Optimistic Nihilism | Ryan Dahl

What Nihilism Is Not

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

On technological optimism and technological pragmatism

"There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”

Museletter #353: Deadly Optimism, Useful Pessimism

What's really needed is a realistic sense of what's possible, and a dogged determination to heal division, protect nature and culture, and build sustainable alternatives.

Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism

I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.

Hayao Miyazaki and optimistic nihilism

Yesterday, I found the post i think we're obsessed with aesthetic on the Discovery Feed. It featured quite a few nice quotes. My favourite was this one: <...

How are we writing the future of humanity?

Consciousness spinning

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We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted… | Kenneth Mikkelsen | 19 comments

We speak often of AI as if it were a future event. But it is already here in the fabric of our being. What Karl Ove Knausgaard captures with devastating clarity in his recent essay ‘The Reenchanted World’ is the departure of the real. “We live in a virtual world, as if the world had been lifted out of itself, into the air, like a giant roof suspended above the ground,” he writes. It is an existential condition. Across philosophy, from Heidegger to Baudrillard, from Don DeLillo to Debord, a singular thread weaves: the world, once our shelter from the self, has become self-referential. Where once we encountered beings in our Zuhandensein—ready-to-hand, intimate, meaningful—we now face a procession of Vorhandensein: inert, objectified, mediated. Simulation replaces encounter. Perception is swallowed by spectacle. And the digital era, in Knausgaard’s terms, “distances culture from the body”. “It is not just the body that disappears—it is the awareness that we are dying,” he writes. What we face is not merely technological change, but what I would call existential dissonance: the erosion of resonance between our inner world, our social world, and the material world. It is the tension that arises when the way one lives, acts, and relates is misaligned with one’s deeper sense of meaning, reality, and value. It manifests itself as a disturbance in being — an unease that is not merely emotional, but rooted in a felt gap between one’s existence as it is and as it could or should be. It is the voice of the self calling from within the noise of the world. This is why Knausgaard’s essay matters for anyone working in, with, or around AI. Because the question isn’t: What can these systems do? It is: What do they undo? “We can explain everything. But we understand nothing,” he writes. Manipulated constructions of truth, in such a time, becomes a currency. As shown in recent events—from Francesca Gino’s research fraud at Harvard to Bezos’ all-female crew venture into space, and Trump’s detention camp —truth is no longer that which corresponds with reality, but that which performs and sells. As Baudrillard warned, the simulation no longer hides the real—it becomes it. And yet, something remains. Knausgaard writes not to despair, but to stay. In the body. In death. In silence. In the concrete. If you seek to understand what is happening—not just in AI, but in the very metaphysics of modern life—I suggest we begin not with data, but with dissonance. With the feeling that something vital is slipping from view, and that “being in the world” now requires resistance. “We are surrounded by mystery. And yet we act as if everything were known,” he writes. AI will never understand this. But we must. Knausgaard’s full essay from Harper’s Magazine can be read via link in comments. | 19 comments on LinkedIn

Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design

We fail to take tech seriously when we do not grasp its full impact on humans

The Origins Of <br>‘Planetary Realism’ And <br>‘Whole Earth’ Thinking | NOEMA

There is no escaping an interconnected world.

Dr

Chaos, Utopia, and Apocalypse: ideological readings of the nonlinear sciences

TBM 405: Hope, Context, and Control

This essay is about hope, fear, AI, and the tension between control and collective sensemaking.

The Waluigi Effect (mega-post) — LessWrong

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. — Carl Jung …

Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist for discussion on how our left-brain dominance obscures our sense of value, especially for abstract qualities such as truth, goodness, and beauty.

Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism