7 ms·

I read the book in college decades ago. It's very famous and he predicted a lot of stuff about media and culture that has become true in the modern era of Inte

I read the book in college decades ago. It's very famous and he predicted a lot of stuff about media and culture that has become true in the modern era of Internet / social media / YouTube e-celebs / etc. However, his good ideas are cluttered up by the usual sloppy reasoning of postmodernists. He also has an unfortunate obsession with weaving Marxist far-left politics into everything, which is distracting. (Chomsky has the same problem for me.) The book did not change my life, but it is a notable work of late 20th century philosophy.

supernumerary 9y ago
I would recommend Walter Benjamin if you find the politics distracting. Also D.W.Winnicott (http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott1.pdf http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott1.pdf). A reconciliation of these two strands are being explored currently by Bernard Stiegler... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Time,_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Time,_1 I have written about it in relation to Facebook here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.htm...
- cmpxchg 9y ago
  Thank you for the suggestions. I will definitely study these.
- adpoe 9y ago
  Which Benjamin? I've read some of his more famous articles (i.e. - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), but I remember them being very political. Sort of an art-historical and aesthetic-theory application of Marx. Which, personally, I enjoyed. But was surprised to see Benjamin's work referenced in that context. Could be that I'm missing something, or mis-remembering, though. This was years ago, now. =)
- frozenport 9y ago
  Benjamin is famous for arguing that in an age of mechanically reproducible art, what mattered was the idea in the art which he saw as a method of communication for political purposes.
platz 9y ago
I agree. I would try to sum as a couple very original ideas that are more solid, combined with a great many loose associations that are tenuous, but according to the french style, given much weight and pomp; it actually makes the the writing style more inspiring/entertaining, but the ratio of claims to justifications is quite low. I also remember going though a great number of paragraphs without grokking anything at all, but i was also a bit younger then and perhaps able to focus less. Nevertheless, it inspired me to pick up a few of Baurdrilliard's other books (e.g. Cool Memories) which are even less rational, so S&S was probably his best work.
barrkel 9y ago
I think Marxist alienation more broadly understood is what drives the simulation dynamic. I don't think the two should be separated. Marxist critique of capitalism is very solid. It doesn't have any good prescriptions for alternatives, but the critique is well-founded.
- frozenport 9y ago
  Its not well-founded because modern financial instruments such as retirement savings blur the line between those who labor and those who command capital.
  - mehrzad 9y ago
    "Newtonian physics is not well-founded because relativity blurs the lines between matter and energy." Marxism is an ever-developing field.
    - frozenport 9y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Also, yes, Newtonian physics isn't well founded for exactly that reason. Although in its original formulation E&M wasn't described.
      - pron 9y ago
        By your reading, no theory can ever be known to be well founded, as there is always the possibility of another discovery finding phenomena that aren't explained by the theory. I believe that most people would view science (in the wide sense, not limited only to disciplines that apply the scientific method) as a continuous process of abstraction and refinement. Newtonian mechanics is pretty accurate if you limit yourself to objects of a certain size and a certain speed, a limitation which is reasonable considering those are the sides and speeds we encounter most often in our senses.
  - pron 9y ago
    Not so much once you don't put the distinction at "owns at least one share and owns nothing". If you plot the amount of ownership, there are very clear clusters.
mo1ok 9y ago
I've been thinking lately about the "sloppy reasoning" problem of critical theory. I used to really love critical theory when I was younger, but now that I'm older I'm almost ready to dismiss it as entertaining crank writing at a time when western civilization was exploring new boundries and slightly adrift. It has more in common with artistic expression than critical methodology. Still valuable, but should not be taken as seriously as it currently is in academia - at least in my opinion. I came to this opinion when I stayed at a friends' place recently who had a massive collection of critical theory, and I had not read any crit in years. I read a few of the books, and to my own surprise, my reaction was "what the hell is this nonsense?" The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    For an excellent example of sloppy reasoning, look no further than Ornament and Crime: https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/Loos-Ornament%20and%20Crime.pdf