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Comment by vinnyvichy | Hacker News Reader

Ah what shall we do if our beloved HN weren't an obligate asynchrotroph :) Passive consumption recommendation (fit for travel plausibly even) is: to «Das Glasperlenspiel» the postpostmodern (but merely pre-eschatological) riposte could only be «Anathem» --- had to complete the commutative diagram.

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Ah, but the kernel between Hesse and Stephenson is fairly large; I'd say Hesse has a large idea (Berlin's "hedgehog") towards which his characters and plots and settings all work, while Stephenson has a cornucopia of small ideas (Berlin's "fox") and his characters and plots and settings are largely excuses to get them all out of his head and down in print.

My diagram would be: (Exercise: who is the contemporary hedgehog X?)

    Hesse ---------> Pynchon
      |                 |
      |                 |
      V                 V
      X ----------> Stephenson

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_M._Kornbluth#Personality... (and some of YT's more discursive HN commentary).

[to what degree are foxes cohedgehogs, or hedgehogs cofoxes? can we get the plurality of ideas of a fox by reversing arrows such that each of the fox's multiple ideas maps back, in the image, to a shared thematic point?]

Will have to woolgather/think about this, but I wonder if it might not be easier (for now, for me) to frame your question(s) in terms of a short exact sequence, with Hesse squarely in the middle, of course.

I agree that Pynchon was more or less an aloof observer of the von Neumann denouement.. maybe you can have Lem in your corner depending on how optimistic you think he is, but I would put Kim Stanley Robinson in that corner (been thinking about the Mondragon Accord). The median HN'er, I don't know, Iain Banks/Gibson. Feel free to take it to another level with some cryptic pointers (/arrows) :) H https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Mondrago...

And checkout KSR's influences.

I admit to not having read <<DGPS>> in its entirety (or any majority,really) -- reason being that I read Demian E2E and surmised that the apple hedgehog didn't land too far from the tree fox. Trying to reconsider now :)

Also, Platonov.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/reading-and...

Re: Mondragon, compare https://www.igalia.com (how many of these are there?); the CNT may have lost at the barricades (and half-star forts), but there are still sparks among their embers?

I hear Portugal (not, specifically, the Man) is trying to host a Cambrian.

Sorry, you have to find citations for that, should be an interesting exercise

The (mafic?) object of 18 May brings us right back to JvN and prediction vs control. Depending upon how isotropic a skipping stone one picks, the resulting trajectory may be predictable or chaotic: in a world of too cheap-to-meter compute and effectors, one might imagine a "skipping stone" with LEDs and some kind of mechanical effectors that could be used to write Peristence-of-Vision messages by "skipping" it across a lake surface?

Just going by publication date alone, I think Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) will be concretely different from Demian (1919). Like Zweig's Schachnovelle (1942), the question of how should/could intellectuals share a world with power-seeking anti-intellectuals* was, in the early 1940s, far from an abstraction.

(if you have a personality suitable to attempt inner emigration, you can claim the State, as an object with little intellectual content, is maya, mere illusion, but like Berkeley's [well, Johnson's] rock it usually sullenly refuses to wither away even if you don't believe in it. cf PKD)

* on that theme: "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." is another change rung.

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