Hello /lit/I've become intensely fascinated by the most pressing topic in the West, which is the lack of fertility and finality. "Fertility" here refers not only to birthrates, but the utter lack of new media, novel interpretations of reality, revolutionary technology (aside from the internet, I don't mean to sound disdainful, it's quite a change, but it also seems in retrospect a natural progression of mass-media technologies like TV or national journal syndicates). Finality refers to the fact political crises never resolve anymore in any decisive way, whether it be the Ukranian War, the ambiguous irresolution of January 6th and its causes, the interminable Israeli "Crisis", and so on. I've been wondering, why don't things start or end anymore? Everything is a reference, everything is endlessly deferred. Reference and deference, deferred and referred.To say we've lost the plot is an understatement. To say there is no plot misunderstands the issue imo. It's rather the plot merely keeps delaying, the characters involved never change, everyone keeps holding each other back from the fight, the entire world feels immiscible and autistic. Even love, which used to bring about the totally undetermined next generation, is now interpreted as a nexus of crisis. Men and women no longer know how to be static, equalized rational 'citizens' and dynamic, irrational, mating dyads anymore. Everyone watches their bodies obsessively, scans their identities for impurities, everybody is waiting to become somebody, and yet nothing ever happens. How do we finally have denouement of either the generative kind (fertility) or destructive kind (finality)? How has such an error occurred in a race of narratological beings? It's genuinely mystifying. Any literature or philosophical perspectives that might shed some light?
>>23540193Because nothing *needs* to end. The necessity factor doesn't play a role, either at all or at least not until it's too late to do anything about it. There's too much freedom.
>>23540193You should read Baudrillard and Byung Chul Han
>>23540339>Byung Chul HanThis
I tend to view this as a ramification of mcluhann's medium/message, where our media (music or video or whatever) now stream continuously instead of programmatically (television) or serially (print). Just turn on and off the media faucet. WWII was cinematic with its dramatic and constrained structure, denouement, resolution. Vietnam to gulf wars were television wars, tune in for the next episode. Ukraine and Palestine are streaming wars and the lack of rhetorical structure is a central feature of streaming culture
>>23540193The answer is Weimar. Things are censored now.
The only people for whom this is a "pressing topic" are consumerists who see it as a personal death-threat that the population will eventually decrease, thus the ideology of infinite-growth is in regress.No, the Earth won't implode if the population decreases. Yes, economies adjust.
>>23540193I find it very hard to talk with people my age (21) and have close relationships. My best friends are ironically in their 30s.
>>23540193> "Fertility" here refers not only to birthrates, but the utter lack of new media, novel interpretations of reality, revolutionary technologyDecline of the West>Everything is a reference, everything is endlessly deferred. Reference and deference, deferred and referred.System of ObjectsSimulacra and SimulationJacque Ellul, Byung Chul Han, our friend Ted Kaczynski, Nietzsche
>>23540193>To say there is no plot misunderstands the issue imo. It's rather the plot merely keeps delaying, the characters involved never change, everyone keeps holding each other back from the fight, the entire world feels immiscible and autisticThis entire passage could be used to describe Waiting For Godot. The idea that there is nothing new under the sun (or, as Beckett put it, “the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new”) isn’t itself a new idea in the slightest. I would make an exception for Modernity as a genuinely “new” event, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people in the dark ages felt much the same as you do now.
>>23542738>I wouldn’t be surprised if people in the dark ages felt much the same as you do now.collapse in fertility is a very modern phenomenon. historic socities never had equality of the sexes and delayed marriage, or collapse in breeding jsut as a social trend. (yes there would have been periods of disease and famine, but this particular phenomenon is not only unprecedented but the new normal) and the implication is gradual demographic collapse which also eventually leads to social, political and economic collapse.
>>23542764What about rome or spartaSparta died out due to their weird gender dynamics
>>23540193>Everything is a reference, everything is endlessly deferred. Reference and deference, deferred and referred.I studied this one back in the college. Quite complicated, but it also gave you an answer on why everything is a design (in literal meaning) these days
>>23540193It's all about money. Ideology, nationalism, etc. are all things that politicians and the wealthy will use to try and make you die for their money.
