This episode I'm going to be speaking with Nick Land who is a philosopher, writer and blogger. We're going to be speaking about accelerationism, capital and number. First question is the typical hermitics question that I've kind of devised which kind of gives you five thinkers And I think it kind of brings to the fore what that person is kind of directed towards their thought. And so if you could have five thinkers in a room, living or dead, which five would you pick? OK, well. I sort of hit a brick wall from the word go with this question.
I'll tell you why, which is that, I mean, first of all, I have to ask you the five. is there something going on with this five thing or is it as far as you're concerned a completely like semi-random number i think it was big enough that you could put if you wanted to you could put a philosophical lineage in there and see you could probably you know you with five you could have Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger Bidou and then you could see who got it right so I think it's just big enough to cause some chaos get everyone you want enough the reason that I'm obviously
being immediately awkward and evasive right from the start is that I mean I feel I've spent the last 20 years locked in a room with five abstract schizo entities you know the and so the the uh i immediately think that this five these five figures are going to be like um meat puppet masks of the pentazygon you know um and and uh insofar as they're not it's going to be disappointing. there probably are, I mean, I could sort of probably try and do five sort of plausible human
characters. You're perfectly fine to include fictional or... Pull it back. But yeah, as I say, I think I think you know, I immediately think, well, are we talking five five scysogetic lemurs in which case of course we know we know who they're going to be um and if they're not if it's not five scysogetic lemurs then you kind of feel why am i why am i in a room with these five anthropomorphic losers rather than out in the uh amicable intercourse intercourse with the lemurs okay so if it could if it could be five it would be lemurs oh you of course it It would be the great lemurs, yeah. It would definitely be the great, and has been the great lemurs.
Yes, I think so. Okay. I mean, that's certainly, I didn't, I expected controversy right from the start, to be honest. So I think that's great. I mean, I usually use this question to call back to interesting thinkers, but we can branch out and talk about the lemurs. I think we'll talk about it. Let's see which five thinkers we end up talking about. a lot about and we'll get a retrospective a retrospective acceptable uh acceptable uh response to the question slowly emerging okay oh no that that's perfectly acceptable um okay so the first question i have here is is pretty it's going straight deep with acceleration and so your your definition of accelerationism going from justin murphy murphy's interview was
accelerationism is fundamentally takes its trajectory from cybernetics and it's it's a positive feedback process it's an all-consuming kind of loop or recursion which just consistently subsumes everything everything into it i think that's roughly correct yes i think i think the the minimal and most abstract abstract definition is that it's positive oriented cybernetics um so i and i think even uh in its kind of in its incarnation that i have been sort of tracking and involved with to some extent um that just simply is the way
it uh it was generated i think it's like basically turning norbert wiener upside down and and you're in okay so from that if if accelerationism is this this all-consuming positive feedback process in what and it kind of subsumes all in what sense do you see the the capital of acceleration, accelerationism as different from the kind of classical, almost deification of Marxist capital. Well, when you say almost deification, can I just ask you to sort of spin that out a little bit further?
My reading of Marx is amateur at best, but the way I see Marxists as reading capital is it very quickly becomes an overarching thing with a capital T, which kind of ultimately can consume and subsume anything into it. And once you have that framework, nothing is actually able to escape this godlike structure of capital. Is there a difference there you find between this? Well, I don't know. I mean, if, yeah, if godlike simply means entirely dominant, then I kind of think maybe that's fine.
I mean, you know, theoretically speaking, there's all kind of ethico-political issues that no doubt we'll talk about. But I think it's, I see that as an extremely valuable insight as far as Marx is concerned. The fact that the motor of modernity, its fundamental infrastructure is capital. And that is because capital is, in its fundamentals, nothing but a self-amplifying diagram that will, you know, every attempt to sort of fix a particular epoch or set of characteristics of capital that
that concretizes it beyond that abstract loop tends to be just outflanked and enveloped by the actual process, which has no sort of attachment to any particular concrete instantiation, as long as that concrete instantiation allows this abstract amplificatory loop to realize itself. And anything that obviously inhibits that, that loop tends to be outcompeted by something that inhibits it less, which I think, again, is already a fully Marxian insight. I don't think there's anything original about that.
