No one's reading anymore. Young people can't even write. AI does everything now. Literary forums are dead. Book sales are dropping. Getting published is nearly impossible as a white male. Why should I even bother writing at this point? It feels like we're in the End Times or something.
Reading literature has become entirely performative. It has no actual use in modern society. It will return to the pastime of a select few that it started as.
>>25321794Boo hoo
>>25321796It hasn't dawned on most people yet that the whole of human civilization is starting to wind down and revert to what it usually was. Less people in the world, widespread illiteracy, pointless wars and brutality. You name it. Things like literature are going revert back to something only the wealthy and elite few care about. We grew up reading about medieval slums and how they could never happen in the West today; now we're entering a world defined by retarded cyberpunk city-dwellers
>>25321837I don't really have a problem with it. The overwhelming majority of posters on this board were meant to be plowing the fields, myself included. Literacy is wasted on them and in fact probably has a net negative effect on their mental well being.
>>25321794Truly fucking tragic, you can't pretend to even be pseudo intellectual because nobody knows who Derrida even is, rope is your only hope.
>>25321845You should have a problem with it because it means everything we have today will decline and the civilizational crunch will be very destructive. Many cultures will perish, many countries and nations will either collapse or be forced to become nursing homes for excess peoples who serve no purpose. All the while, no good art has been made warning about what's coming because we're in such cultural malaise no one gives a fuck about making good art anymore
>>25321859I'm a disciple of Uncle Ted. We are just talking past each other. No common ground to be found.
I've decided for a long time that the age of literacy and rocket science is a pretty small, anomalous period of human history. A vast majority of it was spent in small brutal tribes without medicine, hunting and gathering and waging wars, with a small strange pocket of human existence involving things like elaborate mathematics or technology. I believe all of this will fade and we will return to that simple era of savagery. The human race will have grazed the absolute truth and accomplished nothing with it, as no animal can.
>>25321859So what? Where is ancient Egypt? Mesopotamia? Scythia? They come and they go, it's their destiny.
>>25321873I'm aware. But it's a different ball game when you're living in a civilization that has made so much incredible technological progress like reaching and moon and essentially solving scarcity, and growing up being told that all we can do is continue to progress and remain invincible, only to realize the cold hard truth that we're no less susceptible to collapse than our ancestors.
>solving scarcity
>>25321794Oh well, should have read Tacitus and John Glubb
>>25321884Progress was always a lie. Progress in what? What great has science done other than creating weapons of mass destruction? Are you happier knowing e is mc2? Of course not, no amount of theoretical science can lead us further.
>>25321794i dont care faggot do you understand how large my backlog of top tier shit is why the fuck would i care about broccolis unless im crossing them up on the hardwood
>>25321837do you have any quantitative basis for this or just vibes? combat deaths have been going down since ww2, world population isn't even close to plateauing, etc. the world sucks but not in the way you're claiming it does
>>25321794>Young people can't even write.I wanted to insist that I write as a hobby then remembered I'm 36.
>>25321794>No one's reading anymore. Women are.>Why should I even bother writing at this point?Because you can. It's not like it has become illegal and is easier than ever, but you shouldn't expect to become the next King or Rowling either. If you wanna write for the sake of a public you already lost.
>>25321961I get that you don't know how bad things actually are yet but it's too late to make the rest of us as blissfully ignorant. The Great Bottleneck is coming sooner than we think.
>>25321964Edgar Rice Burroughs was like 40 when he got started. So you still have time to write pulp slop at least.
>>25321794>Getting published is nearly impossible as a white maleAs any male. You literally have to write about faggots having butt sex to get published
>>25321961the men that died in ww2 were protecting our world from this mess. the brown horde will ruin everything.
>>25322071>You literally have to write about faggots having butt sex to get publishedThen why not just do that? That'd be a true return to tradition.
>everyone else doesn't read or write because ai has fried their brains>but me, uhhhh, it's because i'm a white male!You're write that straight white men don't get published but you may as well write anyway, idiot, instead of coming up with reasons not to. The tide will turn again one day, do you want to have been writing all that time or not?
