Frobisher Smith

While this book is ostensibly about conspiracies, ancient orders, secret societies, codes, riddles, catacombs and satanic rites it is also about less esoteric themes - obsession, meaning, reality vs. fantasy. Possibly it is an analogy to the dangers of historical revision. It attacks both modernism and tradition, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. It derides false authenticity, and yet hints at a diffusionism in which nothing can be authentic. Eco combines scholarly treatises, human interest stories, absurd character studies and serious introspection in a story that encompasses all of written history. Taught, measured, delivered expertly in careful doses, the narrative is addictive - I read this book in three days. The only thing I can compare it to is the [b:Illuminatus Trilogy 57913 The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan Robert Joseph Shea http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170482063s/57913.jpg 813], but none of its humor is self-aware or full of winking fan-service; or perhaps the film “Pi,” but of course, Eco is much more skilled than poor Aronofsky, and the journey of descent into obsessive desire for grand secret knowledge (and thus madness) is gradually illuminated rather than drilled into our heads... In short, this book is fantastic. You should read it you uncultured fascist pig!

Mark Fisher deftly outlines the contours of our world as it appears today in Late Capitalism, and how Capital rules even our very imaginations through its logic of desire and production. He shows how everything in our world, even public services and universities, must act as though it is a business providing a product, that we are rational actors, that science and statistics can guide us to the truth, etc. His blistering critique points out that it can't be actual reality that capitalist realism is dealing with, as we are all anxious, miserable, confused, and alienated; and this shows no sign of being resolved through Capitalism, as it is in fact the result of Capitalism and of Neoliberalism's reign legitimized via Capitalist Realism.

He makes a good case, however, that Neoliberalism, while it employs capitalist realism to enforce its ideological supremacy, is not identical to capitalist realism, which does not, by necessity, have to carry a neoliberal flavor to it. Neoliberalism, Fisher argues, stands defrocked and delegitimized by its handling of the 2008 global financial crisis, and as such we, here among the ruins at the “End of History,” can still find new alternatives and build them – alternatives which embrace collective responsibility and a generative constraining of desire in ways the Neoliberal world order, by its own ideological constraints, can not.

This was a challenging but really engrossing and utterly fascinating book on the philosophy of time and the “production of time” within capitalism. Here, the author describes how the transcendental subjectivation of time is necessarily tied up with the development of capitalism and the modern world, that the invention of the precision mechanical clock revolutionized not only industry, but likely made Kant's conceptualization of time possible in the first place. And from there, the further mutation of our understanding of time is also mediated by technology and capitalism, with Greenspan bringing in the Deleuzean understanding of Aeon and Chronos to discuss the Y2K bug as an Aeonic mutation point signifying an evolution of globally standardized clock-time to a post-global, increasingly decentralized, fully machinic “cyberspace time.”

The introduction from the Miskatonic Virtual University team expands this last point even further, showing how the appearance of Bitcoin's decentralized use of timestamp server networks is proof that cyberspace has mutated the production of time, including the fact that the timestamped blockchain acts as a kind of “timechain,” a purely quantified calendar of sequentially numbered blocks, whose ebbs and flows are determined by a difficulty-adjustment algorithm and totally divorced from cosmic motion and cultural seasonality. Instead, the intensity of mining operations on the bitcoin network is the primary variable for the algorithm: economic activity is the very pulse of the cybernetic calendar (time = money). If you are able to read the whole book without your mind getting blown even once, I'd suggest you didn't understand the contents.

Very interesting stuff. At times a pulpy stream of lurid rumors about alchemists and magicians, at times a clear-headed expose of central banking. The real magic trick, as Twyman explains here in depth, is the transformation of time into money. I'm not sure how credible all of the information in this is, some of the claims she makes are quite wild! But she was clearly on to something.

It's an excellent little sword and planet novella. Brackett showing here why she was considered one of the best by fans and Hollywood alike, deftly weaving economical prose and larger than life characters. Very little actually happens in this story, but nonetheless it feels epic. The Cirsova edition I read with nice bold print and full-page illustrations turns this into a captivating light novel that is just what a boring, hot Summer calls for. And there's two more in the series! Definitely recommended.