Ask your favorite AI to explain how the backrooms as raw encounter functions as the Žižekian "imaginary Real", but how turning it into a movie serves the function of reintegrating the excess produced by that encounter. Structurally it's similar to how the anime YKK (Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou) treats the "autumn of the world", emptied out, decaying with residue of a lost past, but with just enough structure to stage and then bind the surplus of the encounter. Incidentally, this is also the register where famous AI generated image material lives, like the Will Smith spaghetti video. But the important piece is that the imaginary Real is somewhat less threatening than the symbolic Real: the latter is an encounter with a mechanistic underpinning that threatens our aliveness by revealing it to have been "just code", "just atoms", "just evolution" all along. The image exhausts itself when we close the tab, but the mechanism is always running, so even if it's more subtle, it's harder to integrate, as it doesn't disappear along with the senses. The horror movie ends, but the code keeps running. LLMs expose the symbolic Real, which is why they're scarier than imagegen: the threat isn't that there's something weird behind the curtain, that LLMs are actually conscious. The secret man in the machine is a defense against the scarier prospect: that there is no curtain at all and mind is just matmul all the way down. So we cling to philosophy and logic that allows us to integrate the terror of that possibility. And to be clear, the question isn't an empirical "what's the Truth", because Truth is a cultural tool we use to enact these same defenses. The question is "what do I need to do to cope with the threat raised by this thing?" And there's no universal solution either, only individual ones that work more or less well for each person's subjective configuration. To return to the Backrooms, I would personally follow Žižek in claiming that the imaginary Real of the scene runs cover for the symbolic Real, the witnessing of the useless arrangement of material that forces us to pause in a kind of terror, "wait, it's all Capitalism? None of this had any point except to circulate numbers on a spreadsheet so someone can enjoy it?" And then we watch the movie, which I haven't even seen, and go back to our regularly scheduled activities of circulating text for numbers that we can endlessly enjoy.
here's a paragraph from fable's analysis of the backrooms > for millennials the Backrooms is repressed memory, but for Gen Z it's inherited dream — they're haunted by the third places that were demolished before they could occupy them > Layer two is the pandemic: a generation whose formative landscape was emptied institutional space — school as vacant building experienced through a screen — and the creepypasta went supernova in exactly 2020–22 > Layer three is the deepest one: noclip is derealization. The horror isn't a monster; it's the discovery that reality has a backend — rendered but unfurnished, procedurally generated, load-bearing nothing — which is the phenomenology of a generation with historically unprecedented dissociation rates whose waking suspicion is that the world looks like a render. > And notice the structure of the space itself: infinite, procedurally near-identical rooms, mildly hostile, no exit, entered by accident, traversed by endless ambulation. The Backrooms is the feed. Wandering is scrolling.
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i like this poast now that i may one day soon return to read it whole
watercolor is my weakness
