important idea. a theme in these is they are variations on story forms that break the fourth wall. where literary fiction breathed life into characters and gave words to essential human experiences, the horror in these stories feels like iterating on a kind of transmissible schizophrenia, not unlike the meme virus in Snowcrash. we're into version 4.x or more of this, where the doubts about the real shown by AI are the effect earlier discoveries about the consequences of a "hyperreal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality).
decades ago those cultural studies people (who now run our institutions) were on to more than we knew. they were reasoning about how to operate in a world that disconnected from a shared Real. we can see these weird fictions as the artifacts of devices operating on todays fragmented, narrative driven realities. i'd call it post-nihilism, where culturally we're downstream of a great unmooring and in an all against all struggle for narrative dominance with no safety in a base reality or truth. the weird fiction devices are patterns of reframing, analogous to exploits for injecting cognitive associations (or dissociations) to align other minds. It's like in the "wet cement" stage of a news event where everyone crowds in to establish the dominant meme first for their "side."
I don't indulge in these stories because I read most of PKD's "Exegesis" and it is among the works you hear about from people who shortly thereafter break down completely. I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
these weird fictions should be studied, but mainly to innoculate people to them, as what we know from LLM's is that we can now produce complete ideologies the way we used to write pop songs, where the hooks are now reframings, and if you can't explicitly source a belief from a first hand experience, it could be the artifact of one. we may actually have to form an anti-memetics division.
nine_k
"Weird nonfiction" is a weird name for it, because it still pretends it's nonfiction. I'd rather call it in a more distinct and weird way, say, "ficnontion".
Rodeoclash
Nothing else to add except this was an exceptionally well written piece.
decades ago those cultural studies people (who now run our institutions) were on to more than we knew. they were reasoning about how to operate in a world that disconnected from a shared Real. we can see these weird fictions as the artifacts of devices operating on todays fragmented, narrative driven realities. i'd call it post-nihilism, where culturally we're downstream of a great unmooring and in an all against all struggle for narrative dominance with no safety in a base reality or truth. the weird fiction devices are patterns of reframing, analogous to exploits for injecting cognitive associations (or dissociations) to align other minds. It's like in the "wet cement" stage of a news event where everyone crowds in to establish the dominant meme first for their "side."
I don't indulge in these stories because I read most of PKD's "Exegesis" and it is among the works you hear about from people who shortly thereafter break down completely. I've met more than one person muttering about Jung's red book and Kripke's theories of truth, PKD's exegesis, evola, and junger, before disappearing into rehab or homelessness. some ideas are just not healthy recreation, and what they all have in common is a meme complex that causes people to dissociate with all the zeal of a religious conversion but imbued with existential horror. in short, avoid.
these weird fictions should be studied, but mainly to innoculate people to them, as what we know from LLM's is that we can now produce complete ideologies the way we used to write pop songs, where the hooks are now reframings, and if you can't explicitly source a belief from a first hand experience, it could be the artifact of one. we may actually have to form an anti-memetics division.