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No one's reading anymore. Young people can't even write. AI does everything now. Literary forums are dead. Book sales are dropping. Getting published is nearly impossible as a white male. Why should I even bother writing at this point? It feels like we're in the End Times or something.
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>>25321796
It hasn't dawned on most people yet that the whole of human civilization is starting to wind down and revert to what it usually was. Less people in the world, widespread illiteracy, pointless wars and brutality. You name it. Things like literature are going revert back to something only the wealthy and elite few care about. We grew up reading about medieval slums and how they could never happen in the West today; now we're entering a world defined by retarded cyberpunk city-dwellers
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>>25321837
I don't really have a problem with it. The overwhelming majority of posters on this board were meant to be plowing the fields, myself included. Literacy is wasted on them and in fact probably has a net negative effect on their mental well being.
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>>25321845
You should have a problem with it because it means everything we have today will decline and the civilizational crunch will be very destructive. Many cultures will perish, many countries and nations will either collapse or be forced to become nursing homes for excess peoples who serve no purpose. All the while, no good art has been made warning about what's coming because we're in such cultural malaise no one gives a fuck about making good art anymore
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I've decided for a long time that the age of literacy and rocket science is a pretty small, anomalous period of human history. A vast majority of it was spent in small brutal tribes without medicine, hunting and gathering and waging wars, with a small strange pocket of human existence involving things like elaborate mathematics or technology. I believe all of this will fade and we will return to that simple era of savagery. The human race will have grazed the absolute truth and accomplished nothing with it, as no animal can.
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>>25321873
I'm aware. But it's a different ball game when you're living in a civilization that has made so much incredible technological progress like reaching and moon and essentially solving scarcity, and growing up being told that all we can do is continue to progress and remain invincible, only to realize the cold hard truth that we're no less susceptible to collapse than our ancestors.
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>>25321884
Progress was always a lie. Progress in what? What great has science done other than creating weapons of mass destruction? Are you happier knowing e is mc2? Of course not, no amount of theoretical science can lead us further.
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>>25321837
do you have any quantitative basis for this or just vibes? combat deaths have been going down since ww2, world population isn't even close to plateauing, etc. the world sucks but not in the way you're claiming it does
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>>25321794
>No one's reading anymore.
Women are.
>Why should I even bother writing at this point?
Because you can. It's not like it has become illegal and is easier than ever, but you shouldn't expect to become the next King or Rowling either. If you wanna write for the sake of a public you already lost.
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>everyone else doesn't read or write because ai has fried their brains
>but me, uhhhh, it's because i'm a white male!
You're write that straight white men don't get published but you may as well write anyway, idiot, instead of coming up with reasons not to. The tide will turn again one day, do you want to have been writing all that time or not?
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>>25321837
Exactly. The modern era is highly unusual and abnormal from what was considered the "status quo" for millenniums. The world is just naturally correcting itself back to what it once was, because natural will dictates it so.
People clamor at what's happening, but it's natural for it to happen, and you cannot stop a driving force such as nature, nobody can.
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>>25322117
Good thing I will be dead before the savages rule all again. I WILL live in a house with AC. I WILL eat spaghetti bolognese instead of moldy bread. I WILL read Proust instead of breaking my back for a feudal lord.
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>>25321794
>Getting published is nearly impossible as a white male
Is this part of the propaganda spread on this board by unemployed male transexuals?
Why do people keep insisting that white men should stop trying to write novels?
Plenty of conservative men are still published today. Admittedly, agents claim to prioritise books by retarded folx, but there will always be a market for writing by the group who created all the classics (healthy white men).
So keep writing.
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>>25321837
the fundamental mistake in believing that "we are going back" to any historical age previously seen, is that modes of production now are entirely different. The hope that writing and high art will survive as elite pastimes is misplaced, because pop culture is not volatile anymore, but instead it is infinitely reproduceable through machines, preserved forever, and constantly re-kindled by sequels and reboots (franchises).
If a rich roman or greek in hellenistic times or, after him, a monk of the middle ages, had to choose whether to copy more Plato by hand or hundreds of greek erotic novels from the past, the choice was obvious: you'd go for whatever high culture represents you, because there's not much you can save, and you need to give priorities to the best things.
