/lit/ - Literature

ufblog is going mighty slow also

>>11919507
also you write like a good writer anon.

gibson doesn't write like a guy trying to Cure or Fix anything, and he doesn't write Spectacle either. he writes like a man who has direct first-person experiences of realities that are not our own, and yet illustrate more clearly the paradoxes of our own life than reporting on this reality would be - because i think for many the attempt to do so lies the road of philosophy. which has its charms, but also one particular problem as well, that being, The Subject.

>Cyberpunk was not a truly pessimistic future, but a pragmatic and even-handed one, where we are given great wonders and compensated with inconceivable drawbacks. In the age of the internet, the death of truth, the echo chamber, the unutterable end of privacy, it becomes clear that their approach to the future was historically perfect, regardless of the particulars. They showed us a path forward where we pay the cost of progress, and we are holding the bill today.

yes. this. retracing the footsteps of people like baudrillard, for instance, through those decades of the 60s-2000s is one of the wilder VR trips you can take, because it leads to the End of History, or so they believed at that time (which doesn't mean that they were wrong). land's (and he feels about gibson the way heidegger felt about holderlin, basically) thesis is that capital would in the end necessarily break with the culture that founded it, and that is i think what we are seeing. he is to my mind the aesthetic philosopher par excellence when it comes to the *meaning* of cyberpunk, but it doesn't mean his is the only perspective, or even that there aren't ways of looking at this phenomena that lay outside of discourses on marx, which is what gibson does, and really he does it better than anyone. he basically invented the genre.

>The fakeness of the American Dream's futurism, the pseudofascist charm of the could-have-been couple's Aryan purity, the list of the crises that let us know exactly what it was that finally ended that dream. This story is less a cyberpunk short and more of a fiction-form essay on why cyberpunk was necessary to write.

i'm very glad you joined this thread anon.

>To rid yourself of the sickly-sweet necrosis of a dead future, you must purge yourself with the ugliness of today.

purge yourself *with* and not purge yourself *of.* i missed this on first glance. this also is brilliant anon. purge *of* and you wind up in politics. purge with and perhaps you can exit that stuff altogether. i don't know. but Dead Cities are the ground for all political palingenesis. and to me this leads to the site of the ultimate girard-land fusion site: the factory-tomb and the world of the Polis which is a weird forerunner of the universal Ghost Polis. things done and sacrifices made in the name of the city in which nobody lives but everyone visits.

i'm getting today's aesthetics from here, btw, if anyone is interested.
http://cypulchre.tumblr.com/archive