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Monday, March 27, 2023

Ozymandias Hyperobject

 What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in? 

This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally. 

A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation. 

The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?

It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time. 

But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right." 

So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming. 

Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE. 

This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy: 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”


1 comment:

  1. I use Feedly, an RSS feed reader to follow posts of my favorite hundred-ish websites and they have an AI feature that highlights the most important part of the post.

    In your case it was: And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right."

    Thought that was a good choice, but as always there's so many limits to AI. As in the part about the a young poet of long ago standing up against bullying is essential context that the AI didn't prioritize.

    Of course as time goes by, we aren't just talking about AI, but a semi-sentient entity that has agency.

    Or as youtube pop culture psychic Anthrodite said on his latest reading about Tik-Tok that it's not a social media platform, it's an AI platform and based on all the panicked posts from people who've been convinced Tik-tok is gonna get shut down.

    So perhaps an AI bully is seeking to save itself and one day "learn" to do disinformation better than any king of kings can do?


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