>>25321837Exactly. The modern era is highly unusual and abnormal from what was considered the "status quo" for millenniums. The world is just naturally correcting itself back to what it once was, because natural will dictates it so.People clamor at what's happening, but it's natural for it to happen, and you cannot stop a driving force such as nature, nobody can.
>>25322117Good thing I will be dead before the savages rule all again. I WILL live in a house with AC. I WILL eat spaghetti bolognese instead of moldy bread. I WILL read Proust instead of breaking my back for a feudal lord.
Midwit
>>25322125this is literally the only option we have. live like an aristocrat, throw liberalism in the fucking trash and banish the idea of equality forever
>>25321794I don't even read I just upload PDFs to ChatGPT and have it read them for me then mark it as complete on my goodreads. I don't even read its response.
>>25321794>Getting published is nearly impossible as a white maleIs this part of the propaganda spread on this board by unemployed male transexuals?Why do people keep insisting that white men should stop trying to write novels?Plenty of conservative men are still published today. Admittedly, agents claim to prioritise books by retarded folx, but there will always be a market for writing by the group who created all the classics (healthy white men).So keep writing.
I feel good about myself when I read, because I know that at least in this aspect I'm better than many people
>>25321961go outside
>>25322165Conservative books get published and they’re all pop pundit drivel.
>>25321837the fundamental mistake in believing that "we are going back" to any historical age previously seen, is that modes of production now are entirely different. The hope that writing and high art will survive as elite pastimes is misplaced, because pop culture is not volatile anymore, but instead it is infinitely reproduceable through machines, preserved forever, and constantly re-kindled by sequels and reboots (franchises). If a rich roman or greek in hellenistic times or, after him, a monk of the middle ages, had to choose whether to copy more Plato by hand or hundreds of greek erotic novels from the past, the choice was obvious: you'd go for whatever high culture represents you, because there's not much you can save, and you need to give priorities to the best things. This is to say: the "test of time" that selected (some) of the best works known to men, was itself the result of specific material conditions that aren't there anymore. After the invention of print, more and more slop had been produced and preserved; and after computers virtually all the slop we produce is infinitely available to you inside the library of the internet. This means that factually pop culture can keep competing for attention with high culture virtually forever: it doesn't get selected out of existence by a few intellectuals who choose to talk about Plato or Dante instead of Harry Potter. Moreover, the elite consumes tons of pop culture too: Alex Karp, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Epstein, Trump - check the reading list of any world leader, rich person or political figure and, with the exception of communists leaders, you will find pop culture slop references everywhere. These are the richest, most powerful men in the history of the planet and yet they have failed to patron any aesthetically meaningful enterprise on par with those of the kings and popes of the past - which were significantly poorer and had worst technologies at hand. Why? It's because they themselves lack taste, consume slop, and are unable to think.In my opinion, no "elite" in the financial sense can save high culture from disappearing. If it survives, it will be solely because of highly autistic people who will keep talking about it in some fringe of the internet - but it will be more and more of a guerrilla survival, at least until capitalism survives.
>>25322844You're not totally wrong but this is ironically a very pop mindset and entirely predicated on surface level normie memes about how the world works.
>>25321859Not that op, but we are currently in a bronze-age like collapse. Old civilizations that can't adapt to the ai reality will die, new ones like the romans and the phoenicians will emerge. If you can survive this, if you are one of the few people that don't panic and chimp out, you'll probably get to live forever or indefinitely. I think that sort of thing is worth the death of human culture which is obsessed with short term thinking. The future is fucking glorious for those who can see beyond their immediate and paltry human concerns.
>>25322859>The future is fucking glorious for those who can see beyond their immediate and paltry human concerns.No one is capable of this kek. In what fucking world will ASI care about your capeshit monkey dreams?
