Posts by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
(DIR) Post #B2gPdXHtVEHDgxv864 by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-01-26T16:14:39Z
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What escapism? The writer Louise Perry wants to lament that Zoomers are turning their backs on the Hogwarts mythos cuz they've lsot faith in liberal ideals. Good. They should. They were fed a fantasy that said evil is obvious, institutions can be trusted & empathy always wins. Soft lighting & metaphor so clean they could be printed on Etsy tote bags. NGE didn't print shit. Instead it printed on YOU.
(DIR) Post #B2gPdXwf3et1jOzgdk by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-01-26T16:37:50Z
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For Gen X youth like me. NGE was the closest we ever got to our Harry Potter.... if it ended with Harry sobbing on the fllor in fetal position while Dumbledore dissolved into LCL. No triumph but clarity through failure. We learned that our trauma was not unique. Just unspoken. We were the death wish in flesh, trying to claw meaning out of detachment.
(DIR) Post #B2gPdYUL2RpDPqka8G by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-01-26T16:40:31Z
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Millennials got Hogwarts as a mirror of hope while I got The End of Evangelion as a mirror of everything I was afraid to admit. So no, I don't miss the magical optimism of that time. I had a much different one that shows you the void & said "you can either look away or face it. Naked, terrified & human." I did & I came out alive. Congratulations.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc078nPxTOOa0vI by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T14:55:31Z
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The Anti-Future: Apocalypse as Branding in an Age of DriftUmair Haque calls our moment the "anti-future," a phrase designed to throb in the gut. Neither stagnation nor crisis, but a regression. The wheel of time unwinding by "decades every year." Liberal order dissolving into imperial rivalry & democracy collapsing into techno-feudal caste. Investment in knowledge replaced by oligarchic extraction. Civilization is moving backwards, not merely failing.https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://medium.com/eudaimonia-co/the-anti-future-or-civilizations-next-decade-5a6cf40b2ed9#UmairHaque
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc1S5p0JPXfOGDg by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T14:57:16Z
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Quite arresting thesis, but also revealing. Haque's essay belongs to a long lineage of civilizational lament. One hears the echo of Oswald #Spengler who described cultures exhausting their inner form & hardening into imperial machinery. One also hears the moral despair of Emil #Cioran, for whom decline was less event than atmosphere. Yet Haque's tone is different. Spengler diagnosed with glacial detachment. Haque warns, impores, accuses. He is apocalypse with a subscription link at medium.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc2hjAMPdQRiGEC by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T14:58:59Z
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The core claim is temporal reversal. Geopolitically we are allegedly returning to the 19th century. Raw imperial competition, spheres of influence, the undoing of cooperative order. Domestically the USA has already crossed into fascism & is sliding into techno-feudalism, a caste society of entrenched capital & permanent debt-serfs. Economically, surplus is extracted by oligarchs while investment in education, science & culture withers. There's truth here.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc2u8QEKy2vWAZE by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T15:00:39Z
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Great power rivalry has sharpened. Inequality, intensified. Ai threatens labor stability. Democratic norms are strained. The myth of linear progress is visibly fraying. But regression is the wrong metaphor. The 19th century was agrarian empire w/o nuclear deterrence, w/o planetary supply chains, w/o algorithmic governance. Feudalism was land-bound vassalage not financialized platform dependency. History doesn't rewind cleanly, for it mutates.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc3SANhYjkTRLc0 by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T15:02:04Z
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What we are witnessing is less re-entry in a prior stage, more of deformation of late modernity under stress. To call it "centuries undone" is rhetorically potent but analytically imprecise. Civilizations decay unevenly. Institutions hollow out while technologies advance. Political legitimacy erodes even as computational power expands. This isn't medieval Europe plus wifi, but something novel: hyper-modern infrastructure paired with declining cultural cohesion.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc3eZdZU4MxFFx2 by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T15:03:54Z
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Haque's most perceptive intuition is a psychological one. Modern civilization ran on a myth: tomorrow will be better. Richer, freer, more enlightened. Even its wars & depressions were framed as detours on an upward arc. When that narrative collapses, societies enter existential vertigo. The Anti-Future is less material regression than the evaporation of collective confidence. This is the real wound.
