/lit/ - Literature

>>12620610
get on it boyo. it's a legit great game. not so much if you are looking for hack and slash, but there are a thousand simulators of this. there is but one game about changing the nature of a man

>>12485996
here's my definition of a utopia: it would be like utopia for Existentialists, a place where people essentially go to to work out exactly the kinds of questions that you have just asked. in order for that to work, it would have to fulfil at least two conditions

a) it would have to realize that many of those questions are unsolvable, and
b) manage to keep itself functional, or afloat, while it does so.

what you want is a place where you can get the answers to the kinds of questions you are looking for, but my own sense is that - for the time being - a lot of the mega-super-interesting stuff really is genuinely unanswerable. it is of course possible - if we take a Landian perspective - that the deal is to further the development of capital, AGI, teleoplexy et al. that's serving the Good, that's being a slave to Reason, much else. Reza is a very persuasive writer, he's almost like what Uncle Nick would be if you removed the Marx and the Deleuze and replaced them with Plato (which is to say, having almost no resemblance to his former self at all).

but still, i think that turning people into computers will fuck with us. we are not steely machines, we are irritatingly squishy, sentimental, panicky, quirky, busted, confused, absurd meatbags also. we do both of these things. and we cannot really go it alone - marriages, or relationships, or friendships, or groups that bring out the best in each other are vitally necessary for exactly this reason, so that we do not become Tyrants of the Spirit (or Tyrants of the Intellect) or Tyrants, really, of any kind.

i mean imagine if a place like this existed, a kind of para-world - call it Gap City, as in the Gap Year you take after uni and before entering the work force. a kind of place in which all kinds of mysterious religious, philosophical, technological et al questions are being asked. in a way it would be like Purgatory, but in another sense it would *tell* you this, explicitly. no sinister plots, no conspiracies. a place where you can ask a whole lot of impossible questions, and not really feel as if anyone is *hiding* anything from you. the point here is really just to make the place more interesting, and it only works by making you more interesting, and vice-versa. like a pirate-anarchy-software-junkyard. all the appeal of the post-apocalyptic world, without the world you left to come here actually disappearing. maybe once upon a time that's what university literature departments were supposed to do. those days today are gone, but *there is no fucking substitute for that.*

>record scratch
you know what fuck that. here's a way better suggestion: ignore everything i just wrote and go get a copy of Planescape: Torment. play Planescape: Torment anon. then ask again after you beat that game.
>thx inner self
>np cringe memer

it's also struck me that pic rel is by no means an accidental deity either, and is absolutely the kind of theology you might produce if you were trying to find an explanation for what happens under conditions of Max Irony. if there is ultimately nothing that cannot be reduced to sadomasochism, the appeal of a gatekeeping deity that is, perhaps, a *repentant, though inveterate, sadist* - and who, by the way, reserves the greatest disdain possible for her own followers - isn't all that hard to understand.

theology *hurts.* it's nice to be reminded of this, sometimes. so too do the implications of thinking through Marx in the absence of Hegel, or guided only by faltering lamps in the darkness, wherein lie the John Carpenter and HP Lovecraft realms.

the world needs more good cyberpunk.

>>11101227
and there something disagreeable about anthropocentrism. there's nothing essentially beautiful about humans just as they are. we are inwardly obligated to become better and not worse versions of ourselves for reasons that i'm not sure can even be articulated, let alone turned into axioms. our whole being is contingent and it is perhaps the feeling of this contingency that drives us towards authoritarianism in crunch times. but that's definitely a suboptimal form of politics, whatever its charms are in crisis.

