/lit/ - Literature

>>10981969
besides the matrix - and fallout, which matters for different reasons, namely, because it takes the subject of the apocalypse as a thing which already has happened, as opposed to something over which the hero has control over - one of the most brilliant stories ever written on these themes was ender's game.

there is no concept of holy war without a matrix or a simulation, and no simulation that ultimately can stand as a simulation without being able to simulate or explain the concept of war. one of the key ideas of EG is that the war is not winnable if it is understood for being what it is. in order to fight the war at its best possible level, the war has to be a simulation which only later is revealed to be the thing in itself. and it's the same thing with all modern forms of war, particularly wars fought with nuclear weapons: the weapons of absolute destruction require tiny screens and vast distances. even the death star is a monument to cold-blooded bureaucratic efficiency. press a lever and a planet disappears. technique requires abstraction, and abstraction requires technique.

this is not to champion star wars as a magnificent text, because of course the whole problem is that it can only function by legitimating a different, positive form of ideological terrorism (and by making those who turn to the sith have their heads turned into scrotums). a more interesting star wars might take as a central character an anonymous Imperial engineer who lost his family during a raid on a death star...but this is to go off on another tangent.

simulation, war and ideology are more interesting themes. sun tzu says that in the end all war is based on deception. so how about the need for necessary self-deception, just in order to survive in a world where truth becomes by the hour indistinguishable from illusion? these are the kind of things that just fascinate me to the moon and back.

>>10982118
tastes vary. some authors just click with you, with all of us, in mysterious ways. there's a fine line between truth, meaning, and symptom, where the philosophical and psychological encounter each other. marxist and accelerationist stuff speaks to me, but increasingly, as ward indicates, there is this need to grasp phenomena like reification and debt in other than strictly dualistic or reciprocal terms. there's always higher mindfulness at work. like the sphinxes within dimly intimating when their riddles are getting subtly dissolved. it's kind of a relief.