i was completely right and i wish i could find that essay again. it's somewhere out there, Online

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955689)

Stage one and two: Associated with the premodern period, it’s representation is an artificial placemarker for the real item. The uniqueness of objects and situations marks them as real and signification gropes towards this reality.

Stage three: Associated with the modernity of the Industrial Revolution where distinctions between representation and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-reproducible copies of items, turning them into commodities. The commodity's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the authority of the original version, because the copy is just as "real" as its prototype.

Stage four: Associated with the postmodernity of late capitalism where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation vanishes. There is only the simulation, and originality becomes a totally meaningless concept.

(Proposed stage five: The simulation reorders underlying reality to act in accordance with it)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955728)

On Exactitude in Science

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955963)

This probably sounds super Boomer, but you may know what I mean.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955798)

i can think of a bunch of reasons off the top of my head though. but they can all be more or less boiled down to artificial online realities out-competing real-reality (the 'why's' are pretty important though)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955741)

My thesis is therefore deeper and more structural than your weak, non-load-bearing one.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955742)

among other things, The Matrix(es) becoming preferable to irl for humans has been a self-fulfilling prophecy in no small part due to the matrix warping the real world. it's a feedback loop that has been and is continuing to intensify

you can't improve irl in order to try to out-compete the matrix fair and square. irl will just be adjusted accordingly by the matrix in response. the feedback loop has to be destroyed, which means that the matrix itself has to be destroyed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955755)

I look forward to your 2028 magnum opus "Seeing Like A Computer"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955783)

just another abyss that people love to pontificate and joke about but won't actually look into

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955895)

Tankh,

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5876487&forum_id=2most#49955841)