The Concept of Acceleration (Session 1)

Hello and welcome to the first session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Thanks, Theodore. So I'll start by hopefully launching a few discussion points. and then obviously we can move into a kind of interactive mode. If people urgently want to interrupt me, that's definitely okay. So I'd like to start actually with an apology to everyone for the ragged and disorganized start of this course.

I haven't provided people with a kind of coherent roadmap for it yet. I could try and blame the pneumonia for that, but that's not honestly really the thing. The reason is actually that what I had been hoping to do in this course, I've come to think is not actually possible. And the reason why I doubt what that was and why I'm beginning to doubt it is going to take up perhaps most of my initial commentary. Because the reason that I call this course the concept of acceleration, and it's not that I'm going to try and duck off that title.

I think it's probably a helpful disciplinary device from my side, certainly. But my hope was that it was possible, given the extremely heated discussions around this topic, to at least formulate at a highly abstract level an uncontroversial definition of what the accelerationist critique of political economy is. to any subsequent fission and disorder might be.

And this is what I'm really having revisited a lot of the critical material and attempt to pull it into place. I've really begun to doubt whether it's possible to just through going meta with this topic to take it outside of the level of its internal controversy. And I think this is to introduce something that is also very important that there's at least two levels of controversy at stake here. One is the external level of controversy that I think has been growing a lot quite recently.

as a whole whatever that is and this is part of our our topic um has itself become a kind of um has become situated within this terrain of of uh antagonism and there's a kind of there's a there's is a very vital anti-accelerationist impulse that, of course, in to a degree has existed for quite a long time, but I think has become far more intense recently. But I think more critically to why it's impossible to even neatly

formulate what accelerationism is, is due to its kind of extremely dense and complex level or structure of internal controversy. And that's what I'm going to be looking at today. I think in the most, if I'm still pretending that things were going the way I'd initially hoped, and one was able to formulate a notion of an uncontroversial abstract concept of acceleration,

the kind of material that is important is fundamentally about the cybernetics of positive feedback. I would add and will add as this course proceeds, perhaps not hugely this week but subsequently, another two elements which I think together produce this fundamental core. One of them, as I say, is this attention to the cybernetics of positive feedback, or to what is called in a lot of the economic development

literature, self-propelling growth. The second element is critique, flatness. And the procedure of critique as a historical force being essentially coincidental with acceleration. And the third element rooted, I think, this is relatively uncontroversial in Nietzsche's unpublished in that class material particularly, is the history of nihilism.

And again, the history of nihilism just almost being an alternative vocabulary for the same processes that we can examine as philosophical critique on the one hand or as a cybernetic dynamics on the other. So at this level of the discussion, even though it's frustratingly philosophically shallow, probably, and in some ways tends to be derided for that reason, I think that the definition by Kurtzweil, Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns is a use of the word

acceleration that is extremely germane to the usage that one finds in acceleration. I think that as a basic system theoretical diagram, accelerating returns, as Kurzweil uses it exactly the same as acceleration as we find it actually across a range of different accelerationist philosophies in the modern sense, recent sense perhaps I should say. And I think you can get to this level of the problem also quite helpfully by asking the question well what what would be an anti-accelerationism and I think that if

one finds the most focused criticisms of Kurzweil one one finds oneself in this same place the person that I would as I have done before and recommend in this respect is is John Greer the writer of the arch jurid report blog and the reason that he's so relevant to this and so systematically neatly articulates that this anti accelerationist position is the fact that he is also decated historical cyber netices but in his case this involves a fundamental

attachment to the absolute priority of negative feedback which is obviously the the classical cybernetic orientation and a kind of derision at any idea that a positive feedback processes can be anything other than comparatively short unsustainable bursts um so on that level i think you can get a certain you can get a toe in the water yes hang on for for joshua yeah john greer i'll put i'll put a list a link to his blog which is which is excellent um

Oops, sorry, I meant to do that before. That's the Kurzweil stuff. This is Greer's blog. His actual messages, his actual remarks on Kurzweil tend to be kind of abusive and a bit dismissive and disappointing, but they rest on a really interesting sort of structure of theoretical disagreement that's quite rich and sophisticated and and i would definitely at least uh hypothesize that that greer is is perhaps the most consistent and theoretically sort of uh theoretically deeply rooted anti-accelerationist voice that that is that is to be found and and

and helpfully for our purposes, outside the most dramatically heated part of the contemporary political discussion. So, in this vein, if people will just allow me, I'd like to read a quite long passage. It's almost a page, but I really think worth it. from Neil Stephenson's novel Seven Eves, which is, I think, hugely relevant to this discussion. So it starts with a discussion between someone who's obviously a fictional version of a

sorry I've just forgotten his name, the famous science guy who did the last Cosmos series, the science popularizer, in this he's called Doob, and he says, if this is a little bit obscure for the first couple of sentences, don't worry, it will clarify. It'll happen, Doob said, the question is how long does Mr. Spinney have to live? The moon has exploded into seven fragments, and so this is what they're talking about and what does that tell us he clicked a small remote in his hand and brought up a slide on the big screen head turned towards it and he felt a mildness relief at not being stared at anymore by the president the slide was a montage of a snowball rolling down a hill a fuzzy bacterial culture growing in a petri dish a mushroom cloud and

other seemingly unrelated phenomena what do these all have in common they are exponential he said The word gets tossed around a lot by people who use it to mean anything that's getting big fast. But it has a specific mathematical meaning. It means any process where the more it happens, the more it happens. The population explosion, a nuclear chain reaction, a snowball rolling down a hill, whose speed of growth is pegged to how much it's grown. He clicked through another slide showing plots of exponential curves on a graph, then to an image of the moon's eight pieces. when the moon had only one piece the probability of a collision was zero he said because there was nothing to collide with pete starling the president's science advisor explained the president

nodded thank you dr starling when you have two pieces why then yes they can collide the more pieces you get the higher the chance of any two pieces banging to each other but what happens when they bang into each other he clicked the control again and showed a little movie of kidney beans break up that's another rock obviously well sometimes but not always they break in half which means you have more pieces eight instead of seven nine instead of eight and that increase in number means increase in the odds of further collisions it's an exponential said the chairman it occurred to me four days ago that it did have all the earmarks of an exponential process deep allowed and we know what happens to those that's uh that's page 28 from seven seven e so

it all seems to my naive point of view when trying to put this together it all seems to be quite neat at this point um because the assumption that i was kind of uh naively holding onto at this point is that we could relatively quickly agree whatever else we yes it's done as one it's done as one uh palindrome yes um yeah whatever whatever we then decide to disagree with we could and as i I say this is hopelessly and perhaps embarrassingly naive for me to admit to especially how late we are

into this kind of antagonism but some kind of selective amnesia had allowed it to be resuscitated that we could agree that this process is abstract process illustrated in this case by the process of the of the uh of the um pulverization of the moon eventually into what is called the white sky where it just becomes a massive cloud of smashed up particles that then uh start bombarding the earth uh with debris superheat the atmosphere and and extinguish all terrestrial life this vast catastrophe this is what what um he's referring

to at the end when he says we all know what happens to those this is again we're back to even you know an exponential process has to hit singularity and we and there will be some kind of transformation it's not necessarily a kind of um all-consuming apocalypse of the of the kind that that it is in this in this but it certainly puts a a kind of ceiling on the on this process and binds the two conceptions of exponential growth and singularity together makes them conceptually indistinguishable. So I had naively thought, well, we can all agree that what we're talking about

there is modernity, aka capitalism. This is what capitalism is when it's abstracted to its maximum degree of of of of cybernetic purity it's it's a self-propelling process the more that happens the more but the more it happens um marks marks is extremely succinct little formula m to c to m dash um money to commodities to more money to more commodities the more money to more commodities The system is intrinsically self-propelling, exponential, a positive feedback system. And that is what feeds acceleration, has fed it historically, has led to its emergence as a kind of discourse that we see today.

but obviously there's the notion that it's possible to get that far without becoming tangled in in naughtiness and controversy and um political disputation is is as i say naive and i think i i want to do a little potted history of accelerationism and i think it's best to make this point within that context so let me just try and do that really fast now the word accelerationism had a political economic usage before its contemporary usage

but I honestly think this can be bracketed. It had to do with a certain theory about the dynamics of inflation in monetary theory. I don't think it's a hot topic for anyone today. If you look at the Wikipedia article on accelerationism, it doesn't even get mentioned. So I think we can say that the term accelerationism has been consumed by the sense in which we're going to be using it this course even though that sense is conflicted and contradictory and untangled and I think it's really crucial to note that the complement of

acceleration is lag time which is to say struggling to keep up and that the formulation of accelerationism itself exhibits this strongly that it's consistently so as Stephen Shaviro notes in his in his essay accelerationism without accelerationism hang on make sure I call that right Yes, here, I'll put that also in the side. I'm repeating this because this is stuff that I've already passed along very recently. So Stephen Shaviro says there, I think reliably,

