Systems, Suits, and Who Gets to Know

Systems, Suits, and Who Gets to Know

We spent this week thinking about information — who controls it, who translates it, and what happens when the systems meant to organize our lives start sorting us instead.The Digital Poorhouse maps how algorithms don’t eliminate human bias, they just move it somewhere we can’t see it. Automated systems price, predict, and exclude with a precision that would make any historical gatekeeper jealous. The mechanism is new. The shape is old.

Read more: https://theyoga.club/systems-suits-and-who-gets-to-know/
All content: https://mjh.yoga

#ashtanga #yoga #shaladaily #theyogaclub

The Zero-Sum Trap

The Zero-Sum Trap

Predatory hegemony isn’t strength—it’s avidya dressed up as strategy, mistaking extraction for security and deference for respect.

Stephen Walt’s analysis of predatory hegemony in Foreign Affairs reads like a case study in what happens when avidya — fundamental misperception — drives policy. The premise is simple: if you believe the world is zero-sum, you’ll act like a predator. You’ll extract, exploit, demand tribute. You’ll mistake deference for respect and compliance for partnership. Walt describes a shift from benevolent hegemony — where the U.S.

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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/the-zero-sum-trap/
Original source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/predatory-hegemon
All content: https://mjh.yoga

Concepts: Avidya · Aparigraha · Dharma · Santosha

#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub

Yoga Filter #2: Systems, Suits, and Who Gets To Know

Yoga Filter #2: Systems, Suits, and Who Gets To Know

Yoga Filter: Algorithms, Translation, and Who Controls What We Know

Michael Joel Hall reflects on who controls information and how algorithms sort, predict, price, and exclude, arguing they don’t remove bias but relocate it into opaque systems that resemble an old “digital caste” logic. He highlights Matthew Luko’s work translating government bureaucracy as a model for yoga teachers demystifying practice and notes his new “Tech Support Tuesday” answering Ashtanga questions. He connects this to real-world community as an antidote to tech-driven loneliness, describing how the yoga club mirrors “incidental intimacy” found in run clubs and other offline meetups. He then turns to memory research showing scientists can delete or alter mice memories, questioning what happens if suffering is removed, and contrasts deletion with yogic practice: working with samskaras, acceptance, and changing one’s relationship to pain rather than erasing it.

00:00 Weekly Theme Setup
00:15 Algorithms And Bias
00:25 Algorithms & The Digital Poorhouse
00:47 The Question Mark Suit Man
00:50 Translators And Yoga Teachers
01:04 Yoga as Translation
01:32 Tech Support Tuesday & Real Life Meetups
02:13 Deleting Memories
02:37 Joyce Carol Oates & Identity
03:08 Who Controls What We Know
03:12 The Thread: Who Decides?
03:19 Closing And Next Steps
03:21 Where Are You Going?
07:50 The Digital Poorhouse
09:34 All Eight
12:34 Forget About It

The Digital Caste: Surveillance Capitalism and the Architecture of Permanent Inequality

The Digital Caste: Surveillance Capitalism and the Architecture of Permanent Inequality

How algorithmic systems are building a new structure of social stratification — and why your next cup of milk might be an act of resistance Michael Joel Hall · Director, The Yoga Club · Washington, DC I grew up in small-town America. The kind of place where you knew the person behind the counter at the hardware store and bought your milk from someone whose name you could actually remember. It wasn’t romantic — it was just how commerce worked. You exchanged money for goods, and nobody was quietly adjusting your price based on what phone you carried or how long you lingered in the dairy aisle. That world is vanishing. Not because people stopped wanting it, but because a different architecture of exchange has…

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? — A Reading

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? — A Reading

Financial equity for yoga teachers means building diversified income streams, learning financial literacy, and valuing your labor enough to set boundaries.

In Oate’s piece, Connie is fifteen, suburban, and already fluent in the art of self-division. One version of herself for the house, one for the world outside it. Her mother sees the home version and finds her lacking. The outside version — the one that moves through malls and drive-ins with confidence — that one she keeps to herself. The split feels like survival. It is actually a trap. One Sunday the family clears out and she’s alone with the radio. A gold jalopy pulls in. The driver calls himself Arnold Friend.

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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/yoga-teachers-deserve-financial-stability/
Original source: https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cofc.edu/dist/d/1041/files/2021/01/Where_Are_You_Going_Where_Have_You_Been.pdf
All content: https://mjh.yoga

Concepts: Svadhyaya · Aparigraha · Dharma · Tapas

#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub

I’m Worried About More Than Kennedy Center

I’m Worried About More Than Kennedy Center

When you destroy cultural infrastructure, you don’t just lose buildings — you lose the pathways that connect one generation of artists to the next.

The Kennedy Center is closing, and with it, an entire ecosystem of artists and pathways will scatter. From The Kennedy Center's Unnecessary Immolation on thebulwark.com

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Read the full article: https://theyoga.club/im-worried-about-more-than-kennedy-center/
Original source: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/kennedy-center-unnecessary-immolation
All content: https://mjh.yoga

Concepts: Dharma · Karma Yoga · Ahimsa · Tapas

#ashtanga #yoga #ashtangayoga #yogapractice #theyogaclub

The Quiet Signals

This week’s thread is about the signals hiding in plain sight — the ones that ask us to pay closer attention. Does getting stronger require suffering? Gretchen Reynolds reports that light weights and consistent effort produce the same gains as grinding under heavy bars. The muscle doesn’t care about spectacle. It cares about showing up. Sound familiar? On the mat, tapas isn’t about dramatic effort — it’s about the steady heat that transforms without burning. What happens when a tech CEO puts down the smartphone? Danny Hogenkamp hosts phone-free parties, runs a Luddite Club, and uses a flip phone after hours. It’s pratyahara in practice — choosing which inputs deserve your attention, and discovering that the world gets richer when you stop scrolling through it….

The Long Game

This week was about patience—and the strange math of how things actually change. Why does practice work in mysterious ways? Because transformation isn’t linear. You show up, nothing happens. You show up again, nothing happens. Then one day something shifts and you can’t point to when it started. Systems thinking calls this “stock accumulation”—the gradual building that suddenly tips. Yoga just calls it showing up. The same patience lives in splitting the sequence. Taking half of Primary instead of rushing through the whole thing isn’t giving up. It’s recognizing that depth requires time, and time requires honoring your actual capacity. The ego wants completion. The practice wants presence. Three teachers, one text: Vyāsa, Iyengar, Desikachar all reading the Samadhi Sutras across centuries. Not to find…

Currents

This week kept circling back to the same question: where is your energy actually going? It showed up everywhere. In the prana vayus—those five currents that move breath and life force through the body—the practice isn’t about forcing energy somewhere new. It’s about noticing where it already flows and learning to work with it. Integrating the vayus means letting apana ground you while udana lifts, letting samana gather while vyana spreads. The whole system breathing together. The same principle showed up in unexpected places. When your favorite tech company goes bankrupt, the community that forms around the abandoned hardware is practicing a kind of aparigraha—non-grasping—while simultaneously building something new from what remains. When you reclaim your feed from algorithmic noise, you’re doing the digital equivalent…