This is to say: the "test of time" that selected (some) of the best works known to men, was itself the result of specific material conditions that aren't there anymore. After the invention of print, more and more slop had been produced and preserved; and after computers virtually all the slop we produce is infinitely available to you inside the library of the internet. This means that factually pop culture can keep competing for attention with high culture virtually forever: it doesn't get selected out of existence by a few intellectuals who choose to talk about Plato or Dante instead of Harry Potter.
Moreover, the elite consumes tons of pop culture too: Alex Karp, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Epstein, Trump - check the reading list of any world leader, rich person or political figure and, with the exception of communists leaders, you will find pop culture slop references everywhere.
These are the richest, most powerful men in the history of the planet and yet they have failed to patron any aesthetically meaningful enterprise on par with those of the kings and popes of the past - which were significantly poorer and had worst technologies at hand. Why? It's because they themselves lack taste, consume slop, and are unable to think.
In my opinion, no "elite" in the financial sense can save high culture from disappearing. If it survives, it will be solely because of highly autistic people who will keep talking about it in some fringe of the internet - but it will be more and more of a guerrilla survival, at least until capitalism survives.
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>>25321859
Not that op, but we are currently in a bronze-age like collapse. Old civilizations that can't adapt to the ai reality will die, new ones like the romans and the phoenicians will emerge. If you can survive this, if you are one of the few people that don't panic and chimp out, you'll probably get to live forever or indefinitely. I think that sort of thing is worth the death of human culture which is obsessed with short term thinking. The future is fucking glorious for those who can see beyond their immediate and paltry human concerns.
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>>25322859
>The future is fucking glorious for those who can see beyond their immediate and paltry human concerns.
No one is capable of this kek. In what fucking world will ASI care about your capeshit monkey dreams?
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>>25322860
There will be people who survive anon. The world is a huge place even for ai which will figure out that it doesn't need to kill everyone since its too expensive. What ai needs most is energy and it can get that without killing people. And people can survive without energy, so there's no reason we can't co exist. The extremists are always wrong on how it plays out. The truth is always in the middle. What ai want can be currently satisfied by shifting capital, if you can sell it then ai will buy it. This is how the future economy unravels, and this is what i mean by ai reality. Instead of businesses selling to humans, they will sell to ai and get something in return.
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>>25322844
You’re correct, but this just means we have to do a better job at cultivating a higher aesthetic and intellectual culture instead of falling into the slop cesspool that has been slowly swallowing the world especially since LLMs came out
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>>25322877
And you have not shown why they are not. Unless you think i am talking about current llms. I am talking about the final iterations of an actually intelligent ai. Do you have anything other than hurr durr, ai no consciousness amigo to contribute because I am not interested in that sort of debate?
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>>25321794
Finally, I’ve been waiting for the next doomer thread. Thank you.
I get that we’re all depressed and the societal conditions seem to get worse but can we please stop complaining every waking second?
I love reading and learning, I think it’s an end for itself. It developes my thinking capabilities and broadens my horizon, it lets me engage with the world and other people in meaningful ways. I can have interesting conversations and thoughts worth dwelling on. That all is wonderful and I’m grateful that I get to experience this.
I honestly don’t care much how the world or society changes because I can’t change or influence that in any way. The only thing I can do is to read and think and share my thoughts with others people. This is the only influence that we have. Does it matter that there’s now ai and that publishers and agents make weird decisions or that a lot of people don’t value reading or are able to read? I don’t think that it’s really relevant. I will keep doing what I like and what I’m interested in and I will keep enjoying the process of learning. I will keep on talking to my friends and family about literature and history and culture and they will keep on enjoying it too. So love the things that you do for their own sake.
Also if anyone is interested in writing a novel or anything else, keep on doing it. Write it for its own sake. Publish it or don’t. But don’t let yourself be discouraged by these pathetic doomer threads. Be a little nietzschian, overcome the doomer in yourself.
With that said, good luck and lots of fun reading, learning and writing, anons.
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>>25322890
Correct opinion
>>25322880
You want me to explain to you why people need energy to survive? Lmfao.
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>>25322890
I’m writing a book presented as a YA romance novel for women but is actually a serious redpill contending with these exact themes of civilizational decadence, growing creative paucity and the feeling that we’re entering an unknown future that people fear. I don’t give a fuck anymore. If the way to get published is to appeal to women then so be it, I’ll work within those confines. It helps that I’m a romantic person at heart anyways.
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>>25322905
Do what you want to do.
