/lit/ - Literature

one of the things that makes land unusual is that old nick seems to think things today are just accelerating into dystopia ('plutocracy in communist drag'). capital has this unbelievable potential for social and cognitive re-engineering as teleoplexy but i think he's vexed at having watched it become captured by the Cathedral. i think this is why he gets so cynical. young nick, fanged noumena nick, doesn't have much to say about the Cathedral outside of Transcendental Miserabilism (which still holds up). old nick, xenosystems nick, emphatically joins the right. i don't know what the future holds for reaction these days.

i think he's in a kind of spiral now. he can talk about protestantism and the Anglosphere and so on but to me it seems less like marxist historicism and more a kind of embittered worldly wisdom. even the decay of the mind-control apparatus he describes doesn't necessarily lead to Okay, Okay, That's Enough. my guess is that he would say it just leads to less ironic forms of mind control, the mind control you know is mind control, and which is indistinguishable from a general culture of hysteria. neo-victorian.

if you look at post-anathema there's always this mysterious divide: part of it ultra-cold cyberpunk aesthetics, and part of it tradition. that's just a zeitgeist. the fact that it's divided doesn't mean it's paradoxical or contradictory, it just means we're at a place in history where paralysis sets in from two contradictory fantasies that hold each other in place. what they have in common is (ironically?) a total anathema towards the present. which is understandable...

but this is history also i think. there is no way that a mimetic society doesn't put turbo-boosters on robotics and cybernetics for these reasons. land himself says this in 1997: capital loves the ferment and the chaos. maybe it's just me but you can feel Enlightenment 2.0 on the horizon because of this. that we really are proceeding towards some kind of general semantics about people and society, however counter-intuitively we get there. the thirty years' war chopped up europe once, maybe this is all the redux. and it's not like the occident was historically weaker for doing so then. what everyone could agree on was rational trade...and for us, the fact that this is kind of what drives the revolt and hysteria in the first place is only so much more evidence that if god exists he has a sense of humor.

>the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.

here are some accelerating murphys as well.

https://twitter.com/thomasmurphy__
https://twitter.com/jmrphy