I'm not enough of a competent intellectual historian to say that with more confidence. the term accelerationism was coined by benjamin noise in 2010 in order to designate a political position that he rejected so accelerationism didn't name itself and it and it was named retrospectively um it was named critically and retrospectively as part of an attack and it was embraced in the same way that these were used to political terms being embraced by their targets you know like queer being the obvious example of that something that starts off as a slur and is

and is owned by the by the by the target of that slur and accelerationism is the same actually as that um so or so the whole of this this little potted history is is structured by this pattern of retrospection and if you carry this pattern of retrospection back there are obvious milestones one of them that is going to be crucial throughout this course and perhaps all of all of them will is obviously that accelerationism is an engagement with Karl Marx. And actually, the Wikipedia article on acceleration

finds a truly excellent Marx quote on accelerationism that I think is better, it's much more succinct and precisely relevant to us, even than the material in the Communist Manifesto that's usually invoked and that I think we will be definitely revisiting in this course. And it's from a speech that he made called On the Question of Free Trade in 1848, where Marx says, but in general the protective system of our day is conservative while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point in a word the free trade system hasten hastens the social revolution

it is in this revolutionary sense alone gentlemen that i vote in favor of free trade and so i think that the sense that uh obviously max marx is not using the word acceleration in in in this quote, but what's being said by Marx here, I think, reverberates very strongly through the Deleuze and Guattari usage of accelerationism that we will then later find in Antioedipus. So that's maybe our first port of call. um the the second uh the second port of call which recent writers i think have interestingly

suggested has been kind of peculiarly neglected and i have to say you know i i take this as a a very uh apt and stinging criticism in the sense that you know it's in my own sort of adoption of the of the language of acceleration i have also been deeply neglectful about taking it back because the crucial quote uh in antidepress is actually based upon a reference um and people generally as i say very much including myself in in the past on this have definitely tended to stick with the de leuze and guattari quote

as as a kind of origin and and uh laggard in following it back one stage to the the nietzsche quote the nietzsche quote comes from his unpublished knacklass the note that was numbered 898 in the will to power compilation and the the part of this passage that uh delinco sorry pick on up pick up on and and compress nietzsche's nietzsche writes the leveling process of european man is the great process which should not be checked one should even accelerate it there's there's a huge amount I think in this quote some of which we touch upon immediately

and I think other stuff will come in later problematic of acceleration to the question to Nietzsche's diagnosis of of European nihilism which is something that I think is is extremely important um and i think this usage the leveling process is also really really worth holding on to um because as we'll see there's the language of of of flatness that comes in when we start talking about networks and distributed systems again in these concrete cybernetic discussions obviously connects, I think, with this notion of a leveling process, a leveling process that

also ties on to a certain set of terms that are all very superheated, actually, I think, cryptically very ambiguous and with a lot of internal ideological tension, you know, notions like democracy equality uh again to repeat flatness these kind of this kind of language that is on the one hand tied up with a kind of liberal capitalist dynamic and on the other hand is becomes taken up into a set of uh i think more left oriented um political uh discourses

and this internal tension produces extremely weird effects. Someone was just saying recently to me something I thought was very interesting about, you know, America has turned all of this language weirdly around. You know, not only the strange notion that you get in America that liberal basically means in a anti-liberal in its european sense you know it's it's a placeholder that then becomes synonymous with progressivism social democracy perhaps trends to the left of that even um go under this rubric of liberal that obviously in the in the in the classical controversies of

political economy the 19th century controversies liberal was completely on the other side of that equation and and it has to be somehow tied up with that that america is the one country that that codes the political stretch spectrum by color inversely you know red states and blue states in every everywhere else in the world you know red is the color of the left and yet weirdly in america there is this strange inversion that that that that ties it around um so i i'm not going to get lost in this right at the moment what i'm supposed to be doing is is this potted history of of accelerationism um so yeah we've gone through marx we go to nietzsche it's all it's all

retrospective of course and then i think the critical everyone agrees the critical catalytic point is this passage in Antioedipus that is quoted I haven't bizarrely prepared our test in one second Nick I'm gonna take advantage of the fact that you're looking for something thing because I need to interject like I mean I actually meant hello everyone my name is Mohamed Salemi I'm one of the organizers at the new center and if you don't know me already and I'm here with

my friend Nick we were just like on our way here and then we were a little bit late I was gonna like do this interjection in the beginning of the of the session but because you guys had to go ahead and start I just waited so I can maybe like find a find a find a gap to insert this in and this has to do with just like a little preamble because, you know, I mean, it's like needless to say that Nick is a controversial thinker, and especially since the election of ha ha ha ha, Nick laughs. And since the election of Donald Trump to presidency, the sensitivity around Nick Lanz's name and how his name has been consistently, if not unfairly, brought up in connection with the rainbow coalition

that brought Trump to power, like people like, quote unquote, alt-right, white nationalists, da-di-da-di-da. And Nick's name has been consistently brought up in relation to these groups on different sort of like social media platforms by different authors in different articles. And somehow this like boomerang effect has somehow made it stuck that somehow Nick should be banned or Nick should be stopped from talking or like, and us as a news center have been kind of like a question about our relationship with Nick. I just wanted to say that like, as someone who co-curate the program, who design every season seminars, I still, I mean, I may not have the same opinion next semester,

but I still think that Nick's philosophy, regardless of his own political orientation, is still open and useful to a number of different political leanings. And that's the reason why I'm still interested in working with him. We're not interested in working with Nick because we confirm all of his ideas. I, in fact, reject vehemently some of Nick's ideas. I engage with them whenever I can. My Facebook profile is filled with posts in which I've directly attacked Nick or positions by Nick. But as I said, we think Nick's philosophical contributions, particularly around the questions of technology, cybernetics, capitalism, are still useful and open to utilization and use by different political leanings and left, right, center, whatever.

And that's why we're interested in working with him, despite the pressure that's been increasingly put on us to not work with him, to condemn him, to banish him. We still think that it's possible. We might reach this conclusion that Nick's no longer useful in the future. And in that point, we might stop working with Nick. But we still have not reached that decision yet. and this course actually will be a great place to sort of like uh see where nick's going with his ideas despite all this uh some of it unfair attacks on nick and let's not get into that here so yeah so i just wanted to get a chance to talk about this before the seminar starts but maybe as nick was digging the deludes and gotari quote this was the best moment to kind of bring this up and put it on the table and so i think i'm gonna ask the moderator to go back to nick and shut me

up because I think I spoke enough and thanks again for being in the seminar and for engaging with Nick hopefully critically yes for sure credit a critical criticism is is of course deeply appreciated um yes no I the quote everyone knows this quote already so I'm it's a basically almost ritualistic thing that i'm repeating it out this is this is the the the sort of bedrock the moment of schism that i think you know accelerationism as we now understand the word uh arises from antedipus of course and they and they ask at a certain point but which is the revolutionary path is there one

to withdraw from the world market as samia amin advises third world countries do in a curious revival of the fascist economic solution or might it be to go in the opposite direction to go still further that is in the of decoding and de-territorialization but perhaps the flows are not yet de-territorialized enough not decoded enough from the point viewpoint of a theory and the practice of a highly schizophrenic character not to withdraw from the process but to go further to accelerate the process as nietzsche put it in this matter the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet now i would have thought people can agree that that quote has become even more um

provocative in perhaps unexpected ways uh recently um um certainly i think people might sort of find themselves doing a bit of a double take on this you know is the remnant quote to withdraw from the world market as samir amin advises third world countries do in a curious revival of the fascist economic so that that seems to be a uh a line that has acquired some peculiar valences in in over the course of the last year and maybe this is something that I'm pretty sure is going to inform our discussion in various ways or push it in certain directions so that's you know that's the the truly

crucial moment happens in this in this text and I think then there is subsequently a wave of of Deleuzean cultural production I think it's sort of associated reasonably to say with that with the CCIU is being quite central to that anyway and I but I think I think most of what is at stake in a CCIU use usage of accelerationism is broadly within the orbit of what is going on in this Deleuze and Quattari quote. I think, you know, that's something people can poke at and discuss. I don't think

it's a completely unproblematic assertion to make, but I think it's roughly right. And then we move on to the next stage of this question, and one that I think is still roiling in some respects even if in others it seems to have weirdly gone into perhaps certain kinds of relapse or people are sort of backing away from certain aspects of it and I think that's the question one of the things that I think inevitably is going to be part of this course um is which is is it possible to rigorously differentiate between a right and left

accelerationism now this this is a distinction that obviously comes in again retrospectively with lag time um um in response to the the next i think really significant intervention in this in this discussion which is uh alex williams and nixon checks manifesto for accelerationist politics and i okay i take a step back into delers and qatarian into the into what i call the cci you um because i think it's okay to say but but again i think this is actually it turns out to be

more complicated than it might seem and it's something that needs to be visiting and and and and poking at with a bit more than i'm going to do right now but i think it's broadly uh accurate to say that both for de leuze and quattari and then for the for the ccriu mode of accelerationism the motor of acceleration is clearly identified with capitalism um and in that case it's still there is still actually a a ghostly precursor to this right and left accelerationism distinction because as we see in a lot of the discussion around accelerationism

the the identification of the motor of acceleration with capital is not it's in itself already enough to unambiguously define a right accelerationism okay look I know I'm there's a lot of there's a lot of terms here that all take on different senses at different stages in in this process and i'll come back more more slowly i and also i'll try to be quick about getting to the end of this little discussion um but let me just go back to this steve shavira quote that introduces ben noise and he then he then continues in noise account accelerationism is the idea that things have to get worse before they can get better

The only way out of capitalism is the way through. The more abstract, violent, inhuman, contradictory and destructive capitalism becomes, the closer it gets to tearing itself apart. Such a vision derives ultimately from the famous account of capitalism and inherent dynamism in the Communist Manifesto. For Marx and Engels, capitalism is characterized by constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation. and agitation. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profane. Far from deploring such development, we will see them as necessary preconditions for the overthrow of capitalism itself. We saw this already in the little quote from Marx's speech on the

and Mo himself can answer for this, but I think when Marx was the right accelerationist, this is what he is referring to that's certainly one formulation and it's one that makes sense again retrospectively after left and right acceleration and take on a a more contemporary a more recent um sense but but if we go back to the to the 1970s and to los and qatarie or we go back further into the 19th century with Marx, it's clear that this kind of accelerationism will be very closely identified later with what then becomes called right accelerationism,

is at the time indistinguishable from a particular strategy of anti-capitalist politics. Whatever one might think about that strategy, and of course Noyes is criticizing it, think Stephen Shavira is criticizing it, as we will see Williams and Shinshet criticize it. So regardless of that, that's to say I'm not at all proposing that it's an uncontroversial position, but regardless of that, is that what we later come to call a right accelerationism is at this stage I think strictly indistinguishable from an anti-capitalist strategy and the only distinct distinction

at this stage between right and left is a largely irrelevant prophetic element about what the process looks like you know there is a kind of eschatological communist singularity for uh classical marxism There is something closer perhaps to a technological singularity for a more right accelerationist prophecy on this. But that kind of distinction is, from a strategic point of view, strictly irrelevant. It's just decorative. It makes no difference at all strategically because the strategy is accelerationist and the question is simply to accelerate the process, both as Deleuze and Qatari say, as Marx is earlier saying in relation to free trade.

