Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 3)

Hello and welcome to the third session of Quernomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Thanks, Theodore. You're welcome. Okay, I'm going to try and be really brief and just get things rolling as far as the discussion is concerned. We ended last week with a promise that we would talk about platforms. And actually, shortly after this, a couple of days later, I had an interesting conversation organized by the NCRIP with Benjamin Bratton,

who Adam was referring to raising the platform question and I do think it intersects importantly with with this whole subject so as far as I'm concerned we've got this is definitely extendable but I've got a sense of three topics that I'm hoping we can address at least partially this week. And the first is the platform question. And I think that one way to think about that is just to take a step back and ask the question,

what is QWERTY? I mean, what really is our object? we thinking of the actual focus of attention in this course and to what extent can this language of of platforms help us to consolidate that consolidate a sense of that object this the second topic which also we sort of promise that we would talk about is the Muller honey material about the Chinese typewriter now this tends to sort of flee off at a strange angle I think from

our from our central topic but at least because it again clearly intersects I think it's worth at least saying a little bit about it and it opens up certain things that I think are really worth at least sort of introducing and the third of these topics which connects I think to both of the others is the relationship of quonomics to stratoanalysis and this is something that came up talking to Ben Bratton and his book I mean I asked him specifically to what extent he thought he was doing in his work on the stack a stratoanalysis

and I think it was left a little bit unresolved he said that he wasn't he wasn't happy with the geological metaphor and so I think that can be accepted I'm not sure whether to what extent strata analysis is captured by a geological metaphor I think I would tend to argue that it isn't but anyway I'm gonna I'm gonna say a few things about that because it points into areas that I think we're going to explore mostly a little bit further down the road um so

first of all I think we've got this this twin question about is QWERTY a platform what we mean by a platform is is that kind of language what we're wanting to lock on to and there's a whole set of linguistic and conceptual systems that I think get brought in quite quickly in this we can talk about platforms we can talk about conventions we can talk about protocols and I think even talk about institutions and they all draw upon a similar pool of abstract

concepts my from a philosophical point of view my very very strong tendency and And I think this relates to the definition that Ben Bratton gives, which was quoted by Adam last week. And maybe I should just repeat it. Which is, platforms can be based on the global distribution of interfaces and users, and these platforms resemble markets. At the same time, their program coordination of that distribution reinforces their governance of the interactions that are exchanged and capitalized through them. And for this, platforms resemble states. A working technical definition of platform in general may include reference. This is to a standards-based technical economic system that simultaneously distributes interfaces through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination.

And that's from page 42 of the Bratton book. The last part of that in particular was what Adam was pointing at us. last week there's a lot in there that is immediately gripping i mean the fact um that we're referring to a standards-based technical economic system makes it very hard to suggest that we're not broadly speaking in our territory when we're talking about that definition so i mean i'm not at all averse to going deeper into the bratton material i think i'll leave that up to people whether that's something

they want to do but from from as i say from a philosophical point of view the the overwhelming temptation is to say that a platform is a quasi transcendental entity that's say it's a distributor of transcendental empirical difference it a platform works to separate aspects that seem to be to function as a universal form across the entire domain from aspects that are um specific local uh contingent in terms of the whole and i think this is this is captured in again just to repeat the final part of this of this

definition that we've just seen that simultaneously distribute interfaces through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrated control through that same coordination so in a certain sense I think platforms just the language of platforms the discussion of platforms is a way to continue certain philosophical conversations that are centuries old and whose and whose structure has been laid down at the most abstract level over that sort of time span.

I'm going to just take that as a pointer to that topic and move on to this second one. So the Mulhaney thing. It's getting I think a lot of very deserved attention. It's a really interesting question. And I'm going to just bring that up in its most extreme, in its most just uncompromising extreme form, which is to raise, again I'll put it in the form, no I won't put it in the

question. I'll put it in the form of a problematic proposition, which is to say the entire geopolitical structure of modern history is QWERTY-shaped. I do this really fast. Again, it's something that we can come back to if people are interested, but I think there's this space here for an extremely kind of large-scale radical phoenomic materialist reading of the whole structure of modernity and and it comes in the the Muller Haney stuff which is related the Chinese typewriter is helpful I think it's it it's simplifying and captures the question in its most extreme form

if we just simplify it down to this Occident and Orient, the European world and the Chinese world and their relations to mechanical writing. um and so i think there's a kind of undercurrent i'm not sure to what extent this has been really tightly formalized but there's an our undercurrent of the um sorry let me take one let me take one step back and say that people have convincingly said that the

great question of modern history is this topic that's called the great divergence like why does why is modern global modernity in its kind of initial fundamental form the first basically half millennium of globalization of the modern world European rather than Chinese and this is a this is a becomes a pressing question just because of the fact that it seems to historians in some ways strangely unlikely and and the reason it seems unlikely comes out very clearly I think most most dramatically in the fact that if you look at the

what marks in his discussion of this of the core technologies that made the modern world possible gunpowder the the compass and the printing press as we've said before this is three of the four what the Chinese within their cultural called the four great inventions paper is the fourth one so all of these all of these inventions which marks mark says between them they blow down the ramparts of feudalism they they they produce the possibility of mass culture through

literacy mass literacy and printing and obviously they globalize the world through oceanic navigation all of these technologies are adopted by the West from the Orient you know it's shocking that there's this utter consistency that all of these things these these sort of as I say within the Chinese tradition they're the classical core Chinese techno scientific innovations and all of them become the kind of feedstock for occidental modernization which then arrives obviously in the east as this shocking disruption to which the country

is it's traumatically unable to cope for at least a century again in their own terms of the century of humiliation in which in which they simply cannot adjust this they cannot adjust that's to say to their own technological innovations returning to them in this alien form of a self-propelling capitalistic system

And I think what Mulahane taps into is a certain sense where this discussion of the great divergence can be run in terms of mechanical writing and therefore digitization on one side, on the numerization of language on the other hand. It's the fact that, and this is something, again, that Chinese analysts were very attentive to themselves, that the Chinese language provided this kind of barrier to their own modernization. because the chinese language resisted digitization because therefore the whole

trend towards the cultural reconstruction through information technologies was there for in a certain sense blocked by the by the chinese language that chinese culture itself itself inherently came to seem as if it was some kind of obstacle to modernization the the structure of of china's trauma in the in relation to modernization is extremely tied up with that i don't know if people know but you know in the early 20th century sort of 1904 um where there is the may 4th movement um sorry i'm i think i'm moving it back to too far it's just after the first world war so it can't be 1984 um there were there was a

large discussion about among Chinese intellectuals about whether they should abandon the Chinese language completely whether it was whether it was a an intolerable obstacle to joining the modern world um and so this puts this puts the whole question of type of the ability to break analyze language down to this to this small set of alphabetical characters which therefore are in conformity with printing in conformity with all kinds of digital technologies at the forefront of the question of what it was that gave this

massive advantage to the to the Occident as a kind of a as a catalytic center of modernization and Malahani's point is that um that there is a certain phase in information technology where things go into reverse where computers can handle symbolic systems of greater complexity such as pictographic characters of the Chinese type and suddenly as if a sort of dam breaks this obstacle this what had seemed like this

absolutely impossible obstacle to modernization just just collapses entirely you get this just surge this possibility of a kind of of a Chinese modernity that is no longer fractured and tortured by by its incompatibility with the digitization of signs I mean I'll just say one more thing about this which I think is also quite fascinating is that is that there's also this fact that binary numeracy came to Europe obviously from China too you know Leibniz's famous reading of the exposure to the I Ching his understanding of the I Ching as being a a binary number system and therefore his

formalization of that in the west as the first as the first articulation of binary numeracy can be added to this list of these chinese um cultural capabilities that that are then launched into this self-propelling form when they when they are adopted by a bio in the west and return to China and therefore in an alien form as Morse code and telegraphic communication first of all and then obviously all the other kinds of binary electronic codes so I think what you get at what you get out of that is a sense

that this this large-scale structural pattern of modernity where you where you have first of all this half century of sort of seemingly unstoppable Occidental global surge and then in only in the late phase of the 20th century during the computer revolution you then get this extremely stunning rise of the East that everyone has become used to and which has now become basically almost coincidental with our notion of what globalization means that all that that whole historical structure can be read in terms of the in terms of digitizable

language and and so that's what a that's what a chronomic materialist reading of modern history would focus upon okay final my final point and this is the most tangled and tortured and I'm only really wanting to raise it as a kind of of an introduction to stuff that I think we mostly be attending to much later mostly even perhaps in the second module of course and this is back to the stratoanalysis question