So that's why it tends towards an increasingly intense actualization of this extremely abstract diagram. You can't depart from the diagram without dysfunction, without being competitively eliminated. And that's why, you know, in the way that you just described it, it isn't, you know, it monopolizes escape. If escape into capitalism isn't the escape you want, then history, modern history is not for you. It's not something that's going to work for you.
which is of course a common situation okay that this is this is um something i mentioned to you before that i'd spoken to john cussins on this podcast and this is actually something that came up with with him um and he's saying that back in the 90s uh what there was there was at least for him there was a split for for him where you and mark fisher began applying cybernetics and thermodynamics to freud's beyond the beyond the pleasure principle which i think if you kind of push push that out more it's applying inhuman and artificial processes to kind of quite classical and humanist i mean that that was thrown around a lot and i think perhaps anthropomorphics a bit better
so applying these artificial processes to things like that so with that in tow with this overarching idea of capital do you think that any any world or any um possibility beyond capital for the human is just entirely naive and nostalgic um yes i would say that but um i mean this is also of course something that came up with justin and and these topics have been discussed on Justin's podcast with other people, that there's a great desire to try and experimentally
prove me wrong on this. And my attitude to that is extremely supportive as long as it is not entertained globally. I mean, as long as this is a local, peculiar experiment that can fail on its own without taking everyone with it then i'm delighted to see people try and you know um experiment with post-capitalist social arrangements um but i'm you know theoretically speaking i i'm extremely confident that they are not uh ultimately going be successful what what happens to the the human in in in your future your vision of the future
well i think uh it's a very interesting question because i think humanism is itself something that we haven't we've only begun to see what humanism will be and what I think a good place to start with this I'm not saying that there's a we wouldn't want to tweak this model or sort of play about with it a bit but I think Hugo de Garris has a really good framework for this where he sees an impending massive conflict between those processes
that are supporting the kind of emergence of synthetic intelligences and those that are resisting it. And it seems to me that the name, the banner or the flag under which resistance will take place is that of man, that of the human. And that in waving that flag, it will actually, in a certain sense produce or crystallize uh what the nature of the human is in a way that has never previously happened so sort of vague intuitions and a vague um a vague attachment and loyalty to to some notion
of of marx because it's species being various notions of what it what man the the nature of I think that we see those things actually historically transformed and assembled into something far more definite, institutionally realistic, rigorized. And this will happen as an essential part of the orientation of resistance to the capital process, to the autonomization of capital or intelligence explosion. so i think humanism has a has a has a great future but its future is to be the you know the the the
party of resistance to the basic modernistic okay do you think that because as you've said with i know i'm not trying to disprove you i think i'm i'm just um trying to figure out what happens to certain things which aren't often mentioned within this within this framework um so you mentioned with the positive feedback process that pretty much anything that comes up against capital against the process uh is almost always not um i mean strong is pretty bad word but strong enough to stabilize itself as something else so you're saying that the party of resistance will
be humanity but that implies that humanity is resisting the process so the question then would be is the humanist going to be strong enough to save humanity essentially will be the resistance to the process is that resistance going to be strong enough to stabilize itself as something separate as something post-capital or will that eventually be just to to win sorry i i obviously again i mean this is you i'm not this is nothing wrong with this i think it's it's great that that you're you're doing it like but but this is a reiteration of the same question as now i mean it's it's like um if it if i what even does it mean for humanity
to win in this process? I mean, that's the question. And I think it's a question that isn't, it's a kind of theoretical question that we can throw about now. But I think it's going to be a real question. I mean, it's a real socio-historical, institutional, military, and security problem that a lot of people, a lot of very able, devoted, dedicated people will be attending to. And it's a difficult, it's a really difficult problem because there's lots of reasons for that.