>we just focus on piecemeal problem-solving and patchworking, maintain an attitude of epistemic and ontological humility/healthy skepticism, and try not to remain stuck in old modes of thought.

yep. a kind of liberal/libertarian pragmatism and an open society is the way to go. it is the thing that's under siege right now, and i'm trying to consciously will myself not to empathize too much with the forces on either extreme of the political spectrum that are chiseling away at it.

i think it has to do with some recoil from several intense decades of marxist theory combined with global capitalism and the technology as well. it's easy to *lose* yourself in the contemplation of the polis, and virtue ethics and classical humanism has been chainsawed by social theory. in some parts for the better, but it also seems like a good time to consider some salvage ops. do we *want* a control society? many do. do we want an absolutely transparent Google-polis? it could be an option.

there's shit-tons of stuff to think about in this regard. han writes very convincingly about burnout for this reason, that a society of total transparency and control burns its citizens out completely, in the end. i agree with a lot of that. and quite frankly the control society - however dystopian - also seems to contain within it the possibility of resembling something like roddenberry's starfleet or banks' culture (pardon the SF references, but i kind of depend on them sometimes).

what kind of society do we want? the ideals of liberalism are for the time being a kind of rainbow, but it's not tenable as such for long. i really think if a political left wants to remain viable, it actually should borrow or at least read into some of moldbug's ideas on patchwork and other things. the contingent nature of capitalist realities - maybe something here that’s more interesting than fisher’s total Capitalist Realism? - means that one can de-abstract a little bit and can think in a more constructive way. micropolitics > macropolitics. maybe a wiser balance comes out of stealing the best from the extremes. utopia is really an incredibly powerful and seductive idea.

marxist-freudian theory and its descendents can describe, really well, the nature of alienation that we all feel at some point. what we don't know is if the 'cure' for that alienation can be found in the same way. i keep finding more and more room for nondual religion in a lot of stuff that i think.

>>11045972
that one. /lit/ shalt have no other gods before planescape

>>10885308
>That's such a better explanation on why atomization is bad rather than "hurr we must defend the traditional family". It's kind of ironic that technique/capital has to break down subsets of individuals, previously aggregated as tight-knit groups, in order to take hold 'by itself' as the one and only emergent property introducing feedback loops into each individual. I wonder if this process is "natural" insofar as it would have happened in some other way even without the machine, or if we are quite literally bound to our smartphones and production modes.

exactly. 104%. here's another thing that passage provoked in me: this idea that back when there was this weird need to 'protect the modern family' but transposed today it becomes in a sense the same puritanical drive to 'protect the modern individual.' and a deluge of idpol madness immediately proceeds: people have this profoundly uncomfortable double desire to be, at one and the same time, discreet and autonomous individuals, and yet also quasi-mimetic beings, beings violently and perpetually triggered by anything that infringes on their sense of individuality *as it is defined by affiliation* - that is to say, by race or gender or whatever else. this desire to have a sense of ourselves by having it both ways leads to total paranoia and constant outrage: i am me but only because i am a collection of my own signs, and that is the whole thing about signs, that we do not possess them autonomously. consumption and media have turned us inside out but preserve this irreducible core of self-identification that is constantly under threat by others in a negative sense, but is also *constantly being seduced* by media.

>Another interesting thought is how the college SJWs vainly try to meet both ends if you think about it. What is the feminist movement if not the attempt to conciliate atomization and individuation with putting all people of a kind (women in this case) under the banner of a tightly-knit group?

i fucking love /lit/. yes. i think it is so.

>Not to mention how the movement naturally fragments once again into black feminism, transgender rights, etc. Is it perhaps that we want to be part of these smaller subgroups, as a kind of instinctive defense of our political and economical freedoms (rather than individual) but are held back by technique?

this also. this is i would say what belongs to capital as technique, when it metastasizes into consumer culture that we might even call a *consumptive culture.* it is semiologically self-cannibalizing. because we all need more of us to go on being desperately happy about - well, you know what i'm saying.

it's why shit is so uncomfortable. we are talking about the *birth pangs of a eudaimonic society.* a society *predicated on happiness* and yet not wholly conscious of the paradox: that is there is no consciousness of self without consciousness of the other. with *all* that that entails.

pic rel for mysterious reasons.