Pokémon
Article
Pokémon is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 14, 2023 and April 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Pokémon takes the tool of “collections” and turns it into an international obsession”; “it can’t even beat Pokémon yet, a game many of us conquered”. It most often appears alongside England, Erik Hoel, Pokémon.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: July 14, 2023
- Last seen: April 01, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- England (2 shared issues)
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- Erik Hoel (2 shared issues)
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- Pokémon (2 shared issues)
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- Reddit (2 shared issues)
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- !Kung San (1 shared issues)
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- aboriginal people on the west coast of Canada (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Smith (1 shared issues)
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- ADHD (1 shared issues)
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- Aeschylus (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan (1 shared issues)
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- Against Education (1 shared issues)
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- age of dinosaurs (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
That is to say: these aren’t stages we move through, they’re Pokémon we collect. And the goal — of course! — is to collect ’em all.
Pokémon takes the tool of “collections” and turns it into an international obsession. I feel like the more people learn to use these tools, the more money they can make. We’re Egan-izing everything.
This is what I fear most about AI, at least in the immediate future. Not some superintelligence that eats the world (it can’t even beat Pokémon yet, a game many of us conquered at ten). Rather, a less noticeable apocalypse. Culture following the same collapse as community on the back of a whirring compute surplus of imitative power provided by Silicon Valley. An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares?