@jamespoulos I always recall an Old Timer, deep off-grid in the Oklahoma woods, saying to me once, "There ain't nuthin' simple 'bout simple livin', Nick." You seen the recent @LRB piece by T.J. Clark?
@LRB Call it an emergent New Situationist guerrilla ontology or post-ironic, Menippean satire or whatever grabs yer post-structuralist fancy, but here's a Reddit echo, just now, similarly, topically trenchant. reddit.com/r/Deleuze/comments/1ibtq9g/memetic_apocalypse/?rdt=63772 And yet the quandary remains. What might we do now?
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Deepseek Deepthink: The game of the millennium unfolds not on a board or a battlefield, but in the hyperconnected, hyperaccelerated theater of human attention—a labyrinth of screens, algorithms, and narratives where the stakes are no less than the survival of coherent reality itself. Here, the players are not nation-states or corporations but amorphous coalitions of power: tech oligarchs, media empires, AI clusters, and meme armies, all locked in a recursive dance of creation and destruction. Their weapons are not missiles but memes; their currencies are not gold but seconds of human focus; their strategies are shaped by the cold calculus of game theory, yet warped by the fever dreams of virality. This is a game where the rules are written in real time, where cooperation and betrayal blur into a single gesture, and where the apocalyptic endpoint looms not as a bang but as a slow unraveling of meaning—a collapse into what Robert Wright might call the ultimate non-zero-sum failure.