Reddit mentions of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

No one has really hit the nail on the head yet.

Check out Alexander Galloway's Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture; McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory, and Cybertext: Essays on Ergodic Literature by E.J. Aarseth

These are great notes! Thanks so much! I addressed your clarity / factuality concerns.

As for examples of things that are "Soulsian", for the most part I totally agree with you, I think. The important thing for me here is to pull from real life examples of people making those comparisons and trying to get to the heart of what they're suggesting by doing so. Those three examples (Rand, House, Franzen) were chosen because hey were earnestly made by people who are not me.

(ASIDE: I find Merleau-Ponty to be incredibly Soulsian - his work is challenging and very rewarding while also maintaining an insane degree of flow ... I can struggle with my experience of it, and repeat the same part over and over and over again, but still feel as though I am progressing and suddenly have killed four hours reading The Phenomenology of Perception... but that seems to not be the way these comparisons are normally made.)

As for movies - the one that seems the most common is Citizen Kane? Which I really cannot wrap my head around...

And finally... have you read Espen Aarseth's Cybertext? If not - HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommended.

I like the science fiction utopianism (it's a lot more believable and interesting to me than the general assumption that society is immediately and chaotically going to shit right now for [enter contemporary political nonsense here]), but one thing that's really sort of great about futurism is how it studies how society's science fiction utopias reflect those anxieties about [enter contemporary political nonsense here] in order to see how developments both cohere and go off course of our expectations of where we'll end up, and also how those expectations inform those developments and how the developments inform our expectations.

To reword that more simply, one of my most favorite parts of futurism is how we tend to end up with something unexpected, but never really surprising. HG Wells 'predicts' submersible boats rather logically from developments at the time, but his actual machine isn't quite like the submarines we got nor is our journeys underwater discovering quite the phenomena he would lead us to expect.

These essays aren't really so broad, their more rigorously applied to specific developments happening now with an eye toward preparing people for the sort of stuff we should at least grok enough so that the future continues to be perhaps unexpected but not really surprising. Once we hit a place where we're really surprised is when we get most anxious about [enter contemporary political nonsense here] and develop new science fiction utopias and dystopias to reflect it.

By the way, in Espen Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives in Ergodic Literature , he discusses cybertexts origins in cybernetics as coined by Norbert Wiener with attention toward biological and social feedback loops. I almost feel like futurism is the initial signal in that feedback loop, but sometimes I have to remember not to be too mystical about it!