Cyberpunk philosophy thread

What are some good cyberpunk or Lain related philosophers? Or just any recommendations that are related to the metaphysical, ethical, and religious themes of the anime and cyberpunk in general. Feel free to post or discuss fiction too or just anything that had a philosophical theme you like and why. Personally I like Marshal McLuhan and Baudrillard and have read some Deleuze which I thought was okay but barely comprehensible. Any other authors I should check out?

Cyberpunk is a literally genre, not "philosophy".

>>9221 I don't know if that's absolutely true. Cyberpunk has influenced a lot of "post-modern" philosophy. Although, I think they mean the philosophy basis of cyberpunk, the genre and aesthetic, Lainon.

You could try the CCRU but imo it’s all just incomprehensible nonsense

Don't think it goes beyond maybe Mark Fisher and his inspirations. Which shows maybe the broad genre of cyberpunk isn't enough to deal with the modern world. >incomprehensible No printed work of philosophy is literally incomprehensible. Even if you have to give your own close meaning to the abstractions works like Anti-Oedipus or the CCRU present that is the first step and part of the point. Try again.

>>9224 >No printed work of philosophy is literally incomprehensible. This could only be true if it were treated as part of the definition of philosophy. Too much respect for people purely because they got a book deal is how so much garbage philosophy gets passed around as respectable.

>>9224 I've never understood the appeal of Mark Fisher. He just repeats what other people have already said and there's no originality. Fisher loved to tell us that we're trapped in a loop repeating the culture of the 20th century, but he was an embodiment of that culture of regurgitation anyway. What really makes me uncomfortable is this crude hatred he seems to have for millennials because they don't endorse his kind of nostalgic leftist counterculture. Millennials had counterculture alright, but it was just mostly online (GNU/Linux culture, 2chan, 4chan, emo and hardcore kids on my space, jihadist web forums). These didn't lead to Marxist outcomes so Fisher seems to ignore them. >>9223 The CCRU were the first people to really fetishize the web without really understanding it. There's a lot of good stuff in Sadie Plant and Nick Land, but if you find it incomprehensible that's because it is. They spent a ton of their time on heroin and meth so their work is rambling and nonsensical.

there aren't any "philosophical ideas" in lain. its just an anime that has stuff about schuman resonances, hacker groups, and becoming god that were popular in the 90s. its like evangelion slapping religious imagery onto stuff to make it cool and edgy. its a good anime but theres no philosophy there.

>>9220 I'd definitely recommend Bernard Stiegler. Unlike most philosophers he lived a somewhat cyberpunk life. He was a 26 year old high school drop out who was thrown in prison for armed robbery. There, Stiegler noticed how his memories seemed to change based on what books he'd read and stuff never matched up with his notes. Our memory is influenced by the tech we use like pencils and notepads or word processors. Corpos and governments deliberately design their tech to steal our attention, soak up our free time, and turn us into alienated consumers suffering from short-term thinking. They invent the disease and then feed us artificial cures creating a confused and disorientated population. I thought the memory thing relates to SEL pretty well. It seems people in the anime rely on machines to store their memories in the Wired which lets Lain edit them. There's also parts where Lain begins to doubt her own memories. Chisa either uses this system to upload her personality into the Wired or Eiri is just manipulating Lain's memories too.

>>9228 You people are so tiresome. You're programmed to tell yourself all this bullshit by default. Like, why do you even have an opinion? Why do you need to always have a binary opinion? Who programmed you to tell yourself you know who, where, what, everything and yourself are all the time? I never had that. >>>/hum/72676 Not going to write about the numerology.

>>9226 >>9231 Thanks for the recs I'll check them out. I avoided CCRU because of the whole stuff about Nick Land being a alt right neo nazi. >It seems people in the anime rely on machines to store their memories in the Wired which lets Lain edit them I thought the point was IRL and wired aren't separate. I don't remember seeing normal people uploading memories and mind data into the wired apart from Chisa. Also thought Chisa thing was fake and Masami was just messing with Lain. >>9228 Even if there isn't any philosophy in the series I'm just interested in stuff that can help explain the anime. A lot of times theres not a lot of depth in a series but you can read into it and use it as food for thought.

>>9237 >Even if there isn't any philosophy in the series I'm just interested in stuff that can help explain the anime. It goes deep, down to the fundamental layers. This is why your presuppositions will overshadow the ability to see what's right in front of you. KIDS and its evolution PHANTOMa is a key starting point. The role of ritual as well eg >>9232 There are always 3 things. 1) What something is to you 2a) What the Creator's conscious mind thought it was doing 2b) What the Creator's unconscious was actually doing 3) What's actually there, the absolute. None of these should take precedence over the others. Need all the layers.

