alt Hacker NewsThis is only tangentially related, but regarding:
>>Post-modern?!
>It's a joke. If Neovim is the modern Vim, then Helix is post-modern.
It's interesting that postmodern is so often used by people, perhaps less familiar with the arts and the humanities, to mean "an update to modern" or a progression thereof. They use it in a strictly literal sense, eschewing the precise meaning of the term they're referencing by mere addition of discontinuity as incremental difference.
Obviously, there's little impact to this. The term is hardly degraded by engineers advertising to other engineers. It looks a touch unread, but then again we have people like Thiel and Luckey misinterpreting Tolkien, so again it's hardly the most egregious example. I guess it just jumped out to me because I was hoping to see something creative truly postmodern.
Replies
>we have people like Thiel and Luckey misinterpreting Tolkien
Could you provide an example / be more specific about this?
That jumped out at me too the first time I ran into Helix making this joke, and I was also disappointed to find that they meant modern++.
That said, I’m not sure I agree with your assessment that it’s wrong, exactly. Postmodernism did indeed follow modernism and come into being as a reaction to modernism. So I think “postmodernism” has a naive and original sense of being “what follows modernism”. Decades (so many at this point!) of discourse have added layers to that and undermined it and generally made it more complex. But the underlying meaning of the term remains.
(If your instinct is to respond with arguments about how works not limited to late 20th century western culture can be nonetheless classified as postmodern, I hear you, but the fact that the term itself was only coined post modernism remains, and is all I’m pointing to.)
Personally, I get more hung up on people using “modern” to mean “new”. Then to use “postmodern” to mean “more new” while to my ears (eyes) it means “dated af” is even funnier and more jarring.
Helix, the first editor to not believe in grand narratives. Helix, the relativist editor. Helix, now updated with the latest from Foucault and Derrida!