Ostensibly it's about this sophisticated game played in a monastery that abstracts over the sum of human knowledge. To me it presented a very potent argument for the value of academia in a commercially-driven world.
If nothing else, it nicely counterbalances the monomaniacal ambition and stress of tech startup land in a way that us geeks can appreciate.
The glass bead game is never really described in the book. It does not serve any real purpose. It is just an academic exercise with no grounding in reality. The players are academics who don't have to earn anything. The state pays for them. Even among other academics it is not clear if the glass bead game is useful. The main character feels this emptiness and tries to escape from that. The end is typical.
I don't think lispm was expressing a judgement on The Glass Bead Game, but rather pointing out the subtext of the book. The parallel with Ulysses is not applicable, IMHO; a day of a man's life is just the ostensible surface of the book, not its subtext.
Ostensibly it's about this sophisticated game played in a monastery that abstracts over the sum of human knowledge. To me it presented a very potent argument for the value of academia in a commercially-driven world.
If nothing else, it nicely counterbalances the monomaniacal ambition and stress of tech startup land in a way that us geeks can appreciate.