well GMT is AOE it's 0100 hours here at Urbanomic GMT hang on wait it's 0100 hours here urbanomic studio hq 1.8 clicks from goon gumpus in the heart of british summertime intensive temporal zone in the solar trance lockdown the hard pants are off the pizza is sliced the protein packed peanut punch is flowing
and we're back with another plague pod live putting in some work to keep your ears full during the covid season and um i've written off as a failed experiment the last one it definitely seems we haven't got anything else to talk about so we're going to be talking about coronavirus again so where are we? we're riding the curve we're vibing with the virus There's four stages, four phases of lockdown, fear, disorientation, boredom, and then the
fourth phase. Now we just want to go out, touch each other's faces, and we just want impending human extinction to become accessible as a dance floor so we can go out again and basically get freaky. I'm going to turn up now. Give it to me like you need some love. Got some bottles in the caddy.
We can all bring up. Let's get drunk tonight. Baby, we don't have to fuck. Bring your friend along. Baby, we can have some fun. Let's get freaky now. Let's get fucking freaky now. Let's get freaky now. Let's get fucking freaky now. Let's get freaky now. Let's get fucking freaky now. Let's get freaky now. Let's get this in the world.
You want me baby fill me in Cause I don't waste my time with lesbian So let's get freaky now Let's get fucking freaky now Let's get freaky now Let's get fucking freaky now Let's get freaky now Let's get fucking freaky now Let's get freaky now Let's get freaky now Let's get freaky now Let's get freaky now Liars Liars Liars Liars Liars Liars Oh baby why did you have to lie to me
I can't play no more games These thoughts are slowly controlling me You're turning off the flames So go baby go baby You don't want me So go baby go baby Come and get me How are you? So go baby go baby You don't want me So go baby go No e-go-na-modo I'm a-za-no-ki I want to be careful I want to be careful I want to be careful I want to be careful I want to be careful I want to be careful I'm a little bit soft, but now I'm burning
How are you? I want to show you the best I want to show you the best I want to show you the best I want to show you the best I want to show you the best I didn't see you the best But now I'm burning
I'm burning I'm burning I'm burning I'm burning I'm burning I'm burning I'm going to go to the next stage. let's talk about next week next week i'm hoping to get on the show mr thomas moynahan who at the
moment is locked down during a global pandemic putting the finishing touches to his next book on existential risk and no doubt we'll also be talking spinal catastrophism m&ms chicken nuggets ontography recapitulationism worms Cornish time travel and Pepsi but also next week we're going to have an audience special last week sorry last year last year now right yeah 2019 we published
Unsound Undead a book based around the Audint hyperstitional mythos which looks at the ways in which the less explored fringes of the sonic intersect with the figures of the undead the ghostly the spectral the revenant it's an incredible collection 64 yes 64 8 times 8 short essays authors including Jonathan Stern, Matt Fuller Paul Pergus, Kristen Gallano Eric Davis Luciana Parisi Eleni Iki Onardu Eugene Thacker Steve Goodman Toby Hayes Aisha Hamid, Stephen Shaviro and many more
you may know we already did a kind of audio trailer for the book which is on Erbinomics Soundcloud as part of podcasts so next week we're going to have some readings plus some exclusive stuff from the Audient Crew allow me to say that all of this is being broadcast to you for free you are invited to buy some books We've also got a link up on the Soundcloud now where you can donate to Urbanomic. And I've also got a personal Co-Fi or Co.Fi or Coffee whatever page.
They really should have thought about that when they started the site. And thanks very much to those who have already bought me coffee and thanks for everyone who left comments on SoundCloud, on YouTube, elsewhere. I appreciate it. Thank you.
time, temporality and templexity with some amazing guests. We're trying to span the time zone again. I think we've got all our guests waiting. We've got Accelero historian and global prognosticator extraordinaire Vince Garten. We've got Anna Greenspan, author of Shanghai Future. We've got Nick Land, author of Fangnumina and Twitter Templexifier. We have Ben Woodard, the slimologist and nature philosopher. we've got Amy Island, AI, Xeno-feminist, Xeno-poet,
and Timeline Syzergizer. And we're going to ask whether this viral crisis is also a time crisis, get deep into some COVID-plex heterochronicity. So I'm going to get those guys online very soon. And of course, as always, you're invited to call in and let me know how you're doing during the fourth phase. I'm going to go to the next video.
Looper, a 2012 time travel film set in part in Shanghai, tells the story of the story of hitmen who are hired to execute people sent back in time to the year 2044. Time travel hasn't been invented yet, says the main protagonist, Joe, at the start of the film, but 30 years from now, it will have been. In 2074, when a crime boss wants to end the contracts
of his hired gunmen, who are known as loopers, he sends back their future selves to be killed by their younger incarnations. This is known as closing the loop. Once each loop has been closed, the hitman concerned receives a massive payout and the opportunity to live out the rest of his life in luxury. Thirty years later, time folds in on itself and the assassination takes place from the other side. When Joe's loop closes, he flees with all his gold to Shanghai, despite the fact that he had been planning all along on France. The unexplained change of heart follows a switch in the production schedule that became embedded in the script. Looper director Ryan Johnson had originally intended to set the film in Paris,
but when Chinese distributors offered to pay to switch the film location to China, Johnson agreed to rewrite the script and transplant production from Paris to Shanghai. The resulting scenes contained spectacular images of Shanghai futurism, many of which were only shown to Chinese audiences. In addition, Looper was able to count as a co-production through a deal destined to be repeated, which allowed the film to bypass foreign quota regulations and premiere on the mainland. mainland. Johnson insists, however, that these pragmatic considerations did not negatively impact the film. In many ways, Shanghai was a more natural setting for a sci-fi movie than my beloved Paris, he admitted. In the cultural imagination,
Shanghai and time travel are twinned. While Zhou's life in Shanghai only begins once the circle is complete, Looper refuses the neatness of a closed time circuit. Much of the story is set in a parallel, alternative, or coinciding timeline in which the time loop stays open and the future remains receptive to change. Chinese modernity In the past, Chinese modernity has generally been conceptualized as involving the adoption of a progressive, linear time that can replace the country's older and more traditional notion of cyclic temporality.
From the reformers of the May 4th movement to the ideology embodied in the Cultural Revolution, the dominant idea has been that modern China must accept the forward chronology of Western time, erase the old to make way for the new. This conception of time as a unidirectional flow implies a relative notion of the future, essentially divined by its difference from the present and the past. In linear time, the future is in front of us, waiting on the road up ahead, and even as the end of the road. When viewed in terms of such a timeline, Shanghai's contemporary modernity can only ever be a rerun,
the copy or repetition of conditions, actions, and attitudes of a modernity that already once has been. The modern as a historical epoch that culminated in the first half of the 20th century posited a future that could be projected, planned, predicted, and controlled. Postmodernism emerged from the wreckage precisely at the moment that this type of futurism collapsed. In China, however, where a developmental model based on centralized control seems to be supporting such staggering growth, the futurism of the past, that is elsewhere deemed retro, appears to be making a comeback. Look closer, however, and it is clear that China's remarkable rise is not, or at least not solely, based on the top-down planning of an authoritarian state.
state. Rather, its yin-yang balance of shadow and light, the new modernity brewing in the contemporary Chinese metropolis pairs the bright spectacle of economic exuberance with a darker, bottom-up, unplanned and unpredictable culture that emerges from the street. In this hybrid and multiplicitous modernity, the future, now intrinsically obscure, is no longer conceived as a destination or end point, or even clearly up ahead. Evolution from the informal to the formal, from the backward to the advance, which was never natural nor inevitable, is disrupted. In Shanghai's jumble of high-rises and street markets, industrial heritage and gothically slanted architecture,
hidden lanes and suburban communities. The very processes of urbanization and development are being transformed. Shanghai evades a relative future by tangling the timeline. Its reimagination of the city of tomorrow is saturated by a nostalgia for what is to come. It is evident through the renovation of an art deco heritage that eludes historical comprehension, the reanimation of industrial zones that look back as they look forward, and the rejuvenation of an urban culture that aims to awaken an older golden age, that Shanghai's ambition for the 21st century are suffused with echoes of the past. As a
future city, Shanghai does not gradually arrive out of linear evolutionary history. It re-emerges in the temporal spiral out of which the future city reaches back to the past in order to construct itself today. Within this time spiral, Shanghai's neo-modernity offers an escape from the devastating dilemma that has plagued China's formulation of the modern. A spiral is neither trapped by the cyclical time of a stagnant tradition, nor committed to the forceful destruction of progressive linearity. Spirals are simultaneously progressive and cyclical, as the I Ching teaches. The spiral produces novelty while simultaneously returning
again and again to the nascent sources. Contemporary Shanghai thus tends to the reinvention of an enormously rich cultural and philosophical heritage. The path was a circle, says Joe at the end of Bluebird. So I changed it. you're listening to
urbanomic plague pod live it was a reading from Anna Greenspan's book Shanghai Futures from 2014 published by an obscure publishing house called Oxford something or other we're going to be talking to Anna in a moment along with Vince, Amy, Ben and Nick. Thanks very much for the coffees. The coffees are rolling in tonight. Nice one.
