/lit/ - Literature

>>11962854
he's given up on the West, but he certainly hasn't given up on capitalism. and - historically speaking - betting against the West just always seems like a bad idea.

fwiw, i ranted about this in Cosmotech #6: Don't Hate on the West. Not Everything is the West's Fault. i will re-iterate that again here. our issue today is *postmodernity,* which has a manifestly cultural dimension, but it is also a world-historical phenomenon. and it is one of the reasons why YH's book is so important also: modernity is a problem for everyone. it manifests in different ways, and the responses to it take different forms, but Planetary Technologization is really a global theme.

and this is why i wanted to make these threads also. Land has recently intimated that he thinks NRx is basically dead too. and who knows, maybe he's right. could be. i'm not even sure that placing all bets on China/Asia is necessarily the right move either: Social Credit is probably going to work as an experiment, but what happens if the rest of the world takes a look at this and says, no thanks, we'll pass on that too. then what? Xi wants China to be a world trading power - that's certainly not a crazy proposition - but even over there, the same as here, the nature of trade is that you can't force other people to trade with you if they don't like what you're up to in a cultural sense.

so yeah. Land is skeptical about the West. everybody's skeptical about the West. it feels like we are headed for something like the Thirty Years' War over race, and class, and gender. i'm not optimistic myself in that sense, if only because i agree with JBP on that too: it won't lead anywhere except back to itself in wheels of bitterness and ressentiment. in Girardian terms: it leads to scapegoating.

what is required is a both a salvage op and something like the formulation of a new program for human development. Stiegler and YH have a lot going on in that regard for me. if the future means technology, and technology is a global phenomenon with localized cultural-intellectual manifestations (that is, - cosmotechnics) then that is something that we can pay attention to. capitalism and tech come out of the Occident and are exported worldwide from the renaissance to the 20C, and then there is an apocalyptic disaster-party about What Did Modernity Mean By This in the middle of the 20C: it's the Second World War.

whatever positivity we can cook up from poking through the fragments and shrapnel left over from this will be something we will have to do ourselves. Land isn't optimistic about anything other than BTC, but the whole point of Cosmotech is to inquire into the possibilities for life after Nick Land's Wild Ride.

Who The Fuck is Yuk Hui and Why Should I Care

>Good Essay:
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/superhumanity/179224/on-automation-and-free-time/

>YH on land, NRx, trump, &c:
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/

>Passing from the digital to the symbolic:
https://www.hkw.de/media/texte/pdf/2017_2/2o3tiger/170530_2o3Tiger_PDFs_Yuk_Hui_press_new.pdf

>Philosophy of tech in china:
http://networkcultures.org/geert/2017/09/04/philosophy-of-technology-in-china-second-interview-with-yuk-hui/?pdf=1446

>Cosmotechnics as cosmopolitics:
http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_161887.pdf

>On the existence of digital objects:
http://libertar.io/lab/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/On-the-Existence-of-Digital-Objects-Yuk-Hui-45-731.pdf