The political strategy is to do what is required to maximally accelerate the capitalist process. so so it is it is massively retrospective to even bring this language of right and left accelerationism back beyond uh the 21st century but if you do it it becomes highly ambiguous and complicated but obviously in the manifesto uh of accelerationist on accelerationist politics williams and schoencheck make a new move that is then becomes the key to this to our subsequent

distinction between a right and left accelerationism because they say for instance in section two paragraph seven they say as marx was aware capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration and then later in section three paragraph 22 they say we need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism. Not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist

society so in this document there is a very explicit deliberate uh dismantling of the identification of the motor of acceleration with capitalism and and the association i i i think it they're definitely right to say of a certain marxism um that would see as part of its definition of socialism that it was capable of accelerating the forces of production in a way that capitalism was unable so that capital is accelerationist from this from this point of view only in respect to a pre-capitalist mode of production and in relation to a post-capitalist mode of production

it becomes a retardant obstacle, fetters being the word that is used here. Look, I was going to go on to say a little bit more about how I think this set of relations becomes complicated, but I think I should, I've gone on for quite a long time now, maybe i should open this up at this stage and see what what people are wanting to uh dig at in this in this material in this story so far oh and but just before i do that can i just say you know there's i'm not suggesting this this story stops with the manifesto for accelerationist

politics what happens after that um is interesting and complicated obviously one of the things that happen are these i think they can be fairly described as left accelerationist tendencies including i think probably most prominently uh xenofeminism which is something that i think inevitably we we will reach in in this topic i'm leaving them out i'm stopping at the the map basically at this point just because I think the story has become so convoluted and tangled and involuted already at this point that it just you know I think we've reached a certain kind of

complexity threshold that requires a kind of period of thrashing out before we try to push any further up this particular road so i'm going to i'm going to try to and open this up and see what people have to say could i say something about the marks quote yes sure um because i was saying the marks quote yes you mean the one from the free train yeah yeah because i was originally introduced it to the page and I'm no longer, I agree that it, I mean my background is as an intellectual historian and I study mostly kind of 19th century 20th century Marxism and I

think that actually distinction to be made between this kind of orthodox Marxist catastrophe theory which I think some left acceleration is still hold and accelerationism as such. Now off to Capital Volume 3 and that's why Engels has such problems. Translating actually socialism isn't what comes after the collapse of capitalism, it's the higher stage of capitalism. So actually you need expedientiating development and when that reaches a certain level, whatever that becomes socialism. And you just need to so-called heighten the contradiction.

Hey Vincent, if you lower your bandwidth on the upper part of the hangout window, window there's an ascending triangle shape if you lower your bandwidth I think we'll be able to hear you better it's a little spotty right now okay is this any better that's much better yes great so my point was I was

the one because I was one who originally added that to the Wikipedia article that quote which I no longer actually is acceleration list right I hope that doesn't mean that you'll be inclined to pull it out because it it's making an No, not at all. But I just think that there's an important distinction which needs to be made between the Marxist catastrophe theory, which a lot of leftists believe, and not even just accelerationist leftists, because basically the idea is that when you heighten them, capitalism collapses, and then you can build something on the ruins. We have this other theory which only really comes about after the third volume of Capital is published.

And this is why Engels has such problems editing it. Which is the idea that actually socialism isn't what comes after the collapse of capitalism. It's at a higher stage, it's what we call capitalism in its highest phase of development. And then this gets tangled up in all sorts of controversies in the 1890s. But I think it's an important distinction to make just because so many people seem to make this error of seeing accelerationism as about by decay rather than trying to Exponentiate progress Right, I mean Even at the level that I've grasped what you're saying it is massively interesting, but I There is definitely elements that I'm not quite

getting of this like when you say I'm when you say that in the third volume of capital Marx has a a can i say a definition of socialism that actually integrate totalistic okay sorry it's just there's a lot there's a lot going on in what you're saying well can i even want to decompose it because it's too much i think i'll have to do some kind of back to let me just stick with this one with this one one question what are the uh sorry i'm being really under ticket well what i'm trying to get at is this like williams and cernicek say that capitalism you know is is a set of parameters on change that act as

this factor and therefore that you you're you're driven from their particular construction of left accelerationism into the conception of a post-capitalism in order to actually liberate these productive forces that are that are constrained by the the capitalist relations of production now I think they're quite vague about about this it's not it's not a long text so you know there's it's it's pointless to be too critical about that but it's a bit there's kind of a quite a lot of hand-waving about exactly what what's being said there and so i'm interested obviously what you're saying is in dialogue with that that contention on their part isn't it i mean in a sense that it

it requires us to say well what are capitalism that that we're treating as fetters and what are the parameters of capitalism that we're actually identifying if i'm understanding you right that continuing to identify with the actual motor of acceleration that that are perpetuated throughout this this transition understanding what you're you're saying correct right I'm I mean I think it's basically a question of crisis theory in a way because obviously there is this orthodox Marxist crisis theory that capitalism goes through this and then it's cyclical and so on but But the feature of Capital Volume 3 is basically that it says that crises are opportunities for expansion.

That what happens is the market kind of explodes. And this is where people like Georges Seurel later come along and they take this along a line, which I think is kind of generationist in an odd way. against people like Kautsky who is the kind of Pope of orthodox Marxism who hews very closely to this catastrophist theory that capitalism is having accelerating crises and this is a problem and kind of claps which is not what Marx is saying at the end of his life and of the crisis theory is the radical distinction here I don't know if that makes any sense Yes, it's helpful for sure, but it's also kind of suggestive in a way, in a sense that obviously the deep, what makes this extremely complicated still?

I mean, it's obviously inherently complicated if you do it as a 19th century intellectual historian. But then you get this super overlay of complexity about what is actually being designated by the word capitalism. And this is so hugely overdetermined. It's almost like coincides with this whole course, I think. there's there's there's so much ambiguity and often deliberate obfuscation i think you know because it's such a a powerful intense uh sort of ideological mobilizing term that that it's very

tempting for people to to to pitch something as pro or anti-capitalist irrespective of the actual theoretical content of what's being said just as a kind of rallying as a flag you know sort of rallying exercise and so it's unclear to me in with the MAP how much of one thing or the other thing is is going on and whether it's different there's a different sort of portions there to the to what you're then talking about is already at stake in the in the 19th century and and whether well I mean obviously like do you still have a labor market the kind of in these

advanced stages of socialized capital that you think you're identifying in Marxist work? That's a difficult question. What happens at this time is that people start trying to kind of reconstruct Labour. I don't know if that's what check from William's also want to do yes I mean I think I'm sure there's people who be much more expert or more in tune with their their thinking then than I am here who probably could be really helpful about about that and I'm not

clear whether they're when they say post capitalism their mean they mean simply the abolition of the wage labor system or whether it's something more nuanced in that? I don't know for sure either I'm not sure necessarily that I mean I have read inventing the future for example and I'm still not sure that there is necessarily a coherent concept of what is post capitalism there. 19th century it certainly seems that people seem to think that come to think that socialism is just capitalism but with certain things slightly reconfigured and better off right yeah

that's a very vague answer I'm not sure I have a good one no well I'm sure this is something definitely to to come back to in this I mean do you can before sort of just pausing on this particular question do you have any particular recommendations of those parts of the third volume of capital that you think are most important to this to this discussion it's the way it's basically the wave discussion that you're pointing to is it hold on uh page 16. it's it's part three of capital three the whole section on the law of the tendency

of the rate of profit to fall and ray talks about the organic composition of capital and that stuff basically saying that capitalism means extreme mechanization right right and socialism is what you get when the rate of profit declines to zero etc um sorry i'm one one last question do you do you think this feeds into that kind of Mandel type of sort of trying to reconstruct Marxism as a as a wave theory and basically like almost at a certain point in certain strands becomes that the kind of the whole discourse on contrastive waves becomes a certain kind of a Marxist discourse or sort of

almost like a substitute in a way for for some of these like as you say this the notion of that this unique climactic crisis theory be instead sort of migrates into this country of style long wave areas carries that the Marxist project in along certain lines think so absolutely I mean the entire point with the crisis theory in Capital Volume 3 is basically that Marx has this idea of waves of expansion and compression in the market with the overall tendency being towards ever more expanded production ever greater mechanization

but with these kind of heartbeat phases so I think there's definitely a link to these later wave theories here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's extremely helpful and definitely super germane to this for sure. Just a final, so the specific references that I've got here is chapter 15 of part 3 of Capital Volume 3 and specifically section 3 of that. I might write that in the chat. Right, superb. Yes, I think that's a good, I'm sure everyone will want to follow this up.

I mean, this is kind of maybe a ham-fisted question, but I'm very curious what you think about how the rise of Trump fits into the sort of way of like the right accelerationist vision. This is obviously a major event. One could imagine that it's an example of things getting worse before they get better. Or that it's the opposite.

You were just talking about what exactly is capitalism. Is this rise of a kleptocracy that is working counter to the forces of becoming that are the good thing about capitalism, or the sort of Deleuzian becoming. Yeah, I'm just kind of eager to hear what you have to say about what's going on. Well, I mean, the first thing I'd have to say is really, I think it's complicated and increasingly difficult There are certain simple stories about it, but they probably go in different directions.

And just to repeat this, you know, the passage from Antioedipus, where the whole direction of that passage, which is criticized by the left accelerationists as being, inverted commas, neoliberal, you know, market oriented. and is explicitly opposed by them, this pro-market drive, to curious revival of the fascist and then another set of quote marks, the fascist economic solution. Now, there's a certain reading of the Trump phenomenon

that I'm cagey about because it just seems a little bit too easy and a bit too comfortable for people, that would just say, well, look, isn't this exactly that? Isn't this the fascist economic solution? Isn't this, to quote again, to withdraw from the world market, protectionism, economic nationalism? there's a strange you know lots of inverted commas right-wing version of the left-wing anti-globalization anti-trade uh discourse that de leuze and quateria are kind of um contesting in the 1970s so you know that's one neat take i obviously think it's like um

it's just a bit too easy to to build the whole thing around that but i think important to the to the public discussion and there's the public discussion is really structured i'm sure everyone i don't think i'm being controversial in saying this i think it's just a fact about the way these things are received is that presented as a nationalist backlash against the liberal international system you know a backlash against free trade against sort of regulated, deterritorializing capital,

which had been peculiarly, you know, had peculiarly moved into alignment with the establishment left under this label neoliberalism, you know, which, I mean, I'm sorry to be incoherent about this, but it's because there's so many weird twists and tangles and reversals in all of this. Because obviously when the manifesto on acceleration politics is attacking neoliberalism, it surely is not thinkable to them. It surely does not across the horizon for them that neoliberalism would just a few years down the line be associated with the counterpole to this insurrectionary populist right politics that

then comes in, obviously, with this is the story of Brexit and the story of, I'm not saying it's an accurate story, I'm just saying it's the dominant story. So, you know, I think that absolutely has to be there as part of this the irony of the irony of that and the and the irony of the fact that they're on the surface at least that antedipus quote could be um could be something hurled at the at the trumpist insurrection you know it's that seems to be the direction that it's rhetorically oriented but but i'm not going to go on about this a lot this massive amount to be said about it i'll just say one more thing that i think weirdly there was a lot of um

a big wave of the popularization of accelerationism as a concept in the lead up to that to the to the american election in particular i know not so much the brexit thing but but to before that election i saw people using this word accelerationism in much wider circles than i've been used to and in some ideological directions but basically i think i can my memory could be failing here because i was going to say i think generally as people proposing Trump as the accelerationist candidate. But quite likely people can find examples of the opposite.

It had entered a certain kind of folk popular sort of meaning at that point where acceleration just meant taking things over the cliff, you know taking things further you know that that somehow there was a sense that some kind of accelerationist strategy from the left i mean i can find people that people a quote for this if they're interested would would head in this direction um um i i won't waste people's time looking for this quite a moment um but but i but i've definitely seen people do that yeah i think this is this is most i i think you need to

say more than just mo and actually and actually lay out a bit there's an alt woke manifesto okay i'm sorry my ignorance is now totally getting in the way here is there an alt woke manifesto Why don't we get people who are closer to it speak about it? Yeah, yeah people in the class. Oh, okay. Yes, sorry, I have missed out on this. You might want to unmute yourself, Karim. Hi, Nick. Hi, everybody. Hi, hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Oh, well, we're a little nervous putting it on the spot. on spot yeah first day but I guess if you could present some questions to us

maybe maybe just explain explain the concept because Nick doesn't seem to be oh this is the artwork manifesto is it I'm sorry but I haven't I'm not familiar with this yet I should definitely maybe I'll post a link while while Karim and Alexandra provide a short brief kind of like introduction okay I mean obviously this is something I'll look at but I don't think I'm going to be able to get I'll get myself around it tonight so it looks like it's something that I will not be that I won't be prepared to to engage until next week but I will definitely do that that's fine we didn't even think it was going to be

really touched upon at all I suppose but we can give you a brief a brief summary and what it is it's a it's not an attempt to be the reactive force within the left to instead of the left being sorry it's an attempt to be an active force as opposed to a reactive force that the left's been you know after the solution of civil rights and then even more explicitly after the USSR the the solution of the USSR and this like Fukuyama mentality that's like permeated like the left as a whole that they're all we can do is just react to the existing economy and just react to capitalism as a dominating force and not

provide any alternative at all and it's in a way what all woke is it's a synthesization of I guess a Landian post-Landian CCRU acceleration with the plasticity of social bodies that someone like Roberto Manjibir Unger has like put forth and we want to the trouble we we like accelerationism but we don't like we'll say this we don't like accelerationists it's a great idea but no one has attempted to put it into practice really like it's you know if we want it to scale and it's is this idea of a language as like a intellectually trendy thing for like waffle designers in helsinki is like do we want can we if anything now is like

the catalytic time to like make this make this a populist force um within the left right um i mean that's also a part of it and there's a whole whole lot whole lot to it um and supposedly like different we call it like left and right hand practice so different um approaches approaches to it one would be i guess um well unfortunately for some trying to disrupt uh the right through social media means and uh what do you call it horizontal not really horizontal um no vertical yeah vertical vertical tactics metapolitics and the other would be to create cohesion amongst the left in order to try and like deal with the problem of like and the valid issues that

intersectionality presents by creating and positing a unified identity created around this futurism and technological forwardness. So it's like everybody can sort of get behind this idea that we'll no longer be or will be like a superhuman, if you want to say that, or a different type of human. There's like something innately, I'm not disgenic, but eugenic about transhumanism. It's, I guess, all right, so like just put it briefly, like it's like intersectional fucking xenofeminism. Right. You know, it's, it's the way that, I don't know, the way that it polls talked about is really silly and not that nuanced. And we, we have,

there's a more nuanced and more intelligent way to go about that because I guess there's also a missing, there's a missing like, I don't know, cultural and like ethnic components, all this theory as well. Like, there is a change in demography for instance like there's a change in like culture uh for instance it's um you know we kind of conflate like i guess you could say that like folk politics it's it's a very telling or it's a very apt definition of like that politic you know that of all that encompasses because you know you get you can associate that with woody guthery and like and to an extension like punk aesthetics of like antifa whereas pop and all these should you know all these genres that

are very technologically engaged and um very they have a positive a lot of like alien aesthetics they've reached like you know they've reached they're international they've scaled farther than like all these old dead genres and which we associate with old dead frames of thought within the left. Could ever help to imagine anyway. All right. We're a little nervous. Yeah. I guess that's sort of something. And can I ask you, this alt-wake manifesto, this is your state-of-the-art statement about your position. Is that right?

I mean, someone's roughly up to date with what you guys are thinking. Sort of. I mean, there's something else that we submitted to, well, that, I mean, we're working on, but it isn't out yet. But it's sort of just the beginning because it was just, I don't know, a haphazard response to the election and what the left should do because it was kind of a wake-up call that something is really amiss in our praxis. And it's really, it's a polemic. It is a polemic. It is supposed to, we are antagonizing the left and will continue to antagonize the left until they get it together. Also offering new issues. Yeah, while also providing an alternative

that will incorporate this accelerationist platform. And we can't, for obvious reasons, we can't talk about everything in detail but well I think you know feminism is a really good situation like situating integrating and exploding intersectionalism however I also think that it did so by like not really at all referencing existing cultures or talking about them and I think maybe my only critique was that maybe it jumped the gun in the program in terms of just like going to that new new platform whereas we still want to discuss in a sense the

existing tensions within communities I think they're important and people don't explore them correctly enough but without this like framing it in the way that is now of like blame or guilt or you know call out culture or anything like that right before we move on to that next step of of whatever you want to call it transhuman or something and can i ask what what the left right polarity means for you guys like you know if i can just you take a step back to the map level and it seems clear that at that point they're saying what it what they they're meaning by introducing this left qualification of accelerationism is the fact that they're wanting to demote the role of capitalism as a motor of acceleration. I think it's fair to say

that what the left means for them is that there is something else that is taking primary responsibility for historical acceleration and and and by implication for them would be identified but with the coincidence of acceleration and capitalism you know it's a it's a a right accelerationism is one that sees those two topics as basically the same and i'm wondering when you when you you use this language of left and right what what are you basically wanting to to suggest with that. What's the most important sense of that for you? You mean left and right in terms of our practice, left hand practice, right hand practice, or

