Slop, a manifesto if you will: Aesthetics of Grit

https://substack.com/@tedgioia/p-157570568