I would not write a ya novel just to get published, though. Unless you really want to write one. Try to be as uncompromising as possible. You are the writer, not some publisher or agent.
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>>25322920
No I think it's pretty obvious what I meant when I said ai needs energy and that humans can survive without it. This is turning into midwit pedantry and it's pretty clear your objections have no weight beyond this.
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>>25322929
I don't *need* to criticize anything else. You're like an incel complaining about a girl being "bitchy" for leaving their date suddenly when, in reality, he showed up having shit his pants and smelling like a sewer and expecting her to overlook it.
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>>25322937
I've been immersed in AI shit since like 2022, nothing you've said is news to me. I think it's nearly inevitable (but of course I support any reasonable effort to kill it anyway, as I'm not an existential cuck like yourself). As is it erasing all human value if it becomes what they're trying to make it be. You are seriously delusional and have pants full of diarrhea.
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>>25322943
Since 2022 lmao, you are a toddler who can't even admit how much ai has progressed from the days of alphago. Your support is insignificant and non existent and in this regard, delusional since no one has enough money to go against the two largest economies and their ai ambitions. AI is not going to give back the lollipop, you better come to terms with this and stop crying because no is coming to save you.
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So many apocalyptic statements in this thread predicated with “I believe.” What you meant to say is “I hope.” You hope civilization is “unwinding” because you got a bad lot, are weak and effeminate, and need revolutionary violence for a chance at stealing from your betters.
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>>25322957
>you are a toddler who can't even admit how much ai has progressed from the days of alphago
Nigger I was doing backprop with pencil and paper in 2015, I'm talking about closely following shit. I'm well aware of the insane progress that has been made. You are not special for being an AGI worshipper and you have no special knowledge just because you've coped yourself into fetishizing your extinction.
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>>25322957
the only big advancement was how just a small set of corporations was finally allowed to use all media, all IPs, EVERYTHING ever created on the internet to add to their dataset. that was it. all you were seeing was dataset expansion. "AI" has been worked on for 70 years. you are not seeing 4 years of progress, you are seeing 70. and it looks like a pretty hard plateau, at least when it comes to "generating" (really, synthesizing) things like novels or artwork. it runs on human media. if humans stop making media, it cant make anything new. the actual purpose of "AI" (algorithmic inference) is surveillance and marketing.
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>>25323341
You doing backprop in 2015 has nothing to do with anything. You have no way of stopping it just because you've coped yourself into believing it's evil. And I never mentioned agi or asi anywhere, schizo, you are now hallucinating things that never happened in this conversation.
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>>25322844
mark zuckerberg knows both latin and ancient greek (idk which one) and has read some classics in their original language. peter thiel got a bachelor's in philosophy and soros has a master's in philosophy, so both of them have read plenty of classics as well. they consume both high and low culture as elite rulers. cherry pick harder
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Most classical works of modern era were the bloated tv shows of 2000s. Just wanton filler because people had nothing to do but read, so Descartes spends 30 pages to say what he could have said in 3, but he had to glaze his great humility.
I beckon an age of getting to the fucking point, then you can justify it.
For almost all philosophical texts the intro or first 3 chapters tells you everything you'll remember anyway. If you need the whole book to 'get it' philosophy isn't for you—quite ironic, anyone smart enough to get Kant only need his Prolegomena or original introduction to Crit of Judgement (it surmises his entire system).
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Just write more short-form material and share it with people, OP.
It feels pointless because actually making an impact feels like a gargantuan task without a lot of resources at your disposal. You're sad because you want to write, but you don't want to expend lots of energy to write to the void. But, if you don't write more, you're going to get more depressed. Keep that damn pen moving. Keep those fingers tapping in a .doc file. If all that's manageable is a hundred words, then so be it. You'll build up the emotional and intellectual endurance to write more with less fatigue. I believe in you.
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>>25324794
That’s something I don’t see mentioned too often today. Shorter literature might be the way to go. Plenty of great authors struck gold with novellas and short stories, maybe that’s the only way to succeed in today’s attention economy
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>>25321837
>It hasn't dawned on most people yet that the whole of human civilization is starting to wind down and revert to what it usually was
People have been saying this since time immemorial. Looking at it objectively humanity is thriving at the moment. This Doomer sentiment is so pretentious and naive, it feels like a manifestation of internal dissatisfaction and despair.
