/lit/ - Literature

>>12495840
prosthetics are a ridiculously interesting phenomenon. if you're interested in reading more about this in a philosophical sense, i recommend taking a look into Bernard Stiegler, this kind of shit was exactly what he was thinking about while he was in jail.

the big one was prosthetic *memory,* or what he calls tertiary retention. what is a memory, anyways? things you write down, record, read and so on. prosthesis in general is pretty fascinating when we're talking about the body and its limits or extensions, or the fact that you can essentially introduce a theoretically limitless number of microprocesses between your brain and your extremities - as long as you're in control of them, technically, it's still your 'body', after all...

and then Yuk Hui takes this to the next level, by introducing these questions of what happens when we start building computers that remember us for us in advance - our preferences, our names, whatever passcodes we need, whatever else it is that we need to identify ourselves as ourselves. again, if you're wondering why i find Wokism so fucking irritating, it's because all of the shit over modernist categories of identity - race, class, gender - aren't even nearly as interesting as what *technology* is going to do. at the same time, it seems entirely likely to me that the very cultural force behind progressivism is what is almost certainly going to drive the economics that leads to those very post/transhuman questions i find so fascinating (>>12479752, and there is a lot more to be said in this vein.)

what the digital age brings up is this impossibility of distinguishing the real from the illusory precisely because of these kinds of mechanisms - like memory, or anticipation, or aaaaaaaaaaaall the other crazy science that will be developed to meet our consumer needs. Stiegler does some pretty interesting stuff with Derrida too. i can even direct you to a good thread on this...

Cosmotech #7: Prosthetic Memories Edition
>>/lit/thread/S11950708#p11963176

aaaaarrr, that megathread was such good times.

>>12495928
the homeland must be protected, no matter the cost