The Communal Mind | Hacker News Reader

The Communal Mind

lrb.co.uk

67 pointslongdefeat9 comments

Patricia Lockwood is a national treasure. Check out Rape Joke as one powerful example. But it’s strange to see her on hn

Headline really needs punctuation.

Indeed. Just read this, Rape Joke, Lost in Trumplandia, and just reserved at the library her memoir Priestdaddy (her father is a married Catholic priest), and her poetry collecion Motherland, fatherland, homelandsexuals. Powerful.

I've not really been a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, but this was an amazing reading. It straddled the line between what we see online today and that outlandish but seemingly very possible malfunctioning future.

Specially timely in light of the open.ai work shown yesterday on advanced language models [1]

[1] https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#content

I wouldn't categorise this is SF; I would call it "beat" or "gonzo". Possibly Joycean, except it's not fictional enough. It's not speculative, it's observational; it really is a record of the lived experience of being Extremely Online. A travelogue of a place that's in your phone.

(I can identity most of the memes referenced, which probably means I spend too much time on Twitter myself)

That's quite a piece of writing. Unusual to see the Twitter style fused perfectly into the LRB high literary style. Very post-Gibsonian.

Thanks for capturing it well. Do you write anywhere yourself? Prose or meta or science or whatever. Thanks. (Asking in sincerity :))

I write here, in this comment box.

That's a joke, but also entirely serious - I've not had a blog for years, but I have 40k karma here and probably 10-100 times as many words; and one day I'm going to extract the best stuff and make a Thing of it.

I absolutely do not have the discipline to produce thousand-word essays for the LRB.

It takes a special sort of brilliance to really capture a particular kind of interiority in prose. To really get at what it is like to be a particular sort of person. This accomplishes that feat for the modern internet addict and hivemind member to a degree I wouldn't have expected possible.

Great piece (heh).

I felt like I was reading the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and realized that that reality is the current reality. Reading this was a journey.

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