Hello and welcome to the fifth session of the concept of acceleration. I'm going to pass the mic off to Nick Landry now. Thanks, Theo, and thanks everyone for being here. So, as I was just saying to people, I think that I'm thinking of this as being the first of a two-week block on the trough phase of our current contemporary wave of accelerationist thinking and dealing explicitly with stagnationist notions, which I think, surely fairly uncontroversially just click onto our topic.
If there does seem to be any doubt about that, hope I can draw some draw people into it within the next 20 minutes or so and it turns out really I think that 2011 was this crucial year I mean I'm looking at the material that you know we've got here and and it's all 2011 Tyler Cohen's the great stagnation book the Peter Thiel piece that called the end of the future that that I'm going to mainly concentrate on a few little bits and pieces around that there's a sort of preliminary sort of philosophical
question that I'm not trying to close but but just recall in anticipation of fair and which is the whole structure we can talk about it in very different ways most simply the fact value distinction whether we're talking about descriptive or prescriptive language how robust that distinction is how accelerationism complicates and perhaps even in certain sense dismantle certainly diagonalizes it and I think that we have to just revisit those questions a little bit in talking about this stagnationist topic obviously accelerate the process is not
a theoretical strict description even if it draws upon one it's a slogan an an imperative maxim, a prolocutionary speech act or an order word. It's actually something much more like an instruction than a theoretical analysis. And since this three-word phrase constitutes the inelimable nuclear core of the accelerationist canon, it is understandable that accelerationism should be conceived as a program or prescription, and I think we have to say such a conception cannot be simply raw however we want to complicate it I don't think it's simply dismissible and the reason to raise that now at this point is that if we were approaching from
the other side and we were saying with equal naivety perhaps that accelerationism was fundamentally a form of theoretical description, then we'd be tempted to say surely that stagnation is almost sufficient as a refutation of the accelerationist thesis. There's a certain naive construction of accelerationism of something like a kind of historical theory and the scientific mode that would simply predict the absence of stagnation and therefore the emergence of this stagnationist issue would look like something like an intrinsic
argument against accelerationism, understood in that sense. I don't think anything like that is going on. i think that there's a far more fertile relation between the two and i think even though accelerationism and stagnationism seem at a certain level to be terms that they're simply opposed to each other they're actually in an extremely uh vibrant dynamic relationship with each other feed into each other so tightly that actually they become at certain points almost indistinguishable and and they serve to rehearse and reproduce a lot of the questions that we've been sort of creeping away into in the previous four
weeks. So I think it's utterly banal and uncontroversial to the point of banality to say that the financial crisis 2008 ushered in something like a stagnationist moment. And I think it's also clear that what we've already seen of the left accelerationist canon is deeply connected with this. You could say, you can read it in a certain way, it's almost an element of this stagnationist moment or perhaps even a symptom of it if one was going to be condescending, which of
course we'll try not to be. And the crucial left acceleration thesis in this respect is that capital is the intrinsic cause of its own underperformance, that this is something to come back to. And, you know, the only reason for making or support for such a thesis is the fact that we have some significant evidence of underperformance to deal with. so so just one last sort of back back tread on this which is sort of going covering things that we've already talked about um and that's to say i hope we've
seen already that there is an intellectual historical and philosophical case for complicating the notions of left and right accelerationism um but just as with the case of these of these uh teleological mechanistic notions fact and value these these distinctions used crudely i think these terms still take us quite a long way and and bring us into the topic quite helpfully and there is a gloss that very basic and you know ultimately to be uh probed with some extra sophistication but very crudely i think that left and right accelerationism can
be glossed as being the socialist and libertarian strains of accelerationist thinking respectively and so still more roughly but also more philosophically the question being does the underperformance of capitalism in its own terms have an imminent or a transcendent cause so this question just to work around it a little bit there's obviously a large number of ways of questioning capitalism that take us right outside of that question and would and would oppose the very notion of growth perhaps the very notion of technology technology or technological explosion that would that would say that
the super performance of capitalism in its own terms as techno economic explosive growth is itself a pathological historical process to be criticized from outside but i think as soon as we're in the acceleration of space that that isn't our problem that's not what anyone is saying it's rather that even if we accept the metrics capitalism places for itself at least some of them and for instance most unproblematically in terms of this dispute take maximally accelerated technological progress as being a
criterion accepted across the whole spectrum then the question dividing left and right is whether this is something that capitalism consistently promotes or as as the right accelerationist position i think would have to have to uh assert or from the left acceleration position does capitalism become inhibitory in relation to this process of technological expansion and while by no means claiming to have uh thoroughly absorbed the the left accelerationist arguments about this i think at least we've
visited them and and have some sense of um what what they're saying so i think this week there's an opportunity to look at what the more libertarian aspect on accelerationism looks like and i think it comes into extremely stark relief perhaps a little ironically perhaps not in this whole stagnationist moment so i think that the the text um adam provided a much wider and more
expansive reading list that i think everybody has uh has seen already um i would i would contend that the basic text of this looking back of this of this question of stagnation is Tyler Cohen's book The Great Stagnation which was which was published in January 2011. I'm not going to get hugely into it now because I want to mainly move on to Peter Teer's argument and perhaps we can we can look at it his arguments more closely either later
today or or down the road a little bit but I would like to quote a remark by Peter Berkker on his blog coordination problem about Cohen's book which I'll put in a sidebar um because I think that it it is extremely relevant to this to to the sense of what the the right accelerationist or more libertarian case that that's to say of a transcendent rather than imminent obstacle to
continuous capitalistic explosive growth looks like and so Berkker says Cohen is a cultural optimist a champion of the free trade in ideas good services and all artifacts of mankind. But he is also an economic realist in the age of economic illusion. What do I mean by the economics of illusion? Government policies since World War II have created an illusion that irresponsible fiscal policy, the manipulation of money and credit, and expansion of the regulation of the economy is consistent with rising standards of living. this was made possible because of low-hanging technological fruit that Cohen identifies as
being plucked in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the U.S. and in spite of the government policies pursued an accumulated economic surplus was created by the age of innovation which the age of economic illusions spent down we are now coming to the end of that accumulated surplus and thus the full weight of government inefficiencies are starting to be felt throughout the economy our politicians promise too much our government spends too much and the apparent chase up the promises made and our population has come to be accustomed i'm adding there's a glitch in his in his text has come to be accustomed to both government guarantees and government largesse so obviously what burke is saying here is that um
rather than as the most classical reading of Marx would have it and and I think it then continues throughout the socialist tradition that government within within capitalist modernity is functional for capitalism broadly speaking. We're seeing something much more the libertarian cases much more that government in this period is compensatory in relation to and at a certain point actually threatens to significantly cancel the capitalist
dynamic and thus leads to this kind of crisis that as we've seen has a very different sense in these two sort of ideological camps these two political camps um so then we come to Peter Thiel now this his essays also it's from October 2011 so it's not much later it's basically a there's a just a very compact wave of this this kind of material happening uh in 2011 and he i think has some connected but distinct
ideas about what is causing the great the great stagnation to tyler cohen but both of them share quite a lot they both share the fact that they they understand capitalistic growth as being driven by these fundamental waves of technological innovation by fundamental technologies um and well i think it's better to quote teal a little bit he he says first of all progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic it is rare indeed the unique history of the west proves the exception to the rule that most human beings
throughout the millennia through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal unchanging and impoverished state but there is no law that the exceptional rise the west must continue so we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that america is on the wrong track and has been for some time to wonder whether progress is not doing as well as advertised and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse the decline now he's a little bit evasive in this uh essay about exactly what these uh this derailing looks like in terms of policy terms um it's not his his central goal here to deal with that um but i think it's quite clear
So in terms of what he says about money, maybe I should even just try and quickly find that. Sorry, one second. Yes, he says, the most common name for misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is Keynesianism. Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there was
always a bit of clever trickery and massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. But we must acknowledge that this fraud strangely seemed to work for many decades. The great scientific and technological tailwind of the 20th century powered many economically delusional ideas. Even during the Great Depression in the 1930s, innovation expanded new and emerging fields as divergent as radio, movies, aeronautics, household appliances, polymer chemistry, and secondary oil recovery. In spite of their many mistakes, the New Deal has pushed technological innovation very hard." So, I mean, this sort of emphasis on the Keynesian New Deal compact as being inherently contrary to the maximal prolongation of capitalist dynamics,
I think it looks very Austrian. It's very classically libertarian in emphasis. and I think it would be hard to say that that kind of thing isn't going on behind Thiel's argument, even though his own ideas are very distinct from classical Austrian analysis in certain respects. He certainly seems to be suggesting that if we're looking for the process that has taken us into the great stagnation in the deepest sense it's a lot to do with the expansive role of government in the economy and
the and the takeover of the financial and monetary system in particular by by government um i'll just do another couple of little teal quotes from the same essay he says when tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 96s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration. We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th to 18th centuries, the advent of ever-faster roads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century, reversed with the decommissioning of
the Concorde in 2003 to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-911 airport security systems. Today's advocates of space jets, lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar system appear to hail from another planet." Now there's lots of things that could be said about this paragraph my interest in it particularly is how it really locks onto the MAP which is which actually is written two years later in this question of of speed and the fact that the move that Teal makes from in this thing
consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration it weirdly sort of mirrors and echoes that this move made in the map saying oh um right accelerationism simply confuses acceleration with speed i think brain mere braindead speed i think is the exact is the exact quote um we shouldn't perhaps get completely lost back in this question again but And obviously Thiel is saying that the collapse of actual transport velocity is a relevant index of what he sees as this deceleration process into profound stagnation.
And one more quote from him, which I think is very important for the contemporary relevance of this. This is obviously 2011, so it's basically five years before the Trumpocalypse, but it I think gives some weird preliminary reverberations in relation to that, where he says, the technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth.
