/lit/ - Literature

>>12050454
the thing is that the earth *does not lack for power.* power we have, and we are the multiplying, amorous, meatbag species as well.

but we have *plasticized culture.* and we have more or less jettisoned anything that might look like *refinement* as a kind of cultural imperative. true, a lot of things had to get blown up, because within all of that refinement lay some other dark and horribly brutal metanarratives that had to come out into the light. my own hot take is, Mission Accomplished. the skeletons have all now been exhumed, and parade in the streets. we are currently watching this happen, and the result is a profound reality crisis.

Sloterdijk writes things about Rules for the Human Zoo that make people anxious, and rightfully so. JBP has the right idea. leave society alone, cultivate yourself. this is a Confucian idea, but he doesn't make it up; it comes from the Great Learning.

but you don't even have to go to these dimensions to understand that mastery > amateurishness. the degree to which you can push difference is very remote, but in the long run it connects to Land's own teleoplexy argument: the point of the skill is moar skill, ultimately for algorithms. Land is highly consistent in this regard.

but this is a Cosmotechnics thread as well as an acceleration thread. i don't see the point in taking The Machine all the way. only until the message is received, which in my case, i think it is. but i would prefer that humanity deliver up something *other* than Peter Thiel and seasteads and much else, or even Neo-China arriving from the future. it's just not necessary. all anyone needs to do is to be good at the thing they are good at, and the rest will fall into place in the way that it must. the problem is that, so often, the only reason people become good at things is ultimately because *there is money in it,* and it's not like money is losing its appeal. you can use that money to turn yourself into a cyber-unicorn, or build yourself a Pleasure Dome and collect your own pee in it like Howard Hughes, or whatever the fuck. the market only responds to these fantasies, but the fantasies of the fantasies will either drive you insane, or - worse - convince you that What Society Needs Is and you'll get into fuckface politics with Great Ideas about What People Need.

all people need is to fucking calm the fuck down and get a handle on what they can get a handle on. the Optimization Process will happen as it happens, but it will be better served, imho, if people don't feel they are being press-ganged into it. or that somebody else is out to get them. there's a lot of other stuff. mostly it's just about how to live. which is hard, and i'm no expert. i'm an absolute fuck-up. but i have some sense as such of what it means to live as a fucked-up human. i am an expert in being inexpert. and mostly because i spent too much time reading, instead of learning a trade.