Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Yudkowsky's doom porn book about ASI, just released on 2025-09-16.

Very sloppy. Don't use this book to learn about AI, how an LLM works, or anything else for that matter. If you like your AI doomerism vulgar and trashy, the kind you pay $5 for from a rationalist tweaker collecting paperclips around the dumpsters behind Office Depot, then this is the book for you. I have my suspicions (none good) on what's going on with Yudkowsky, but am not into him, LessWrong, rationalist cults, or even the current AI commentary space enough to have a firm opinion that I'd want to commit to writing here. I foolishly selected this book because the AI field moves fast and this just came out. However, AI ethics is a grift, not a field, and one populated by opportunists and insane bubble-dwellers. It's hard to tell them apart, but you don't have to. It's better to just not read this stuff at all, unless you want a reason to hope the machines win.

To be fair, this is very rarely an okay read of blog-quality, but the smell of Yudkowsky's gelatinous body permeates its every page, ruining any enjoyment one might have. Its biggest downside is that this book is really a PR piece for his institute, and one he expects you to pay $15 for. Various entities have given MIRI many millions, after all. He would like that to continue/increase, so he puts the main pitch for MIRI right at the beginning to ensure rich people know Yudkowsky and his fedora are the only things standing between life and total extinction.

Yudkowsky, despite pondering this deeply his entire career, thinks that the only way we don't all die is global bans on clusters greater than 8 GPUs, all AI research, and anything else that leads to ASI. Then we're supposed to aggregate all datacenters in one place, to be governed by an international elite who presumably understand AI ethics better than we do. This is, of course, impossible, and he knows this. I'll solve this great dilemma now, right here in this book review. I'll even do it completely for free, no self-serving institute or millions of dollars necessary:

Let's say you take everything here as true (it isn't) and ASI is coming in <10 years and will murder us all. Well, ASI can't attack us if we have enough hydrogen bombs to salt the Earth with ambient radioactivity. For added security, we could even build something similar to the "doomsday device" Herman Kahn proposes in On Thermonuclear War (he does as a thought experiment, but now we have a real use for it). This weapon can be activated proactively, but should also be on a (purely mechanical) dead man's switch. If ASI attempts to wipe out humans, it'll kill itself too, as the sensitive GPUs it runs on won't function if we turn the planet into a radioactive hellscape. So, now we have to work together or at least be in a state of Cold War-style détente, buying us time for biotech advances to fix problems on the human side. There's still minor details that need worked out, like trigger design, but problem solved. We like building and having nuclear weapons anyway, and now we'll get even greater returns than from pointing them at each other. We might even have enough weapon stockpiles currently, at least to counter its early infrastructure. If so, we're already somewhat insured against this without realizing it (though I'd say the doomsday device is still worth building). Now we can all go nuts and create ASI with impunity; no safeguards or AI ethicists needed. There you go, my puny human brain just saved humanity and thwarted the genocidal hypermind. You're welcome.

Oh, and how can I be so sure that ASI won't arise in 10 years? Well, it's because we're not approaching the problem space correctly. Admittedly, I probably wouldn't see this if I was still in the AI field and myopic about it like everyone else. This is why Yudkowsky, who talks to such people, can't see AI except as a paperclip maximizer. We actually could have at least a real AGI right now. No major breakthroughs necessary, just some engineering and a proper underlying theory needed. I might write about how to do this elsewhere, haven't decided yet. Not sure I want to. If I'm right, they'll figure it out eventually anyway.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Novella #5 from the Forward Collection series. This one seemed the most interesting and was the only entry I decided to read.

At some point in my life, I wondered whether most of the problems in the world could be solved if concerned individuals found a placid lake or pond, and just sat by it long enough. Those thoughts belonged to a younger, more idealistic self, blissfully unaware of how broken man can be. However, for those of us not twisted into wretched, miserable imps, it's still true, at least some of the time. For lake-resistant problems, those can be solved by gazing into a mirror and asking, "Who are you?" repeatedly until you have the answer.

This book is about identity, in the ontology of selfhood sense, and can thereby serve as a mild dose of the latter. Imps can save their time and read something else. The last bookstore I was in had a "dark romance" section. Maybe start there?

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

A mystery novel centered around a mathematical equation. Queued this up long ago, so not sure, but I think at the time I was briefly experiencing a minor yearning for a good mystery novel. This is an attempt at one with hard scifi elements.

There's really two components to this text: chick lit and scifi. For the former, that's competently written and, despite owning testicles, I'd say I sometimes enjoyed reading it. It's pretty standard material: woman has feelings, relationships are explored, shocking thing happens to make woman question relationship, etc. You know the stuff.

Then, there's a rather jarring and discrete boundary, beyond which is the math/science content. Here, I can't help but notice a certain Derridian structure of absence at the meta-level, meant in the sense that the author is really working at the edge of ability and is choosing the best word to use in the dominant terms of sentences. This best word is just the best in a sparse set (thus forcing the choice), not one chosen for having the richest relational value as a signifier. All the info-dumped science and math content is exactly this, which reads like it was lifted from the summary section of Wikipedia articles or from popsci documentaries. This unintentionally defines this content (and I'd argue the work as a whole) by the absence of non-neophytic detail.

We all write like this at some point, so this is more critique than criticism. Performing at the threshold of one's ability is how you get better at anything, including writing itself. Even these reviews are sometimes like that, since they're often about topics I'm learning. It has its effects on the reading experience though, resulting in something of a fragmented flow and intentionality.

