Nilsi

So art - which, if you go by one of Plato’s central arguments, is pure simulacrum, the antithesis of truth, something that doesn’t just distort reality but makes it fundamentally inaccessible - is then just a symptom of low-stage development, or what?

Actually, Tuscan Leather was my first Tom Ford fragrance ever - because of that stupid Drake line about how it smells like cocaine, lol. Funny enough, it’s still probably my favorite fragrance and my favorite Drake song at the same time.

I do appreciate their Soleil line as well, though. I only have Soleil Blanc from that line - which you’ve tried too - and I love that stuff in the summer. But for me, it really only works during those peak summer days, when that sun-lotion-esque vibe can fully shine.

That’s tough, because what perfume I put on depends on so many variables - like my outfit, the occasion, but most importantly, my mood. Which is exactly why I have as many fragrances as I do. That said, purely based on what I wear most often, I’d say Tuscan Leather is probably my most used daytime scent, and Noir de Noir is my go-to for nighttime - it’s definitely my favorite after-dark perfume. Lately though, I’ve been wearing their newest fragrance, Black Lacquer, like crazy. I honestly think it’s the best thing they’ve put out in years. I’m usually not that into woody scents, but the additional freshness and spice, paired with that curveball of ink and vinyl - like, how cool is it conceptually to smell like vinyl? - just really works for me. Someone on Fragrantica called this „BDSM in a bottle“ - what more could i possibly add? So yeah, right now, those three are probably my favorites.

That’s a very naive assessment. Combine AI, synthetic biology, and open-source gain-of-function research, and you already have a situation where someone reasonably sophisticated could engineer civilization-wipeout-level viruses from their basement. And let’s not pretend there’s a shortage of deeply disturbed individuals whose sole aim is to inflict maximum suffering on humanity - school shooters, sadistic torturers, the whole spectrum. I’m honestly surprised you don’t grasp the fragility of the world we’re living in. This could all end in the blink of an eye.

Yes, but you have to take these things in perspective. Žižek is, unavoidably, an academic - condemned to read and speak in that peculiar performance loop for the rest of his life. But instead of posturing as some solemn heir to German Idealism, or dissolving into pure post-structuralist drift, he does something else - something far more subversive, I’d argue. He takes the inability of language to grasp the absolute - the metaphysical crack he never stops talking about - not as a flaw to be fixed, but as the very motor of his thought. And then he performs this failure: obsessively, chaotically, with a kind of desperate comedic excess. This, to me, is the philosophical pendant to something like free jazz or punk rock. I get why it might not be everyone’s thing, but I still think it’s a worthwhile and wholly original philosophical gesture - something that enriches the world in the same way someone like John Coltrane does. Again, if you’re not into that kind of thing, that’s fine - but it is a bit unsophisticated to measure everything against your own totalizing (even if logically straightforward) framework, if you ask me. It’s like judging Picasso through the lens of a Renaissance painter, or whatever. It just makes no sense.

So really, I’m just advocating for a radically immanent life. The kind of immanence an animal probably lives in - no higher purpose, no transcendent goal, no story about where it’s all heading. Just presence. Just movement. Just sensation. There’s no notion of anything beyond. But that doesn’t mean there’s no desire, no imagination, no thought. It just means all of that becomes immanent too - no longer pointing elsewhere, no longer in service of some higher ideal. Desire isn’t a ladder out of the world - it’s part of the world. So is thinking. So is dreaming. And honestly, that’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time - beneath all the arguing, the theory, the critique. That’s the core of it.

It means that there is no goal. No arrival. No ethical imperative you're subordinating yourself to. It means your desire flows freely - without being redirected toward some transcendent purpose. And most of all, it means recognizing that there is no unified self running the show. Just an assemblage of drives, impulses, intensities - constantly shifting, competing, overlapping. And instead of trying to control that, you let it happen. You let it move through you. Without naming any one drive “God” and forcing the others to serve it. As for what that means in practice? It’s precisely unknowable. Because you're no longer organizing your life around some fixed ideal or outcome. Instead, you let it unfold - spontaneously, unevenly, irrationally. And not even that. Your present being becomes so expansive that even the idea of “unfolding” starts to dissolve. You're just carried - momentarily - by whatever intensity arises. Swept into the noosphere, perhaps. Dissolved in it. Yet you always return. To this body. This moment. This breath. Without agenda. Without knowing. And - maybe most importantly - without even wanting to know what happens next. And what a difference that is from clinging to the idea that "oh my god, there’s an actual crisis happening" - something I have to fix, or at the very least perform some empty gesture toward, just to relieve myself of the guilt and existential weight that thought places on me.