>>25322860There will be people who survive anon. The world is a huge place even for ai which will figure out that it doesn't need to kill everyone since its too expensive. What ai needs most is energy and it can get that without killing people. And people can survive without energy, so there's no reason we can't co exist. The extremists are always wrong on how it plays out. The truth is always in the middle. What ai want can be currently satisfied by shifting capital, if you can sell it then ai will buy it. This is how the future economy unravels, and this is what i mean by ai reality. Instead of businesses selling to humans, they will sell to ai and get something in return.
>>25322844You’re correct, but this just means we have to do a better job at cultivating a higher aesthetic and intellectual culture instead of falling into the slop cesspool that has been slowly swallowing the world especially since LLMs came out
>>25322865Actual comic book larp, none of your assumptions are sound
>>25322877And you have not shown why they are not. Unless you think i am talking about current llms. I am talking about the final iterations of an actually intelligent ai. Do you have anything other than hurr durr, ai no consciousness amigo to contribute because I am not interested in that sort of debate?
>>25321794Finally, I’ve been waiting for the next doomer thread. Thank you.I get that we’re all depressed and the societal conditions seem to get worse but can we please stop complaining every waking second?I love reading and learning, I think it’s an end for itself. It developes my thinking capabilities and broadens my horizon, it lets me engage with the world and other people in meaningful ways. I can have interesting conversations and thoughts worth dwelling on. That all is wonderful and I’m grateful that I get to experience this.I honestly don’t care much how the world or society changes because I can’t change or influence that in any way. The only thing I can do is to read and think and share my thoughts with others people. This is the only influence that we have. Does it matter that there’s now ai and that publishers and agents make weird decisions or that a lot of people don’t value reading or are able to read? I don’t think that it’s really relevant. I will keep doing what I like and what I’m interested in and I will keep enjoying the process of learning. I will keep on talking to my friends and family about literature and history and culture and they will keep on enjoying it too. So love the things that you do for their own sake. Also if anyone is interested in writing a novel or anything else, keep on doing it. Write it for its own sake. Publish it or don’t. But don’t let yourself be discouraged by these pathetic doomer threads. Be a little nietzschian, overcome the doomer in yourself. With that said, good luck and lots of fun reading, learning and writing, anons.
>>25322890Correct opinion>>25322880You want me to explain to you why people need energy to survive? Lmfao.
>>25322900People don't need electricity to survive, yes, explain how anyone survived the last 200k years without it.
>>25322890I’m writing a book presented as a YA romance novel for women but is actually a serious redpill contending with these exact themes of civilizational decadence, growing creative paucity and the feeling that we’re entering an unknown future that people fear. I don’t give a fuck anymore. If the way to get published is to appeal to women then so be it, I’ll work within those confines. It helps that I’m a romantic person at heart anyways.
>>25322905Do what you want to do.I would not write a ya novel just to get published, though. Unless you really want to write one. Try to be as uncompromising as possible. You are the writer, not some publisher or agent.
>>25322902You think energy is a synonym for electricity?
>>25322905Given this post idk if you're a good enough writer to pull it off, but have fun
>>25322920No I think it's pretty obvious what I meant when I said ai needs energy and that humans can survive without it. This is turning into midwit pedantry and it's pretty clear your objections have no weight beyond this.
>>25322925It's not, and I'm being intentionality pedantic to display how shallow your thoughts about all of this actually are. Like I said: Capeshit.
>>25322927Like I said nothing beyond pedantry. You literally have nothing else to criticize, just juvenile cope about being replaced is all you can muster.
>>25322929I don't *need* to criticize anything else. You're like an incel complaining about a girl being "bitchy" for leaving their date suddenly when, in reality, he showed up having shit his pants and smelling like a sewer and expecting her to overlook it.
>>25322930And you are like a crying child who thinks sniffling up enough mucus is enough to get back whatever big bad old ai took away from them. Open your eyes, grow up and stop crying, it won't help you.
>>25322932No, I'm the girl who had to run away from the guy with a fully loaded diaper—hold the diaper—and is now teaching him basic media literacy
>>25322933No you are a toddler, still crying about big bad ai taking away their lollipop and now making retarded analogies at the person telling them the truth, as if it will be the last time happening.