who was with us once before. He's in London. He is a political analyst interested in, particularly in East Asia, the intersection of politics with economics, technology and aesthetics. We have Ben Woodard, who's a postdoc researcher at Leuphana University in Lüneburg and the author of Schelling's Naturalism, Edinburgh University Press and Slime Dynamics, Generation, Mutation and the creep of life. We have Anna Greenspan, who teaches at NYU in Shanghai and is the author of Shanghai Future, Modernity Remade. And we have Nick Land, who is Nick Land, who is the author of Fang Numiner, published by Urbanomic, of course,
and Sequence Press. And we have Amy Island, who is the keeper of the circuits. So, yeah, I thought one thing that keeps on coming up throughout the podcast we've done so far is the question of time and what this whole event is doing to time and there's clear it seems clear that there's some kind of weird temporality at work here um are you all with me can you hear me yes yes oh of course um so it seems like there's this kind of paradoxical heterochronic event that we're all living simultaneously but at different times um and ben has written in um there's a there's a great collection of articles over at the identities journal um one of which is by ben called the curve of the clock
where he calls it a temporally and spatially distributed event and as he points out and maybe we could compare it with an astronomy the image that we're receiving of the changing shape of the pandemic within which we're all trying to kind of orient our everyday lives, those numbers are already coming late. There's already a lag. So we don't really know what's happened when, and we have no real clue when or how it's going to end. So first of all, I mean, we began the podcast with asking people to call in and tell us about how they were feeling, how the whole thing was affecting them. So to start with, you have these psychological effects, right, that we're in a kind of calendrical freefall. It's this weird type of holiday. and I've been reading today Francois Bonnet's new book After Death which is coming out later
this year with with Urbanomic and there's a note there where he talks about how calendar is etymologically connected to calling so it's to do with convocation it's to do with moments during the year where the collective there's a collective calling together and a synchronization and what's extraordinary right now is that the calendar is suspended but there's at the same time there's this one event that we're all synchronized to. So from a psychological point of view, several of the accounts I've read of the kind of lockdown or quarantine, in particular Preciado's short article, have made it sound like this generates a kind of vertical time, that the existential pressure exerted by this event and the way that it's concentrating
everyone's domestic circumstances means that it becomes this kind of reckoning it becomes a moment of a bit like the eternal return where you say do I really want to do this forever because that's what it feels like maybe more positively there's also this discovery of a kind of dilation or detensing of time a kind of spreading out of days that have been released from deadlines and meetings and even shopping trips I guess but that's also then connected to the question of what comes after like are we going to ever re-inhabit the calendar again how are we going to feel about that um are we going to be able to re-synchronize um and then on a wider level if it's not a singularity it's certainly a global synchronization it's a truly
global event um and i find myself continually doing what i'm calling a transcendental double take that i think i'm actually living through this thing that everyone else on the globe is living through at the same time. And that's a kind of a strange thing. Politically and economically, things that for a single country would be economically ruinous, since they're happening to every country on the globe, seem to take on a different light. But then, of course, it's not exactly synchronous, because we're all at different places on the curve. One of the graphics that I've been looking at is the one from the FT, where instead of having the x-axis showing you time, it's actually plotted all of the countries from the start of their curve and that gives you a
really good indication because of course you can see the Wuhan curve has already landed and you can see the rest of us right up in the air so that gives you this kind of freeze frame of the way we're in this kind of limbo waiting to cross the curve and arrive to where to where Wuhan has already got to and then finally I guess those that I would say there's the the question of acceleration that in one sense this seems like a stalling of the global machine but on the other hand as we were talking about um a couple of podcasts ago it's also accelerating all kinds of tendencies so it's accelerating remote working dependency on the internet and hikikimorization if i can say that i tried saying that last time and it didn't really work but um you know it's uh
it's accelerating the tendency toward kind of digitally enabled atomization of society. So I think there's all kinds of different angles from which this thing is shaping, reshaping time. So maybe, Anna, if I could ask you to say something. I don't know whether there's anything that you could say that links this sense of time linked to the viral crisis with the sense of time that you talk about in your book, which is specifically related to Shanghai and modernity. But I don't know. How are you feeling about what's happening templexically at the moment? um well i think a lot of what you just said is the things that are on my list so the the time
lag that displaces the present um and and the stopping of time um and this strange as you said synchronicity that's uh at the one hand synchronicity but at the same time um everyone else at different spots in time um i guess my my time obsession at the moment is with waves and so it's interesting that um yeah so so you know the the image of the the curve is a wave diagram or you can certainly read it like that so um you know what it is to what it is to flatten the curve is is really to make a longer wave
um so maybe there's that sure so it's um it's like a frequency question yeah so the so the you know like if you do nothing it's a higher and steeper wave and if you know all the rhetoric that we're getting but flattening the curve the curve is a time diagram right as you said of course yeah increase the wavelength is the same as flatten the curve what was that? increase the wavelength is a synonym really isn't it for flatten the curve yeah right so you just
Ben, are you there? No. Is Ben here? Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah. You were talking about, in your piece, about this idea of a kind of what did you call it? If I can't remember, you must be able to remember. You wrote it. Do you mean the phase horror thing? Yeah, right, phase horror. Can you explain that a bit? Well, yeah, it's just an inversion of an idea
from Darcy Thompson, who kind of explains how the shape of things So the shape of the heterogeneity of something makes it seem beautiful if it's all made of the same stuff. So like waves, like he talks about waves, waves in a field or in an ocean. And he says it's beautiful when we can see that there's a spatio-temporal disparity between them. So it's not just that there's a big and small, but that the bigness and the smallness are a function of time. um and so i was thinking um you know looking at the statistics and i'm sure other people uh just you know looking at the numbers all the time and looking at the graphs um it's
you know the the only sort of uh snapshot experience you can have of the whole pandemic is to kind of picture it as this basically kind of inverted, you know, phase beauty instead of this phase horror where you kind of just see, you know, the crests of the waves across the planet in terms of the dead. And to me that seemed like the only way to actually picture it as a whole, if that makes sense. right i mean we're all kind of trying to i guess produce some kind of image for ourselves that will allow us to grasp this and and failing
yeah yeah everyone is agreeing so that's fine um so nick do you want to say something about this kind of wider question of um synchronization because there's a kind of global synchronization but it's certainly not in any kind of triumphant sense of unification and it also feels like uh the pressure of the event is also accelerating possibly fragmentary trends that you've been tracking for a long time what's it doing to the globe um well i wonder robin if
it would be possible to just kick that question a little bit up the road of this chat, because I think we're going to definitely get onto this whole thing like globalisation and deglobalisation. You know, lots of stuff in Vince's recent piece is obviously very relevant to this as well, I think. But I wonder whether I could just read out a strange little text that was put up on Tyler Cowen's marginal revolution blog, sort of latest in March. And he's interquoting a guy called Scott Ellison and his idea for how to deal with the virus.
It was obviously, we're talking mid-March at this point, so people could see what was happening to some degree. And he says, quote, I propose temporarily stopping time. Yeah. Temporarily stopping time is such a great description in itself. Then he carries on. This means that today's date, Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, will remain the current date until further notice. This also means that everything that happens in time, e.g. mortgage due dates, payrolls, travel booking, stock market trading, contractor gigs, concert sporting events, will be paused. Yeah, right. It also means that all of these events remain on the books
and will continue as planned once time is resumed. So part of, I guess... It sounds like kind of what's happening already, but properly implemented. It seems like we've got a very ineffective and incomplete version of that going on. Yeah, I was exactly going to say that it's like this is the formalization of the kind of theme and this absolute sort of monotonous, changeless state of duration that's involved in it. And, you know, on one hand, obviously Scott Ellison is saying, you know, the way to fight the virus is to put the whole of society into suspended animation. it's quite interesting that just very shortly before
this all kicked off maybe it was in the early stage of I forget, there was the sort of story that was very viral on social media about Jordan Peterson because of his various problems had gone to Russia and his borders of Biden and agreed to be put into an induced coma. And there was a lot of interest in this whole what the hell induced coma thing. But obviously he's in a way being quite prophetic. This induced coma is the giant policy story of our time. How do you put everything into an induced coma and then later
worry about pulling it out. So anyway, yes. That's that's my first contribution I had it's absolutely right that basically all we're seeing is a slow piecemeal badly managed version of stopping time does this bring you back to some of the work, I mean I know, I should say this we were saying this when we just briefly met up before I know you know reunions always make for good entertainment but this is like the first time we've actually had a conversation through a vocal medium rather than text for two decades at least I was just going to ask does this kind of bring you back to any of the stuff you were working on
last time we were speaking about calendars because calendars were a big thing at one point Yes, but not formally, not formally. But yeah, I'm sure that those links are all super interesting. I mean, I found your remarks about calendars very interesting at the start. I mean, I think that one thing about calendars that's worth noting is that obviously the disease hit like exactly at Chinese New Year, at the dawn of the year of the metal rat. And it disrupted, of course, that celebration. And now as it rolls through the world, it disrupts these, like Easter and Passover
and all these other ritualized calendric celebrations, right? Yeah, I mean, it feels weird that, I mean, it's not like I pay a lot of attention to Easter but it feels strange that anything calendrical should be happening during this period which I guess just reinforces what we're already saying that um we're on a kind of badly managed um half half-baked time stop yeah time out Vince do you want to come in on this um I love the idea of stopping time I think it's interesting to look at the history of this um Linear time as such is historically inherently bound up with catastrophe, I think.
And if you cast your eyes back into the mists of ancient history, when the first political experiment with linear time was something called the Seleucid era. And this, I mean, linear time is not an obvious, it's not an obvious concept that you should count your years going forward in the continuous linear sequence. the first time that was tried on a mass scale was after alexander's conquest in babylon and that was pretty much as close to a world political catastrophe as you could imagine at that time the sort of everything changing at one go and so this the advent of this political overturning i guess you could also call it an anastrophe where there's a cascade upwards of political systems
coalescing that then inaugurated the first linear era which uh actually lasted for a long time it's a dating system called uh the year of the greeks and in some places of the world it was used up until the 20th century so linear time is bound up with catastrophe this is a different sort of catastrophe obviously it's not a political catastrophe in the sense that alexander's conquests were um it's a completely anti-political catastrophe it's something which is demobilizing politics disrupting politics and that then inaugurates a new kind of time yeah what kind of time is it this is what we need to know i don't know i mean let's say like so if we got used to the fact that
every few years this kind of thing was going to happen then uh would we have some kind of new type of calendar like that it would be kind of like a potlatch event that every so often we just accept that this was going to happen everything's going to stop the economy is going to be fucked and then we're going to start again because it's not unlikely that this might this would happen again soon i mean is there now a new kind of cyclicity indexed by pandemics right exactly yeah I mean it's obviously it is a virtue of it to say you know this could happen again that it's it's sort of inherently paradoxical
as well isn't it to say that I mean you know a huge part of what this is is precisely that even though there's a distant history of plagues or a century ago obviously the reference is almost to the to the spanish flu it's it's precisely that it's so completely uh unanticipated that it's took everyone completely by surprise and it was completely off everyone's radar that is the phenomenon you know i um heard the other day which was interesting was that um uh what's it called um wimbledon the tennis the company who runs Wimbledon had taken out pandemic insurance so they've been paying millions and millions for years for pandemic insurance and now they're finally getting a massive payout so I was thinking
you know on that basis what kind of impact is this going to have on the global system of risk management insurance that I mean that would surely be absolutely gigantic definitely I mean I think it makes you realize how much people have been in a mindset of thinking that everything important that's happening is basically endogenous you know and you just have to understand you have to theorize the system however whatever you you think it is and then you're basically um telling a story about this set of predictable endogenous effects and the sheer exogenous nature of this thing i think has really blown everyone away and and and often actually kind of silence people or just
stop them in their tracks that it's just ruinous of all the narratives that everyone has been involved in for for years because of the fact that it's not based on some kind of endogenous process at all it's that you can play in your game it can all be going well badly depending and then something just comes from outside and kicks the whole thing Yeah, it's an asteroid, basically. Basically, yeah. It's interesting that people like Nassim Taleb in particular has been very vocal that the pandemic is not a black swan. It's not something that was completely unanticipated. The fact is that people just failed to prepare for it in an adequate way. So it's an exogenous shock that people should have seen coming.
Wimbledon saw it coming. Yeah. There's no one else. But I think it's kind of interesting why it is or how it is that people didn't see it coming, right? Because sort of even while it was happening, people didn't see it coming. I mean, even myself, I mean, I sort of saw it and didn't see it. So there is a way in which it's the kind of event. I mean, some people talk about this because of its exponential nature. I don't know if that's the reason that it is, you know, somehow there's a failure of prediction, even though obviously everyone should have known that it was coming. I mean, everyone knew there were five million people or whatever it was that left Wuhan before the close down happened.
So everyone should have known. But somehow. But then what would it even mean to know that something like this is going to happen? And that would be the question I would ask, you know, what epistemologically speaking in terms of, you know, how would you prepare for something like this? How would you, you know, what kind of knowledge would that be, really? Because, you know, unless everyone knows it and everyone's prepared for it, it's not going to do you much good, is it? This is like what, like, I think actually refutes the idea that Vince just brought up about the Black Swan event. like it really is something that is shredding epistemology and our ability to model predictively and even when we do have some kind of modeling it's impossible to implement it in any effective
way and the most striking thing temporarily about the virus is that it's put us all into a react like a globally it's put humanity into a reactive position or maybe a better way to phrase that is that it's shown us the nature of the reactive position that we were always in from the beginning in really stark terms because we just can't keep up um it's actually more like what ellie ayash calls the the blanks one right which is like you can make all of your bets in the casino but what if the casino burns down it's this complete change of context right yeah right right it's like absolutely changing the rules of the game um but it's like yeah it's kind of it's kind of interesting because in order to counter it in any way that's vaguely effective,
we have to become more like the virus. We have to become inhuman in the way that we need to evacuate from our behaviour, this kind of fundamental human sociality. We have to take out this really human aspect of the way that we relate to each other. So it's kind of playing out this dynamic that you get in serial killer movies where the detective has to become more and more like the killer in order to be able to catch them. The detective has to learn how to think like the killer so that they can preempt the next move. So we have to think like the coronavirus in order to see how it's going to unfold before it does and to preempt the transmission patterns. But unlike the detective in a lot of films, we're really crap at it
and we're seeing this really darkly laid out in front of us. Are we that bad at it? Or is it just that there's a kind of massive cognitive dissonance at work that people simply can't, people simply don't seem to be able to alter their behavior accordingly? I mean, we have a fairly good idea of how viruses spread. Even a child has quite a good idea of how illness spreads from one person to another. It's not that complicated, is it? But it's more to do with actually. Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's a kind of epistemological matter. It's like, how do you get get it through people's heads? Well, one of the things is it's in the UK, at least. It's like forced us into this global assemblage, like the subjectivity that we have to operate
with now is global or at least national. And it's impossible to coordinate that many different nodes into something that has an effective response to this. And I think that just shows us something fundamental about humans from the beginning, that we're kind of uncoordinatable in this way, or we're really bad at it. But just like the really crap detective that ends up getting killed by the serial killer in the end. I think the point about having to dehumanize to face the virus is a good one. And I'm reminded of the fact that when China imposed the initial mass quarantine measures, which have now become normal, basically, in many parts of the world, the reaction was kind of disbelief that this is not something that can be done in the modern era. I remember reading a long article saying that China doing it can only mean that
they've already completely lost control and there's no chance that it could possibly succeed. but over time especially after italy did it and then after more and more western countries did it this way of operating which according to conventional political theory would be a completely inhuman way for a state to act has become normal right and it kind of connects to this sort of idea that oh sorry then oh you know you can go ahead no no no you go oh well i was just gonna say like the other thing is a bit maybe more boring but in terms of there's a lot to do with the models of epidemiology and i think we're in a situation where it's taken a long time to actually take causality
seriously in epidemiology because for so long it was just based on statistics where there was a kind of agnosticism about like human decision involved in it and then once you get to like 1960s and 1970s when you start to have causal inference being used in epidemiology there's kind of a sense that well okay like there's some human choice that needs to be made in terms of preparedness and things like that but by the time we sort of grasped this it was sort of handed over to automated systems. So I think on the one hand, we sort of know that statistical models require obviously some added action, but we've gotten used to the fact that the action that needs to be added to the statistical models
is supposed to be like computationally taken care of for us. And so I think this has put us in a weird position where we feel like we have things under control, but we don't. there's an interesting historical comparison as well in terms of the epistemological side here because when the plague was going around europe in the 17th century so not the black death but like the early modern period there the debate over how to actually respond to it went hand in hand with this giant scientific debate over whether diseases are spread by miasma or by contagion yeah which that still doesn't seem to be clear to some people in high positions in the government in the UK. Yes. I wonder if there is any kind of
formally similar debate going on at the moment. In what sense? Well, for example, in the UK, there is this big debate between the so-called the imperial model and the Oxford model, right? If you've seen these news stories, the imperial model is saying that the virus will probably overload the healthcare system and then hundreds of thousands might die. And then the Oxford model, so-called, which claims that two thirds of population or whatever have already been infected and the virus is just the flu in terms of its mortality. And clearly those both correspond to completely different ways of handling the virus in a similar way to the way that miasmatic and contagion theories did in the 17th century. So whether there is then this kind of epistemological debate
about what exactly is going on in natural science and how that plays into it, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not well informed enough about what's going on there. But it certainly seems like there's no consensus. I think there's one actually very simple epistemological issue that's tied up with the issues people have been saying, which is the fact that, you know, if you look at the cybernetics of panic with this whole system, it's got many aspects, but the one that's disease-related,
the basic, it's self-limiting or self-suppressing in the sense that if people drastically change their behaviour, in fact, at a level that was completely unimaginable before, I mean, an apocalyptic level of reaction, then you do actually squash it, which means it doesn't really happen. I mean, so it was politically impossible for anyone to do the sort of things that we've now seen done until there was graphic evidence about quite how disastrous it could potentially be. You know, in advance of that vivid sense of this could be a complete disaster.
So I think for the West, actually, Italy had to happen to get to the state where we are. Because if people had done Italian-type things soon enough to stop Italy happening, everyone would have thought it was completely insane completely disproportional and therefore completely politically unimaginable so this obviously relates partly for instance to the agency stuff Ben was talking about you can't actually do these things until you've managed to really have a lurid disaster on a scale that is sufficient to just overwhelm people's sense of what would be considered proportional response.