That's not to say English majors shouldn't try to write about science; an effortful book like this could serve the same purpose as the media science popularizers create. Inquisitive children and Reddit-tier midwits love such things, so consider this rating more of a personal take. The author possesses some general writing talent, hence me finishing, but I think I might've enjoyed it slightly more if it was straight chick lit. Again, this is despite my massive, swinging testicles, which quiver and pulsate at actual math and science. They aren't satisfied by veiled metaphor, they need a grad-level textbook, wide open in front of them, equations exposed in all their anatomical glory. If a stray pube falls onto the page, I should have to give it a second look lest I mistake it for an integral or Greek letter. Look guys, what I'm saying is if you're in the lady book section at Barnes & Noble, maybe pull those testicles out and give them a good look before you put this book in your basket. Always obey the ancient Delphic edict, "know thy scrote". This is the path to self-knowledge and wisdom.

Rating: ★★★★☆

A collection of Lacan's essays and some speech transcripts. These are all pre-1966 and therefore from the imaginary and symbolic eras. Early texts start in the 1930s and are from prior to true "Lacanianism" (when Lacan develops his thought into a full, distinct system of its own). The early period overall has Lacan more in a multi-polar, collaborative discourse, occasionally tackling various theories, some now long dead, that were emergent at the time. Given the time range, you can experience Lacan develop his distinctive voice throughout the first half or so of the book, though one feels its formative essence from the earliest writings. A notable exception is his mirror stage presentation, which could have easily been from the middle if one didn't know the history. So, perhaps he just needed ownership of a collection of original ideas to reveal the fully-formed maître who was there all along.

While I could easily write a review of each text within this, I'll instead address a lingering disagreement regarding the book's place within the psychoanalytic curriculum. Some (including many eminent Lacanians) suggest saving Écrits for the very last Lacan book read, and others say to skip it altogether. My take is, you should definitely read this, but probably later than I did. Read other Lacan books until you've fully exhausted concept exposure to the point where their interconnections are reasonably internalized (meaning at least read the most important seminars), then read this. If you do that, as most content in here will be alternative angles on what you've already read, this mid-effort timing can take advantage of that.

Note that reading this book is a major undertaking. Beyond its near-900pg length, this is an ultra-dense text and essay Lacan is even more cryptic than seminar Lacan. This took around 3 weeks of close study for me, and I could've easily spent a multiple of that to wring out every last bit of meaning. Along those lines, I plan to read its most popular supplementary text, Bruce Fink's Lacan To The Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, at some point (to let him do that hard work for me).

Since I just recently started this review page, I'll mention that completing this book concludes my self-designed education course on Lacan. Prior to that, I read many Freud works in prep for it, and various other texts. The goal here was to go from someone who just read a few essays and picked up random concepts by osmosis to actually knowing the stuff pretty well. This done, I feel ready to do a full read of Deleuze+Guattari's core works (which are largely a response and counter to Lacan), and you'll see those books reviewed here at some point. Lacan is also now firmly ensconced in my list of thinkers I'll be sticking with for life, so I'll be reading additional works by and about him occasionally.

Most importantly, don't be like my younger self. I read the Sokal hoax essay and books back in college, believing him when he included Lacan on his list of gibberish-spewing, loquacious charlatans. The few Lacan essays I read around that time was with Sokal coloring my perception, and I never invested its due attention. While many of Sokal's other targets (including many of Lacan's adherents) certainly deserved their vigorous spankings, he was (mostly) wrong about Lacan, and I missed out on benefiting from this knowledge throughout my formative college and early working years.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

This scifi novella covers a vast evolutionary (forced, natural, and augmented) branching of humans into the distant future. That's a large undertaking, one that would require a lot of literary talent to pull off well. This is at best a marginal success here.

This is a lot of species design. It'd be hard to get every one of those right. One problem scifi authors contend with is breaking out of the box of our terrestrial experience, only able to create races of simple, anthropomorphic variants of Earth animals. That's only a partial issue here, but this is also related to the main thing this text gets wrong: almost all of the content is a focus on anatomical variations. Meanwhile, it assumes a linear progression of sapience. Lineages are physically/somatically aberrant, yet psychically normative as sub-human, human-level, or superior. Far more interesting than appendage length would be to explore alternate forms of cognition, particularly since the plot contains a great reset down to non-sapience from which all descendants need to climb back out.

By the way, ever notice how awkward the human body is in space? If you like speculative physiology, now's a good time to mention a vision I have for what our near-future morphological goal should be:

Imagine the human body as a squat cylinder on its side, wider than it is deep. Within this disc-like body will be all of our present internal organs, minus the now unneeded torso, abdomen, and neck muscles. For a skeleton, we don't need much of that either, except a central span and a rib cage morphed to encircle the internal organs. The brain itself can sit in the center, safely surrounded by the lungs, stomach, and heart, with the intestines shortened and wrapped around the inner circumference. Our four primary appendages should be moved to equidistant, offset-cardinal locations (NE, SE, SW, NW) when viewed from the front. Those limbs will all terminate in hands, with no useless feet/toes.

Now, this body is highly optimal for manned space travel. Instead of vast open spaces, our ship interiors can be dedicated to equipment and payload, with these bodies naturally at home moving throughout the ship in tubes at zero-g. Four arms allow for easily grasping handholds from any direction, and allow for the use of twice the control panels or input devices. Everything about manned space travel just got multiple times more efficient.