But one of them, and this is the way, this is why capital is so resilient in its process, is the fact that you end up doing it as soon as you want to do anything competently or effectively. You know, I mean, already in the sort of, you know, in the in the socialist tradition that we've seen up to this point. it's been widely seen you know there's a kind of I think extremely telling and insightful paranoia that you get among the most intelligent proponents of the left and actual leaders of the left
I'm thinking particularly at this point of Mao Zedong who has this notion that capital just brings up like mushrooms everywhere because as soon as... Sorry, who are you thinking of? Cut out, what could you go? Mao, Chairman Mao, the great helmsman, yeah, who I think is actually very realistic about capital. I mean, he hates it and he does everything to try and obstruct it and prevent it and suppress it, you know, with extraordinary ruthlessness that is entirely appropriate in one respect, given what you're dealing with. But he recognizes that, you know,
I think this is his own metaphor that it just brings up like mushrooms everywhere. You need this constant, active, cultural revolutionary communist activity to keep it suppressed. And And the reason that it's like that is that as soon as you try and do something competently, it starts turning into capital. It starts turning into capital because all it takes for something to turn into capital is that you need some kind of positive return on something. You know, if you're doing something that is resourcing itself with a small surplus, you know, so it's therefore it's becoming stronger. it's reinforcing itself, whatever it might be, if you're doing something like that, you're already
abstractly doing capital. So the question of how you would not do capital then becomes, you know, fascinatingly complicated. You can't engage in any process that is actually in any way self-reinforcing without without without capital sneaking back in again through the back door and now to me that just spells that just spells death for any kind of social project of any kind you basically saying look unless my social project is going to be absolutely minimalistically steady state that it it's not in any way uh accentuating itself amplifying itself, expanding itself, resourcing itself at any kind of surplus, you know, only this perfect steady state process is actually not doing capital.
And once something starts doing capital at all, it's doing capital more and more and more and more. I mean, that's the essence of the thing, obviously. It's like, you know, it doesn't capital. It doesn't is not interested in any kind of steady state. It can't tolerate steady states. It's constantly fleeing steady states in any direction it can find. And it flees it in the direction of self-reinforcing processes. So you sort of have to stop it. You have to nip it in a bud. You have to get that full kind of full communist paranoia about that if you're going to be realistically antagonistic to it. um and i think the depth of that that that necessary paranoia says a lot about the the
the um power of what it is that you're uh against in under those circumstances it's not it's not that i'm against capital per se because it's somewhat unavoidable once you begin to visualize things within that framework it's more so that i believe i find it interesting to see because interesting to see whether or not there's actually a possibility of exit from from capital and i think what from what you've kind of said there it's it's like there's a 0.000 or not 1% chance that you could have the possibility of this just kind of minor perturbation and
stability for a short time. But the energy expenditure needed to even keep that up against the flow of capital is pretty much nigh impossible. Capital is going to find a way to take what you have and use it within its own means it will just regenerate it will regenerate with anything that you're doing well anything that you're doing competently is you know mushroom mushroom fertilizer for capital it's you can it can exterminate capital um to all appearances you know you can like completely level the economy put everyone into re-education camps all of that stuff but it will regenerate as soon as you start doing something intelligently or you know
intelligently in capitalist terms meaning in a way that is self-reinforcing well while you're flatlining since it seems to be recording my my babblings here i will just respond a bit to your exit from capital because it seems to me that that um that formulation is a i would say a transcendental error you know capital is pure exit um you you you can't you can't exit from exit it doesn't it's something that is not uh is not imaginable um you know if you're exiting
effectively then you're doing you're doing capital and and i think any notion of exit from capital is therefore conceptually incoherent and when when experimentally actualized it becomes uh sociologically incoherent um which is as i say not something that i i want to somehow uh help to forestall it's not that i think that these experiments you know would be better off not happening that that's not the claim at all it's just it's just a giant bucket of theoretical cold water that i i feel compelled to to to to throw up on it um so we got up to there you were
saying that exit from capital is a that's a transcendental error on on my part yes i think so i mean it's just well if you want to take responsibility for it then of course that that's fine but i mean whoever is proposing that idea i think is not getting what exit or capital means because they're ultimately coincidental notions. So there's nowhere, I don't know where it is supposed to go. I mean, as I say, the only place that capital can't use is something that is absolutely securely steady state. Now, if that is an exit, it seems a weird conception of escape to me.
