Nightmare Vision and I talk about the way the internet and online subcultures shape political discourse and cultural morality

Follow me on substack at Astral Flight Simulation and Twitter @afscast
Follow Nightmare Vision on Twitter @godclosedmyeyes

Is the work of art possible in the digital age? Ostensibly this is the topic Gio and I discuss, but as we often do, we veer off onto internet political subcultures and Nick Land, among many other things. We compare/contrast The Matrix and Ready Player One, discuss Walter Benjamins "The Origin of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "Hauntology," and much more!

Follow me on twitter at @afscast
Substack at www.astralflight.substack.com
Follow Gio on YouTube at Content Minded 
and on twitter at @giantgio

Helios and I discuss the occult and demonic forces shaping our culture through the internet, using it as a body to bring into being a God whose been sleeping since before time. The fiber optic cables are its Cthulu-like mind flayer appendages, the smartphones and laptop monitors its eyes, its users its brain cells. Dark forces have been transmitting messages to us from beyond the wall of sleep, giving us the form it needs us to bring into reality so it can raise its dark master.

Follow me on twitter @afscast
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Amanda is one of the brightest and most creative up and coming film makers in America, and she's Hollywood royalty. We discuss her short film The Lotus Gun, her film school thesis, her legendary father John Milius, and the sorry state of American film making today. I hope Amanda is only in the early stages of a very prolific career, she is clearly capable of great things. And please, I want her to come back many times, so show your enthusiasm for her here in the comments and on twitter!

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https://astralflight.substack.com

We discuss Yarvin's essay "Monarchism and Fascism Today" (its decidedly anti-fascist, sorry liberal media). In the spirit of Moldbug, Yarvin shares a futuristic vision of an absolute monarch in which a cyberpunk CEO president has all sorts of high tech gadgets at his disposal to administer the government - but can be taken out at any time by a shadowy cabal of ominous "shareholders." We also discuss the passage prize for poetry, of which Yarvin was a judge, and Zero HP Lovecraft, a former guest on the Astral Flight Simulation podcast.

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A deep analysis on the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" by Martin Heidegger, elucidating the key concept "Enframing" via The Terminator.  Special quest Athenian Stranger.  Visit my substack for a long-from essay crystallizing the key points of this discussion, and also visit me and Athenian Stranger on twitter for updates on our work and access to lots of other content on philosophy, film, and culture.
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If you become a paid subscriber you'll have access to extensive content that is otherwise unavailable, including long form essays on philosophy and literature by myself and guests, as well as podcast episodes that are unavailable anywhere else
Find me on Twitter at @AFScast
Find Athenian on Twitter at @Athens_Stranger

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If you like my discussion of digital age science fiction, I insist you read “God Shaped Hole” by Zero HP Lovecraft, found here.

https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/god-shaped-hole/

Part 1: The Dark Enlightenment and the Digital Prison.

Platos cave is an allegory for the liberatory power of rationalism, however as history shows, rationalism isn’t always enough. Once rationalism fails, humanity regresses into what Nick Land calls a “dark enlightenment,” in which people revert to pre-rational mindsets. However, we can never really go back to the way we were in Platos Cave, and we enter novel forms of delusion. Philip K. Dick says we become trapped in the “iron prison” or rigid thought forms, however we are beyond even that - now we find ourselves more and more locked in the Digital Prison of an always online world.

Part 2: The Astral Flight Simulation

We trace the trajectory of several Science Fiction stories concerned with Artificial Intelligence antagonists, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Neuromancer, Tron, and The Terminator, to The Matrix, Ex Machina, and God Shaped Hole. In so doing, we see how humanities will is superseded by that of technology, how like Faust we hand over our autonomy - our eternal souls - in exchange for the promise of technology, and are thereby locked in the digital prison. Once there we are in a new Platos cave, in which digital shadows play out on the walls, in a mimicry of the fulfillment of a religious or even a rational world.

All music herein used with permission by Turn Knight, check him out on YouTube

War propaganda in America is in full swing....yet America is not engaged in a war. Is this the run up to our next conflict, or is this pure propaganda and the disappearance of war? Because of our ever accelerating technology, the nature of warfare has changed over the last 50 years, and conflict as we know it is morphing into something totally different. By examining some of the ideas and observations of Paul Virilio, Jean Baudriallard, and Deleuze and Gattari, we may  better understand the nature of "war" in the digital age, in which the spectacle becomes more real than the event: war disappears and propaganda replaces it. Soon we shall find out if America is using this media blitz as a pretense to enter the next global conflict, or if the future of American warfare will play out exclusively in the media.