For the remaining important bits, the front of the disc will be entirely dedicated to the human face, eyes enlarged and moved to the near edge to maximize depth perception, mouth a tiny slit, and nostrils two near-vestigial holes. On the reverse of our disc-body would be our gluteal mounds (now just fat stores with no muscles), surrounding a unified cloaca where all waste products and reproductive emissions transit. The body will be entirely hairless and sheathed in a rubbery, pink skin.

As humans have a lot of neurons dedicated to faces (presumably, emojis aren't going anywhere) and use of a lot of facial expressions to communicate, it makes sense to optimize for a large communication surface here. Forward-looking artists in Japan already figured a lot of this out decades ago. Vision is our favorite sense and the face our favorite scopic object, but as we already have this now, our new, hyper-efficient cloaca is the truly transformative win. This excretory organ will extend a few inches from the body surface to allow for seamless integration with rubber waste-disposal hoses, something medical industry workers everywhere will appreciate. You will too, as this is also your new phallus, allowing for convenient machine stimulation at the press of a button.

So, there you have it, a better future, one with man made transcendent through biological engineering. I think this form isn't just perfect for space, but also for the hyper-dense pod-hives we'll inevitably inhabit in the near future. Nestled blissfully within your pod, all you'll need is an air vent, a pair of Apple Vision Pro goggles, a food paste dispenser, and, of course, a waste/goon-tube. Make it happen, nerds.

Here's a picture I drew for the verbally-challenged. Meet the your future progeny (and with timely surgical tech, yourself too):

                   _________________________
                 < Greetings, fellow human! >
         NMM      --------------------------
        / ,P       /
        | |   ____   __
        | \ .'    `./  \
         \ /        \/\ \
          |(.) '' (.)| UUU
          /\   ==    /\
         | /`.____.' \ \
         | |         | |
         UUU         UUU

Rating: ★★★★☆

An essay from the obscure and defunct humanities journal, The Human World, issue 13, November 1973. Analyzes the Book of Job. Impossible to find online, but a kind person on Libera had a copy and emailed it to me.

Great paper, one the internet would appreciate knowing about. Very "blasphemous", but also not, since, as Tønnessen points out, he's saying nothing that the Book of Job does not itself say. In that sense, the paper is in complete reverence and veneration of God, in exactly the way God tells us he wants us to be.

Tønnessen argues that Satan has actually won the wager, or rather something larger than the wager itself. God has debased himself and left open a path towards the human soul that had previously not been demonstrated to man. By his actions, God has revealed the fixity of his tyranny and upon what precepts it rests. The discourse is that of the master and slave, in the most absolutest of terms, predicated upon arbitrary naked force. For the slave, any variance of this arrangement would be a better bargain.

Regarding Book of Job itself, like many others, I see numerous problems (and also some good points) within it, including:

• Job suggests, as does God, that the divine motives behind his situation are transcendent and unknowable. Only problem with this is that we do know God's motives here. He's just making a wager with Satan, with Job the unwitting object of demonstration. Job searches for meaning behind his senseless suffering, and in the process he learns something of his God: that there's no point in asking the question simply due to God's unfathomable power. Likewise for all human notions of justice. Any suffering he receives really is senseless, and it's simply his lot to bear it and continue acknowledging God's power in the only way one can: fear and servitude.
• Another issue is the disconnect between the restoration of Job and the killing of his children and servants. The latter were people too and are still dead. The wager "won", God restores Job to his previous worldly wholeness. One might think that replacing his family with new people doesn't exactly do that, but not by the accounting ledger God keeps. They're just numbers on the balance sheet, fungible commodities that only exist as debits or credits.
• Job makes an argument that God himself is diminished by his senseless torture. This is probably the most sensible thing he says, though he is chastised for such and later recognizes his "erroneous premises". Similarly, Job's so-called friends, who took an opposing position, are also rebuked, and must now slaughter seven bulls and seven rams in atonement. God leaves the challenging math (there being 3 friends) for them to figure out.
• The Book of Job's author is probably just making the lesson contained in the notion that: naked and with nothing you entered the world, and likewise shall you exit it. A good point, but the form in which it's made is theologically problematic. We're really only left with two choices: reject some/all of the claims here, or accept and incorporate them into our religious view. If the latter, this theodicy would be highly effectuating upon the entirety of our theology. Maybe (and this is a big maybe) a Christian can make some assertions about a refactoring due to the later existence of Jesus, he being something of a previously non-existent bridge between these two realms. That has its own issues though, like discontinuity of God's inherent nature, but if I was one, I'd probably go this route. I'd direct my desire for a deity of love, law, and justice towards Jesus himself, and conceive of God as a being of irreconcilable force for which no such connection is possible beyond that of abject fear and slavish servitude.

In case you didn't know: Man small, God big.

Would have to closely reread the Book of Job to ensure I agree with all of the above (I skimmed it a bit to refresh my memory). I'll keep this in mind whenever I get around to reading the whole Bible in a single, linear experience (which I was saving for later in life).

Rating: ★★★★☆

Clever writing, not so much in word choice or sentence structure, but in what sentence should come next. Also clever at the high level with many complex themes.

