/lit/ - Literature

>>12374656
it makes me wonder also if this is sort of how the Victorians felt on reading Freud: you are not in charge of yourselves, your drives are leading the way, and know more about you than you could possibly understand. with Land there is a reversal: capital itself is the reflection of those drives, and constructs the world in which you come to live. *it knows.* it already knows, like an enormous nascent supercomputer. and there is no fix to this, except through the skein of philosophy.

it is possible that Reza is the Jung to Uncle Nick's Freud. AI is something that has to be built, true, but because AI is actually the goal for philosophy itself, and not only because AI is the endgame for capital. it's a subtle distinction. Uncle Nick is who he is because he is the world's greatest Marxist heretic: modernity means capital, and vice versa, and it is modernity which shows its fangs through the toxic neo-humanist torpor we call postmodernity. when i read Land, i realize that capitalist positivism *is* the face of existential nihilism in the 21C: death is replaced with the aggression of happiness, the forced and desperate positivity that at least one other theory magus has sussed out.

one question to ask, however, is whether or not it is actually sustainable. if Silicon Valley is any indication, it may be possible that the way to actually poison the well is by wedding technocracy to its eerie doppelganger, communism. if it becomes impossible to distinguish culture from advertisement and advertisement from politics, Idiocracy beckons and things can simply stagnate or regress into a winter phase of pointless metaphysical bloatware. as Hickman says:

>Against both Land’s conservative vision and Brassier’s speculative cosmic nihilism Negarestani tells us there is a need to institute another form of inhumanist praxis: the programmatic objective of an inhuman praxis is to remobilize non-dialectical negativity beyond such Capital-nurturing conceptions of negativity. Without such a programmatic sponsor, alternative ethics of openness or politics of exteriorization, the speculative vectors of thought are not only vulnerable to the manipulations of capitalism but also are seriously impeded.

Sloterdijk's ideas will do well in a milieu like this also. but so will a lot of nondual mystics. even in China there have been times when Confucianism waned and Taoism and Buddhism waxed; maybe it will be like that for us also. the world is not our own to direct and control; that's probably a good thing.