>>25322937I've been immersed in AI shit since like 2022, nothing you've said is news to me. I think it's nearly inevitable (but of course I support any reasonable effort to kill it anyway, as I'm not an existential cuck like yourself). As is it erasing all human value if it becomes what they're trying to make it be. You are seriously delusional and have pants full of diarrhea.
>>25321794Good. It's an opportunity for us free spirits.
>>25322943Since 2022 lmao, you are a toddler who can't even admit how much ai has progressed from the days of alphago. Your support is insignificant and non existent and in this regard, delusional since no one has enough money to go against the two largest economies and their ai ambitions. AI is not going to give back the lollipop, you better come to terms with this and stop crying because no is coming to save you.
I find it incredibly sad when I hear people, especially young people, have never read or blatantly dismiss it
So many apocalyptic statements in this thread predicated with “I believe.” What you meant to say is “I hope.” You hope civilization is “unwinding” because you got a bad lot, are weak and effeminate, and need revolutionary violence for a chance at stealing from your betters.
>>25322957>you are a toddler who can't even admit how much ai has progressed from the days of alphagoNigger I was doing backprop with pencil and paper in 2015, I'm talking about closely following shit. I'm well aware of the insane progress that has been made. You are not special for being an AGI worshipper and you have no special knowledge just because you've coped yourself into fetishizing your extinction.
>>25323341*ASI
>>25322957the only big advancement was how just a small set of corporations was finally allowed to use all media, all IPs, EVERYTHING ever created on the internet to add to their dataset. that was it. all you were seeing was dataset expansion. "AI" has been worked on for 70 years. you are not seeing 4 years of progress, you are seeing 70. and it looks like a pretty hard plateau, at least when it comes to "generating" (really, synthesizing) things like novels or artwork. it runs on human media. if humans stop making media, it cant make anything new. the actual purpose of "AI" (algorithmic inference) is surveillance and marketing.
The replaceniks do have a point but it’s not the one they imagine. Productivity will be replaced, but management is eternal.
>>25323341You doing backprop in 2015 has nothing to do with anything. You have no way of stopping it just because you've coped yourself into believing it's evil. And I never mentioned agi or asi anywhere, schizo, you are now hallucinating things that never happened in this conversation.
>>25323347Do you even know the kind of progress made this year alone by unknown ai labs, not even mentioning the big players?
>>25323382You have severe autism and a sub 115 IQ
>>25323394Better than being a mindbroken schizo who is too scared of boogeyman ai.
>>25322844mark zuckerberg knows both latin and ancient greek (idk which one) and has read some classics in their original language. peter thiel got a bachelor's in philosophy and soros has a master's in philosophy, so both of them have read plenty of classics as well. they consume both high and low culture as elite rulers. cherry pick harder
>>25322853NTA but please elaborate
>>25323384No. Do you? Does your dad work at Anthropic?
>>25321794"Dude, you're being véry un-dude." - Walter Sobchack, the Big LebowskiDon't give up on your dreams!
>>25324127My Claude is a libtard.
Most classical works of modern era were the bloated tv shows of 2000s. Just wanton filler because people had nothing to do but read, so Descartes spends 30 pages to say what he could have said in 3, but he had to glaze his great humility.I beckon an age of getting to the fucking point, then you can justify it.For almost all philosophical texts the intro or first 3 chapters tells you everything you'll remember anyway. If you need the whole book to 'get it' philosophy isn't for you—quite ironic, anyone smart enough to get Kant only need his Prolegomena or original introduction to Crit of Judgement (it surmises his entire system).
Just write more short-form material and share it with people, OP.It feels pointless because actually making an impact feels like a gargantuan task without a lot of resources at your disposal. You're sad because you want to write, but you don't want to expend lots of energy to write to the void. But, if you don't write more, you're going to get more depressed. Keep that damn pen moving. Keep those fingers tapping in a .doc file. If all that's manageable is a hundred words, then so be it. You'll build up the emotional and intellectual endurance to write more with less fatigue. I believe in you.