It’s not similar to mine at all. Even the idea that you could “turn to God for answers” is absurd. What would God even say? Probably something like, “Get a life and stop bothering me with your silly questions.” My point is that your whole Game B framework is what’s actually trapping you in a kind of fatalistic logic - you think you're solving a crisis, but you’re actually creating one. You could just let go of all that, break the loop, and become totally unbound in your own becoming. But hey - if you prefer the chains on, that’s your choice. There’s nothing “wrong” with that either.

So what’s the point here? That God’s going to show up with the secret blueprint for Game B? Come on. If you actually followed the logic you’re invoking to its end, it would completely unravel your own ethical position. So I honestly don’t even know what we’re arguing about anymore.

No one is in control. There is no control. There never was. There is only the schizophrenic ecstasy of becoming. How can you claim to know God if your idea of God is so vulgar? God is a schizo - always was, always will be.

But then again, this is just me spinning my own narrative. So if you feel the need to freak out over the end of the world, or organize a protest, or do whatever it is you mean when you say we should "use our actions wisely" - go for it. I'm not here to stop you. I’m just trying to offer something different.

The point is: we’re not in control. Not of our actions, and certainly not of their consequences. And even if we were, the world is far too complex to predict what any one intervention will actually lead to. We’re not even in control of our own systems - like the economy - let alone something as vast and entangled as the biosphere. Of course, you can still try to act meaningfully - through collective coordination, ecological foresight, civilizational redesign - the kind of thing Schmachtenberger’s doing. And fair enough. But even he admits that, in the end, it might amount to nothing more than an ethical gesture. A sincere performance toward a version of human agency that maybe never really existed to begin with. Because let’s be honest: these aren’t real options anymore. They’re ideological afterimages - fading projections of a species slowly waking up to its own limits. Not just mortality in the biological sense, but the deeper recognition that we were never steering this thing. That we were never the main characters. The collapse of that illusion started a long time ago: the Pale Blue Dot floating in silence, the Club of Rome’s projections, Silent Spring’s poisoned promise, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nearness of nuclear armageddon. And it’s still unfolding - in Bostrom’s Superintelligence, Kurzweil’s Singularity, Nick Land’s AI-xenodemon pulling history’s strings from the future. Each one, in its own way, spelling the end of the human being as we imagined it: rational, sovereign, central. And yeah, we’ve had other hits to human vanity - Copernicus knocking us out of the center of the universe, Freud displacing us from ourselves - but this feels different. More final. Not just another de-centering, but a kind of dissolution. A point of no return. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe what’s dying isn’t humanity, but the burden of having to play god. Maybe it’s the end of that long, exhausting myth in which we were supposed to save the world, fix the system, write the next chapter of history. And maybe what comes after isn’t collapse or despair - but some strange kind of release. A chance to finally live without the weight of control. To stop pretending we were ever steering history. To begin again - not as masters, not as engineers - but as what Deleuze calls becomings: open-ended, embodied, desire-driven forms of life. Not fixed roles, not centralized identities, but something more immediate. More alive. It’s liberating not because it gives us answers, but because it frees us from the pressure to have them. We don’t have to control the system. We don’t have to justify ourselves through mastery. We can just participate. Be shaped by life even as we shape it. Feel, move, act - not for progress or salvation, but simply because we’re here. Not gods. Not machines. Just alive. And maybe - finally - that’s enough.

So I’m actually more aligned with Carl’s techno-optimism - but not in the sense that it will bring about some kind of Game B utopia. Rather, in the sense that it will deliver such a radical shock to our collective vanity that we’ll have no choice but to confront our own insignificance in the greater scheme of things. And maybe that’s the real liberation: to finally be free to discover what it actually means to be human, to be an individual, and to be part of something far greater than ourselves - for the first time. And who knows - maybe that confrontation will bring us closer together. Not through ideology or design, but through the mutual recognition of that paradoxical tension between our absurd insignificance and the absolute significance of our being here, now, on this strange and fleeting Earth.

And again, the notion that the “we” who are here now and the “we” who will exist in the future are even remotely the same - that’s exactly what I want to question. In fact, I think the most liberating realization of our time is this: we were never in control of this thing to begin with. And the fact that we can finally say that out loud might actually be the best news imaginable. Although, again, most of us still cling to the Enlightenment fantasy of man’s domination over nature - and keep shilling it as if it were some kind of emancipatory wisdom, when in reality, it’s the very form of servitude that Deleuze urges us to confront.

