Ohhhh... I don't know. Too long ago. Ask me when I have a bit more time and I'll try to piece it together. War on terror, reification in my degree... one of the ideas which became TGAW was that they were pursued by the shark from Jaws across the broken world... that didn't gel until Gnomon...
Thx. Weirdass experience, though, to read it in 2025 and keep thinking, "2007."
It's a very interesting connection you're making, and one that hadn't occurred to me. My nightmare in 2007 was of making stupid ideas real, of forcing the sharpness of theory onto the frailness of human life and cutting off the overhang like Procrustes' bed... 1/n
I saw it in terms of "professionalisation" - the instinct in late capitalism to strip away everything that is not part of a particular government role, job, or corporate product, and do ONLY that pure iteration, when it's often the peripheral, unwritten functions which keep everything working. 2/n
To go with that, you have a new dream crushed down onto everything which doesn't mesh with the truth. Anti-science, ideological economics, blah. Metaphorically, obviously. So I guess, without wanting to blow my own trumpet... It feels relevant because those things happened and here we are? 3/n
And AI Slop and so on are - ironically enough - a reification of those fears. But the other bits are worse, at least for now. Huh. I feel like I should go read my own book. Thank you. 4/4
Lean and Taylorism have been a disaster. Nowhere has productivity actually improved, at best you end up with a short term death march until the reactor unexpectedly blows.
Thanks for this. Maybe what's in common is that evil tends to involve insisting on a belief about how the world is or ought to be, at the expense of a world that isn't as imagined? A pastor friend suggested evil may intrinsically consist of "carelessness" and I wonder if he meant this.
I think there’s certainly a truth in the idea! But not all accounts of evil and error have to unify. There can be many, alas.
And since you've used it twice in this thread, I just wanted to say thanks for teaching me the word "reification" when you used it in TGAW. 👍🏻
You should, it’s really good.