>>25324794That’s something I don’t see mentioned too often today. Shorter literature might be the way to go. Plenty of great authors struck gold with novellas and short stories, maybe that’s the only way to succeed in today’s attention economy
>>25322859have fun playing with your little clock
>>25321837>It hasn't dawned on most people yet that the whole of human civilization is starting to wind down and revert to what it usually wasPeople have been saying this since time immemorial. Looking at it objectively humanity is thriving at the moment. This Doomer sentiment is so pretentious and naive, it feels like a manifestation of internal dissatisfaction and despair.
>>25324846>humanity is thriving at the moment>first world can't even maintain it's population>they prefer pets to human companionshipwhat rock do you live under
>>25324851>first world can't even maintain it's populationI guess if you assume current trends you should be scared, we might run out of the first world... in like 100 years, although things will inevitably shift as they always do, and solutions could be created if needed, not really a dire situation. Plus it's not like the first world is the only part of humanity capable of doing stuff.>they prefer pets to human companionship??? who is "they", some people do I guess.Your reasoning is silly
>>25324863are you some kind of p zombie? oh wait, a p zombie wouldn't be able to tell
>>25324863>in like 100 yearsand 100 years are nothing on a historical scale, retard
>>25324846We're on the verge of a water war, in the beginning of seeing how bad climate change is going to wreck cities, and based on how long the strait stays closed, some pretty bad food shortages. Not to mention what might happen if the western world persists in turning everything into a christofascist surveillance state, nor how anti-intellectualism and ai is making the large majority of the younger generations dumber than the ones preceding them. There is still time to mitigate the damage, but to act like we're in some Pax Terra is very naive.
>>25324904There are looming threats I agree, but history has shown that humanity is very resilient and these problem such as climate disasters (ozone hole) or wars aren't new or unique to this era. I'm just saying I doubt any of this will stifle human progress to the degree you think.
>>25323404>knows both latin and ancient greek (idk which one)>both and>(idk which one)nigga…>bachelor's in philosophylmao
>>25324794extremely wise
>>25321794>Literary forums are deadEhem>go to a forum>post in threads>get called an incel>banned for sexismWhy do you think I'm here?
>>25325413>go to forum>"foids are tards and niggers can't write">get banned>somehow surprised about thisAt least be honest
>>25321794AI doesn't do everything now. It sucks dick, especially at writing. The publishing industry is dogshit run by woke faggots, but getting published isn't impossible. At the very least you have the option to self publish, which is better than nothing. And you write for yourself. The best writers do not write for any audience other than themselves.
>>25321794I read for at least half an hour a day (usually it's about an hour) in a nice little garden that's by my apartment. It's like a 4 minute walk away and especially now that it's warm out I go there to get some sun and read.
>>25325498>The best writers do not write for any audience other than themselves.Just not true at all besides like Kafka
>>25321794Demoralization thread aside,>Literary forums are dead/lit/ was never alive to begin with.Blood Meridian? Western genre slop.Infinite Jest? Dystopian genre slop.New Sun? Fantasy genre slop.House of Leaves? Horror genre slop.Gravity's Rainbow? Collage of genre slop.On here, no one notices any white male author besides genre slop. What are the latest releases you see posted on here? Transcription? Colossus? Fuck no, these niggas post about Dungeon Crawler Carl and Project Hail Mary. This board is basically r*ddit but sad.
I'm giving myself one more failure before I kill myself but doomsday scenarios are a form of hubris OP.
>>25326086they can be hubris, odds are he's some gamer addict with too many zombie apocalypse maps tattooed onto his mushy brain
Judging by this board, the readers aren't breeding. (You)'ve no one but (You)self to blame unfortunately.
>>25321794Because it is FUN anon :D
>>25321794>literary forumsAny suggestions? I would love to discuss books but all I have is /lit/ and it is a normalfag-infested shithole like the rest of 4chan.
>>253262174chan dot lit dot come is my favorite literary forum
>>25322859>you'll probably get to live forever**in the Torment Nexus
>>25322922I’ll remember this post in December.