left and right? Yes, or just in terms of the fact that you obviously think that that polarity is a crucial source of orientation. I mean, as I say, I'm not up to speed with what you guys are doing. haven't read this thing but but the way you talk about about the left and identification with the left and a reformation measure it's clear that you're kind of navigating this whole situation within that left right framework and I'm just wondering how what it is you're you're seeing when you when you say that I'll use that vocabulary all right well to clarify the left we in its present state we we identified with again just for the sake

of brevity we use shorthands moderate liberals and the radical left you know I don't think I need to explain what um moderate liberal is exactly what you think it is the radical left we can also condone distill that to radical left academics and radical activists. Our issue with the academics, we went to the school and from what we know, I used to be a reporter and I had to do a story about school endowments and exactly how much professors make, and the truth is most college professors make

peanuts and if that's true why not leave the academy all together why not why stay in the ivory tower why not if you really want to you know if you really if you're a pedagogy so important to you why not cross over you know why do you why why does one have to pay you know six figures to go to get the you know to have access to this you know why not so you know that's a failure on their part you know it's uh it is and again that's that that's intended to be as blemish as it sounds that's a failure on them on their part the radical activists they haven't come up with any they're still just reactive and that's the that's the problem if they want to impact change they should not run run for office like it's again we're since people are side we're readers of you

but we're also readers of Unger. And Unger, he, in a way, he's, I feel like he's a closeted accelerationist in the realm of like Van Braten or Hito Sterell. Like I feel like they're closeted accelerationists. And I, sorry. With, yeah, with radicals, we, they, yeah, they have no alternative. They have no, they're not active. The Tea Party was active. And I guess that's the other distinction, that there's a new form of, and we feel like all this phenomenon is accelerationism. The Republican is not what it used to be. It was not what it was in the Bush era.

Like this inequality, this gross inequality is made in a more radicalized and like brutish, you know, GOP. and that was exemplified by the Tea Party and the traditional Republicans, they're blindsided by all this and they're slowly being replaced with this new rabid Republicanism. And you have this far, far right ideology which is now the dominant right ideology. I think it's telling that, again, I don't want to conflate you, but I guess you sort of are on this end. You know, it's telling that someone who's associated with the Dark Enlightenment,

you know, the author of the Dark Enlightenment essay, someone who, yeah, someone who was associated with NRX, fascism for a t-party republican platform the daily caller you know like it's it's that there's it's the crossover it's like there is no the the the politics are so so vastly accelerated that they're that far right and what was once the i guess you could say the moderate right the gop they're now in bed with each other in a sense and that's I don't know what do you think of that I guess that's our orientation for left and right

sort of yeah there was a question though from I'm assuming it's at the door I can't see Arthur do you see the difference between left and right as difference in desire? both I just wanted that question to explain a little bit more first yeah can I jump in here and ask a question Nick and the alt-woke manifestoists. So when we talk about left and right, it seems funny to, I mean, maybe this is Nick's provocation when he asked this question about to find left and right. I mean, left and right, okay, so what's the antagonism? What I mean is you don't have a left and a right. You also have an antagonism which generates a left and a right insofar as there is a left and a right.

You know where does explain one more time like really This is to everybody not just you guys though, right? So yeah, we just assume the left and the right Where does the left and the right? Come from what antagonism generates the left and right so to take a simple example Though what we were just working through on volume three in capital you posited objective tendency or this is how Marx posited it. He doesn't say a right-wing tendency. He doesn't say a left-wing tendency. He just says a tendency of capitalism, right? Right. So you could just naively map three positions in relationship to that flowing with whatever we want to call right

and whatever we want to call left, and then you would have to put politics on either side of that, meaning that the historical conception of this whole idea of left and right is posited by the class struggle, which cites a certain antagonism that's generative of history itself. So something that accelerationists, which I'm not taking a position one way or the other, yet struggle with, which Badoo posed to Nick Snarek and Alex Williams a week after the election, is what's your conception of class struggle? What's your main, for example? Yeah. So like, Where do we, where, how do you have left and right without class struggle? No, no, that's not it. We do, like we are, or at least like, yeah, both of us are really into the Marxist leaning

and tendency of seeing capitalism and things like that. I do usually go in this route from Marx to the Frankfurt School and like Fanon and things like that. I don't believe only in class struggle. I definitely believe that there's a layer of intersectionality, which is why I say the white working class never sees itself or has this like, you know, issue with seeing itself as part of the disenfranchised group that it is, whereas the black underclass or whatever does not. So I think that like explains and goes a step further explaining the complexity of the system within which we live that Marx did not fully explain or did explain at the time, but I think it was kind of like not fully answered by the complexity that happened within advanced stages of capitalism that we are in now, like the idea of a middle class and things like that and why there are even certain races.

is why you get Stacey Dash, or why you get people like that who have seemingly espoused viewpoints that are actually undercut their own history of struggle. So of course it is framed from that perspective, and that to me is in a sense right and left. Like right and left is not just like clear cut, obviously there's many different, like right is somewhat, and is historically somewhat white working class here. also of wealthy white business class but it could also be a small understanding or small proponent or sorry small percentages of wealthy minorities it can also be certain minorities that

have like interesting like weird connections to imperialism and colonialism and existing hegemony like different subgroups within Hispanics and stuff like that have historically more of a, you know, a lot of them did vote for Trump, things like that. And so that to me sort of makes up this current of the right. But when I talk about that also, like drawing this, it seems like a broad stroke to make. However, I guess it's like going off of commonalities that I see. And I think one of the things that almost all the right from top to very far right does is in my opinion at least in some way This is proven and I can prove it at like lower levels that from Fox News such and such

There's this falsification of information in order to sort of in my opinion at least keep people within the I Don't know what you say like Lies or something The post facts. The alternative facts. Right, like even I was watching the Sanders and Ted Cruz debate, and Ted Cruz kept saying, how are you going to answer the fact that 5 million people lost their health insurance under Obamacare? And that is just an ineffective factual discrepancy, just a lie. And I think that to me sort of categorizes some of the differences. Also, you answered your own question. Oop. Oop. But I'll send it. Bye. Hi. Snarky hi. Next question.

If I could, I have a question that sort of for both. That question was to everybody and to Nick too, so. Yeah, I mean, look, I think honestly that this is not only complex, but extremely dynamic at the moment. And I have a lot of problem with the notion that we can just comfortably and without further question position the alt-right on the right or the far right. I mean, I don't see any stability to that. I see a massive amount of confusion being just brewed up. Just go back to this American, this history of American ideological confusion to do with

red and blue states, to do with the word liberalism. I mean, it seems to be reaching some climactic point now with this left and right vocabulary, because the alt-right, in most of its policy agenda, is not traditionally rightist. it's kind of it if anything it's its affinity seem to be anti-capitalist by by inclination i think it's kind of the fact it's prone to anti-semitism is a is a kind of index of that reliably generally um it's populist it's it's very sympathetic to to uh welfare redistribution

programs even if it wants to kind of start subjecting them to some process of ethnic qualification which i kind of undercurrent there and and obviously going you know the undertow to this whole question is like where do you position uh fascism on the left right um spectrum that people are using I don't think that's a straightforward question I think people want to be able to comfortably say fascism is the extreme right that seems to me yeah deeply confusing in a whole kind of way and and so I just want to kind of complicate things like that and I think they say what that sounds like

dog whistle politics I guess there are like connections don't whistle to who who it's not it's not just like a oversimplification I don't think it's not like we don't understand the complexities or the inner working connectedness of these smaller groups but however when you take something like human biodiversity there's like a very long-standing history of that being essentially scientific racism I mean the connections are not that I don't think that's controversial to say that the connections are there because I think that they're super apparent you don't even have to dig that much beneath the surface obviously the relation between the alt-right and HPD are massively complicated they all right I mean you're right or not the alt-right are not very

sympathetic I mean they sure they like certain parts of the kind of mainstream hbd story when it is making uh when it is flattering to themselves but you see them just drop it like a hot potato as soon as they start talking about so you you think that their their kind of story about the jews is is is based on hbd totally not you know they'll say oh you know there's no there's no way that um this is anything to do with uh kind of hbd factors no it's to do with with uh nepotism and and various kinds of sharp practices and all of this kind of thing so i i think that you know it's not a neat it's not a neat line okay but

you even get like the the lowest rungs of 18 i mean sort of like 1488ers as well as like some people within HPD are both pulling from the bell curve, which is all funded by the Pioneer Fund, which is all, you know, the president of which is J. Philip Rushton, who is connected to white nationalism, like that type of connection. Also, it's okay. What is the alt-right then? Like, or what do you mean when you say alt-right? Because I think basically, I don't, I think most people identify with the alt-right. are not uh i won't say incriminated and i think it would be unfair to suggest that it was an explicit thing for most people who use that term but i think in its core in its theoretical core

the alt-right is a fascist movement and i think it you know we have to then ask well what is fascism re-raise that question and i don't think that that's a question that there are just pat answers to it fascism has extremely complicated relation to capitalism it's not a straightforward pro-capitalist um ideology by any stretch of the imagination and it has a very complicated relation to the left you know there's much more fluidity between uh leftist constituencies and fascist constituencies historically than there is between fascist constituencies and classical liberal constituencies it's just simply okay i mean you know the the the nazis were called

the the german workers party for a reason that mussolini just straightforwardly moved from being a socialist politician to being a fascist politician very very smoothly because they share a huge amount of kind of ideological common ground and i think equally you can say that that Marxist-Leninist regimes in power systematically and consistently reconstruct themselves in a fascist direction. You know, I think it's what happens when socialist politics makes itself practical in certain convenient ways.

