3 ms·
The Communal Mind
- demygale 8y agoPatricia Lockwood is a national treasure. Check out Rape Joke as one powerful example. But it’s strange to see her on hn Headline really needs punctuation.
- MaysonL 8y agoIndeed. Just read this, Rape Joke, Lost in Trumplandia, and just reserved at the library her memoir Priestdaddy (her father is a married Catholic priest), and her poetry collecion Motherland, fatherland, homelandsexuals. Powerful.
- pjc50 8y agoThat's quite a piece of writing. Unusual to see the Twitter style fused perfectly into the LRB high literary style. Very post-Gibsonian.
- AnthonBerg 8y agoThanks for capturing it well. Do you write anywhere yourself? Prose or meta or science or whatever. Thanks. (Asking in sincerity :))
- pjc50 8y agoI write here, in this comment box. That's a joke, but also entirely serious - I've not had a blog for years, but I have 40k karma here and probably 10-100 times as many words; and one day I'm going to extract the best stuff and make a Thing of it. I absolutely do not have the discipline to produce thousand-word essays for the LRB.
- d136o 8y agoI've not really been a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, but this was an amazing reading. It straddled the line between what we see online today and that outlandish but seemingly very possible malfunctioning future. Specially timely in light of the open.ai work shown yesterday on advanced language models [1] [1] https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#content https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#content
- pjc50 8y agoI wouldn't categorise this is SF; I would call it "beat" or "gonzo". Possibly Joycean, except it's not fictional enough. It's not speculative, it's observational; it really is a record of the lived experience of being Extremely Online. A travelogue of a place that's in your phone. (I can identity most of the memes referenced, which probably means I spend too much time on Twitter myself)
- gipp 8y agoIt takes a special sort of brilliance to really capture a particular kind of interiority in prose. To really get at what it is like to be a particular sort of person. This accomplishes that feat for the modern internet addict and hivemind member to a degree I wouldn't have expected possible. Great piece (heh).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- unforeseen9991 8y agoI felt like I was reading the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and realized that that reality is the current reality. Reading this was a journey.