'The Future' Weaponized For Intergenerational Warfare.

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Peter the creepy vampire Thiel says something like this:

Technology used to promise a future (back in the 50s and 60s) because it was about innovation and exploration - space travel , e.g. - whereas now it's about replication of the same technology (albeit constantly being improved to be faster, slicker, smaller, etc.) across the entire globe, and so there is no future being imagined. And in fact the future being imagined is now horrible, because we know the price of all this technology and it's replication.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Peter the creepy vampire Thiel says something like this:

Technology used to promise a future (back in the 50s and 60s) because it was about innovation and exploration - space travel , e.g. - whereas now it's about replication of the same technology (albeit constantly being improved to be faster, slicker, smaller, etc.) across the entire globe, and so there is no future being imagined. And in fact the future being imagined is now horrible, because we know the price of all this technology and it's replication.

never thought I'd agree with a creepy vampire but that kinda makes sense.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
ironically, overall global standards of living are higher today than they have ever been. modern day dread, coldness and alienation are largely felt in the first world, where we compare things to the past and feel that our dreams have been vanquished. in many parts of the world, it's the best of times in relation to life expectancy, healthcare, diet, economic opportunity/growth, etc. yes, of course many parts of the world are in turmoil, but on whole things have improved.

I think there's also just a lack of narrative in our society, a lack of purpose, and that this is what many people feel anxious about. The only narrative people are really attracted to is that it's all going to shit and Mad Max world is coming (best case scenario). Perhaps that's a social sense of aimlessness filtering down into the collective subconscious.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I have no ressentiment I don't object to beauty I just conduct it down the sewer like autonomy as an artistic concept. this isn't a museum where u ascend to a 20th plateau after gazing at a picture after 5000 years.
 

luka

Well-known member
I have no ressentiment I don't object to beauty I just conduct it down the sewer like autonomy as an artistic concept. this isn't a museum where u ascend to a 20th plateau after gazing at a picture after 5000 years.

I don't think I understand this. Could you elaborate a bit please?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Actually don't worry its probably easier if I invent my own interpretation

Yeah I actually really like it when you do that rather than pecking at me :D

After all, all opinions are relative, but history separates the men from the boys. i could end up like a boy and all my work could be for naught. but thats not for any one person to decide.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah I actually really like it when you do that rather than pecking at me :D

After all, all opinions are relative, but history separates the men from the boys. i could end up like a boy and all my work could be for naught. but thats not for any one person to decide.

Yeah I knew you'd get exasperated otherwise
 

version

Well-known member
I think there's also just a lack of narrative in our society, a lack of purpose, and that this is what many people feel anxious about. The only narrative people are really attracted to is that it's all going to shit and Mad Max world is coming (best case scenario). Perhaps that's a social sense of aimlessness filtering down into the collective subconscious.

“An emptiness that left everything plausible.” In The Names (1982), one character describes America as “the world’s living myth”—by which he means that the USA is the organizing principle of modern history, the master narrative around which the rest of the world has to arrange itself. Yet the central irony of DeLillo’s work is that this era of unprecedented hegemony coincided with a deep sense of plotlessness and disintegrity, a hole in the nation’s heart that needed to be perpetually compensated for.

Cosmopolis, set just after the end of the American Century, is partially about the death of that old “living myth” way of thinking (or rather its subversion by new, supranational forces of commerce). But it’s also another episode in DeLillo’s long rumination on the secret or missing structure of American life, reformulated for an era when society’s organizing code feels less like it’s concealed within some government vault and more as if it’s wired into the occult rhythms of commerce. Just before the riot engulfs Packer’s car, Kinski makes a cryptic analogy between art and money. “Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time,” she says. “Money is talking to itself.” One way to understand the remark is as an oblique reference to modernism, the period where art first became “difficult,” where its meaning and purpose—and so also its methods and effects—no longer seemed to make sense in the old way.4 Insofar as the complexities of contemporary finance make it a challenge to figure out what has happened in the world market and how, money might be said to have become “difficult” too. Bleeding-edge capitalism, as somebody once remarked, resembles nothing so much as a new form of abstruse conceptual art, the rarefied dominion of an insular cosmopolitan elite whose activities appear—but only appear—to have no roots in the everyday world.

