Tag: Stanislav Lem
-
Cyberpunk
Lately, I’ve been thinking about cyberpunk’s jagged grip on the collective id, its knack for haunting the edges of our digital decay like a rogue algorithm stuck on loop. Cyberpunk isn’t just about dystopian futures—it’s about the failure of successive belief systems, each of which once promised order, progress, or salvation but collapsed under their…
-
Soviet Sci-Fi, and the Dream of Hyper-Organicity
This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions…
-
Inelegant Futures
In likelier futures, where the trajectory of events bends not toward grandiose spectacle but toward the mundane grind, the intricate mechanisms that drive history reveal themselves as stupefying in their banality. Imagine, if you will, the vast, teeming complexities of bureaucratic machinery grinding away in some fluorescent-lit, windowless office in the bowels of a faceless…