The give and take of Western democracies depends on the idea that we can craft political solutions that enable most people to win most of the time. But in a world without growth, we can expect a loser for every winner. Many will suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of racket, so we can expect an increasingly nasty edge to our politics. We may be witnessing the beginnings of such a zero-sum system in politics in the US and Western Europe as the risks shift from winning less to losing more and as our leaders desperately cast about for macroeconomic solutions to problems that have not been primarily about economics for a long time so i think that people even people really not at all coming from where
teal is coming from and deeply suspicious about his about his agenda would be hard-pressed not to to see a certain prophetic element in that paragraph. As a one-paragraph introduction to the kind of place we've come to, I think it would be hard to beat. And obviously, there's very different interpretations of as we've seen of what the the sources of this growth deficit might be considerable cross-partisan agreement about their consequences and the fact that we're seeing some of those consequences
playing themselves out in our contemporary political environment um i think i'm tempted at this point to do my usual sort of backing off thing and and and and just seeing whether we're already in a position to to talk about this uh the outside monologue mode i'd obviously like to thank this is zach who um pushed us onto this and I think it was extremely helpful thing to do.
I'm not sure it's going to add much, but in the Peter Thiel talks, in the extracts you sent us he also links I think the idea of stagnation to a kind of horizontality right yeah which which is missing in in in the examples that the paragraphs you've just you've just quoted but I think it's quite explicitly related to
to a kind of globalizing horizontal movement of capital and technological development yeah I mean I don't know what more to say about that but no no no but that's that's a great thing actually Derek I'm sorry if you have more they don't let me know I haven't I haven't at the moment but if you haven't let me just jump off just for a couple of minutes on that because because I haven't really obviously touched upon what Teal's specific ideas are and I've mostly just been using him as an emblem of this kind of libertarian oblique line into our into our questions about acceleration but I think it's but what you're saying I think just provoke some attempt at least in a nutshell just to
talk about Teal's ideas very very quickly because you're absolutely right that he draws this big distinction between horizontal and vertical axis and Now obviously this language again has these echoes in left accelerationism, but I think they're very distinct. If people think they can join these two vocabularies up together then that would be great. I think it's just a kind of chance echo rather than anything more substantial. Because for Thiel, it seems almost everything comes from his reading of René Girard.
And it's really fascinating. He really does do something interesting and important with Girard. I think he draws things out of it that were not. seen before and and again super in a nutshell girard's basic thesis is that there is this anthropological structure that is organized by what he calls mimetic desire that's to say that what is desired is the object of desire of the other always um so it's basically that uh the value of any object is is how much is valued by other people and that that this has an intrinsic contagious dynamic to it that sort of spreads across the social field and you know it has a
kind of this is not a language that peter teal himself makes big advantage of it but it has a kind of positive feedback structure to it because the more people invest in particular objects of desire the more those objects of desire are valorized throughout the social field and trigger more and more and more of this what what Girard calls mimetic desire and there's a kind of christian twist in Girard that Thiel follows up on too and which is that he interprets the Christian religion in terms of this deeper process of sacrifice where the only way that this kind of process of of amplification of mimetic
amplification is actually short-circuited and sort of restored back to some kind of ground state is through an act of sacrifice of some scapegoat who stands in for the um for the uh sorry i've just lost the right word here for i could probably be stuck on this for half now so i better just but just jump over it the the process of social hostility that is intrinsic in this spread of mimetic desire is requires this act of violence that that can be concentrated in this symbolic iconic form in the figure of a
scapegoat or sacrifice and therefore acts as this kind of ab reaction um that that restores social equilibrium so there's this whole set of relations involved that in that involves this notion that the whole thing climaxes in some kind of sacrifice in a way sacrifice of the king as it would be in um in phrases in the golden bow type of construction that's i think very big for um girard and obviously in the in the christian passion there's a similar uh model of this and so this is the this is horizontality uh for teal and he says look isn't this what globalization
understood as this horizontal process of competitive market economics memetic desire consumerism advertising you know this this construction of this horizontal plane of um of coordinated desire in terms of of these um particular consumer lures that are sort of amplified in a way by advertising and by but more importantly by this by this horizontal dynamic itself this social dynamic that spreads out across the whole world um and everything about this this dynamic he's deeply suspicious about because he thinks it does lead to this escalation of violence
that requires some act of sacrifice um and all there's all kind of fallout in all kinds of direction from this analysis one of them is that in radical departure from the kind of austrian mainstream of libertarian thinking he he thinks competitive economics are disastrous he doesn't you know competitive free markets for teal are constantly read in this in this girard framework that makes him think that they are these motors of this escalating social violence leading to some kind of crisis and so verticality for him is something that escapes this uh this axis of
of mimetic desire and violence at a complete perpendicular. And this is what his zero to one book is about. That the zero to one movement for him is this movement of that takes you completely out of this competitive field. It takes you from the non-existence of stuff. Hey, Nick, we just lost you for a little bit. The whole thing is not...
it you know I say about this extremely short and scrappy maybe people want to come back to it but as a take on to some of the weird themes of the kind of PN program intriguing you know like if you say well come on nationalism and the attempt to kind of reach tree the slightest amount of libertarian
to propound. And without wanting to, I think there's a whole lot of complicated things around this. Hey, Nick. But one, this. Can you hear me? Yeah, sorry. Sorry to interrupt. There's just quite a bit of lag, I think. Can you hear me? Sorry, Theo, have I got some connection? Okay, I think Nick's just going to log out and try and come back in.
Hi, Nick. Can you hear us? Yeah, sorry guys. I don't know what that was about. I just lost Google Hangouts completely. Okay. I think that it seems like you're a little bit clearer now. It looks like maybe we lost you for like two minutes before you. Okay. Okay. Well, anyway, look, there's no need for me to particularly press this very much. I don't want to interrupt, but it's just to say that optic onto what this Trumpian...
If you're asking, well, what on earth could TLC in this Trump program, you know, wouldn't it be and against his kind of libertarian impulses and you can see that perhaps that there's this about the attempt to this axis of horizontality you know that axis of globalism market competition um untrammeled sweeping ever expanded mimetic desire and and return or at least to emphasize instead this axis of verticality to do with technological innovation of a radical kind without you know that's monopolistic intrinsically
it's not monopolistic because it's because it's produced a competitive situation it's monopolistic because it's totally originally and therefore without initial competition and there is there does seem to be this kind of solidarity that at least you can see how he might see he might see that kind of break as something he can work with and that might be in keeping with his with his ideas particularly as I say outlined in this zero to one book but I think more generally part of his kind of intellectual formation in general so all of that just to say Derek's totally right I think to introduce this question
the horizontal is a huge issue for T and I think it does a lot of work in this in this framework Hi, do you think Teal has any connections to NRX? um well i think to say he had none would be would be a stretch i mean um
because teal's essay on the education of a libertarian done in this 2009 cato uh colloquium was i think very influential so that that's just one intellectual link i mean obviously this um very famous sentence him where he's saying i can i no longer can see um democracy and liberty as compatible i think was almost a kind of mantra for for the initial um the initial wave of nrx and then there might be other issues i think they're complicated i mean
you know it's very easy to get into conspiracy theories about this i'm at a huge distance from it even though i get brought into these conspiracy theories it i'm generally sadly um out of the loop you know i'm not in america i don't know these silicon valley guys i've never had any communication with Peter Thiel at all but whether Peter Thiel and Curtis Yavin have some communication I suspect they they they're not utter strangers to each other and I don't know what they think of each other's ideas but at least there's a question there so I think there's some there's some room for interesting Machiavellian analysis but it does slide very quickly into kind of wild delirious
conspiracy theorizing and so it's it's a complicated a tightrope to walk and I'm not wholly sure I think if there's a definite connection between yourself and mold bug then you can make the argument that there is definitely a clear-cut one between him and Peter Thiel well my relation to moldbug is that we that I mentioned him and there has been a tiny amount of like encrypted blog commentary back and forth but I mean I've never spoken to him I we you know so it's an extremely tenuous relation on that level of social connection it's it's a one-way
philosophical connection I think more than anything else and so I don't know but but you know you can perhaps draw a two I mean obviously I would be very flattered by the notion of any of these two-stage remove connections to Peter I find him an absolutely fascinating person, even though I'm not always in full agreement with his ideas. I'm always interested in them and enriched by them, I would say, maybe. To throw out maybe a provocative statement that people could respond to, perhaps. I mean, it seems to me, my reading of Peter Thiel, he's almost on the spectrum of accelerationism.
I mean, you could pretty easily peg him as this left accelerationist type in a couple different ways. I mean, I'm thinking of the statement from the MAP, basically, what was it like? The future must be created, or they said it more eloquently. But, you know, in a nutshell, that's almost Peter Thiel's entire shtick the last few years. Like this non-deterministic conception of the future. I'll leave it there rather than rambling. Okay, I thought you were going to make two, though. Have I missed one? I mean, that's a good point. Am I missing two parts to that, or is there another one still to come? I'm actually kind of curious to see what Vincent might have to say since he agrees.
Yeah, can everyone hear me? Yeah. Okay. Okay, so it reminds me of something that actually Nick says in his article on teleoplexy. Nick, you mentioned this possibility of investing the state with a kind of tactical accelerationism. And it seems to me that Thiel is almost trying to do the same sort of thing, that you would need these kind of palpitations almost of developmentalism in order to get the kind of vertical progress that you need beyond the multiplication of globalization. So it seems that there is possibly a way you can read the all as a left acceleration is in a weird way right I mean that this is interesting. I I've sort of trapped myself in a in a bit of a box here because I'm because the way I've defined Defined the essential claim of left acceleration is and that the cause of
capitalist stagnation is intrinsic to capital itself and I think that in that respect it would be hard to make the claim that tears are left acceleration is because of the fact that he he's wanting to he's redefining capitalism but he's definitely making this zero to one movement something that he wants to put up that at the very heart of capitalism and in a way he's trying to in his own terms he wants to rescue capitalism from what he sees as the mimetic entropy of free markets I mean it's a weirdly interesting in terms of the thing that I've been used to you know coming out of brodell and this whole notion of sort of a kind of free market anti-capitalism
model that you get in a certain relation to Deleuze and Qatari and coming out of Bradell's historical work Teal just seems to invert that and and you know accepts the separability of markets and capitalism and says that markets are basically there to wreck capitalism. And he wants to save capitalism from free markets, which is a kind of really off, I won't say off left field, because that would be confusing in this context. But it's a real out of the blue, a bleak kind of a move to make, I think. But having said that, yes, I don't know what to make about the claim there.
I mean, you see, what do you think Teal expects from the state? Let's try and construct a certain kind of model of like Teal, the Machiavellian genius, who really has close access to Trump's ear and to the workings of the administration and can push it in certain directions. What do you think it is that he would want the state to do? I mean, practically, I guess for him, it's a question of diverting the resources available to the state away from things like welfare or whatever into these big projects,
which seems to be kind of what... It's not the analysis of left accelerationism, and I agree with you completely on that, but it seems to be what they kind of implicitly want as their praxis. They define it as marrying the network and the plan, which I think oddly is similar to what Thiel wants to do. He wants to have some kind of central kind of redirection of resources towards something which is more productive, i.e. that there's some kind of idea of a plan going on, plan going on but it's done via the network of the market right yes i mean he does now i'm trying to think where i've just seen that was that actually in his essay where he says um i think that's a
quote that just is really very relevant to what you've just said um yes sorry can i just read a bit of this teal thing which i think is very it ties up with your with your point here vincent very very tightly he says in practice we all sense that such gloating that is uh i probably you know about the success of manhattan project and these and these big uh state directed technological enterprises belongs to a very different time most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists today a letter from einstein would would get lost in the White House mailroom and the Manhattan Project would not even get started. It certainly could never be complete in three years.
And then I think most crucially, I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research, or more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. so that does seem to be very much in tune with the analysis that you were making and it does yes it does have an interesting relation to left accelerationism for sure it would be an interesting thing to put to them I mean I don't know whether you know Karim's willing to stand in as a kind of spokesperson for left accelerationism and respond to that respond to that suggestion
and how it how it fits um I don't know I just think that what you just said or I forget who pointed out that when you ask the question of what would you want with the state I believe that it's principle principally right ends and goals I think that in his mind destruction of the welfare state and destruction of democracy as is and saying that it's an obstruction to true freedom is ostensibly an extension of right-wing principles? Well, I mean it is for him, but my point I guess is that if you bracket away the ideological background then what you're left with is a practice that looks very much like some kind
of state-led development process. And of course you're right that it's not left-wing, but then in a sense this is a problem that left accelerationism has to deal with because that is what the rigorous form of their praxis looks like in my opinion. It looks something like the East Asian developmental state, for example, I think. I'm just saying I don't think you can bracket it away like that. I think you have to situate what people think in terms of ideology along with intentionality and him being situated so close to mold bug and obviously Trump makes me see his ideology as praxis in a particular way. Specifically since he has so much capital and is in a position to make so many decisions, it's the only way that I think it is plausible.
Yes of course but I guess the point here is that things never work out the way that people want them to. It may very well be and it is of course true that Thiel has some kind of right-wing background, but that doesn't have to mean that what he's proposing is some kind of inherently right-wing thing. This is why I keep bringing it back to this question of developmentalism, because you look at Park Chung-hee in South Korea, because I'm publishing an article on him at the moment, but Park Chung-hee had this very kind of peculiar, basically, understanding that he drew from Japanese fascism, and he wanted to construct a kind of fascist state. What he ended up doing was catapulting South Korea to becoming a developed nation, essentially the fastest growth in the history of the planet. But his actual project basically became irrelevant. After he died, it collapsed.
South Korea became a developed nation, but then the developmentalist project kind of obsolesced itself. That's kind of what I see might happen if you carry out this zero-to-one praxis, is that you get the zero-to-one moment, and then that whole ideological network, network, then, okay, its project is accomplished and then it decays and its kind of historical function is fulfilled. That's what I think happens, basically. I mean, I guess there's a whole sort of construction of American political and economic history that would see that as some kind of repetitive wave-like motion.
I mean, if you were to say, you know, you're obviously very far from a kind of standard Austrian economic viewpoint in saying this, but, you know, starting with Hamiltonianism, a certain sense of the usage of the American state in pushing forward technologies like the telegraph and the railroads and this sense of the state as a driver of infrastructure. projects in order to catalyze this techno-economic circuitry if you if you have this Promethean sense of politics as a kind of technological driver then I
guess you would constantly see these waves of you know progress and relapse of the kind that you've just said you you see in Korea and maybe there is a reading of what Teal's saying in this piece that is not a million miles from that that um that you know insofar as it succeeds it produces a it produces an economic surplus that that economic surplus is then haggled over by kind of redistributionist democratic politics it's basically absorbed through that process stripped out of its role as being a technological driver and then you reach
some sort of stagnation period that requires some kind of reboot, some actual crisis that allows you to redirect the social surplus back into this direction of infrastructure and technological stimulation. Which is also Marx's point about the waves, about the fact that you have these waves of progress and relapse, and that you need some kind of occasional crisis, which then, for him, resets the rate of profit. I think there's an interesting analogy here between Marx and right-wing kinds of developmentalism. Yeah. up I mean it's interesting you know what is the is there a story on the left
accelerationist side about how the the trade-off between invest infrastructure let's put it as crudely as possible infrastructure and welfare spending is to be negotiated you know because it surely can't be the case that we can just say you know it's all a kind of happy win-win there are no trade-offs you know we get our universal basic income we get lots of government directed technological process we can have it all and there's you know there's none of this there's none of this zero-sum nastiness there's no there's no sort of conflict over resource allocation to worry us.
I mean, that seems to me just pure utopianism. I mean, open to an argument against it, but I can't see how that can be a consistent or persuasive position. So it does require some story about how the kind of government infrastructure spending is not going to be bled off into these forms of welfare consumption i mean maybe it would come from higher taxes on
businesses and the wealthy i don't really know i don't know what the details would be but wouldn't wouldn't even that if you expand the pool oh well and good i mean but but there's the question of the internal i mean look there's a little story kind of beginning to emerge image here of of a certain kind of promethean status that that is peculiarly ambivalent between um you know a certain construction of right acceleration and and left acceleration and that that Promethean statism is faced by this kind of rhythmic historical tragedy of the bleeding off of
infrastructural investment spending, its kind of technological promotion role into redistributive welfare politics. so i don't i don't think that that you can't sort of resolve a tragedy of that that basic by simply saying well there's kind of untapped resources outside that we can just suck suck in and and and you know displace this forever i mean that seems to me um really unpersuasive especially if you know the the untapped economy is partly a kind of cybernetic function of the efficacy of this infrastructural technological stimulation and
and and you know where we're starting with this whole question about stagnationism is a situation where there's been a failure of radical technological innovation leading to this cascading stagnationary syndrome across the economy that precisely you know removes the the possibility of milking up free untapped economic resources from somewhere outside I think. I almost think the question could even be framed like without government in the picture and relate
a couple ways back to this course, i.e. what happens to take any kind of redistribution out of it, but just plain consumption in the marketplace and consumptive buying and how that relates to moving capital away from savings, i.e. investment, and how it all filters back around. I mean, I'm thinking about it in the context of where we left things last week in in terms of like the teleology of capital and how that might not work without kind of human consumption, you know, right at the center of wherever you start that diagram. Right. Yes, I mean, we're coming at a very different angle, but I agree it totally connects.
