/lit/ - Literature

>>13002235
i've read it a bunch of times. the stuff after Meltdown where he goes full-bore Lawnmower Man - rolling initiative against the GM, as it were - is i guess part of what makes the book what it is, and it's good that it's there i suppose, but it's not as interesting as the earlier essays, like Circuitries.

but again, send yourself back to 1990 here. from the present perspective this seems kind of hyberbolic perhaps, but it really isn't. Land and the rest of those CCRU guys were prepared to take postmodernity *really at its word,* even moreso. Baudrillard skirts around the edges of media apocalypse in his own way. or Deleuze: he says something about the simulacrum devouring the model. here again is one of those places where the Matrix just strikes me as being such a missed opportunity: if instead of turning Agent Smith into a Big Bad (when he was in many ways would have been a much more interesting hero), he had just been removed altogether and the writers might have considered what an internal collapse, or implosion, of a completely media-driven reality would look like.

that's basically what Land was up to. and the real kicker is that he really does it in a kind of terrifyingly good faith: he's prepared to take media reality basically for what it is, which turns out to be...well, incomprehensible, or if comprehensible only truly explicable in terms of Bataille, or Lovecraft, or Burroughs, or whatever. i think it makes more sense when seen in the context of both the age: the late 1980s and early 1990s, the shift online, post-Cold War stuff, and with the writing on the wall for whatever phase of postmodernity that was. there was definitely about to be some shit that was going to kick off, however perversely you would have to be in tinkering with the Do Not Open boxes.

on top that it's not like he goes it alone either. Sadie Plant is pretty important all of this also, and their wires cross over what it is that is being called feminism, what is being called capitalism, what is being called cybernetics, and more. Fisher is there. and whatever drugs and music they are listening to. i've never really been able to feel as though even Young Nick *wanted* things to be this way, but he was intense enough to really want to take a look under the hood and enquire into the workings of the machine. and nobody else has ever quite written about the cyberpunk aesthetic and its relevance for philosophy as much as he has. personally, i think Roy Batty is more interesting by far than Wintermute, but hey, everyone's different. and in hindsight...well, the funny thing about the really excellent writers is that they have a funny way of changing what it is that we even mean when we say, 'hindsight.'

you should read that book. it's a hell of a horror story.

>>13002697
cheers m8. it's very much appreciated! and a pleasure to talk with you gents as always. as my kindly dad says, 'keep your fork.' as in, there's probably more...