/lit/ - Literature

>>10971484
here's an image to think about. it kind of feels like what a whole generation is collectively walking into. at least those who, like myself, seem to be relentlessly hung up on the idea of the past, some kind of failed-romantic sense of a return to collective sanity, since The Future feels like a place that has already disappeared, sometimes.

maybe it felt like this to previous generations as well. i don't know. my grandparents basically went from a world just after the great depression all the way through the 60s and into CNN and the internet. they had no idea what any of it meant. neither do we.

and so i've spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out how it is - or why - that we keep up with the joneses, the meaning of consumer culture and all of that, and post-apoc stuff seems these days to hint at this, or to be a kind of fiction that expresses the weird incongruities and paradoxes that lie at the heart of consumer culture. if i want to get really continentalfaggy with it, i would say that it feels like a culture that insists on abolishing itself, because it keeps opening up more freedom and more choices all around, but the more that it does so, the less and less people are able to make sense of it all. and then into the world of cultural politics today, which...are generally a fucking dumpster fire all around.

i'm not actually triggered by stuff myself, i'm triggered by other people getting triggered. maybe this is the same thing that happened before: for a previous generation, the television came into their house and brought with it the vietnam war. for us, it's the same thing with higher intensity - the internet, mobile devices, and all of it.

or the curious paradox of the fact that after the 90s we were supposedly all so jaded and ironic, so flooded with porn or violent video games and whatever, and all of that has now morphed into this incredibly puritanical virtue-signaling era in which we live, trolling the libs, punching the nazis, all of this.

post-apoc stuff just kind of intimates that space was and remains the final frontier...but that totalitarianism may not be the way to get there. the cold war, much as girard suggests, is all very logical.

in dune, there's the butlerian jihad, herbert's workaround for questions about AI. AI doesn't seem to come up at all in star wars, or in star trek. it's there all day in cyberpunk, of course. but post-apoc has its own way of presenting technological questions that i find enormously interesting to think about.