So I would definitely turn it upside down. And I think if you're going to be, and of course, I'm not trying to discourage this. I think the history depends on people not being discouraged from it. If you're going to be, you know, determinedly anti-capitalist, then it has to be that you try to stop something else escaping. if you're trying to escape then you're just you're pulling you're uh pouring fuel on the on the on the fire it loves it when everyone tries to escape i mean that's just great that's the you know that's the main line as far as it's concerned yeah i think we're seeing that in quite basic ways as well with with even simple things such as kind of protests and um kind of anti-capitalist groups
I mean, it amazes me that people can't see the transparency there. That does lead me to quite a big question which was going on within Twitter, which is the place of, and you might be getting a bit tired of me dragging this back to the human, but I think it's somewhat inescapable that, I mean, perhaps this is just a classical philosophical question, but it is in as far as I view it impossible to view any of this without the perspective of human and human agency because that's that's the only cognition we have which is in some sense dragging back to Kant but the the the impossibility of escape is that a form of determinism
um which is entirely kind of separate to the one of uh of just general free the the old the kind of old free will question right well yeah hang on this is good but let me first of all just just say i i can't i can't uh accept the the setup of the impossibility of escape because obviously i I think it's the opposite. I think it's the impossibility of stopping escape. But the escape is not for us. It's the escape from us that is the phenomenon that we're dealing with. But on the substantial philosophical question, I think the line I would take on this, because I know it does get talked about a lot,
and it still sort of excites people, this question. My line on this is that the cant of the first critique is better on the topic of the second critique than the cant of the second critique, which is to say that the crucial issue here is the fact that the structure of free will and determinism is a metaphysical structure. It's not, if you're trying to choose one or the other option between free will and determinism, you're just so admired in metaphysical confusion that it is comical. You know, we simply do not, when we use those concepts, we are just simply radically confused about really what we're talking about.
And so I definitely think, I mean, I just bracket, honestly, any any argument on this that is that is laid out in like do we have agency or don't we have agency you know is there free will or not is is time deterministic history deterministic all of that seems to me just confused you know it's it's not the it's not the way it's rather that that whole structure is an antonyme that is the symptom of a fundamental philosophical confusion um and uh we're thinking of we're just not thinking about time realistically if we get ourselves into those kind of problems okay if if then i think i'm going to ask you to expand on
that a bit if there's a confusion which would imply that we've we've we've taken a certain path which has just led us into this uh metaphysical system which is which is kind of the wrong way to think about it then if we were to go back then what is in in your view the the way to to go which wouldn't head into confusion if there's confusion then what is the the correct view the other correct well maybe correct view is not ultimately that helpful i mean we can knock this back and forth But fundamentally, the right approach, the philosophically rigorous approach is the same thing as the philosophy of time.