>>9237 >Thanks for the recs I'll check them out. I avoided CCRU because of the whole stuff about Nick Land being a alt right neo nazi. How is Nick Land a neo-nazi? He's literally married to a Jewish woman. I think its interesting how people just say soykaf about Nick Land.

>>9240 If a marxist or liberal doesn't understand it, and it falls outside of their worldview, they will usually call it/them/the idea neo-nazi / fascist / nazi / "right wing". This is to be expected, modern left and modern liberals are simply reactionary (oh yeah, that's some *mint* irony, considering the subject matter, huh? lol)

>>9241 I think you could definitely call Land racist (who isn't, lmao?), but calling him a Nazi is just totally wrong. These Marxist types that say this stuff about Land simply don't understand that Nick Land is a nihilist of epic proportions and pretty much outwardly states that he wants to munidicide or at least enslave humanity as a whole. His position is that Anglos are special as a kind of bootloader for angelic super intelligence which will initiate something resembling Armageddon and explode all forms of political subjectivity. He talks about this openly, and derives a feeling of joy of the thought of a hyperintelligent angelic machine race annihilating humanity. What's more is that nowadays his philosophy is totally oriented towards this "war in heaven" and he believes that it is his life's work to commune with and pray to angelic superintelligence, which retro chronically communicates to him. It's a completely different headspace from Nazism. I mean, he clearly stated in an interview something along the lines of wanting to free technology from humanity but that he didn't really care if the humanity was free. In the dark enlightenment he explicitly calls identity politics "fascinatingly stupid".

I love Mcluhan and feel like he ended up at sort of similar conclusions to some of the big existentialists from a different direction. For those I'd rec Heidegger's Discourse on Thinking for an intro to him, he also has some collections of essays you can get that include The Question Concerning Technology. What is called thinking is a more book length treatment on similar ideas. Another guy who goes in a similar direction is Gabriel Marcel, Man against Mass Society is a good starting place for him.

>>9237 You should avoid the CCRU. They were a bunch of charlatans and drug addicts mimicking internet schizo posts and combining it with highly cancerous academic leftism. Despite their name, the CCRU never really existed and didn't seem to explore cyber cultures or tech all that well anyway. 90% of their writing is just incomprehensible. Nick Land is a poser who's always glued himself to whatever happens to be edgy and underground. In the 80s he was a sycophant for Deleuze, in the 90s he stuck himself to cyberpunk and the internet, today he's a reactionary retard who spends all his time soykafposting and pandering to far right Twitter while writing pro-government trash for fringe Chinese newspapers. People like the aesthetic of his work and rarely evaluate it on it's merits and coherence. Some of his early essays are interesting but he's a washed up overrated failure. The sad thing is Land and the CCRU distract from actually good writers that deal with tech, the virtual world, and the internet. >>9244 This. Everybody interested in tech should read Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology. Stiegler is great too. Ellul is another person to look into but I've not read him yet and like Land he had a xenophobic streak.

>>9247 >>9247 >rarely evaluate it on it's merits and coherence. Some of his early essays are interesting but he's a washed up overrated failure. Name the essays that are interesting.

(idk if this is redundant and everyone knows about him or not so i’ll just say) douglas rushkoff is a cyber media theorist whose work is greatly influenced by mcluhan. he’s extremely comprehensible and inextricably tied to cyberpunk themes and culture. he wrote the book “cyberia” in 1994, which might be directly alluded to in lain? there is significant theme overlap, anyway. when i first read him, as a fan myself of mcluhan and baudrillard, i was very pleased. his work isn’t a rigorous read but it’s satisfying to see things you’ve probably speculated/observed in print. also interesting to map his 30-something year career and foci as the internet has rapidly changed. not quite concentrated philosophy, but can’t philosophy be derived from anything? and if anybody knows anyone else in the vein of rushkoff (internet-heavy theory/research/philosophy/sociology/psychology, currently alive), plz throw them my way

>>9248 Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest along with Mechanic Desire, and Meltdown. Even Meltdown is almost incomprehensible anyway. Aside from this, Land isn't worth reading.

>>9252 >Aside from this, Land isn't worth reading. I disagree. I understand if you personally dislike Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Negarastani, Fisher, and so on. I personally do not like Mark Fisher at all. However, I think other people might find reading the CCRU writings and Nick Land worthwile. At the very least they are certainly entertaining, which is really not so bad.

