The Concept of Acceleration (Session 5)

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 um rehearse and reproduce a lot of the questions

that we've been sort of creeping away into in the previous four weeks um So, I think it's utterly banal and uncontroversial to the point of banality to say that the financial crisis of 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 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 ultimately to be 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 or technological explosion 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 or at least some of them um 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 is 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 um is tyler cohen's book the great stagnation which was which was published in january 2011 um i'm not going to get hugely into it now because I want to mainly move on to Peter Teer's argument. Perhaps we can look at his arguments more closely either later today or down the road a little bit.

But I would like to quote a remark by Peter Burtke on his blog Coordination Problem about Cohen's book. which I'll put in a sidebar. Because I think that it is extremely relevant to a sense of what 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 burke 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 the 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 an apparent chase after 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 um that government within within capitalist modernity is functional for capitalism broadly speaking um we're seeing something much more the libertarian case is much more that government in this period is compensatory in relation to and at a certain point actually threatens to significantly cancel the 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 teal now this his essays also it's from october 2011 so it's not much later it's basically uh there's a just a very compact wave of this this kind of material are happening in 2011 and he I think has some connected but distinct ideas about what is causing the great the great stagnation to Tyler Cohn but both of

them share quite a lot they both share the fact that 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 in terms of what he says about money um maybe i should even just try and quickly find that. Sorry, one second.

um 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 is 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

diversified as radio movies aeronautics household appliances polymer chemistry and secondary oil recovery in spite of their many mistakes the new dealers 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 takeover of the financial and monetary system, in particular by government. them 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 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 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 concord in 2003 to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post 9 11 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 um now there's lots of things that could be said about

this paragraph my interest in it particularly is how um it really locks onto the uh map which is which actually is written two years later um in this question of of speed and the fact that um the move that Teal makes from in this thing that consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration it weirdly sort of mirrors and echoes that this move made in the MAP for saying oh right accelerationism simply confuses acceleration with speed I think brain mere braindead speed I think is the exact is the exact quote and we shouldn't perhaps get completely lost

back in this question again but obviously Thiel is saying that that the collapse of actual transport velocity is is a relevant index of what he sees as this deceleration process into into profound stagnation um and one more quote from him which i think is very important for the contemporary relevance of this like this is obviously this is 2011 so it's it's uh basically five years before the 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 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 see a certain prophetic element in that paragraph um you know as a sort of as a one paragraph introduction to the kind of place

we've we've come to i think it would be hard to beat and obviously there's very different um interpretations of 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 outside monologue mode i'd obviously like to thank this is it's zach who um pushed us onto this and i i think it was extremely helpful thing to do Thank you.

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 which is missing in the examples 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 it that's a great thing actually Derek I

sorry if you have more they don't let me interrupt no 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 because because i haven't really uh 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 um oblique line into our into our questions about acceleration but i think it's but what you're saying i think does 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 horizontal and vertical axis and now obviously this language again

it has these echoes in left accelerations and but I think they're very distinct if people think they can join these two these two vocabularies up together then that would be great I think they just it's just a kind of a kind of chance echo rather than anything more substantial because for Teal it it seems almost everything comes from his reading of René Girard and it's a really fascinating he really does do something interesting and important with Girard I think it 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. So it's basically that the value of any object is how much is valued by other people, and that this has an intrinsic contagious dynamic to it that sort of spreads across the social field. You know, it has a kind of, this is not a language that Peter Thiel 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 um uh is uh actually short-circuited and and sort of restored back to some kind of ground state is through an act of of sacrifice of some scapegoat who 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 fraser's in the golden bow type of construction that's I think very big for Girard and obviously in the in the Christian passion there's a similar model of this and so this is the this is horizontality 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 uh 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, the social dynamic that spreads out across the whole world. And everything about this dynamic he's deeply suspicious about because he thinks it does lead to this escalation of violence that requires some act of sacrifice. And 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 thinks competitive economics are disastrous. He doesn't, you know, competitive free markets for Teal are constantly read 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 axis 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 some um hey nick we we just uh lost you for a little bit whole thing is not it you know um to 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 treat the slightest amount of libertarian to prepare and Without wanting to I think there's a whole lot of complicated things around this and they put one This can you hear me?

