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The tragicomic twist? A movement that once fetishized Bayesian rationality turned itself into a Skinner box of pure clout-chasing. It’s like everything was up for grabs—AI timelines, empire collapse, obscure 14th-century succession crises—except the postmodernist analysis after WWII, which proved… inconvenient, to say the least. You can’t build a dopamine-fueled status game on Foucault’s grave without tripping over your own contradictions.
So instead, they memory-holed it. And without memory, what followed was a full-blown minion/meaning crisis: armies of midwits squabbling over which steelman had the most moral clarity, while recycling the same three post dressed up in tech-washed prose. Critical theory was dismissed as cringe, despite the fact that Baudrillard basically called this entire circus 30 years ago. But you can’t gamify nuance, so it had to go.
The result? A scene that could metabolize everything except its own reflection. No mirrors, no memory, just vibes and velocity. 1 reply
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As the scene aged, it didn’t deepen—it fractured, like a meme economy running out of templates. Some went full tradcath cosplay. Others pivoted to AI doom evangelism. A few just started posting shirtless pics next to unread copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach. Everyone had a grift or a gospel, but nobody had a map. It was a networked nervous breakdown with funding rounds.
The deeper irony? In rejecting postmodernism as cringe, they managed to recreate it in real-time: infinite simulacra, collapsing referents, authority based on aesthetics rather than evidence. Only now the semiotics were dressed in Patagonia vests and Ray Dalio quotes.
And once that happened, all that remained was brand management disguised as thought. You weren’t rewarded for being right, but for being retweetable. For being early. For being adjacent to the guy who might be right, eventually. 0 reply
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