and an ethnic appeal is part of that for sure and and a certain type of a relation to capitalism that is that is certainly not a classically liberal relation to capitalism it's a it's a it's it's not a full communist relation to capitalism it doesn't abolish capitalism but it but it thinks that capitalism should be subject to the state it should be subject to the people it It should be subject to a set of transcendent criteria. And, you know, that's the fascist program. And I think that you can see that kind of discourse re-emerging hugely on the alt-right now. I don't think you're going to find a lot of people doing unqualified pro-capitalist polemics

and identifying themselves with the alt-right. Nick, I also wanted to like put something here, put something here in relation to what you are saying on the table and also add to what Karim and Alexander was saying is that we don't need to search for some sort of like funding secret affinities. the fact of the matter that all these groups, which are called Rainbow of Coalition, and some people laughed, are connected, is that electorally they realize the significance of all banding together with people like Peter Thiel and with others and support Trump to get elected. That itself shows that, you know, simplifies a lot of these complexities where it actually counts, which is election or politics.

but i'm not sure what i think about that analysis to be honest because i don't think look peter teal didn't get into this game on the same lines that these guys did you know you've got on the one hand you've got a populist movement that is trying to you know in a in a quite recognizable way sort of motivate this ethnic valkish uh politics um against against this notion of a kind of alien largely jewish um establishment i mean amy twa's world on fire i think is extremely helpful for this kind of thing and on the other hand you have um peter teal who simply totally goes the back around the back door he makes makes no kind of populist appeal

whatsoever he puts some money on the table as this kind of contrarian bet and and is basically buying a seat at the table on the inner circle of the of the new regime decision making thing and and of course his line in is much more effective than the alt-right line in in a sense that there are no none of the hardcore alt-right people have any um you know their leverage is the fact they can rile up the mobs and all of that and and when it comes to people voting it makes some distance But when it comes to just standard governance now, I don't think they have. It's not like, I mean, what I'm trying to say here is the significance of electoral politics, actually.

This is something that I kind of liked about the Alt-Walk program. or like what these people, the Aynon group, which the collective that wrote that manifesto, sort of like highlighted. And the fact that when you look on the right, you see that despite these differences, despite the fact that each one of these elements were interested in a totally different set of priorities, they were able to band together and use or hack or take over this system with or without the help of the Russian because that's another question that needs to really be considered. Seriously. And basically cause this tectonic shift that makes like basically stall the conversation in the classroom.

At least like, I mean, it's important enough for us to have spent at least like 45 minutes on it already. Right. If not, all these reactions of the left, reactions of the so-called establishment, this is all because of this electoral coalition that we cannot just put aside and say, oh, no, it's not important. In fact, this is one reason why I am interested in these questions, because I think electoral politics and electoral practices are crucial to understanding how all of this will work in lay democracy or quote-unquote democracy. Yeah. I mean, look, obviously, I don't know whether I'm kind of stepping beyond the bounds of whatever in terms of provocation on this, But the near reaction analysis of this is that fascism is the teleological conclusion of democracy.

So, I mean, in that sense, it's completely unsurprised by this phenomenon. And, you know, but it's a kind of tragic diagnosis. I mean, it's something that is just seen as being the final confirmation of how absolutely irredeemable mass populist politics are. that this is this is where it ends up um now that that's not a left wing that's not a left wing diagnosis of the thing at all and and that's part of the reason that i was um you know i was raising this kind of question well what are people what's going on with the vocabulary left and right now because i think there are some very just lazy ways that can be used in terms of like maybe practical

on some levels but in terms of just theoretical analysis are not really helping us to understand what what's what's going on i mean i don't know i would like even ask about because there are two and this is just two things that come off the top of my head like by talking to you but um two things that i do think kind of can be generalizably sort of seen across the board and what one would presumed to be right-wing, which is one, some sort of conception of or use of the cathedral in place of what left-wing politics would call hegemony or reversal of this, and two, kind of just like swaths, like huge swaths of misinformation, and that runs from,

And that's why I guess I say it from falsifiable information being on Fox News to an entire wing of falsifiable science, i.e. HPD. On that topic, I think it's pretty interesting the experience I've had, especially fairly recently with a lot of, I mean, not just explicitly near reactionaries, but that sort of like outer right end is that the extent to which they do this to themselves, there's like a whole complicated like counter epistemology of self gaslighting that goes on like uh you know when i'm like pretty good friends with and keep like trying to sort of pitch on this or that uh

sort of uh conversion of ideas i really i pitched climate change or climate catastrophe quite hard with them and you know the immediate and just like really shockingly hard to get through response was like no public science is valid or like i don't have to listen to like anything that relies upon like a general consensus that if like public science, you know, at the scale of hundreds of thousands of scientists, some billions of dollars and so forth, says something, then like probably there's something going on, just thrown out the window. And, you know, you can put that alongside, you know, this like vast network of sort of semi-automated or linked or, you know, camouflaged as to their origins, like quote unquote fake news sites. It's like, I mean, I'm definitely with like some of the people on the right that like it is it is at least like unfair and unself critical.

And I think Mo has said this as well to start like calling out people about fake news, one not necessarily looking at the distortions in construction that was already very much like, you know, endemic in the media sources that we already had. The left listens to. But I think but definitely distinct from the left like this. idea of like a you know whether it's any given person it's conspiracism or it's these media networks or whatever there's a whole like disinformation that doesn't network that doesn't even perceive itself outside you know self-imprisoning sort of and it's just bizarre to watch that develop I mean do you guys like you see that as a front for I guess for like whether it's alt-woker it's something else like a sort of aggressive epistemological politics like something

that's looking for tactics like how do we pierce like this circuit of no evidence can matter in advance if it's not already part of like our minor canon you know whatever it is with short answer yes that yes long answer you can change someone's opinion by with post post facts by meeting them halfway meeting them where they're at yeah i think the left sort of erroneously only wants to present uh argument that is like very all or nothing yeah all or nothing airtight whereas like there is some if you i guess if you believe or you adhere to the idea that intersectionality has these differences or creates these differences among people like there are

populations that like or people like in certain aspects of the black community for instance homophobia and like sort of misogynistic tendencies are are there you know and it's sort of like instead of thinking that you are gonna you have to put all your cards out on the table automatically to make the most airtight quote-unquote like uh dogmatically correct argument as opposed to like I don't know, sort of let that be for a second and try to like change what you can and go that route. Like meet people where they're at sort of. At least at the very least make their bigotry less damaging and that it doesn't cross over into the electoral practices. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Sorry, I'll finish your question.

One thing I wanted to introduce here, I'm not sure if people are aware of this phenomenon. Maybe it's kind of local. But for example, since the election, the Democratic Socialists of America to take one organization in the U.S. has grown to 18,000 people. It's like tripled in size in New York. Yay, great. Love it. There you go, right? So this is not exactly the conversation we're having, which is sort of how to engage the alt-right. This is kind of a spontaneous, semi-spontaneous phenomenon that happened by virtue of what the left would call a negative phenomenon, right? So the growth of an organization like democratic socialism was just that they had an apparatus, an intersectional apparatus that was ready to receive this thing produced by an event, right?

And now we're in a different state, which is like you have 18,000 people where you did not two weeks ago. So I'm just wondering if, one, I think that we would do really well as a leftist to take on Nick's questions that he poses to us, because I think sometimes they're better than our own self-analysis. So this is kind of aside from that. I think we do need to take those questions on. But another thing we need to pose to ourselves is the question of power. I mean, if all of a sudden we are having organizations that have thousands of people, real politic questions, right? so we're not any longer talking about sort of what we've i mean i count myself amongst this the comfortable leftist positions of the academy scholastic marxism etc of recent years now we have

like 18 000 people plus right that are identifying themselves as leftists and if you go to these meetings right we really don't have a good sense of what that means politically like the politics of these organizations right are very unclear and and what a leftist is even within them is very unclear. I mean, you find the full spectrum from people who are unconsciously or consciously pro-capitalist, pro-liberal, who are in a socialist organization, to people who are sort of 20th century communists, to da-da-da-da-da, right? So this is like a real question that we have to intervene at, at the level of real politicking even at this point. It's not just scholastic debates, right? Of course, that's not necessarily what I think we're saying. I don't necessarily i mean even my definition of what is considered the left is less in my opinion uh

small scale than what a leftist would say because now there's all this like a liberal backlash and all this stuff i still consider that to be part of the greater left i think i draw the line somewhere at uh generalized conservatism i think then you start having well because then you do like have start more having more of a difference of opinion a serious difference of opinion in terms of like even seeming even the uh programs that i see if someone did still quote unquote support capitalism or something there are still like ways that i think you could make it more socialist or integrate these more you know as like stepping stones but i think once you start getting to like generalizing conservatism we start it becomes too much of a difference whereas like i think

these organizations that's good like that they're getting this type of membership and i think there are like I don't just think about theoretical terms I think for instance there are serious like legitimate real issues that could be addressed and should be and that I think even far left it should have more awareness of like gerrymandering and voter registration issues that's something that everybody I think from far far left to I guess quote-unquote liberal should be able to like rally around and deal with because ultimately that does still help help The ultimate goal because gerrymandering is done at least right now disproportionately stacking things towards the right I'm trying to make the connection in this conversation

back to the concept of accelerationism as Nick was kind of keying it on at the end of his intellectual history You know, basically the MAP represented a bit of a split, right, between the traditional Marxian position where capitalism is the thing to be accelerated, and they've pivoted to, I actually don't know exactly what they pivoted to. It takes a bit of room between the lines. That's a good point, yes, definitely. Some concept of, you know, maybe technological innovation, maybe it's human creativity are the objects to be accelerated. and with kind of these new praxis like the old work or democratic socialists, how would that fit in with respect to the MAP

and kind of what's being said there? Nick, can I just say something quick in response to that? And then you can... No, definitely. I took that as an open question. That was Vincent, right? That was Vincent? That was Zach, wasn't it? Sorry, if I'm... Yes, it was Zach. It was Zach right Yes, okay, how does that guy doing so to me? I think if you want to just get to it philosophically and I've been kind of like trying to like write this down and address this Right what what map did which actually is kind of going back in a way where the conscious your unconsciously to fill philosophers of technology prior to prior to the prior to the the publication of map, right?