This connects to the point that Thomas Moynihan made, which I mentioned in my last blog post, where he says that catastrophe is actually a kind of impulse to thinking. It's also an impulse to actually doing something. You can only do something once the catastrophe has already arrived, in a sense. and it actually enables thought in that sense. Right. So if we're all stuck in this reactive relationship to the catastrophe, is there a way to wriggle out of that? Is there a way to respond in a non-reactive way to the pandemic or to kind of keep up with its time, to live in time, rather than against the time of the virus? Is there a way to do that? Or are we now kind of consigned to just reacting against what we've already seen
as the kind of image of the disaster. I think we're living in a kind of interference pattern between two different wave systems. We're living in this strange kind of scrambled noise between our calendrical everyday life and this totally different wave that's just kind of swept over us and, yeah, it's come from outside. and there are also negotiate some kind of some kind of way between them right and there are also these two uh different wave functions almost of the virus itself in the political response there was a a widely circulated piece which had the great title the hammer and the
dance where the hammer is the initial quarantine to try to crush the virus and then you have to have this protracted so-called dance where you impose measures repeatedly to prevent future outbreaks up until you can stamp it out completely by a vaccine or whatever so i guess it's it's almost like a helical structure between the the political response and the virus where they're both responding to each other yeah i mean it's sort of weird like is it reactive because uh the whole flattening the curve thing is that you presume a future well there's these different models of the future and that you then intervene into those in order to uh postpone the future and then and then
i guess sort of wait for this other intervention that will change the future um so yeah the time dynamic just in sitting at home doing nothing is obviously complex yeah and it's i don't think it's purely about reacting to the virus, because I think the way the virus moves is itself, of course, a reaction to political measures. And this is sort of predictable. So when you lift the lockdown, if you do it too early, then it's going to spread. It'll probably spread at some point anyway, and then you'll have to impose the lockdown again. So it's a two-way street. I mean, I definitely have a question about predictive modeling. I think in the pre-
COVID era, most analysis of sort of techno capital was that it was all about predictive modeling. And I think, as we were saying, there's now a lot of doubt about that. And so it will be interesting to see what happens to predictive modeling. You know, I mean, the initial Chinese response doesn't seem to have been based on predictive modelling so much as just prudence. They took a leap in the dark because they had no real statistics by which they could have predicted how exactly the virus was going to behave in response to their measures. And I think a lot of these political responses probably have to depend a lot less than they
look on actual forecasting because the models are all over the place there was a great quote from an italian epidemiologist a while back who said something like the models really only work about one or two days in advance they're worse than the weather forecasts so then in the end all we have is this very common sense kind of image of the curve so it is really a case of just generating some kind of graspable image rather than actually having some clue about what's going on. Yeah. That sounds good. Let's take a break and we'll come back and pull this back to the whole time question again.
This is another track of Code 9's Unreleased Dubs, before that Pop Fiscal, and before that Suge Knight who's also just put out an album of unreleased dubs on Bandcamp which is well worth a listen. Play some more of that later. Yeah.
I think Reza was trying to call in to give us his gardening tips but I lost him. We'd probably better take a vote before we let Reza call in. Okay. Are you still there, everyone? Yeah. Sorry, I cut you off, I think, Nick. What were you about to say, if you can still remember? I know, I was just looking at the curve. I mean, it's an amazing turn, the way it suddenly started being used.
It's like, the curve. Everyone now, its reality is now acknowledged by everyone. But, you know, what is the curve? It's actually complicated in a way because it's not just what happens, but it's at least in part this mass education in exponential functions that everyone is being compelled to undergo. And there's a kind of pure, uninhibited exponential function kind of lurking behind actual outlets,
with everyone being guided by the fact that if you don't do it right, you get onto the curve. you know the curve is really it's kind of you know the disaster that could happen you mean it's like a looming virtuality basically yeah I think so I mean what triggered this one was you saying everyone has to learn how you know how to think about this or to imagine it or to give it a shape and and in a sense the shape that we have and that is training everyone's intuition the pure shape of the exponential function is i think always at work and isn't
something that you just modify or adapt or you know depart from in the direction of what is empirically real about the epidemic it's something that you don't leave behind because it's always it's always part of what you're seeing as some kind of imminent potentiality of the epidemic, the contagion. I think the curve is also, in a sense, it's kind of liquid disaster in itself. Flattening the curve is channeling disaster and trying to keep it within a particular hydraulic limit. on the curve graphs you always have this horizontal line
or sometimes it bends slightly upwards that represents healthcare capacity and when that is breached then all hell breaks loose that's the idea so you're trying to keep it within the channel yes, that's right and does this have any bearing on the question of time then? time yeah just in the sense that um i don't know like uh it seems to we seem to then be looking at this kind of space-time block where this uh this huge thing is just kind of lurking there and we have to navigate around it somehow i mean i think this thing that you started with um maybe is worth trying to pick apart and spend
some time with which is this um dislocation of the present right because the present is being you know because we're somewhere on the curve and we know that there's a time lag about where we are on the curve in the present but also because we know like there's no other events are going to happen before we get to the end of the curve right yeah everything else is suspended yeah so there's a kind of this is the the strange aspect of the present where there's kind of a I don't know like a time lag in both directions both towards in the past and and and to the future and so um i think that's the the dislocation of it is got to do with how it
changes the nature of the present in some way yeah another another temporal aspect that i i just wanted to bring up there was this this literal feeling of time travel which i keep coming back to something that uh dino jang said watching stuff happen in the West is like, I mean, it's about as close as you can get to actual time travel watching the West from China at the moment. Yes, like Cuomo's famous words when he said, look at us today, we are your future. So that's very similar. It's that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And also, of course, it's the old Gibsonian thing that the future's already here it's just unevenly distributed Absolutely I think also this all needs looping back to where we started about stopping time this question about how does this exponential function relate to time well in a way what are you trying to stop when you stop time you're in a way you're in a way doing a portrait of time in a very social process of trying to arrest it And that portrait, it seems to me, is the portrait of this exploding exponential function. That's the thing that you're trying to, that's what you're trying to stop. How much is it a portrait? What do you mean?
Well, that's like, if you say, okay, we're going to stop time, what does that mean? You know, in filling that in and saying this is what it is to stop time, you're drawing a picture of time. And that picture of time is a picture of the uninhibited explosion of the virus. Right. So in fact, basically we're in the presence of far too much time. more time than we can cope with epistemologically and as a species. And this is part of this whole thing about you're only seeing the time lag factor,
like people have compared it to this thing about light from a distant star. It's that, you know, everyone's in this thing where, to put it into the terms that you have, we've got far too much time. But there's far more time even than we're seeing. There's a massive, huge, submerged iceberg of exploding time that we can indirectly intuit by these lagged statistics and that we're trying to flee from into suspended animation. The time bug. Bug. As in the millennium bug.
yeah i'm also wondering about something like um it's related i think something vince said um you know because there's a way i think like everyone else i'm reading all the plague books like the camus and the uh plagues and people and um you know there's this sense in which contagion pure contagion or or plagues haunt all of history right that as this kind of virtual um virtual mode or whatever and and so um i think it's somehow related that there's like we we understand even though this is you know we couldn't see it coming we don't
there's something is that understand this mode of just pure contagion or exponential contagion And so this is also, I think, related to this time travel thing about what happened in China now happens in Italy and that happens in New York. Well, I'm interested in what people think about this, that there is just this mode of being which is plague mode and it just gets triggered and that's what we're in and that has kind of haunted all of history. Right. And you think that's invariant across historical time that is just like the kind of hibernation that you go into. Yeah. Like, you know, it's interesting. Well, I'm curious about it.
But, you know, these modes of quarantining and things that, as we said, seemed would have seemed completely impossible is just that's what everyone does. Yeah. Well, maybe also an interesting way to look at it is in terms of war, because, I mean, obviously in the UK, everyone's point of comparison for everything forever is the Blitz. and I definitely think there's some kind of joy in being able to go back into this wartime mentality and as I think I said before, even people who obviously never experienced that, there's some kind of genetic memory in British people that if we can get locked into our houses and eat shit food and not be able to do anything, there's a kind of jouissance involved in that.