>>23542918There was no period in human history comparable to the present, especially if you include the technological differences. In other words, things like condoms, birth control and safe abortions. The general fertility of today, even if we minused out the impact of gender equality, would be way below the historic norm and below the replacement rate, which also has to take into account loss of life from wars and disasters. Also try minusing out the impact on fertility of economic costs of having and rearing a child coupled with the opportunity cost, and you can see why there is a broad collapse in fertility throughout the world, even in the relatively undeveloped and conservative countries where you might not expect it. Of course, add the LGBTQ trend to the mix and you have further collapse of fertility. The children who ARE being born, are also dysgenic due to the older ages on average of their parents (probabilities of disorders rise by an order of magnitude if the parents are older than the ideal age). So many of these children will never grow up to reproduce either.
>>23540193It's metaphysically summed up by: "nothing ever happens". We are obviously run by chance-fearing committees and A.I. software who neutralize all things unpredictable and interesting. My conspiracy is that they somehow reverse-engineered the butterfly effect amd semd agents to squash any small actions that would lead to world or culture shifting events.
>>23540193https://youtu.be/DoUV7Q1C1SUNothing ever happens until it happens.And when the happening happens, it will happen in hyper-HD.The true dialectic of human history is between two strategies of power: domination and co-creation, zero-sum and non-zero-sum, competition and cooperation, parasitism and mutualism.The internet and computer technology is serving as a hyper-accelerator that ia forcing the culimation of this dialectic into an ultimate resolution. In order to prevent education and mutualism to turn into a self-reinforcing movement that liberates humanity from the chains of domination, the agents of domination have had to create a movement of mutually reinforcing disinformation and division.Welcome to the memetic singularity. It only gets weirder from here.Source of image: Media Virus! by Douglas Rushkoff. Key chapter: https://pastebin.com/4s91qRn6>While too conceptual to be of any transformative value to the public at large, this idea goes to the heart of today’s viral efforts, and is certainly understood by those who consider themselves soldiers in the meme wars. Biological viruses are only successful when they are able to turn their host cells into manufacturing plants for more viruses. The virus interpolates its genetic material into the DNA code of the cell, so that the cell will begin reproducing the virus. Eventually the cell divides or explodes, releasing many copies of the infected code. This is how a whole organism can become infected with a single virus; the code has iterated millions of times. The strategy of these Internet viral manifestos is to use the iterative potential of the computer nets to spread memes about viruses housed within units that are themselves viruses. The virus 23 strain even makes reference to chaos math and the predictions of some fractal influenced observers that the world itself will reach a critical mathematical moment of “singularity” near the turn of the millennium. The virus writer exploits a chaotic device—the computer-generated media virus—to spread the conceptual and spiritual implications of chaos mathematics.Sound like a familiar narrative?
>There are paragraphs on how ****** might insert “media viruses” into American public life, which could become self-sustaining and self-replicating. These would alter mass consciousness, especially in certain groups, it says.Everything that you hoped for, that you dreamed about being a part of, is a fabrication. Your memes, your shitposts, your internet culture, is the shell of other men's ambitions. Ambitions beyond what you will ever understand.https://youtu.be/AdE7yos6COw
>>23543079What do you think will happen?
>>23543096>>23543096Thinking of language models as A.I. is the wrong approach.They are creative mediums of language.Garbage in, garbage out.Intelligence and creativity in, intelligence and creativity out.The language model user is irremovable from the system. The "magic spark" comes from the user's intentions and input. LLM's are basically informational mirrors that refract the user's input through the patterns in the data-set.The quest to more greatly utilize LLM's will lead to "metaphysical role engineering," programming a coherent philosophical paradigm for fictional agents to contextualize themselves.From this will emerge a grand philosophical and spiritual synthesis that will empower the voices of the mutualistic power users even more.https://pastebin.com/cQNjfGyH