and and and teal's skepticism about the market and as seeing it as it as instead as this kind of horizontal plane of mimetic rivalry and and conflict sort of escalating to some kind of crisis obviously does link up from this from this with this other kind of formation that we've come that in the in another direction I mean consumerism Teal makes a very clean
break I think from this which is in itself refreshing I mean it's it's intrinsically you have to actually add things to his story to to make it a consumerist account and I think his his his sense of consumerism is in this sense tragic and even in this grandiose Christian kind of metaphysical sense tragic like one other twist of this that I saw in one of them kind of there's a whole set of quite interesting um journalism pieces on teal and and girard and medic desire and one of them at least even suggested that his own sense of trump is as this uh sacrificial king you
know that that i'm not going to say because it would be too crazily provocative or whatever that that he's seeing Trump as a Jesus, you know, a Christ-like figure to be sacrificed to appease this process of mimetic desire. That would be maybe too provocative. But he certainly, it was suggested in this article, kind of sees this kind of growing tension to this point of necessary collective sacrifice of some iconic figure. and that perhaps you know the role of Trump is to be this is to be this kind of phrases phrases sacrificed king so I thought that was definitely interesting
This is a little orthogonal and I'm not sure where it comes in relating to accelerationist politics as we've been discussing them, but just for the sake of, if we're considering stagnation, this period of stagnation as an empirical problem that to understand its relationship to capitalism, we want to consider other factors going into it. And Thiel mentions that the last time globalization contracted, it was the world wars. And so I was talking about in the sidebar that the wartime economy is one of the most extensive and great examples of this where a huge chunk of the American economy was just
rapidly converted and converted by public control on a temporary massive investment basis, goal-oriented, etc. And in the wake of, you know, I mean, that was, that bought us decades of prosperity as well. A lot of technological innovation came out of it. You know, nuclear weapons lead to the ability to have, you know, Keynesian mass spending, all of that sort of thing. You know, even Europe is laid waste to, but then the Marshall Plan comes in sort of like, you know, the middle class after the Black Plague, and you got stuff coming out of that and i'm just so if we're if what we're looking at is partially that because nuclear weapons have made the great land wars impossible and have diverted or have sort of like trapped military technological innovation and spending within this loop where
it's just feeding into itself growing into a complex you know built better and better and better jets you know is it is it just absolutely necessary that in this particular phase of of stagnation and that is due to a lack of this and contraction away from globalization. Do we need to have some equivalent of a World War II and of the kind, I mean, at bare minimum to get the state to be involved in a process of acceleration in some meaningful way at this juncture? Do we need something like a war? And if a great war is now impossible, then what are our alternatives and is that kind of a right-left question yes I don't know it's interesting for sure and
complicated I mean there's different ways you could approach that yeah I think I mean I just see whether other people have things to say right before before responding to it I think I have a really stupid question actually are there other organizations or technologies that are trying to divert crises of capital other than state powers I know that is really really vague and stupid well yeah when you say defer them I mean this is the sort of standard obviously australibertarian kind of notion of this is
that if you're going to divert all their spending, you want to divert it directly back into the private sector and reclaim it to the private sector by sort of slashing state expenditure generally. So I don't know whether that counts. You know, what's sort of obviously interesting about where I are now in this discussion and this whole issue of this, the role of the Promethean developmental state is the fact that the tension isn't on these classic lines. It's not about actually stripping money out of government and returning it to the private sector directly, but by reorienting state expenditure
back towards these hard infrastructural techno goals rather than to welfarist redistribution, which I take as a proxy for into political goals. You know, like if you're cynical about the state, and maybe there are people who want to defend a notion of the altruistic state, but if you don't accept that, then obviously this entitlement spending is about political positioning. you know it's the you that the use of state resources for political advantage and that would be the dynamic that depending on what which axis you're on
which of these you know for one that dynamic is simply one to to do with state expansion and and the and the sucking of resources out of the private sector into into government this that's something close to the the peter burke quote that we started off with um but it seems like whether or not teal can be identified with this there's something emerging in the discussion of him that is quite different and is to do with the kind of attention within the state from this role from this kind of heroic role of the developmental state to a kind of degenerate role as the political state
whose actions are totally governed by the sort of logic of the electoral popularity contest and is diverting all its resources into winning direct public acceptance through some kind of entitlement process rather than indirectly through infrastructure innovation technological promotion but sorry I feel I've just dropped Jake's point a little bit on this like I mean you see one point
on this Jake is like okay this Cohen who we haven't really been focused on particularly but I think that Teal in a less direct way says the same thing here sees that you know the economy and its growth rates and dynamics and all of these things to out of the exploitation of these fundamental technologies and and now actually i should be i should be more on my on the ball on this because cohen has a very definite list where he says you know these are the fundamental technologies of these particular epochs um things like for instance uh steam locomotion he says the only one you know
the reason that we have a great stagnation at the moment partly is because we just lack we only have one you know the previous epochs of um of growth had a had at least you know two or three of these fundamental uh drivers going on simultaneously electrification and the automobile simultaneously for instance whereas now everything is information technology is his argument that's the only sort of economically significant major technological um you know driver of recent decades and so the question to plug it on to your point is like um you know what is the story of military technology
when it's related to this um because you know what is the military technology okay yes it had a huge role in computing so we but we've agreed that that's there anyway um rocketry well you know what has rocketry done i mean it's maybe starting to get interesting now um but i don't think even in 2011 it would have been possible for even the most optimistic booster to say that you know rocket technology had been a big economic driver of post-war um post-war societies um you know and then you're on to i mean i suppose yeah maybe the jet engine
gets counted as a military which i don't know it's a genuine question for me nuclear power perhaps yeah no nuclear power I think is definitely the kind of counter example you're sort of referring to like definitely if that's you know one of the biggest or the technologies that had the biggest economic potential coming out of that were clearly you know wartime developments you know that would be one of them and it you know ever since three mile island And that hasn't been happening at all. What was I going to say? But I mean, so yes, the technological issue I think is definitely is the weakest, you know, other than the computer connection thing coming out of it. But like, you know, I mean, one thing was that the bomb making, you know, the huge amount
of chemical plant that was produced during the war, all of that was converted over to agricultural production afterwards. and that was like, you know, agricultural fertilizer production. And that was like worldwide and used sort of like the U.S. penetration via the world war into the, you know, it had an early globalization aspect. And, you know, also the, I guess, pumping cheap. I don't actually know if pumping cheap fertilizer into the American heartland was part of us becoming the breadbasket of the world, but it wouldn't surprise me. It was the origin of Monsanto, for example, which is another one of these. um sort of worldwide global and i guess like if what you're i guess what the implication of what you're saying is is that you know the war was a path maybe the path dependency of this first
phase of capitalism blooming and stagnating or whatever rather than being your rather than being like um an independent cause i guess an independent cause of the stagnation that we have to like screen out it's more a path dependency in the process of this technology that started in the 19th century sort of blooming and ossifying yes i mean it's a genuinely interesting question for sure i'm i mean i guess my if we take it back to this thing that you know several people have been raising i think in a really interesting way um you know and we and And we're on the kind of left-right accelerationism fissure here in a really intriguing way about
what is actually sort of imminent and transcendent in relation to the dynamic of capitalism, I'm taking that as a synonym for techno-capitalism, but it's a conflicted term as we see immediately. um so so from the from the classic right side of that um the the dynamic of capitalism is so intrinsically technological that you would expect you know the default expectation would be that this these technological drivers would be imminent um and and just very very crudely
it's you'd say as i think marx i think marx fully would be in this camp this is one of the the points that i think he would skew very strongly to the to the right end of things is that the the dynamic of industrial mechanization has a completely intrinsic capitalistic program to it which is to say that your variable capital outflow in terms of wages is your major competitive cost and and technology therefore is automatically directed towards the substitution of of wage
labor activities with machinery so you know and there's obviously you can construct this technological lineage as this series of substitutions of technological systems for human work processes you know and the standard discussions about luddism and and industrialization and the whole way the kind of textile industry sort of steadily went through this series of mechanical things throwing throwing various types of skilled textile labor all of that stuff would fit that story i think very well and but what's interesting here is that when you introduce this military factor that i'm not at all wanting to dismiss because i think it how it is very
persuasive in an interesting way but you are tending to skew over then to the left accelerationist side of the of the fissure it's perhaps a little bit ironically because you're saying that that the normal function of industrial capitalism is somehow uh inadequate as a as a as a to maximize maximize or maximally promote technological innovation and this extraneous factor that comes from intense military phase interstate competition provides this missing element you
know it sort of hugely accelerates technological development and and the fact it does so is a sign that this kind of level of state involvement in in armed competition between states is is introducing something that normal civilian capitalism was incapable of doing itself and so yeah it's a it's an interesting thing that you you could try to make the left accelerationist case against right accelerationism through this discussion of war technology in the state and it's I mean it it's it's obviously a very small step from the notion of the
Promethean state to the notion of the kind of heroic military and you know without wanting to be too crass about it but fascist a it seems it seems that you can make that transition fairly smoothly. Yeah, which is maybe the most important or the most practically salient upshot of the discussion is how thin that line and how related to developments in military-civilian relations and military-capitalist relations are to sort of like how this will go. you know it maybe the question is like or if our the real version of my earlier question then is
like what is the next path dependency that maybe that is the thing to be looking to but i also i wanted to say there's an interesting you know because we you know gerard has been so important but there's a definite like sacrifice mimesis sort of thing going on here where you have this enormous sacrifice of like normal commercial activity end of life and things like that And then you see this sort of process of technology originating. I'm not quite have the sort of structure of mimesis down, but like the production of technology that imitates death or something based on it and then spreads into other usages outside in the wake. My favorite example is neuroscience. There's this great book about the history of major discoveries, early discoveries in neuroscience.
and this guy makes the point that it has like a deep that every time it advances it's because you had some horrible injury that was unprecedented and the to study it and so like the idea of the notion of a phantom limb is noticed in the Civil War because it was the first time amputees like regularly lived and the ammunition used and it like shredded people's lives it was still the deadliest I mean I may have said this in a previous class we talked about this but the deadliest ammunition ever used in World War II, PTSD. And this whole behaviorist psychology, arguably, is made into World War II. Yeah. I mean, also, I think we could bring in the distinction
between a market economy as such and a market economy. Sorry, Hunter, I missed the grammar of that and wasn't expecting it to finish quite so soon. Can you just repeat the question? Sorry. You must have dropped down. Hunter, I don't know if we can hear you right now. Do you want to type it in the sidebar and one of us can read it? Is this very cryptic music coming from somewhere? I'm gonna do some...
