Tangential reactions to "In the beginning there was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson:

Post modernism does not work because of the negative implications of Cartesian principles. First, post-modernism is the belief in relative values and norms. Thus, nobody can "get it" because the basic belief is that there is no "it". That, however, in itself belies a belief in a value system. Descartes desconstructed understanding and realized that the perception of self-awareness, the mere ability to question, was itself a form of knowledge. More importantly, it was not one which a person could avoid. If you try to not question, that's thinking too. The key here is that this perception is a positive value, not a negative one. It exists separately from the rest of the knowledge that has been eschewed to reveal it - it is more than the mere absence of it. Same goes for post-modernism. Originally set up as a counter-cultural movement, post-modernism is itself a culture. It has values independent of the previous culture which it rejected.

Taking a few examples: Post modernism is biased against religion. Ideally, post-modernism argues that everyone can practice religion, but nobody is right. However, this manifests itself as a devaluation of the religion and religious belief. There is a similar de-emphasis on the stratification of the knowledge, so that it is not merely that different accounts of, say, an historical event can be valid, but that the whole business of determining what actually happened seems somewhat futile.

And this is why post modernism does not work. By existing as a value system in and of itself, it is definitionally a modernist institution, with its own rules and beliefs. Hence, there is no post-modernism. On a similar note, as a modernist institution, post-modernism is destined to fail. It lacks a positive goal. Human institutions with negative goal - "Anti-anything" societies cannot exist independently and are too narrowly focused to succeed in the long term. Religion, while oppressive, offers salvation. Democracy offers freedom. Capitalism offers opportunity, while socialism offers equality. Post modernism just offers lassitude. It devalues ideals, and does not offer any sort of success toward which to reach. Such institutions have never lasted because they lack popular appeal. Perhaps that is why the notion is largely the purview of wild-haired individuals in old stone buildings.