But, you know, there's many other senses in which you could say, you know, it's also an opportunity to put the economy on a war footing. There's all kinds of interesting comparisons that could be made between that as another kind of catastrophic mode of being that suddenly the whole nations can be tipped into. Yeah. Shelter in place is a good expression in this, isn't it? Like for Brits, it has to be good because it's got shelter in there. yeah right all right look i'm meant to be the one who's tired it's like 2am here drink some coffee people right you're listening to the urbanomic plague pod live
I'm out on the stage, you're a files and killing All of my sets have been out here feeling myself Charles and Cease are killing it as well Man, I wave E like Michael Phelps When I'm bearing that cheese, that piff don't matter I ain't giving up cards, but things get dealt Don't do it for the image, yeah, I do it for myself She goes for the system, I tell you what else We just do this thing, cause we know what sells There ain't no love in the game no more I'm only joking, it's the same as before Shot my BG in the M14 Man like, what, yeah, you know the score? Man like, Max said he's ready for the war for the war, since got buk in man fell short. Pick myself up, come off the floor, what you know about pals, what you know about force. Shad my fam from the south way to the north, got to keep my gang around me like a fuck, you even gonna bat the teeth. None of them can get killed on a dead shot, me will slap out the head back with some leg shot. Me mean, head shot, no leg shot, and he boy like this, me them dead pan this bat. When I take talk, when I take shots, from any song boy, pan any block, and he boy violate
me cousin, I get shot, when I give a fuck them, they pan this bat. None of them can get killed on a dead shot, me will slap out the head back with some leg shot. Me mean, head shot, no leg shot, and he boy like this, me them dead pan this bat. When I take talk, when I take shots From any song, boy, I pan any block Any boy violate me cousin, I get shot When I give a fuck, him, they pan this back One Cause ten man are minors Man like me, only clash with titans Young called Luz Black, top like Shanners Know what it is when I die like Rikers Ride like bikers That's where the team inside, though, life is Man I'm out here, 24-7 crinness Us man like Jackie, we fuck like us When I stop fucking, he ain't paying them prices Go for all niggas in the midlife crisis But they can tell me about my shit Been seen a few plays that I did I try and think what's mine, that's like shit Then cut me out, I'll cut them down If you think, oh, that ain't my ting Fuck a lay, but I own my brand I'm independent, I'm vibing These days I might be paranoid
But I stress it as I train it And if I keep my cool when it's heating up When it gets hot, it ain't the climate I'm a wild boy from a madhouse And I call it Arkham Asylum I'll peep your game, but I don't play I am the way from Poseidon I know a couple bitches only wanna be around me When they see me shining I know a couple people only talking to me now Because they hear I'm thriving I know they wanna get ahead of me up in this game But they ain't surviving I'm built for this, I film I must flip a smoke my life this time Thank you.
quarter, 3.30 on Hyperdub. This is playing at completely wrong speed, temporarily deranged. One before that, that's another off Suge Knight's unreleased dubs and just releasing Bandcamp, this is called Headshot. I believe they have a caller, and I'm going to try and bring in, if he's still there,
someone with an extremely cryptic Skype name. Hello? Hello? No? Okay, maybe I can't remember. We had Reza as well, but I think he's gone to sleep. How are we doing, guys? It's fine. Yeah. I'm eating Easter eggs. Oh, yeah. Well, it's the season of Humpta Tadum, isn't it? yeah not enough worm to be honest
can i can i yeah go on time thinking over you guys have we gotten up on the table already no go on no it's rest of more in well well because one of the things that i think is like also affecting maybe more slightly this just common time intuitions. There's this weird sense that's very close, at least to some sense of like inverted time signature of a whole bunch of things that were happening that have been so dramatically recontextualized in this way that's very smooth, you know. So you almost do get this teleological sense of, Oh, that's what that was about.
And I'm thinking, you know, for instance, the huge AI surveillance matrix discussions that were going on just before, everyone sort of obviously inclined to the libertarian side on that. And now there's this sense, because of what the Chinese have been doing with the stuff of all these East Asian societies, that, oh, that is what that stuff was for. Yeah. It's completely reframed. Or the big political one is obviously this massive trend over the last few years of this disconcerting political shocks to do basically with de-globalization. You know, this kind of attack on the neoliberal consensus coming.
I mean, obviously, lots of people on the left were doing that. On the right, it was winning elections in a way that was just shocking people. And again, it's like this deglobalization wave now seems like strangely some kind of anticipatory or prophetic process that was just naturally consummates itself in this, in the coronavirus calamity. You know, and it seems like, so, of course, decoupling with China, of course, everyone's locked down in place, of course, people are flying. All of that stuff is suddenly, like, within the viral framework, completely intelligible in a way it was just weird for people before.
But it's kind of both, though, isn't it? Like, Vince, Vince, you wrote about this recently. like at the same time there seems to be a consolidation of of a kind of like like a global empire as well as this fragmentation um yeah i mean it it's it's a kind of pincer process again right so you have to you have the fragmentation and the integration at the same time but what's what's clear is that what's in the middle which is our present political order it can't stand yeah yeah but sort of which way is it is the tendency going to resolve uh like are we heading towards consolidation or fragmentation i don't i don't think it has to resolve i think both processes can go on at the same time
like in terms of temporality it's kind of like there is this sort of like um to kind of borrow the language that like from that anna has used a long time ago to talk about like time um in terms of syntheses there's this kind of like tempo which is the sort of global synchronic subject uh and then against that there are all these kind of erratic rhythms of different nations and different states inside nations closing down their borders imposing different rhythms of measures um and then kind of appearing at different points on this spatialized curve that robin's been talking about uh so there's this kind of like strange sort of like percussive thing happening with this um tension between the the tempo and the rhythm but then all of it is is somehow knitted
together because this deglobalization wave didn't succeed until the virus came uh manufacturing was not being rehomed quickly enough um and a lot of global supply chains were obviously still fragile as we can now see um and we now have the spectacle of different countries having to cringe before china in order to get their medical equipment their protective equipment um because they don't have the manufacturing capabilities to do it to do it themselves despite this decade of de-globalization so all of it is still catastrophically interdependent yeah do we have our caller is that me yeah hi i've no idea what your name is because your skype name
is like just a random string of characters oh that's really weird my name's nat hi hi how are you good thanks for calling in yeah of course i love the podcast i love having something to listen to where people are uh talking at a little bit more of a higher level about what exactly the fuck is going on are we doing that are we doing that i'm not sure that's entertaining for me at least the level's high enough for me anyway yeah how are you how are you coping with the uh temporal scrambling oh man it's it's a scramble for sure um not a whole lot has changed as far as my routine other than I'm wearing less clothes on a daily basis I'm working from home no hard pants no
hard pants whatsoever where are you in the world in the US uh I'm in Michigan kind of in northern Michigan a bit so less populated around here but still still impacted for sure so what are you saying you've called in tell us something oh dear god um well i um i think it's really interesting watching watching this this coronavirus take hold in the western nation nations i mean we're watching like um countries grapple with trying to trying to do what it is that humanity wants to do right sustain economic viability well um and outside naturalistic forces is kind of forcing us to
react and in a way that doesn't align with those values inherently i mean we're looking at human life versus money on a large scale so i think that's really interesting yeah i mean one interesting thing is uh just the kind of sheer weirdness of the fact that so many things can shut down you know which seemed unimaginable before that the fact that all of these things can just shut down at once and yeah sure we're talking about how strange it is and we're talking about the economic effects but it's not like reality is crumbling before our eyes and that in itself is kind of an interesting phenomenon that you know it kind of proves that all of these things can
just kind of stop and reality still uh resists yeah well a lot of things seem a little made up at this point i mean i was always told so far that i could never i could never work from home for example yeah yeah we were talking about this um on an earlier one weren't we where um you know it's saying it's a bit like uh after the war when women had all gone to work being called up to work in the factories and then you know that you can't go back on that and i wonder whether there's going to be an effect after this that people are going to say you know i'm not going to sit on a train for two hours to go and sit at a desk you know because i hope so yeah but have so you've you've actually changed from what commuting going to an office to working at home now yeah
yeah and most of my office has too um i think part of uh my workspace is that you know people have to commute at least some of them because they don't have like very good internet in more rural areas um but i'm not one of those people so it's very easy for me to just stay home and and do the same work as always and have the same meetings as a you're experiencing that as a positive thing overall i i absolutely think so yeah i mean coming home and i mean not even coming home right but you know 5 p.m strikes and i'm i'm not tired i i have time and energy to do yeah right I mean, there's a temporal aspect to this as well. I'll speak as someone who hasn't had a proper job for a long, long time, is that, yes, your time if you're working at home is more flexible,
but that also has a downside that your work can creep into every hour of the day or that you can go the other way, that you can just put something off forever because you've got so many other things you could be doing because you're inside your own house. It kind of has an interesting effect, do you think, on identity as well, that your identity, when you work somewhere different to where you live, you have this kind of portal that you go through and your identity switches a bit. Whereas if you're at home working, then you're just the same person all the time. I think that can be a bit wearing. So it may be that some people are kind of glad to go back and to have that, at least the relief of having this other person that you become every day when
you walk out the door. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think working from home has kind of forced me to consider the integration of my work into my everyday regular identity as a person. I mean, staying at home and living my regular life, I've even become more open to working on weekends because I'm like, well, I'm here, my computer's here, I could get some work done, Why not? Well, this is another, interestingly, then that makes it seem like this is another sense in which the crisis is accelerating tendencies that already existed in, if you like, post-industrial, post-modern capitalism, like this thing of everyone becoming the entrepreneur of themselves and that your work and your life are completely integrated. So, you know, maybe it's
another way in which the the virus situation is accelerating everything i think so i i know a lot of people that are starting to stream on twitch for out of hopes of getting an income right now yeah i mean i'm i'm doing this i've earned some coffees yeah i'll have to buy you a coffee after this oh that's great thanks uh anyone else is everyone still there yeah yeah i think this point is important right that this is a very common uh sentiment that it's everyone feels like they have more time like we were speaking of and and i think there's just this big question about to what extent like to me this is one of the biggest questions about the future like in
well i don't know how far we're going to put it uh when time restarts right a year from now or whatever it is, six months from now, is it just that we look back on this and it seems that things have accelerated to a certain degree, but that was weird and it becomes this kind of dreamlike, weird space? Or is it that there's these fundamental transitions that we can only understand in the post-COVID world you know um so i think that's very unclear right like there's all these ways in which it seems as if things that were happening are only being accelerated by it but there's another
sense you think well the whole world this is the whole world has transformed and will never be the same and and that future is unknown i'm actually surprised i'm not seeing perhaps i'm just kind of sheltered from their discourse which would be a mercy but i'm surprised i'm not seeing more kind of leftist like communist stuff about look this is how the world could be let's kind of try to structure things so that we can't go back because there is this sense in which like like the universe the thought the universe basically obviously one of those discourses that has been massively accelerated, right? I think Jehu has done that, hasn't he?
