/lit/ - Literature

>>11874521
greentext c-c-combo breaker
>balls
>oh well

>Kingship deliberately sought by means of the megamachine to bring the powers and glories of Heaven within human reach. And it was so far successful that the immense achievements of this archetypal unit for long surpassed, in technical proficiency and output, the important but modest contributions made by all other contemporary machines. Whether organized for labor or for war this new collective mechanism imposed the same kind of general regimentation, exercised the same mode of coercion and punishment, and limited the tangible rewards largely to the dominant minority who created and controlled the megamachine. Along with this, it reduced the area of communal autonomy, personal initiative, and self-regulation. Each standardized component, below the top level of command, was only part of a man, condemned to work at only part of a job and live only part of a life. Adam Smith's belated analysis of the division of labor, explaining changes that were taking place in the eighteenth century toward a more inflexible and dehumanized system, with greater productive efficiency, illuminates equally the earliest 'industrial revolution.'

>Henceforth, civilized society was divided roughly into two main classes: a majority condemned for life to hard labor, who worked not just for a sufficient living but to provide a surplus beyond their family or their immediate communal needs, and a 'noble' minority who despised manual work in any form, and whose life was devoted to the elaborate "performance of leisure," to use Thorstein Veblen's sardonic characterization. Part of the surplus went, to be just, to the support of public works that benefited all sections of the community; but far too large a share took the form of private display, luxurious material goods, and the ostentatious command of a large army of servants and retainers, concubines and mistresses. But in most societies perhaps the greatest portion of the surplus was drawn into the feeding, weaponing, and over-all operation of the military megamachine.

>The social pyramid established during the Pyramid Age in the Fertile Crescent continued to be the model for every civilized society, long after the building of these geometric tombs ceased to be fashionable. At the top stood a minority, swollen by pride and power, headed by the king and his supporting ministers, nobles, military leaders, and priests. This minority's main social obligation was control of the megamachine, in either its wealth-producing or its illth-producing form. Apart from this, their only burden was the 'duty to consume.' In this respect the oldest rulers were the prototypes of the style-setters and taste-makers of our own over-mechanized mass society.

'illth' is actually a word. seriously.

>>11707889
>Also about Land in general: would doing some economics reading help with his work? Obviously Marx is mentioned a lot, but are there any other authors or books that are recommended?

don't know if this anon is still here, but the overy and greenspan theses on r/theoryfiction are pretty amazing introductions to land stuff, whether you've already gone through fanged noumena or not. they will lay out all his big influences and will explain why he says the things that he does in less hyperbolic language. available here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/theoryfiction/

i recommend amy ireland's essay as well.

>In its simplest form, then, accelerationism is a cybernetic theory of modernity released from the limited sphere of the restricted economy (‘isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ asks Bataille) and set loose to range the wilds of cosmic energetics at will, mobilizing cyberpositive variation as an anorganic evolutionary and time-travelling force.

>A ‘rigorous techonomic naturalism’ in which nature is posited as neither cyclical-organic nor linear-industrial, but as the retrochronic, autocatalytic, and escalatory construction of the truly exceptional. Human social reproduction culminates in the point where it produces the one thing that, in reproducing itself, brings about the destruction of the substrate that nurtured it.

source:
https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

land really is no meme. it's true that he says crusty old guy shit on twitter now, the back end of fanged noumena is full of hunter thompson-style science fiction, and perhaps he thinks only a moff can save western civilization. but still. peel back the layers of craziness and you find not only some visionary stuff but just a pretty persuasive marxist analysis of capital in the 21C.

>>11715686
i honestly have no idea what matters or what does not matter anymore, what is useful or what is not. if you think it's germane on some level it probably is. this is /lit/. we all swim in the great memetic sea here.

>>11715718
this is legit awesome, i've been in need of some YouTube stuff to watch. you can only listen to so much peterson.

also, that second video looks familiar, i think it came up in the aztec thread.