/lit/ - Literature

also, Uncle Nick is going infuriatingly slowly on publishing recent chapters of his book. it's not like i'm complaining about him trickling out some of the greatest theory anywhere in the world today, but dayum...he took another huge break and i was loving getting daily updates.

he is the fucking best tho. everything else i read is just squaring me for Full Cybernetics going forward.

§5.583 — The Federal Reserve Note is nothing less than a wager upon the future of America, its central government, and – most specifically – its taxation power. By extension, the exceptional global acceptance of the US dollar is an investment in American world order. All these relations are analytically reversible. Geopolitical crisis implies currency crisis, or – still further – potentially follows from one. The coin has two sides, and can be easily flipped. ‘Derealization’ into pure credit only accentuates money’s ambivalence. As it is incrementally demetallized, money takes the form of a promise, whose credibility is founded upon the public image of state power, as fully-expressed within both domestic and international contexts. Under such circumstances – especially when a global hegemon is in the spotlight – the stakes of a ‘monetary revolution’ are not easily over-estimated. Nor are its positive implications readily anticipated. The nature of money has long ceased to be separable from the order of the world.

i'm glad i didn't have to write this book, because i would have torn my face off with my fingernails long before i ever got to the kind of lucidity that he has. but that book had to be written and it could have been written by no other, he's been perfecting this kind of analysis for thirty years. BTC, security, pass-keys, the internet, all of this stuff. he totally leaves the foundation open for lots of other writers too to go in and investigate the cracks that he has found in the way we think about political economy in the 21C, the relation between money, knowledge, and tech. all that.

>>12867871
just some intellectual or host i think, i haven't looked him up. but he's got a fucking great team if they can make art like that for him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaIslptrD-g

>>12740489
>gf, my dude, i know your brain is a dyspeptic soup of the sevenfold and seven thinkers you've gobbled up in three days, but man would it be easier to have a comversation with you if you could just pop, like, a xanny and some antacids tabs and just focus on one thing at a time.
you know me very well. i feel like my contribution in general is to basically try and leave something interesting and mysterious out there on the boards for people to discuss, because my own brain is exactly as you say it is. can only nod at this.

>let's start with social credit: what do you think are the practical virtues of such a public accounting system?
it incentivizes incentivization. we know we like grinding, we know that games represent some kind of step forward culturally. i feel, basically, that consumerism has more or less completed the human species, in some way. don't shit on me too hard, again, if you're familiar with my usual schizo-rambles you will probably have some idea of the things i tend to say and repeat. we like the chicken, we like the iPhones, we like the wifi, we like all of it, we do not want it to go away. but we have social problems with this: first of all, the production of kajillionaires, with mobile capital; tech-comm firms that have no permanent address and tremendous sway over governments; globalist sensibilities at odds with national ones; and Wokeness, the unholy fusion of capitalism and libertarianism that supplies ideologies more disease than cure. we need something that can work around some of these problems.

>what would a social credit system get individuals to *do* that would scale to the necessary order of magnitude needed to effect change?
if it doesn't hold out the promise of a livable city it's not worth doing. the model is Singapore, but not only Singapore. look at Rwanda: they are, incredibly, moving beyond one of the worst scenes of genocide ever. they're not playing idpol games, they want something else. they want what the First World has, and they should, because it's good to have what the First World has. there has to be an incentivization process that allows for human frailty but has nobler aims in mind than 21C Thomas Hobbes.

(cont'd)

>>12693495
capitalism can't be stopped and won't be stopped. it's moved into the domain of intelligence now, that's the whole reason why i shill so hard for Uncle Nick, and why he presents philosophers with such a conundrum: you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

what i think that book quite brilliantly articulates (echoed to some degree also by the essays anon linked to here, >>12692247) is that neoliberal capital is itself the end of the end of the end. and whether you like to reflect on these things with Hegel, or Wilber (i like Wilber), or whoever else, it tells us that these are the precursors to epistemological breaks and sea changes that are

a) absolutely unpredictable, and
b) guaranteed to blow our minds.

i liken it to a war-zone. we have ripped open a whole in time and space with this process, not unlike the scientific revolution once did, or the renaissance, and one way or another we are going to have to man up and get the fuck in there and see what's going on. i'm not a nostalgic fascist or a starry-eyed utopian communist or a cynical neolib, which is why i spend most of my waking hours quaking in absolute fear and dread about what's coming next. i can find no other reason to do this, but it makes sense to me.

as Brassier says, this is a speculative opportunity and point of departure. i think a little Zen and the Tao is good, obviously, in terms of not losing our shit. but i also think we pretty much have to give ourselves a whole new operating system too. politically, it could be the case that China simply has to eclipse the West technologically and economically before we understand that political radicalism is completely attritive and destined nowhere good.

capitalism can't be stopped. we survived no end of disaster and trauma in the 20C, and now we have another one, the encephalization of the human species by turbocapital. where it leads, nobody fucking knows, including me. but politics a shit. let's keep having conversations and hold on to our butts.

tldr >>12692298 is right, i say write so much and say to little

that's about all i've got.

>>12682784
>This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum...

kek. i know those feels anon. god be with you wondrous wandering soul

>>12670618
>Tell me about your personal views.
punch in girardfag on warosu, they're mostly cringe rantings and ravings about acceleration tho. not really all that interesting tbqh. but i do like talking about philosophy with anons here, i've had some really wonderful conversations on this board. the Cosmotech threads were really fun.

>Are you religious for example?
this one is hard to answer. i don't go to church or anything like this. i have a great fondness for the work of Girard, but most reading that interests me invariably blurs the lines between religion, philosophy and psychology. those in turn connect to anthropology and mythology historically, and going ahead to more recent stuff involving technology. i'm kind of all over the place. i find the Tao pretty nifty too, and i am attracted to Land threads on /lit/ like a moth to a flame. i find religion to be a more or less indispensable check on political extremism.

>Trump voter?
i'm a leaf, so no. i'd have voted for one of the independents. but the 2016 election was the first one that i ever really paid much attention to, if only because i was getting seriously into a lot of conservative thought at that time, doors that were opened up for me by readings of Heidegger, Land, Baudrillard &c. learning about the big reactionary wave of NRx and Austrian school economists was quite fascinating, i hadn't really done much reading of the other side of the fence until a few years ago. now i'm kind of drifting back towards the same boring centrism i departed from, i think. i shill for Land because i think he's one of the most important philosophers alive right now, but not because i genuinely want the world to be taken over by Skynet or anything like that. more because he has identified some the critically malfunctioning parts within our neoliberal world order. hard and fast political ideology of any stripe strikes me as being more pathological than anything, but it's very hard to shake ideology or ever talk about philosophy in a kind of completely detached way also. i think we're going through some kind of epochal shift right and i'm really not sure what the best to comport oneself to it is. i admire Peterson for a lot of the things that he does, even if his readings of the continental guys i like is often terribly uncharitable. Land is no saint either and i am hoping someday to find somebody more interesting than him to talk about.

i have no academic philosophical pedigree at all, i'm self-taught in all of this stuff. just always been a big reader. and i probably have a few screws loose.

>>12649585
>It's not a problem at all. You just think it is.
true, but sometimes i become sentimental also

>If you subscribe to Land or Austrians, you should understand money as either Ai or proxy-for-AI, calculating towards the singularity. Austrian theory of money and Omohundro Drives fit together.
this also. you're not wrong. i'm just bloviating here in my usual way and trying to figure out what i want to be pointlessly and impotently cranky about today, on this beautiful sunny day which i will completely fucking waste thinking about Land et al

also i'm very much enjoying learning about the Enlightenment also