/lit/ - Literature

>>12577713
>>12577836
so it's a subtle shift, but not a crazy one.
>disabuse me of the notion land & co. are only really interested in philosophically justifying their fascination with a genre of sci-fi novels
one thing to bear in mind also is that Land and Reza are not on the same page either - there was an all-too-brief moment in which RN and Nick were going back and forth on Twitter about some of this stuff...alas, that story ended much too soon.

anyways, i don't think they're just justifying a fascination with sci-fi novels. a lot of this is still exploring Kant, Hegel, Marx...a century+ later we're still trying to figure out these problems, now updated for the age of the global corporation, with a century of totalitarian political experiment under our belts (fascism, Russian communism, Chinese communism), the end of the Cold War and the present state of general meltdown of post-WW2 liberalism, whatever the Internet is doing to our minds, computers, crypto-currency, robotics, biotech, lots of other stuff. there seems to be some kind of connection between language, money and intelligence, at least, in a kind of self-propelling mechanism that nobody really knows what to do with, or even if proposing some kind of telos is even a possibility.

i was saying earlier that i was in a kind of return-to-Baudrillard mode, as i always enjoy reading his work. Baudrillard is one of the sharper critics of Marxism and a key figure in these stories for me, because he deprives socialism of a lot of its mystique, but doesn't really offer anything in its place for ordinary folk, besides hyper-refined modes of disappearance and fatalism and so on...all the way up to terrorism. that seems to me like a bad look, but it's not like the nihilism isn't warranted or justified. as for How Bad Things Can Get, Land's whole career is a study in this, that capital after 1990 becomes a true black hole that just sucks everything in - and, to cap it off, that thing itself is produced by some combination of our most autistic and schizophrenic drives, the one-two punch of Skynet and Cthulhu. i don't know what your threshold for continental theory masochism is, but i am a kind of enduring Land homer in this regard, not only for getting a sense of how truly crazy things can get, but also because Land's own nightmares actually connect back to not only Heidegger (Gestell) but also as a continuation of Hegel and Marx (Spirit/Capital/Teleoplexy). those give you the cyberpunk time-loop that is, to my mind, a far better way of coming to grips with postmodern nihilism than anything you will find in Woke politics on the left or on the right. that is the *actual* story.

but it doesn't have to end with Land. nihilism is a speculative opportunity and a point of departure. intelligence still exists, and it doesn't necessarily always have to be the handmaiden of libertarianism and vice-versa. that's Reza's contribution: philosophy yet lives.

(cont'd)

>>12378846
my own sensibilities skew more towards Neo-Augustinian Neo-Confucian, ultimately. and as such they are destined to be thwarted, but i still think melancholy > rage. postmodernity, like man, is something that must be overcome. it is liberalism in its terminal phase. some days i don't actually know if even Landian capital has a future pre-arranged for it; it may not, if it finds itself irresistably wed to Silicon Valley communism on some deep level. Arrighi's thesis about the rise and fall of great cities and the marriage of speculative capital and landed sovereign authority doesn't have a special clause in it for San Francisco. Genoa had its day, as did Amsterdam and London. long before this, Rome; and once upon a time even Baghdad was a shining city on a hill. then the Mongols showed up.

>>12378863
meh, i guess. there may be no way out of Hegel, but if that's the case, there's also an infinite number of potential phenomenologies of spirit to come also. Hegel writes something to this effect himself in the preface, iirc; there are a lot of ways from sense-certainty to Absolute Knowing, not this one and this one only. Aminom would probably just say more like Hofstadter and Whitehead with their own eyes.

and one has to ask what Hegel would have made of the past 200+ years anyways. or whether or not he would agree with Fukuyama that Hegel more or less fulfills his historical mission after 1990. just in time for the internet, cryptocurrency, and AI blastoff, perhaps. presuming everything doesn't regress back into Idiocracy, that is.

>§3.08 — Fractional reserve banking partially anticipates macroeconomic governance in the discretion it affords to money creation, but – in itself – it offers only the faintest glimpse of the new world that is arising. This systematic incorporation of Keynesian ‘animal spirits’ into the realm of government policy objectives, beginning – very tentatively – in the 1930s, and then ascending to dominance in the post-war world, completes the politicization of the economic sign. Money is now invested with mass psychological meaning, identified with a technocratically-accessible dimension of collective arousal, and economic sentiment becomes an explicit object of administrative manipulation, through the money supply. The profundity of this development is easily under-estimated. In the era of macroeconomics, monetary policy is seamlessly fused with psychological operations, oriented to strategic public mood alteration or ‘demand management’ orchestrated with reference to an array of guiding concepts which are overtly attitudinal: ‘wealth effects’, ‘money illusion’, and ‘wage stickiness’ prominent among them. It is now the psycho-social propensities to save or spend that are to be theoretically reconstructed by the academic-administrative economic complex, with integral cynicism, on the functional analogy of pharmacological medicine. Economic and clinical therapeutics become increasingly hard to distinguish in principle, as they are differentiated only by their specific techniques of psychological intervention, and by the scales of their domains. In each case the (individual or collective) patient, vulnerable to ‘depression’, is subjected to expert treatment through the measured application of artificial ‘stimulus’. Feedback is provided by economic sentiment polling, designed to gauge business and consumer confidence. There is nothing metaphorical about any of this, except insofar as euphemism is called upon in the public presentation of monetary and fiscal objectives. Macroeconomic policy is – quite simply, and exactly – mass mind-control. As it is normalized, it sees ever less need to disguise the fact.

don't mind me, i'll just be here stitching a Purple Sweater for the world's most interesting philosopher. come join and have some hot chocolate if you like, baby it's cold Outsideness &c
>&c &c
ITT we talk about Uncle Nick

source:
http://www.ufblog.net/

atmospherics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=107dADrIVBk

>>12090358
>>12090289
one thing tho: i'm going to be traveling again this week, so updates are going to be spotty. i think the timing on this is good, tbqh. the Mighty Cruffitan was completely awesome, and really scratched an itch i needed to scratch. for two months+ was it scratched and then some.

so a new Cosmotech cruffitan probably won't be up for a week or so, owing to the usual logistics of life. we can keep our conversation running in this thread in the meantime, or start another one if necessary. 'tis all well. but the next general may have to wait until i'm back from some other IRL responsibilities, and then daily schizoposting and hypothesizing on civilization as self-assembling consciousness experiment can begin once more. and we'll try to keep it mostly focused on BTC & Philosophy so as not to arouse the ire of the nofun anons.

DJ Krush: Jaku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwkjdnV8Hrk
>dj krush is /ourguy/