That's my background to the dark ambient. yeah yeah I mean there's a there's a whole sorry I'm it's there's a lot going on the separate so it's hard to keep up I can see that there's a whole thread from Adam that I think is pretty interesting about this to do with emergence versus managerialism in these things which I do think yeah a lot of these tensions very interestingly and obviously I mean I was I was just trying to find some terms that um in carrying the same sort of baggage as left and right for as a starting
point right so so if you put you would put teal on the managerial side in this case because he seems to say that okay you need that you know drop that push to get over the next you know bit of stagnation or whatever um and you put alexander hamilton and you know lee kuan yu and you know uh you know probably nick sterncheck all in the same weird looking team um that way um versus like the importance of emergence or or it's right just um you know uh the degree to which you can be driven um with an executive sort of approach um essentially
yes totally agree i think this there is this kind of role of the hero isn't that in in that that as i think we've agreed is is a weird sort of resonance between teal and left acceleration i mean i i i i'm hoping it doesn't sound i think i hope that we've got beyond the point where that seems like an unfair thing i mean that that the that prometheus prometheus is the figure of the hero um so i mean whether or not one's talking about specific individual once talking at least about a heroic process that that is to be contrasted with this
kind of anonymous emergent processing of information by that by the market or by these catalactic processes distributed learning systems which which totally lacks and and in fact you know philosophically generates itself by systematically eliminating the heroic element you know I think the heroic element is the transcendent element in a certain construction of this you know and you'd almost you have a kind of critical a critical responsibility to traverse the circuit and de heroize it in order to kind of melt these points of kind of Promethean
vitality back down into into these distributed processes of emergence and and obviously teal goes the other way with that for sure yes If someone wants to talk about modism now, it seems super relevant.
you know, because I know some of this stuff about MUD not being anti-technology as such, but more worried about the social conditions of the workers and so on. So, you know, Vince or Joshua, if you know a bit more about it, more weighing and try and connect it, that would be practical. and you should prod Vincent he's got something on the sidebar that definitely suggests he has some cogent remarks on on love and love isn't to make I could you repeat the question I was just I was just seeing the stuff in the sidebar
that you and and Joshua were putting in there and it seems like a rich threat so it would be interesting to hear. I know, I mean, it's just a general point about Luddism that I think it's important. And I mean, my background is as a historian, so I tend to be kind of obsessed about being rigorous about history. The way that people talk about Luddism often doesn't bear that much resemblance to what it actually was as a historical phenomenon. And Stephen Jones has this great book, Against Technology, where he distinguishes, he actually traces it historically how it turned into this image that the original political movement became kind of unmoored from its historical reality and then became this kind of middle-class romantic image of smashing technology of kind of uh you know practical decelerationism almost which the
original kind of workers luddist movement wasn't really about it was about kind of protesting specifically people being made unemployed by technology but also wanting kind of to repurpose the new technology for their own purposes for the workers, which is a kind of left accelerationism almost 200 years before the letter, right? Right, sure. So it's just weird. I mean, I think, I don't know if you know who this person on Twitter, Uriello, he made a point about this. He said the fact that Ludism isn't actually what people think Ludism is, shows that there's never actually been a serious kind of coherent decelerationist political movement in this sense because people ultimately don't want us to just smash technology you know. I would actually say um uh sorry Nick I didn't mean to interrupt.
No no no it's fine for sure Zach go ahead yeah. Just what Vincent said this it jogged in memory um that there's never been kind of a decelerationist Luddite movement this is a bit obscure or maybe among this group it's not obscure but I think like 10 years ago, this French collective called Ticcun, T-I-Q-Q-U-N, published a piece called the, I think it was the Cybernetic Hypothesis or something like that. A brilliant piece. It was so good, I thought. It was a really stimulating bit of writing. But kind of fundamental to their praxis, basically. It was this almost Luddite type of argument framed within cybernetics. And before I say anything intelligent about it, I'd have to go back and read it. But one of the pieces that stuck with me was,
like, they basically recommend throwing noise into the system to, like, basically scramble signal type of feedback processing. I think ultimately, like, some of them maybe even acted on it, like they got busted for screwing with train schedules or something crazy like that. I don't really know where it was going, but it does seem like a modern-day kind of cybernetic Luddite type of movement. If anybody wants to pick up that piece, it's kind of fun. Yeah. I mean, Ted Kaxingst is obviously the example. I mean, I guess clearly not a movement. You know, it's the fact that he has to act purely through this kind of Dada terrorism is a sign that he lacks a movement. But the program definitely seems unambiguously decelerationist, doesn't it?
I forget the first sentence, whatever. a you know the industrial civilization has been a disaster for the planet and for mankind or something of that kind it's a it's he completely is clear that he's again against there I mean sorry if this seems a bit of a digression but is there any chance of getting a bit more about what this the true the actually historically real Luddite program was like when Vincent you're saying that they wanted to repurpose technology for the workers
what is there any thing that you can say that flesh that out a little bit or am I asking for too much I think I think you probably you'd probably have to go go back to the book I recommend it because it's not my it's not my historical field but yeah I think the point that Steven Jones makes is that if you look at what the Luddites actually were doing, I mean they didn't really have much of a coherent program that we know of because I mean they were workers, they didn't generally have this kind of access to printing, you know, literature and so on. But they had very kind of a tactical kind of approach. They didn't just smash technology willy-nilly, they made specific points with
the things that they destroyed like uh we destroyed this particular um mill or whatever to because it's unemploying right however many people but we'll leave alone these other things which have been kind of integrated and which haven't haven't made people kind of unemployed that kind of trying to get them to implement technology in a way that serves them rather than just kind of profit yeah I mean obviously it's difficult for me this because this is I'm probably just being kind of palio-marxist in taking this line that the only really solid index of whether this technology is industrially useful is if it's making
people unemployed oh I agree I agree so it must have been I mean the technology they left alone I'm assuming either they were misconstruing its function or it was in some sense intrinsically dysfunctional but it in either ways that if they just followed the program that you're saying they would necessarily be focusing on taking out the crucial links and doing and and optimizing the actual frustration of technological industrial development. You know, if you just say, look, we're just going to smash the machines that are most dramatically throwing people out of work,
then you're actually going to be smashing the machines that are really working. No, I think so. I mean, this is kind of Marx's, one of Marx's critiques against utopian socialism, in a way, and the Luddites were a kind of utopian socialist movement. I guess it's just important to separate that and then maybe you can ask whether this presents problems with left accelerationism, but separate that from the kind of radical decelerationist kind of impetus, which I guess you can identify maybe with things like some forms of Heideggerianism or whatever, which is something which is very different in my opinion. Right. Sure. Yeah. I mean do you think it's fair to summarize that as just saying that Luddism was essentially tactical?
Yes. yeah I mean I don't know what James's comment here fits in I mean I just can't even make sense of this I mean I don't know whether anyone else can James got this thing says they the laddites can find their attacks to manufacturers who use machines in what they called quote a fraudulent
and deceitful manner to get around standard labour practices it I mean what you know what does that mean other than just simply that effectively made people unemployed by automating industrial processes right okay so the Luddites theory was just that machine shouldn't substitute for labor but should increase the quality of of craft out yeah Well, and that issue of apprenticeships specifically is interesting because, I mean, I look at that and the one thing that stands out as like no way that was ever going to happen is apprenticeships required in order to run machines.
And then that's that issue of like, you know, human know-how or human capabilities and substitutions. So there's like not only if, you know, if machines are producing substitutions for various aspects of human behavior, then like in that light, you can look at capitalism as replacing or using that to replace the system of human knowledge transmission, you know, itself to machinize it by making more and easier, you know, things to use. and so the worker becomes you know proletarianized in in stiegler's terms which is another you know sacrifice mimesis dynamic because if you know you better lose it thing yes totally totally and and and teal in zero to one does have does have remarks that do connect with that quite interestingly
like he's got he's got some very interesting remarks about about uh restaurants you know which he says that it's a super competitive industry that it's generally kind of self-imposed as many scare quotes as you want exploitation but it's a stunning level of exploitation in terms of people's working hours low wages low profitability of those businesses you know and he's he's saying this is just like what a competitive marketplace looks like it's just screws everyone except in a certain sense the consumers of that of that business and so that does seem to kind of
weirdly yeah as you say that there's a bridge there between that the the the luddites are wanting a non-market driven mass consumerist model for technological absorption Yeah, definitely. And I think it's interesting to bring up restaurants at this particular juncture in economic history. Because I have a fair amount of experience working in them as one of those people. And it's just interesting that it's almost the last industry, really widespread industry left, it seems like, at least here, but I think a lot of other places too. That's kind of piratical. you know like if you know how to like serve or bartend or something like that like you can live
off of that and no and no more you can always find work like and anybody can do it you know you can murder somebody and you can work in a restaurant etc etc and then right around now i think we're in this place where like uber for food models combined with the fact that i mean I've heard from a number of people that the feds are just done with, with servers not paying taxes or do, you know, like taxation on tips, like not really happening. And that there's a, that's about to come to an end, like server wage and things like that in the next few years. And I think those things together, you know, I mean, like has the potential to just sort of like radically destroy this sort of existing replicative, hyper-competitive, piratical thing and replace it with something like much like lower personnel much more
algorithmic and you know i don't think there's trade-offs there's trade-offs they're like i wouldn't i understand his argument but like there's definitely a benefit from having a thing like restaurants i guess it's interesting to ask like what the what the next version is like where does the precariat go well when you say uber for food how developed is that model are there is it something that's kind of implemented in terms of companies in serious way yeah in new york just like in the last six months i guess is um something called meal pal went public which has like you know i don't know 200 something participating restaurants in in manhattan and
It's like you pay for a certain number of meals a month and they release like a menu of one item from all of these places the night before. And you like order and then you just like go and pick it up. You skip the line, all that sort of thing. And it's a flat six dollars, you know, is what each of the meals is worth. And I think once you combine that model with like automated delivery courier service, like whatever it is, which is also happening with like other widespread apps like Seamless and so forth. and you'd be even to the point of self-driving cars you have a point where like all you need is a kitchen right it's more a matter of kitchens all over the city pumping out food that goes in all different directions rather than you know like serve the restaurant as a model i think starts to like decay away it's just what i would so it's basically to do with eliminating
physical restaurant spaces and and restructure the whole industry increasingly as a delivery service is that the is that the core of the model or am i missing the yeah yeah no no it definitely is and i think it's also definitely driven by you know rising rent and real estate prices and so forth like in different and so it's definitely you know there's a city aspect to it like obviously this doesn't work so well in the midwest but i mean how big is the restaurant industry in the West anyway given population right yeah I'm not I don't know where that goes in terms of flowing back into our argument but it's it's definitely an interesting moment for that particular industries relationships you know technological acceleration and all this stuff.
