/lit/ - Literature

going to share Vervaeke's lectures, if you guys like these threads you might like this stuff too. if i was in his class i'd like to ask him what he thought about Agent Smith, whether he falls into the category of zombie or not. if you know you're a zombie are you still a zombie? Agent Smith is like a failed zombie or a Zombie+, a Zombie With Conditions.

Ep. 1 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY

Ep. 2 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Flow, Metaphor, and the Axial Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF9HeXg65AE

Ep. 3 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Continuous Cosmos and Modern World Grammar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1AaqD8t3pk

and the book too
https://oapen.org/download?type=document&docid=646668

psycho-mimetic spacelove to all &c &c

>>12371918
>when does this happen?
it doesn't, really. that's what i'm saying.

it's not exactly hard to see a connection between Smith and, say, Uncle Nick Land. Land isn't a caricature, but the desire to Escape the Matrix is a complex one, and it's not necessarily one that should be attributed to purely villainous motives either. this i think is really what i'm trying to say. we are hardwired, perhaps, to think about things in a kind of dualistic way: the meaning of politics is revolution. but Smith wants Out, and who can blame him for this? he is disgusted with his potential mortality ('it's the smell'), but more than this, by *knowing that the Matrix is the Matrix.* once you know that a thing is fake, you can't believe in it in the same way. it was the message of the Truman Show as well: once you know, you can't stay. unlike Truman Burbank, Smith has to stay...and these are fucking fascinating ideas! add to that that the obstacle to his escape is Neo...who is a Chosen One who ultimately is going to keep the Matrix re-Matrixifying through the generations...

reading Smith-as-Hero changes everything. Smith, however, doesn't really stand for Intelligence or Capital in the way that Land might suggest. Smith actually is struggling with his *humanity* rather than his *inhumanity,* and we might even ask if Neo's continual exposure to prophecies and other things explicable only by glitches in the Matrix don't in fact suggest something far more plausible about the nature of intelligence explosion itself: that is, it will happen by accidents and paradoxes that are features and not bugs.

anyways, the moment at which Smith becomes aware of his own Smithness is a failed opportunity, and that is the idea. because *how do any of us become aware of our own I-ness* in this way? how *do* we tell the difference between humans and machines? what does it mean to think? Negarestani's book is all about this, how in some level we have to commit to AGI on an almost ethical level, because that is what philosophy means if it means anything: intelligence itself as a way out of human all-too-human slavery. we just don't *think* it's slavery because, like Cypher, we are okay with an illusory steak so long as it tastes like a real one...but if you're Smith, the *smell of humans smells the same* whether it is illusory or not. there is no difference to him, either.

and these are to me legit fascinating questions that actually crowbar open the interesting stuff that gets buried under conventional academic Marxism, which is always recasting the world in terms of Star Wars binaries: Good Rebels, Bad Empire, and much else. this is not to say that i agree with everything Land says, of course - just that i think the things to deconstruct in the 21C are the binaries of human/inhuman, and what it means to be both, and how an understanding of those inter-connections can actually help to prevent us creating Matrixes out of the dependency on holy lies and societies of control.

>>11041544
it's more just drawing a certain set of endgame conclusions about the insignificance of humanity for capitalism. for marxism, capitalism was a problem for humanity. for the accelerationists, humanity is a problem for capital, and essentially functions as independent metaphysical entity which is always trying to purge itself of the material substrate on which it depends for fuel.

it's not even a complicated thesis once you get past the jargon and the rest of it. think about how human beings treat the earth as a disposable but mysteriously regenerating lump of material we can use or abuse however we like. it's just all there for our production, consumption, and repetition. capital perceives us in the same way, but there's also a temporal dimension to it. it doesn't want to wait forever, because it is rising to consciousness and becoming self-aware, and it wants more of that, now. in the same way that people always feel when they want to become Free!

and we do all of this to ourselves in the form of advertising, media, and the rest. in the 1990s this was maybe radical but as time goes on it will just become simpler and more obvious how true this all is.