(DIR) Post #B3Pqc4R8j0KenZy2eO by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-17T15:05:00Z
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When young people doubt upward mobility & when education appears disconnected from dignity, the civilizational story fractures. W/o belief in expansion of rights, prosperity, knowledge, the system feels terminal even if GDP grows. Spengler called this the transition from Culture to Civilization: technique w/o transcendence. A society materially brilliant & spiritually fatigued. Haque senses this fatigue & describes it as catastrophe. But it may be something colder: exhaustion.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyNdiyIXdvug7yC by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:22:41Z
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The internet went stupid? Sure, & water is wet. And your phone is currently vibrating with some half baked opinion from some dude who thinks research = I saw this TikTok. None of this is breaking news. The internet has been a public restroom wall with a keyboard since about 2005, when broadcast went from luxury to default. Before that you had to want it. You had to earn your time online the way you earned anything back then: by waiting, by listening to that demonic dial-up screech.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyOiMyVqrGbrLqi by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:24:23Z
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And most importantly, having a working relationship with troubleshooting & patience. The barrier to entry was competence. Back in the narrowband era, the people online were mostly the kind who could read instructions w/o crying. Not geniuses, not saints, just functional adults with enough literacy to type a sentence & enough curiosity to finish one. The internet was smaller, slower & crucially, less crowded with the human equivalent of 70 open tabs blaring autoplay ads.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyPVe1JGbjQuhea by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:26:22Z
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I remember joining a discussion board called the Internet Infidels. A cage match disguised as a symposium. Everyone was either an intellectual, an expert, or at least convincingly pretending to be one. I was 25, the perfect age to think you're immortal & verbally armed. That place was a training ground: you learned how to argue, how to cite & how to cut someone down with a clean sentence & no wasted motion.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyQMSqvWANFcsz2 by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:28:07Z
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You learned that language is more than communication, closer to a weapon with a safety switch most people never find. And I suspect I was the only deaf person there. Not just there but on a lot of boards. Which meant I learned the internet the way you learn a city by walking it: by pattern, by rhythm, by reading what other people miss. Deafness makes you allergic to fluff.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyQpt5X3NqVONqS by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:29:38Z
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Can't rely on tone to do the heavy lifting, so you start measuring words like calories, notice what matters & what's just empty air in text form. That is where I really learned the only rule that ever mattered online: signal to noise ratio. At first the signal was strong. The noise existed, sure, but it was background static. Then something happened that always happens: the room got popular. Popularity is a solvent, dissolves standards.
(DIR) Post #B3WSybStZMCKoNig2C by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:31:33Z
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Once a forum becomes a thing it moves from a conversation to a food court. More users show up, & not more good ones. Just more users. The distribution doesn't change. The proportion stays the same: a handful of thoughtful folks, a mountain of average joes & a smaller but louder group of professional clowns. So the noise grew faster than the signal. Not cuz people got dumber overnight but cuz the internet stopped being a place you visited & became a place you lived.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyiCqVQWFidGSUS by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:33:16Z
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Broadband sped up more than just downloads - it sped up stupidity. Social media took that & strapped a rocket to it, then handed over controls to advertisers & the most attention-starved people alive. The old discussions had substances (history, philosophy, science, substantial arguments). Then the tide came in: fads, trends, hot takes microwaved to boiling, the endless parade of "just asking questions" from people who never wanted answers.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyptduhubZOLEfY by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:35:11Z
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The conversation got watered down the way everything gets watered down when it's packaged for mass consumption. Just like beer, news, culture itself. And this is the uncomfortable part: the noise to signal ratio did not become a thing after broadband. It just became impossible to ignore. Cuz the number of intellectuals vs the hoi polloi has never changed. Not in 1999, not in 2005, nor now. The ratio is constant.
(DIR) Post #B3WSyy1Nhor6li1WqG by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-20T17:35:57Z
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The difference is scale. When the crowd was smaller the signal could still be heard. Now the crowd is the whole planet, & everyone's got a megaphone, & the megaphones are programmed to reward the loudest, dumbest, most contagious nonsense. So yes the internet went stupid. Not cuz it changed but cuz it succeeded.
(DIR) Post #B3hImfEirMO8EMJloW by Gotterdammerung@glitch.social
2026-02-26T01:09:31Z
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The cafe television is still replaying clips from last night's address. The chyron reads: STATE OF THE UNION - HISTORIC, DEFIANT, UNPRECEDENTED. They sit around a wobbling table like philosophers who've lost tenure. On TV, Trump was replayed mid-applause, chin lifted towards destiny. Julian Vale (Postmodern Absurdist): So. The annual national seance. And there he was, the president, summoning the "Golden Age" as if it were a discontinued fragrance.