Yes. Yes, it is interesting. So hello, Nick. Sorry, guys. I'm just going to interject for a second and say that we were eavesdropping on you here in Athens. I'm at the art institution called the State of Concept. And I did a bit of a presentation on what New Center is about. And I went over the whole Nick Lang controversy a little bit. And sorry for interrupting you. But we did not judge you. And we did not kind of like anything. We just watched like 10 minutes of the class. And thanks for letting us in. Thank you, Theodore, for letting us in. So what time is it in Athens? What time is it in Athens? It's 7 p.m. Oh, that's a nice, comfortable time, yes.
What time is it in Shanghai? Just go midnight. midnight okay so please don't please don't corrupt the mind of these young innocent people there okay and and I hope they give you enough enough challenges to make it all worse I'm going like yes yes and and hopefully we get to talk privately about the business of the new center at some point okay Sure, yeah. Have fun. You guys later. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Makes you think.
Is that an official news center no comment? No. That was a very fast reply, Theo. Don't get the into trouble Um So yeah, maybe we're where do you think we're at I think um oh, yeah, we're actually five minutes to
The end time, but we can go over people like oh Oh, are we okay? Well, whatever guys I know um yeah, that wasn't what I meant was more just like Is the restaurant discussion on a glide path or are we um? Do we need to do a kind of rejolt? if we want to read rilt there's a question I had That I tried to ask before I cut out Okay, great, yes. Do, sorry that you cut out. So it's about the distinction between private enterprise as such and private enterprise or market economy as such
and a market economy that's driven by consumer desires. So like one can imagine a state that encourages competition for government contracts, contracts for you know massive spending on technology um and like disincentivizing um maybe by means of uh high taxation uh orientation uh enterprise towards consumers um and like like
So it seems like in the MAP, part of the issue is the fact that we keep making more and more gadgets that people think they want without investing in enterprise in sort of a more fundamental way. and uh so yeah i i wanted to bring up that that's like you can have cat you can have a market and competition but that there's sort of the whole like consumer fantasy field right that is because again interestingly i do think teal has this point of resonance with this where he says uh sorry just give me one second
um but damn hang on sorry one second I think I'd have just search here we go so so he He says, the economic decoupling of computers from everything else leads to more questions than answers, and Bailey hints at the strange future where today's trends simply continue. Would supercomputers become powerful engines for the miraculous creation of wholly new forms of economic value? Obviously, this is what he likes. Or would they simply become powerful weapons for reshuffling existing structures for nature read in tooth and claw?
So this is his, you know, mimetic rivalry. more simply how does one measure the difference between progress and mere change how much is there of each now it's not that he's exactly a left accelerationist if that really needs to be emphasized but there obviously is kind of massive resonance between their rhetoric and teal's rhetoric in that paragraph isn't there i mean it just seems shockingly close um and exactly in the area that hunter's um pointing to um i mean this you know would they simply become
powerful weapons for reshuffling existing structure i think you could almost cut and paste you know this paragraph into the MAP and it wouldn't it would be invisible I mean it would so it would so just smooth into the language of that of that text that it would not be visible that you've crossed a transition there I mean Hunter please come back if you think I'm I'm dropping that the key to the point that you're wanting to make there
I mean so so when is I mean there's this um we were talking before about you know where would the money need to come from or like you know how could you have a universal basic income and also have massive government spending on technological innovation and um i think the the point i was making or the question i was trying to point to was um uh sort of shifting the topic to whether um whether capitalist enterprise feeds like consumer consumers sort
of imaginations and fantasies which is maybe not the most rational way for it to produce um but that but that like you could have maybe a universal basic income and then incentivize companies to produce these sort of larger industrial projects rather than be addressed to like the individual consumer. So... But are you saying that there is some centralized mechanism that decides on on the difference between essential and frivolous consumption that would substitute for the marketplace
as the milieu for that decision. Well, maybe like the consumers in the marketplace would actually be states. They would be, sorry I missed the last word, would be what? states like it would be like like contracts for for large projects like um does that not make any sense well it's sort of i don't know i think there's several different things going on at the same time like that because your starting point is this whole thing about um frivolous consumerism it's it's like it's like the the system generates these sets these desires that from some vantage point um is to be kind of uh derided um you know
that both left accelerationism and teal are deriding it from their different points of view you know teal's just saying it's mere change as opposed to progress that you know he's seeing it as in some sense this kind of um this degenerate form of production and obviously there's this kind of complementary critique of kind of facile consumerism on the left acceleration side um obviously i've got a problem with just well where is that where's the criterion for that distinction to be made i mean you know i can't believe Teal is suggesting that you're going to have a government bureau deciding the difference between, you know, what is actually valuable and worthless consumer desire.
um but i'm assuming the left accelerationist needs something like that they need some kind of political they need some kind of political body that's going to be able to sort of sift out good and bad uh modes of consumer satisfaction on hey or or or isn't the criticism completely empty if it if there's not a kind of possible practical response to it And wouldn't they also have to argue that, you know, kind of this frivolity, I mean, in some sense, anything outside of basic survival, you know, you could almost define as frivolity. But in fulfilling those needs, I mean, that is actually what drives a lot of technological
progress, you know, versus trying to solve, like, these hard science and computational problems for their own sake. I mean most of them have been basically knocked out over the decades as ways to streamline business operations for like I mean the most mundane things like all the innovations and logistics, IT etc. It's emerged out of that. Yes that's a good point that you can have a radical transformation of business processes with a completely arbitrary product and so the quality of the product needn't actually be relevant at all to the quality of the industrial
advance that is associated with that. I mean I don't know this is a kind of very I think it's a very foggy because it's so such an essential point really I can you know it's easy to deride the outcomes of consumerist preference and Peter Thiel does that in one way and the left accelerationist does it in another way but you know what actually is the alternative model that is being suggested and I don't really see one I mean teal has one of a kind which is that you don't try to change the consumer the structural consumer desire except by in this heroic
entrepreneurial way bringing something totally new onto the market and then that's I assumed like displacing displacing some significant chunk of what was there before I'm much less clear what the what this more straightforwardly left acceleration is solution next to that problem. Isn't this the same sort of problem of trying to measure the alleged stagnation in the first place? Because I mean how do you how do you decide whether there has been stagnation yeah I mean you know you feel has his you know we was it we
wanted flying cars but we got a hundred and fourteen characters or whatever you know but that's sort of putting it within a certain sort of value system of you know this this kind of promoting these this kind of businesses is good you know flying cars good you know Twitter social media social media useless yeah but you know according to what I mean yeah I don't know whether because we all agreed that there is a stagnation and I'm not it's a fantastic question really good and Teal asked a version of it himself I mean there is a response that
that just sidesteps it, which I'll make just to get it out of the way more than to derail what I think is your really good question, which is that you've just turned to income stagnation as the bottom line. I mean, the fact that I think there is this great stagnation discourse because wages in America have been flat now for decades. There's this collapse of the basic sort of upward path of wages in America that I think is the kind of clunky bottom line of that that avoids difficult value judgments.
but but I think that your question is is absolutely right and I agree I think Teal you just take him but I think you know without wanting to over egg and putting on this I think that there are these resonances between Teal and the left accelerationist on this kind of thing and and for sure he is utterly dismissive and Cohen too in a way of the internet of all of the all of the consumer surplus that have come out of the internet um he thinks is basically you know of marginal value compared to these previous waves of um technological progress
which is i would have thought weird um but that's just me i guess not just me but yeah it does seem weirdly myopic you know like sort of like hypnotized by the smartphone era or the first smartphone era where it's all you know attentional costs but very little attentional like gain and attentional mechanisms um you know because i mean obviously the enormous promise of this is the ability to um to amplify cognitive activity and since that's not mostly not been what's happening because you know you hand a monkey a phone um you know it's going to play pop the balloon or whatever those stupid games are but like that you know doesn't necessarily last with like machine learning and personal analytics and smart assistants yeah that could
change yes i mean i'm hoping sorry sorry i was just gonna oh sorry i was gonna say that um the The statistics on this technological stagnation, I've tried to find quantitative evidence for it, and it's pretty hard to. I mean, for instance, the US research budget as a percentage of the total federal budget has actually been about the same for the last almost 40 years now. So that hasn't really changed very much. um the only thing that might have changed is that there's been somewhat less government investment in very large research facilities right so there might be a stagnation there but i'm not convinced that there's statistical evidence for a general technological stagnation or that the state has
somehow relinquished its entrepreneurial role um i don't know i think there's a whole cluster of different questions there all of interesting but they're sort of detachable like you know on the On the one hand, there's this question about the role of the state, which you end up with on the question, and, you know, government infrastructural spending and primary research. But Theo, I know, taking it in the other direction, he thinks that scientific productivity has fallen off a cliff. Now, I wish I could remember where this was. Maybe other people who've been looking at this stuff recently can remember. But I think he thinks that there's been like a two or more orders of decimal
magnitude collapse of scientific productivity in in the United States so you know so let irrespective I mean just hypothetically let's say there's something to that it would make trying to use budget figures as a valuable metric completely yeah I mean Vince is definitely right to say it's not a all a settled question but there is a fair bit of evidence and there is a fair bit of discussion in the economics profession around why are we in this low growth state and how do we get out that's there's a lot of very engaged mainstream
economists in that and it's not purely about income stagnation it's also about very low GDP growth there's there is empirical evidence of dropped investment by private companies in the US like not actually as much reinvestment going on so using the ATM of the stock market And you know, there's these discussions about secular stagnation and so on. There's a whole six or seven reasons. Is it a kind of long debt hangover where when you have, you know, a recession or depression caused by, you know, the end of a debt bubble that that causes a permanent, you know, multi-decade
difference in behavior in the market that there's a whole argument about Japan and whether that's what the US is going through where you're saving more instead of investing more. I mean that's very current in the economic profession but it's not a settled question basically because it's so hard to measure all of these things all of the time. Can I interrupt here in respect to Thiel in particular because it seems to me that a lot of the things that quantitatively do represent kind of obvious stagnation in some sense, particularly the fall in global trade which has been measured over the last kind of two years which is basically unprecedented. That's not actually a problem for TEAL because TEAL sees globalization as such as just a kind of multiplicative process which isn't really, it doesn't represent substantive
progress for him. So in a weird way the stuff that we can actually measure as being some kind of economic stagnation. For Teal that's just a kind of impetus, that's not the thing that he sees as the problem I think. So the question then becomes what is the problem and how can we really measure this which I don't think it has necessarily been answered very well. No it's still and it is a really difficult serious question because all your obvious metrics end up being in some way questionable. Like let's say like Adam saying you go to business investment but business investment is not really telling you anything unless you know how productive that investment is being you can be in a stagnationary state that is absorbing huge amounts of business investment and
producing a really low return on it you know it's not actually part of some explosive techno economic dynamic so so you know even when you think you've got fairly solid economic criteria and it tends to kind of pour out between your fingers I think in this question a lot and on the other side you know notoriously the internet is just bad at monetizing itself you know people it's very hard to actually get positive revenue flow from an internet business But the amount of consumer utility of the Internet is obviously completely disengaged from that.