https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/Loos-Ornament%20and%20Crim... It argues that all art is erotic, that if you have a tattoo it is only a matter of time until you murder someone, and expresses something about Negroes that I don't care to look for again. (It was written in 1900 or so. I wonder what people in 2120 will wince about when they read our important works?) The frustrating thing is, I agree with many of the points in the essay. There's always something there: a grain of truth in the framework of obfuscation. But they dress it up. The essay even frames it as "Here is something I have discovered, which I now bestow upon the world." It's not a direct quote, but it may as well be; many philosophers share that air of fake importance. If only he was relaxed, he could have gotten his points across to many more people. "I get over a fire much more easily when only worthless garbage has been burned." Interesting point. "Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament." Great observation! Notice how we eschew ornament; HN is bare, Twitch is austere, Youtube is as minimalistic as possible. If you image search DaVinci, it's hard to find a single example of anything containing ornament. Coincidence? Works without ornament are timeless. But something comes over people -- simple isn't enough. Me too. I wrote a downvote hiding extension for HN, and I was embarrassed that the v1 was only a few lines of code. "It doesn't even hide your karma if you look at your profile!" So I wrote a far more complicated v2 and shipped that. Surprise, HN shipped an update and now it broke. v1 works fine. You're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in almost every aspect of our profession. What is going on there? It's worth exploring. But philosophers manage to obscure these observations in the most complicated ways. And unfortunately, those complications introduce mistakes that make it easy to dismiss the rest of the work, along with the good ideas.
pizza 9y ago
It's funny you dislike Chomsky because of Marxist tendencies, because Chomsky himself has stated that he strongly disagreed with many leftist (Marxist) groups on the issue that led Marx and Engels to diverge from anarchists. Chomsky disagrees with them (Marxist doctrinists, Leninists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Hoxhaists, etc.) on the same grounds of statist antidemocratic rule as he does with fascists, meritocrats, theocrats, anarchocapitalists, nationalist socialists, etc.. That's his reasoning for being an anarchosyndicalist, rather than some flavor of progressive reliant upon the rule of a small cadre of enlightened revolutionaries
- fao_ 9y ago
  > Chomsky disagrees with them (..., Trotskyists, ...) on the same grounds of statist antidemocratic rule as he does ... As I understand it (Based on an admittedly rudimentary understanding of the relevant philosophies), Trotsky advocated that everything be decentralized -- i.e. not controlled by the state -- at least in the traditional sense, but by the people, locally to the people. Thus it seems weird to me that Chomsky would disagree with him on this matter. Personally, I'm still searching for the holon system that was used in Suarez' Daemon series. Although I suspect that I might be remembering it to be less capitalistic than it was described to be.
  - pizza 9y ago
    Ah, interesting. For some reason I had the sense that Trotskyism was like dictatorship rule by vanguards (like Stalinism I guess), but it seems that it's more like dictatorship by the proletariat by means of a dash of anarchism according to wikipedia, and in that way pretty much completely different than how I perceived it. Although wikipedia does also say that "permanent revolution" has non-identical uses; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution All I know for certain is that Chomsky is no Posadist, lol.
    - madaxe_again 9y ago
      Trotsky opposed centralised technocracy, and he was right - this was what ultimately killed the ussr, as corrupt and incompetent centralised bureaucracy could not respond rapidly enough or appropriately to external conditions. Production was a mess, goods would be in dire shortage in one oblast and vast excess in another. Those who held the central reigns of power funnelled everything into their own pockets - cf. the incumbent oligarchy. Had Trotsky succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin, the world might be a very different place today. But he didn’t, and it might not have made any damn difference. I guess we need to run another experiment.
madaxe_again 9y ago
Actually, as Baudrillard himself readily admits, most of the ideas are not his - he formalised and presented to the academic world the philosophy of Philip K Dick. As to the Marxist tendencies - i think it’s more of a reaction to the totalitarian worlds he and dick foresaw. It’s certainly what’s pushed me leftwards over the years.
conatus 9y ago
Baudrillard was on the left but was absolutely scathing about Marxism. He thought was a total theoretical dead end and a flawed reflection of the systems of capitalism it sought to overthrow. See his The Mirror Of Production.

