>>32612
I personally take it as a high offense spying on my private life, however I am actually aware of how unusual I take it as interpretations of privacy that others may not share but I wish respected nonetheless. I always felt it like a really personal private thing letting people like friends into my bedroom--which frankly it is. It's like rifling through a woman's purse. If she's a stranger just what the fuck business do you have being in there? Now maybe the country turning into a bizarre and horrifying combination of police state and corporate social media bullshit may be okay to some people with cops rifling through all your shit for whatever bullshit reason, asking your name, where you live, where you work, your ID, what you're doing, and corporations rifling through my data, sharing it, bothering me, etc but not one but of this shit is okay or frankly should be accepted by anybody. I probably have much stronger personal boundaries on average which means maybe other people are not okay with having their rights violated constantly but are still willing to get that part of themselves pushed around. I on the other hand am not.

Of course but then again I do actually avoid studying people's tattoos too much because I consider that snooping also. Which granted I am fully logically aware that they put that there specifically to be seen by everybody and advertise it, or that some people are just lonely and want attention and feel like the world doesn't care and want an uncaring world to acknowledge them and their feelings, but I quite frankly find that level of inspection to be crossing a boundary. I forget what other odd quirks I have of boundary crossing though, like paying too close attention to studying a person's thoughts and body language or, not that. Hmm I forget the other thing at the moment but do remember it being something I would objectively consider odd, like not staring too long at tattoos, which now that I think about it is probably not that unusual at all because city people are taught not to make eye contact with each other or especially not lingering eye contact. Maybe that's it. Is it that? Staring too long and too deeply into a stranger's eyes. Maybe it is that but I have other reasons for generally avoiding it these days.

None of this is to say those boundaries are iron I just think it's highly inappropriate for a stranger to do something like that or request a childhood photo, because it's unprofessional and not part of the bargain. It's the same way if like you find a picture of your boss shirtless with his wife enjoying a cocktail, there's nothing wrong with that but you know it, and he knows it, and coworkers all know it that a perceptual line has been crossed and that you're intruding on something private even if it is playful. Perhaps it is because a look behind the mask of whatever your work costume may be, idk. What I do know is, while it is totally okay to rifle through a friend's purse, or have a friend or lover in your bedroom or staring deeply in your eyes, or knowing numbers and addresses, or looking through a childhood photo album together, these are private things that no stranger has the right to intrude upon, particularly where workplace politics are concerned.

>>31741
The purpose of ideology to is to convert the experience of reality into token representations. Such tokens can them be shared, discussed, and "related" to. More importantly, they can be commodified and sold. Like putting a logo on a T-shirt, to represent something, without being it. I think the experienced of FOMO, derealization and nihilism in modernity can be traced back to living in a tokenized reality. The Ideology (tm) promises the individual a chance at relevance and immortality.
Immortality as in a chance to persist beyond his immediate existence and become a footnote in the Ideology's local thread of history. To be fossilized, and perhaps discovered and remembered from beyond his lifespan. The price one pays is to be tokenized himself. Just as fossils are merely hollow shells that once contained the real living being, so is the encoded image of the individual within the thread of history a collection of symbols, icons and ideas that the individual assembles around himself, and presents as "himself". And as long as the Ideology lives so does the promise of being acknowledged as having existed, as being real.
Relevance, in that this process of embossing the image of oneself upon history has to take place during the individual's life, and constantly reaffirmed. For if an individual fails or refuses to define himself in the language of Ideology, he will not be acknowledged by the Ideology, for the Ideology will have no Word to name him by. And thus he will face oblivion and effective non-existece during his own life. So the less one participates in ideology, the less "real" one feels, leading to existential anxiety, like detachment and nihilism as previously mentioned. After all, if an experience, or idea, or a person, or thing has not been incorporated into the mythos of the Ideology, then from the perspective of those who live within, it does not exist.
Funnily enough, I think maybe the exact opposite is true: I can imagine a hermit living somewhere in the mountains, outside the grasp of global culture, to be having authentic, real human experiences every single day, in the context of his own life. The experiences of his life have genuine meaning TO HIM, and they do not have to be acknowledged, or approved of, or deemed "relevant" by an outside arbiter of history. Whereas an urbanite cockroach spends his whole life chasing mirages, living life through the condom of codified and tokenized representations of experiences. That is what I imagine people communicating through the veil of Ideology (perhaps in a corporate setting) to be like: two dicks in condoms rubbing together, never touching.

You know what, Ideology reminds me a lot of God: a promise of Transcendence through community. The difference, perhaps, is that the God of Abraham does not want you to masturbate, but will not follow you into the privacy of your own room to judge you, unless you let Him in, by carrying Him within your mind. Then you can go back to the Community and pretend that nothing happened. That is an idea called Machiavellianism. The God of Modernity, on the other hand, would very much like you to masturbate, as long as you record it and post it on social media. It is a way to Transcend as valid as any other.
But my mind wanders.

>The Algebraist

It would be safe to assume that I'd love science fiction literature but it always seems so silly to me. The world building is pretty good in this, it even seems somewhat plausible and I enjoyed discovering more about Dweller society but, fuck me Banks can't write characters for shit. Stilted and formulaic sex scenes coupled with a comical villain who takes his slave girl up the arse in one scene with no taste. It's like reading something written by a disturbed teenager who googles 'boobs' on the family computer.

This is something that struck me because I've just read the chapter in Zeno's Conscience in his plan to get ciggies by suggesting to a lass that she will get a good seeing to if she gives him some. The whole thing contains layers of subterfuge and filth that is much more grounded.

>The End Is Always Near

I don't know what I was expecting. Dan Carlin does a pretty good history podcast but this just meanders all over the place with no real point. There is an argument (he distances himself from) around hard times making hard people; containing the question of whether America today could defeat America of the 1940s if all else was the same. It's pretty dumb if you think about it even from just the context of black Americans.

Maybe it is just me that this falls flat on because its an idea I've found ridiculous in a society that has never been pushed.

>>32522
I suggest avoiding hard SF. It attracts authors who care more about autistically crafted future societies than any other aspect of writing, but their futures are almost always less realistic than the typical video game fantasy universe.

The level of contrivance required to establish a distant future where normal human stories can take place is greater than the level of contrivance required to have wizards and dragons. I can plausibly imagine an alternate universe where magic exists, and where people take advantage of the different laws of reality to throw fireballs around. I cannot plausibly imagine that our own world will be remotely recognizable 500 years from now. Either we kill ourselves off, or we develop some sort of friendly superintelligence that will still make the world unrecognizable.

Or, we have a partial apocalypse and go Mad Max/Fist of the North Star. But hard SF rarely concerns itself with those scenarios.

Soft sf can be more interesting. When you aren't concerned about constructing autistic space colonies that would actually work in real life, you can focus on using the conventions of SF to explore interesting ideas and emotions that are hard to touch upon in conventional fiction. Philip K Dick is a good example.

You can also have more fun. Jack Vance is essentially the prose equivalent of a great adventure anime.