Robin, I just said, into an argument, I think, Badjur, saying, what the hell, quite colorful language, you know, what the hell are you thinking? Like, everyone's being thrown out of work and you think that's a problem? I think that's pretty funny what he's saying. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there is a certain tendency now. I think like at the beginning, there was this fear, horror, kind of disorientation. And bit by bit, I'm certainly feeling more and I'm seeing more people thinking, you know, how are we going to feel if all of this is over? And then we go back to exactly how things were before.
or in fact worse because the economy is going to be in terrible shape. And obviously this is a very big question for China, right? Yeah. And I think, I mean, I'm interested in what Vince thinks about this, but it would seem that this decoupling and sort of bringing manufacturing home and China as the factory to the world is going to get hit very, very badly, right? I understood that the kind of the advantage China's China was drawing an advantage from having been the first in that it would be the first then to be able to restructure and build up the industries and to be in a position to serve the economies that were still going to be in a mess like six months down the line.
Is that right? Well, I think that there's an interesting, I mean, it's obviously this AI tech model that this sensing and testing that allows for the society to reopen. And the question about whether, I mean, I just read today, but I didn't read. I don't know if anyone knows more about it, that Google and Apple have joint forces to perhaps just copy, I don't know, copy what Tencent and Alibaba have been doing for the last six weeks or something like that. So that tech component and the AI component is obviously really important to that.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know to what extent it's going to be that big of a shock to China compared to the shock that's in store already unfolding in the West, certainly in Europe. And I mean, also in America, China, for one thing, in terms of the exports, it's no longer the economy that it was 20 or even 10 years ago, it's no longer as export dependent. And the Chinese government has kind of known that this moment was coming for a long time. And so you do see this new focus on trying to move into high tech and so on. There was a fascinating point made by a dissident economist called Branko Milanovic recently, who pointed out that China is roughly at the threshold where further Chinese growth will increase
rather than decrease global inequality, which is an interesting point. But basically, it means that China is a different sort of economy now. And the sorts of kind of ground level aspects of economic catastrophe that have materialized in the US have not really materialized in China. You're not seeing huge numbers of business bankruptcies. Retail in China hasn't been hit as badly as it has in the US and in Europe. In fact, the sectors of the Chinese economy that have been hit worst are the ones in which the Chinese government is most deeply involved. and so it can control things at a quite fine level of detail. I don't know what the law is. I'm not sure that that's...
It'll be interesting to see whether that sort of low-end entrepreneurial sort of noodle stand type level of the economy is resilient enough. It looks like it is now. Oh, it sort of depends on whether there's a second wave or whether it has to close down again. And, you know, that's sort of unknown. Yes. I mean, if the lockdown had lasted for another couple of weeks or another month, then there would be huge bankruptcies in China. The problem with the US and Europe, of course, is that they imposed their lockdown a little too late compared to the eventual speed of the Chinese response. And what we found is that the countries that are late also end up having the biggest economic consequences.
I mean, how complete are the Western lockdowns now? Like, is London and New York still running metro trade services and some kind of skeleton of public transport? I mean, I don't know whether it has even got to the absolute extremes that China reached, especially obviously in Wuhan. It definitely hasn't in the UK. I mean, this general lockdown basically doesn't exist in the UK. I think New York is still running public transit to some extent as well. Yeah. so they're burying people in the park but they're still shoving them on trains like sardines yeah right yeah cool yeah i mean it's a to be honest it's a
joke in the uk it's just yeah there's no real well you know as soon as you get a tiny bit of rigor about it like you get a policeman telling someone off then everyone's complaining about it and it's on the news and there's a kind of outcry about it so but the police is here i mean there's just a sort of kind of clownish element to it you see like police vans going past with loudspeakers telling people not to sunbathe like it just looks ridiculous yeah yeah um i think i saw the most german thing i've ever seen where at the market they had uh traffic cops with a giant ruler making sure everyone was distancing properly and just seeing like a german cop with a giant ruler
was just too much for me that reminds me to give a shout out to the the guy who wrote the article about um surreptitiously going to the farmer's market in new york while listening to plague pod thanks for the thanks for the mention guy and also we shouldn't forget the very important public safety messages that the British government is putting out I'd like you got it baby you're so hot you're giving me a fever
Anything? Dead! Anything? Dead! Anything? Anything? Death! Anything? Dead! Anything? Dead! Anything, yes, dead! Stay wherever you are because we have guns and we have tanks.
Anything that's dead, come! Organs crawl like aphids upon the immobile motor of becoming, sucking at intensive fluids that convert them cybernetically into components of an unconceivable machinism. The sap is becoming stranger, And even if the fat bugs of psychiatrically policed property relations think they make everything happen, they are following a program which only schizophrenia can decode. Anorganic becomeings happen retro-efficiently, anastrophically.
Their tropisms attesting to an infection by the future. Convergent waves zero upon the body, subverting the totality of the organism by way of an inverted but ateliological causality, enveloping and redirecting progressive development. As capital collides schizophrenically with the matrix, ascendant sedimentations of organic inheritance and exchange are melted by the descendant intensities of virtual corporealization. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Machinic processing or its reprocessing by the body without organs? The body without organs is the cosmic egg. Virtual matter that reprograms time and reprocesses progressive influence.
What time will always have been is not yet designed, and the future leaks into schizophrenia. The schizo only has an etiology as a sub-program of descendant reprocessing. How could medicine be expected to cope with disorderings that come from the future? It is thus that the great secret of Indian culture is to restore the world to zero, always, but sooner. One, too late than sooner. Two, which is to say sooner than too soon. Three, which is to say that the later is unable to return unless sooner has eaten too soon.
4. Which is to say that in time, the later is what precedes both the too soon and the sooner. 5. And that however precipitate the sooner, the too late, which says nothing, is always there, which, point by point, unstacks all the sooner. A cyber negative circuit is a loop in time, where a cyber positive circuitry loops time itself, integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed collapse upon the future. Descendant influence is a consequence of ascendantly emerging sophistication, a massive speed-up into apocalyptic phase change.
The circuits get hotter and denser as economics, scientific methodology, neo-evolutionary theory and AI come together. Terrestrial matter programming its own intelligence at impact upon the body without organs equals zero. Futural infiltration is subtilizing itself as capital opens onto schizo-technics, with time accelerating into the cybernetic backwash from its flip-over, a racing non-linear countdown to planetary switch. Schizo-analysis was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity, politics is obsolete. Capitalism and schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent
inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion. No longer infections threatening the integrity of organisms but immunopolitical relics obstructing the integration of global viral control. Life is being phased out into something new And if we think this can be stopped, we are even more stupid than we seem. How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyber-gorilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one's software was part of the disguise. Exactly like this.
you're listening to urbanomic plague pod we're talking about Covid, time patchwork the global synchronisation is everyone still here? maybe we can come back to this patchwork versus global synchronisation question because there certainly seems to be
potential for the acceleration of fragmentation in this crisis if only because of this kind of existing temporal fragmentation that's already taking place and the differing responses of differing governments. How do you see that, Nick? Well, one of the things we were talking about sort of in preparation actually for this discussion was in terms of de-globalization, especially Sino-American decoupling the decoupling that should be added to that and which is most relevant to the question you're now asking is is urban or metropolis hinterland
decoupling because you know the big cities I don't like to include Shanghai, London and New York obviously I'm not going to become post-cosmopolitan I mean, they're essentially destined to be cosmopolitan centers. So in the epoch that we're in now, where that means that they're kind of highly viral positive and function as menaces to their own sort of societies, there's a lot of impetus towards social distancing
between cities and their hinterlands. I mean, people living out in the sticks do not want to have to introduce a regime of extreme biological surveillance in order to just run their normal lives. It's completely unnecessary. whereas people in the big cities probably are going to be forced to make this choice. I mean, I'm absolutely 100% confident which way they'll come down on it, that they will accept previously unimagined levels of minute surveillance in order to be able to remain open cosmopolitan centres. And so the conclusion that we were drawing from that is that probably as units of political
organisations, cities are going to see a kind of jolt, an upward jolt in their importance. Where does that leave the denizens of the rural place? Does it kind of become a peasantry again? Well, it's interesting. You can do it either way. I mean, one of the stories that struck people a lot in America was when Rhode Island started stopping cars with New York license plates and turning them around. You know, and everyone's seen the example, everyone's seen those pictures of the kind of villages in China with guys with medieval weapons standing on the road.
You know, so it's not that the hinterland is just simply being, like, pushed out or excluded. It's rather that it is actively arming itself, protecting itself against the metropolis, which becomes a kind of social menace, a national danger zone. But the extra urban zones are also kind of batteries for the cities, right? I mean, the intensity and the concentration of the city can't be maintained without drawing on, you know, food, resources grown in these outlying places. So there's presumably a kind of power dynamic there as well.
Well it's interesting what that power dynamic is again largely to do with the fact that you know, articulate elites tend to be urban, so everything gets seen from their point of view the media's run from that point of view but I mean it seems to me very possible that the hinterland could just decide that it wants to get off the bus or at least you know not be on the bus ride quite as exciting as the bus ride that the cities are taking people on um and so there's some room for people just sorting on that on that basis there's an interesting twist with the medieval weapons because i asked i asked quite a few uh
chinese friends what was going on there and the and the consensus seems to be that that These are all theater props. They're all props from Chinese opera. It's weird, like temporal twist. It reminds me of something that you said, Nick, in your book, Templexity, where you talk about the strategic inauthenticity of the different kind of types of time in Shanghai. It's the same sort of inauthentic return of the past. Right. Yeah. how about um the california calexit this is also seems to be um being put quite seriously on the table i mean my problem with this sort of stuff is i just get over excited about it and run too far
ahead i mean you know i'd love to see something like calexit happen but frankly you know it's not going to happen anytime soon it would be my my tedious sober judgment about it so ultimately then for the virus uh the the whole um crisis do you think do you see it as a generally an accelerative um entity or do you think it's just too complex to come down on one side or the other Well, probably the ladder is the right answer, but the former answer is more attractive. So, I mean, I tend to think that overall and perhaps retrospectively, it will have seemed
much more of an accelerator than the accelerator. So we'll come out the other side of it, in a certain sense, kind of feeling like we're going back to normal and then we'll look back after a while and think hey this is not quite how things were before. Well I think also there's more optic shifting happening like one reference that seems to me like huge in all of this is Michel Foucault who you know now when you look at lots of stuff that maybe looked vaguely metaphorical just for literal realistic social analysis and it's basically all his work is just saying you know it's all about contagion suppression you know everything holds social
apparatus power knowledge the way all these institutional structures work is it's controlling contagions um and yeah i think that this is the way people are going to see things like that It just changes what people think government is about or what it's related. The whole way of articulating the kind of left-right spectrum in terms of a socialized or privatized, liberalized economy, I think is somehow, you don't have viral positivity about contagion. And so the biopower apparatus, if it's kind of not pathologically, if it's not a kind of autoimmune reaction, like a cytokine storm, I think they call it.
If it's not like that, then it has to accept that, yeah, commerce is good. It requires commerce. Resources come from commerce. Commerce is efficient. But commerce is contagion. and so the actual orientation of the social structure is fundamentally anti-commercial but with an option a sort of sliding scale of about you know what level of emergency we're in right now and if we're in a low level of pandemic threat then we can dial it right back and let commerce happen but always that control knob is there and that's i think that's what people were not seeing. That's like when Vince was saying everyone was completely shocked by what China did. It's like
Western Sighted have forgotten they even had that control on. They've forgotten what sort of machine these political systems were, these administrative systems. They've forgotten what kind of control apparatus was available to them and what it was for and when it would be used. And so people saw China do this and they thought, oh my God, what is that? You know, we can't even think of doing that. And then a month later, everyone is doing that because that's what these systems are for and they've just forgotten it someone in the chat here is saying nick what would you say to the idea that the virus is actually a product of that concentrated dense urban society and pandemic is a kind of
of an oppositional force to that type of human settlement I guess you know isn't isn't the virus in fact produced by the global metropolitan lifestyle we're not produced but yes what allows it to emerge. Yeah, that's totally right. I mean, I was looking recently at what's his name? Scott. Sorry, I've forgotten his name. James Scott. James Scott's book, I don't know whether you know Against the Grain. It's this slight, long history of urbanism and the state, and he, too, is obsessed with contagion.
And his basic sort of is that people totally overestimate the degree to which the state urban form has been robust and implacably on the rise. He said for almost all of history, it was extremely fragile because it would keep getting destroyed by epidemics. And, you know, it was in this kind of arms race with epidemics and not at all in a position of any kind of security. in that respect until extremely recently in history. So I definitely think that's right. I think the virus is tending to obliterate cosmopolitan liberalism.
That's its fundamental orientation. But is this because the virus is aligned with cosmopolitan liberalism? It is a sort of avatar of structurally how that works. Absolutely, yes. It's a model for it, yes. So it's kind of usurped the mantle of cosmopolitan liberalism from human liberals. The reaction it induces necessarily, I think it probably, put it badly, I think it's definitely that the reaction induced by the virus is directly oriented towards the suppression of, of course, polyglyphorosis.
Sorry. Just to comment on that, I think, like as someone who has friends in rural Michigan as well as metropolitan Detroit area of Michigan, I think people in the metropolitan areas are deeply concerned, whereas the people in the rural areas are more concerned with getting back to work as soon as possible. They don't really take this very seriously, and they're kind of upset by the reaction because it applies more to a metropolitan area than it would to the rest of the rural state. Yeah, that's true. Can I just add this other thing that's maybe like a half thought about planning? because obviously I think one of the strange temporal elements of this is that it's impossible to plan.
Like just personally, it's impossible to plan. But also that China's planned economy and how we saw planning as coming very early on in the outbreak, that these QR codes and this kind of machine for, like what Nick's saying, this kind of machine for control during an outbreak just got activated really quite quickly. um and so this i you know it's just this question about uh planning and the capacity to operate within the pandemic and then on the side of looking at it from uh canada or north america
or i suppose europe as well where there really just seems to be no planning um and and just it just freaks me that that planning is another temporal dimension this is operating yeah okay time to break for some music i think we've got um bognor coming in to uh talk as well. Hopefully, if we're trying to get her on the line.
Yes. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hey, Bognor, so you had an interesting hypothesis to put to us, I believe. Yes, hi, good morning from Hong Kong. I'm asleep. Thanks for joining us. You are. Yeah, I had some thoughts regarding what Anna talked about with planning and also virus time. So, like, first of all, the question of virus modeling, as it is with climate modeling, kind of gives us a type of knowledge in which we can only access the real via simulation.
So simulation becomes the dominant mode of knowledge. And empirical data plays a role, but adequately simulating planetary conditions, which is more important. So what kind of planning can we do? What kind of a real it is when it is mostly simulated? And that's the question of both cyberculture and COVID culture. So I think that's quite an interesting intersection. And then I have been reading Anna Street's recent interview in Shroom Journal. Shout out to Shroom Journal, where she talks about the time spiral in relation to technological innovation. So like the time spiral as the repetition of the future through the invocation of the past. And I was thinking maybe viruses have their own version of that. Like in the Medea hypothesis of Peter Ward, who's a paleobiologist, I think.
And he argues that life on Earth is essentially suicidal. so microbial triggered mass extinctions are attempts to return the earth to the microbial state it has been in for many years of its history so microbes are like ultimate reactionaries and they think for self-replication and maybe viral life happens in cycles of regression and progression just like human politics and viruses have their own like time spiral yeah I don't have anything more like I'm very sorry I obviously want Anna to comment on that Sorry Anna Obviously there's been just tons of talk about
and this is also a time issue that this is somehow a foreshadow or something for climate crisis whatever that means But I think obviously part of what it means is what you're saying about these sort of simulated futures and modeling. We were talking about this earlier, this question about the virus finding, adapting to its own environment, which is in the human host, right? So that, again, is this other question that makes the future very unknown. So I think that the theory that or one theory is that the because it's a new virus for humans, it's it's so difficult for us.
But that as it acclimatizes to the human host, we human organisms and covid virus get along a lot better. but obviously there's the counter examples you know which is like the Spanish flu where the second wave was more deadly than the first wave so I think that's you know this is still an empirical question that still we don't know I mean beyond the epidemiological aspect the emergence of a second wave would be catastrophic economically because it means that no one will be able to tell whether it's safe to actually
resume normal activities um it's one thing when you've got a quarantine which begins and then ends but then when you've got the prospect of endless future quarantines it's going to be a lot more difficult to get the economy rolling again but isn't that what this planning question is about like we are in yeah yeah uh i mean i think most people assume there will be a second wave or and the third you know unless you know the future is different or whatever i don't know if the markets assume that the markets are doing their own thing but yeah so certainly the way the stock market has behaved recently is is not seen to me to be pricing it in then do we do we do jump kind of straight in into shifting epistemology completely to
the simulated kind of knowledge because it seems a way to understand you know how markets work how the virus works how climate works and you know we still in our like funny biological human bodies are stuck in this empirical perceptual present and we're trying to grasp this virtual economy virus climate so how can we cognitively even achieve that is a problem i think for epistemology at least I mean, this is a very humbling moment for model builders.
You know, and because of the whole global anthropogenic warming thing, I mean, everyone's been living where this whole question about models and what they're projecting, whatever, has been very central to a lot of very heated political debates. But the speed at which that's been happening has not been such that it can really test the models in a convincing way within a timeframe that people can grasp easily. Whereas with this, we're seeing the models go up and the epidemic line go off course, as far as the model is concerned, within days and weeks. And I mean, you know, I think there's a question of whether people are going to come out of this saying that maybe we should just be a little bit warier about modeling and withdraw some of the faith that we've put in it.
Because when it was actually, you know, put to the test, it really wasn't very impressive and served only as the vaguest kind of guideline about what was happening. right like not to bring this down to a kind of like petty philosophical scuffle but i think one of the things that's been really um eviscerated by the events that we're going through is some of the like basic premises of um neo-rationalism like the whole focus on modeling epistemology as the fundamental way of grasping reality is just being completely exploded apart by the emergence of this exogenous event we got what's the alternative i mean epistemology is modeling isn't it like what's the alternative it's not as if we have some other better way that we should now
switch to there isn't an alternative i mean it's just uh it's basically uh trauma isn't it we're discovering that the but the biosphere is not a stable or safe place for for us to be right but it never has been sorry sorry yeah it's just a foreclosed kind of knowledge and i think faith in modeling i don't know how much faith there is definitely this you know knowledge of general veracity of climate models but then when you read climate modeling papers the scientists themselves you know they've been writing these papers oh can we make the models simpler so different scientists from different disciplines can adequately understand them you know scientists themselves are comparing themselves kind of
where Hessian cartograff is supposed to be like the faith is not is much more in the popular political discourse when you get to scientific papers there's much debate about you know how to adequately model clouds and like how to parametrize and so on so there's a lot of debate about the actual course of climate change as much as the general veracity of human but it's always kind of a partial knowledge but we also have to remember like um in the famous title of mckenzie's book that um models models an engine not a camera that the existence the presence of these models is itself introducing perturbations into all the systems that we're modeling continuously yeah i was i was also gonna
i think it's it's very hard to separate the success of any of these models from the game of chicken that everyone's playing between the virus and the economy. Because if all the models are ultimately only taking in uncertainty to the effect that they're making the economy keep running, then the way they're parametrizizing is, you know, going to be with a huge skew towards affordability. so you know i feel like if you have whereas if you have like a bio if you have a biopolitics like china is doing and not just like biopolitical theater that the west has been doing because they
didn't want to spend the money to do it you know i think if you actually did real biopolitics you'd have maybe actual models that were less about um just keeping the economy from totally exploding and more about actually trying to understand the flows of contagion. I do find it very interesting. I mentioned it earlier. Obviously, I personally have no clue what's going on in the secret committees in China that are determining this, but it seems like they're not relying on modelling per se to the same degree that the West is. They're basically making pure political decisions. The first was obviously the mass quarantine, but also stuff like closing the borders and then also this interplay between the local and the central governments in China,
where you have local governments imposing new lockdown measures and then occasionally the central government will countermand it. And that sort of stuff is all happening basically out of purely political motives. It's not founded in this kind of obsession with modelling numbers, as far as I can tell. Yeah, I mean, that's true. But I think that's true in lots of other countries, I mean, especially anywhere that has a confederalist structure. it's going to be a huge battle between local and central. Like in Germany, for instance, you know, Merkel said, don't celebrate Easter. And then the local authorities said, no, it's fine. But yeah, definitely you see it in the US as well. But I guess my point is that models as such are not being mobilized into this debate in China in the way that they are. For example, in the UK, where you have these competing models
that I mentioned, and they are very publicly being instrumentalized instrumentalized by factions within the government that align with particular responses to the virus. Right. And the models are going to look a lot like the availability of testing as well in those locations, because I think, I mean, in the U.S. at least, we don't have that availability, so we're not seeing an accurate model. So what are we working off of at that point? It's obviously like that. This is just a pure time question, right? Like the time it takes to test and the time it takes to read those tests. And so the data, you know, I mean, the fastest that I've heard of a test result is five hours, which is in Shanghai. So this question about modeling and the time of the empirical, you know, this is part of also the planning thing, right?
Like the idea is that when we get this like no time lag testing, then we'll understand what's happening, right? yeah and the exponential curve is overwhelming the testing curve in this sense it seems like the sort of the numbers get more and more meaningless as the as the virus spreads because less and less of it is being detected also with modeling not only the time it's also that with climate models for example because we have no control earth on which we can do experiments and measure things basically scientists have to simulate a wholly artificial earth and simulate all the physical processes and then kind of they let the artificial world like spin up and after it reaches equilibrium then
they simulate the climate but it's like this artificial world for testing uh hypothesis which i don't know how possible is that to do with the virus or what that would achieve and then also with the relationship to the economy i had just a strange impression watching the American government trying to appease the market in the beginning, that they were almost like priests in this weird ritual, like trying to say something just to stabilize the market. So at first they were saying, oh, we're not going to do anything, like let the old people die. And the market dropped. So then they came to the stage again and were like, we're going to do everything we can. And then the market started going up. And then they were like, lockdown for a month and then it started going down so they tried two weeks and then it started
going up again so it's like trying to appease this like ancient god like what you need to say exactly cool right well it's coming up to 4 a.m here so i think i'm gonna um cut this thing but does anybody want to have a final last word on uh the 10 plexical effects of covid 19 i i have a question for nick if that's okay yeah yeah nick i'm just wondering um i mean during the coronavirus we're seeing a lot of people talk about um maybe mandatory vaccinations and um you know id 2020 which is more or less a conspiracy nut case right but um i'm curious
what you have to say about like the use of blockchain and those types of things and what that will do to like the future of humanity given given maybe like a post 9 11 situation with this coronavirus um well honestly i could i just haven't put in the work yet i mean i think you know to integrate all of this what's going on right now into into thinking about blockchains is obviously fascinating. And, you know, like there's been a lot of talk, I think it's Bill Gates' plan or whatever to have an immunity pass. Right, yeah. You know, these systems where you've got some kind of certification
for your sort of pathologic status, of course, you know, is very sort of similar to the kind of credential issues that blockchains supposedly have a lot of promise in. So I'm just sort of emptily recognizing the significance of the question, and it's really good. But I don't honestly think I can say anything about it that isn't inane. Yeah, that's totally fair. I hope I can talk to you again about it at some point. Well, I hope that some of you will come back again. It's been great to have you.
Thanks very much for joining us. It was great to talk to you. Cheers. Thanks. I've got a few more tracks to play. This is an amazing track from the album by Mohamed Reza Mortazavi. I was going to play this for my friend Negar Astani, if he's listening. And thanks very much to Mark, Mark Fell, going out to Mark, because he recommended this one to me. It's absolutely amazing. This one is called Taken by the Wind. And then I've got a few more tunes for you, and then we'll say goodbye. I'll be back next week with Tom, hopefully, and with a pretty amazing audience special
with some exclusive stuff from Code 9 from the Audint crew and some readings from the book. Thanks for joining us on the Plague Pod again, and I'll see you next time. Thank you.
This is the novelist of Shyland. This is off the EP Heat, recorded in the car. is putting in work, I ain't got time to chill I'm trying to perform at Rolling Loud but the feds want me gel I've been raised in this, ain't trying to be where it's hot as hell, fake friends wanna see me down and out, I know they hope I fell Sometimes I wanna catch a body but I control myself
I'm trying to do it for my fans, it's like a show as well, remember being locked up behind them doors, I used to stress myself Yeah, it was just me and I, can't forget myself Use my eyes, put it back on the shelf No, I don't need no skills I've been trying to find my way I can't be sitting still Straight to the top, fall off and drop I know they wish I will I was thinking about taking a nigger's life But I stopped myself Because I ain't trying to get locked Or drop myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped myself They told me that they had my back Till I clapped, I got myself Back then when I never had no breath Is when I was not myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped my soul. They told me that they have my back to the cup
I got myself back then when I never had no bread is when I was not myself Can't give my heart to a jazz why would I mock myself? Don't take no pressure from anyone and I don't put it on myself a lot of man talk hard But I guess that they're not there so been feeling like letting these rappers out, but I don't wanna block myself When they kill my dog And I don't know what I felt When I got that news I was hurt And feeling like I got shot myself Fing a cock this clock myself Late night I'm glad they did it off myself But I don't want to carry that guilt inside When I answer to God myself But if I gotta answer to God myself I'm a answer to God myself Could have started from time But I wanna see Mills Cause why would I rob myself When I gave my heart to a yak like that I ain't never forgot myself Ain't putting my faith in another nigga When I could have done that job myself Wanted to but calm
Put focus on the girl Babi telling me that she's in love with me But she's not my girl I don't take no chance Because I don't put blame on myself I was feeling like putting in work in silence But I just stopped myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped myself They told me that they had my back Till I cut I got myself Back then when I never had no bread Is when I was not myself I was thinking about taking this nigger's life Then I had to stop myself Because I wouldn't want to get dropped my soul They told me that they had my back till I clocked I got my soul Back then when I never had no breath is when I was not my soul
The dead are not laid to rest once, returned to the earth from whence they came. They are continually disinterred, cast and recast on the terminal beach, recursed at the behest of the endless recombination of the undivided waters. Just as I, in the vault of murmurs, lost myself, was scattered, unborn and undead. The rigorous analysis of all time anomalies excavates a spiral structure.
Pneumogrammatic recoil toward the time assembler. One cannot look behind the curtain when one is not behind it. Yet one may know by means of certain exploits that something lurks there unbound. When the AOE, the architectonic order of the eschaton, fortified the institutions, erecting those impassable obstacles to anomalous crossing, they couldn't help but drag something back
in with them. But why was Templeton so determined to lever the wound open again to spring the timeline? And why return here? Transcendental occurrence. Reopen the crypt. What are the conditions for the fact of these transportation? That will be the question.