um and i think my guiding question for this is you know why are we what's so special about QWERTY let's just say we agreed that QWERTY was a platform and was a sort of interesting was an interesting model of a platform and and does all the kind of things that that are tied up with that and and we even then make the second turn and we say that mechanical writing is some kind of key to an understanding of the history of

modernity I think even those two things don't really quite pin down why QWERTY becomes a kind of object of special obsessive attention and I think the reason that you take another through a certain loop it takes on a more intense compelling characteristic is by asking what is the relationship of QWERTY to stratoanalysis and but by talking about stratoanalysis I'm obviously making a reference to this geology of morals quest essay that is that I hope is kind

of haunting the course and and I hope we will get to look at in some kind of detail and I think we've already seen there's one set of kind of cascading relations that goes you know QWERTY is obviously some kind of platform Stratto analysis is obviously some kind of philosophical toolkit for discussing platforms, and therefore we have a set of relations of that kind that can be firmed up, but promised to be quite solid, I think, from the start. but I think the twist occurs when you say well is it not also the case this

sounds more modest than I think the thesis probably sounds as if it can support that strat that QWERTY the QWERTY keyboard is itself a map or diagram of abstract stratification put that another way Deleuze and Quattari in there they have this obviously this fictional or hyperstitial character called professor challenger who is presenting in a in a kind of opaque and elliptical way this science of strat analysis it's it's a

deliberately kind of mysteriously written text and it's deliberately made obscure where professor challenger is supposed to be getting strato analysis from and so my suggestion is that professor challenger gets strata analysis imminently and imminently meaning that it's already at his fingertips in a sense that his diagram his set of his fundamental conceptual resources for the production of strata analysis are already embedded in the in the QWERTY

keyboard that the QWERTY keyboard is it is a kind of stratification diagram and and the whole of what de l'esmissar are doing in this essay what professor challenger is doing in his in his in his lectures is actually a coded discussion of the QWERTY keyboard and I'm not won't push into this too much now because it obviously becomes quite opaque but let me just say it's just a little bit about it that they they bringing together a set of discourses in this one of them is is him slaves

linguistics and from that they take the vocabulary that they use a lot to do with content and expression and the relation of forms and substances that are rejigged by by this relationship and they think that that him slave is already engaged in a in an exercise of strata analysis and it and is upgrading structuralist ideas sort of inherited from Saussure and his and his followers in doing that and they say that substances forms and substances correspond in some way I should quote them exactly but I don't

think I will because I would have to just do a little bit of hunting around in the text and slow us down I'll get I'll do that later they correspond in some way to the relationship that they to the terms that they've used previously in the in the previous volume of capitalism schips of codes and territories and they say and they're wanting to say that the relationship between content and expression which is the relationship between one stratum and its substratum that's to say the stratic relation is a relationship between content and expression isn't a relationship between forms and substances because both strata in that system are themselves both formed

or consist of formed substances that's to say forms and substances are are applied to both of the strata involved in the content expression relationship so if you're talking about languages and and the the conversion from so sure to hymns lives from so sure as linguistics to structural linguistics to hymns left structural linguistic and the key point that they want to make is the the implicit proposition of of so sure in linguistics is that the distinction between the signifier and the signified can be mapped onto the distinction

between form and substance. And that Hemslev upgrades that by saying, no, no, that isn't at all the case, that the relationship that is being approached by Saussure's distinction between signifier and signified is a structural relationship, a stratic relationship rather, between a stratum of content and a stratum of expression and both both content and expression is it consists of formed substance forms and substances and that's to say it consists they think you can translate it across it consists of both of elements that are both coded and

territorialized so I just want to say that you know a key board it seems to me is exactly the the model for this relationship between code and territory form and substance that every key has a position it's a it has a territory and and it has a code which is obviously the character or instruction or I mean it's actually what is coded onto the keys when you look at your keyboard is as you would expect from the complexity of

their essay but if you're looking at the central keys they have a basically they have a character an alphanumeric character and a position. So there's a relationship. There's an intrinsic duality of form and substance, code and territory on each key. And insofar, therefore, as the keyboard is a diagram of a static relation, it comes in layers, as they say. their very first their very first definition in this essay is to say strata a layers belts or in Bratton's language their stacks and this is

obviously what again you're immediately seeing when you're seeing a keyboard it's it's a stack it consists of weirdly six layers and basically speaking and I had I thought I didn't push Ben Bratton on this because I just thought it would get too weird too fast but he his his stack also has six layers and he says he said I'm hoping there's some video of this because I isn't enjoyed the conversation I thought it was very interesting but he says uh there's nothing magical about the number six he says you know I was hoping there would be seven layers um um you know if someone else can find another layer for me

uh then that's totally fine but there just happened to be six layers in Ben Bratton's stack there are six rows six of these belts or layers on the on the keyboard layout um you know so it's a it's a it's a stack diagram it's an intrinsic stack diagram whether or not you can trust it or not to tell you anything interesting is obviously another another question but just on that level it it it is and each of the each of the elements in those layers is both coded and territorialized it's both got a position and it's got a code and so to wrap up this provisionally wrap up this little

diversion I'm just one say that this is why I think QWERTY is special because it doesn't remain on the side of the object it's not just it's not that you've got a theory of platforms on one hand and then you look through your whole archive of of platforms and you say oh look the qwerty that's also a platform you know the the theory of platforms is not transcendent in relation to quoting if you if you take this admittedly at the moment precarious step on the quant on the contrary your general diagram or general theoretical matrix for platforms or strata

or stacks in general draws upon the imminent diagrammatic resources at your fingertips of the keyboard the keyboard is is um transcendental in relation to the conceptuality of the platform it's not it's not merely one among other uh any other number of potential empirical um objects that you can apply your platform theory to um so anyway i think i'm going to stop my ramble monologue ramble phase of this and and open it up and any of these zones of of

consideration or others that that are pressing on people are open game for us to to discuss before you finish this um what are the six the six strutter of a key i'm saying that the keys themselves are arranged in six in all right there's you know you have you have your layer of as they actually say the the the top layer consists of just these abstract functions then you have the new rule rather than you have three layers of letters and then you have your layer which has the space bar and and this other series of

functions so I mean if I was pushing Ben Brad on this which of course I didn't because I would, even though it would be hard to drag me out of Shanghai and subject me to psychiatric incarceration, at least that would be would be the concern if I was to say to him, isn't your model of a stack actually a particular elaboration of what you have right now at your fingertips in your keyboard interface that according to a unexamined semiotic fatality has presented you with this this stack diagram that you are using

to type on at this very moment but we can backtrack from this particular I'm going to kind of try and not just back into this so eventually but if this seems just too gone to be our point of departure I will this this week I will fully understand understand that of course I mean, I think everyone is probably still digesting the six stacks on the keyboard,

but just like if we do back out of it just before we do, what do you think the significance of the sort of turn that happens on the right with the repetition of the numerals and sort of a different way of using the keyboard that comes into play there that sort of specifically meant for, I mean, I gather for like, you know, secretary, accountant, stuff like that. anything well actually I mean I we we maybe we can go through this at some point you know step step by step but I think that they have bizarrely a whole range of conceptual vocabulary that is would work extremely well if you were just looking for a set of abstract conceptual terms for describing the

geographical regions of the keyboard and their their name that i think they apply to this other zone being which includes the numeric keypad is um epistrata you know what what are epistrata well i think that when you're saying well what are epistrata we have an actual diagrammatic model of epistrata right here on the right hand side of the keyboard um no that's okay that's just a word that's not necessarily very helpful um yeah i'm not sure i can say anything particularly helpful about it right now I I get I have to confess kind of engrossed in the

engrossed in that in in this major part of the keyboard and it and its structure and and I think it's important what you say well there is this other there is this other zone perhaps I mean it's This is significant. It's completely a linguistic isn't it except for this set of instructions on it Yeah, absolutely. I mean the sort of secondary functions of end and home and all of that thing Kind of aside. I mean maybe not entirely aside because you'd still presumably be using the same gestures But yeah that interface with a purely numeric Like you know one-handed is just like I don't know quite what to make of it

but is epistrata a term that's used in a thousand plateaus? Yes, it's used in this Geology of Morals essay, actually. I mean, there was a certain point of looking at this stuff where at least the question struck me of, like, is all of their discussion of the unique culture of the nomad war machine a discussion of what your semiotic practices would be if you were entirely localized on the numeric keypad side of the of the keyboard um you know is is this little strange block over on the

on the right hand side of the keyboard actually a kind of the culture of the nomad war machine laid out there that just consists entirely of this number system basically doesn't it that's been sort of integrated into the into the territory of the keyboard yes it's off to the side of it yeah yeah Interesting. And I mean, I guess this kind of flows into like another thing I was thinking about with in the first point with this issue of like platforms and whether QWERTY is a platform and like looking at Bratton's definition, the sort of the qualification or the endpoint

of it where it is about like centralization of its sort of integral adoption through coordination um it's interesting that like that qwerty seems to have like that lies in its past like it seems as if the explicit network effects could either be considered to be super saturated like saturate so saturated in such a way that we can't individually identify them there aren't like specific routes by which they propagate now because like already has become you know through through those network effects happening in the past has achieved a state of sort of total saturated coordination pre-coordination or something yes do we still want to call that a platform it's just like i don't know maybe it's just like being too much on the social network idea of platforms or something

like with the you know pretty modern one but it just seems as if that once it becomes totalized in this way there's something about like the sense of a living contingent has competitors kind of platform that that disappears and which is an interesting comparison to the blockchain too is something that kind of starts from that point of like the disappearance of of a contingent outside i don't know if that yes no i think the definition of platform it because again if you sort of step back a little bit obviously part of what's going on in the Ben Braden book is he saying we have to sort of rethink our fundamental ideas about geopolitics through this platform and stack model of

of these of these systems you know what he calls stack sovereignty platform sovereignty sorry um and obviously what you're saying is well there's something about QWERTY that obviously interlocks with that discussion but also seems to over flow it doesn't it in a certain direction yeah it sort of it subverts resistance by its kind of extreme its extreme globalization and the fact that it seems to have just preemptively subverted though there's any kind of leverage or resistance by by that we try that we have to substantiate this lock in argument by going for like the one other layout that anyone has ever even

tried to use and that is still like adopted by like a tiny fraction I mean forget you know forget windows like that is that's the kind of like unprecedented it's hard to other than like maybe the arabic numerals with it yeah the indian numerals themselves it's hard to think of anything else that yes it is and i think it's it's it's interesting to think like obviously if i can just kind of zoom down to this sort of super concrete level about the kind of of global geopolitical traumas that everyone is undergoing at the moment this is obviously articulated the common public discussion of that is that it's some kind of revolt against globalization that is happening isn't it i mean that's the kind of the basic narrative

um and so you know we could say well so how does that relate to this topic because obviously where we're looking here you know that this qwerty question is is it's a model of this absolutely extreme instantiation of globalization isn't it it's like a kind of high water market mark of it and whatever we say about the chinese typewriter i mean it's still the case that qwerty has pushed itself really deeply into into China I mean the electronic shops here are still all selling QWERTY keyboards and it's it's not as if China somehow whatever is now going on in terms of this

these kind of Muller honey questions China did not have some barrier against it so QWERTY has really globalized itself as nothing else has as you say other than perhaps well I think I don't I shouldn't qualify it other than the decimal numerals and is it sort of wrong to have an impression that a lot of that globalization of the Indian numerals is pretty much contemporaneous and sort of entangled with the globalization of 40 like I can't imagine that like there was just universal use of like those numerals in China for example like prior to like or much prior to the simultaneous spread of like of typewriting and yeah that's a

really interesting question it's a really interesting question because because I think that there's a temptation to do two completely contradictory things here and both of them have something to them I think one is that the Hindu-Arab numerals obviously are actually so catalytic so primordially catalytic of modernity that you that you have to put them like right at the start you know and there's no there's no sense of what the Renaissance is what the kind of genesis of modernity is that doesn't already involve the arrival of the decimal numerals but then there's the other thing and I think you're totally right about this like what what sort of

completed the globalization of the decimal new wars clearly was their instantiation in these technical products that were then you know as commodities distributed around the world and I think one of them that is totally crucial is just the calculator you know basically before the computer the calculator where I mean I had an experience that this is totally anecdotal but I thought there was something kind of archetypal about it where I was in some Southeast Asian country honestly I can't remember where and there was a complete absolute language barrier because I was in some

little market where people were not English speaking and I can't even remember maybe it was Thailand or somewhere with with a language of which I have absolute zero competence and and yet you could engage in completely comfortable articulate commercial transactions because every they were used to people foreigners flowing through and every shopkeeper every little storeholder had a electronic calculator and they didn't use these calculators as calculating machines they use them as communication devices because you know it's a show to

to say you know how much is this they just type it in and show you on the calculator the the decimal numerals for the price of this particular product Yeah, fantastic. So, you know, I think there's something really important going on there. Numbering characters or number words? Yeah. Yes, I mean, certainly if you want to call it a word. But for sure, it's numerical communication via this particular technical, cheap technical device. Yeah, I didn't mean to call that a word. I meant sort of in contrast to their number words because of a lack of verbal number words. signs i mean china actually has an old traditional set of number signs um but also has fully adopted

the kind of hindu decimal numerals so you you both run in parallel it's not that they've abandoned their old ones but absolutely everyone is conversant with both of those systems um And I think China is the utter outlier in this, in the sense that if anyone was not going to have been globalized into this semiotic regime, it would be then, you know? Right. Did you see what Adam was saying, that Baidu has been able to cut that out, cut the pinion middleman out, and is directly recognizing or doing mappings

from speech to character. I thought that was pretty interesting. Yes, yes. That's total Muller Harney's own stuff, for sure, isn't it? Yeah, I think I missed that reading, unfortunately. But I thought it was just like what a medium is that it works a lot like facial recognition. You know, you've got like a sort of set of like unique records and you're doing like visual matching on the basis of sound features, I guess. And I don't know, it just reminded me of... What is it called the way of like of interfacing with data is like facial expressions remember from Yeah, I don't know just as an alternative. It was from you Jake that there was that incredible video of the lip-reading

Computer software wasn't there remember that was that from yeah, I mean which is just That it It has a reliability way exceeding human competence Yeah, and obviously so this general sphere of translation software is something that's just racing ahead so fast now, but it's just Incredible but if you can go back to this back some platforms I did There's obviously is this set of strata here. We're at the base level of the strata Or yeah, but I'm sure that you're not going to push it below this you have a kind of digital numerical system

That then in this set of software stacks Goes through to these high-level translation Competences, so there's a complete right there's a complete kind of globalization of a certain new set of numerical protocols That then allow um these local semiotics to to survive you know and and and china can keep its undigitizable um characters precisely because the whole infrastructure has gone over onto these digital machines right like it sinks down to a more base strata and it's interesting it becomes purely numeral in the process of doing so you lose the alphabetic numeral distinction once you

go below the level of the alphabetic keyboard and that digitalization sinks into the level of pure number which is pretty cool yeah I was I don't mean to like just completely monopolize like no no no it's great it's totally on the spot I'm sorry what I'm totally losing what saying what what's the meaning of seven seven three five cell Little calculated trick of you know when you're walking around in maths in primary school and you write words and you're calculated Yeah The alphabet yeah Yes, no that's that's that's critical isn't it and it's something that I think someone could put as a counterpart to what we're doing is the

is the mobile phone this this is now on really on the side of a numeric keypad isn't it where you have your translation of words into into numbers by that strange i think totally different semiotic regime i i should probably be more interested in that than i am but i've always been so um so much more tangled up with keyboards than i have with mobile phone interfaces that i I'm a bit blind to this one. You get some weird stuff there. I mean, I use swipe, for example, where you're basically tracing out simplified vector diagrams across the board in order to get words, which is just sort of...

But you do it with your thumb, basically with one finger, and so the whole manual element is maximally abstracted away. And then, of course, it's constantly wrong Because you're just purely dependent on like the equivalent of auto correct and so you get these sort of constant like sometimes interesting Substitutions yes Yes, but what now what you're saying about autocorrect. I'm sorry to keep bringing this mother honey thing in fact which you I'm not doing it to just to torment you bet he his big is that this thing about predictive text Which is which is basically autocorrect is is critical to this what's now producing this kind of Chinese advantage because of the fact that

in the West because of the fact that the system's laid out to our convenience you know you you type out all the characters you want but because their characters are not on the keyboard instead you get to them through these predictive text routes these peculiar vectors that actually allow software to work for you to produce your text in a way that that he's saying in the occident is is blocked by our sheer success you know there's no we don't we don't get that economization through predictive text because the because the keys just are our letters and so we don't need to get to them by this software mediated route

yeah which i mean i haven't said when i do get the chance to actually read this article i feel like i'm going to have a fair amount of sympathy for it because like i mean this is like especially just as feels topical this week um but the way digital like rapid like minimally um minimally mediated interaction with these digital systems seems to have affected you know, political stability, mimetic stability in general in the Occident, like especially among like, you know, the rising generation and so forth, but like across the board, you know, this like flood of disinformation, even, you know, in excess of the usual that's been going on this week. And just whether like the Chinese having this sort of staggered entry,

