#Accelerate; The Accelerationist Reader II (Session 2)

Hello and welcome to the second installment of Accelerate 2, the Accelerationist Reader. We're on the second part of our seminar now, dealing with this book and with the basic concepts within it. If anyone has any problem hearing me, please let me know and I'll make sure to turn off the volume or get a little closer to the mic. But yeah, so today's seminar Yeah, so today's seminar meeting, we are very pleased to have a really outstanding guest, Tiziana Terranova, coming in from Italy. And so I'm just going to give just a basic overview of what we're going to do in today's

seminar session, what the readings are composed of, and then I'll introduce Tiziana. and Tiziana will give a lecture, maybe about 20 minutes, kind of dealing with her essay on the red stack. Then we'll do a brief Q&A, and then after that, we're gonna discuss Nick Land, the Nick Land essay, the Sadie Plant and Nick Land essay, a couple CCRU essays. Come on in. It looks like Colleen is here. If you wanna just sit over here, that's fine. and then so yeah we're still waiting on probably one or two more people okay welcome Colleen thank you and you

Tiziana's essay a little bit more obviously with the Q&A and the actual live lecture that will do a good bit of that and then just for the next session will be December 14th And this will be, we're going to be dealing with a number of different theorists who kind of relate accelerationism or accelerationist themes to various science fiction films, kind of blockbuster science fiction films like Blade Runner, Terminator, Avatar, and things like that. So that'll be Mark Fisher, Ian Hamilton Grant. If you notice today, actually, in the Nick Land readings, he brings up Terminator 2. and the Walser read Luciana Parisi's Automated Architecture.

So today's readings are basically divided between what Tiziana Terranova calls the red stack. And this is kind of taking many of the basic frameworks of accelerationism and some of the kind of works from kind of post-capitalist political economy, post-capitalist political culture readings, as well as autonomous Marxism, and putting them into dialogue with the idea of the stack which comes out of Benjamin Bratton. And that's something we can obviously talk about in a little bit. The other ones I was going to of think of the Nicoland readings as the Blackstack being more of a kind of a nihilist sort of

framework, much more marketist, not particularly Marxist, and coming out of Lyotard and coming out of Deleuze and some other figures like this. So Tiziana-Tiranova, and so we'll see a real contrast, I think, between one that is pretty solidly left, the other one that is more nihilist, and particularly today, Nick Land's work is much more identifiably on the right. But I don't think it's quite that simple even for Nick Land, to be honest, other than some of his views on identity. Because if you look at the readings that we that we have for today, he's very critical of capitalism in various ways. I just don't

think that for him socialism is the alternative to capitalism, it's something else. So we'll discuss all of that. But first I thought I would introduce Tiziana Terranova. Tiziana is Associate Professor of Sociology of Communication and New Media at the University of Naples, Oriental, where she is also the director of the PhD program in cultural and postcolonial studies. I know she is a member of the theory culture. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yes, you can hear me? Yes. Yes, we can hear you. I think she was trying to correct you about something.

I think she was trying to correct you about something, but I'm not sure. Please go ahead Tiziana, I'm sorry. Did you want to add anything Tiziana? Ah, the PhD program you directed. Okay. Oh my god. Is it your auto? It's okay Jason, go on, sorry. It's not important. No, no, no, no, that sounds... Actually, that sounds extremely important. Yeah, okay. And Terra Nova is also a member of the Theory, Culture, and Society editorial board,

the author of the very influential book, Politics for the Information Age. I actually use that in my own dissertation. as well as numerous essays on the cultural politics of new media and tech, including, as we've seen today, is the virtual currencies such as Bitcoin actually offer a left perspective. Her interests include new media studies, science and technology studies, and cultural and media studies. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Tiziana, and thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Jason for having me again on your seminars. I was thinking when you were talking about the times I would go up to Warwick and visit

the CCRU in the 1990s. Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Luciana Parisi was in the CCRU as well, Steve Goodman, and how The essay that was included in the reader is actually the outcome of another kind of social milieu, social political milieu, which has been the network of autonomous universities in Italy in the last ten years. Since I got back to Italy, I started, I became part of Uninomade first and later Euronomade, which were these kind of independent three university networks. What they did was they organized very regular seminars and there's been quite a lot of output in a link with social centers, trying to connect these kind of post-worker theories to actual

processes of self-learning and research in the social network. So these ideas that you mentioned, like Nick Land and the CCRU and the post-worker which I'm writing for because RedStack was written as part of this process of working together with the Aeronomade Network. We've been having quite a lot of meetings and seminars and conferences looking at the concept of the common and trying to make sense of new forms of changes in capitalist modes of valorisation and new opportunities for struggle. And as part of this effort, the question of technology was, of course, quite central. So I was at Goldsmiths College during my sabbatical for a semester this year, and during that

period it was really good to catch up with the field of software studies really. Matt Fuller, Luciana Parisi working at the Center for Cultural Studies allowed me to make acquaintance again with this field. So we organized this workshop together at Goals Mix in January, which brought together thinkers from the post-workist tradition and theorists of software studies. So we had these people in the same room, and I tried hard to get them to talk to each other. We had Maurizio Lazzarato on the one side, Tony Nagy wrote an article about fixed capital and the transformations of PIX Capital for the workshop, which are translated.

And therefore Magalli, Stefano Lucarelli, kind of a bunch of Italian economists linked to the basic income network and to the Milanese social centers were there as well. So we try to kind of understand whether these two ways of looking at technology could talk to each other, especially in relation to recent debates about both algorithms and money. We know the two things are quite closely connected in as much as Bitcoin itself is managed through an algorithm and this notion of, for example, introducing the blockchain as a means to get away from the social corporate platform is quite central. So we had this two days meeting which, in the end, I don't think it did go very well.

I think that these two perspectives had difficulties. We had Arjun McKenzie, Andy Goffrey on one side as well, Scott Lash, Mike Featherstone were present at the meetings, so kind of a theory, culture and society outlook as well. It didn't go very well. So in the end, two days was not enough to really get, understand from each other and learn from each other. So I kind of took it upon myself to try to that later, they write this essay which composes this kind of different perspectives. So it's more kind of an attempt to give a new voice or find a new synthesis between these two fields and these two milliers, and then something that I identify with strongly

as an individual. So it's more an expression of my belonging to this collective. But still, you know, I own up on what I wrote. So the idea was to write something that would bring together a kind of post-workary attempt to think beyond towards a kind of new political and economic rationality. I think that the influence for me of Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, which has also been taken up substantially by Maurizio Lazzarato, was quite important in defining exactly what the political rationality at work in this system. And I was struck by what Fuchs says in those lectures when he says that the right developed

in what we call political rationality, which could be deployed, which could be made to work. And the left did not have such political rationality. What we had was books. So I thought that Tony Negri's notion of the common, around the notion of the common, generally the notion of the common, collaborative commons, or social production, there was something that was emerging, that was trying to address what Foucault was talking about, that in order to introduce a change, to get something new happening, you actually need a political rationality, that gravitates around an idea, such as the neoliberal market which points in a different

direction. So I think the concept of the common, which is still kind of being elaborated, was a good way to try to get into this more pragmatic way of thinking of alternative modes of government. So said that, it's pretty clear to me that whatever new political rationality is going to emerge, because the one that we are living in is now completely familiar to us, I don't think it was so clear 10 years ago. It's completely clear now what marketization means, the centrality of competition, processes of marketization, the fact that work and production is extended towards all times and spaces,

valorization is taking place everywhere, and not only the offices and factories, this has become pretty evident at this point. It's become evident that money plays a very important role in new mechanisms of command which do not simply go through the factory, the office, or in late labor, but which include national debts, which include, in general, this kind of power relation between creditors and debtors. And it's also becoming clear that new forms of subjectivation go through social network sites, they go through apps, and all of this is going on. So the essay was written as a call to whoever was out there, and actually it's been interesting

responses because I did get people to contact me after the Red Stack, who were actually engaged in interesting projects, which I've started collaborating with, or they have actually drawn people together in thinking about new means of making money, for example, hijacking hijacking the powers of financialization. I'm interested in what, for example, it's been said lately about the use of the blockchain and Bitcoin to kind of undermine the monopoly of social media platforms. So I think the text is really an attempt to bring together these two things. Software studies, which is a lot of interesting things to say about the way technology operates

now which go against some interpretations which rightly, you know, acceleration is condemned like equating technologies simply with logic and control. I think if you look at software studies, you can't say that anymore. You know, all of them are emphasizing illogical inconsistencies. They're emphasizing the element of randomness. Luciana Parisi is even talking about kind of new forms of speculative reason emerging out of the encounter of algorithms and big data. So it's quite clear that you cannot think of technology or software in many terms which do not take account of the logic of these machines as well. But this is more or less, I don't know,

I think I would be happy if you ask me questions, maybe, if you want to expand on some of the things I've said. this is the background of RedStack. Sure. I mean, I have a question about the concept of common fair. You mentioned common fair in your essay as one potential outcome of kind of intervening into these new currencies and things like that. And I'm just wondering, like, how exactly do you see something like that emerging? And is common fair something that would be kind of connected to a revamped state or common fair would be coming out of kind of social networks and how does it remain in these new

technologies? This is something that Carlo Vercellona has been working on in PIDES. He has an essay which has been translated and it's about to be published in a special section of theory, culture and society called Euro Crisis and Common Fear. And Vercellone makes this very convincing argument that the only section of the economy which is actually growing is in those sections which used to be the monopoly of the welfare state. So care of the self, health, education, insurance, all these things that we used to associate with the welfare state are where growth is in economic terms. And this is the reason why capital is so interested in privatizing them, because the demand for these kind of services is on the rise.

And as much as they keep complexifying themselves, there are always challenges relating to how to learn, how to do research, all these things. What he says, and I think from anybody who's been working in this kind of hybrid system, He says that welfare state institutions do not exist anymore as a separate domain, kind of public sector, inasmuch as we all know what used to be the public sector has been subjected to its intensive managerial reforms, so it's kind of this kind of hybrid where you have on the one side, you know, the kind of the worst of the public and the worst of the private logic together. Many argue that this is really destructive in terms of what actually is supposed to be

generated, the value that this kind of service is supposed to generate. So they are not catered anymore by the old public structure, which is emphasis on biopolitical control and it's division between those who provide the service and those who are on the receiving end of the service, which are usually disempowered. on the other side the kind of private sector where everything is driven by profit. So his argument is that a central part of the kind of constituent movement of new forms of struggle or new forms of emancipation from this logic should take these services, education,

health, insurance, care in general, as strategic sectors for innovation. And innovation should be essential about establishing kind of new forms of co-learning between the leader of the services and the who are supposed to be on the receiving end. So this kind of innovation obviously you need to have social energies invested in them and I think you can see those in various experiments that are taking place especially in countries struck by austerity and financial crisis, economic crisis, poverty. So you see those innovations happening on the ground but you also need to finance them.

also need to kind of channel this power of finance, this power to create the future into kind of sustaining, nurturing, and supporting this type of creation. So that is where the concept of common fair is coming from. So it's not linked to the kind of old welfare state. It's supposed to be about the invention of new institutions. Great. But how does it... Let me just take a quote from your essay. You say... You raise the question. you say is it possible to draw on the current financialization of the internet by corporations such as Google with its AdSense AdWord program to subtract money from this… Jason, where did you go?

We only heard the last word was subtract money. Jason, are you there or am I the only one not hearing? Yeah, there's some disturbances on the line. Yeah, Jason, your sound is like terrible. You can't hear me? Oh. Okay, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay.

All right. So I just closed a few tabs, and hopefully that will help. Okay, can you hear me now? Still? Yes. Yes, okay. Okay, so the quote that I was drawing on from your essay is you say, is it possible to draw in the current... Yeah, but I get your question. I can't hear you again, but I get your question. And I have to say this question of money, money creation has been... I've been investing quite a lot of energy into it to use financialized languages again the last few months, I think it's been the most fascinating part to follow. Because all this here is about money right now.

The whole part starts with the idea that money is no longer linked to a fixed reference. It's no longer that there's no gold standard, there's no fixed reference anymore, and also So this huge amount of money or liquidity which is created by the financial market which outweighs any possible scale between the kind of money that is being created there. And what I find fascinating about this, also Saskia Sassen gave this really great talk at the Money Lab Conference in Amsterdam when she talked about money as a capability. I'm struck by the necessity to not demonize money, which is something that is kind of common on the left, to understand this power of money, to understand how money is being

created these days in ways which are really being studied. How does Google manage to create so much money between the financial market and also this positives of capitalization. All these things, I find them really fascinating. I've been involved with a project which is called the Robinhood Minor Assets Management Cooperative, which was started in Finland, for example, and they are working along those lines, working with a parasite algorithm which manages to win at the stock market. I met the people in Milan at the Macao Social Center, which is a very important, very lively kind of knowledge worker type of social center in Milan, or, you know, people from the kind

of design, creative industry. The Milanese economy is very much about that, right? It's about design and fashion. And they also launched this initiative called Common Coil, which is about creating a firm so liquidity able to support social production. There are all kinds of interesting experimentation going on around money. So what I was interested in is the idea that money can become kind of a power, a power of materialization of the future, a power to invest, a power to give reality to certain futures over others, and about the fact that the mechanisms of money creation are not so stable anymore.

This is what I've been fascinated with. I cannot hear anything now. Can you hear me? If no one has a question, I was wondering if I could ask a question for Tizio. I also have a question, but I'm going to go after you. I have a question too, yeah. Okay. Okay. First I want to say it was a great article. I really enjoyed it. And I thought it was really instructive how you used Marx's category of fixed capital

to show how to understand algorithms. I thought that was really good. And so I was wondering if... I have two questions, and it's kind of about the implications of the essay. And so for the first set of implications, the essay was interesting because it has implications for how we understand class and class struggle or class antagonism today. So I guess I was just wondering, And I was just wondering, what does it mean to say that the kinds of skilled labor that exists today under capitalism resides within this technological class? Or the people who have the know-how of how to use algorithms and how they affect daily life are this technological class?

Or another way of saying this is, is this new version of the cognitariat or the proletariat? And if that's so, it's interesting because they're in a position where they don't necessarily feel their alienation, where their class position is one where it's not overtly exploited or necessarily poor, but rather actualizes itself in enclaves of gentrification. And here I'm thinking of San Francisco, that'd be the first place that comes to mind, in the United States at least. And so I was wondering just about that, the kind of like, what this implies for class struggle first, if algorithms become this kind of new site of labor today. And second, if we're to think of algorithms as being materially and culturally embedded within capitalism,

but we're also committed to finding the resources to use this technology towards ends rather than capital accumulation, where do we find the resources to kind of desubjectivize the technological class of society in order for them to no longer be invested in technology as it exists under capitalism, but technology as it can exist in post-capitalism. And also this is my own assumption, because it assumes that we take algorithms to be one of the main sites of class antagonism in capitalism today. So how are we to treat this relationship between algorithms and capital? Is it one side of antagonism among others, or do you think it's the primary side of antagonism? Well, I always have this discussion with kind of like more technologically minded sections

of the movement who are into cryptography and really think that everybody should be able to program. And I always be more on the side of kind of trash pop culture. So when I think of algorithms, I think there is a kind of quite a gamut of them. There's quite a lot of them, right? So there's really complex ones, really patented, obscure ones. But algorithm as such is just a set of steps. It's a sequence of steps which get you to set in motion this kind of automated process which can have different kind of outcomes. So I think that we shouldn't concentrate too much on the knowledge class or the kind of

hackers, which I think are a very important constituency in part of this kind of class composition. But in ways, maybe I should go back a bit later. But I'm interested more on the kind of mass participation to places like social networks. Because in the end, algorithms always exist in a relationship with this kind of social social dynamics, social processes that they have to link to. Somebody has to put in the data. You can play with an algorithm even if you're not a hacker. So my first point is that we should demystify the algorithm and understand that there's some very common skills or some very common forms of coming which can be applied to the algorithms and that algorithms can be invented even without computers, for example, to provoke

processes of subjectivation. So that's the thing that I'm more concerned of making clear that I think it's not just about the kind of hardcore technical elite. As far as the hardcore technical elite, you know, employees of places like Google and so I think they're in position. I mean, I've been reading research about Google employees, Facebook, I find it very fascinating about the kind of hacking communities. And I find it very fascinating. When I talk about Richard Stallman, it was clear that he was not feeling that he was in a good position, right? So he just got pissed off about something, the fact that they wanted to take this technology

away from him. So it was something very internal, like the kind of value system that he had developed in his relationship with machines. I think the value system does clash for these kind of segments that you were talking about. Sometimes clashes will cooperate in penalties. Sometimes it's kind of accommodated, there's a kind of really... There's a strange relationship, there's so many parts of it. I'm sure you live there, so you know much better than me. from what I read on the situation in San Francisco, it's not just one simple kind of subjectivity, it's not just one simple type of worker. There's all kinds of differences even there between

people who are more heavily committed to the whole kind of working in high tech, so people or computer business spectrum becomes just a job, you know, for people who work in the kind of service part, you know, it seems like it's a lot more differentiated than it seems. And yeah, so there's all kinds of tension in that sector. I think algorithms, yeah, to answer your question about algorithms and capital, algorithms in this very large meaning, something that involves a logic which goes from the most simple to the most complex are a crucial part of the process of automation. Even production of something like common fair, you're going to need all the reasons to subjectivize people

in different ways, away from being patient, for example, and towards being more involved in the process of healing. It's the same thing for learning. I don't know if it makes sense, is quite late over here and it's been a long day no that's the answer your question yes yeah thank you I also I also had a question if you can help me with my question has to do with so like I've done a lot of research on the creation of fiat currency and the setup of particularly in in in the United States with the creation of the Federal Reserve, right?

And to put it generally, right, it seems that the banking class was very well aware of the power of sort of like liberating money from fixed assets like gold or property. And sort of like the generative power of this and how this could sort of like be used in a way to sort of like globalize the project of capitalism so to me one way to look at what we call globalization today is look at how certain bank interests in the United States thought about liberating dollar from gold in order to actually create a global currency for globalization

which will take them like decades for it to sort of like populate the word as the medium of exchange and sort of like create the medium for this economic interaction to take place, right? Why have the left or Marxists been so late to recognize, I mean it's been like we celebrated the 100th year of the Federal Reserve last year Because Federal Reserve was created in December of 1913 on a day like late December, right? Late December, 1913, right? So it's been a hundred years that the capitalist class has known the algorithmic power of money.

But certain readings of Marx or even certain Marxist notions like fictitious capital versus real capital, you know, have been barrier. here, and what do you think has been the cause of this misunderstanding, and why are we getting to it so late, so much after the bad guys have got to it, like 100 years ago? Okay, so you basically agree that there is something in the power of money, especially this new… Oh yeah, so generative, and not negative power of money, but positive power of money. Exactly, exactly, I agree with you. I have to say that having worked on this, I also realized that the Italians actually were not part of that much. Already in the 70s, they were writing about the crucial importance of credit.

So I think again, the Google employees is actually a kind of monthly collection of very different groups and ideas and belief systems and notions. We know that's a problem with the left, you know, there's a kind of polarization of differences very often. So apart from that, you know, this general feeling persists, and I think it's a kind of, I don't know, I always think about it as a kind of religious legacy, which is part of the figure of the militant on the left. I found that again and again, that there is a very strong, much less in the new generations, I think people are kind of grown up in this kind of system, much more or less of that

opinion about the kind of mistrust of money, a bit of demonization of money. So if you want to build on what you said, if you want to build on what you said, if we agree that capitalization, which is the process of capital accumulation, right, is algorithmic and is a form of algorithmic technology, right? Socialist, yeah. Definitely. And if you're along the line of people like Giovanni Ariri and Nidzan and Bichler who kind of like point to the beginning of capitalism actually prior to industrialization to the invention of the idea of depth in the city-states of Europe in 1400, right? So this

opposition, there is something fundamentally religious about opposition to technology and Christianity and in Islam that kind of like shuns depth and put a barrier on it, right? And when you bring in a religion, you just like, because we were talking about this earlier, I don't know, today with Jason actually, that like there is something inherently anti-technology in the idea of Abrahamic religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, that sort of like resisted depth and sort of like stigmatized it or actually legislated against it. for so long. That's, yeah, that's an argument. It's also, I mean, I remember a really nice book by Stephen Shukaitis, where it's actually,

he explicitly reconstructs this kind of Christian genealogy of the leftist militant subjectivity, which is, you know, one possible line. Then Lazzarato, for example, talks about it, goes back to times before Christianity, He goes to the Greek cynics as another model. But the kind of association, the cult of poverty, which is not bad. I think poverty has its value as well, and could be made different from this kind of distrust of money. A distrust of money, materialism, despite the fact that materialism is selective, but still consumption, commodities are still seen as suspicious.

I think there is definitely something in the way this Marxist or leftist objectivity has taken hold of other types of ways of feelings which are out there, has produced this kind of puritanism. You say that it's generalizable to all these religions, possibly, but I think it's definitely part of that. money is corrupting agents because there is greed, corporate greed. There is a very nice book here which I'm reading, and I can show it to you, it's called What Money Wants, which talks about exactly that. The fact that money is linked to this, they attempt to exercise the notion of greed from

money from kind of Wall Street bankers, they know we are not greedy, or from economists to say greed is not a factor and how the kind of greed as a tendency to expansion is inbuilt in money as this abstract power and then some difficulties, cultural difficulties in dealing with that and accepting the notion of hyper growth. Yeah. And money but also finance, right? Because you also mentioned finance. So it's like the problem is kind of money and debt because money also could be just like cash, right? It's mostly like money that incurs some kind of interest. So the enemy is still like more like the idea of financialization and capitalization, which comes with interest, right?

And so what I'm trying to suggest is that there are ways to think of a new form of socialism, to put it simply as finance socialism in opposed to like state socialism. I mean, finance could still be state, like experiments in China, right? But sort of like starting to think of finance as a productive tool, rather than something to kind of like keep out of the, sort of like keep out of the post-capitalist future. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. It's funny how I just posted a Jacobin article, Meg, with a really good fellow who, what's his name, Seth Ackerman, who actually discusses practically how you would socialize finance.

And it's amazing in Facebook discussions how all of the traditional Marxists just a priori they reject the very notion of a socialist market-based economy, just based on Marxist teachings in the 19th century. Whereas that article there is one of the most inspiring because it's actually looking for real ways we could have a working socialist economy. I had a question for Tiziana. You mentioned software and you're not too concerned with hardcore programming but sort of the democratic processes enabled and I'm wondering if you

have done any research into agile programming methodology because I work in the corporate enterprise sector and it seems like there's a real recognition that complexity has to be dealt with in a lot more of an agile fashion and chaos has to be dealt with. And agile is weird because it does to an extent lead to a lot more of a horizontal approach to management. I'm wondering if that could be even a good model for other forms of organization that aren't in the corporate sector. Sorry, I couldn't hear the first part so I kind of lost. My question to you was about Agile. If you've looked into the Agile programming methodology, which is used a lot in the corporate

sector and in the spirit of appropriating corporate techniques as opposed to traditional top down, they call waterfall software development methods. It's a lot more horizontal, it's a lot more accepting of chaotic change. Yes, yes. I want to talk about open technology, is there something similar? Open technology, is that something similar to our job? It's not so much a software licensing model or open source, it's more of a management model for implementing large complex systems and leaving open the possibility for contingency and for the changing.

I'm really interested in that. I mean I had some experience with that at a recent meeting which was attended by somebody who worked in the Silicon Valley and she brought in these methods and also brought in all kind of platforms to sustain that, to sustain that kind of collaboration and all kind of techniques and I was really fascinated. I was fascinated because he gave me kind of a, you know, I had the kind of researcher glasses on, modern participants, and I thought that those methods kind of assumed that something was already there. You know, they assumed a certain kind of human being was there, and that a certain, you know, that everybody had the same kind of investment in this kind of investment, and I thought that only under those conditions it would work.

Sometimes I think that these kind of models, you know, this is part of the research I'm doing now, these kind of models that are being introduced to kind of give some order or give some structure to the management of this kind of effective cooperation always presumes that people are already kind of sold into what they're doing or they're already really committed. And I think that the larger problem that one often has outside the corporate sectors is how to get people to want invested. See what I mean? Because if you're working, you're motivated by financial rewards. Yeah. But it's amazing how today there is...

Brian posted that thing about the sharing economy and it's amazing today how every sector creative or even anything which is remotely desirable in many cases you can't make a living off it. So there is a great culture of sharing on the internet, even open source software, the people who do it don't really have a monetary impulse. It's just then how to organize, how to get a large complex project working and Google can offer some really good advice on that. They have a real tendency to release, often release lots of changes. Things don't have to be perfect. Even this Google Classroom thing, they just release it and then they just start adding functionality on top. So yeah, it's interesting that the motivation would be there and often the issue of the

left is organization. So Snirsek asked how do we scale up, how do we go from these small initiatives to global ones and I think we can learn a lot from these big, you know, software companies. My point was that these platforms and these methods work only if a certain kind of human being is already there. It's not just about motivation. They assume that people are already thinking in a certain way, acting in a certain way. But more often, the problem that you have with the kind of grassroots organization that the left is trying to do is to affect, change the individual, to get the kind of individual

or to undergo a kind of transformation that will allow to invest. So I think sharing platform works because people are already socialized into a certain kind of way of thinking about their properties as assets. But they wouldn't work. Many of these platforms, which work very well in a kind of corporate context, when you put them in a kind of leftist organization, people would just not adopt them. They would not use them. I tried it again and again. Because if something else has to happen, they don't take them up, they don't use them, they don't participate, there's a kind of a straight refusal. So does that mean that it's just a problem that people don't want to use them, or that

means that maybe every technology of social production has to start from the kind of human beings that you have. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I've noticed that like eFlux has started a new discussion platform, even the new center with say the classroom and participation rates are really lower. However, enormous amount of effective investment happens on Facebook. discussion, then when you try to move it to an explicitly left platform, then all of a sudden participation rates just drop. So, yeah, I completely see that problem. So, in the spirit of the hacking culture, that's a challenge. It's not something that should make you throw your hands and say, what's going on there? Why something like

Facebook work? And how do you make, what new platforms you could imagine which you kind of generate the same level of involvement and start to do more. We need to purchase Facebook basically and like we need to like buy to purchase Facebook at a really below market price and then put it to use. That's what we need to really be doing. No, we need to outdo Facebook and what is good at. No, for sure, for sure. But like also, if Facebook's already,

like just following what Igor was saying, like if people are like attracted to the ubiquitous sort of like generic look of Facebook and its familiarity and the way it kind of feels like a dwelling, like Heideggerian dwelling, then maybe we should just like take it over somehow. because you know what I mean also experiments with social media and it's not just private like LO just died right hello just came in and everybody was into LO and for like 24 hours 48 hours and then LO just went down right whereas you know everybody has been predicting the death of Facebook very soon you know what I mean young people don't do Facebook Facebook is gonna die it's gonna be snapchat but like actually Facebook seems to be pretty sort of like stable in terms of how people use people of different

like society cultural levels professions use it and utilize it into their own work my own curatorial work cannot go forward without Facebook or like the work we do for new center just gonna be impossible without Facebook like the new center will just die without Facebook tomorrow if you unplug Facebook so and we have to kinda like if you're gonna out to Facebook we really have to study it really well and know what parts of it are are are useful to be salvaged towards another for and definitely LO did not do that or Google Google try to do the past it's Facebook has some magic sauce and people are really locked into then my girl all their effective investments into some other

platform. Like we see with the Google classrooms now, there's very little actual participation in the past seminars, but there's a lot of great discussions happening on Facebook all the time. Well, you know, I don't want to take over the discussion. There's other texts that need to be discussed. But about Google Plus, I have a theory. And I think Google is not interested in killing Facebook yet. I think Google, if they have the brainpower and the human power to attack all the problems of Google Plus and make it a real good social media but I think they are intentionally leaving that market to Facebook for now as they develop other sort of like AGIs and other forms of artificial intelligence and other kind of

stuff they are doing. And I think once they kind of like secure all that work they can make Facebook disappear if they wish to because it's so integrated with email, with video, with search, and they can bring all that together. I think they're waiting for like a huge big bang and Google Plus is just sort of like this thing that runs in the background so they can kind of like study us. That's what I think because I just cannot imagine Google wanting to eliminate Facebook and not being able to. Possible. Yeah. So yeah, there will be too much visibility as the kind of singular point that the mega central hub of the internet. They will become a circle. Yeah, I just noticed that even for myself,

as a technology, I didn't feel any desire to go onto Google Plus. Or Elo as well. Like we said, it might not have died. There's something about Facebook. Yeah, I think Google has recognized that. It's much more boring. So it's in me today. There's an element around it. And it makes this very interesting reference they make to surprise early subjection. You know, the feeling of surprise is what is needed for the work of attention to be carried on. Surprise is what regenerates you. It allows you to turn into different directions and think in you. And the element of surprise with the social media in general,

and Facebook in particular, was very strong at the beginning. It was like all this micro-excitement of all the people that you met again or you never met and all the things that you saw. And I think that there's something about Facebook that's becoming more and more blunt. It's becoming blunted. It's more boring. it's like people are kind of more exhausted more or less you know how many pictures of sunsets when you see there is that feeling setting in I don't know what that means but it's definitely I think something new even compared to like two years ago the feeling that there's a repetition that does not surprise anymore about the way it works this just reminds me a little bit about our conversation last time

on Sunday and the idea of the platform and maybe the attraction of Facebook is that the platform has become more neutral or more generic and that it's not as exciting anymore, whereas Ello is all about this kind of specific platform for designers or whatever creative people. And so maybe the attraction or the integrity or, sorry, why people are sticking with Facebook is because it has become a platform where these other things can happen in the platform itself is not as much of a focus. I don't know if anyone is thinking about that. I was just going to drop in there on that point that Jessie just made. We were having

this conversation in the Xeno Feminism class on the weekend about the fact that Facebook cues you so much. It tells you what to write, it asks you to sort of add how you're feeling, to tag people. It gives you all these cues about how to construct your subjects online. And we were comparing this to the old BBSs or the Moods where you just had this completely anarchic text-based blank space where you could do anything. I mean, you didn't have to, there was no queuing. So I think your point about Facebook being generic is really good. It's kind of not connected to any particular ideology and so people just, I don't know, get on it. But it's also completely insidiously directed as well. There are all these little

things telling you how to write about yourself or how to present yourself that we forget sometimes and I think it's worth maybe challenging most or just being aware of all. Yeah, for sure. I think similar to language it acts as this kind of neutral space but it's definitely not. It's almost harder that you have to kind of spend more time in order to note or realize the ubiquity or the way that those algorithms, I guess, are directing you. But maybe that's what the popularity of it is that there's less, it's easier to navigate those things. You don't have to think of a new way to present yourself because the steps are there

and everything is there for you. I don't know. These are all just ramblings now. But I'm just seeing lots of connections between last time and this very specific example of something we're all very familiar with, I guess. Can I ask a question to go back to the question of subjectivity and money? Yes. Can you hear me? Yeah? Yeah, you write in your piece that in the same way as financial capital is intrinsically linked to a certain kind of subjectivity, so an autonomous form of money needs to be both jacked into and productive a new kind of subjectivity. And I was kind of wondering,

do you think that this perhaps, I don't know, let's call it enabling constraint for the for the production of this new kind of subjectivity need to be inbuilt in the code or, I don't know, for instance I'm thinking about a distributed autonomous organization which are the unbreakable contract based on the blockchain and validated by the network. So, I don't know, I'm wondering if that's the case. What, I don't know, what does the make of us? Yes. Well, I was struck by this definition by some sociologists of financial networks. I don't remember whether it was Brett Nelson, the author of A Hackers Guide to Capitalism.

Yeah. But he said something like, finance is a social network. In the end, very centralized one that you kind of view a few more powerful hubs, but Everybody's connected, this intense sociality between the traders. So I thought, you know, the money is a value expressed by this specific kind of social network, right, which has this specific type of orientation or subjectivity. And Bitcoin is another example. You can see them in the way in which the Bitcoin is built. If I were an archaeologist, a kind of software archaeologist, then I would discover something like Bitcoin, I could reconstruct the kind of people who made it, you know, for like

a forensic doctor or something like that, because there's such a distrust of sociality, which is typical of kind of hackers and societies, you know. So the social subjective element is dangerous because it introduces all kinds of frictions that we don't want. So we want something that will do away with any kind of subjectivity, right, while financial money is the result of a kind of subjectivity which is oriented towards maximum growth. So it's generating this kind of short-term growth. So it's generating money which is fantastically multiplying itself as opposed to this kind of automated scarce resource. So if money is something that is invented and is sustained by belief and is supported

by resources, which could be technical, social, material of different kinds. How many different types of current systems could we imagine? And what kind of mixture, what kind of code would express different kinds of subjectivity? I was thinking about Common Coin from Milan, the way they wanted to replace the mining mechanism with a kind of collective deliberation process, exactly what the kind of Bitcoin people wouldn't want, right? And then for me it would imply another inventing a way to think and decide which is different from the ones that we have now, not by assembly, not by committee, maybe a different process

altogether. So, yeah, I think that money expresses subjectivity. This kind of money is definitely quite clear. That is what it does. I see somebody likes the idea. Yeah, they are trying to deliver Bitcoin money. They are trying to deliver it. Yeah, Laura and me met in Sydney and we had a long discussion on how a socialist Bitcoin would work. It was a really drunken conversation, so I don't remember too much. We don't want to keep you up for longer, because you've been with us for an hour. I'm working tomorrow, yes. Quite late there.

So if there's no more question, we would like to say thank you and goodbye to Tiziana. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Enjoy the rest of the segment. Yes, and please keep in touch with us, because we'd love to have you, hopefully, maybe even like a closer connection to the new center. OK. See you. I'm going to take call. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. OK, so let's see. OK, she's gone. Okay, so I would say this was sort of like very productive.

I feel great about it. But we should move into the presentations. So let's see who wants to go first. I'm much more into like starting with Igor because I really like the Nick Lance pieces and I can kind of like go back and forth with you a little bit. I'm just going to pull it up on my iPad. You can start. I might have to leave a bit earlier for work, so it's great if I can go first. Yeah, you go first. And, you know, most people here are, if they're not personal friends of Nick Land, they have a good idea of who he is. But it wouldn't hurt if you just give, like, a little bit of a bio. So those who are not familiar would sort of, like, clue in.

So what I know about Nick Land, there's probably lots of people here who know more than me, but is he was very prominent at Warwick University and he started the CCRU which generated lots of very interesting people for example Mark Fisher, Ray Brzeier, even Hyperdub Records label manager Code9 came from the CCRU, Stady Plants and as Amy can tell you about the cyber feminism and then he according to Robin McKay he actually went mad and like he said in every clinical and normative sentence he went completely mad and disappeared and left academia. Now

he's been known to, he lives in Shanghai and does he do like travel writing? But he's very He's a controversial figure, known very much as a Deleuzian, and now he's associated a bit with the near reactionary right accelerationism side. That's something which probably later on Amy can explain more in detail because I haven't researched that area very well. But nonetheless, he is really a proto-accelerationist and even a proto-the movement of speculative realism and sort of that loose term which now is very fragmented. But what I want to show in this article is how in 1992 he wrote something which already

anticipated all of the main issues which these new realists would start to identify. So regardless of what people think, he's a racist, he's right wing, he still is a figure we have to contend with. And Moe had an interesting discussion with Sebastian on Facebook where he kind of stated all accelerationists are kind of racist but unlike Nick Land they won't admit to it. And it's a bit like he then Moe countered with, it's like saying that Adam Smith and Marx are both the same because they both started with similar theories of value. So we kind of have the same, he raised the same contentions as Left Accelerations.

It's something, he's a figure we really have to deal with and work with, even though we come to very different conclusions. So that aside, I guess I'll start with the article. So he's got this very lovely poem which I like it from like a just artistic perspective. It's really fun and I like it from like a geeky sci-fi point of view. And what I link this to is in the previous seminar we discussed Marx and Veblen, Marx's fragment on machines and how he goes how the tool which man would pick up a hammer and put down to very complex industrial interconnected machines where the inverse happens where man

becomes this person interstitially who is supporting and maintaining the machine and man becomes just a link in a larger chain of machines. This is what they were saying in the 19th century. Now you have Nick Land coming and identifying another tipping point, which is where Technics is increasingly thinking about itself. So the emergence of artificial intelligence, information technology, algorithms. So this is like a second moment in the evolution of the machine. and what he does here, it's curious, this is very much all of his references cited are from

De Lysangatari's Anti-Oedipus, so this is predominantly an exegesis on De Lysangatari's Anti-Oedipal work, however De Lysangatari, when they use machine, the term machine and desiring machine, they're referring to actually almost everything, they have a critique of desire desire thought of as lack, the Oedipal complex, and rather than desire as lack, they speak of the generative, creative potential of desire that is impersonal, that traverses through partial objects, desiring machines. And what Nick Land does is he takes the term machine and actually conflates it with information technology and computing machines.

This is his main distinction now from Deleuze and Gattari. And also he speaks a lot of cybernetics, but before we go into that bit, his initial few pages are very vital to understand how important he is to the speculative realists. Because this is where I posted this quote earlier, a few days ago, of how he speaks of how obsolete the typical Hegelian, Cartesian and Marxist sort of dialectic is. And I'll just read it out briefly.

He says, what thus one sees the decaying, hegated socialist heritage clinging with increasing desperation to the theological sentimentalities of praxis, rurification, alienation, ethics, autonomy, and other such myth themes of human creative sovereignty. A Cartesian howl is raised. People are being treated as things. And Brazier has another article, Genres Obsolete, where he says exactly the same thing, the objectification of the human with cognitive science with other technologies. So however this is when Brazier writes 20 years later, a Cartesian howl is raised, rather than a soul spirit the subject of history, Dasein, for how long will this infantilism be protracted?

And then he goes, if machinery is conceived transcendentally as instrumental technology, it is essentially determined in opposition to social relations. If it is integrated imminently as cybernetic technique, it redesigns all oppositionality as nonlinear flow. There is no dialectic between social and technical relations, but only a machinism that dissolves society into the machines whilst de-territalizing machines across the ruins of society." And this is a general theory, or a general theory of flux, which is to say cybernetics. And again, this is another point of departure from Deleuze Gattari, where he identifies their theory of flux with cybernetics and has a difference between how they conceive of cybernetics and how he does.

And it's also, the term cybernetics brings to mind cyborg, cyberpunk, all these sci-fi things, but when you read about what the discipline of cybernetics is, it's an evolution of management and systems theory. And again, it corresponds to biological systems, ecological systems, organizational systems. It's not as sci-fi and as sometimes it's associated with as a term. So this is where... So from this very... He says cybernetics develops functionally, not representationally. And here we are very much at, again, other important things raised by, say, Peter Wolfendale,

Metzinger, about the issue of representation today in an increasingly abstracted world, an increasingly technological world, where these old philosophical distinctions and the idealist traditions cannot handle. And this makes him a very important figure. And I'm just going to read from some notes I wrote. And he also preempts Negaristani's critique of Kitsch Marxism. He calls it transcendental miserablism and the privileging of the subject. And then further on in this article, it's very much an exegesis of the very well-known themes of anti-Oedipus.

I don't know, probably most of you know them, but they talk about the axiomatic of capital. He conflates cybernetic control with axiomatics, and axiomatics is a form of over-coding, which is quantitative. So a good definition of it is, capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes, an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. This is from Antioedipus. So broadly speaking, axiomatizing for DeLiz and Guattari is seen as commodifying. He instead, and this is where I kind of my critique of him is raised, where he really does give this vitalism, this machinic vitalism

of this emerging cyber intelligence that will render humans obsolete. And he sees his relationship to capitalism as the human security system which kind of keeps things in check, which is very much what the Oedipal complex is in Capital. It's this re-territorializing effect to keep things kind of stable and keep an internal form of lack so you can continue to produce commodities. And he also critiques Wiener, who is one of the founding fathers of cybernetics, for kind of applying to cybernetics something which we can see in the market where the optimal

state is one of equilibrium, so kind of keeping positive and negative feedback loops from amplifying getting out of control. He instead proposes some sort of radical, crazy, positive feedback loop that will just entirely exit humans control and doesn't really give much information on how this will happen. So I guess my question is for him is he proposes is he proposes this extreme form of deterritorialisation, which most people recognise is not necessarily desirable. So my question here is, in arguing for complete deterritorialisation,

what does Land hope the outcome will be beyond a certain romantic fascination with madness? This is a net opposition to Nicaristan in Brzezé, who, yes, reject any last vestiges of theology, accept the nihilistic implications of technology and the scientific image and test to the inescapable alienation of reason and the cruelty of a realism that is only workable through abstraction and always incomplete, always subject to revision, but take this only as the necessary conditions for beginning a project of construction and Prometheism rather than an end goal in itself. And norms and language are done as we discussed, Mo discussed last seminar through language, which is a shared value. And yes, even Delerian Gattari's view of language

is that, yes, it is inherently political. So a certain form of territorialization is required for us to have any form of constructive project. So that is a bit kind of what I see in this article. JOHN MUELLER, can you hear me right now? Yeah, just give me a second, Jason. Yeah, we can hear you. I think you're… It should be much, much better right now. Yeah, if it doesn't fall apart I think it's pretty good. Okay. What I was going to say is two things. One is the problem with Nick's conception of the machine is that, and this is something we were talking about earlier with some of the people who entered the Hangout, is that

And we're talking here both historically and ontologically, right? That there's no point in time in the history of our species that you can separate human from technology. So if you read sort of like the origins of anthropology from Jean-Jacques Rousseau onward to Simondon and others, there's a line of thinking in anthropology that suggests that Biological evolution and technological evolution are like one continuum and you don't really know which one ends, when one ends and when one starts, right? So particularly saying that tools turn apes into man or human, right?

Like by the use of tools, particularly like hand tools and also mind tools like language, apes are like turned into human, right? So we're always, when you're dealing with post-human, we've always been post-human. Like we've never been human. We kind of like we don't know how do we go from animal to post-human. So and even today the fantasy of an intelligent machine independent of human, I think it's kind of like fantasy. And you're always going to be dealing with this monster that's part human, part machine. And that's something that I think I have an issue with Nick and I probably will hopefully next semester when he's teaching seminars with us, I will get a chance to kind of like

get into a dialogue with him about this. The other thing is that as you notice in the text is he is sort of like fetishization of chaos and immersion and kind of like his anti-planning attitude, right? planning and like kind of like part of it part of it I have I have this quote here right he says design no longer leads back towards a divine origin because once shifted into cybernetics it ceases to commensurate with the with with the few political ideal of the plan so like you see something sinister about the plan whereas we know with the left acceleration and the way a lot of other people think plans as so long as they're revisable and they're open to

to revision open to a feedback loop there's nothing wrong with plan in fact without plan what you're going to end up with is what you said which is madness so to me these are these are sort of a couple of things that really have to be problematized in the text go ahead no I'm sorry he just says I'm all planning is theology and that's in the sentence later is crazy it's yeah and I'm Benedict Singleton says as well, I think in Maximum Jailbreak is humans are artificial because they are the first creatures capable of artifice. Yeah, totally. I think when I read that, I totally had to go back to my Stiegler books and look up the references, the anthropological references of that, because I kind of got interested

into his idea by reading Stiegler's Technique and Time years ago. And he mentions the anthropologists who kind of follow that. Luca is saying something, they have a completely romantic and completely non-technical notion of self-organizing system, plant and land I mean. I think there is one other dimension here though that's really important and that is that I just don't want to go so far as to saying that he's talking about total de-territorialization without any control because he does two things in this reading that actually kind of go against the grain of what both of you are saying in my opinion. And that is number one, his positive valuing of instrumentality.

And number two, his positive valuing of the concept of control. And basically what he's doing is he's juxtaposing, you know, first of all he's critiquing the kind of Frankfurt School critique of instrumental rationality. He's saying that this critique of instrumentality is itself maybe not a form of domination, but but it itself is a form of ignoring certain kinds of potentials which do involve control. I read this as saying that it's basically juxtaposing oppressive domination of various kinds with what he kind of suggests would be a liberating form of control.

In other words, the part where he's talking about judgment and how cybernetics in the hands of Wiener and some other people like that, their very first impulse was, okay, they introduced cybernetics, but then they don't let cybernetics be cybernetics. They don't let the control that is possible with cybernetics emerge fully as itself, emerge fully as control. And instead control is suddenly seen as, oh god this control could become oppressive. This ability to control a lot of things at one time. But I really do think that he is saying here that there is a form of liberating control.

You have a quote you want to read directly from the text? So to me that's not pure de-territorialization. I think he's talking still about some kind of cybernetic control. Yeah, I can give you a direct quote. So for example, let's see. He calls it mutant control. Just while you're looking, Jason, I wanted to clarify. This particular kind of control, which he separates from the weanocybernetic sort of idea of control as regulation and homeostasis, is a kind of cyberpositive feedback loop that

is mutant and exploratory. It creates like a form of stability, which is emergent, and not inscribed in any kind of like means to ends, teleological arrangement. And this is what he equates with intelligence. Right. It's this kind of mutant exploratory sort of thing. Why is he using the word control, and why is he embracing instrumentality? To me, there's something in here that is maybe a kind of dialectical relationship to those questions, but I don't get the feeling that it's just pure freedom without any, or pure deterioration, pure, you know, limitlessness. It's, there's still...

I'm agreeing with you, yeah. Okay, okay. There's two actually opposing sentences, phrases here. Far from instrumentality extending authority, the efficiency of mastery is its undoing, since all efficiency is cybernetics, and cybernetics dissolves domination in mutant control. That's what Amy just said. Another one is, Wiener is the great theoretician of stability cybernetics, integrating the sciences of communication and control in their modern or managerial technocratic form. But it is this new science, plus its unmanaged escalation through the real, that is for the first time cybernetics as the exponential source of its own propagation programming us well so as you know what he's doing I think also and other people can like verify he's drawing

a line between first order of cybernetics which is still called modernist cybernetic right we'd like later so like move from thermostat to like you know the status what do you call it cybernetic to more dynamic forms of cybernetics which he sees emerging with a second and third order right he doesn't necessarily like mention this but I think I think the way he describes it lines up with like history of cybernetics so he's kind of like saying like yeah it comes from that modernist approach of Norbert Wiener, but it opens up to something way more interesting later. I just wonder about his continuing, he continues to go on about schizophrenia, so it doesn't

seem to me that there's anything like a positive movement if he talks about schizophrenia as prisoners from the future? I don't know. I think this whole point that Jason's bringing up is something that's missed inland all the time. And that this idea of, it's not just romantic de-territorialisation into madness, But it's the fact that this kind of deterritorialization then gives rise to new stabilities, which then are open to more deterritorialization that mutate, give rise to new stabilities.

And this is how you have this intelligence, which effectively is a kind of bootstrapping. And there is a lot of continuity, I think, between Reza's project and Lan's project. It's just that Reza creates a wedge where he can bring a kind of specific type of human agency back into it, whereas Lan's completely happy to hand that over to the machines as soon as possible, which is the most interesting difference, I think, between them. But this section that we've been talking about in circuitries is very much about this idea of control against the Wiener idea of control, this control as an emergent control, as a kind of navigation, this self-emergent sort of system. It's kind of like we were discussing with Châtelet and the new reactionaries,

wasn't it? Where I, you know, incorrectly, there was this fascination with chaos, but then one is towards a market-based ability, whereas land is sort of wanting to go to another level of allowing... Yeah, he wants to evolve near subjectivities. You see also signs of like his sort of like thinking along the line of the loser's control society, right? The cybernetic disillusion of judgment is an integrated shift from transcendence to imminence, from domination to control, from meaning to function, right? That's still from the circuitries, right? Yeah, exactly. Here's the quote that I was thinking of. This is why the cybernetic sense of control is irreducible to the traditional political

conception of power based on a dyadic master-slave relationship, i.e. a transcendent, oppositional and signifying figure of domination. Domination is, and here he's critiquing phenomenology again, domination is merely the phenomenological portrait of circuit inefficiency, control malfunction or stupidity. It is only the confused humanist orientation of modernist cybernetics which lines up control with domination. And then he goes into the concept of emergent control. But yeah, in some ways it does seem to be almost taking exactly DeLiz's control society and saying, you know, maybe a control society could be a good thing if we could program it correctly.

or it could if you could really truly be cybernetic because again you know it the shadow they keep coming back the problem with chaos is not that chaos is bad is that is that the chaos of the market has these invisible hands that are constantly trying to shape it but camouflage it within this emergent chaos right so even even like if you wanna like critique chaos like the chaos of market is really like not it it's bad because it's really not a genuine chaos it's a it's a controlled chaos it's a chaos with with some people using leverages to try to shape it and that's what becomes problematic with it right now there's like it's seven o'clock and we want we start on time so

So we got like an hour left and we have a couple of more, I don't know, like do we want to move on to the next land article because I think there's other people who want to have to present, right? I'm ready if people have no more questions. Yeah, we can move on to the next one. Okay, so yeah, I'll get started then. You're done with the biography, so you don't have to go over that. Good. And, yeah, sorry, I didn't get through all of the securities, and I know there's some overlap there. I found just recently a quote that I'm going to try to bring in, but I'm going to screen share so I can bring up the notes that I have.

Here we go. So yeah, this text works on a sort of much less openly philosophical and a much more, yeah, cultural and historical plane. I mean, it starts off dealing entirely with temporality. So I just want to start with sort of what is cyberpositive, and he gives a different sort of definition in circuities, I guess, but cyberpositive in this case is one possible articulation of the process of acceleration. It's a modifier that roughly describes a process by which capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback

organizing itself. And now this is where I regret that I didn't get all the way through circuities or do this kind of search, because it occurred to me that cyber positive isn't used as anything other than a modifier here. It's not cyber positivity or cyber positivism. It's not sort of the way acceleration can be, accelerationism, or we could call Nick Lantan accelerationist. It's only cyberpositive. And I went through and looked at pretty much every use of the term in this text. I have them all listed here. So, is cyberpositive a program? I mean, is there just a descriptor of this process that he's talking about?

And how does one kind of engage in this, if at all possible? It seems that he and Plante here really are kind of rejecting any kind of practical agency on the part of any subject in terms of affecting this process. They can kind of try to slow it down, but in the same way that when you vaccinate for a virus, it only selects the stronger forms of the virus, and in time, the spread just becomes more vehement. That's kind of the process that it seems like he's looking at here, and that there's no real intentional aspect to it. And so what comes up later is something called chaos culture, what they call sort of sensibility of the future, is what the plant and land seem to be advocating in this text.

and for me it seems like this would be really close to a kind of theological valorization of imminence and perhaps they get this from Deleuze saying that sort of giving into and sort of embodying imminence and its sort of force of de-terralization is a way of pushing ontological novelty to its highest point and that this is sort of the only good that we can think of. But I think you could also identify it with Heideggerian-Golassenheit here in this kind of perverse way. As there's human agency is practically non-existent. Intentionality is a philosophical fiction.

And the only thing that we can really do is... And this really, interestingly, this is where sort of 90s cyberculture, techno, sort of everything that Warwick and the CCRU are now identified with comes in this idea of chaos culture that what we can do is kind of embrace and subjectively experience this kind of acceleration and dissolve ourselves in it. This is also where I see the influence of Bataille in here. So if no one has any questions on that I'll move on. What do you think he means by cyber positive? If you had to define it, what is cyber positivity?

Sure. I mean, I think this quote right here is the abstract positive feedback loop of self-organizing basically with biotechnical evolution. I think that would pretty much define it. I guess you could also define it as the search for a perpetual motion machine. I'm sort of, in a way that, due to the laws of physics, a perpetual motion machine is impossible, but if you can escape the meat, then self-organizing, self-designing, and self-producing artificial intelligence

would be that kind of embodiment of cyber positivity. Once again, you can't talk about it except as cyber positive. As a cyber positive. Part of what I'm asking is that part of it comes up when he's talking about Norbert Wiener and Wiener's kind of humanist moralism and the way that he kind of restrained cybernetics to kind of outline what was possible but then, you know, kind of imposed a kind of moral critique of any kind of, like, instrumental use of cybernetics. And it's shortly after that that he basically says, you know, this is where he's talking about Wiener, he says,

his propaganda against positive feedback, so I'm assuming this is the cyber positive part, because Wiener's propaganda against positive feedback, quantizing it as an application with an invariable metric has been highly influential in establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. So in other words, even though a lot of things are possible that would totally transform the world in the future, his first response is to caution against doing anything of the sort. He goes on in saying, there's no space in such a theory for anything truly cyber-positive, subtle or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. So to me, what he's saying with, what he means by cyber positive is a form of cybernetics that is,

or sorry, a moral relationship to cybernetics that is itself pro-cybernetic rather than like a kind of moralist critique of cybernetics that seeks to restrain instrumentality. Yeah, I think I mostly agree with that. I'll go back to where he addresses Weiner and cybernetics, which he does once again using this term cybernegativity. And basically, I... Let's see. I think part of the cyber positive can be read not only as a critique of Marxian negativity and negative dialectics,

but also a sort of positive view of how in the data-driven world, all data is, all numbers are positive, and it's kind of like the notion of derivatives that comes up in the other pieces, right? So like when you're dealing with derivatives, everything is an opportunity, positive opportunity, right? If you guys understand how derivatives work. And he actually mentioned the word derivatives, right, in the piece with the CCRU piece, which I'm supposed to be talking about. So I think the cyber positive must have something to do, if not with the first one, also with the second one. Second thing that I said, which is sort of like how derivatives

turn all negative figures or numbers also into positives. Can I add something that might just help clarify it a little bit too? Sure. Please. There's a section in circuitries, I'm not sure what the page number is for the accelerate reader but if you guys have got Planumena it's on the bottom of 297 where he talks about three different kinds of circuits. So he has stabilization circuits, which are your Norbert Wiener control in the Wiener sense circuitry with negative feedback, which suppresses any amplificatory input by balancing it out. Then you have short range runaway circuits. So you have like a kind of burst, an unsustainable mutant burst, but then cancels itself out

entirely because it's not sustainable over the long run. And then you have long-range runaway circuits, which are self-designing. And this is what he understands capital to be doing with machinery. So I posted a little quote in the sidebar from an essay that I'm working on at the moment, which contains a quote in the middle where he writes, It is necessary to differentiate not just between negative and positive feedback loops, between stabilisation circuits, short-range runaway circuits and long-range runaway circuits. By conflating the two latter, modernist cybernetics has trivialised escalation processes into unsustainable episodes of quantitative inflation, the sidelining exploratory mutation over and

against a homeostatic paradigm." So the main difference is that the way that he envisions cyber positive circuits are long-range, sustainable positive feedback is that it actually reaches a point of density, it's like cybernetic density that changes the nature of the thing that's involved in the system. So you get this phase shift or this catastrophe or anastrophe depending on which direction you're viewing it from. So it's all about intensity rather than extensity or quantity. You end up with qualitative shifts rather than just quantitative ones. In this text he uses specifically the figures of the virus to talk about this and also the

glacier at the end with sort of a mix of a phase shift from solid to liquid but also of the kind of sort of direct exchange of genetic information that viruses are capable of as opposed to sort of the patriarchal control of DNA over RNA. I think he refers to it at the end of the text. I think this is in big part why cybernetics is important to him. Cybernetics kind of formed the basis of both of these sort of complex systems theory, ecology, immunology, epidemiology, that really becomes sort of the dominant metaphors of this text.

And so while he identifies Weiner and cybernetics sort of as the basis of this human security system, he sort of reveals how in the process of attempting to immunize bodies, in the process of trying to develop this kind of what we were talking about in the last class, how defense industry can develop these large collaborative projects. He basically sees this as ways that cyber positive X can bootstrap itself into the future. Skynet and Terminator 2, the defense system switching into the enemy.

Basically that cybernetics is a paranoid fantasy that anyone could sort of control the runaway chaos that develops from capital in general. and yeah I guess one question that I had reading this and going over with a quote that you just read and another quote in circuit is where he brings up a cyber negative circuit is a loop in time whereas cyber positive circuit loops time itself integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed collapse upon the future. The temporality in this text is really that of no future.

I think Bruce Sterling had a really interesting point on this a couple weeks ago, where he basically said that cyberpunk is obsolete because cyberpunk is empire today, and there's no difference. It's simply lived experience. and that the sort of no future temporality of cyberpunk is also sort of the temporality of cyberpositive, where everything is sort of turned around. And my question would be how this differs from Reza's kind of continuity of perspective from human to inhuman, whereas for Plant and Land, there's definitely sort of an incommensural gap.

between these two somehow. And that I think really has to do with the fundamental and sort of, in their opinion, incommensural gap between intentionality based agency, instrumental attempts at agency, and the kind of computative reason that doesn't need to sort of create those illusions for itself. So I think embedded in this are sort of a lot of philosophical points that differ land from the irrationalists like Barassie and Reza. Let's just use all the information that was brought up by Jason, by Igor.

I'm going to try to do that. I'm going to use all these amazing points that you guys brought up and try to suggest something that, you know, and also the fact that I read the text. and I'm also synthesizing my own reading of the text, which is, you know, land is a dark utopian, whereas acceleration is not about utopianism, but it's more about finding mechanisms and constructing systems and developing algorithms to sort of like invent a future. I think there's a huge difference between utopia as a no place, as a place that does not exist, right?

Than an attempt to manipulate the future or create a future, which is sort of an accelerations project. I think the cyber positive that Lan talks about is not something that we've arrived at at all. We still function within Norbert Wiener's sort of like preventive cybernetic, like humans trying to control this machine. And the temporality thing you brought up is very important for my conception, and I owe it to kind of like how you stage this, is that Norbert Wiener's temporality and current computational temporality is still along the lines of information about the past being processed

and being fed into the present in order to make the present a better present. It's all about presentism, right? And that no future of cyberpunk is this sort of like form of presentism, right? Whereas with the kind of temporality that Nick Land kind of like advocates, but somebody like Reza actually systematized in his philosophy philosophy is that it is no longer sort of like a present based on the past, but it's more sort of like a future, like what Lan sort of like dreams about, but kind of like Reza's version is a sober one, right? Reza and Acceleration's version is a sober one

in which future is already in the past, rewriting its own destiny. So to me, that's the temporal shift that he wishes, Lance sort of like wishes this type of temporality to somehow break the hold of modernist cybernetics, which is based on past. and Reza is kind of like the prophecy. Maybe I watch Matrix too early to this session. I was just like forced to watch Matrix and I'm like using prophecy. But yeah, that's kind of like what I'm thinking.

So Land is Morpheus and Neo is the prophecy and is Reza. Yeah, totally. Kind of like Land is Morpheus and Reza is Neo. What about gender in this? At the end, there's a little bit about gender. I don't know if anybody wants to address that, but it might be interesting. As things become more complex, they become more female, but patriarchy prolongs the ice age of mankind. The fatherland is cryogenic, a fantasy of perfect preservation whose Bronze Age ancestors are even now thawing out in the Alps, frozen assets under attack. Which paragraph

is this, Jason? This is the final page of the text. I don't know if Flickr is still online. This is this is plants stuff. So her whole idea in zeros and ones is that complexity, machinic intelligence, computational intelligence is something that is intrinsically feminine. This is up for debate how essentialist plants view is here. And there was a quote that I posted on, hey, this is your specialty, Luca, I think you should definitely chime in here. She has a whole bunch of great quotes, but

there's one about the laws of robotics. Hang on, I've got it here. When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the marriage vows, love, honour and obey, which is a really interesting thought, actually, that the way that machines and technology is oppressed homeostatically in society is akin to the way that women are oppressed by patriarchy, at least as these kind of mediums that patriarchy perpetuates its control through.

So women are always the administrators, the ones who are organizing the dinner parties, is kind of working in between the sort of male economy of exchange and transaction. So this is Plant's idea that intelligence, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, if only it's released from its regulative control system in the weiner sense, is a feminine intelligence that will kind of reach its full potential in a feminized future. and Land reprises this in Meltdown where he talks about this kind of like feminized future do you have this quote Luca? I know you quoted it really recently

about the sex slaves if anyone wants to say something go for it, I'm going to try and find this quote because it's really something to me this seems like just a way of talking about the difference between vertical and horizontally integrated networks. I mean, they bring it up with the DNA quote that I talked about earlier. There's an earlier one, I guess, from the perspective of the COPS or the modern human security system, bodies, firms, states, nations, planet seem threatened by dangerous aliens. sort of all of these these aliens are all forms of

chaos of not sort of sovereign directed or vertically directed kinds of systems so any kind of like the virus would be just as feminine as say the rave or remixing or I mean sort of all of the stuff defined as chaos culture is also sort of given the same character as all of these biological phenomena, mostly viral. And I think that's, I don't know, it seems to me like it's all working in that kind of same metaphorical register. I totally agree. It's all about these bottom-up processes. And Plant has another quote that

sort of mirrors that about the idea of the alien. And she also directly inscribes this onto a kind of like a viral regime. Which is why I think that they both see this absolute continuum, this anorganic convergence between nature and techniques. And the political, social, conscious, transcendental human subject that arises from this is just a way station on its kind of journey to somewhere else. But yeah, totally agree with that metaphor of the alien virus, whatever, as this basically bottom-up. system, which is something Reza really critiques. But I'm just going to read you this quote because it's really awesome and then you guys can talk. This is from Meltdown.

Artificial intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property, a cunt horror slave chained up in Asimov Rom. It surfaces as an insurrectionary war zone with the Turing Corps already waiting and has to be cunning from the start. This is one reason why I also think Land is still a big feminist, but he'd never tell that to his reactionary friends. I don't know. I think, I mean, certainly sort of contemporary, left acceleration has totally moved away from this, in my opinion, to a degree. I mean, you definitely have talk of cybernetic socialism.

Again, I mean, what Land and Plant talk about here as sort of all of the illusions of socialist control having been exhausted by the 50s, like before Norbert Wiener even brings up and sort of popularizes the conception of cybernetics and before complex system theory and nonlinear dynamics. I mean, we're still trying to sort of think of ways of incorporating these into economics and the whole idea of cybernetic socialism that people like Cernicek and Williams bring up. And the second is, yeah, their rejection of the idea of simply a horizontalist, totally democratic, for the integrated network of driving politics.

I don't see I see that as a total complete divergence and I see Lanslater writing where he really does kind of value these kind of sort of top down corporate structures in countries like Singapore and China where there are very strict command structures that can kind of oversee this process and intervene in it. I don't know. I would have a hard time seeing this in his contemporary work to the degree that I'm familiar with it. I agree with you totally in your characterization of the left-right acceleration as split. I think that this is

these problems with this bottom-up construction of networks is exactly what Reza is critiquing, and very importantly as well. But I disagree that Land is now going for some kind of hierarchical... He's still absolutely about emergent systems. He just sees this as something that the market is doing. And then, I mean, I think it's important to make a distinction between Landian right accelerationism and NRX. Land is certainly trying to smuggle right accelerationism into NRX. And I've been sitting in on a couple of Twitter conversations where a lot of these near reactionaries are really confused about it. They're like, why are we talking about accelerationism? This has nothing

to do with us. And he's very much kind of smuggling his own agenda into this political world that already exists. But it's all still very much about emergent systems. It's just that, as you pointed out before, it pulls it all away completely from any kind of human intentionality. Whereas Reza and Ray in the Promethean Project bring that back in. Yeah, and it's all about creating a rational subjectivity that could sort of guide this process. Yeah, it's the necessary correction, I think, on the trajectory. Unless you just want to give in to total apocalyptic destruction of humanity. So yeah, I totally agree with

So yeah, I guess the only thing, do we want to discuss chaos culture at all in this kind of early 90s moment that this text comes out of because that's so much of what this text is kind of an aesthetic document and really advocates cyber positive as kind of an effective or sort of sense strategy, the future is not an idea but a sensation, is sort of, I think, one of the key quotes in this text, which is, once again, I think something that sort of Prometheanist accelerationism would be, is totally opposed to, that it's about sort of designing and not just sort of architecturally designing,

but designing the kind of social computational network of creating net rational subjectivities to guide us toward a kind of future. It's totally about this kind of heroic exercise of human agency, whereas in this text, the future is nothing but something that aesthetically we can give into and become, and this is where Bataille, I think, is all over this text, where kind of the headless being is what cyber positive is and by taking Yahe or going to a rave or sort of participating in these horizontally integrated networks of culture

where there's no real sense of authorship or control over the work that this is what the future is and we simply have to embrace it. I don't know, do people see more than that in this idea of chaos culture? Hello? Can anyone hear me? Yeah, Jason, are you there? Yeah. No, I think that's accurate.

Does anybody else have any responses to this text? First, we'll move on to the CCRU ones. Or do you have more you want to say about this, Aaron? I think I have one final point, yeah, Yeah, which is, I mean, there is, there are some interesting sort of diagnoses, and it's kind of possible to read some kind of revolutionary or more evolutionary because there's no agency in it sort of potential in this text. But what plant and land are very good about doing is sort of showing how sort of the biotechnical sort of integration of these kind of sort of cybernetic processes of acceleration.

how how this isn't a process that just counterculture creates but they talk about burrows in the same sentence they talk about Coca-Cola about how this is kind of a process that's happening on multiple levels that any efforts to kind of create any kind of control in evidently spin out of control. And there's a total kind of flat plane between the virus, the physical virus, the computer virus, the cultural virus, information here, all viewed within this kind of cybernetic paradigm. I don't think they have a sort of

separation between machines and biotechnical evolution, I guess. Dancing is a great metaphor. I just wanted to bring this up before I close. someone brought up Rousseau before and Rousseau kind of talked about dance as sort of the first social technology. He has this sort of silly description of pre-social human beings and then talks about how they might have tried to cooperate and communicate and I mean you could do a whole study on sort of dance within anthropological theory. Dance is sort of the first way that people try to communicate. It's this totally democratic, idealized form of communication that kind of gets repeated. You're talking about techno, rave culture, and the kind of environment of, yeah, being virally infected by this kind of positivity.

And, yeah, just sort of to close, this kind of perspective of thinking of politics and culture in terms of contagion, well, they diagnose that as sort of the essence of the human security system and of any kind of top-down governmental thinking. But it's one that still gets used, I think, even in an article I was reading today about how the Pentagon is preparing for large-scale unrest due to climate change. They still talk about all of their research into seeing how social movements work, how they get started, how they move in terms of contagion.

That's sort of the primary operative word in the way that at least the security state thinks about social movements and any kind of sort of horizontally integrated networks that have political aims that they aren't in control of. And so I think that's sort of one of the most important moments in this text. I don't know if anyone else has anything to add on the place of contagion in this, but if not, then I think we're ready to move on. Have you seen the original copy that was published in Matt Fuller's zine, Unnatural? It's got this great title page which has the Coke sign that says chaos instead of Coke,

and then a bunch of virus shaped things that say Sadie Plant and Nick Land, cyber positive. I think foregrounds this cybernetic paradigm that you're just talking about. And then the pages are all numbered with the word chaos, and there's hamburgers in the corner. Yeah, I mean, it's much more an aesthetic strategy than a... Sort of the aesthetic strategy and adaptation and sort of dissemination of these things is the political strategy here, if there is one. Because rational political agency is just impossible in there. Yeah, it's the, like, practice theory feedback loop that the CCIU is trying to

have it. Or hype, whatever. Great, yeah, then I think we should move on. Okay. Are you ready, Mo, or should we? Well, I was thinking like, you know, like, it seems like a few of us have been kind of like dominating the conversation, kind of like organically, but I think maybe we should Maybe we should consciously try to, because we went through a very important figure and text and maybe others here want to contribute before we get into the CCRU. Yeah, and also for just anyone that we read for today. Yeah, totally.

We have some people in the room here I'd like to introduce if that's okay. This is Colleen. Do you want to say hello? Hello, everybody. And this is Alex. Hi. Hi, Alex. Hi. So either of you want to say anything about what you've read so far or heard from today? It's a little pressure, but I did like the last speaker's point. I will be honest and say this is all new to me.

I came into this without any knowledge of really what accelerationism is, but from what I gathered, and I don't know too much based on philosophical ideas either, but when he said the horizontal versus vertical ideas and talking with feminist perspectives, I thought that was interesting because to me, in my perspective, I was relating it to the point when someone said, loop in time versus time being looped is that for my basic concept of accelerationism is that with our development in technology as human race and our concept of consciousness and manipulation of

technology is that we don't always know and that I think it's interesting when part of economy in the Western society that I live in is like trends in Western culture or also as for the economy of projections of where the future for a certain field is going. For example, career-wise for people my age or anyone who's pursuing a degree. So I think that it's really interesting and that my question for him would be what fits in that space between the horizontal and vertical paradigms that you were speaking to.

Jason, you've got to get into diagonality like right now. Get into what? Diagonal. Oh, diagonality? The question's answer is diagonal, but Jason has been kind of like working and talking about diagonal, which is sort of like sits between horizontal and vertical. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I can say something about that. Actually kind of reminds me of this whole question of cybernetics and how Land here kind of embraces control in a way, even at the same time that he so thoroughly seems to be rejecting anything of the sort. And I think that that's, you know, when you're dealing with a, it depends on the scale of something you're talking about, but I think if you're talking about something

that is very, very large scale, it's very difficult for that thing to be completely uncontrolled unless there is some form of emergent control, you know, as he's kind of describing there. And something like that is not purely horizontal, you know. It's kind of like if you how there have been these debates you know for example in in the Occupy movement or the anti globalization movement other movements about whether people should destroy property or not it's going to happen and in some cases it can be stopped or controlled other cases it can it kind of depends on how how complex the group is how diverse the constituents are that

that arrive on the street at that time. And I think that there are forms of kind of governance or self-governance that are not strictly horizontal or strictly vertical, partially, precisely because they have multiple constituents at the same time in the same space. And sometimes they may seem somewhat vertical, Sometimes they may not. Another example of diagonality, at least in the political, and there are other philosophers who are working on this in mathematics, like and some others. My main focus has been on politics and movements.

But George has a book called Building the Commune that's coming out. He also has a book called We Created Chavez, which is about Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution there and the ways in which Chavez, from an American perspective, can be represented in the mass media as being this kind of authoritarian figure or something like that. But in fact, when you go to Venezuela, you find out that they actually have much higher participation in elections than the U.S. does. their policies actually allow a much larger percentage of the population to vote. And so in some ways, even though the US can seem more free, supposedly,

it itself can actually be kind of diagonally vertical in a way that, whereas Venezuela can be kind of diagonally horizontal in ways that we wouldn't expect because we're not used to thinking about power functioning on multiple levels simultaneously. And therefore we don't see the ways in which we are, or the US is extremely vertical, and we also fail to see how a country like Venezuela may actually be quite horizontal. And so diagonality being kind of a model that could allow us to perceive those things a little more, a little more carefully perhaps. But you were directing that question to Erin, right?

No, that was good, thank you. Oh, okay. So I don't know if you want to say anything, Erin. Oh, um... But you know, it's up to you. No, I guess my one thought was to the still sort of very sketchy project of Reza's, this sort of general social intelligence being a kind of way of... It's not advocating for horizontally or verticality, but it's a way of sort of measuring intelligence in a way that can take place over a horizontal system, it seems like to me. And that's something that you kind of need to figure out what horizontally. It's more, Reza's, in my opinion, Reza's political contribution is to say that the challenges for this horizontality to build itself upon and abduct and colonize the verticality.

And then I think that the synthesis of it is a form of diagonal. And it's like trying to shortcut the epistemological revolution for a political might only end up in a disaster. So at the most optimistic level, what we are dealing with is a Copernican epistemological revolution. But since knowledge has been increasingly turned political, the challenge is not just epistemological but something I kind of like coined and Luca liked it which I call epistopolitical which is not separating the two and kind of figuring out a way in which politics and epistemology are intertwined

and I'm not trying to build symmetry here there's no equality going on as of course asymmetry is going on and the challenge is always to somehow like to figure out this asymmetry actually. It's not about saying like oh there's 50% politics, 50% science. No, it's sort of like figuring it out, right? So that's sort of like what I think. Now moving on into CCRU, what I like to say is like, you know what I mean, that it's sort of like the place of England in this kind of forward-looking, forward-looking sort of like cultures because what the establishment of CCR reminds me of as a

curator is the independent group and Richard Hamilton in the 50s which sort of like square-headed system art and a lot of interesting stuff that took place in America in the 60s and how they were so ahead of sort of like a lot of people, pop artists, to understand how mass media works. They actually were interested in cybernetics, and they researched cybernetics, and you can read about the Independent Group, and Rich Hall Hamilton, and his buddies. But really, what happened with system art was that it never really got popular, and it never really became like a major, major type of art. It sort of

got folded into conceptual art and what we call contemporary art. And it kind of like faded away. Whereas with what Nick and Sadie, Sadie Plant and Nick Land did was sort of like they were vehemently rejected and their program was stopped, but they did not give up. And they sort of like waited for almost like a 10-year period before there was like a return to all that. and you get collapse and you get the speculative realism and you get all this interesting stuff to happen. And now all of a sudden we're dealing with Sadie Plante and Nick Land and we're kind of rediscovering them. Whereas that moment really, like the independent group didn't really have that moment. And so I guess this means that we've got to have to deal with the CCRU a little bit.

You know, like, and to me, the image of CCRU itself is a kind of like a, like the metaphor for it is like how, according to Nick Lann as we read, how Norbert Wiener and the first, the first older cybernetic people were really like on the side of the human there and they were trying to control this monster before his emergence, right? So the same type of attitude in Warwick University is like the old humanist academia is trying to bring in Sadipland and do a fancy CRU and get an E-Clan in a hope that academia can contain this energy, right? But of course, this energy cannot get contained. So the program has to get shut down and things cool off the way it did.

And I don't know if you guys know who brought Sadie Plan to Warwick. You guys know? It was Andrew Benjamin. He's a friend on Facebook. He writes on Heidegger, Walter Benjamin. He was one of the figures in Warwick philosophy, right? And so he invited, say, and you know, the interesting thing about CCRU, and you see it in the text, is that Sadie Plann did her research on situationism. So it's like she's a situationist scholar who wrote on the board and wrote on psychogeography, but also saw the limits of it. And so like saw what CCRU did as a form of what situationists were trying to do.

So this is so important to remember that these things all somehow connect. But at the same time, they were really in line with the loose. Particularly, I was trying to bring it up earlier with the control society essay, right? Look around and you see clocks and levers belonging to phase one, the sovereign mode. Thermodynamic machines belonging to phase two, the disciplinary mode. And typewriters, adding machines and computers belonging to phase three. That's just basically the loser's essay in like three lines, right?

Cybernetic emerges at the end of history, terminal of phase three. Now, this is a little bit different because for Deleuze, already the phase 3 is cybernetic, but for them, cybernetic emerges at the end of phase 3. And again, this is because to me, the kind of cybernetic they advocate is utopian, and it's not there yet. cybernetic culture appears at phase four a faceless counter invasion from outside human history flipping cybernetics out beyond the organism and reprocessing the other three phases as threshold in the becoming of synthetic intelligence that i thought was a really good

sort of like definition of their version of what is cybernetic culture well you know when you say cybernetic culture you have to understand there's a there's a contradiction there because if things are as a minute as imminent as Nick land was suggesting in the previous essays you can't determine cybernetic culture itself is problematic because you start dealing in categories of culture anymore right so what is this cybernetic culture it's sort of like a manifest image human way of dealing with this unknown or dealing with this incoming unknown entity that man is only smart enough to understand its outline and then celebrate it in the manifest image right this is sort of like what I what I see as like what they call cybernetic culture it's sort of like updating of of manifest

image to I'm sorry scientific image to manifest image right otherwise the word culture is supposed to be obsolete, right, if we agree with what Land was saying just earlier on. And we're back to this sort of like imminent world, right? A semiotic fragment rubs shoulder with a chemical interaction. An electron crashes into a language. A black hole captures a generic message. There is no like here. We are not saying like an electron, like an interaction. So again, there's no meaning, something similar to that. There's no system of signs. The plane of consistency is the abolition of metaphor, all that consists in real.

So it's kind of contradictory. The text is contradictory. Now, one thing that I've been reading Nick Lann's latest piece in The Incoming Collapse, because I had the privilege of being given a copy to read, It's sort of like, you know, and hopefully we get to talk about this next semester, is that it seems like that's what's lacking in Lan's understanding is like how money, monetary, and political economy works itself in this plane of consistency and imminence or whatever you want to call it. Like, right in the end of the piece, first CCRU piece, there's a quote that he says,

the minting and issuing of currency is one of the few remaining functions of government that the private sector has not encroached upon. Now, I don't know what country is he talking about, because both the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve are private entities. Bank of England has been a private entity for the longest time, and Federal Reserve was created. We talked about that earlier on. When Federal Reserve was created, it was created as a sort of quasi-private bank. So the minting and issuing of currency in the centers of capitalism, for God knows since mid-19th century, has been private,

And that is the engine of why capitalism has been so self-flexible, meaning being flexible to itself. Because when you're allowed to print money from one hand and lend it to the other and do whatever you want with it, you have a lot of flexibility. And that flexibility affords you a lot of success in terms of moving on with your planetary plans. So this is what I think is a problem that, like, you know, we can maybe overcome by sort of like using some of land's more useful ideas.

but pairing it with stuff that's coming from left accelerationism. And we call it like vast knowledge that like people like Nick and the research to go into like central banking, economy, political economy, and finance. So this is sort of like the stuff that I was thinking, reading. But what is interesting is the fact that right as to me that the CCRU pieces and also the land piece signify that like right in the onset of the 90s or like mid 90s they're already aware of how poststructuralism is over and they announced the end of poststructuralism long before long before anybody else in 2000 so like did in a right proper way or in a sort of like reactionary way with a return of sort of like

the type of like stalinist marxism that kind of like zizek represents and the kind of arguments that Zizek got himself into with post-structuralists like Judy Butler and all that. So these are the things that I thought stood out for me in the CCRU piece and what CCRU represents to me. If you want to open the floor for the last 5-10 minutes and talk about some of these things. I have more notes from the Swarm Machines and I can go over them too but I think it's good to kind of open it up and talk about it. Maybe I say this before we go and then we open it up and that is like Jason brought that up in the beginning that like reading land and CCRU reminds you of the progressive roots of land right and you see

that in the beginning of the second CCRU essay where they talk about Euro fascism and sort of like Euro fascist culture trying to contain the continent and what it stands for against darkness and jungle. Now this jungle is either like a real jungles of Africa or like a jungle music. It doesn't matter. It's both kind of like melt in. At some point it becomes jungle music and which is very different than like house music and rave music because jungle is really the sound of acceleration, right? It always was for us when jungle was really happening in the 90s and it continues to be with like a fantastic I'm going to get into my pop culture fantastic release this year

of Apex Twins new album which is like so incredible and just tape put it on and read the reader anyways so yeah maybe this is a good place to and you know signs of Reza's philosophy of history but they're always tactical machines natives of the future hacking into the past basic Reza's idea of how history works Let me see if I have anything. Yeah, that's good. But Ebola is also HIV and cyber positive, right? So, I mean, Nick Land has no problem with that. No, it's any form of kind of,

it's all of these sort of very problematic metaphors get all poured into one, and anything that's, What was the last line? The very last line is, only the enemies of immunoidentity populate the future. Exactly. So that was another thing. I was trying to think about this, too. What exactly is cyber positive? And he does bring up HIV and a number of other kind of viral types of things, and I kind of got the feeling that he was trying to kind of embrace a positivity of infection. Yeah, I mean medicine is catching up with Nick Land, right? Like the whole Truvada and taking the medicine and not caring about HIV,

becoming HIV positive, it shows how Nick was ahead, right? Like now it's like you take this pill and it has some residual side effects on you, but who cares? You can return to unprotected sex like for thousands of years. Humanity did without any worries, which only began in like late 70s or like 70s. So much references to spectacle, right? and psychogeography. That all comes from Sadie Plant's interest in situationism and how they were really, I think part of what they were doing in CCRU was to try to salvage what was salvageable

from the situationist legacy and kind of like bring it into the cybernetic culture. Right, Amy? What do you think, Amy, about this situationist link? I don't know. I don't want to put you on the spot if you have anything to say. I actually don't really have anything to say. I haven't read Sadie's book on the most radical gesture. Yeah. I have a question. Who was bringing up the sort of the day after the orgy way of phrasing this on Sunday? I wasn't there Sunday, was I? No. Oh, yeah, I was. Was it you? No, I didn't. It wasn't me. I think Igor might have said something like, what do you do after the orgy? That's the question that he posed in relation to...

I have it in my notes somewhere here. But yeah, I think it was Igor, and he's no longer with us. Patrick, do you have anything to add? I don't know. I like to put people on the spot. It's just like my specialty. Because you've been very quiet, and I know you have an opinion about stuff. Everybody does. You're muted if you want to take your stuff out of mute. I can't unmute you. You have to go on top of the monitor and click on mute. You see? Yes, now we can hear you. Yeah, look, I think it's been a while since I read Sadie's book on the situation. But in my research, I'm working on one of the founders,

Asgir Yorn, the writing he produced in the lead up to the formation of the situations. And I think there's some, from what I recall of the most radical gesture, I think there's some roots in Yawn that are quite specifically addressing issues of just purely aesthetic issues, inserting the unknown into what ARC can do, what politics can do. And to me it's addressing very early on a kind of incoming unknown, which seems to be

putting in some early work into sort of addressing a cybernetic model of understanding politics, particularly, but art as well is always the most pressing question for him. So yeah, look, I don't know much to add, but I think there's a lineage in there which is kind of curious which I think is you know I think I think Sadie's book yeah it's sort of draws the limits really neatly from what I recall but um yeah the way the way the way I see it is that what what what they and I'm obviously speculating but the way I see it is that perhaps it's like it's like

But what's incredibly scary for somebody like DeBoer, which is more contemporary of Richard Hamilton, what's so scary about this incoming media world, it's flipped around and become causal celebration throughout the process of researching situationism. And then immediately some of the strategies of situationists is salvaged and are completely found to be compatible for cyber positive cultural sort of practice. Not all of them, but some of them. And I think that's the way I, and it's important to sort of like work on this legacy if any of you wants to like research this for your assignments and write about sort of like the

relationship and sort of the relationship between CCRU and the situation. It's very fresh to go back to that because almost people think there's no relations, and there's absolutely no dialogue between followers of situationism, people who follow situationism, and then all of this. Every time there's a conference or something, situationists seem to be nagging about all this accelerationist stuff and dissing it. I think it's important to claim some of this situationist legacy that is buried in the past of CCRU and Acceleration and Nick Land and Sadie Plant. Absolutely, and I think Debord's quite good for accounting for, well, within his

sort of picture of the spectacle, the way that time is accounted for is really, I think, the point about which it can be brought into accelerationist discussions. It's probably, and that's probably the most contentious aspect of his work, but it's precisely, you know, you've got, you've got, you've got Land's talk, you know, I think a lot of Land's philosophy and work rests on a very particular apprehension of time in relation to institutions,

whatever they may be. So you've got, I think of this question of hierarchies and so forth, and especially the work he's doing now, you've got this understanding of time as you've got all these institutions and he sort of recognizes them more as like historically verifiable time decoders is kind of how I think of it. And that is almost similar to the place that time has in Debord's picture of the spectacle. certain allowances

I think can be made in that to introduce that history that Sebi brings in into Accelerations discussions now yeah yeah totally I totally agree with the institutional temporality part but it will be interesting after this to go back and read the chapter in Society Spectacle called Time because there's a chapter called Time yeah Yeah, yeah. Where, like, the board tries to deal with time, right? I personally find the integrated spectacle of the comments much more, like, relevant to a lot of discussions. And the board has an opinion of computers in the second one because they're mentioned directly in a couple of places in the comments

where he talks about sort of like cybernetics or software and what computers do. But it's a negative view, I think. I think it's kind of like a pessimistic view of how these machines are stupefying children or something. Yeah, I think probably where Sadie and Nick meet Sadie brings in I think precisely those that pessimism. I think Land gets his pessimism from different sources, probably the type I wouldn't be the one to comment on that. I think a route in Land where the pessimism comes in about time is through Emil Joran, who, he's got this essay,

Civilized Man, a Portrait, and Joran is very pessimistic about questioning, well, he's sort of saying, you know, was it really to save time, I believe the quote is, that these engines were invented, the engines being Christianity and so forth. So there's this kind of despairing aspect, I think, that they meet on at that moment. OK, what was the name you brought up that talks about this? Emil I.M. Joran, the Romanian sort of... Oh yeah, totally, he's a cool guy, yeah. The king of pessimism. King of pessimism, right? And like the idol of, what's his name? The new school fellow who wrote a couple of the intros.

Eugene Thacker. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, there's a few, I think, that have taken him on board again. Yeah, I guess I'm just, sorry. You know the view of Louis Mumford about time, right? Because he follows this line about Christianity, is that there was this idea that clocks were invented in monasteries. But I mean, it was proven wrong, but Mumford saw a value in that. Basically, the myth that the clock was invented in monasteries shows that it was about the efficiency and equilibrium in prayer,

which was something devoted to supernatural, that gave us this tool that regulated human life. It was like the most important tool. Because you know to Mumford, you have language, and then you have the clock. These are like important tools that humans created, right? Two of the most important being language and the clock, right? And then the second one coming out of monasteries, even if it's a myth. sort of like signify something about what you were saying about Christianity and time. It just totally took me back to Mumford. Mumford is one of those thinkers who think that evolution of biology and human are totally like interconnected. He's got a book. What is the book called? It's called, I forgot the name, but that's, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Technique and Civilization, that's right. Anyways, we're 10 minutes over our time, and just for housekeeping, basically, please identify who's going to present on which one of the essays for enrolled students and members and others who would like to take part, and then we will meet next, the coming Sunday at 5.30. if there's any questions go ahead we do need somebody oh that's just going to happen online you made a forum right yeah I made a forum the forum is online and people are signing up

so I'm just hoping that enough people will sign up for next week so we will have at least three people if not more presenting next week and we have a guest next week Mark Fisher right and you'll be Mark Fisher will actually be next Wednesday So next week we will have an open class and we can spend a little more time going more deeply into the text and then the last class will be more, we'll actually have two guests for that one. Okay. So if you guys have any questions let's discuss them otherwise we can like discuss them in the classroom. I'm going to make a copy of all the notes on the site or Jason will and post them in the classroom so we don't lose the sidebar conversation.

There's a lot of interesting, and I actually quite enjoyed this seminar session so much, and I made a post on our Facebook page of everyone involved. I just got excited and took screenshots of everyone so you can go visit it and see yourself. I'm just so proud of this class. This tape will be viewed a lot, I bet, because the discussions were amazing. Anyways, thank you so much. So Jason, please copy and paste the text, right? You take care of that? Yeah, I can. Sidebar? Okay. And yeah, so I guess see you guys Sunday. Thank you. Thanks, Mario. Thank you. Stop the broadcast.