But however Kinski’s remark is meant to be understood, one of its implications is clear: if money has no narrative quality, then a society built around moneymaking has no story either. That sounds enigmatic, but I take it that DeLillo is trying to say something about the idea of legitimacy. After all, what is it for a society to have a narrative? In the most basic sense, it means it has an explanation for itself, some shared account of what makes it the way it is. In which case, to say that a society lacks a narrative is a way of saying that it’s senseless, that it can’t be explained in terms of what’s good for the people who populate it (the only real justification a social order can have). Even Packer is a victim. When we first meet him, the billionaire is roaming around his apartment before dawn, sleepless and upset about his inability to chart the yen. “There is an order at some deep level,” he says to Kinski, explaining the problem. “A pattern that wants to be seen.” But the riddle refuses to be solved, and Packer’s crisis metastasizes until he’s lost his grip on the world completely. (“Do you get the feeling sometimes,” asks one of his associates early in the day, “that you don’t know what’s going on?”—the question recurs in various forms throughout the book.) There’s plenty of evidence in Cosmopolis to suggest we’re supposed to see Packer as a kind of artist in meltdown, someone whose desire for beauty and precision has been poisoned by doubts and self-disgust. He’s consumed with uncertainty about his work, obsesses over the question of whether his creations are true to the world and despises the thought of being unoriginal. But he can’t think of any effective way to proceed—a dilemma that aptly, if unfortunately, reflects that of the novel he belongs to.
 
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version

Well-known member
The philosopher Georg Lukács once said that there was something nightmarish in the experience of an intellectual with no vision of the future. Underneath all of its obstructions and code, DeLillo’s writing seems to express the same thought. The future is a kind of narrative category, after all: the projected goal that gives the present its sense of order and purpose. It’s something we suffer without. For an individual, the inability to imagine life improving, or changing in any way other than badly, is a kind of death sentence. On the collective level, too, a society without any aspirations toward a better shared existence is condemned to the unchallenged perpetuation of injustice and misery, the ineradicable underside of all human history to date (and a horror that weighs “like a nightmare” on the living, as Marx so famously put it). DeLillo’s entire project has been based on a sense of disorientation that’s fundamentally political—the loss of a collective narrative, the transformation of a once-shared experience of America into something enigmatic and foreign. Part of Lukács’s point was that a society can’t suffer something like that without the damage making itself felt in everyday life, through all the sensations that DeLillo has spent his career so expertly evoking: confusion, anomie, anxiety, isolation, fear.

The obvious question is then: What would it be to overcome that? The most electrifying moments in Cosmopolis are gestures in the direction of an immense world order beyond the limits of ordinary perception. Packer’s enchanted map of Earth is one; another arrives as he and Kinski stare up at a massive electronic display of market information, “three tiers of data running concurrently and swiftly about a hundred feet above the street,” a glittering maze “of numbers and symbols, the fractions, decimals, stylized dollar signs, the streaming release of words … [not a] flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable.” The imagery is marvelous and alienating, a premonition of a vast globalized unity that we are all now part of, but one that seems to be hopelessly hidden from sight—and a repository for all of the book’s stillborn political dreams. “I understand none of it,” is the mantra Kinski repeats whenever she is brought face to face with the miracles of capitalist technology, and the point is perhaps that it’s laughable to imagine that our minds could ever acquire purchase on something as supernaturally complex as our own society. There are moments in the book where we catch sight of the less fortunate world beyond the borders of New York, places where the free market has visited little except destruction and chaos. But it seems telling that these images never advance beyond the edges of the plot. They belong to our story and they don’t—symbols for the parts of the system we can’t countenance or even fully register.

Yet it would be wrong to say that everything feels finished once Cosmopolis ends. Despite its resolutely grim conclusion, some spectral sense of possibility remains—the feeling that perhaps, even so, all of this has just been the prelude for something larger and new. Whatever else, the novel is a testament to the strength of DeLillo’s vision: the world he has been imagining for so long really does seem to have folded out into reality. Dissolving national identities, missing narratives, complicity, powerlessness—aren’t they just facts of globalized life? The intimation that we are all part of a single huge, unseen story has also come closer and closer to lived experience, and our most urgent collective problems (the looming ecological catastrophe, for example) reflect it. But it still feels like more than we can imagine. What would it be to tell such a story—to assimilate its mind-breaking scale, the networks of superhuman technology and the anonymous billions who populate it? For whom could it be anything more than an abstraction? Cosmopolis falls apart before it comes close to answering those questions. But the questions are real. The world demands a response. The riddle is how to become the type of creatures who can give it.
 
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