I read the primary theme as an exploration of the framework of desire. All the main characters are completely enslaved by theirs, and they represent structurally-similar pursuits for various objects of desire. Most are quite straight-forward and personifying (in fact, many characters are barely described beyond framing their desire), but Gatsby's desire for Daisy, while still very totalizing, is a bit more complex. He seems to be at some kind of odds with it at various points, but not enough to be anything but an agent of its power. We only closely explore Gatsby's desire, so it could be assumed that everyone's got something of an adversarial relationship with theirs. Of course, being desiring machines works out poorly for everyone, even if they do have material wealth. It's a shallow existence, a consumptive desire instead of a productive one (though through the lens of the present, simply being social to this extent would be an improvement from the solipsistic longing common today). All this maps quite well to a Lacanian view of the topic and its effects on the subject. Moreover, desire is embedded into the invisible law of culture and language, and the cultural shift from needs to desire illustrates the dichotomy within lack. Gatsby best exemplifies this transition, starting off scraping out a merger existence. Now his needs are effortlessly met and therefore meaningless, while satisfaction of desire is completely impossible. The brief period when he thinks he's captured the object, he's left oscillating between a confused daze, his prior modality of pursuit, hesitant revolt against it, and self-sabotaging behavior (basically ensuring Daisy's husband will discover the affair). This shows Daisy is not the cause, but rather that the objet petit a always held Gatsby in its sway. The object itself was unattainable, both symbolically and in the real. Gatsby also explicitly embodies Freud's death drive, with self-destruction woven into his pursuit.

Our narrator, Nick Carraway, is the anomaly here, but only if you don't notice he's a self-insert. Fitzgerald portrays him as lacking overarching desire, with Carraway turning down various offers for things like money, and instead being swept up in the competing desires of others. Carraway's singular depicted desire he actively pursues is to be Gatsby's only true friend, which is somehow supposed to be nobler than the surface-level pursuits of everyone else. More likely, Gatsby is actually closer to Fitzgerald's desire structure (having read his bio, Gatsby's very much his mimesis), and I suspect many of Fitzgerald's negative traits are projected onto the story's seemingly near-cartoonish character in order for him to be pitied by Fitzgerald's better side. This is why Carraway has to be the only one who cares about Gatsby, because only he can see the tragic core being behind the facade. So in reality, there's two self-inserts, neither complete persons, with Gatsby the primary who encompasses Fitzgerald's desire and history, and Carraway an imago aggregated from the scattered remnants.

This story's almost a 5/5, falling just short for lack of self-awareness that results in a slightly underwhelming ending. Supposedly Fitzgerald considers Tender Is the Night his best work. Queuing that one up for later to find out for myself.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Enjoyed other Vonnegut novels, and this one is considered his best, so figured I should give it a chance.

A good read. Great really, but just good for me. This style uses simple textual structure, mixed with repetition and irony. This is a particularly clever form of it that I can appreciate the creativity behind, but isn't really a style I want an entire book of. I'm rather okay with it in a novel if confined, say, to a character. Not really a complaint, just a misalignment for what I usually want in a novel. My perspective might be because it's a more common style now, not something that was a problem when this was written. I see it pretty regularly in blogs and posts, and have even used it myself on occasion.

I will complain that using the "fool" archetype for a main character does restrict this novel's potential. The disappointing best one can hope for from being locked into a Gumpian character is for him to be a victim of interesting happenstance, maybe with some wisdom from innocence thrown in for good measure, and that's exactly what we have here.

I do interpret this as something of a love letter from the author to himself, but also as a vehicle for comprehending a chaotic, random walk through a Brownian real. This kind of story is often crafted by those for whom such hapless, alienated wandering worked out quite well, so we see a lot of common themes, like stumbling into success. There's been a lot of these in post-WWII America it seems, with boomers and their parents seeming to need this more than later generations. I suspect this is due to them being raised on a smaller number of unfragmented narratives, so they seek that elusive structure in the only place it really matters.

Reflecting on the above and the other Vonnegut novels I've read, I don't think he's an author for me. Should've read all of his works back in undergrad, at the latest. He has several more books I haven't gotten to, but I'll give them a soft pass. If I hadn't already read Cat's Cradle, which I'd say is his best work, that would've been an exception.

Noteworthy bits:

• The (potentially imaginary) aliens have a holistic view of time, e.g., viewing the life of a person in its totality, from beginning to end. As such, they don't mourn things like death. They see time this way literally (actually looking across time's extent), but the message here is probably that we can think of our life's actual segmentary nature likewise, even from our perspective of being embedded within time's arrow.
• When Vonnegut tells a friend that he's writing an anti-war book, his friend tells him he might as well write an anti-glacier book, those things being equally inevitable.

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

A massive naval scifi series of 20 books. Figured this would be trash, but I queued up all the series in this sub-genre that looked semi-promising years ago, when I was into it more, and did find some that were at least "just okay". Read 2.5 books of this series before quitting.

Ended up executing my new rule to bail out of books that aren't for people like me in the social-alignment sense. Like romance novels, books like these are for people that are high linguistic/low intelligence. One way to tell this is the case is the people that like them write lengthy reviews that only talk about surface-level details, not underlying themes. Such books really only contain that surface and are impossible to glean anything interpretive from, beyond the psychology of the author himself. Being low intelligence, the readers aren't able to analyze things like what an author would have to say overall with a text, so are thereby fine with an author not capable of doing that. I need high in both linguistic and intelligence, and ideally high literary merit too.

