“What Wikipedia is not”
1) Wikipedia and the fantasy of infinite recourse: all from one to all
The first proto-Wikipedia article, written by accredited knowledge experts. The lure and mythos of “scholarship”: we believe in history, facts, technological record, which distinguishes our epoch. There is no “dreamtime,” only privacy (the things in our private thoughts and records. We believe others have a private truth for themselves and a private existence.)
2) ‘Techno ugg’ Arthur and Marilouise Kroker- the nihilism of technology and the will to blah blah blah about the revolutionary new future, just crap and erotic lure of destiny, fumes of the Pythoness
3) James Wood- Don DeLillo replaces religious transcendence with, the same thing...
4) The central idea of the novel: everyone’s life is a chronological sequence, you must sit down and live through it this way, from beginning to end, through reflection and recycling: the record of how days on earth, walking around as a unit of life, is spent. Everyone fulfills the same conditions and lives in the same requirements: these are not vague or poetically general, but rich and specific: evolved from lower primates-lives in a language world-needs riches and peer attention to thrive-has curiosity and thirst for wisdom but is in darkness-born from woman, dies: dies before human history has ended. Lives with animals and bugs inside them and outside them. Processes heat, seeks sex and wants pleasure and comfort. Stimulated and repulsed by the universe, which is perhaps hostile to life, an unsupportable aberration.
The (punchline) Anecdote as the smallest unit of compression. And then the Day, as in “Today I repeated my usual duty, then met my needs, and thought of redemption.”
5) The right to block people from walking and seeing. (If I want to walk somewhere, the geographical point where my motives are questioned, my body is restrained, and I am in danger from the Enemy. The warzone civilians stay out of.)
The right to kill- the final arbitration; in the name of transcending principle. “I have spent my days Killing, with the hope that others may live..” XX
The totality of wanting to relax and have a City of
The Western idea of leisure and the surplus which creates culture and stockpiles abstract thought in an archive.
(To define wisdom as “resistance to reality” vs conformation; requires a position first as Enemy, an adversarial position that you have to declare based on deep intuition. “This isn’t Wikipedia data in an indexed public archive, it is a determined form of social life, where injustice creates oppositions” - the poetry of thirsting, hungering for justice)
To stay aware of division, in the “optimism of the will,” versus to stay lost in lifeyness, the dream of homo ludens and the ‘obvious scenario,’ the winnable contest: at what point in one’s life history do you begin to consider this choice, with any conviction?
Speaking to our friends, even in lying we give over a greater truth.
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