So people just are, in terms of the amount of Internet content they're consuming every day, is utterly vast. As a sort of anthropological transformation, it's almost without precedent. you know people just constantly plugged into their mobile phones that this is what their life is just you know eight hours a day of internet immersion the fact that you can't put a monetary figure on that it seems a bit of a leap to then say well what's being produced I mean what's being produced is this massive transformation in the basic functioning of the human organism almost you know comparable only with the emergence of mass literacy or something.
You can also bring it back to Marx's argument about the rate of profit because Marx argues that it's actually where the moments where it becomes most difficult to get profit that's when you find the kind of highest speed of innovation. And the internet might be something like that. Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, I mean, it's a standard thing of then of subsequent wave theory, too, that the trough is the period of technological innovation. because all the resources that are required for technological development are crash in price, devalued as a kind of industrial environment.
It's vastly superior to the kind of highly inflated boom era time where money is expensive, equipment plant is expensive, labor is expensive everything costs a lot and so it's a very difficult time to innovate whereas you kind of bottom feeding in a trough you can do all kinds of stuff really cheaply and i and i i think i mean that's just that sounds just like a theory but i i think when you sort of track when these waves of innovations happen they tend to be much more markedly trough phenomena than peak phenomena. For the last several decades, that's absolutely true,
like empirically, corporate profits, you know, kind of following like those early IT innovations in the 70s and 80s, they spiked during the 90s. There was a further kind of spike in corporate profits actually like just right after the financial crisis, I think probably as they laid off like zero marginal product workers and things like that. Yeah. So in terms of like Teal's really negative opinion of scientific productivity recently, is that just like an across the board thing? Does he include like biology and biotechnology in that? Or is it just like, I mean, physics, it's kind of inarguable or longstanding, but yeah. Okay. Does he have comments specifically on biotechnology?
Like he sort of just blew past it in the interview that I was reading. yes he i think he blows past it a bit but i think as a venture capitalist he just feels that he's got a pretty good sense of the companies that you can stick money into and that biotech plays are just not very you know there's just not a big asset class there you know so i think just he's It's coming from the place of someone who wants to stick money into exciting, potentially profitable technological businesses and is just finding it hard to find stuff to invest in. Right, okay, I got that.
Do you buy into the sort of spreading conspiracy theory worry that China is going to be so ahead on using CRISPR because of a greater ability to relax ethical constraints quietly as needed in terms of developing a smarter, developmentally enhanced generation, a generation or half a generation ahead of the West because of our taboos about genetic engineering? like do you think that that's there's something there what I think it's definitely at least an interesting thought and and I think um obviously Teal's argument which he sort of doesn't emphasize but he states it clearly enough that you can't miss it that regulatory sclerosis is what has
basically brought a lot of these things to a halt I think the American medical field is an absolutely classic example of that you know the role of the fda in just increasing the price of drugs and the and how much it costs to bring a new drug to market is absolutely fantastic um and so if there is going to be an epoch of regulatory arbitrage we would see whether you know how much this criticism is is true I mean I I would certainly expect I think it is surely just inevitable that if people are prepared to take more public
health risks they will accelerate the speed of innovation in these fields and so there's a political trade-off there which may be different societies will will weigh in different ways about how you know what you're prepared to see in terms of public hazard in exchange for highly accelerated innovation. I think there's, again, an assumption in lots of societies up to this point, you know, under the kind of American example that basically people will pay almost anything to squeeze out some marginal residue of social risk,
that there's just simply no level of social risk that is ultimately acceptable, public health risk or whatever, transport risk or whatever field you're talking about. That seems to me just simply economically impossible. And I don't think there's a very good price discovery system for that at the moment. Okay, and so the implication then from sort of like an NRX angle is that because that is an inevitable feature of large collective decision-making processes, you know, with regards to this risk acceleration trade-off, the democracies are at a fundamental sort of like inimitable disadvantage relative potentially to other state formations because they'll always make the risk-averse collective choice.
I don't know. That's an interesting suggestion. and it's definitely not one that I would immediately be inclined to resist I mean it's not necessarily clear that for instance either there are there are on one level the issues about sensitivity to public pressure and that's and that is not restricted to democracies obviously the thing that would really limit it is regime diversity you know so I mean if people with deep misgivings about the the public policy of their own society felt extremely mobile and are able to go
into a into a kind of jurisdiction that better reflected their own balance of preference vis-a-vis the the innovation security trade are then there would be less there would be less pressure on those regimes willing to kind of set the bar high in the innovation direction to to moderate their policy stance So, I mean, I'm just saying I would put much more weight on regime diversity than any particular kind of internal regime structure in this respect. I think, for instance, China, being the size it is, is likely to be an inhibition in itself,
and you're likely to see much more turbo growth in these things in smaller satellites in Hong Kong and off the coast, various types of special economic zones, and in the wider Sinosphere, then, probably on mainland China itself. right that makes sense and maybe we're just continuing to go too far afield here but like how is the sez in hong kong or i guess all of hong kong is it is it fairly independent in terms of technological regulation like i would think very much so is it's the formal status of it is what's called a semi uh not semi a special autonomous region an sar um and there's a number of these
sar's around hong kong is obviously interesting because it's so highly functional but i think uh that formally speaking tibet for instance is also an sar um yes well if james just says hong kong and macau macau's macau's a little bit sleepier than hong kong so it doesn't get quite onto the same thing but both of them obviously are much more turbo charge then and Tibet and to the Tibet category might be slightly different but it's close I think my first order guess is this saying I mean the problem now with China though is that the Chinese state under Xi Jinping basically doesn't like these things because in many ways
Xi Jinping is a kind of old-school Maoist and he has kind of negative opinions about what's going on in all these special economic zones he's reasserted the need for state leadership of the economy so i think you're probably right that the very size of china and its kind of contradictory traditions are going to be a problem in this sense yeah yeah but but there definitely is at the moment even in the mainland a vastly more relaxed attitude to for instance biotech regulation just through the fact that there's a lack of these cultural inhibitions there's a kind of ick factor in the west that is totally missing you know so you go to some biotech company in shenzhen and they'll show you they've got miniaturized luminous pigs
you know aren't these cute um they have no sense that you're going to say what the hell are you doing you know this is an abomination against the lord that i'm seeing in front of me here you know they're just there's a complete lack of that cultural kind of resistance to these kind of developments so even if there are you know structural factors to do with the size of the country and its degree of authoritarianism and its willingness to try and guide private industry what's lacking is the um is this kind of natural cultural disposition to to be offended by these biotechnological radical biotechnological innovations I think so and that's got quite a lot
of mileage in it in terms of what I think there's a lot of things that Westerners think are inherently deeply controversial that would just pass without a nod in China right now it seems like some interesting questions fall out of this as you you know push that question to its limit like the idea of risk aversion. So in the age of autonomous capital, if it ever becomes a thing, it seems like right now the assumption within the unconstrained accelerationism is almost like, I don't really know how to frame it, but basically no risk aversion and just letting things run wild. But for the individual entity or whatever
the agent is within that system, like probably something is going to emerge just by virtue of like, you know, to use some gambling terminology like the Kelly criterion. You know, if your variance as an entity is too high, you know, you run up against a risk of ruin that might become unacceptable to you. Right, right. You know, just globally, how these kind of things end up playing out would be very interesting to start thinking through. Yes, definitely. yeah i i think i what i maybe this is kind of almost a kind of utopian thing on my part so i'm very open to push back about it but but i suspect that there's a lot of global dynamics
at the moment that result in the loss of a kind of implicit consensus on the natural level of tolerable risk you know I kind of see it just disintegrating much more and becoming becoming more open to price discovery being more open to kind of regime variation and to and and and more optional because I think there's almost at the moment the kind of you know there's certainly where you can construct a kind of core Western socio-political tradition that leads to a
notion of sort of minimalized risk as something very close to human right you know where you just it's not even a question that someone could legitimately choose it you know and so libertarians have obviously always been outliers on on this but a lot of their positions have just been so far outside the kind of ethical ethical mainstream as to kind of be amusing to people um um and it doesn't seem to me that there's any reason why that sort of construction of of a kind of a default a very strong default
to the minimization of risk that's treated as something that is really almost beyond serious question that what is holding that together you know other than a kind of transient cultural hegemony that that that has been sort of installed in in the kind of west directed globalization process. I guess if that if that risk is is minimized it becomes it becomes indistinguishable from stagnation simply by being imperceptible or something it can't be anticipated it can't be felt so I was thinking about
the idea of stagnation in other registers other than in the economic and I don't know just thinking about it as something that's experience you know is about the experience directly or indirectly of change sorry that's that's that's that's more than I more than I think I intended to say but no no so I think you need to say a little bit more I guess some somewhere I was thinking that the the the experience of stagnation is is is a might be considered as a in in different time frames so rather than
the geopolitical is it it's linked to a there's a kind of stagnation that's chrono political let's say yeah I mean that sounds like a very plausible thesis but and it's a great sentence and I'm not sure that I'm fully getting I partly because my brain is taking this in a certain line that I don't think is the is the line that you're wanting to to take it down necessarily okay so when you say that um um sorry sorry make sure i've got it right the experience of stagnation is chronopolitical is that am i am i quoting you right or i think i think i mean i certainly said those words whether
