/lit/ - Literature

>>13417873
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/

It might be worth checking out. She does make interesting points regarding a feminist reading of Land's accelerationism, very much inspired by Sadie Plant, who was *ahem* very close to Land...

Though the accelerationist take on this might be something like 'even if you were aware of "what is going on", would you be able to stop it? Somebody else would just begin developing the technology/intelligence/systems, putting you at a tech/intelligence disadvantage, leading to you going the way of the aboriginal'.

For the accelerationist, tech/security/intelligence always eventually wins because it is what is best able to generate better versions of itself. Stagnation always leads to decay, but acceleration-focused schema are always able to produce the new. It's their basic function - their raison d'être. When you wed already self-expansive system(s) to capitalism you see that this schema of continual innovation isn't going anywhere anytime soon. As Zizek and Jameson say, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. With this, we can infer that the best methods of producing innovation and creative solutions will be the ones that win out. For Nyx, female design principles better mirror the 'whims' of capitalistic/accelerationistic reproduction than masculine/phallic design principles, which will ultimately lead to their prevalence.

As I say, it might be worth checking out. Nyx, like Land, could be read as a joke or as horror-theory-fiction, but when taken at their word as being sincere they are indeed intimating at something profound. At the end of the day that's really all philosophy can really aspire to do.

>>13410874
I'd be tempted to say Cyclonopedia because (I haven't read Intelligence and Spirit lol but) Geotrauma is an interesting concept and I like the idea of oil as a sort of Lovecraftian entity, but Reza's books are hard and that's about all there is to it.

I'd be more apt to recommend his essay Labor of the Inhuman for a take on what we might call the acceleration of reason itself as a sort of self-improving construct that never really owns itself - but yeah, I'll be eager to see Reza's next book as well as that comic he was working on. That might end up being pretty cool, so fingers crosses that it comes out making any kind of sense.

>>11918710
>what's after cyberpunk?
Us.

Cyberpunk's authors, and I relate more to the John Shirleys and Pat Cadigans than the people who are often cited as its figureheads, were a leading indicator. If, as Mumford asserts early on in Art and Technics, the prevailing moods of our culture's major artworks are indicative of the qualities of our culture itself, amplifying its good and ill, it goes without saying that cyberpunk was a cultural landslide without equal.

I always found William Gibson to be a better short story author than a novelist, and Burning Chrome begins with a story called The Gernsback Continuum which is itself a countercultural weapon of mass destruction. It stars a marketing man, it evokes sci-gilded postwar behemoths like the timeless beasts of fable, it excoriates the flaccid optimism of technics with a series of precise lyrical incisions.

>"You'd sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around in this big old Nash with wings, and you'd see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downes's never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles.

A thousand thesis statements are contained within the trim thirteen pages of this story, but "You never actually saw it take off" is one of the most heartbreaking.

In a rather beautiful piece of temporal parallelism, the moments in time this story snidely recounts are the same moments Lewis Mumford did some of his most significant writing.

>While I was waiting, I thought myself in Dialta Downes's America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings onn the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: Ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots.

Cyberpunk is often said to criticize the science fiction that came before it; the impression given is that Gibson and Sterling and the like were sickened by the optimism of their predecessors. But looking at Dick, and Asimov, and more, you see that that optimism is not something that pervades the literature of that time. What it did control, with the authoritarian glitz of propaganda, was pop culture. That pop culture is what cyberpunk is a wailing protest against, and in a tragic irony, cyberpunk's trappings became eventually a chrome-armed marketing representative of that very pop culture, though even in diluted form, its pessimism is retained. Cyberpunk went from darkening the fringes of fiction to darkening our TV screens and iPods.