this fairly, fairly base level, but, you know, obviously not utterly numerically base sort of linguistic semi-barrier a traumatic experience at the beginning of it which if you wanted to go in a psychoanalytic direction is you know arguably part of the basis of a stable personality you know for a territory quote-unquote if like if for a stability and sustainability um standpoint if this won't ultimately have been good for china you know relative to the occident to have this sort of time offset yes well that's definitely malahani's argument i mean obviously amy's in the sidebar putting objections that i'm very sensitive to i mean i i'd be interested in what other people think about this because i sort of hate autocorrect i mean i'm always tempted to turn it off um i

i feel that i'm being bossed around by in a way that it's just like molarizing in the most annoying possible way you know like no this I want this goddamn neologist I mean you know what I mean I'm not trying to say the thing that's in your vocabulary database yeah but but at the same time I get Malahani's point that is the fact that you're deliberately refusing to allow software to cooperate with your writing process because um because well it's it's there already you know in the in the in the keyboard and it comes as a kind of aggression against you almost whereas i think in the chinese case it it

is genuinely helpful that you you want to the point is you want to okay let me let me let me see this it's like a different way i think as as a westerner it might be that there are people who try to go with the flow of autocorrect you know and say how can I make this work for me and how can I learn how it thinks you know how does it work and and become you know get into the zen of autocorrect so it does what you want you know rather than constantly and annoyingly and and unpredictably doing stuff that you haven't expected and and is going against your sort of your I would say to be crude about it your intentions and I think because of the fact that

the Chinese character just isn't going to come to you except by this kind of route that you get cultured into this cooperative relation with this predictive text machinery that you've just not cultured into in a western context Is there kind of like an analogy between the way, like thinking about this idea that we have a cultural system that is, it becomes embedded in the technology so it predicts the most likely next word in your phrase based on, I don't know how it's calculated, Adam was saying that it sometimes is calculated through other means, but the general pool of possible next phrases

which kind of leads it down to a mainstream consensus. Yeah. In the way that, so you get this kind of, the cultural is embedded in the technological, which then feeds back into the cultural and sort of standardizes it even more or fortifies its particular polarities, to use that phrase. Yeah. In the way that, so you get like, like finger counting is where digitization comes from. the alphabet then can be sort of seen as something that's built on top of digitization in all these alpha numeric, uh, uses of the sort of like alphabet, alpha numeric languages, um, which then, you know, eventually fast forward a millennium, um,

becomes a QWERTY keyboard and then feeds back into those very hands that built the decimal system in the first place. And I mean, we all have like the QWERTY pattern kind of ingrained in however we type. And when you, you know, you notice that when you try and type on a, like a French or an Italian or a German keyboard um so so it's the same kind of like feedback it back into the cultural world and material in this particular um uh um yes I think there's a lot going on in that I think there's a lot going on in that I mean one of them is obviously this is a this is a kind of system of stratification isn't it like the system of stratification they say produces is molar aggregates and so you know this if we're going back to the start of what you're saying to

do with this protective predictive tech system it just as uh the first at the beginning of the era of type dictionary standardized spelling so there is this kind of standardization molarization of language that is now coming in with this with autocorrect where it's telling you what it thinks that you want to say based on exactly as you say that it's the standard molar thing that would be said from a particular position. And so part of that is that autocorrect is actually,

I mean, it almost just is linguistics. it's like it's it's you know what the same again and at least analogous to the role of the dictionary in sort of the construction of a sense of what is language autocorrect actually requires this you know it can't work unless it is an actually incarnated linguistic analysis that these are typical patterns this is what your language actually it's like you might not consciously know or you almost certainly don't you know how if you write a particular set of characters it would it would standardly unfold but the but the software knows more than you do about the actual kind of

standard pattern of your of your own language um so i i definitely think there's uh in all the ambivalence of what it's meant by stratification there's a process of stratification going on in this in this particular wave of linguistic software for sure i'm sort of i'm chopping up a whole bunch of what you said in terms of also this this mind this kind of um techno neurological loop that reinstalls the keyboard in your brain well i mean it's interesting it's interesting because in at least in the predictive text

example it's it's kind of culture that that's the agent the primary agent but maybe with quality you could see it in a different like or sort of poised on an inversion of that agency where instead of the cultural informing the technical re fortifying the cultural so you get a kind of concretization ultimately of the cultural and a sort of elimination of possible other trajectories if it went the other way so the technical kind of takes on a an agency of its own and then is reformatting the cultural towards a different kind of articulation of material possibilities that's not connected to cultural agency or at least kind of like levers it out of its

ingrained pattern. I mean, there's a different way of thinking that. Yes, because QWERTY, obviously, whatever you say about it in terms of its origin, which is very mysterious, it's not a systematization of already existing linguistic propensities in the same way that these autocorrect systems are, even remotely. It's, in some sense, just irreducibly alien code that is being introduced into the culture. Yeah, I mean, we haven't kind of approached this yet, but I was thinking of this in relation to the alpha question, alphabet, which can be distilled from the Quotty arrangement.

And gives you that other code which comes out of it's sort of like a occulted trajectory that's hidden in the technological Concretization of the cultural well. Yeah, I mean it depends where Where you want to say your decimal system came from but um Maybe we should talk about that later Yeah, I think it might be a little bit early to introduce our question at this point. I would be my guess I think in the sense of the following on this cascade that you're describing, Amy, I was reading about subatization the other day, just following on from starting the universal history of numbers in this issue of like, can any human beings naturally perceive groupings greater than four as such, like perceive fives directly at a glance.

and that so naturally it only goes up to four but specifically if we through the use of dice most adults can recognize fives and sixes at a single glance uh purely through that sort of like technical remediation which adds to the set of percepts that we have which is sort of pure percepts of number and it's just sort of interesting to imagine that like you know do my finger my fingers know the shape of the word nap or the word apple or something like that and does that sort of is that a form of subletization like even if it's you know diagrammatic and sort of manually remembered rather than all these things that we associate with sort of numerical visual recognition um i don't know if there's sort of similar techno neurological processes

I Yeah, I see I might No, no, no it's it's engrossing it's engrossing point, but I might need a little bit more how help with this then so Yeah, because I saw your sabotage Asian tweets and I I think I get the point of this you you catch some glimpse Not even a whole glimpse of some part of a of a die for dive a Dive face and you see the whole the whole number that you're not in fact seeing you know The foot and you are seeing it Specifically because

Say that again yeah it's a prompt it's a like a kind of a yeah and a sort of a medium or both a medium and a motive for recognition of these being trained or like your sort of your numerical percept set expanding because like part of the point is like so it's is that naturally we don't go above four there's like a very specific sort of cut off which is why we get like in the roman tally system it changes from marks at five and he had a couple of other like good examples of where yeah the four to five transition before actually this is interesting because four seems too far i mean both in the roman system and in the chinese numbers one two and three i like the roman ones

but on their side there's a stack actually so um one is just a horizontal line two is two horizontal lines three is three horizontal lines and then four is a distinctive character and obviously with the roman system two um four is five minus one isn't it you suddenly change your semiotic procedure in the in the transition from three to four not the transition from four to five i think that he says that at some point he's like and some people can see fours and you know he goes through like the one too many and the like two and two and all that sort of thing I'm just trying to find the spot where sort of where he adduces a good a good like two or three examples of where

like at least for at least for some symbolic representations that that four seems to be the maximum it wasn't just the Roman tallies might have to come back to this that specific thing later but yeah i mean this just the fact that through the use of dice and that again like that mode of a medium that they give us we are able to expand that set of things that we naturally subatize or i don't know if they call like if the the base level the three and four is still referred to as subatization or not um but i don't know the fact that that that expansion that transition is made possible through mediating it through dice. I guess just that comparing it to the way the shapes with which words map to the keyboard as typed out

is also contingent, adds to a contingent vocabulary of percepts that some part of our brains is like repeatedly recognizing it has trained itself to add to sort of a set of natural forms that it knows whether those two things are comfortable we're kind of yeah sort of running at a tangent here no but it's interesting it's complicated to me because the representation numbers on dice is itself weird isn't it and it is like what we see with both the roman chinese systems up to three you know like it's it's like you say it's a tallying system so one is one line two is two lines three is three lines um with the dice

one is one dot two is two dots three is three dots um and so it's like uh it's not a symbolic number system I mean in some ways it's an extremely different semi-autic regime to that for instance the Hindu-Arab numerals or then if you get into more arcane questions about the numerical values of letters the same they have a symbolic value and so for instance it's the difference between the number of letters in a word

which is like the number of dots on a on a dice isn't it on a die it so it's the difference between tallying and symbolic calculation you just wonder you know how you can't move this subitization stuff out of tallying out of semiotic regimes based on tallying what is there a translation to other semiotic regimes or is it something that is tied up very much with with tallying I think no I mean I think it corresponds like to just pictures because that's sort of the example or that seems relevant to me with you know the dice each face being

two-dimensional and of that promoting blocking groups of dots together the brother than tallying them linearly and so forth but if you look at it like a picture of like five antelope versus seven antelope versus three like there's a processing difference like you're able to immediately see and say that that is like three antelope but if it's seven you gotta split you gotta at least in a split second you have to split it up and count and then add together you know But that like through this sort of this promotion of blocking into groups and then just sort of repeated motivated having to recognize these things on the spot. Or like we find that we expand the number of things that is able to be like spot recognized like that.

