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pete wolfendale Profile picture
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24 Feb, 10 tweets, 6 min read
As a coda to my recent threads about the problem of childhood, I might as well announce that the novel I've been working on for the last few years is an attempt to deal with these issues in literary form. Here's an extremely minimal blurb, with a nod to LC, Dan Simmons, @hannu.
The first thread on the ethical temptations of childhood:
The follow up thread making my case against eugenics more explicit:
An earlier thread on the question of intelligence, wisdom, and the mythos of heredity:
Another on the problems of symbols, self-cultivation, and the virtue of neoteny that culminates in literary science fiction:
And a neat passage from Orphic epics to Orphu of Io:
A broader reflection on the genre I'm trying to work in (#infopunk): deontologistics.co/2019/11/24/tfe…
And a tiny snippet from a later chapter:
Thoughts and inspiration taken from interactions with @NegarestaniReza, @tjohnlinward, @benedict, @HelenHester, @qdnoktsqfr, @poly_metis, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @amendlocke, @cstross, and more.
There's always some you forget to add: @lemonbloodycola, @n_srnck, @m0lpe, @rechelon, and a host of delightful people I cannot find on Twitter. Solidarity in expressive experimentation guys. 🖖

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More from @deontologistics

pete wolfendale Profile picture
25 Feb
Here's a final thought for the evening. I've been saying this in various ways recently, but I aim for better compression: the temptation to confuse our political priorities with our communicative priorities is powerful and must be resisted with every ounce of strength we have.
To put it in different terms: it is all too easy to confuse the ways in which we organise and express our own thoughts about politics with the ways in which we should organise cooperation with those with the same priorities, even if they are expressed in different terms.
I believe quite strongly in the dialectical virtue of communicative charity. This means something like: 'first, do not talk past one another'. This is difficult. Charity is not simply won by hard work, it must be maintained by it. The temptation to miserliness is everpresent.
Read 14 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
25 Feb
I think the discussions about the uses and abuses of the language of 'clever/smart/intelligent/etc.' that @bayesianboy has sparked are an absolute joy, especially as they bleed out of one context and into another. Allow me to add some thoughts of my own.
There is one phrase that is burned so deeply into my brain it generates echoes of ancient shames even as I type it: "You think you're so smart." I can't even recall a specific memory in which this was said to me, it's nothing but a neural palimpsest of iterated childhood misery.
I have, for as long as I can remember, been interested in almost everything. My curiosity is so powerful it's often quite hard to control. This has created problems in socialising with my peers for my entire life. I'm mostly fine now, but there's some atypical trauma hereabouts.
Read 41 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
24 Feb
Maybe the time has come to openly admit that I love David Foster Wallace’s writing, warts and all. If only there was a simple and straightforward way to describe such novel naïveté.
To have done with the old irony. To revel in our favourite postmodern pretensions. To pursue parodic self-reference for its own sake, no matter the cost. To simply enjoy what we enjoy despite and even because of its over elaborate efforts, its affected try hard cringe.
It’s on the tip of my tongue... but such proximally prandial pronouncements fail to emerge even as I salivate over otherwise worthy words. Imperfect poetry uttered in an intolerably obtuse manner, unapologetically assembled with childish, Pynchonesque glee.
Read 8 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
24 Feb
I stupidly ran out of amitriptyline last night, and after tweeting far too late into the early morn I had the most psychedelic sequence of lucid dreams I have ever experienced. It was like I got to consciously explore the latent spaces encoded in the layers of my visual system.
Glutamate is a hell of a drug. Excuse me while I go out and collect some weak NMDA antagonists to stop this from happening again.
Here's the obligatory fascinating facial manifold.
Read 4 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
23 Feb
This is perhaps the most tempting/tragic contradiction embedded in the human condition: "you are not a person until you can appreciate the intrinsic value of children, who are by this definition not persons." This absolute scission of value from respect infects everything.
Compare: "Women do not have the (ethical) value of men, because they cannot appreciate their own (aesthetic) value as expressed in the practical consequences of protecting it."
Which translated means something like: "Men must control control women (as resources) because they are the only ones who appreciate what resources would have be sacrificed to conserve them." This is basically Veblen's point about women as the original site of property.
Read 31 tweets
pete wolfendale Profile picture
22 Feb
Here's a final thought for this evening. I often give a hard time to Marxists talking about the 'contradictions' inherent in capitalism, usually because this is methodology turned metaphysical bombast. But there are concrete absurdities around us that bear the weight of history.
Much like Lakatosian research programs, societies accrue anomalies/exceptions that can be handled in more or less progressive ways. Ad hoc solutions beget ad hoc solutions, and the result is ramifying technical debt: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical…
These accrued debts to future generations can persist long enough that they seem like pillars of the world, rather than failures of administration. There are many such debts in the post-industrial West, addicted as we are to avoiding infrastructural investment of every kind.
Read 33 tweets

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