Yeah, sorry sorry to interrupt the there's just quite a bit of lag I think Can you can you hear me? Sorry, have I got some connection? Okay, I think Nick's just going to log out and try and come back in. Just one minute.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. 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. 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, wouldn't it be against his kind of libertarian impulses? and you can see that perhaps that there's this month about the attempt to this axis of horizontal you know that axis of globalism market competition um untrammeled sweeping ever expanded memetic

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 uh 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 T1 I think it does a lot of work in this in this framework you Hi, do you think teal has any connection to nrx?

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 colloquium was I think very influential so that that's just one intellectual link I mean obviously this very famous sentence him where he's saying I can I no longer can see democracy and liberty as compatible i think was almost a kind of mantra for for the initial um the initial wave of 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 teal at all but whether peter teal and um curtis yavin have some communication i 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 questionnaire 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 mold bug is that we that I mentioned him and there has been a tiny amount of like uh encrypted blog commentary back and forth but i mean i've never spoken to him

are we you know um so it's an extremely tenuous relation on that level of social connection it's it's a one-way um philosophical connection i think more than anything else um 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 Thiel 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 and enriched by them I would say maybe to throw out maybe um 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 the statement from the m.a.p basically What was it like the future must be created or they said it more eloquently? But you know in a nutshell that's that's almost Peter Thiel's entire shtick the last few years Like this non-deterministic conception right the future I'll leave it there rather than rambling Okay, I thought you can make two though have I missed one? I mean that's a that's a good Point with it is am I missing two parts to that or

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. 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 accelerationist 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 accelerationism 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 he's wanting to he's redefining capitalism but he's definitely making this zero to one movement something that he wants to put at the very heart of capitalism um 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 de la zinquatarian coming out of bradel's historical work teal just seems to invert that and and you know accepts the the uh separability of markets and capitalism and says that markets are basically there to to uh wreck capitalism and you want to save 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 it's a real out of the blue oblique kind of a move to make i think um but having said that yes i don't know what to make about the claim there um i mean you see what does he what do you think teal expects from the state if you let's let's let's try and construct a certain kind of model of like teal the mashavellian genius who really has close you know access to to trump's ear and to the inner workings of the administration and can push it in certain direction what do you think it is that he would want the state to do i mean practically i guess for for him it's a question of uh

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 that 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 and the plan which I think oddly is 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 but it's done by 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 little 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 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 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 with you'll want with the state i believe that it's principle principally right ends and goals i think that in his mind uh destruction of the say welfare straight 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 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 Moldbug, 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.

Well 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 Teal has some kind of right-wing background, 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, which is, you know, 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 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 uh ideological network then okay its project is accomplished and then it decays and it's it's kind of historical function is fulfilled that's what i think happens basically i mean well i guess there's a whole sort of construction of um 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 start starting with hamiltonianism um a certain sense of uh of the usage of the american state in pushing forward technologies like the telegraph and the railroads and this and this sense of the of the state as a driver of infrastructure projects um in order to catalyze this techno-economic circuitry if if you if you have this um promethean sense of of politics as a kind of technological uh driver then i guess you would constantly see these waves of um 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 um it's basically absorbed through that process stripped out of its role as being a kind of technological driver and then you reach some sort of stagnationist period that requires some kind of reboot some actual crisis

that allows you to redirect the social surplus back into this kind of 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. 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'm 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 infrastructure investment spending its kind of technological promotion role into redistributive welfare politics so I

I don't think that you can't sort of resolve a tragedy of that basic by simply saying, well, there's kind of untapped resources outside that we can just suck in and displace this forever. I mean, that seems to me really unpersuasive, especially if 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 ie you know what happens to take any kind of like redistribution out of it, but like just plain consumption in the marketplace and consumptive buying and

how that relates to, you know, 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 kind of where we left things last week in terms of like the teleology of capital and how that might not work without kind of human consumption, you know right right at the center 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 at in the in another direction um 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 um 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 gerard 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 he's seeing trump as a as a jesus you know a christ-like

figure to be sort of sacrificed with peas this this process of mimetic side that that would be that would be maybe too provocative but but he certainly it was suggesting this article kind of sees this kind of growing tension to to this point of necessary collective sacrifice of some iconic 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 you know where it comes in relating to you know acceleration as politics as we've been discussing them but just like for the sake if we're considering you know stagnation for 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 Teal 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, you know, on a temporary massive investment basis,