We have to get time right. If we get time right, all of this stuff will slot into a much more realistic, sensible, coherent pattern. If we keep getting time wrong, then we're going to be just babbling nonsense in this antinomian structure that is, you know, irresolvable. No one's going to win in a free will determinism debate, however it looks one way or the other. because the two concepts are mutually complicit and mutually confused and they're both symptoms of a pre-critical understanding of time okay yeah that makes sense so your your
understanding of time um as far as i can see it with as the way that i've placed it in my own mind was one of your older old lectures from the new center on on and this was specifically on right accelerationism which i'm sure we'll get into was the difference between convergent and divergent waves so um i'm just trying to remember the what the the way that time is is placed for you is that the the waves of time if you want to view it like that are actually we're being we're being dragged towards an event as opposed to the event happens and then we kind of
splay outwards without a kind of place to go. That's a crucial part of it. But I think that a convergent wave is just a finalistic understanding of time. I mean, in the old Aristotelian quadrant of causality, we're talking about final and efficient causality and i'm not trying to say final causality is right and efficient causality is wrong but but very very strongly i'm wanting to say if it seems to you that efficient causality is right and final causality is wrong then that again is a sign that your conception of time is
completely metaphysical because what's at stake here ultimately is extremely traditional within modernity it's it's it's just kantian which is to say that time cannot be conceived as an object in time um time itself cannot be um efficient any more than it is final um it's simply you know if if you if you're trying to sort of put time in time then you're engaged in a hopeless uh metaphysical undertaking and when you stop trying to put time in time then you're no more confused by
convergent waves than divergent waves or finalistic processes than efficient processes both of those both of those things are you know make equal sense and if taken in exclusion of the other they make equal nonsense so the notion that the future is somehow unmade has is incomplete and the past is complete is an anthropomorphic illusion. We think there's something more to say that the past has been finished and the future hasn't is just because of the peculiar angle
that we're looking at things from. Time, the time of the future is as much time as the time of the past is time. And the time of the future doesn't come from the time of the past. time you know that's again just to make time into an object in time the future the future does not come out of the past that's the that's the mechanical the commonsensical mechanical error that is so tempting for everyone to make um and and i think probably sorry you just cut out there sexy said that the future does not come from come out of the past the future does not come out of the past the past present future the
structure of time comes out of time it's transcendental it doesn't come out of any particular part of time it doesn't come out of the past doesn't come exclusively out of the future it doesn't come out of the present it's you know time comes out of time um so so if you think that You know, the implicit commonsensical structure is, of course, that the future comes out of the present and the present has come out of the past. That can't be right. You know, as the most elementary grasp of transcendental philosophy, it cannot possibly be right that the present comes out of the past and the future comes out of the present. and now once you stop thinking of that as being in any way a meaningful way of thinking about
things then what are you saying about these free will and determinism arguments because both of them actually then look very much like the same thing don't they they both if you're a determinist you think that the present has come out of the past and if you're attached to free will you think that the future will come out of the present i mean it's the same mistake it's not that they're really opposed in any important way they're they're trivially trivially uh collaborating in the perpetuation of an entirely metaphysical conception of time that that that does seem to seem to make sense that actually negates one of the the comments that i've written down here which was i did find your readings of time quite heideggerian but now that you've said um
that the present doesn't come from the past and the future doesn't come from the present that um i think you've you've entirely left heidegger's reading of time behind there well i don't know i mean i'm not sure i haven't read heidegger honestly for decades now so i mean i'm just not i'm not there but it's always seemed to me his reading his basic propositions about time are generally transcendentally rigorous propositions and and and certainly the notion the insistence that time cannot be grasped as something in time i think is a strictly heideggerian formulation and and i think it's it's completely unexceptionable i mean okay it
has to be right um so i'm not particularly wanting to to distance myself or you know or in contrast you know be promoting some kind of heiderganism i mean i simply don't go back to where you were saying about the the kind of the future isn't really for us um it's not it's not something that humanity as it is now it's going to be partaking in escape escape isn't for us i think the near future is going to be it's going to be a culmination of of of neo-humanism so i mean it's not it's nothing in the short term that's definitely not not the case i think we
haven't seen anything yet i expect explicitly humanistic structures of ideology and institutions to have a massive role in the near future. But, I mean, I think that there are extreme limits to the amount of intelligence explosion. Okay, so me and Nick both had pretty bad connection issues throughout this. So there's a 10-minute loss here, but the 10 minutes of conversation took us from the previous section on canti and space-time and we began to speak about how number in general can be utilized and is utilized as a metric to almost track the progress and track
the innovation of accelerationism and acceleration in general so this section coming up is going to quickly jump into a bit about number being used as metric which won't make complete sense to the previous section however the stuff we did speak about in the lost 10 minutes is actually repeated in this section coming up and is extrapolated more thoroughly so not much of this conversation was was actually lost okay so yeah i was saying about number and and so you you can utilize um accountancy and kind of and math in general as a kind of um a metric for for accelerationism
yes it is doing that already i mean you know that's i think really it's crucial to say that It's like, it's not that we theoretically have to come from outside and say, hey, let's try this. That's what it's doing. You know, it's built these systems for self-analysis, self-measurement, you know, performance evaluation. That's absolutely imminent to it. And so, you know, from the position of the theorist, that's great. it's already just providing all this data for you i mean um and and formatting it all nicely and that that's it's intrinsic to the thing that it does that yeah so what i was going to say there is that i think with that there's some connection there to your old work with the ccru and and a bit
later with the numagram stuff and do you think there's something in a i guess you'd have to call it a kind of kantian phenomenal and noumenal connection between the accountancy of accelerationism and your your interest in in things such as the the kabbalah um yeah that that connection i think is is again there's there's a kind of tricky point to it but I don't think it's that impossible to kind of capture it with some crunchiness.
Because the crucial point is, you know, if Kabbalism is used to mean those practices of treating words as numbers and treating them as numbers on the basis of a certain set of very definite procedures, that are, they're kind of, they're kind of sneakily recognized by mathematicians, but at the same time, they have an aura, they have a worrying aura to them that means that they don't tend to be discussed very much. And I'm saying, I'm referring primarily
to this extremely central capitalistic procedure that's called digital reduction, You know, where you've got some number in the sort of modern Hindu Arab format, you know, let's say 1027, and you just add up one plus zero plus two plus seven gives you 10. And so, you know, you convert the number, you reduce it on the basis of this thing of just simply adding the digits together, irrespective of modulus. And the reason that that's so important and has such general application is that once you're able to apply numerical values to letters, and there's obviously all of this cabalistic to and fro about the exact coding procedure that allows you to give a numerical value to a letter.
But once you've satisfied yourself about that, then you can use this same technique to words as you do to numbers. Like, so there's some complications to this. I mean, you know, John Nash, interestingly, had a whole Kabbalist system. It was completely modern and didn't work like this at all. But I'll bracket that off. Now, the crucial thing to say about that is that you can absolutely see where it comes from. You know, that event, that semiotic event that triggers Kabbalism and therefore, in a certain sense, the whole history of modern occultism and occultism is kind of actually modernistic.
It's kind of cloaks itself in this deep traditionalism, but it's very modernistic because of the fact it comes from this. And this event, we know when it happened and it happens exactly at the dawn of modernity. It happens because you go from a Roman system, you know, where, you know, I, I, I, you add one plus one plus one equals three or, you know, XXVIII, you add 10 plus 10 plus five plus one plus one plus one. i.e. when you do Kabbalism, you're treating the new numbers in the way that you used to treat the old numbers. And the fact that that's what you're doing shows that it's something that is triggered precisely at this threshold of transition between your numerical semiotics from one to the other.
So, you know, I think once you've said that, you can see that actually what's at stake, you know, Kabbalism is extremely important window onto the event of modernity. You know, what it's doing is really is holding us at that point of transition, at that threshold of conversion where we enter the modern world. It's taking us back to that point. It's taking us back to the genesis of modernity. And so I think on that sense, it's just the two sides of this latch together very tightly and neatly. It's not that they're on parallel paths. It's that when you're talking about modernity as a singularity, there is a semiotic spin off of that, which is the whole of technical capitalism.
