/lit/ - Literature

>>12656407
kek, there's the SC Hickman reference from Murphy! i've been a fan of this guy for a while, he's really unappreciated. anybody interested in reading more /acc stuff should definitely check out his blog.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

>>12479492
to inquire into questions like these is to ask fundamental questions about things that for centuries have simply been taken at face value in Western societies - that freedom is progress, progress is emancipation, the wedding of free market capitalism to liberal democracies and technoscientific development. it is almost impossible to understand how these things also can constitute an ideology of themselves, and this is something Zizek has said for years. only recently has it actually become possible to understand that uninterrupted technocommercial development is both ideology and symptom, in a way. it is not even that some kind of horrible dystopia has been imposed on us, but that we have actually wound up asking for it, in a way, because we didn't know what we were doing. maybe there was no way of knowing what we were doing. i think a lot of these questions go back in the end to Nietzsche also.

Land has asked, provocatively, if capitalism itself is not in fact the real meaning of progress, of freedom, and much else. we know what he thinks, and Land threads on /lit/ are always a fascinating discussion. what makes them so is his devotion to the terms of what really are a kind of pathology, but it is a pathology that really shows the contours of our minds themselves, in a way.

the horrifying thing to confront is this idea that Progress has become for us an illusion, even a trap. to my mind the colossal failure of US politics today shows up the need to ask this question. both the Blue Team and the Red Team are arguing, in the end, over the same thing, the right to continue a certain kind of American experiment in unopposed neoliberal capitalism and technocracy. they can argue over the terms as much as they like, attribute all kinds of things to racism, or sexism, or anti-semitism, or whatever, but to me it all shows up the same things, that at the bottom of it are much more fundamental questions about money, freedom, power, pleasure. these are the universal human questions. that the US has found its greatest potential threat to its own dominance of the world in *itself* and not in any other rival power- the Nazis, the Communists, whatever - this makes sense to me. and it is also why the cracks in the system have to be understood, i think, as indications that capital itself isn't working as well as it is supposed to.

>>12407526
>not seeing kant anywhere in there, unless you're obliquely referring to bernard williams 'city of thieves' critique of the 'kingdom of ends' formulation of the categorical imperative.
have you read anything at ufblog? did you read the Murphy interview? have you read Fanged Noumena? how about Xenosystems? TfA? anything? i can't spoonfeed you Land's entire corpus through these tiny little boxes. it's taken me a fair bit of time just to get familiar with the references he does use. and it's not like i take everything he says as gospel, but if you're familiar with at least the background material we will be able to have a much more interesting conversation.

i am not an authority on Kant myself. i have no problem admitting this. but i think Land knows what he's talking about. would Kant have liked BTC? who fucking knows. that's not the point. you may not want Kant to be read with Land's side dishes of Marx, Deleuze, and Bataille, but that is what he does. and this is the fruit of this. enjoy! or not.

>seriously, though, you're blathering
kek. this is not even remotely my final form. when i really get blathering you'll know, there will be a lot of *asterisks* and Capital Letters. until then it's pretty boring i admit

>what good is a new theoretical electronic 'gold standard' if the energy costs of actually implementing it are literally unrealizable?
as i said: this is about theory. imagine if we were trying to describe a theoretical moon expedition, but we were doing so in the 16th century. how many fucking windmills would we need to get out of earth's orbit? it would take an *impossibly* big catapult. right? even in the 1950s anything like the internet as we understand it today would have been rendered impossible by hardware limitations. today, those limitations are relaxed.

>you're just blowing smoke up your own ass at that point.
continental philosophy, amigo. there is no ass there until the smoke is blown up it, as if into a great cave. i can see what your objection might be: that is, that i know nothing about either Kant or BTC, and i using my absence of knowledge of one thing to make (equally baseless) claims about the other, and vice-versa, and somehow presenting this as a revealed truth. by comparing one thing to the other, i can make elliptical claims about each, like a great conjurer's trick, and ought to have my head dunked in the river.

and if this is the case: ain't even mad. i don't have a ton of eggs in Kant's basket, but i have found this to be an interesting way of learning about why i might want to have some there, or not. Kant, imho, is frustrating, perhaps in the same way Land is. but i think this is how it must feel to put the shoe on the other foot, sometimes.

>>12407768
kek, i wasn't running away. the cafe i was in closed suddenly and i had to walk home in the middle of my response. i'm back now. ready to resume insane scribbling