Ellul, Deleuze and Guattari (shocked no one recommending land recommended them, they’re literally crucial to understanding him), Byung-Chul Han, etc. Honestly you should probably read from the Greeks on if you want to understand most of these guys, Land is essentially incomprehensible without knowing D&G, Baudrillard, Bataille and they’re incomprehensible without understanding prior philosophers.

>>9226 > What really makes me uncomfortable is this crude hatred he seems to have for millennials because they don't endorse his kind of nostalgic leftist counterculture What? The same Mark Fisher that ranted about 60s student protests being mainly priviliged male middle-class kids? Or condemned modern popular colture because it was a dishonest repetition? I don't get it. You can say a lot of things about him but I really don't see where exactly you could pinpoint his legacy to "his kind of nostalgic leftist counterculture". From modern culture critics he seems to be **profoundly** aware of this nostalgia and rejects it harder than many other (say Zizek even). Seems to me like you're just making a popular "safe" argument that was already heavily discussed - hence probablly not controversial - but it feels misguided

Are there any eastern philosophers of tech? I mean tech is huge in Japan, Taiwan, China etc. so I wonder if there's any Buddhist or Taoist writing on it

None of you mentioned uncle Ted. I am disapointed. He foresaw where the rails of modernity would take us and tried to warn us.

>>9270 Few things more cyberpunk than not even being able to hide in a cabin from a bunch of weapons grade autists who don't even leave their room.

>>9270 He probably wasn't mentioned because he was a schizo pseud with nothing of actual substance to contribute and is only remembered because he killed a few people.

>>9283 Its unclear to me how someone with a professorship at Berkeley was a psuedo-intellectual. And he absolutely did contribute to the anti-civ/anti-technology crowd, if for no other reason than that he has spread his ideas very far. How many people do you think know who Linkola or Ellul is versus Kascynski? And, you know, Kascynski does bring up some good points.

>>9228 bro the anime is about an AI program that breaks the barrier between the online and offline worlds, how is that not philosophy? Lain is literally the technological singularity

>>9287 >Kascynski does bring up some good points. He sure does, but unfortunately most of those were made for him by other people. ISAIF mentions a lot of really interesting bits of philosophy/sociology throughout it by some very prominent philosophers and sociologists. It's just when Kaczynski gets to his own beliefs they come down to p1) Destroying the environment is bad p2) Industrial society destroys the environment c1) Industrial society is bad p3) Mental illness is bad p4) Primitives are less mentally ill than moderners c2) Primitive living is good c3) We should retvrn to monke p5) It would be good to destroy industrial society p6) But it's almost impossible to purposefully change society c4) Revolutionaries should just be adaptable™ BONUS: p7) I like killing p8) Primitives don't have laws c5) IT'S KILLING TIME BABY

>>9287 >someone with a professorship at Berkeley Yes, in mathematics. Not the subjects he wrote about. His writings demonstrated a significant ignorance of philosophy and political economy, even after spending decades in jail.

>>9290 And by the way I'll just add: some of the dumbest people I've met in STEM academia have been mathematicians, especially the ones that don't do much applied math. Their discipline is so isolated from the material world that often they're just as stupid about other subjects as any layman outside academia.

>>9291 Jordan Peterson said the highest IQ people in Universities are mathematicians and physicists. Just saying.

>>9292 Uh, ok, I don't really care about anything Peterson says.

>>9292 Burst out laughing. This is where we are.

>>9290 >Yes, in mathematics. Not the subjects he wrote about. His writings demonstrated a significant ignorance of philosophy and political economy, even after spending decades in jail. Well my point is that there isn't anything pseudo-intellectual about him. He was just an intellectual in regards to the areas of life where he was trying to be. I've heard these types of criticisms of kascynksi before, and I think they are unwarranted. I do think people who think that Kascynski is like some groundbreaking philosopher of technology need a reality check, but I don't think he was trying to write Industrial Society and It's Future from an academic or intellectual perspective. He's not trying to be someone like Foucault. He's not trying to be Marx. People need to stop with this, "Oh, but did he contribute something original?" <- this is a botched kind of intellectualism. Originality was probably the last thing on his mind. You don't need to be original. It's not like he was writing in some random academic journal. I just don't know what you expect from him. He had different priorities. He wasn't trying to be an academic or an intellectual in respect to his writings on technology. He's not developing a system or a philosophical critique of industrial society so much as a moral or ideological critique of it. >>9291 >And by the way I'll just add: some of the dumbest people I've met in STEM academia have been mathematicians, especially the ones that don't do much applied math. Their discipline is so isolated from the material world that often they're just as stupid about other subjects as any layman outside academia. The same is even more true of philosophy and sociology. Ted Kascynksi unironically had a better understanding of the primitive lifestyle than someone like Greer or Ellul. But I get your point, you think being good at mathematics doesn't necessarily make someone intelligent when it comes to other topics. However, Ted Kascynksi was not dumb and that implication is totally stupid. He was clearly highly intelligent and capable of engaging with topics outside of just mathematics. You can not like that, but it's just the truth.

>>9296 >He was clearly highly intelligent and capable of engaging with topics outside of just mathematics. Seems suspect, considering the idiotic drivel in his essays and prison letters. >but I don't think he was trying to write Industrial Society and It's Future from an academic or intellectual perspective. Yes, hence why it's inappropriate to call him an "intellectual". Maybe he only seems like a smart guy to you because, like him, you too haven't spent any time studying political economy?

>>9298 >Yes, hence why it's inappropriate to call him an "intellectual". Maybe he only seems like a smart guy to you because, like him, you too haven't spent any time studying political economy? But you accused him of being a pseudo-intellectual...? I was pointing out how he was an intellectual in certain fields, and that in regards to his writings concerning technology he wasn't trying to be an intellectual. Again, what do you expect from him? If you think you are more convincing by being unnecessarily combative, you aren't. For one, you aren't even so much as pointing out what his misunderstandings are. And what I was doing is really just questioning the whole structure of your criticism of him. Why does he need to be a intellectual in your eyes? Why is he a "pseudo-intellectual"? Moreover, he tested at 137 IQ and attended Harvard when he was 16. I don't care what your opinion is on IQ as a psychometric, it is more accurate than determining intelligence by degree of comprehending political economy. I think that this is fairly obvious.

>>9292 Hello, actually confirmed 160+ high IQ mathematician major here. Please don't listen to Juden Peterberg. >>9291 A lot of that is because they are scared to learn outside of their own discipline. To the point where I get snide comments about how nice it must be to have nothing to do, because I have hobbies that don't exclusively consist of mathematics and alcoholism. They have this idea that you can only live one way or you won't "succeed" in the field.

>>9291 That is sometimes the case. I once talked to a guy who was weirdly proud about the fact that he was completely ignorant of programming. However, he also routinely made mistakes in abstract algebra. In my experience the best abstract mathematicians are quite able to adapt to applied mathematics. Sometimes not the other way around. Partly I think it's a reaction to the fact that there is a huge push in academia for everything to be applied. So people who are more interested in abstract fields that don't bring in much dough get really defensive. Partly also it is a desire to be "smart" by hyper-specializing using in some extremely abstract subject that nobody else can understand.

>>9289 Kaczynski wasn't trying to be original. He was trying to explain his actions and use propaganda of the deed to spread the anti-industrial message. Ted came of age in 50s America, before the radicalism of the 60s and 70s and (apart from maybe Adorno and Horkheimer) ecology and technology weren't hot topics for the militant New Left. Ted took that militancy, cut out the leftist stuff, and meshed it with American frontiersman homesteading. His manifesto was tapping into a whole group of people disillusioned with technocracy and pissed at how corporations and governments ruined the environment. Ted made some good points but his ideology of an anti-tech revolution is full of holes. Anti-tech thinking is motivated by the same mental attitude that makes tech destructive in the first place. The feeling that things should or shouldn't exist based on how useful they are to us and if something displease us or causes us inconvenience we should just nuke it.

>>9301 >I once talked to a guy who was weirdly proud about the fact that he was completely ignorant of programming. They're overgrown little boys. Mommy-Daddy is saying "good boy" through their parental introjects.

Try gits or Technolize. Very interesting cyberpunk

what about the unix philosophy? can you apply that to areas of life outside of tech?

>>9321 Yes! I have massive filing cabinets that I use for everything for example.

>>9265 Yuk Hui is the big one.

CCRU are probably the only people seriously interested in anything because they combed through actual cyberpunk lit and tried to build a philosophy from it. They weren't flawless by any means and were wrong on most technical details but they at least tried. The magic of computers and the internet was worn off and its become something mundane and ordinary just like washing dishes or taking a soykaf. Philosophers don't write about it. Then by the mid 2010s, the idea of the internet was this amazing alternate reality was exposed and nobody really writes cyberpunk anymore because its become our reality. We live in authoritarian ethnostates that manipulate truths, fight constant wars against so-called human animals in foreign countries and dope people up with entertainment. Cyberpunk is duh.