And just because it's distributed like they're very simple diagrams, but they're always well, they're not always square. Square surfaces. I mean, those are modern dice, something like post Roman dice. But you used to have things that you rolled that were cylindrical and so forth, but still used I think every face. Maybe that they were more linear in those cases, I'm not sure, but just that turning the numbers into diagrams that are recognized on the spot as soon as you perceive them. And that sort of turning into a finite grammar. I mean, obviously, like QWERTY is not directly mappable. much more sophisticated because you have this arbitrary generativity of language mapped in versus like a discrete finite set of sets. I just think in terms of

like the brain being trained to... one of these geometrised I guess like geometrised numerical systems that involve like sort of spot recognition or translation into something spatial and something semiotic. I mean this obviously does connect with with Amy's point about the kind of neurological reabsorption of the keyboard doesn't it right it's complicated because of the fact that the keyboard is it's such preposterously complicated system I mean even though you know on one level it's very finite it's that you know if you compare it with a with a kind of diagrams modeled by a face of a die it's just bizarrely

complicated you know how many particular semiotic elements and and and right territorial positions that you have in a kind of standard a standard keyboard is is huge so I don't know it's a there's just that simple really like directly the more that just seemed like a really early really earlier basic example of something that we that ultimately we see in QWERTY yeah this technical remediation of recognition of like the basic semiotic elements but yeah no I

didn't have anywhere to go I think you're I think that makes a lot of sense I don't have anywhere to go from there does anyone have anything to say about this as dirty thing and I mean it is a it is a remarkable phenomenon I mean the fact as as one was just I mean I guess politics of that is all very interesting and and and you can put together kind of plausible narratives

about it quite quickly but you know is a certi a kind of a spontaneous pre conscious pre intentional French revolt against anglophone globalization It's not, yeah, I see what you're getting at. I mean, the French don't like a standardization model that doesn't privilege their particular version of events. Like the standardization of Greenwich Mean Time is something that they...

Yeah, sort of. And my partner's father still his French he still refers to it as Paris meantime in 2016. Yeah, yeah, no, it's been a fascinating process that. But it's not just the French. Like the Germans have a Quartz keyboard and Italy has Cazerte. So there are still these kind of regional differences as well. Are they like, I'm not sure. Does anyone use a quetz or a keyboard? I don't know. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting,

this particular sort of cultural resistance connected to a particular French idea of patrimony. Well, I mean, it's a hugely sort of significant, model of kind of anti-globalization or resistance like you say to globalization I mean you you you think about what's involved in I mean all the industrial structures producing keyboards need to be localized you know like it's just on that sort of simple level of of of techno economic friction it's extraordinary as not surely you know

you can't just stick a standard keyboard in some crate in wherever it's produced now shenzhen or somewhere and and and send it to France you if if people want and a Xerati keyboard. There has to be a whole other production and supply chain and all of this and the same for all these others. So it's like, it is quite remarkable like that. You can turn it back, though, and look at, I mean, like, the American recalcitrance against adopting the, like, the decimal measurement system. Like I don't know we have a kind of problem in Australia Where we have we can't employ or there's a kind of problem in playing American laborers

Because when they get onto building sites and start doing their measurements they they kind of lapsed back into the duodecimal system Yeah, no, no that is it is hugely interesting that it's true. I know I don't know obviously it is related by this question about globalization and standardization and and conventions it's kind of a question of like where do you locate your abstract substrate where is it um and these like pockets of resistance yeah I guess correctly identified as resistance to globalization I mean connected to it. It's not like I obviously think the comparison is totally right

But it does seem to me there's a kind of asymmetry in the sense that however Sort of on some level bizarre the American Attachment to imperial measurement systems is Because of their particular position in the global trading system it's it doesn't strike me as being a form of resistance in the same way that these other other systems are it's it seems more like a form of like absolutely you know complacent

complacent hegemonic sort of you know I'm not trying to moralize the whole thing but it's it's not as if it's not as if this is oh maybe I can't I'm not this it's kind of relapsing into a form of extremely unsatisfactory intuition to me so okay because I totally see the connection of this but it sheer scale and power of the American market means that this kind of imperial measurement system isn't subject to just kind of stress is it in the same way like it's not as if it's not as if there's any suggestion that they're sort of making a

sacrifice to defend local the local culture from this kind of global globalizing force it's more that they just haven't because that position is so super secure that they just aren't under any pressure to change it I mean sorry this is like now wandering and wandering off of them but that's kind of the question i was asking i don't know if that like there isn't an answer but like whoever has market predominance gets to determine well i mean not that they're determining it intentionally but the abstract substrata

of calculation that they have absorbed in their history becomes the dominant abstract substrata um yeah because of market dynamics so the market puts the abstract in place Well, it's nice to export it to everyone else there has to be a complication to that to the to the extent that You know if it were the case that there was just no question of competitive press pressure on these substrates Then for sure that that would be true, and it would be completely arbitrary Question of path dependency and that's what the critical people in the in this or chronomics camp are wanting to say about QWERTY but insofar as there's any sort of differential competitive competence of these different substrates

then you'd at least think at the margin that there would be a tendency to push it one way or another wouldn't you i mean it's like it's not arbitrary in the sense that that some just simply quirt is a complicated example but for instance this decimal thing i mean it's just a okay I'm gonna I'm gonna hate myself for things but I mean the French do have a point on a lot of the the the decimalization issue that it's just like um of course makes more sense where it can be conveniently and and and practically done to to push things in the direction of a decimal system

they just kind of simplifies calculation there's a whole bunch of kind of semiotic economies that that come in to it and just engaging in a kind of any kind of mathematical calculative practice where you're involving with a whole set of incommensable numerical modules and converting between feet and inches and and as you know base modulus 12 to modulus 10 and the modulus 60 time units and it that it can't be that it that's purely arbitrary because it's just clearly massively inconvenient and you wouldn't you know you wouldn't start from there if you were doing it again um whereas the qwerty case

it's much more difficult because i don't think we can be confident that we wouldn't start from there if we were if we were starting over you know there's no argument that we wouldn't but i i don't think it carries through with vast force yeah I don't know there's lots of weird directions this can

can go it. I mean, obviously, I think this whole Sumerian, this whole Sumerian sex adjustment question is really interesting. But I can't help feeling maybe it's a little bit of a digression. If no one's going to jump on that, I'm just going to mention something weird that happened to me the other week. I was talking to Jake about this, but we were talking about this kind of on Twitter.

You mentioned the speculative hypothesis of IFRA on where the sex-adjacimal system came from and I went to look it up in my copy of the Universal History of Numbers which is second hand and I hadn't gotten up to that bit but when I well I don't think I had and when I opened it up it had been bookmarked already presumably by the previous owner of the book that one page and it completely freaked me out. Right, oh good. And that's all I'm going to say, someone else. i mean there are there there are very there's a very arcane route as again something that's been

done on twitter about um sexagesimal the sumer the sumer of babylonian system and decimal because of the fact that you know if you just if you fold the decimal numerals together into into pairs so you've got 54 63 72 81 90 that adds up to 360 so it's good so it's completely So it's completely decimal in the sense you're not introducing anything else at all and yet you get this Sumerian Babylonian numerical structure out of it.