supernumerary 9y ago

I would recommend Walter Benjamin if you find the politics distracting. Also D.W.Winnicott (http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott1.pdf http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott1.pdf). A reconciliation of these two strands are being explored currently by Bernard Stiegler... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Time,_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_and_Time,_1 I have written about it in relation to Facebook here: https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html https://iainmait.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.htm...

cmpxchg 9y ago
Thank you for the suggestions. I will definitely study these.
adpoe 9y ago
Which Benjamin? I've read some of his more famous articles (i.e. - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), but I remember them being very political. Sort of an art-historical and aesthetic-theory application of Marx. Which, personally, I enjoyed. But was surprised to see Benjamin's work referenced in that context. Could be that I'm missing something, or mis-remembering, though. This was years ago, now. =)
frozenport 9y ago
Benjamin is famous for arguing that in an age of mechanically reproducible art, what mattered was the idea in the art which he saw as a method of communication for political purposes.

platz 9y ago

I agree. I would try to sum as a couple very original ideas that are more solid, combined with a great many loose associations that are tenuous, but according to the french style, given much weight and pomp; it actually makes the the writing style more inspiring/entertaining, but the ratio of claims to justifications is quite low. I also remember going though a great number of paragraphs without grokking anything at all, but i was also a bit younger then and perhaps able to focus less. Nevertheless, it inspired me to pick up a few of Baurdrilliard's other books (e.g. Cool Memories) which are even less rational, so S&S was probably his best work.

barrkel 9y ago

I think Marxist alienation more broadly understood is what drives the simulation dynamic. I don't think the two should be separated. Marxist critique of capitalism is very solid. It doesn't have any good prescriptions for alternatives, but the critique is well-founded.

frozenport 9y ago
Its not well-founded because modern financial instruments such as retirement savings blur the line between those who labor and those who command capital.
- mehrzad 9y ago
  "Newtonian physics is not well-founded because relativity blurs the lines between matter and energy." Marxism is an ever-developing field.
  - frozenport 9y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Also, yes, Newtonian physics isn't well founded for exactly that reason. Although in its original formulation E&M wasn't described.
    - pron 9y ago
      By your reading, no theory can ever be known to be well founded, as there is always the possibility of another discovery finding phenomena that aren't explained by the theory. I believe that most people would view science (in the wide sense, not limited only to disciplines that apply the scientific method) as a continuous process of abstraction and refinement. Newtonian mechanics is pretty accurate if you limit yourself to objects of a certain size and a certain speed, a limitation which is reasonable considering those are the sides and speeds we encounter most often in our senses.
- pron 9y ago
  Not so much once you don't put the distinction at "owns at least one share and owns nothing". If you plot the amount of ownership, there are very clear clusters.

