23rd
SCI FI
Everyone is free to play the game of utopian poetics with different rules and different results:
Working with tech jogs extropian thought experiments, like living in LA—with long summers, huge hills, open desert moments away— aroused luddite primitavist fantasies.
When something like Baricco’s City tugs my dick in both directions, I get the feeling that the two impulses are actually one and the same; that the particle is also a wave:
In the fictional city of Closingtown, my desire for wilderness is gratified at a level undreamt of in the most frontier SCI FI.
My favorite SCI FI is green, low energy, high information. I don’t believe in the pro/anti bolo’bolo techne of SF. But I do fantasize about the possibility of a more immediate and satisfactory culture through the scaling of economy and technology. It tickles my C-centers. (The genre is not important here. It works in both directions.)
Leone-style Rousseau- Westerns and good SF are equally dreams of autonomy:
A night, a week, a month of that autonomy would be worth more to me than a lifetime of nostalgia for the past or future.