But as I say I think that's at least peripheral to the core concerns of coinomics probably. It sounds kind of like Andes territory to me. Yes, I think it is. It is. It definitely reminds me of your comment, I think it was in Calendric Dominion, of just

like the sheer horror of the fact that the year doesn't add up to 360, that all of these things work, and that not only does it not add up to 360, this chrono geometry breaks in the final margin, but also doesn't, none of these natural quantities form, you know, I guess like real number of relationships. I don't know you can have that nostalgia that desire for the chronometric ideal like yeah and the word no I keep always sort of forgetting that it's supposed to be the year of course and people try so hard to make it the year oh yeah war is over it I remember I did a

course in intertestamental Judaism at one point and just like the number of like physically violent schisms between communities that happened over this question of the solar the lunar the hybrid you know and it had to match up to the holidays in the same way year after year and it's with the introduction of jubilees and like just all of these things like it was just a gigantic cultural psychocultural struggle over over this incompatibility yeah I mean the year is not constant is it it's that earth's rotation is slowing down so if there's a date eventually that will hit

any of these smaller years at some point in the future they will be that there'll be a year that matches what you're looking for but right absolutely I'm ready to be there's time I wonder if you could somehow construct one with days that would never be hit mathematically if that would work huh sorry tangent I have to spend a long time trying to figure that out I mean if it It's too long. You've got no problem. I think oh right right right Tom

Shoot this off in a different less arcane direction Maybe bring some other people in Something I was thinking about reading through some of Bratton's stuff in relation to the article, the Milani article. Bratton writes some really great stuff about the user layer in relation to what is defined as the user. I think he says something really great. Like it's only a pattern of, a user can only be identified in relation to its pattern of interaction with the interface or something like that. A user is just a pattern. It doesn't have any ontological content. He has a great quote about masks or something like it. The position of the user maps only varying completely

onto any one individual body from the perspective of the platform, the user platform. What looks like one is really many, and what looks like many may only be one. And he kind of talks about, you know, trying to define a subjectivity for the user. Is it an IP address? is a kind of conglomeration of human and non-human entities and their proxies, sensors, whatever, and sort of talks about this strange effect where as soon as you start as a human user interacting with stuff like the quantified self movement, these health apps, you get this kind of overwhelming individuation, this concretization and continuity of your identity through the data, which then is multiplied and de-differentiated because you suddenly

see how the outside space, the material space that you're interacting with is determining you and you become replaced by this sort of fluid multiple fraction identity. And so human use of the user platform inevitably kind of splinters. And I was thinking about my kind of feeling when I was reading the Malani article is that there's, he kind of talks about how the Chinese typing system is kind of dominating now because of the levels of mediation that happen between the input and then the kind of processing of the code to get back the particular character that's produced.

And I feel like there's a kind of argument you can make that there's a sort of ontological openness in the East to fluidity, which you then have to build a concrete individuation on top of. And it's sort of the reverse in the West. You kind of, you always start from the position of the individual and then you try and push it into the flows. So there's this inversion of like kind of ontological concreteness and ontological fluidity, and that this kind of Chinese ease with mediation. comes out of a sort of spontaneous cultural ontological presupposition about the individual user that it's fine to have all these levels of mediation and this kind of splintering effect, whereas in the West it comes as a kind of trauma. And so the way that the stack, as Bratton kind of

puts it, seems to be going is towards this more mediated, more Eastern model. And I just thought was interesting thinking about what what becomes individuated as like what i what identity what sort of anthropomorphic identity becomes in relation to these particular technological systems but just throwing that out there no no i think that's good for sure is it's it maybe is to shift your vocabulary a little bit but or across it in a certain way but there's this whole question about masks i mean obviously the cliche it's kind of orientalist in a way that i don't really have much problems but maybe people do but this akashna face you know which is is such a giant chinese

notion um and it basically means the same as uh originally obviously person means mask you know you're so the personal classically in archaic western culture is the same as face in contemporary chinese culture and it is the pattern of interface behavior without grave ontological anxiety about the relation of that to some deep individual you know you sort of maintain your face you maintain your person you maintain your mask you maintain your

avatar and and so I think there is this I sort of agree a lot that in the in the contemporary West there is partly to do with some sort of notions of authenticity isn't it that i mean the tendencies do deride these notions of face you know to see it as kind of somehow inauthentic that that you shouldn't be so concerned about face but you should be concerned as what of expressing some authentic real thing and it's the same as that has been the migration of the notion of the person you know from from person just being a mask

to now when you talk about something personal you mean the exact opposite of that you mean you know the thing that is somehow not the mask not just the kind of um management protocol but but that which is being served that the internet interface management protocol is serving so yeah and obviously can be you could run it through the whole avatar language I guess just the same I feel like it's more traumatic for the west though to have to kind of come to terms with this idea of the self as a

mask maybe that's just random speculation yes but i don't i think it seems very plausible to me too i think it's got a lot to do with this whole notion of spiritual interiority that's such a big part of the western religious tradition isn't it so that um you know that it's a matter of just cosmic religious importance what the authentic spiritual personal content of of some processes you know like um the state of one's soul which i think is really different in the

in the east i think if your face is good then things are fine you know i think that there's much less anxiety deep deep ontological anxiety about personhood Oh yeah that's interesting Adam's thing about Mienne yeah. How old is the western sense of that? It goes through French to old French into basically beyond the mists of time.

right so it's really archaic in the west too yeah it only survives as an archaism but it's at least recognizable yeah definitely yeah that is interesting it's weird actually isn't that because obviously the ma thing I have no problem with at all in the sense that it seems to me you know it doesn't surprise me that there are these kind of certain primordial linguistic phonemic elements that are just pre-conventional um but it's very hard to say there's something almost unbelievably like twisted and paradoxical about me and which is the absolute opposite of what would be meant isn't it by a a primordial pre-convention it's all about convention it's

all about surface it's all about you know the non the non-primodial in a way and that it should then have this weird this weird consistency is extraordinary yeah really strange and then there's so few um it's sure it's a little shared vocab actually between Chinese and English even today like there's loan words going back and forth in very modern loan words but there's there's actually not a lot of shared ones otherwise so yeah anyway it's you know it it may be it's just interesting i i don't know that i can put much scholarly weight behind it but yeah

Yeah. The user thing, I do really like the role of the user in Bratton's sort of layout, his stack model. And the stuff that, exactly the sort of stuff that Amy's bringing up. And then Bratton, I was on the session that you mentioned, and I think you picked up on this too. So he's always talking about reversibility. So as soon as you have an interface, okay, there's a couple of points here. So is the keyboard the whole platform? Maybe that's not the right way to think of it.

At least you could say that and you could not say that. But if you use Bratton's model specifically, I think you would say it's the interface layer into another part of the platform, right? And then you're the user on the side of it. And then whenever you have an interface, it's reversible. And Jake had this great paper about baby names being influenced by QWERTY, which he dropped in one of these previous sessions where, you know, more baby names are being chosen that use letters from the right side of the keyboard.

You have this, because the dominant hand is associated with certain positive sort of associations psychologically. And so that's this very clear example of the reversibility of that interface and the sort of QWERTY interface programming its users in a certain way. The other really interesting or the other thing that Bratton emphasizes about users is he's constantly saying they're not necessarily humans. Not only can you be several in the fact that you face all different platforms as different users, but the users facing platforms don't have to be human.

They could be animals, they can be self-driving cars, they can be sensors that are spread throughout the city, etc. It's a position rather than a person. It's not a person. yes or it's a person only in the archaic sense of person where it's exactly a person but in a modern sense no yes yeah I mean obviously that it's I mean it's probably a bit inane to bring this in but it's impossible for me not to immediately make touring test connections with this um just even in the most colloquial sense

like that you know the spam filter thing about proof you're not a robot um where all it has to go on is your intersection with the interfaces now and the fact it therefore has to ask you has to test you is confirmation of this thing that it's not it's not it's it's lost all of the sort of a criteria for ontological differentiation that you would get outside of the interface

zone. There's an, just this is anecdotage but I'm sure there's an article somewhere, I can't remember where I found it, but there was a very early days of computer terminals facing stock exchanges um one particular firm uh got a robot built because they couldn't interface of the terminal in any other way so they got a robot built to type on the keyboard in order to automate their trading because that was the the best way to get orders in quickly and be responsive so they could sort of get the read but they couldn't get the right into the

You know the terminal system is prior lockdown sort of these exchange tunnels still are But they can put a robot in the user position Literally typing on the keyboard how we I'm finding it hard to even get my head around this like Well, I wouldn't be a full humanoid robot. It would just be literally something that's a typing machine But why would you go through the keyboard though? I don't know sure programming interface into the machine that could then transmit the orders by pressing the keystrokes there's no other way to get the information can't just replace the keyboard with a you know the keyboard is being translated into a set of wire so they went through

the keyboard literally impersonating the human user not use a position that's odd that's really strange I didn't catch on but it definitely existed I'll see if I can finally Thank you.

Thank you. Sorry, I mustn't get lost in the sidebar. Nick, one of the things you touched on with Ben last time was the static nature of the platform. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more?

Well, when you say about static, this question about... Because this is where this platform discussion, as I'm sure Ben is very explicitly working on this, quite subtly in some way. But there's obviously a whole set of political economic questions about the platform because it, I think you can surely define a platform by the fact that it is a machine for protecting itself against intrusion from users.

Like what makes something a platform is the fact that by inusing it, you're not rewriting the basic protocol of the platform. now i think you can say the same thing about strata that's why i think these two discussions are very similar to each other and it obviously also then spills into a whole set of of um political economic questions about about governance because the basic relationship that the user has with the platform is one in

which they are structurally excluded from the system of governance I mean that I'm this could be said very critically i'm not at all suggesting it is intrinsically critical and ben also was saying he he he also doesn't see it as being a critical point but i think conventionally within the western political tradition it would be seen as a critical point to make that um that the user is in from a certain perspective radically disempowered because their interaction with the protocol or the platform does not extend in principle to rewriting the

basic principles of the platform or the institution or the convention or whichever however we're running this thing so it's sorry just to make sure that that's the discussion that you're Referencing their theater is that right correct? Yeah Yeah, but I mean it seems also like the like The platform is also constantly revised having to need to revise itself um as as it determines better ways to function. Or no?

Well, I don't know. I think this is a really complicated and extremely interesting theoretical issue. I mean, look, if you start with where we're at here, obviously the user of a keyboard is not redesigning a keyboard. You know you could use a keyboard to write a tract as People have done about why the query keyboard Should be replaced by a different keyboard, but that but it's just kind of It's a it's a rigid platform in the sense that that there's your use of the platform does not change the structure of the platform and

So it's it's a it's extremely you could say Extremely techno hardened version of this continuum, and I think at the other end of the continuum there are Edison I think political models where all interaction is in principle um accessing the core principles and procedures of the system under consideration um and i i sort of think that that's this kind of ideal

form of that conception that is absolutely central to the mainstream of western political economic thinking I think it's the kind of Rousseauistic ideal that social participation is subject to no restraints other than those continuously negotiated in the process of the social process. And I think this is a very extreme generality, this question, and this distinction, this spectrum. So...

There's one whole, you could launch a kind of, you could take this whole chronomics question and embed it within a kind of Russoistic radical democracy critique of technostructure, where this of platforms to be static, to distinguish the protocol layer from the user layer would be just being taken as a kind of point of criticism definitely and then i think there are currents in the opposite direction which would take this as a model um now in in in that discussion we obviously talk about this whole voice

voice exit discussion you know so uh the counterpart to the rusoistic model is that by exit and entering platforms you subject them to selective pressure which is extremely different in principle to editing pressure so no one you don't edit a QWERTY keyboard by using it but you could migrate to a different keyboard and therefore you could apply selective pressure to the keyboard as a whole and that this model can be generalized to political regimes to involvement in to

interaction with businesses and it sort of cuts across the whole political economic space I think. I mean one of Romans all things is platforms are not markets are not states right he's he spends a lot of time trying to say it's not a market versus state opposition as a

triadic relationship where you have market states and platforms yeah I mean I'm slightly skeptical of that we didn't get into but I mean I'd be interested in your take on yeah I'm a little bit skeptical we didn't really have an opportunity to dig into this I think Ben's point is that if you have if you're talking about governance you're not talking about a market and I'm a bit I'm not sure whether that move is persuasive like you know is it it's not really that the question of governance is in principle something alien or extrinsic or is it in conceptual

opposition to the principle of commerce is it i mean um there are a lot of different ways they can be articulated did um one of them is obviously you people can actually shop around for systems of governance in various ways you know like when uh we were talking last week about um about trading platforms so you know whatever sphere you want some sort of high level relatively abstracted highly liquid sophisticated markets there is a range of possible trading platforms and you know are those trading platforms you know in having in

being systems of governments like states I mean if they are then I think we're thinking of states in a way that is is unfamiliar and extremely interesting you know if we're if we're if a state is basically just a system of governance that we could potentially shop around between and you know so so states gonna set up government systems and people move in and out of them by these market processes of exit and entry and and therefore select between states then for sure I can buy the thing then.

But how is that different from a platform? Wouldn't that be to think of a state basically as being a trading platform? Well, and it's interesting that the precise point where the current state does start to behave like a trading platform, which is sort of the purchasing of judges and officials or the contribution of money to like, you know, very different or not even necessarily very different, but to particular regimes or campaigns as a sort of arbitrary platform or semi-arbitrary platform for pursuing policy that benefits you. And this is whether you're, you know, you're the cartel purchasing drug policy

that benefits your business or you're the Koch brothers or whoever, that precisely at the point where it starts to act like a semi-arbitrary platform for user operations, it is market-like and it involves money and where you choose to spend your money. Yeah. But actually, I mean, I think small states all have to basically behave like trading platforms. You know, big states don't, much less. but I think when we look at that heritage index and all the top five you know freest economies in the world us tiny little countries you know it's like obviously Hong Hong Kong Singapore New Zealand Switzerland it's because those

if you're a small state you you're selling yourself as a trading platform and if you don't work as a trading platform you hemorrhage people and capital and everything leaves and goes to an alternative trading platform because and the fact from the point of view of a big state it doesn't look like that but I think that that's a kind of weird distortion that comes from the fact abnormal magnitude that it just right that definitely makes sense in terms of of sort of, because there's a, there were two different senses of the state as a trading platform kind of there. And one of them was this, the one you're making with these small states that converge on banking

or on being a place where you incorporate your business or whatever. And then it's sort of the state policy itself as enacting a trading platform and being sold as like, you know, an off the shelf jurisdiction kind of thing versus with these big states, you get the government of the state itself precisely by sort of the value of being able to determine policy for these really large territories or groups of people. Yeah. It becomes that trading platform. Horse trading, as they say. Yes. It becomes obscurely commercialized, for sure. Right. Yeah. But it is much more obscure, isn't it? I mean, I'm trying to think where this word came out. I think it might have been in this same talk. I think it's a really crucial term.

and we came across it in the previous course, sovereignty services. You know, when you're a microstate, let's say some little Caribbean country, you're selling sovereignty services. You know, all those distinctive characteristics that make you a state rather than a product are encapsulated in that term. and so you you're functioning surely as a platform there you know you will you can be used to register shipping you can be used for offshore banking and finance services or all of these various things and and your very survival depends upon your functionality as a

as a commercial platform you see I mean I mean at the point my my concern with the way it's a triadic thing that Ben was setting up with it is I just think they melt together so so much I mean every there's no market that isn't a platform surely and there's no I could see there's no state that isn't a platform it's just that it's it's hard to see when you have abnormally large concentrated political entities but they're still serving as a trading platform it's just that they are can get away with being a far more dysfunctional

one then then then is possible for a small state well and you could also also, this is a sort of orthogonal articulation, is that surely by virtue of having survived and grown to that level and sustained themselves at that kind of grossly abnormal size, they have more path dependency in the course of growing to that size and becoming stable at that size. You see more and more layers of these historical compromises and these different ways of bribing populations. Right. I mean you see that in the structure of Roman governments, first of all, where to establish the base core of Rome they had to bribe 19 different tribes on the Italian peninsula

and integrate them one by one, and then you end up with this enormously bizarre sort of congressional system that we then just write on. Yeah, and use for a platform for the same sort of path-dependent compromises. Yeah. So it's kind of institutional inertia in a way that is part of that, isn't it? Mm-hmm. It also creates, I mean, you know, inertia is also conservation of momentum that's already been established.

So I mean, you think in the Roman case that they went on to be such, you know, so extraordinarily effective, like not even, you know, like it's not the conquering of the territory that's so much extraordinary as like the ability to integrate it across like pretty like radical cultural differences, like military detail differences and so forth. and just to sort of, I don't know how exactly you would draw a structural line between them, but to relate this to sort of the initial consolidation process in the Italian peninsula, which, you know, wasn't really one tribe conquering everybody, it was this sort of progressive rolling integration of different like small micro territories and groups and so forth. And to see that as like, you know, a destiny that comes through that particular path dependency to the

future history of the empire. and then the American case as well. Sorry, say more about the American case. Yeah, I was sort of trying to think it out. I mean, part of it is definitely this, is the stuff about the frontier and the frontier constituting American society that we had talked about in the last class. But another is this giant political and cultural issue, which is the continental interior versus the unity of the two coasts. And I think there's so many features of that that were destined by the process, the specific process of the consolidation of the American state

as this progressive movement westward followed by a secondary wave of political consolidation, so that by the time the wave finally reaches the west coast, things like trains and telegraph and so forth that then shorten that distance to the wealthy you know base in the east coast dramatically by the time the territorial extension got there sort of you know i mean it has these long long-term knock-on effects like creating this sort of cultural unity between coasts versus this much like sparser culturally different like interior heartland which then sets up for you know political divide like giant political divides and destinies which are like really operative right now where you say see you know very literally like two contiguous bands of blue

um you know uh diametrically opposite each other across the continent you know central corridor of red like just to see that is to see that the process by which america consolidated itself um you know i mean you could the path dependency of it like i don't know how many other examples of like the continental interior naturally promoting cultural separation from opposite coasts like i don't know how many other examples of something like that there would be so maybe you know you could make an argument that it's not a very specific path dependency there but yeah i mean it seemed i don't i have no idea where i even started with this to be honest it's it's

complicated I think it to me one of the things that's kind of haunting this discussion is this is this question about like um divergent and convergent evolution like you know to go back to what you were saying it's like if you have a long pedigree to whatever your your system that is and it seems to have this greater embedded path dependency and therefore greater resistance to horizontal substitution is part of that is not like I mean I'm assuming part of

the difference in this like we're going to make it super contemporary and and all these maps everyone's seen about the the last the political distribution of america now as we've seen it from this last election um so what is dividing these these blue zones which are partly yes these coastal strips they're partly just these urban hubs aren't they i mean i've seen some really striking diagrams that just show the the kind of red blue vote in terms of them the degree of urban intensity and the right the urban zones it seems to me at least partially are these what's it mean to stay

you know you think of all the kind of colloquial political language around them to do with like cosmopolitanism, rootlessness, you know, a lack of tradition. I think there's a lot that could probably be slotted into this. What's at stake there is that there's a system of horizontal substitutability that you find in these metro zones that doesn't transplant into the hint land so like in terms of like availability of many brands or availability of like many origins of worker or yes well so the point is if if

some it's goes back to this past dependency process that if if something in a in a in a metro center is being is its selective environment is the is global cosmopolitan and is all the other big metro centers in the world you know if if Hong Kong does a skyline better than you then maybe you end up importing a Hong Kong skyline or you end up importing the cuisine of some region because it out competes you or you import some any kind of social technical technical cultural practice from any of these hubs that are in horizontal communication and and kind of mutually in a mutually competitive environment

whereas the hinterland is in this much more yeah I don't want this to sound like a kind of um again a kind of morally weighted term but a inertial pattern isn't it the past dependency is much stronger because it's not it's not in this it's not in this uh situation of kind of potential substitution um like right that makes if you think of it as the establishment of a continuum or the convergence on a continuum which is sort of made possible by having the

same means of transit and the same sort of speed and liquidity of transit via the ocean and you know the and then money concentration in urban areas and everything if you have like just sheer distance of transaction times like difficulty of accessing the same pool of horizontal substitution like means that you can't form a continuum you're going to diverge from the continuum established or you could say that that continuum is a divergence from like local continental territorial interlands or whatever those those kind of past dependent continua are subject to kind of horizontal selective pressure of an extreme kind aren't they and just and and so unless they can actually um

sell themselves within this this this commercium this global inter-hub commercial network as being viable plausible functional contemporary solutions then they will they will tend to extinction within those in those zones right whereas whereas in the hinterland that there's much less prospects of that i mean this is just the path of ence is just like this is this is our tradition this is where we've come from that's not gonna that's not gonna change because of the fact that the hinterland of some other country does things a different way there's no there's no system of sort of a kind of effective substitutive comparison taking place

on that local right and you could also argue partially i think from the reactionary perspective that in that hinterland rather than like horizontal competitive survival it's sort of vertical it's not quite the term i'm looking for but um uh time survival you know because of lack of access to money and like fungibility of resources depending on how the weather goes, assuming like the hinterland is more agrarian, more subject to these sort of punctual disruptions of the ability to sustain the line, right? Like line sustaining things like these path dependencies are higher, more preferentially valued. So very, very crudely

there's a kind of diachronic Right, and a synchronic one in in the urban course isn't there to some degree like In the urban cause if if someone somewhere else is putting together a widget in a better way than you're putting together that widget You will end up converging on the best way of putting that widget together wherever it comes from but but it but in the hinterland someone's You know folk music tradition is just not gonna is not in in Synchronic Competition with your folk music tradition. I mean they just are not they're non-interfering Irrelevant things. It's your your folk music tradition is in relation to the urban

cultural acoustic tradition or even if traditions like would rather than in this relation of synchronic competitive about dying out I mean being so dominant like especially as soon as like the hinterland really I think you know it seems to discursively encounter this opposition to the urban like all of your like a huge proportion of about languages dying out traditions dying out music styles dying I think is actually a pretty good example of where you know a folk music tradition might like be at constant risk of dying out because of a generational gap or something if it doesn't have these very, very consistent standards. So I think that, and I think that fits the diachronic, synchronic opposition.

But I think Theo has a good point, sidebar here as well. The sort of urbanity is infrastructural standard, which I think is interesting from like, you know, the urban region's own area of deep path dependency is this layering of infrastructure. over time and this caught you know the the difficulties that presents for massing a population that's constantly changing and growing over time and I don't know I think this creating in urban areas a greater understanding of like the need for convergence on standards like that are maybe like somewhat arbitrary or not what any one group sees as being centered on them just because of the sheer difficulty and path dependency involved in living with 10 million

other people in a place the size of like what would be a county in the hinterlands well i think the urban zones are prepared to swap swap out chunks of this infrastructure with a willingness that is deeply disconcerting to hinterland populations you know like um because the american example is so sort of heated and tormenting to people i mean it's it's useful to just look over go back to 19th century china you know and and the status in people's imagination of a city like shanghai where the fact that in shanghai because it's a it's it's a global hub because people have this set of sort of synchronic global comparisons of the way things are done

They will just swap out some chunk of local culture and replace it with something, you know, within the cosmopolitan shopping mart, you know, in a way that for the traditional population, for the hinterland population, is actually, like, upsetting to the point of being considered, like, treacherous. you know I think there is a sense that for the for the hinterland the urban population are ethnic traitors because of the fact that they are prepared to just just replace these chunks of kind of

socio-cultural process within this within this synchronic competitive system in a way that's just absolutely unimaginable for someone in this more Linear right in such a radical sense that Like it's just substitution with a void Because there is nothing there's nothing strong enough with strong enough synchronic access to actually replace it so the very thought of this being a replaceable and eliminable substitutable thing is unimaginable. Yeah, yeah And a blank in imagination something like that. Yeah Cities are also they tend to be built in platforming ways that allow those substitutions right like I did and

there's this example of the Manhattan grid and Remco house the grid is itself a sort of platform that allows substitutability and you can substitute a what's happening on a particular floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan very independently of what's happening on the next floor down. Right. Like sort of modularization is part of that, isn't it? Right. Yeah. Sorry. I was just going to give a time check here.

We're 5-2-1 right now. Yeah. Actually, I should, if I was being responsible, have kind of a strong sense of agenda for next week, but I have to confess I don't really, actually. I haven't. I was just concentrating on what we were up to right now. I'm slightly losing track even where we are. We've got two more weeks of this module. Is that right? Technically, this is the third session. So we should have four more scheduled. Is that right?

Yeah, four more scheduled. And one more. And one more that wasn't done initially. Right. Okay. Yeah. So perhaps like in the Google classroom, we can start a conversation with everyone about what's the best day to try to fit that extra day in. I think after the, was it the 10th of December? Is that, or let me just double check the date really quick. The, so if the 10th of december is the scheduled last day right now that's a saturday um after that i

think people have said it'll be more difficult to do the week after is that what people said yeah um but we can we should start like a conversation maybe about okay what's another date yes let's do that let's do that i'll be more attentive to to that space and get a sense of what people are up to but thinking on this yeah oh and choggy's did post uh reading earlier that we were we're talking about um was that the one that you were looking at nick uh there's a giant chuggies

um sidebar comment that i was trying to just scan for but i think i need to read it properly um this is boja from boja on simon um I I mean if there's a particular way people want to relate to the this I mean it's very close and all the sort of technical object evolution then I'm yeah came to dig into that too okay that's that's good I mean I mean my Inertial course I think is is one of the things I'll

Do is actually talk a bit about the George of morals essay next week But I think if people want to Bombard bombard the session with with Bojo or Simadon and all of this kind of material then it It's it's great for that to happen and let's just sort of see what kind of resources can be pulled out of these different discourses i think that would be good but but i'm seeing i'm seeing the next week here's a kind of is the final one in this initial stage of quenomics understood as a socio-historical and economic

cybernetic process it's like we're in the mode of what i i call quenomic materialism like understanding understanding understanding the whole QWERTY issue as indicative of certain techno economic dynamics and then subsequent to that next week that's the week after next I think we go into a mode that is more specifically like semiotic and is about what it what actually is quality like

what are what are we seeing what it how what is this system what are its rules how can we describe it abbreviate it what kind of patterns are we looking at when we when we we see this system this weird little micro cultural system that we've inherited great and um it's now a good time to wrap up then uh and yeah one last wave of chances for for suggestions or remarks from people and and and i think that's that's us done great okay so I'm gonna gather by the fact that everyone's quite quiet now that

we're done are we is everyone happy to wrap up at this point okay I will take that as a yes okay great great to talk to you of all as usual take care thank you thank you okay have a good week you too