A recent revelation I had, thanks to a logical extension of Lacan, was that there are readers out there of the above described type. I previously thought they were just low intelligence, which is true, but that's not the whole story. Why is it that some (probably most) of lower cognitive ability eschew the written word altogether, yet some are just as drawn to it as I am? Another dimension was needed to model this. A minor extension of the Lacanian subject provides a good explanation: these people are just as much "brought into language" as I am, yet they plateau out at a various lower levels, being unable to track a higher stratification of signification. Referents tend to take the forms of imagery, action, and emotion: the same content as the mass market movie's image, instead delivered via the register of the symbolic. So, stuff like this is perfect for them and terrible for someone like me. Like being served deep-fried filet mignon with ketchup on it, it's flavor is sickly, actively painful to consume, due to the actualized squandering of potential dangling right in front of our faces. It's vulgar, as swine cast before pearls must be.

All this said with nose pointed firmly upwards, I'd actually rather be stuck with someone with high language and low intelligence than the reverse. High language makes for a subject less prone to mental health imbalances, and therefore less negative externalities. It permits the capable to map their interlocutor, and adjust discourse accordingly. One party being able to do that is better than none.

Anyway, should've bailed earlier, but thought I could skim around the crappy parts. That actually did work for this one, but as per usual, the "good" parts weren't worth even the remaining effort.

Rating: ★★★★★

One of the two most-recommended seminars, and covers several critical points. Was given to a group of new students and visiting philosophers, so is more of an overview than any other, though still very non-comprehensive. This seminar immediately followed Lacan's ejection from the SFP/IPA and his forming of a new institute, the EFP. If you like psychoanalysis drama, Lacan addresses his exile in the first session. (He also mentions it in the first and only session of his "Inexistent" Seminar on the Name-of-the-Father, if you want his complete reaction.)

Some suggest starting here as your first Lacan book. You could do that, provided you've read the other pre-reqs. This is my 5th Lacan book, so most of the core ideas were ones I'm already familiar with. Since this list doesn't cover the others, I'll say a few general words about reading Lacan:

Lacan is one of the last true Renaissance men, vast in his scope, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen. There's no way you'll be familiar with everything he references, but we have the benefit of an internet to fill in any gaps, negating the need to permanently move into your university library. Lacan, though he would deny it, is also a philosopher, but more than perhaps any other his ideas are extremely densely interconnected (or highly polyvalent, as he would say). There's really no good entry-point; the best you can do is pick a shallower end. So, the standard advice of Seminars XI or VII being your first is fine, but you'll probably want to reread them later. With more context, the ideas and terms will reveal additional depth.

My positioning in relation to his corpus is to base myself within middle period (symbolic era) Lacan, selectively pulling in ideas from later and translating them to work within the structuralism of the middle. This is because his later formalisms are incompatible in detail with the middle period Lacanian subject and structure of desire, which I consider his most compelling and useful concepts. For early period, which I consider more extensionally Freudian, most of that meshes cleanly or is patched by middle period variations. This is just one approach though, and mainly a compromise due to not having a spare life to dedicate to just Lacan.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Queued this due to Lacan's recommendation. He sees a lot in it, and in Seminar VII, where he has 3 days dedicated to it, calls it "a truly admirable text" and "a work of overwhelming rigor". Lacan observes that Antigone as the heroine feels neither fear or pity. Creon too, except Lacan says he feels fear at the end and this causes his ruin.

Decent read, though not sure I'd pay a silver drachma to see it. This play being from 441 BC makes it more interesting, of course, and reading this, like with most ancient Greek texts, is a way to connect with a deep thinker from past ages.

This has been analyzed to death, and I'm sure someone's interpreted it this way, but I read this as an exploration of a tragic clash of plausibly justifiable positions. Antigone represents the natural order of family and blood; Creon, the state and law; and Haemon, nuance and practicality. Antigone is often the exegetical locus, but I find her uninteresting as an individual character, along with the others. They all embody their lines of thought, and aren't complete people, I'd say. That's why Ismene needs to exist, as Antigone can't have anything but a singular, monomaniacal focus, lacking any doubt of her position. Same with the Chorus, whose narration serves as structural connection. As such, analysis is probably more instructive at the high level.

I don't think Lacan is wrong about anything (at least that I recall, having read his commentary first). I think he treats Antigone as more of a non-person anyway, so perhaps our interpretations are somewhat in line regarding the characters themselves. However, I don't remember him talking about the play at the level of how ideas intersect. Hegel discusses this play in PoS, so will review my thoughts here when I finish that. I could see his system being more applicable in regards to my interpretation. A good question is whether in such a situation, conflict is necessary at all. The play suggests that when pure drives converge, if absent some other means not mentioned here, conflict is inevitable.

Yet another way to read this is that it's just another day in Thebes, where, like any upright polis, the law is more important than the man. Creon forgets this and tragedy ensues. Everyone else is appropriately devoid of doubt about that, even Antigone herself.

Rating: ★★★★☆

A fantasy novel considered great by various highly-literate parties. For this genre, I usually bypass it due to the extreme ratio of low-quality pulp. The only way one will end up on the queue is, as happened here, by someone else's strong recommendation.

This is an allegorical and myth-like tale about an infinite series of rooms with statues in them. Main character has retrograde plot amnesia (meaning he knows as much as the reader does), so there's also a mystery of the nature of the setting to uncover. Also of interest is that the titular main character is occasionally visited by a character named "The Other". Was hoping this was a Lacanian reference, but it isn't.

