The Invisibles

What Hacker News says

1. specprocNov 2023
   If you're getting into comics, I can strongly recommend Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles, Saga, and the original Sandman books (there are a tonne of new ones now, and none have really clicked).

   I'm also part way through Supergods by Grant Morrison. It's not a comic, but an autobiography-cum-history of the superhero genre. Worthwhile.

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2. metaphormMar 2017
   - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

   - Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts

   - The Tao Te Ching

   - The Gateless Gate (Koun Yamada translation/editing)

   - The Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World) by Neal Stephenson

   - The Invisibles by Grant Morrison

   - Incerto (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, The Bed of Procrustes) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

   - Iron John by Robert Bly

   - Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

   - The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman

   - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

   - 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

   - Pharmakon by Dale Pendell

   - The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss

   - Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton

   - The Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual by Gary Gygax et al

   - Introduction to Algorithms by Charles E. Leiserson, Clifford Stein, Ronald Rivest, and Thomas H. Cormen

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3. turbojerryFeb 2022
   I think the Gnosticism of The Matrix comes at least in part from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.
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4. SemiapiesNov 2018
   Combine it with Morrison's The Invisibles.

   "Big Brother is watching. Learn to move indescribably."

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5. A_COMPUTERMay 2015
   On a metaphysical level I think Grant Morrison touched on conventional counterculture in The Invisibles. Counterculture is just another, essential part of The System expressing itself. Things happen because of The system you're inside The System, and your "individualism" is an emergent property of it. The example I think he used was the police. Was there ever a year when nobody decided to become a police officer? If society was made up of free people making free choices, there would always be catastrophic upsets like this, but it doesn't ever happen. So to that extent, I think the article is incorrect because while you may feel more "authentically counterculture" the further away you are from "conventional counterculture", you're still just a slightly rarer perturbation in the tank.

   Your counterculture is only useful if it combats or shields you from a dominant paradigm that is offensive to your values, and if you're alone in the suburbs being hardcore, you're probably losing. Unless your real goal is to feel cool, I guess, then by its own standards yes you are more counterculture than "counterculture". Establishment countercultures may be hypocrites because they don't recognize they're establishment, but they may also be creating systems that ultimately comfort the people in them. But it's probably not sustainable because your primary definition for a culture cannot be one of contrast to something else. America is a nation that has was born in and has internalized rebellion. This is probably the worst value we have, because you can't actually build on that for very long, it's "meant" for the tearing down phase of a bloated bureaucracy. As a nation gets settled if it doesn't abandon that value it will start turning inward and attacking itself, which I think is exactly what is happening.

   Did I read too much into this essay?

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