The Irony of Desperation

Hold up, is he talking about bloggers, yo? [wink]

“As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a demonic irony, the irony of desperation — it is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand the,. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace was burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology of this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943

Apparently The Metaphysics of of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim “explains why Hesse’s GBG is a crucial metaphor for understanding the nature of cyberspace.”

“The glass-bead game’s synthetic, non-linear information play is a forerunner of hypertext and of virtual worlds. Hesse’s fiction also touches on some of the human problems underlying the advent of cyberspace and virtual reality, such as the role of the body and of disciplines for deepening the human spirit.”

Duly noted.