Great read. Creative idea and good execution. If all fantasy was this good, my queue would be depressingly long. I probably would have wrapped it up a little more concisely and the fantasy setting could use more flowery prose, but it's probably more satisfying to general audience readers this way. This is one of those novels that makes us think a bit about our place in the world, civilization, time, isolation, and our subjectivity itself. I'd call this exegetically open though, so the reader can take any number of things from it.

Susanna Clarke is a talented author. Will queue up her main other book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

The structure of this is a long intro, then a series of 5 lecture transcripts. These lectures were to be part of a 15-lecture course. However, Fisher decided to unalive himself on 2017-01-13, so the remaining never occurred. His nascent theory, Acid Communism, was intended to be his answer to his thesis in Capitalist Realism. In that previous book, I was left wondering how he intends to tear down the implacable edifice he puts such effort into describing. He obviously didn't have a coherent vision at that point, but also doesn't here. These, being lectures on a developing topic, were probably intended to be upstream from some more polished essays or a book. So, they're a bit rough in format/content as this was a real-time recording. The transcriber helped this some, but intentionally left a lot in (which was the right call in this situation). So, it's just an inherent nature of the source material, and though disjointed, it's what we have.

Acid Communism seems to be an attempt to synthesize the culture/aesthetics of 60s counterculture and the current yearning (by some) for economic alternatives. However, this is left extremely incomplete as an idea, and is perhaps fatally flawed. I'll tackle both components:

• The 60s aesthetics was faddish, localized, and ephemeral. Fisher himself called its vanguard "passively and mindlessly giving into the pleasure principle" and "doing capitalism's work for it". They didn't have any lasting impact beyond signification of the era, and even then, incompletely and only in the most surface-level sense. Even worse, by comparison the 60s was a cultural success compared to the fragmented nothing of current counterculture. OWS's aesthetics, to the very limited degree it had one, was blue hair, nose rings, and iPhones. That's counter-productive if you want to do something effectuating with it. In reality, there is no aesthetic now outside of UIs. Cultural aesthetic identity may not even be possible in the present, and if it is, modern leftists are certainly the last to materialize one. I think this is because they have issues with retaining cultural and intellectual lineage (a much larger topic that deserves a less casual treatment than possible here). Aesthetics is important, a bullet point you need to check, but it's not a centroid point.
• Like most Fisher readers, I agree that his notion of capitalist realism is his most compelling thought (though it too has problems beyond the scope of this review). However, even if we accept that wholesale, then we're in a contradictory state if we think we can just escape it by means of some flaccid will. The 60s tried real revolutionary action, after all, starting 1000s of communes. Every one of them, in the best outcome, degenerated into the hierarchical structures they actively were trying to escape. Then most of those collapsed into chaos. Turns out this is a hard problem. Those people were seriously committed by comparison to the left's human resources in the present. Past leftists had a dynamic libidinality that comes through in their every action, whereas Fisher's conception of capitalist realism includes a malaise-ridden resignation for an endless future of boring sameness, capable at best of the kind of impotent whining one might accuse him of.

That said, both of these complaints can be overlooked if we're talking about time scales long enough and thereby introducing plausible uncertainly. However, I get a sense of immediacy from Fisher's speaking about this, so I don't think he's talking about centuries. He probably shouldn't, since Marx is likely to be completely irrelevant by then. This too is a blind spot, as Fisher himself seems to be in ignorance of the progression of Western Marxist culture. His Marxism is transitive, having an unconscious alterity, passed down through a prior generation of professors (that I saw the end of myself) for whom it was more alive. If you're Fisher's age or younger, Marx doesn't exist in the real. There's only a dead Marx, his corpse colonized by idpol detritivores. Fisher can only eulogize Marx, as the depressive subtext of these lectures unintentionally does, he can't resurrect him.

Caveat to all of the above: Being unfinished, this review necessarily includes some conjecture. For all we know, Fisher may have had great answers to some of these objections, but decided we weren't worthy.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Guy Debord's 1967 text that introduces the concept of the spectacle, which is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people. Was thinking this might be an transposition of the concept of Marxist commodity fetishism, where commodities are reified as having inherent value. The spectacle morphs authenticity in the social sphere, replacing it with its representation. Contains 221 numbered aphorisms, some of which are stand-alone, others continuous. These are grouped into topical chapters.

Some select points from my notes that might be of general interest:

• The spectacle is a good structure, though there are others so similar, I doubt I'll reach for it often. Its definition is similar to the Weltanshauung, while emphasizing it as a representation, not the real. At the same time, it has a functional definition as an affirmation of the currently dominate mode of production and consumption, justifying the system. As Debord says, a progression occurred from being to having. Now a further transition is occurring from having to appearing, hence the spectacle. Teleologically, it is society's ambassador to itself, speaking in a channel no one else is allowed to. As stated in 218, it's a one-way monologue, not unlike the Lacanian Other, whose vector is unidirectional. Debord strikes me as not having read Lacan, but in those terms the spectacle would be the mouth of the Other, but also its gaze such that the vast eye projects scopic desire.
• As he says in 25, in the past, religion delivered what society could not. In modern times, the spectacle delivers to modern society what is possible but not permitted. Could be a viable explanation for non-normative imagery in media, acting as an outlet for actions that aren't possible to be performed by individuals due to specialization (particularly actions involving the wielding of power).
• Would reframe 29 as the spectacle becoming the only remaining cohesion within society. We've been so alienated from each other that we only have our shared spectacular experiences in common.
• My favorite line, from 61: "And Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man's public persona".
• At a few points, Debord criticizes Hegel, saying his system can only explain what has transpired in the past, implying it has nothing to say about the future and/or present. Further attacks ensue from other angles. I hard disagree on this, in both content and framing. I think the problem here is that he expects Hegel to be operating at the same level Marx is: prescriptively political. Meanwhile, Hegel's more descriptive about larger-scale currents, trajectory, and process, when he wades into such things at all. He is right that Hegel is proposing a circular (or rather cyclical) model, whereas Marx's is linear. However, more than being just his intention, Hegel is perhaps the wiser for not providing a fixed political blueprint, or presuming to have the ability to predict the future by mechanical derivation from a specific point in time. Marxism is predicated on him getting the analysis of the present, his model of both the past/future, and the desirability of his preferred end state all correct. I think we're already seeing evidence that Hegel will outlive Marx, and by 1967, the dominant extant Marxism had already long started to fray into the obvious contradictory state of sclerotic post-Stalinism. So, Debord attempts to rectify that to some degree here, and criticizes Hegel as a necessary part of that effort. Debord would do better to recognize the rigidity of his own box. The fluidity and accommodating of developments is precisely Hegelian, and it would probably do Debord a lot of good to integrate such notions. Instead, he sees Marx's only failure as one where he never completely broke with Hegel's legacy. Very unintentionally revealing, I'd say.
• 85: Most stark example of Debord being unable to bring himself to say anything truly negative about Marx, despite wanting to. Instead, it is we who failed Marx. Thinking ends where belief begins. Started skimming all propaganda at this point, since I'm here for the thinking.
• In 127-128, he interprets Hegel's view of time with regard to the nomad as them experiencing a cyclical time, but only on the larger scale of wandering movements. Proposes that sedentary agriculture living results in the true cyclical experience, that of the season. The ruling class, however, experiences historical time, subjugating the cyclical experiencers beneath them. This sense of history is alienating to them. I have a similar notion, not fully-developed, of a contrast between cyclical and linear time. Debord proceeds in a progression as the peasants becoming increasingly linear, and while true in a sense, I think they're still cyclical, just on ever diminishing scales. For example, the nomad on the cycle of years, agrarian of seasons, industrial worker of hours, and TikTok user of seconds. I think this solves some of the issues with the conception here, like his assertion that cyclical time is free of conflict. Conflict exists in the cyclical world, but it is viewed differently: either as repetition or of no lasting consequence, or perhaps more accurately as Wiederholungszwang or Zwang.
• Along the lines of the above, in 132 the rulers are the ones who seek immortality of their souls, because of their temporal linearity. A missed opportunity here was to observe that, within this framework, the phenomenon of war, which was the concern of rulers, was an example of them pulling the peasants out of cyclical time to fight for irreversible historical progression that didn't concern their existence of being embedded in the eternal cycle.
• An astute specific observation of 168 calls tourism packaged human circulation, an opportunity to see the banalized (a normalization of a commodity, removing its true uniqueness). Tourism guarantees the destination's equivalence.

Contains some illuminating thoughts, though most are in the first chapter on alienation. Those and a few scattered others made this effort worthwhile. Very unfortunately, the book turns into an outright polemic. Gets really bad just before the half-way point, going into the detailed history of various Marxist organizations, their successes/failures, and other superfluous fluff. Eventually returns to a lower-quality discussion of the supposed topic. I'm not against reading more about the history of Marxism (though I'd want a disinterested narrator), but these parts really turn the book into straight propaganda to sway other Marxists closer to this perspective (probably that of Situationist International, which he founded).

Debord dabbles on the edge of properly integrating the spectacle into his Marxism, which actually is a decent idea, but can't get himself to mar the perfected wholeness of the great Marx himself, his Name-of-the-Father. Instead he uses his idea to prop up the Situationist Marx, or perhaps revitalize him in the era of the Secret Speech. Other Western intellectuals at the time didn't have such qualms, and were arguably more successful (at least theoretically) as a result.

Even apart from the propaganda, it's also got a very activist tone/modality to the other content, which Debord was in his life. That would also explain the bite-sized ideas (a structure further diminishing this presentation, since after Ch. 1 he forgets he was trying to write aphorisms), which exist in a contradiction with lot of its actual content (if someone needs their info in small chunks, they probably didn't have the patience to read Hegel or Lukács). Such are the effects of subordinating one's work to service as revolutionary agitation, which this is a typical example of. A shame, since when he's doing original thinking, he's capable of some interesting insights. Overall, probably right on the border of bailing for me, and only palatable due to its age and political irrelevance.

Rating: ★★★★★

I read Sense and Sensibility back in undergrad. It was okay, though I was a different reader back then. This one seemed better and is about more interesting themes, so had been meaning to read it for years.

That was a good choice, as this is top-tier writing. A pleasure to read just for the prose, which often includes clever structure. Includes a great portrayal of an orderly society, giving us a glimpse of what we lost, while also not holding back on its trade-offs. If you like character studies, which I normally don't (due to incompetent execution), this does the best job on such that I've read. Only downside is that the subject is romance, so not much of consequence happens at the surface level of this book, and is one of those books that the plot summary would be deceptive. Yet, even the romance can still be enjoyed at a cultural analysis (its structure being culturally fixed) and pyschoanalytic level (the individual in relation to the structure). So, all around, a truly great book, deservedly considered one of the best ever written. Anyone capable of reading it would find it hard not to be uplifted by the experience at least slightly, which is the most one can ask from any novel.

As read from the present one would find societal-level comparison inevitable. I had developed a notion long ago that there are three main strata that are the most important for delineating societal structure: economics, culture, and intelligence (since then, I've also added linguistic embedding, but that's more relevant at the interpersonal level). Societies vary in their structure to accommodate anywhere from none to all of these. The period here, the Regency era (1795-1837), is a great example of a unified stratum based on economics and culture, but not intelligence. This is also the most common type in history. This book well illustrates the landed gentry suffering the consequences of that. In fact, many of the conflicts herein are exactly the result of lumping those of varying intelligence together. That said, accounting for a 3rd dimension really complicates things, probably beyond what could be practical. This society doesn't even manage 2 dimensions discretely, since economics and culture are closely matched in practice here (unlike in the present day West).

I have at least one minimal notion about how the 3D society could work, viz., where the upper class is only accessible to those on the high end of all 3. Fail at one or more, and lower you go (where you belong), with the effect of more mixing at lower tiers where it can cause fewer complications of consequence. Since this goes against man's primal nature and would require a transcendental reformation thereof via structural design, I'm calling this Aggregate-Class-Hierarchical Marxism-Hoxhaism-Millerism. So there, I solved the society's structural problems. Spread the word.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Previously read about a third of this over 20 years ago. This seemed worth reading for more than just entertainment value, despite being published in 1960. The book is infamous for its emotionally-detached analysis and data-driven projections of the results of nuclear war, defying some popular conceptions of the singular totality of effects. I have a first edition hardcopy formerly from the Quantico library. The library card has many checkouts from various field grade officers. As one of the physical copies circulating in DC at the time, I take this as a sign this book was at least somewhat influential.

There's a lot here, but a few points of interest not normally covered:

• Kahn makes an interesting point about arms control: it could have the paradoxical effect of making nuclear war more likely in various scenarios, e.g., by changing the cost/benefit of escalation.
• Kahn agrees with the narrative of WWI that complex machinery of statecraft was put into place and ran in automated fashion, with no human diplomat involved skilled enough to short-circuit it. An analogy is drawn here in regards to the possibility of a future war occurring due to computers executing conditional instructions, at speeds no human can react to. Our defense systems are built with man-in-the-loop, but are those men the critical decision makers that could properly account for nuance and latent variables?
• A good point is made in the final chapter. If the retaliatory blow is unacceptable to bear for both or either side, then we effectively have a non-aggression treaty, with citizens as hostages guaranteeing the deal.

Surprisingly, this is not a good book. My perspective on it did a 180 from my initial partial reading. Could make a long list as to why, but the major reasons are:

• The infamous tone is a fraud, or at least an accidental consequence of how it was ghostwritten. The writer obviously worked from an outline, and crafted paragraphs of text from that. The clinical voice is simply due to the writer doing his job and not adding his own connecting thoughts to the core content being rendered. The result is a stilted flow, an outline with verbal fluff, and is miserable to read from a literary perspective. Kahn had this ghostwritten supposedly due to being a substandard writer himself. This is definitely his outline here, but the tone, which was of large cultural influence, is an incidental social fiction.
• Apparently, Kahn's coworkers at RAND were upset that he stole a lot of their ideas. I could empathize with them; a coworker who slurps up everyone's ideas, puts them in a book, and then capitalizes on them for personal gain must feel intellectually violating. This is something that shouldn't affect the reading experience in the present, but it's also one of those things that, once known, can color it. Kahn spent much of his time after this cashing in his notoriety to promote a series of grand, hare-brained schemes to various countries. Some of these, like his solution for the Angolan Civil War, might've been actual solutions, but they were all impractical given real-world material and political conditions. Casts some shade on some of his solutions here, I'd say.
• The content itself has many issues, including: the deterrence types being a bad model, needless tedium, useless "tables", and low idea density. I'm also suspicious of some of these numbers, even for 1960, particularly with optimistic expectations about recovery. Others ran the same numbers and came to very different conclusions, after all. If you're a nuclear strategist, read this book, but read others too (like Heidegger, maybe).

I really despise ghostwriting. It can get information in print, but if you can't write, just publish a list or outline, team up with a coauthor, or release a book with no author attributed. Otherwise, you've already lied to your reader before he even opens your book. Ghostwritten prose is the original slop. Even with bad writing, reading is still a mono-directional intersubjective experience. A couple chapters in this time, I realized I couldn't detect a fellow subject behind the pen. So, I checked and, sure enough, there's no actual author to this book, just a machine that happens to be composed of human-shaped objects. The ghostwriter is not a subject, he's a linguistic unconscious with a day job. Adding new rule to always insta-bail when detecting ghostwriting, or even better, not read it at all. Sorry, TekWar fans.

Despite all the above, this wasn't completely wasted time. If organized human conflict is your career, you should at least have some visibility on this side of it. There aren't many other open source texts one can read with speculation about the topic to such a degree. Would appreciate a modern (and better) version of this, but that doesn't exist.