Written in epistolary form, the novel tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant and ambitious scientist who, driven by Enlightenment-era ideas of progress and science, creates a living being from dead body parts. However, upon seeing the creature come to life, Frankenstein is horrified and abandons it. The creature, shunned by society due to its appearance, seeks revenge against its creator, leading to a series of tragic events. The novel explores themes of guilt, loss, and the emotional and moral consequences of scientific hubris, blending elements of Gothic and Romantic literature.
In 'A Cyborg Manifesto,' Donna Haraway introduces the concept of the cyborg as a hybrid of machine and organism, challenging traditional dichotomies such as nature/culture, mind/body, and idealism/materialism. The essay argues that the cyborg represents a new ontology that blurs these boundaries, offering a postmodern and posthuman perspective that rejects essentialism and promotes a non-essentialized, material-semiotic understanding. Haraway sees the cyborg as a symbol of resistance and a tool for feminist and socialist politics, emphasizing the importance of partial, ironic, and intimate identities in a world where technology increasingly mediates human experience[5][4][3].
In 'The Inevitable,' Kevin Kelly outlines twelve technological forces that will significantly impact how we work, learn, and communicate over the next thirty years. These forces include becoming, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, interacting, tracking, questioning, and beginning. Kelly argues that understanding and embracing these forces will help individuals and businesses navigate the coming changes effectively. The book is praised for its optimistic and insightful view of the future, although some critics note that it lacks a detailed discussion of the potential downsides of these technological advancements.
Published in 1967, 'The Society of the Spectacle' is a seminal work of Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord. The book critiques contemporary consumer culture and the effects of mass media, arguing that modern society has replaced authentic social life with its representation. Debord introduces the concept of the 'spectacle', which he defines as the social relation among people that is mediated by images. He contends that this spectacle is a result of the capitalist mode of production, where relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, leading to alienation, commodity fetishism, and the degradation of human life. The book consists of 221 theses and is considered a key text of the Situationist movement, offering insights that remain relevant in the age of social media and digital culture[2][4][5].
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What the hell is going on with culture right now? The Web is running evolution in fast-forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic, post-human, post-truth meme-play that reminds me of nothing more than the porous networked selfhood of bacterial in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer. RIP the genre and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of [EDIT: Guy Debord’s] society of the spectacle [and Baudrillard’s simulation], the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts a kind of reversal as the movement of the Tao that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment…it is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them. How to make sense of it all…or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game?
Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nicolae of Incognita swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator. Riffing philosophically on network society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the posthuman bestiary of our AI- and biotech-saturated century, Rina’s Substack is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic/algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital and the possession by and performance of meme-space.
How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and -destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate roughness, fractality, wildness, illegigility? How do we stay, as Cadell Last put it in the previous episode, “in the gaps and cracks” instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of the unleashed imagination? How do we *befriend* those monsters?
William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture — an age in which “Technology slays the victim” of the mind “resurrects it as art” in a new ecology of consciousness. If, then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as, once more, we dive into the noise and make music together with Rina…
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Discussed
Prophets Of A Machine FutureWhat Is Posthumanism?The New MonstrousMilady Infiltrates The VaticanKim Kardashan Was Never HumanThe AI That Can Change Your Mind
Mentioned
Priya RoseDonna HarawayBobby AzarianDavid DeutschJack HalberstamJulia ChristevaTimothy MortonK. Allado-McDowellMary ShelleyBenjamin BrattonCharlotte FangMarshall McLuhanJimi HendrixTaryn SouthernJim O’ShaughnessyKevin Kelly
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