And you know what I mean? There are plenty of people we can quote, but I think that the familiar names would be like Simone Doan and people like Kittler, Freddie Kittler, is that to kind of like show how genesis in a single word or like basically sort of like the entangled evolution of biology and technology, right? is semi-autonomous or autonomous in the last instance from the evolution of political economy, something that Marx was not able to do, and show how the rift between these two entangled progressions or evolutions can be exploited. So on one hand, and then how it's all complicated

with the third evolution, which is evolution of nature, which then is returning to history in the form of climate change, right? So sort of like to show how the urgency of this other form of history, which is also semi-independent, like climate change, with the technogenesis, with the evolution of political economy from whatever Marxian point of view, how these three are interacting and how they can be, the rift between them can be exploited. and things are not just as straightforward in terms of like how to to accelerate you only have to accelerate capital yeah i mean i obviously want to turn that around in the sense that i think the combined intellectual achievement of the marxist and austrian tradition is to have integrated the the dynamics of capitalism and political economy and and and to see it as some

kind of at least straightforwardly some intellectual achievement to have disengaged them is to me at least questionable um but this is a this is obviously huge i mean you know there are probably several candidates for what is the central question that this this course should be addressing and i think this is one clear strong candidate is to put it in the terms that you've just put it more like is there some effective autonomy to the to the technological lineage or not and i think that that is obviously the dividing line between right and left acceleration is exactly on that on that question yeah i also wonder if it's like um uh there's the question of capitalism's power

to transform the fabric of human reality or human nature in a way that kind of goes beyond this whole conversation, you know, that like, like we're sort of taking like freedom and equality as like quasi transcendent values but it's like capitalism, you know, is like, this whole conversation is going on like in the world, not just in here, but like meanwhile, you know, like artificial intelligence and gene editing and all these sort of scientific capitalist processes are sort of reconfiguring like what it is to be human. And so like, you know, we talked about Nietzsche a little bit

or like Nietzsche versus Marx and like, you know, so like the basic Nietzschean idea is that his version the leveling of the European man is, you know, includes leveling of his values, right? It's like that we might produce new things that we can't even conceive of right now, or that nature might be doing that through us or whatever, you know, versus a more like Marxist view, you know, that is also sort of utopian, but has certain values that we currently share kind of still in place um and and i'm you know those maybe it's a little bit artificial to

contrast those two ways of doing things and it's kind of half-guisted or something but it's interest like i'm very interested in sort of the sort of nietzschean view or like version and then it's like our time like everything is sort of suddenly become so scary um and like messed up that like it also feels uh you know that that that's uh speculative in this very dangerous way and uh um yeah i don't know i'm just sort of chiming in with that that uh uh commenter and i guess i imagine left versus right accelerationism kind of that there's an

antagonism between those two views this kind of like long view I I think there's a lot going on in what you're saying and if I'm you know if I'm not if I'm misconstruing what you're saying to do correct me about this but I think one of the issues is to do with transcendence in relation to this acceleration this process and I think that that is a line that runs through Marx rather than necessarily just between Marx and Nietzsche. I mean, there's a certain, I would think, quite traditional reading of Marx where, you know, the notion of transcendent sociopolitical values is exactly being processed out

by Marx-Engels' conception of scientific socialism, that the values are shown to be internally generated, you know, so that the collective, all, for instance, of collective ethics, you know, everything that comes from that, it can be shown to be produced by the industrial system and the way that it fosters cooperative activity inside the industrial process. And it doesn't invoke some transcendent source of ethico-political direction. And I sort of, it seems to me that there's a necessary consequence of the kind of things that the MAP is wanting to do,

that that side of Marx, you know, what maybe you could call a kind of Nietzschean side of Marx on a very abstract level, that the allergy to the invocation of the transcendent is um is something that gets lost then um you know and and it necessarily is a is uh that the imminent accelerationism that that comes from the fact that there just is not going to be there's there is not going to be a source of value outside of the of the motor that is actually running the historical process that is that then becomes actually uh something that is put under attack um and there is a kind

of appeal to a set of kind of values that are being brought out from outside and and and acting as a criterion and judging it you know and so you get that language which we've already seen you know to do with um uh sorry let me just repeat exactly you know not only is capitalism unjust and perverted system no i think that it's like there's a certain level of of scientific socialism in its kind of classical form that would find that a really embarrassing judgment you know i mean that would see it as the lowest tier of sort of of rhetoric that was available to them but but really below the plane of analysis that is philosophical

and that is truly Marxist in that sense. Because it's making an appeal that it's not able to explain the source of those values, of those criteria within the process being described. I mean, sorry, if I've just wandered completely off the point you were making hunter then i apologize for that but i i took it that well yeah no yeah i mean i guess it doesn't maybe a question of like the like what what exactly the ontological status of cybernetics is in a way you know like like how uh like is the acceleration uh you know is it

like you know what's in the assemblage you know is it just sort of economics and ideology and science or does it also include the criteria by which we're conceiving of the whole process or like actual values, not just false ideological ones? Totally, totally. And why I sort of wanted to call out that invocation in the Nietzsche quote of the leveling process of European man, I think that that is totally tied up with what you're saying now. You know, it's to do with flatness in the system theoretic sense. It's to do with imminence. It's the fact that the direction of your analysis

is meant to systematically process out any transcendent source of value or criteriology. It's the symptom of an incomplete, and in a certain sense, like unscientific analysis that would allow there to be these residual transcendent sources of authority. And so that definitely seems to me something that is, you know, happening two levels in Nietzsche's work, at least two levels, and one level being this appeal to leveling, to flatness, which is the systematic eradication of transcendent elements from the system under consideration. You

We're still live right yeah, yes, sorry everyone Maybe I've by ranting or whatever. Yeah, I was going to resist replying so that someone else could chime in or talk. Can everyone hear me? Yes, we can. Good. I wonder, I just wanted to press Nick a little because it hasn't come up as far as I can tell in this conversation, but you've talked occasionally about what you call fundamentalist accelerationism. And I wonder if you could distinguish that from left and right in your view. Well, I've noticed this conversation happening in the sidebar.

And actually, I don't think my usage of that term is able to support the kind of weight that people seem to be putting on it in the sidebar. because I meant it just almost in this exact sense of kind of a scriptural literalism. I think I used that term in relation to the obsolete capitalism text that I hope I've linked through to you guys. I sent it, I think, to Theodore. I'll put them in the sidebar too. I can't. I can't yeah the text that you sent to the group email thread I've posted in And you know, this is a kind of I think very strong

intellectual history type Approach to this subject and so as I say just to be repetitive when I say fundamentalist Accelerationism, it just is simply that they they go through the the word the word of the scripture and they follow it through this this key dealers and quattari passage and they follow it back to nature and and the and through the discussions that those texts have um have introduced in the works of klosovsky and this and this kind of thing so it's not in my usage of it to to date a term that has much theoretical dignity to there at all and I certainly think I certainly think that the kind of

philosophical question of a kind of fully imminent critical discourse on acceleration is something that is not carried by this notion of fundamentalist accelerationism in this sense um can i just hop in really quick i i i guess my question is sort of accelerationism as i understand it um in the way that you've uh spoken about it before in your own work um strikes me more as a philosophical analysis

of nature and trends that happen in nature rather than something we can easily categorize as a political program. I suspect that's going to come up a lot in the class. Yeah, yeah. I think Josh already made a a point like this if i if i go back a little bit he says in the cyber right acceleration is phantom it has no coherent political program and i think there's a lot to that in the sense that um basically like just recently zizek wrote a kind of journalism piece that repeats a point he makes

often and i think accurately which is to say that um the left requires a new international order for its program to operate and that and that in the that the failure of the left is the default condition of possibility for right accelerationist trends to happen i mean it's not that you need anything positive to happen on the right at all for capitalist techno-economic acceleration to happen you just need you just need to sabotage undermine and mess up the the attempts to control and constrain and inhibit those processes so so in that sense i would totally

agree you know there's not really any need or requirement there's something bizarre about a strongly positive right accelerationist political program and and i think this obviously feeds into the question we've been having this week about the whole relation to trump and everything i mean the alt-right you know and let's say i think it's too early to be very clear about whether this is right or this is just falling into a certain convenient pattern but let's just say that the the Trump phenomenon really is about this populist economic nationalist political program. It obviously is in that sense a positive political program and just as a political positive political

program it should raise the hackles of right accelerationist. I mean they might be able to tactically navigate it. I mean I guess they think they would have to tactically navigate it and And they might think that this program by somehow by its nature is going to, in other ways, mess up, confuse and disorganize more potent forms of inhibitory political action in relation to capitalism. And so there might be some sort of tactical or strategic allegiance with it in that sense, that it's just being sort of tactically supported for its pure chaos value for the fact that it's messing things up. And there are certain elements that I can see that, you know, reasons why one might do that.