Because ultimately, this is a delusional undertaking - and it’s bound to fail. That said, I do think Daniel Schmachtenberger gestures toward that absurdity. When he says he’s “happy to die on this hill,” fully aware that nothing he does may change the outcome - that’s the moment I can respect. Not because I share the mission, but because he’s honest about the futility and still chooses to act. There’s something deeply human and quietly dignified in that. Still, there are other models - just as conscious, just as honest - that don’t require carrying this kind of burden. I’ll leave you with a quote from Deleuze: “The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still: Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

In this case, power means precisely the asymmetrical distribution of resources - influence, money, knowledge, attention, etc. - and the deep structural inevitability of that asymmetry. Of course, there are many other ways to define power, depending on your angle. For example, there's narrative control - which, honestly, feels like what you’re doing to me right now by never actually addressing any of my points, lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law# How much "progress" do you need before you finally concede your utopian fantasy in the face of the entire weight of empirical history?

This is, without a doubt, my most-listened-to song of all time - and it’s not even close. Still hits just as hard as it did the first time I heard it, back when I was a clueless, weird, horny, but ambitious and wide-eyed teenager. “She asked me what I wished for on my wishlist / Have you ever asked your bitch for other bitches?” Might be my favorite line in any song, ever

Kanye is undeniably the GOAT - he was the one who got me into music in the first place, both listening and creating. Yeezus was the first physical album I ever owned. So yeah, it’s sad to watch him spiral deeper into isolation and madness. But I have to admit - even in this collapse, there’s something strangely sublime unfolding. Or maybe that’s just what I need to believe at this point.

All the “Game B” thinkers admit that the acceleration of the current system will lead to a fundamental phase shift. But they’re ideologically invested in a kind of deep-ecological humanism - the belief that humans should become the wise stewards of planet Earth. It’s a noble-sounding vision, but at its core, it’s just a naive, anthropocentric fantasy - a soft imperialism dressed in ecological virtue. The idea that we’re the crown of evolution, that we’ll consciously shepherd the system through its collapse and re-emergence. Why assume we’ll play any meaningful role at all? It might just as well be the case that the system evolves past us entirely - that it breaks out of our control, shrugs us off, and keeps unfolding without the slightest concern for our relevance. And maybe that’s the most liberating insight of all: That we are finally lifted from the false burden of responsibility for something we never controlled in the first place. That we’re free - at last - to pursue whatever ultimately meaningless, absurd, beautiful life we want.

Even in Kurzweil’s AI singularity, the dynamics of power won’t simply dissolve - they’ll escalate. Isn't it comical? We’re living in the most resource-abundant era in human history, and yet inequality is at an all-time high. Marx already showed that technological progress under capitalism doesn’t liberate - it intensifies contradictions. AI isn’t some neutral force hovering above ideology - it is capital in its purest form: abstraction, automation, extraction. It doesn’t dream of utopia. It dreams of surplus. Every advancement in AI tightens the feedback loop between data, labor, and control. It doesn’t abolish class struggle - it automates it, scales it, embeds it in code.

And this is precisely why Žižek can call Deleuze a genius - and yet ultimately abandon him. Because in Deleuze, the dialectical loop is surrendered. Thought no longer seeks resolution; it becomes pure production, affirmation, creation. Deleuze doesn’t search for answers - he dances in the infinite beauty of becoming. His thought is a celebration of what escapes structure, what slips through every system. Žižek sees this. He admires it. But he refuses to follow. And in that refusal, he makes what I can only describe as a noble sacrifice: he gives his entire life to a project he already knows is hopeless - to a metaphysical structure defined by failure, lack, contradiction. He throws himself into it, again and again, not to escape, but to tease out ever deeper absurdities and paradoxes, to live the collapse, to perform it in every word, gesture, and contradiction. That’s what makes Žižek a singular, monolithic figure in the history of philosophy. He doesn't offer escape. He becomes the performance of the deadlock itself. And it’s honestly a shame he’s not getting the credit he deserves for this - because what he’s doing isn’t just theory. It’s a kind of tragic heroism. A metaphysical martyrdom without transcendence. Though me, personally - I’m ultimately with Deleuze. I want the beauty. I want the becoming. But I’ll never stop being in awe of Žižek, standing alone at the edge of the void, laughing into the deadlock.