
The Communal Mind - longdefeat
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n04/patricia-lockwood/the-communal-mind
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demygale
Patricia Lockwood is a national treasure. Check out Rape Joke as one powerful
example. But it’s strange to see her on hn

Headline really needs punctuation.

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MaysonL
Indeed. Just read this, Rape Joke, Lost in Trumplandia, and just reserved at
the library her memoir Priestdaddy (her father is a married Catholic priest),
and her poetry collecion Motherland, fatherland, homelandsexuals. Powerful.

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d136o
I've not really been a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, but this was an amazing
reading. It straddled the line between what we see online today and that
outlandish but seemingly very possible malfunctioning future.

Specially timely in light of the open.ai work shown yesterday on advanced
language models [1]

[1] [https://blog.openai.com/better-language-
models/#content](https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#content)

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pjc50
I wouldn't categorise this is SF; I would call it "beat" or "gonzo". Possibly
Joycean, except it's not fictional enough. It's not speculative, it's
observational; it really is a record of the lived experience of being
Extremely Online. A travelogue of a place that's in your phone.

(I can identity most of the memes referenced, which probably means I spend too
much time on Twitter myself)

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pjc50
That's quite a piece of writing. Unusual to see the Twitter style fused
perfectly into the LRB high literary style. Very post-Gibsonian.

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AnthonBerg
Thanks for capturing it well. Do you write anywhere yourself? Prose or meta or
science or whatever. Thanks. (Asking in sincerity :))

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pjc50
I write here, in this comment box.

That's a joke, but also entirely serious - I've not had a blog for years, but
I have 40k karma here and probably 10-100 times as many words; and one day I'm
going to extract the best stuff and make a Thing of it.

I absolutely do not have the discipline to produce thousand-word essays for
the LRB.

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gipp
It takes a special sort of brilliance to really capture a particular kind of
_interiority_ in prose. To really get at what it is like to be a particular
sort of person. This accomplishes that feat for the modern internet addict and
hivemind member to a degree I wouldn't have expected possible.

Great piece (heh).

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unforeseen9991
I felt like I was reading the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, and realized
that that reality is the current reality. Reading this was a journey.

