Weird Studies/Pattern Recognition

26 Feb 2022 05:12 - 16 Dec 2022 12:22
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    • Admiration for Gibson's prescient vision and skill in rendering a world which is superficially like ours yet very strange.
    • As they are wont to do, the conversation goes to the nature of magic and the relationship between symbols and reality. The context is Gibson's largely symbolic world of semiotic signs – tif there is no other nature, then it's not that mysterious.
      • But when they do that I always want to jump up and say "computation has a theory of that!". See computational constitution. But these guys are anti-tech humanists, more or less.
    • The symbol as having two sides, from the original definition. The dark side where everything connects. The opposite from the superficial, well-lit side.
      • The word symbol derives from the Greek σύμβολον symbolon, meaning "token, watchword" from σύν syn "together" and βάλλω bállō " "I throw, put." The sense evolution in Greek is from "throwing things together" to "contrasting" to "comparing" to "token used in comparisons to determine if something is genuine." Hence, "outward sign" of something. The meaning "something which stands for something else" was first recorded in 1590, in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. – Symbol - Wikipedia
    • Surfaces that hide depths. Mercury.
    • The revelation of the top of the pyramid. Yes that is a typical Gibson ending, the real powers of the earth who are driving things are revealed. In this case, the "baron of attention" (Bigend) meets a Russian oligarch.
    • A novel about discovering agency, fighting off the attention vampires. Intention vs. attention.
    • Mentioning Rushkoff's Program or Be Programmed which I should read if only for the title.
      • This show is about a certain streak of anti-pessimism or anti-miserablism, and this stance is key, the persona of the magician is someone aware of the forces in which they are enmeshed, who can listen to the voices and do something with them.