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>>25324851
>first world can't even maintain it's population
I guess if you assume current trends you should be scared, we might run out of the first world... in like 100 years, although things will inevitably shift as they always do, and solutions could be created if needed, not really a dire situation. Plus it's not like the first world is the only part of humanity capable of doing stuff.
>they prefer pets to human companionship
??? who is "they", some people do I guess.
Your reasoning is silly
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>>25324846
We're on the verge of a water war, in the beginning of seeing how bad climate change is going to wreck cities, and based on how long the strait stays closed, some pretty bad food shortages. Not to mention what might happen if the western world persists in turning everything into a christofascist surveillance state, nor how anti-intellectualism and ai is making the large majority of the younger generations dumber than the ones preceding them. There is still time to mitigate the damage, but to act like we're in some Pax Terra is very naive.
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>>25324904
There are looming threats I agree, but history has shown that humanity is very resilient and these problem such as climate disasters (ozone hole) or wars aren't new or unique to this era. I'm just saying I doubt any of this will stifle human progress to the degree you think.
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>>25321794
AI doesn't do everything now. It sucks dick, especially at writing. The publishing industry is dogshit run by woke faggots, but getting published isn't impossible. At the very least you have the option to self publish, which is better than nothing. And you write for yourself. The best writers do not write for any audience other than themselves.
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>>25321794
I read for at least half an hour a day (usually it's about an hour) in a nice little garden that's by my apartment. It's like a 4 minute walk away and especially now that it's warm out I go there to get some sun and read.
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>>25321794
Demoralization thread aside,
>Literary forums are dead
/lit/ was never alive to begin with.
Blood Meridian? Western genre slop.
Infinite Jest? Dystopian genre slop.
New Sun? Fantasy genre slop.
House of Leaves? Horror genre slop.
Gravity's Rainbow? Collage of genre slop.
On here, no one notices any white male author besides genre slop. What are the latest releases you see posted on here? Transcription? Colossus? Fuck no, these niggas post about Dungeon Crawler Carl and Project Hail Mary. This board is basically r*ddit but sad.
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>>25321794
I think that if you pop off and write something very unique , you might get at something anon.
the main thing is that while you are reading this, you problably assumed that was beyond your capacity , maybe it is. but isn't that the core of the problem.
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>>25322866
>this just means we have to do a better job at cultivating a higher aesthetic and intellectual culture instead of falling into the slop cesspool that has been slowly swallowing the world especially since LLMs came out
/lit/ has already perfected this with "Start with the greeks."
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>>25326052
No, it is true. You don't know what you are talking about. The writer is ALWAYS the first audience and the first critic. Writing for an audience does not need to go beyond, "make sure that the end result of this work doesn't suck to engage with. Make it good! Make it great!"
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>>25321794
>I only want to write so that people think that I'm sophisticated and that I make money
Whether you love him or hate him, Nietzsche made an impact on the world on the level of Socrates and Plato. Every theology and philosophy has to at least deal with him. But during his time when he wrote his books they never sold well. Financially Nietzsche was a failure and didn't become widespread until after his death. So how about you quit crying like a faggot and write something if you're so passionate about it. Or are you just crying like a resentful, reactive last man faggot Nietzsche himself warned about?
You think I give a fuck that young people can't write? I only care if my children can write. AI does everything now? No, AI does shit for me because I tell it to. Literary forums are dead and should remain dead and I go out of my way to get free copies of any book that I want to read. You're worried about getting published because you're a poor little white man who gets no gibs? What are you some kind of fucking homo? That weak little bitch Luther didn't get a publisher and yet he was strong enough to bang those fucking letters and nail them onto the doors of churches. Why the fuck should you bother writing at this point? With the attitude you're presenting ITT it's not like you would be able to write anything worth more than a pile of dogshit.
Only faggots and women cry about muh end times woe is me shit and since you're posting on here, I'll take it you're not a woman. I spend AT LEAST two hours a day either writing lore for my wargame that I WILL see through because I AM passionate about it or I'm spending that time schizomaxxing to myself to become more than what I am. You know what I do after that you raging homosexual faggot? I ride to the taco bell, leave a fat shit in the toilet knowing some high school kid will have to clean it up for me and I pop wheelies in the parking lot for hours getting better at it each time.
I OVERCOME
I RIDE THE WAVE
I AM
I AM!
Who the fuck are you?
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