goal oriented, et cetera. 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 sort of where 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 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 to get the state to be involved in a process of acceleration in some meaningful way at this juncture do we need something like war and if a great war is now impossible then what is 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 big and stupid well yeah when you say divert them i mean this is the sort of standard um 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 this slashing state expenditure generally so i don't know whether that counts um you know what's sort of obviously interesting about where i are now in this discussion and and this whole issue of this the the role the role of the promethean developmental state is the fact that the 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

into political goals you know like if you're cynical about the state and i'm going to 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 um positioning you know it's the you the 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 a kind of degenerate role of as the political state whose actions are totally governed by the sort of logic of the public the electoral popularity contest and is diverting all its resources into winning direct public acceptance through some kind of um 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 colon 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 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 And, 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 growth had at least, you know, two or three of these fundamental drivers going on simultaneously. Electrification and the automobile simultaneously, for instance, whereas now everything is information technology.

here 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 i think is definitely the kind of counter example you're sort of referring to like definitely 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 um that hasn't been happening at all

um what was i going to say but i mean yeah so yes the technological the technological issue i think is definitely is the weakest you know other than the computer connection thing coming out of it but 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 a early globalization aspect. aspect and also the 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 worldwide, global... I guess the implication of what you're saying is that the war was 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 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 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 you know and we 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 or I'm taking that as a synonym for techno capitalism but it's a but it's a conflicted term as we're gonna as we see immediately so so from the from the classic right side of that 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 um uh 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 um 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 acceleration this 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 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 uh 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 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 and it's I mean it it's it's obviously a very small step from the notion of the promethian state to the notion of the kind of uh heroic military and you know without wanting to be too crass about it but fascist um it seems it seems that you can make that transition fairly smoothly yeah which is maybe the most important or the the most like practically salient uh

upshot of the discussion is you know how thin that line and how related to developments in uh you know military civilian relations and military uh capitalist relations are to sort of like how this will go you know it may be 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 and of life and things like that and then you see this sort of process of technology originating i'm not i don't quite

have the sort of structure of mimesis down but like the production of technology that you know imitates death or something based on it and then spreads into other usages outside in the wake. I mean, 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 ability to study it. And so the notion of a phantom limb is noticed in the Civil War because it was the first time amputees regularly lived and the ammunition used and it shredded people's limbs. It was still the deadliest. I may have said this in a previous class

and talked about this, but the deadliest ammunition ever used and then in World War II, PTSD. And this whole behaviorist psychology, arguably, you know is made into world war ii and that yeah i mean also like i think we could bring in the distinction between a market economy as such 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 sorry he 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 There's this very cryptic music coming from somewhere. I'm going to do some music. That's my background to the dark ambient. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole, sorry, there's a lot going on this side, 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 traps a lot of these tensions, very interestingly. me 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 like they need that you know, drop that push to get over the next, you know, bit of stagnation or whatever.

And you put Alexander Hamilton and, you know, Lee Kuan Yew and, you know, you know, probably Nick Sterncheck all in the same weird-looking team that way versus, like, the importance of emergence or just a, you know, the degree to which it can be driven with an executive sort of approach essentially yes totally agree I think this there is this kind of role of the hero isn't there in that that as I think we've agreed is is a weird sort of resonance

between Teal and left acceleration is and I mean 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 one's talking at least about a heroic process that that is to be contrasted with this um 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 um 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 muddism 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 kind of cool. You should prod Vincent.

He's got something on the sidebar that definitely suggests he has some cogent remarks on Ludd and Luddism to make. Could you repeat the question? I was just seeing the stuff in the sidebar that you 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, 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, No, no, that's fine for sure. Zach, go ahead. Yeah Just from Vincent said this it jogged in memory 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 ten years ago this French collective called Ticcun published a piece called the I think it was the cybernetic hypothesis or something like that. Yeah, a brilliant piece. It was so good

I thought it was is really stimulating a 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. So, 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 um i don't really know where it was going but it does seem like a modern day kind of cybernetic lunatic type of movement if anybody wants to pick up that piece it's kind of fun yeah i mean ted kaxingst he is obviously the the example i mean i i guess

clearly not a movement um you know it's the fact that he he has to act purely in this 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 i forget the first sentence whatever you know the industrial civilization has been a disaster for the planet and for mankind or something of that kind it's he completely is clear that he's again against that 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 anything that you can say to 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 they were workers they didn't generally have this

kind of access to printing you know uh literature and so on but they had they owned they had very kind of a tactical kind of approach they didn't just smash technology willy-nilly they they they they made specific points with the things that they destroyed, like we destroyed this particular mill or whatever because it's unemploying however many people, but we'll leave alone these other things which have been kind of integrated and which 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 it's difficult for me this because

This is I'm probably just being kind of palio Marxist in In taking this line that 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 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 optimizing that the actual frustration of technological industrial development

You know, if you just say that we're just gonna we're just gonna smash the machines that most dramatically throwing people out of work Then you would actually gonna be smashing the machines that are really working No, I think so. I mean this is kind of Marx is one of Marx's critiques against utopian socialism in a way and they 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 uh 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

just summarize that as just saying that luddism was essentially tactical yes yeah yeah i mean i don't know what james's comment here fits it 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 luddites can find their attacks to manufacturers who use machines in what they called quote a fraudulent and deceitful manner and quote to get around standard labor practices i mean what you know what does that mean other than just simply that effectively made people unemployed by automating industrial processes this right okay so the luddites theory was just that machines shouldn't substitute for labor but should increase the quality of of craft out yeah well in 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 that was ever going to happen is apprenticeships required in order to run machines. And then that's that issue of human know-how or human capabilities and substitutions. So there's not only if machines are producing substitutions for various aspects of human behavior, then in that light, you can look at capitalism as replacing or using that to replace the system of human knowledge transmission 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 it he's got some very interesting remarks about about restaurants you know which he says that it's a kind of 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 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 like 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 servers not paying taxes or, 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. 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 an 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 7pm. Oh, that's a nice comfortable time, yes. What time is it in Shanghai? Just got 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. No. That was a very fast reply, Theo.

Don't get Theo into trouble. um so yeah maybe 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 if people like oh are we okay well whatever guys I'm not um yeah that wasn't what I meant was more just like is the restaurant discussion on a glide path or are we do we need to do a kind of rejolt if we want to read wrote there's a question I had that I tried to ask

before I cut out okay great yes good 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 um so like one can imagine a state that encourages um competition for government contracts for you know massive spending on technology and like disincentivizing maybe by means of taxation orientation of enterprise towards consumers.

And 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 a more fundamental way. I wanted to bring up that. 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 Hmm. Damn, hang on. Sorry one second. I think I'd have to just search. Here we go. So 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 dropping the key to the point that you're

wanting to make there. I mean so when is, I mean there's this, 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 in this 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 that's 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 thus I

assume 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 that's 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 140

characters or whatever 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 a really good and and teal asked a version of it himself i mean there is a response that just sidesteps it which i'll i'll make just to get it out of the way more than to to derail what i think

is your really good question which is that you just turn to um income stagnation as the bottom line i mean the fact that i think there is this great stagnation uh discourse because um wage wages in america have been flat now for decades or whatever there's just this collapse of the basic sort of uh upward path of um 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 i agree i think teal you know just to take him but i think you know without wanting to

over egg the pudding 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 of the internet of all of the all of the consumer surplus that have come out of the internet he thinks is basically you know of marginal value compared to these previous waves of technological progress which is I would have thought weird 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 I was going to say that the statistics on this technological stagnation, I mean, 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, I mean, it's been about the same for the last almost 40 years now. So that hasn't really changed very much. The only thing that might have changed is that there's been somewhat less government investment in very large research facilities. 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. I don't know. I think there's a whole cluster of different questions there, all of interesting, but they're sort of detachable.

On the one hand there's this question about the role of the state, which you end up with on the question and and you know government infrastructural spending and primary research um but teal i know taking it in the other direction he thinks that scientific productivity has fallen off a cliff um i now i wish i could remember where this was maybe other people who've been looking at this stuff recently can remember um 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 here completely Yeah, I mean Vince is definitely right to say it's not 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 of it, right? 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 um there's there is empirical evidence of of dropped investment

by private companies in the US like not actually as much reinvestment going on so using the 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. There's, 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 the debt bubble, that causes a permanent, 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 the time. Can I interrupt here in respect to Thiel in particular? 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 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 um and producing a really low return on it um you know it's not actually part of some explosive um techno-economic dynamic so so you know even when you think you've got a 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

anthropological transformation it's almost without precedent. 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 that it's 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 the trough is the period of technological innovation because because and all the resources that are required for technological development are crash and price devalued you know as a kind of industrial environment is vastly superior to the kind of highly inflated boom era time where you know 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 can have bottom feeding in a trough you can do all kinds of stuff really cheaply and I think I mean that's just that sounds just like a theory but I think when you sort of track when these waves 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 this early IT innovations in the, in the seventies and eighties, they spike during the nineties.

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 sort of really negative opinion of scientific productivity, uh, recently, is that just like an across the board thing? Does he include 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. 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 coming from the place of a of someone who wants to stick money into exciting uh potentially profitable technological businesses and is just finding it hard to just to find stuff to invest in um right okay i got it do you buy into the sort of spreading conspiracy theory worry that i mean you know that china is going to be so ahead on using crisper because of like a greater ability to relax ethical

constraints quietly as needed um you know in terms of like developing a smarter like a developmentally enhanced generation like you know 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 how much it cost 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 uh just inevitable that if people they're 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 the in in terms of public hazard in exchange for highly accelerated innovation i think there's a again 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 margin of marginal um 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 um 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 uh balance of a 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 i would put much more weight on regime diversity than than any particular kind of internal regime structure in this respect i think for instance china being the size it is is is likely to be an inhibition in itself and you're likely to see much more kind of turbo growth in these things in smaller the smaller satellites in in hong kong and and and off the coast various types of special economic zones and um you know

in the wider cyano sphere 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 Hong Kong is it is it fairly independent in terms of technological regulation like I would think very much so is it the formal status of it is what's called a semi not semi a special autonomous region an SAR and there's a number of these SARs 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 nsar 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 turbocharged than than tibet um The Tibet category might be slightly different, but it's close. I think my first order guess is the same. 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 its willingness to try and guide private industry what's lacking is the is this kind of natural cultural disposition 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 you know in the age of autonomous capital if it ever becomes a thing it seems like right now the assumption within you know kind of the the unconstrained accelerationism is almost like well I don't really know how to frame it but like basically no risk aversion and just letting things run wild but you know 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 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

more open to price discovery, being more open to kind of regime variation and more optional. Because I think there's almost at the moment the kind of, you know, there's certainly a way you can construct a kind of core Western sociopolitical 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 this, but a lot of their positions

have just been so far outside the kind of ethical mainstream as to kind of be amusing to people and it doesn't seem to me that there's any reason why that sort of construction of of the 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 has been sort of installed 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 other than in the other than in the economic and I don't know just thinking about it as something that's experienced you know is about the experience directly or indirectly of change. Sorry that's more than I more than I think I intended to say but... No no sir I think you need to say a little bit more than that.

I'm not sure I can. I guess some somewhere I was thinking that the experience of stagnation is is is a might be considered as a in in different timeframes 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 so so I make sure I've got right the experience of stagnation is chrono political is that am i quoting you right or if i think i think there's 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 it's as usual it's a once only performance so 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 reduction of risk and this being linked to certainly the

management of risk in the way that futurology and futures forecasting has developed has 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 becomes so imperceptible, you know, that reduction in the management of risk becomes so minimized or is so controlled that the the

stagnation becomes it becomes indistinguishable from from that managed situation. Yes and maybe 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 a whole set of social processes that just look like social risk management on uncontroversial grounds actually leads to a stagnationary 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 squeezing out that risk has led inseparably to this kind of process of economic stagnation that then triggers a political crisis of the kind that as I say I think Peter Thiel 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 the erosam 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 were wanting to go with your chronic politics. I think I just need to take a bit of time to think it through before next week, to be honest. I think it's just what I'm getting

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 is put in place basically to 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 yes almost some kind of sophisticated understanding of acceleration but politics seems to be accelerating if other things are not 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 phenomenon of political acceleration in some 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 i think trump is obviously the key symptom but i don't

think you can push it back much before then you know up 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'd 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 know and 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 you 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 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 this in terms of technology 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 economic process it 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 him that's predominantly machiavellian political and both of them clearly get at some substantial part of the phenomenon there

it ties 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 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 well 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 for a 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.