Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here’s Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.
There’s a letter in the book of Asimov’s correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he’d been asked “How close are we to George Orwell’s 1984?” again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.
He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.
I don’t think I disagree with much of what Asimov is saying here! Aside from the silly bits about left infighting and scifi as forecasting (yawn), and the horrible recount of the Spanish civil war, I’ve made pretty much the same observations about 1984. It’s nihilistic and reactionary, it’s profoundly misogynistic and it reeks of contempt for the working class. It’s also shockingly naive and paradoxically enthusiastic about the workings and effectiveness of propaganda and censorship. There’s certainly nothing prescient about it. It’s baffling to me that it’s still popular with leftleaning people to this day.
The most generous thing I can say is that the book might have been intended purely as satire, and as such it would at least be coherent. But sadly I don’t think this is how people tend to read it.
Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don’t mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.
Then there’s a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It’s pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It’s only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it’s just sparkling sectarianism.
Better organized than the POUM, I’ll give it that. “Won out” is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.
And then there’s the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it’s impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn’t work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn’t possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn’t this dystopian society more feminist?
The thing is, the world in 1984 is feminist! as imagined by a bloke who hates feminism. Sex for pleasure is outlawed, makeup and dresses are banned, women look and act like men (and indeed are worse than men) instead of following their womanly nature. It’s a feminist dystopia!
I mean, if god damned Asimov thinks your book is misogynistic, you know you’ve fucked up!
Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.