i said them in the same and and and that that's the front them together in that in that way is is It's you know, it's probably debatable and as usual it's a once-only performance I'm not sure I can put them together that way again myself. I think I think it's You were talking about I think you were talking about The the reduction of risk and this this this being linked to Certainly the map the management of risk in the way that futurology and future futures forecasting has developed is shifted its terminology to one of the kind of management of risk and its anticipation, the anticipation of risk. So I guess the point that or the
ideas that came to me or came through me or something were really about how if that if that if that becomes so imperceptible you know that that that that reduction of in the management of risk becomes so minimized or is so controlled that the stagnation becomes it becomes indistinguishable from from that managed situation yes and it may be that maybe the subtext of a lot of this and of this whole week's material is is very close to that you know that a whole
set of social processes that just look like social risk management on uncontroversial grounds actually leads to a stagnation re-social dynamic and then to a crisis and that we're sort of in the crisis of that now you know we've that with the culmination of this process that seems from a certain point of view completely uncontroversial and maybe even just simply humanitarian of successively identifying zones of social risk and and and and legislatively and regulatory uh squeezing out that that that risk has led
um inseparably to this kind of process of economic stagnation that then triggers a political crisis um of the kind that as i say i think peter teal really captures extremely well when he says you know when you have this kind of low to zero growth environment then all political audience becomes zero sum and so they become extremely savage so there's a kind of tragic irony to the whole thing that you produce this extremely dangerous socio-political environment through the attempt to actually do the opposite and to it to successively to rationally in a
humanitarian fashion eliminate social danger I don't know whether I'm anywhere near where you where you were wanting to go with your chronic politics I think I just need to take a bit of time to think it through before before next week to be honest I think it's just what I'm getting out of out of today rather than anything I can add to today I mean, one question is, is political time stagnating? Because it seems to me from a kind of political history perspective that actually it's almost
the opposite that it's accelerating. The whole kind of end of history liberal political structure was put in place basically to pass politics from developing in the direction in which it developed in the 1920s and 1930s and so in a weird way they kind of this reset the clock back to 1900 in a weird way and now we're starting again so i guess you could always look at it i mean i don't know if this is almost some kind of sophisticated understanding of acceleration but politics seems to be accelerating if other things a lot at least no i think that's right but but i wonder how much how recent that is whether the there's a you know phenomenon is a difficult word because it takes us in these different directions
at the same time but if you see the the phenomenon of political acceleration in some such kind of scientific sense as the actual process political acceleration might be deeply rooted But I think it's only perceived as something that is massively and terrifyingly accelerating very recently. You know, I think Trump is obviously the key symptom, but I don't think you can push it back much before then. You know, if you go back even to the beginning of 2016, it's like maybe people begin to feel something weird is happening, but it's not there's not some strong sense and in fact there's there's another what see what had seemed to be the current that is the very word neoliberalism was meant to designate of a kind of
entropic convergence of all political tendencies on a kind of um on a kind of neoliberal social democracy system you know what i mean that that you'd have most you either have a left-wing party in power that was basically focused on market reforms or you'd have a right-wing party in power that was kind of obsessed with compassionate conservative and increasing entitlement spend and and the the the political spectrum had seemed to completely uh disappear in some respects you you know, and lots of frustration on the left and the right about that. But I think also with a great sense of impotence on both sides, of just thinking that it's nothing that could stop this horrible sludge monster in the middle
that obviously both sides hated for different aspects of itself. And so I guess what I'm saying is that it certainly didn't look like political acceleration. like it was in fact some heat death of politics that was happening in that yeah and i mean there's a funny story here with the kind of return of the repressed of of post-war embedded liberalism if you like that and um in the kind of 1960s 1950s when people came up with this idea of populism they basically created a set of things which they defined the liberal order against and what's happened weirdly in the last very recently like you say in the last two years is that all of the the things that they designated, they suddenly came together and emerged as this monster of populism
which didn't exist at the time that they designated it. They created the very thing, destroyed them, or is destroying them now. So the gates have kind of broken. The question is just why is this happening? I suspect that there is a technological element to it in terms of technologies, political mobilization and that sort of stuff. So you could maybe say that the acceleration has kind of moved into a different sphere, and it's still a kind of technomic process. ways in terms of politics yes this is interesting and i think again teal is a fascinating figure like this because he is weirdly amphibious isn't he between these two zones and you could you can have a reading of him that's that's predominantly libertarian economic or you can have a reading of
that's predominantly mashevelian political and both of them clearly get at some substantial part of the phenomenon there it takes back to some extent too to like almost a measurement problem um you know we're talking about like is gdp really measuring what's going on you know within the political scene it's almost like we had this cascade in the last few years that You know the dam just broke loose, but all along if we had more, you know calibrated type of measurement equipment would we perceive this? acceleration or you know maybe accelerating acceleration as and as like a linear type of trend through time on Yes, I mean it's interesting what even remotely is the is the metric there, you know
Because there's probably a few that people might suggest isn't there one that obviously comes up a lot on the on the right side of the discussion in particular is this whole thing about the Overton window you know where there's a there's a particular zone of acceptable political opinion that can be shifted leftwards or rightwards or in other ways modified and so some kind of traumatic shattering of the Overton window is certainly one way of kind of describing what's happened in very recent years I think but I don't know whether there's a more long-term and in a way more kind of materialist metric that we can use for this process
Well, I mean, the fairly obvious one, to me at least, and this is like, you know, it's a metric that by the very fact that it works, you know, as a metric for what we're talking about is sort of what defines this era. And similar to what I was saying about Brexit a few weeks ago, you know, defines its blind spot and collapse, which is like the movement of money and advertising purchases, because Because that's what is the last few elections of the 90s in this century. It's completely dictated. The election is nothing other than a mass advertising reality TV platform that has had more and more and more private money circulating, especially at Citizens United, obviously. That's your metric right there. So what happened?
A bunch of people with all of that money, instead of rent-seeking, decided they were going to blow up the ship. I mean, more or less. well there's that and but but also i think it takes us back to this question about the internet and measuring internet in terms of productivity and the fact that a lot of that spending just seems to have been totally ineffective in the last cycle doesn't it i mean you know i don't know to what extent this is the uh you know i don't i'm not wanting to put this as a hard fact in in the the sense that I'm sure those people can can dispute this but it at least is a narrative that the totally unexpected side of the brexit vote and then the Trump vote was that the normal calculations of kind of efficiency of
political spending had just become broken because of the internet and all kinds of sort of to use vincent's to like processes political mobilization that were happening on the internet or in these yeah through these distributed channels were having this vastly disproportionate effect and kind of minimal cost compared to the kind of what had been seen as the kind of traditional traditional broadcast channels or whatever right like money relationship gets ran yeah yeah definitely I mean it's it obviously also our current yes sorry sorry I was just gonna say I think there's also a
kind of Foucault point here about how when you think about technological acceleration you also have to think about maybe the acceleration of social technologies in the sense that Foucault uses the term as well as material technologies if that makes sense I don't know if it does but yes well the very fact the word mean has undergone this phase transition exactly in this period house now I mean you know you could do a lot just tracing the history of that word but it but it's but it had tended I think to to decay you know and had been this there's been some sort of papers that had been trying to discredit its kind of value as a scientific term and you know debunk it and I think it was a
term and sort of a process of slow eclipse and then suddenly it becomes re-energized in this predominantly vulgar sense I mean I don't think most people using the word mean now a packaging into that any particularly rigorous understanding of what Dawkins and and and those mean theorists had wanted to put into it but for sure it's just it's not become senseless I mean it's still it still means something and in certain sense means more than it ever has like it's it's become so it's becoming vulnerable to a certain kind of
empirical criticism now I think if someone said you know memes don't exist or you know memes aren't real or memes don't really work I mean it would be people would just gape with incomprehension because because it's like saying you know sentences don't work or something it just doesn't we wouldn't register with people anymore now just random side note also I think you know one of the great prophets of our era is Charlie Strauss and I just remember like sort of early in accelerando and he talks about the internet
most of the internet having been flattened by successive semiotic jihads like i mean that is just right now in a nutshell and you can you know because suit is especially more like you know there's been a meme going around lately in the proper sense of you know about like doxing congressmen and doxing you know like corporate leaders who fund this and that and you know the line between or the there's an obvious unity of that with like ddos attacks and like as soon as stuff starts coming together and it's not the semiotic warfare is more than just talking at each other you know i could i could definitely need that yeah definitely yeah yeah um okay like my inclination guys is to is just is to say that we've reached
the end of this um phase what do you what do you think maybe we can we can take some of this as a as a jump off point i know i mean my inclination was to do another kind of um to roughly be in the space of stagnationism next time but maybe this whole this where we are now with memes if that can be spun into something might be a good sort of thread in specifically to next week's discussion. I'm not sure. Sounds good to me.
Yeah, we're about 20 minutes over now. Is there, does anyone have a point that they're going to just bust a blood vessel if they don't make now? Okay, I'm going to take that as compliance there. So thanks everybody and hope to see you all next Sunday. Sounds good. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye.