Virtual Reality

There will come a point in the relatively near future when a mass psychological breakdown will occur in large sections of the Western population, most noticeably in the middle-and-upper class white and jewish populations. The first sign of this will be an attempted frantic reversion to a period of pre-internet living, a massive campaign encouraging people to abandon iPhones, social media and advanced consumer technology in order to escape the vague but ominous cultural shift which is about to take place. Expect mainstream debates about the value of representing your existence primarily via the internet (i.e. virtually), expect depression rates to increase rapidly, birth rates to plummet (within the aforementioned demographic), and expect announcements from major figures within the tech industry claiming they acknowledge the problem and desire to help change it. When you first hear some prominent member of the consumer technology industry claim they acknowledge this problem that they themselves have helped perpetuate, and also claim to want to solve it in a way that appears to be at their own expense, you will know there is no turning back and that the point I mentioned earlier on has truly been passed. The shared reality server in which each of us has been spawned is dissolving like never before. The promise of other, more congenial servers such as those offered by religion (heaven), drugs (psychedelic experiences), politicians ("yesterday" or "tomorrow") and advertisers ("elsewhere") will soon be rejected en masse and in its place a narcissistic, solipsistic and above all autistic server will be presented to each of us to visit, construct and dwell however and whenever we choose. All great philosophers and writers are praised in large part due to their capacity to observe and articulate the essential (if at times bleakly humorous) wretchedness of the external world while advertising (consciously or not) the superiority of their imagination or of their own private worlds. These private worlds will no longer be accessible only to artists and philosophers (and also many great scientists etc) but will be a consumer product, a mental Minecraft, a personal escape hatch to our own personal heavens.

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.fo/EJquW
youtube.com/watch?v=4Lx1kIrempw&feature=youtu.be
youtube.com/watch?v=gRXhyLcSwhw
youtube.com/watch?v=-LXl4y6D-QI
youtube.com/watch?v=ofV_5-Caah0
youtube.com/watch?v=3OoU2ck2RiY
youtube.com/watch?v=ZXLCqA2ARSw
youtube.com/watch?v=f37LA3NLapI
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

thank you future man

...

No problem. The technological self-exile of man is approaching.

fuck dude this post is terrifying because I try to live life like everything is normal but I realize underneath everything that what you are saying is true

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level-2?

>massive campaigns encouraging people to abandon modern technology

I have been thinking a lot about founding something like this. Some kind of neo-Luddite party. I go to a Catholic university so I know I'll find plenty of people, at least within the staff, that would support me.

Hmm... your point on abandoning all electronic devices seems a bit far fetched but the rest seems on point. I think resistance to the total digitization of the mind will come in the form of legislation as officials will recognize the negative impacts of completely ignoring our biology.

Yeah, and we'll all have hover cars by then, right?

The only way out is through.

The popularity of Ted Kaczynski proves otherwise. Whether people will actually act on it remains to be seen. I think resistance will come more from the corporate side as profits drop ass people spend less time in this world consuming things.

On your own server if you want one, sure

Feeling a 2nd renaissance coming in the next few decades desu

*in China

>I tried to warn you

One of my favorite movies, see u in the ether friend

Finally, an escape is coming from this world I've lived in up to now as if in a burning hell. I'll meet you there, in the ether.

Only coercion and cowardice can save us now.

Did we ever have any other alternative?

Are you some kind of cyber-situationist, OP?

>Ellul
muh nigga
Virilio is also worth reading.

Some of the back-lash against technology is already in development. This was published just yesterday:
>'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia
>Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet.
archive.fo/EJquW
Although that is still more about Silicon Valley in particular than technology as such.

Anyone know the name of the song playing when they're selling the stolen CDs?

The problem with the situation you're describing is that there is always someone with the power to pull the plug

It's opposite, there's no pilot in the cabin. Nobody is in power, there's no conspiracy at all. Nobody could control the system that big and complex. Besides, everybody is only a tiny node or cog within it, not above it. And precisely because there's no one in control you see the rise of all these conspiracy theories of some secret entity controlling the world. The fact that there's no driver at the wheel causes too much anxiety.
The system will come crashing down, with all of us in it. Or it won't. It's purely a matter of fate.

Personally I can't wait for every shitty motherfucker to start living in VR. More reality for me.

wow thanks for that link: likes are "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure" said the jew who invented them, instructed his assistant to turn on parental controls on his iphone for him, that's really something, (YOU)s are less than likes but still

That's such a stupid thing to say. Look at what's happening already with the widespread use of current technology. In many cases your survival depends on having a smartphone or some social media account. In some places you can't even get a job or an apartment without them. That's simply because everybody else uses this shit so they take it for granted that you use it too. Or else you're excluded and isolated.
I personally don't use much of this shit as well but I can tell you from experience that it can be difficult to function sometimes because the world is now made for people who do use this shit .

>(YOU)s are less than likes but still
It's interesting that the whole "here's a (You)" meme only started not so long ago. But with the way things have been developing it's true: even a (You) on an imageboard now produces some kind of excitement or pleasure because we've been trained to crave these little notification signals.
I think some guy in the article talks about how they deliberately make the frequency of notifications inconsistent for maximum addiction.

Eh, I haven't been on facebook for at least 5 years, possibly more. Never had twitter or any of that other stuff either. I've had no trouble finding jobs or places to live on that time. For my current job, I do use a smartphone, but I don't really use it too much besides that, especially compared to some other people I've met whose whole lives are seemingly structured around their internet presence (rather than the other way around). I've known people who ordered toilet paper from amazon with overnight shipping instead of just walking two blocks to the store to get some. That's lunacy, and it's a societal dead-end, and the sooner these people lock themselves in their VR pleasure gardens to die, the sooner the rest of us can get on with our lives

>Virilio
any particular recommendations? guy has written quite a bit.

Crepuscular Dawn is a pretty good introduction in my opinion, it's a long interview divided into chapters and sections, and it kinda maps the general progress of his ideas.
The Information Bomb is also a good starting point, it's a collection of articles that discuss various concrete events and cultural phenomena tied to the rise of new technologies.

I have to warn you though that his style can be pretty rambling at times. He also likes to exaggerate things, occasionally their less important aspects. I see him as a huge messy collection of ideas, some interesting, others not so much.

The re-action will be crushed in the ever-grinding gears of progress.

Great, thank you. I'm a big fan of the Ellul stuff I've read but haven't had a whole lot of luck finding other writers who are more ambivalent towards technological progress (with the exception of anarcho-prim people like Zerzan who I am less inclined to read).

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel

When will novels become obsolete. I want to become the last great writer

Wait, so even (You)'s are part of the global Jewish conspiracy?

In that case you could also try Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil. Some of the essays are purely about technology, he writes with a sort of smirk at the absurdities of technological progress and its ideologies rather than being as alarmist as Virilio.
His works in general are critical of technology although that critique is buried between his other themes, so you basically get a chapter or a section here and there throughout his bibliography.

Another author that's maybe relevant is McLuhan. Haven't read any of his works yet but from various quotes I've come across it seems like he's also pretty critical and his analyses seem interesting. His object of study is more or else just media though, but with social media spreading everywhere he might be becoming more relevant now. He already spoke back in the 60s of the effects of information technologies and digitalization on society and human psyche.

Do not show hand just yet, comrade. You will scare away Yankee before trap is spring on his hollow capitalist leg.

Yeah, I've had McLuhan on the backburner for awhile since encountering footage and info on him in a few different documentaries. Will definitely look into the Baudrillard stuff as well!

Personal, ultra-customized VR effectively neutralizes any kind of push for societal change or revolution. As of now, I fail to see a coherent argument that somehow manages to prioritize material reality over an indistinguishable-from-reality-VR.

We're heading for the Matrix folks.

>Personal, ultra-customized VR effectively neutralizes any kind of push for societal change or revolution.
>We're heading for the Matrix folks.
Are you seriously implying this hasn't been the case for decades already? What are video games? What is the Internet? We can go even back: what is consumer society and mass media? Why did May 68 fail?
Resistance has been neutralized so long ago that people are now sad because their larping will gain yet another layer with the VR goggles.

nah I didn't imply that

I just view it as the final nail in the coffin - so to speak.

Great article. This video pretty much says the same thing in the article, but it also explains the physiological effects on the brain.
>youtube.com/watch?v=4Lx1kIrempw&feature=youtu.be

Interesting.

Dunno, is it on here? youtube.com/watch?v=gRXhyLcSwhw

I don't think so. I mean the scene after they've stolen the CDs and they're selling them at a used records shop, with the middle aged shopkeeper who knows they're stolen right away. There's music playing in the background.

'Mind' is not sacred. Its changed before and it will change again

Imagine reading the thoughts of another person for the first time (with the invention of language)

We came out of that alright, didn't we?

I recall a scene where Hasumi tries to SELL the stolen CD, but I know the scene where he gets caught stealing the CD, and his teacher shows up and offers to buy it for him to get him out of trouble.

It's not enough to destroy smartphones and the whole level of tech. You must hunt and kill the beast that feeds it all: late-stage capitalism. You must declare war on the markets. You must put stockbrokers and financial analysts in danger of life and limb. You must declare yourself an enemy of the free market, and of the free flow of commerce and ideas. And you must be willing to destroy, destroy, destroy! You must be willing to leave all of mankind in ruin and ashes, in the name of defeating capitalism and the market.

And you shouldn't be communist, either. Communism has failed in its predictions and failed in its effects. Don't hitch yourself to that dead horse. Don't worry about what comes after capitalism. Just worry about destroying capitalism. Butcher the beast. Kill the monster. Cut and bleed the invisible hand--at all costs!

Nah, it's all three of them. It's the shop where he asks about the lily poster and the shopkeeper tells him it's free

No one is talking about destroying tech in this thread friend. We want to eject ourselves from this world and live in our own virtual heavens. The internet is only heaven's waiting room.

Do you mean the scene where he stands there looking at the poster?
>youtube.com/watch?v=-LXl4y6D-QI

>No one is talking about destroying tech in this thread friend.

Well, I am, aren't I? I am here to do a terrible thing. I am here to whip men into a frenzy. I am here to wreck and ruin the digital utopia you wish for. I am here to see you all beaten and trampled and hanged.

>Attempts to rile anons to conspire, and commit domestic terrorism
Nice try, FBI.

There's no stopping it. The point of the OP post is that this is the telos of mankind and it's the fulfillment of what humanity has been trying to achieve through art, religion, and other methods. If you look at history it's one long effort to make the demands of life easier and more comfortable, this however has created atomization, solipsism, etc. this world is just a shared reality server we happened to spawn in and eventually we will be able to leave this one and immerse ourselves in our own private server.

We've been living in the 2nd renaissance since the Internet took off

No, right before it, when they're in the shop

I'm sick of using literature to try and cope with real life. Give me the most disgustingly self indulgent and hedonistic private reality you've got.

The thing is; why not? What's the problem? I don't feel there is some kind of inherent virtue present in reality. Reality doesn't even exist as such anyway. Not in the /x/-tier 'it's all a simulation, man', but rather in the sense that everyone lives within the confines of a certain aesthetic experience. If you're born in bumfuck Africa you will have an experience 'as if you're a child soldier', if you grew up in the West you will have an experience 'as if you're an office drone with a wife and kids', and so on. There is no 'genuine' reality as such. There isn't somehow an experience of reality at the fundamental level that is 'real'.
On top of that we've always been in the process of the substitution of 'our own experience of reality, our own little simulation' for a better one.
If you're an African child soldier you try and move up to a better position like warlord, if you're an office drone in the west you try and make mad bank so you don't have to do your shitty job anymore etc. It's no secret civilization is based on wanting bigger and better things. Virtual reality is the natural culmination of that process; it's the most efficient way to get whatever you want. You take out all the luck involved, all the strife and hardship, and you go directly to the experience you want.
Whether it's the end to the world's malaise I don't know, but that's a different story.

There is no problem. There is a clear existential need for virtual reality, or at least something approximate to it. Paradise in the end will be nothing but software for solipsists

A lot of you guys including OP are freaking out.

Please calm down, and you'll be able to see whats going to happen very very soon.

And its nothing bad, everything will be fine, and you'll never feel better.

Please don't be a normie and let fear shut down your gift.

Goodluck ^___^

>late-stage capitalism

Doesn't this imply that it's going to end itself anyway?

What did he mean by this?

youtube.com/watch?v=ofV_5-Caah0

youtube.com/watch?v=3OoU2ck2RiY

Outsourcing

youtube.com/watch?v=ZXLCqA2ARSw

youtube.com/watch?v=f37LA3NLapI

Aren't you bored of reposting Pessoa-chan's posts yet? You've been doing this for three days now.

Top tier film

(You)

And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides

>I think some guy in the article talks about how they deliberately make the frequency of notifications inconsistent for maximum addiction.
Of course they do, classic Skinner box. Before social media MMORPGs did the same thing.

Just because we can predict that an event will happen, doesn’t mean that actors aren’t necessary

>-at all costs!
no thanks, warmonger
i'd be happy innawoods with my family if you need me
you don't

i love you

nxt lvl

I as well have been thinking of forming a similar group. A neo-luddite group focused on Liberation. If anyone is interested in having a discussion about this maybe we could create a discord or signal group chat (kind of ironic to use tech to discuss it but w/e). My email is: [email protected] if you like the idea.

Nobody is going to join your group faggot. If you actually care, create a /general/ on the relevant Veeky Forums board or create an 4+Veeky Forums board. Email groups etc are dead.

Has anyone come into contact with fiction that incorporates online reality in a contemporary and literary way? We have tao lin's minor g chat tangents and the like, but I'm thinking more of incorporations that stress intimacy and connectivity, or the more common alienation and mundanity of online interaction. Examples in other media I can think of are the skype conversations between Nanami and the hikkikomori girl in A Bride for Rip van Winkle, or phone/desktop shots that Inio Asano uses (pic) to depict popular sentiment around plot events. Sometimes I think that literary fiction in particular is on a sort of timed delay when it comes to integrating technology and connectivity realistically.

It's not social media, the whole internet is addicting and time consuming and there's nothing you can do about it, you'll always need the internet and you'll always spend a lot of your time using it so there's no escape from it.

Nice.

Can't believe I read the whole shit

how will corporate world sell new freedom?

>When FBI is bored baiting /pol/ so they come bother /lit9k/ into action, kek

>you'll always need the internet
Wrong. I'm haven't been using the Internet for more than a year now.
But to be serious, I know people who really don't use it because they don't have access to it anyway.

Transparency of Evil is good, but it's predominately a cultural critique. If you want to the Simulation angle then the important books are Simulation & Simulacra and The Perfect Crime.

His version of Simulation has less to do with VR and is more about Information (Integral Reality or the Simulacrum) replacing the Real. "The Impossible Exchange of the World for its Double".

Here's the intro to the Perfect Crime.

Language doesn't have the potential to eliminate biological intelligence altogether though.

You really want to live in an ahistorical stagnant pool? Virtual realities are a local maxima. There is no where to go in an environment where you are at maximum fitness.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_equilibrium_trap

Simulacra & Simulation seems kinda overrated to me, most people also really simplify his idea of simulation and exaggerate its importance when in most works it's really just a notion he sometimes uses here and there. So I tend to avoid recommending this work to people unfamiliar with him. I think Fatal Strategies gives a clearer idea of what he's doing.

Still, when it comes to simulation I would instead recommend "The Order of Simulacra" chapter from Symbolic Exchange and Death where he opposes it to two preceding stages. In later works (e.g. "After the Orgy" in The Transparency of Evil) he adds a fourth stage after simulation (a phase governed by code and models): the fractal stage (a phase of cancerous proliferation of everything without any reference to anything whatsoever). But the two stages do seem to overlap.

I think with Baudrillard it's always a cultural critique - or rather a parody since critique is worse than useless according to him. Technology is central to how he sees contemporary culture and its desire for final solutions - even though he doesn't directly discuss our everyday use of technology that much. But essays like "Xerox and Infinity" form The Transparency of Evil do put technology in the foreground.

The Perfect Crime really is a good recommendation as well, although some of the more metaphysical chapters are probably incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

Some chapters from The Intelligence of Evil are also worth checking out, especially "The Mental Diaspora of Networks" is great imo.

Yeah, I do.

Then you might as well not exist. (don't kys become better)

Yes, I don't want to exist and I'm not going to get better. Thankfully there will be an escape one day.

Totally agree. I mostly recommend Simulacra & Simulation as a starting point, jumping into The Perfect Crime or the Intelligence of Evil. S&S feels like the simplest, earliest version of the thesis. The Transparency of Evil is maybe my favorite, but reading it without prior knowledge of the bigger arguments, one would mistake it for just reactionary cultural critique.

Ugh tell me something I haven’t known since I was 10.

Wallowing in nihilism does no one any good. Attempt to analyse your situation and find a way to improve it. You have nothing to lose by doing so.

No. The virtual world is objectively better than our own in every way, we just can't immerse ourselves fully in it yet.

Then go ahead and wait for the virtual world to fix all your problems. This won't happen in your lifetime and VR is hollow and uncanny anyway.

Have you tried reading any of his early works (System of Objects, Consumer Society, etc.)? Symbolic Exchange and Death is the earliest I've read and I don't know if anything before that is worth it.

I would bet good money that compelling VR will be increasingly common over the next 20 years.

Though I agree with you that the dude should try fixing his problems. More satisfying that way.

You should do more research.

There's a perfect slogan for that: "I Can't Believe It's Not Heaven!" like in that margarine brand. However heaven's proper place is in our imaginary, being a counter-pole to our harsh reality. True hell starts when we decide to implement it in the reality itself. At that point life itself ends since it loses any struggle and we become just organic automatons - or in the case of virtual reality simply computer processes powered by organic brains.