RE: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/116216357692725093

told ya

Sigh… yes, there is a very true fact that "a new generation" of AI developers, vibe coders, and tech commentators does exist and exclusively posts and promotes stuff on X instead of Mastodon and Bluesky -- and as a result we on the latter platforms are not aware of everything that goes on over there.

But once you've made that observation, why would you not pause for a minute and ask yourself why that overlap is there?

Why would you not conclude anything from the fact this entire new generation of AI enthused developers are hanging out almost *exclusively* in the Internet's largest nazi bar?

Why would you even mention this observation as part of your argument if not to state that conclusion?

*sniffs, tugs at shirt* You know, the true perversity of Evangelion is not the obvious Freudian symbology -- the mother in the robot, the father who abandons, and so on and so on -- but rather how it stages the fundamental deadlock of the otaku subject under late capitalism.

*gestures wildly* Here you have Shinji, the perfect neoliberal subject: he doesn't want to pilot the Eva, he hates it, but he does it anyway! Why? Because of some abstract duty? No! Because he has already internalized the superego injunction to enjoy his own exploitation. "I mustn't run away" - this is not courage, this is the purest ideology!

*touches nose* But the real obscenity -- and here Anno is a true genius, whether he knows it or not -- is how the series presents instrumentalisation itself as traumatic. NERV literally dissolves the boundary between human and machine, mother and weapon, and what do we get? Not liberation but pure anxiety! The EVA units are the perfect metaphor for our digital predicament: we are told these technologies will extend our capabilities, make us posthuman, but instead we discover *laughs darkly* that we were always already instruments!

Gendo's Human Instrumentality Project is just making explicit what capitalism already does: reducing humans to pure exchangeable substance, orange goo, the ultimate liquidity!

*sniff* And the masterstroke is the ending - not the false happy ending of End of Evangelion, but the original episodes 25 and 26, where the budget runs out and we get pure interiority. *waves hands* "Congratulations!" they all say to Shinji. But for what? For accepting his place in the symbolic order? This is the ultimate perversity: the show literally cannot afford to show the apocalypse, so instead it stages the real catastrophe - the subject accepting his own subjection as liberation! The production committee pulls the funding, and Anno turns this material limitation into the perfect metaphor for ideological closure!

*adjusts shirt violently* You know what nobody wants to admit? Evangelion is not about robots or aliens or whatever -- it's about the impossibility of authentic action under capitalism. Every character is trapped in their own repetition compulsion: Misato drinks, Asuka performs superiority, Rei submits to erasure; and the Angels? The Angels are just the return of the repressed, the stupid insistence of the Real that says: your little techno-military complex cannot contain the trauma of existence!

*sniff* And so on, and so on...