But as a positive political program, of course, it cannot be the bearer of a right accelerationist program. And that makes no sense. It's a kind of intrinsically incoherent theoretical suggestion. Is there a level of irony to use right accelerationists in that context then? Well, I mean, I'm taking it as just an inevitable production from left accelerationism. It's like, I just think it almost writes itself as an inevitable sort of semiotic effect once someone is qualifying accelerationism in that way.

But it could have been done in different ways. I mean, I've otherwise said, and I like this much more personally than fundamentalist accelerations, unconditional accelerationism. you know i.e. accelerationism without any transcendent criteriology i actually don't know did you coin the term at acceleration or is that coined by some like was that i think i coined it but honestly i'm not confident about that i'm not confident about that my I Think I coined it in political polemical engagement with with the MAP But but it wouldn't surprise me if someone was to come back to me and said don't don't delude yourself

You know it was coined by x y or z at a different time that it's entirely possible. I Think Ray brassier is probably characterized it Sort of earliest right um now if he's characterizing it in relation yes yes no that's right but that's even isn't that even before the MAP that he writes that piece um I'm not sure sorry I'm getting my timeline tangled at this point but yes whatever Whatever language he uses if I mean, I don't know whether he uses the word right acceleration as it may I certainly would believe it if told

So it's almost like a question of the the relationship between philosophical consistency and political practice or something sort of do do you start with coordinates within the manifest image that you care about and then use philosophy from there or sort of like you know go all the way with philosophical theory yes I I would be very happy to characterize it in that way but of course I wouldn't be surprised if people were to come back and and Challenge that From the other side and I don't know it's an interesting it's an interesting question actually whether whether they would do that Yeah, that is an interesting question. I'd be curious to know what the challenge would be from the other side I mean obviously partly the the

the term unconditional acceleration is meant to provoke exactly the response that you are now also asking for but I don't think it has been successful in doing so so It remains unknown But naively Admittedly naively, I mean I'd like to pose a question. So if we have a sort of ontological force objective tendency in which subjective agency as a reflex doesn't have some Reflexivity in relationship to it then it's all moot anyway we don't need any apparatus right left or otherwise to protect defend stop right right

yeah no i think that that's that's definitely the way that one is the way that one is pulled and it and it seems to me quite clear that um it's not that there is a the process and the of the process in some neat sense but the antagonism between the process and its antagonist or pseudo antagonist is essential to the process I mean you know it's it's it's the dynamics antagonistic dynamics are much more dynamic than non antagonistic antagonistic dynamics and this is again it's in some complicated non-linear way going to

take us back into this whole question about left and right here because i think that that one of the reasons that um the right is confident about the coincidence of technological dynamism and capitalist process is precisely that they they see the conflictual competitive structure as being absolutely integral to the genetic process you know it's not that it's not that there is a separable genetic process and then a set of antagonisms about it but the competitive antagonistic process is itself the genetic matrix and and so I think that this definitely goes

across to what you're what you're saying that the kind of it's not of course it must be consistently that that the kind of various kinds of leftist revolt against the process are dynamic frictions of the process in a way this debate between right-left accelerationism recapitulates the arguments of Marxism a century ago. Of course, yes. In fact that's my entire argument in my PhD thesis. Good argument. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this point John's making about, it's obviously also tied up with this question about transcendence in this respect, isn't it? I mean, like, you can run the thing the other way around and say, and it goes back to this question about to what extent is politics itself analytically derivable from the capitalist dynamic, you know, in an absolutely traditional analysis. you know and what they are what Marx and Engels are denouncing as a utopian communism is precisely the notion that you have these forms of practical

collectivity and and and political orientation that do not have a genesis internal to the actual socio-economic process of production so you know described that way it's perhaps seems it seems less of a problem but but i think that they're just it's it's the same issue but just flipped flipped over actually that the industrial process there's a there's a there's a point where deleuze and crotty in antidepress are being deliberately provocative and say capitalism produces schizophrenics in the same way that it produces prel shampoo. And given the role that, for them,

schizophrenia is the bearer of the revolutionary impulse, I think they're saying something that is a kind of fundamentalist Marxist point, that the fully imminent apprehension of the industrial process encompasses the whole terrain of political possibility. Can you talk a little bit more about John Greer and like this the sort of anti accelerationist I've never actually heard of him before you mentioned it so so this idea of negative feedback like like this sort of accepting the sort of cybernetic approach but yes he's he's someone who is very very attached to historical cycle theories he he reads a

lot of Spengler and and and these sort of giant sort of historical accounts based on because he thinks that that any apparent progressive process i.e. any process that is that that seems to be the bearer of a kind of positive feedback dynamic is only a partial optic on a complete negative or equilibrium cybernetic circuit and so this is his basic framework for understanding all of these these things he thinks if you know if it looks to you that that you're

on some up curve you're just not seeing enough of the big picture to see the complementary down curve of that process. So he's got a bunch of really interesting essays on his blog. If you go back near the start of his blogging career there, you know, he lays out a lot of this historical theorizing quite clearly. So I just want to give a time check for about eight minutes to the end of the class time. I'm happy to keep running longer. That's over Eight minutes over class line. I think we're ending at 1230

So okay, so so eight there's still eight minutes left correct. Yeah Nick I don't know if I will be here in every class, but but see nevertheless I It will be great if you I don't know if you did this or not But if you can talk about the trajectory of the the next seven classes or some kind of like a Yes, I mean I As I was apologizing to actually before you came here more about this because my sense of how this course was going to work was sort of thrown into chaos by by the way Working on it when and I I'd really sort of thought that I could just philosophize my way beneath or below these

controversies about the the Claims of accelerationism and get to some core that would be shared across all of these different frameworks And I just have abandoned that as a completely naive and hopeless Expectation so I I what I had promised people is that by Tuesday I will I will provide something that is at least a kind of basic reading this syllabus course organization thing I mean I was going to sort of build in a lot of what people wanted to talk about today into my sort of thinking about how that should go but maybe but maybe we

could make a promise about next week and I think there's something to be said for maybe taking the MAP as a starting point because I think it's so important to the sort of reactivation of this whole accelerationist discussion and while there's been lots of interesting work since that I hope we'll be able to get to I don't think that anything that's happened since that point has been as essential to sort of redefining what this discussion is about and why people are talking about accelerationism and how it might intersect with our contemporary sort of quandaries.

So my strong temptation is to put the MAP at the heart of next week's reading. And then if people can sort of allow me the patience to sort of then spin things out from that and give people a larger framework by Tuesday of next week. Great. And if anyone hasn't been able to get into the classroom, please send me an email. So any last... We're sort of reaching exhaustion point

probably I can see from people. Although you're not at horrible times, all of you, are you? Amy is, I know. and but i mean here let me put this in a more strong way is there anything that people would want me would want to put on the table now i'm going to assume that i haven't looked at this alt woke manifesto yet but i'm going to assume that that's something that's worth taking a look at i'll put the xenofeminist manifesto definitely on on the course somewhere down the line um is there anything that people want me to add to our agenda at this point and that then i can sort of build that into our program over the next few weeks nick i wrote i wrote i wrote something for a catalog of an artist exhibition that's going to

get public translated to german and published as part of a catalog the essay is not published but I don't mind just not assigning it as a reading, but just posting it to the classroom for people to kind of have access to, because I think it touches upon a lot of the stuff that comes up. So I'll add that to the classroom. Okay, cool. Like an extra text. So just please, people, don't share it, because it actually is copyrighted and belongs to this museum that's going to publish, translate and publish it. And when it comes out, then we can share the official design PDF of it later. But I just really want to pass it on to people to read. and it's past the point of commenting on it, but it's still good because it's already finalized. But it's good if people read it because I think I try to address a lot of the stuff that are theme of the seminar in that paper.

And it's called Machining Intelligence and the Winter of AI. That's what it's called. Okay, cool. Cool. Nick, a lot of the things I addressed there are basically things that popped to my mind in our last summer residency when you came to New York and we had that wonderful five-day thing with Amy and Jake and everybody around. So it's kind of like I take the discussions from those sessions and then I expand upon it to get to Trump in a way. Okay, great. One thing I'd like to ask, I don't know if I missed it, just where everybody is in the world physically. I'm physically right now in Berlin, but next time we speak I will be in Sharjah.

All right, I'm in Brooklyn, New York. Oh, lovely. I'm in Berlin as well. I'm in Queens. Anybody who's in New York, I'd love to meet some more people from New Center around. It looks like a lot of New Yorkers from what I'm hearing. Yeah, I'm in Brooklyn. I'm in San Francisco. Hey. West Coast. I might. Robin you're West Coast or Berlin West Coast San Francisco Who said Berlin I just barely heard it Me Joshua Vincent Vincent okay sorry

Because I can't see your face I'm trying to assign another face to your voice It's just like normal human Myopia right sorry about that So Quick quick thing before we end today if people are able to get uh wired internet connections and i know that's not really popular right now but that's it works a lot better um and it'll make the class smoother so great okay yeah so thanks massively to everyone for a great discussion i've really enjoyed it thanks theodore for your work putting it together yeah no problem have a good week. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Nick. Bye.