mo1ok 9y ago

I've been thinking lately about the "sloppy reasoning" problem of critical theory. I used to really love critical theory when I was younger, but now that I'm older I'm almost ready to dismiss it as entertaining crank writing at a time when western civilization was exploring new boundries and slightly adrift. It has more in common with artistic expression than critical methodology. Still valuable, but should not be taken as seriously as it currently is in academia - at least in my opinion. I came to this opinion when I stayed at a friends' place recently who had a massive collection of critical theory, and I had not read any crit in years. I read a few of the books, and to my own surprise, my reaction was "what the hell is this nonsense?" The ideas were certainly interesting, but had no real provable basis, and just seemed to be the reasoned expression of one author's individual sense of alienation - more like artistic expression than any real solution to the dilemma of civilization or consciousness.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  For an excellent example of sloppy reasoning, look no further than Ornament and Crime: https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/Loos-Ornament%20and%20Crime.pdf https://faculty.risd.edu/bcampbel/Loos-Ornament%20and%20Crim... It argues that all art is erotic, that if you have a tattoo it is only a matter of time until you murder someone, and expresses something about Negroes that I don't care to look for again. (It was written in 1900 or so. I wonder what people in 2120 will wince about when they read our important works?) The frustrating thing is, I agree with many of the points in the essay. There's always something there: a grain of truth in the framework of obfuscation. But they dress it up. The essay even frames it as "Here is something I have discovered, which I now bestow upon the world." It's not a direct quote, but it may as well be; many philosophers share that air of fake importance. If only he was relaxed, he could have gotten his points across to many more people. "I get over a fire much more easily when only worthless garbage has been burned." Interesting point. "Every age had its style, is our age alone to be refused a style? By style, people meant ornament." Great observation! Notice how we eschew ornament; HN is bare, Twitch is austere, Youtube is as minimalistic as possible. If you image search DaVinci, it's hard to find a single example of anything containing ornament. Coincidence? Works without ornament are timeless. But something comes over people -- simple isn't enough. Me too. I wrote a downvote hiding extension for HN, and I was embarrassed that the v1 was only a few lines of code. "It doesn't even hide your karma if you look at your profile!" So I wrote a far more complicated v2 and shipped that. Surprise, HN shipped an update and now it broke. v1 works fine. You're certainly familiar with this phenomenon in almost every aspect of our profession. What is going on there? It's worth exploring. But philosophers manage to obscure these observations in the most complicated ways. And unfortunately, those complications introduce mistakes that make it easy to dismiss the rest of the work, along with the good ideas.

pizza 9y ago

It's funny you dislike Chomsky because of Marxist tendencies, because Chomsky himself has stated that he strongly disagreed with many leftist (Marxist) groups on the issue that led Marx and Engels to diverge from anarchists. Chomsky disagrees with them (Marxist doctrinists, Leninists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Hoxhaists, etc.) on the same grounds of statist antidemocratic rule as he does with fascists, meritocrats, theocrats, anarchocapitalists, nationalist socialists, etc.. That's his reasoning for being an anarchosyndicalist, rather than some flavor of progressive reliant upon the rule of a small cadre of enlightened revolutionaries

fao_ 9y ago
> Chomsky disagrees with them (..., Trotskyists, ...) on the same grounds of statist antidemocratic rule as he does ... As I understand it (Based on an admittedly rudimentary understanding of the relevant philosophies), Trotsky advocated that everything be decentralized -- i.e. not controlled by the state -- at least in the traditional sense, but by the people, locally to the people. Thus it seems weird to me that Chomsky would disagree with him on this matter. Personally, I'm still searching for the holon system that was used in Suarez' Daemon series. Although I suspect that I might be remembering it to be less capitalistic than it was described to be.
- pizza 9y ago
  Ah, interesting. For some reason I had the sense that Trotskyism was like dictatorship rule by vanguards (like Stalinism I guess), but it seems that it's more like dictatorship by the proletariat by means of a dash of anarchism according to wikipedia, and in that way pretty much completely different than how I perceived it. Although wikipedia does also say that "permanent revolution" has non-identical uses; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution All I know for certain is that Chomsky is no Posadist, lol.
  - madaxe_again 9y ago
    Trotsky opposed centralised technocracy, and he was right - this was what ultimately killed the ussr, as corrupt and incompetent centralised bureaucracy could not respond rapidly enough or appropriately to external conditions. Production was a mess, goods would be in dire shortage in one oblast and vast excess in another. Those who held the central reigns of power funnelled everything into their own pockets - cf. the incumbent oligarchy. Had Trotsky succeeded Lenin rather than Stalin, the world might be a very different place today. But he didn’t, and it might not have made any damn difference. I guess we need to run another experiment.

madaxe_again 9y ago

Actually, as Baudrillard himself readily admits, most of the ideas are not his - he formalised and presented to the academic world the philosophy of Philip K Dick. As to the Marxist tendencies - i think it’s more of a reaction to the totalitarian worlds he and dick foresaw. It’s certainly what’s pushed me leftwards over the years.

conatus 9y ago

Baudrillard was on the left but was absolutely scathing about Marxism. He thought was a total theoretical dead end and a flawed reflection of the systems of capitalism it sought to overthrow. See his The Mirror Of Production.