And you just have to know what it is that is happening there to see that, I think. So there's a strange connection with capitalism with regards to time, which in itself, many people have commented, you know, accelerationism is inherently a theory of time. Yes. Historical time, especially in this case. Yes, it's historical time. And particularly, obviously, what we're talking about is the origin of capitalism is the event that generates Kabbalah. you know as we capitalism is generated by capitalism switching on it's completely seamless in that respect so this completely kind of strange numerical system is birthed alongside
the thing, you know, the unnameable capitalism. Yes. It's, you know, you're going right into its unconscious on some level like this. I mean, it's like the arrival of the new numerals, the birth of capitalism, the birth of these are the same event that's just being captured in on in in different aspects and is this is this too connected with um zero or is it is that something oh yes 100 of course because zero is part of modular arithmetic so so one could read the the kind of birth of zero cabala capitalism as
as the birth of this decimal labyrinth. Yes. I mean, I think the crucial point on the Kabbalism is that it's on the friction line between these two inconsistent semiotic regimes. You know, the old Roman numerals and the new Hindu-Arab numerals. it's in the intersection of those two systems that you get this the genesis of of kabbalism so it's not you you don't get it purely from the uh the side of the modern modular arithmetic it's actually it registers historical transition because of the fact that you have a
a traditional convention replicated into an epoch where it seems simply mistaken um but i think mistakes are i think that the cabalistic sort of commitment is that mistakes are rarely as simple as they seem okay so if are you happy to talk about the the numogram in relation to this yes i well i'm i'm happy about it but i don't have any prepared uh comment about it um it's it's entirely up to i mean if if it if it takes more more preparation but i mean just as
um nothing deeply complex and intricate more the numogram as as a as as a as a device in in relation to this this labyrinth well i think what the numagram i mean there's various ways it can be described but but i think the most uncontroversial and straightforward definition of the numagram is it is just a diagrammatic um instantiation of the decimal numerals it's decimalism so the numagram is nothing but decimal numeracy diagrammatically i'm worried that in saying instantiated i'm making
some horrible kind of platonic metaphysical error but it's the diagram let me just say it more simply it's the diagram of decimal numeracy and that's that's all it is so there's no there's nothing i guess the attachment that the thing that then connects it to this um to this previous capitalistic issue that we're talking about is obviously the operation of decimal reduction is involved in its construction so yes okay i think that's the bridge that i was groping for and failing to to to to grab onto for a bit i think that yes that's the connection so yes okay there's a yeah there's this this is just a strange connection there okay um is there
anything else that you're you're thinking of that you'd like to to bring in in relation to accelerationism or or um philosophy um oh i don't know i think that that might be too open a question to be to be helpful actually but i don't know i mean there's obviously things i could launch into like but i'd sort of rather not like obviously the nightmare of the bitcoin book um which is like having mount everest on my on my back right at the moment but are you are you are you still working on the bitcoin yeah yeah every day every day i'm you know i don't know but it's like scratching Mount Everest day with a toothpick or some horrible metaphor like that
I think is the thing. But yeah, I'm doing a bit of it every day. So I could ask you a question about that, which we're probably paying you to answer. Yeah, I took your Bitcoin discussion, the big philosophical, I guess it's not so much a problem, But a continuation that happens there is that absolute Kantian time is now physically, in a way, physically within the world. As you say, there is now absolute time, kind of successive blocks of time. So what comes from this?
Well, I guess one thing that comes from it, from my point of view, is just a certain vindication of reactionary stubbornness that the notion that we're leaving Kant behind becomes more and more implausible. you know so um i just think the history of modern philosophy to a huge extent is the history of failed attempts to supersede kantinism and you know in that way it completely it i'm not gonna i could say echoes but i mean the relation is is is much closer than that
the political projects of modernity to overcome and surpass capitalism. I think the two things are the same. I mean, we're really looking at, you know, again, it's an aspect issue. So the fact that I think Bitcoin puts us back in a position where, you know, we're thoroughly recommitted to absolute temporality, as something that was supposed to have been, you know, successively demolished over the course of a series of intellectual revolutions, is very telling as a political point. You know, it's basically the story of failed revolutions.
Kant is the last revolution, and every post-Kantian revolution is a failed revolution. That's whether it's intellectual or sociopolitical. Okay. So your task, is your task with this book to re-find Kantian philosophy within a world which now has absolute time? Or is it to utilize the blockchain as a new means towards time in relation to accelerationism? I think, I mean, there are all kinds of tasks that it says me.
But I think if there's absolute sort of core to it, it's simply to try and communicate the absolute intelligibility of Bitcoin as an episode in the history of transcendental philosophy. I mean, I think, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin paper is an absolute crucial masterpiece of transcendental philosophy. And that's really what I'm, I think, fundamentally trying to get across with this book. That, you know, that's what we're really talking about. But I think we're talking about that because critique is something that is done by social history and not just by academic philosophy.
Okay. Yeah. Somewhat makes sense. Yeah. um is it could i could i where's what's the this is quite a basic kind of bland question but what's what's the stage that you're at now what's the the what's the problem that that's being tackled uh well i i have to do a kind of my i've got a preface that is supposed to be a kind of overview um and i'm working on a version of that that i'm going to submit to a journal at the end of this month so so that's forcing me to get at least that one bit completely just nailed down
but i mean the economics that i've got a big well i've got six chapters the economics chapter is the absolute mind killer you know because it it raises these questions that once they're raised have to be addressed and are and you know just do your head in a bit I think like which is basically a transcendental deduction of money you know so there are six there are six kind of classic characteristics of money i'm not i'm i'm worried that if i try to outline them even though i've spent thousands of hours on
this i'll somehow forget one and there's some embarrassing way it doesn't really matter anyway it's you know it's like portability divisibility fungibility verifiability i don't know whether i've already have i done divisibility as one of them uh and uh durability um and everyone agrees that money has to be these things basically there are kind of weird exceptions to it but they kind of those kind of exceptions that prove the rule type things you know like those giant stone rings that some Polynesians use as money and are completely non-portable but as soon as you start talking about them you realize yeah money has to be portable let's let's face it and something really weird is going on when it when it is and so I think that these things are categories you know in a kantian sense i think that it's what we're talking about is the
conditions of possibility of a commercial object um and so doing this this work that i think now i can't escape from but it's i'm finding it sort of very challenging to do this critical deduction of money um um but yeah i think that's i did i'm it's getting it's getting almost to the point of a really pitiful type of psychotherapy so i think i should probably i should probably refuse to go further into this like neurotic okay at this point there's one one little thing that i was wondering perhaps this doesn't interest you as much as the the kind of thorough economics but is there any comment there there's a book by all i'm not too sure how to pronounce his name but old berg where
he he talks about money as symbolic and contemporarily people the the symbol of money is an as actual value has pretty much been removed well one of the one of the things bitcoin actually brings back is that the the money that you have the bitcoin that you have is the actual value uh as opposed to kind of um notes notes and coins are you're you're you're using a that's merely a physical symbol um and that used to be kind of powerful enough for people to suspend disbelief but actually one of the things berg comments on is that the disbelief with regard to physical money is is gone now but actually bitcoin completely brings back because you you legitimately have
the value yes yes that all sounds good i mean that that's obviously crucial to the whole thing The fact that notes still have promised to pay the bearer the value of written on it, you know, as if they are some kind of contract to eventually cough up some transcendent value that's equivalent to what is kind of, you know, symbolized on the note. So, yeah, I totally agree with you that Bitcoin takes us absolutely out of that regime into imminence. You know, one Bitcoin is worth one Bitcoin. I mean, if you're looking for anything else, you're certainly not going to get a promise to pay from anybody.
There's just one little final little thing I'd quite like to mention. uh you're you're quite fond of the the phrase from musk which is um if humanity becomes nothing but the bootloader for ai you know that wouldn't that wouldn't be so bad um yes biological bootloader yeah he he reused that you know in his talk with um joe rogan yeah i don't know if you know this um but in in thinking about that i think that musk's vision can i mean this is quite this is more of a comment and i don't know if you could follow follow it up with something but musk's vision can actually quite neatly be applied to uh the niches kind of rope of animal man to superman
as a kind of stepping stone for towards the Ubermensch. Do you see any similarities between kind of techno-economic singularity and Nietzsche's vision of the Ubermensch? Well, I think that they do connect, but I think the thing that connects them beyond anything else is that neither of them, when rigorously conceived, has a notion. I mean, you know, the thing about singularity, verna vinge had this great paper about it called a wall across the future and the topic of this paper was that you can't write science fiction anymore you know distant science fiction it's become a kind of fantasy literature because there's a wall across the future when you hit this when you hit intelligence explosion um things change in a way that completely
exceeds any imaginable human capacity for uh anticipation and I think that this is when Nietzsche is being rigorous about Ubermensch it's the same of course we have no idea what Ubermensch means other than that it's again a wall across the future it's something other than the perpetuation, the tired croaking perpetuation of the last man that's what we know for sure But what it is, you know, as soon as we try to fill that in, we're just involved in a comedy exercise. And I think that that's the strongest connection that takes you across from one to the other.