you're basically one of the leading thinkers, I would say, arguably the leading thinker, of what we might call the school of thought that's known as accelerationism. And I would say that just very briefly, and certainly all too schematically, accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change kind of confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. And so that's just for people who have no idea what we're going to be talking about. That's broadly kind of the school of thought that you're known for and associated with. So, I mean, maybe just before we even move forward, that's my kind of short elevator pitch, as it were.
Would you add anything to that if someone sort of on the street walked up to you and asked you what what is this whole accelerationism thing? Is there a kind of essence or key upshot that that you would add to what I just said? I think it's one. I mean, we're going to have this conversation. So, you know, it's probably to try and anticipate might be might be a mistake. And I think, you know, as we start talking about it, we will find ourselves in the various dimensions of acceleration. I mean, in terms of my own involvement in it, I would say the guiding term for certainly a long time was cybernetics.
And, you know, the basic accelerationist thesis is that there is a that modernity is dominated by positive feedback processes rather than negative feedback processes. And the first wave of cybernetic theory, which consistently sort of normalized negative homeostatic feedback and pathologized positive feedback, was therefore self-obsolescing. I mean, it was something that was not going to be a sustainable stance given, as you say, the basic accelerating trend of the modern process, most extremely in its sort of technological and economic dimensions.
So that's the kind of, I guess, the off-the-shelf conceptual vocabulary that I think, at least initially, it comes in with it. But it's itself extremely dynamic, and we've seen an astounding range of different systems of reference get sucked into this accelerationist conversation, perhaps you could call it. I don't know the best way to describe that culture. I've always been extremely curious about your sort of the relationship between your earlier work and your current thinking on these matters. And so a lot of your early work from the 1990s, it tends to embrace a fairly radical and even kind of emancipatory political tone.
I think it's fair to say, you know, it's very kind of insurrectionary anarchist, I would say. You know, there's a lot of kind of feminist connotations. It's very cyberpunk. obviously. And so it's all about theorizing. A lot of it is about theorizing rebellion in the digital context. Things like hacking the macropod and exploiting glitches in what you call the human security system. These sorts of notions. You talk about K-war, which I kind of interpret to be a kind of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, but on the level of the social codes in some sense.
And, you know, back from that period, you're even interested in more fantastic ideas such as stuff like Neo Lemurian Time War, in which, you know, one gets the sense that you your position then seems to be that, or at least you seem to have thought that these sorts of accelerationist insights might allow rebellious individuals and groups to fundamentally alter or hack the nature of social reality in ways that the status quo institutions are not able to defend against. And so it's this very heady, emancipatory kind of tone to all of it. And so a lot of people who are interested in your work and in your ideas got into you through these early texts. And I think we know it's very clear that since then, your thinking has evolved drastically.
But what's unclear, I think, is how and why exactly your perspective has changed or just how to understand the trajectory between those early kind of heady, typically emancipatory kind of connotations in your thinking, in your kind of accelerationist view of the world and your current viewpoints. viewpoints. And so before even going into your current views and picking your brain about how you see these things today, I'm just curious if you could kind of mentally go back to the 1990s when you're theorizing all these kind of radical ideas at the beginning, what would you say, like, what was the first kind of crack in that tendency for you? Like, what gave exactly? Was there a particular realization or insight or problem or anomaly in kind of your viewpoints in the 90s that kind of cracked and made you kind of see that all of these radical events
anticipatory ideas are not going to work? Or how would you explain that? These things come in waves. I mean, wave motion is crucial to this. There was an extremely exciting wave that was ridden by the CCIU in the early to mid-1990s. You know, the internet was basically arrived in those years. There were all kinds of things going on culturally and technologically and economically that were extremely exciting. And, you know, that just carried this acceleration, this current, and made it extremely immediately plausible and convincing to people, outrageous perhaps, but definitely convincing. But it was followed, and I wouldn't want to put specific dates on this really,
but I think there was an epoch of deep disillusionment, Like the, you know, I'd call it the Facebook era. And obviously for anyone who's kind of coming in any way out of Deleuze and Qatari, for something called Facebook to be the dominant sort of representative of cyberspace is just almost, you know, comically horrible thing to happen. You know, and I just really responded to this with such utter prolonged disgust that a certain like a, you know, deep sedimentary layer of profound grumpiness, you know, from a personal point of view was added to this.
But I don't think it's just a personal thing. I mean, I think that accelerationism just went into massive eclipse. To me, what's really at stake in this question is understanding the nature of ideology, because that's one of the things I'm really interested in today is just what exactly is ideology? What is the most empirically sophisticated way to understand social communities' tendencies to divide along ideological dimensions, the number of those dimensions, the relationship between those dimensions? I find it very fascinating and important because I think it's that those are the tracks along which so much of contemporary kind of mass insanity and confusion go down.
So it almost seems to me like you listening to you describe your own trajectory, it almost sounds like you're endorsing kind of like a horseshoe theory of ideology, right? This idea that, you know, the radical left at a certain margin almost has to become right wing to some degree. That seems to be kind of baked into what you're saying about Deleuze and Guattari's perspective on acceleration, that, you know, if the real way to rebel against capitalism is in some sense to be so capitalist that capitalism can't handle it to some degree. Is that how you see it? Actually, that's not really how I see it, but I think it is an interesting suggestion. And I think you're touching upon this really fascinating and intricate zone in making that suggestion for sure.
So what's wrong with that to you? Okay, let me see. Well, maybe before trying to immediately sort of respond precisely to that, let me just say that, you know, a lot of there is an actual sort of fabric of discussion, obviously very connected to your point around this, which comes from the fact that precisely because of this surreptitious, insidious strategy that Deleuze and Guattari, I'm going to use them as the kind of the epitome of this that we're involved in. Because of that strategy, they have resulted in a question that has haunted accelerationism from its birth,
which is precisely this thing about is it a left wing or a right wing process that we've seen people exploring in stages later. And, you know, one, the sort of leftist, I would say the original leftist formulation of it before, very different from anything that we get in what then becomes called left accelerationism later, is that, well, it's almost like Lenin's, you know, the worst, the better. So the understanding of it is that, you know, what Deleuze and Guattari are doing, what the acceleration is current coming out of them is doing, is saying the way to destroy capitalism is to accelerate it to its limit.
And, you know, there's no other there's no other strategy that is has any chance of being successful. Now, you know, is that? Oh, so then there's a question. Well, OK, can we can we model what we're being said there as a horseshoe, that there is a certain kind of possible meeting point of of kind of hyper rightist in the terms of kind of proponents of capitalism and hyper leftist as defined as kind of ferocious and take antagonists of capitalism? I mean, yes, I will grant, you know, in that construction that that's not implausible.
That's not implausible. And I think we do see these interesting crossovers. Like, obviously, one figure that I think is sort of on the edge of this and of great interest to lots of people working in sort of accelerationism related areas is this guy who goes by the nick of Dam Yehu. Yehu, or if I'm pronouncing that right, Jehu, I don't know. He's an absolute, he's as fundamentalist Marxist as anyone I've ever come across. I mean, absolutely fundamentalist, anti-capitalist, proletarian revolution, economistic Marxist.
And yet there's a huge zone of resonance between his analysis and kind of accelerationist currents that would be seen as being sort of absolutely sort of offensively and unambiguously rightist in orientation. So I'm saying all of this to say that there's something serious behind what you're saying. It's not like there's nothing there. But I think there's this, I have to put this, my fourth point on the table, which will bounce back onto this question, which is the fact that I think the, you know, the right accelerationist commitment that sort of has, that feeds into all kinds of later things,
but definitely is something already going on in the 1990s, is that the actual practical social force of conservatism, you know, of what in a certain sense would be called even reaction, is the political act. You know, that's what the political left is. The political left is the thing that is set essentially against the imperative to accelerate the process. And so, you know, by that by that definition of leftism, it's really what then becomes said.
What I would say I then say as soon as I'm not within a certain strategic context set by the set by I'll say the academy. But I think it's not just the academy. It's also a sort of set a sort of structure of political and ideological hegemony. that, you know, it's just misleading to really present this as being a leftist project at all. You're so against the basic grain, the basic impulse and imperatives of the left to say that, that it's just, you know, sure, you'll do it for strategic reasons, but then when you're no longer under that pressure, why would you do it? Oops. Sorry, am I still? Yeah.
Okay. Well, it's just to say that, you know, why would accelerationism maintain some kind of affinity with allegiance, affection for the left as a position when it just is in a position to come clean on the situation and just say, look, you know, what the left is, is the, the cat is the counter movement. It's the, it's the opposition to the accelerationist process. And, you know, you get, so that, that's where, why I
say, you know, look, it's not really a horseshoe. I mean, it's only a horseshoe if you continue to define the left in terms that don't actually make any sociological sense. You know, if you think about the left and the right as both superficial, strategic, social, you know, molar, molar formations, then they're really like, kind of mutually reinforcing, paranoiac simplifications, trying to deal with the unbearable anxieties of economic acceleration. And so like, if you try to do either one of them too seriously, you'll, you might find yourself popping out into the other one. But that's not for any deep, meaningful reason, but simply because they're both diluted or strategically simplified, ultimately disingenuous tracks along which contemporary society kind of sends people down or something like that.
Right. Yes. I mean, I think that the terminology of the left and the right, for anyone as you who is fascinated by the question of ideology, it's completely indispensable. You know, I think it's like I totally see why people get dissatisfied with that, you know, that language and say we have to move beyond this or this terminology seems to be useful. But I have a sense of its kind of extreme resilience. You know, I don't see us ever stopping talking about the left and the right. It's always going to come back in sort of.
I call it the prime political dimension, you know, that there is a basic dimension with left and right polarities that everyone returns to, you know, after their wanderings and complications and all kinds of ideological currents themselves have a kind of a strategic interest in either mudging the water or trying to get people to rethink what left and right mean. But in the end, people come back to this basic dimension of ideological possibility. And I think it is the one that captures the accelerationist tendency most clearly.
I think that, you know, on the right end of that is something like, you know, the kind of extreme laissez-faire Manchester liberal anarcho-capitalism, a kind of commitment to the maximum deregulation of the technological and economic process. And on the opposite extreme is a set of constituencies that seek in various ways to, I mean, you know, polemically, I would say just like words like impede and obstruct and constrain and whatever. But I mean, I realize that's just my rightism being put on display.
And there's other ways of saying that, to regulate it or control it or to humanize it. You know, I won't try and do a sufficiently sophisticated ideological Turing test on myself to try and get that right. You know, I'll let other people say how they want to say that. But I don't think there's any real, it's not really questionable, you know, which of those impulses is in play. And I think that, you know, it's on that dimension that so-called left accelerationism, you know, is left. I mean, it's leftist because it is basically in a position of deep skepticism about the capitalist process.
It's trying, it's accelerationist only insofar as it thinks that there is some other, I would say, magical source of acceleration that is going to be located somewhere outside that basic motor of modernity. They gesture towards the fact that things were somehow still accelerating when you just chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap. And I think that that is the left. I think left accelerationism is left in a way that is robust, that everyone will recognize. They definitely are, in fact, genuine leftists. They're not playing games like that. And they catalyze, obviously, a right opposition as soon as they do that, because they're already in the prime political dimension.
They're on the left pole of it. They're, you know, in antagonism to them, one is defining the right pole of that same spectrum. OK, so, I mean, you would it sounds like you would basically say that Deleuze and Guattari are not really leftists. In other words, they might be writing from a kind of leftist milieu and they might have some sort of leftist kind of connotations. But the core of their project is not leftist. Because if you think leftism is basically the, you know, leftism to you is basically the position of trying to slow down the accelerator. Yes, I think that project is anti-leftist. I think it's anti-leftist, but smuggled in in this insidious thing of subverting the Marxist tradition from inside.
And I think the Marxist tradition is easy to subvert from inside because the Marxist tradition is based upon an analysis of capitalism that has many very valuable aspects to it. And as soon as you are doing that, then you are describing the motor of acceleration. And, you know, once you then make the further move that Deleuze and Quattari do, and Marx obviously at times does too, of actually embracing the kind of propulsion that that motor is generating, then you're there. I mean, you've already crossed the line. Okay. Okay. I think that clarifies things substantially. I think that's interesting. because you also said that you think that there are kind of cyclical tendencies in ideological manifestations.
You seem to be kind of referring to the possibility that in some times and places, to pursue a radically critical philosophy, you'll tend to find yourself on the left, but at other times and places that might be more of a right-wing manifestation. Is that what you meant? Yes. Well, nothing so articulate, but I think the question is extremely interesting. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to put a sort of dogmatic response to that down. Sure. But I think the conversation could go down a huge, extremely interesting track guided entirely by that question that you've just raised, really,
which would be, does the history of critique, you know, pass through these strange processes of ideological oscillation? And I think there definitely does seem to be some indication of that. You know, I think that I think that there's a lot of work that has to be done to really bring out the pattern really rigorously and clearly. But I'm absolutely convinced that Marxism, in its core of maximum theoretical potency, is definitely a working of critique in its strict Kantian technical philosophical sense.
and obviously at a certain point that seemed to have obvious anti-capitalist implications. And I think that in Deleuze and Kortari's work, that does flip. But it's also complicated because in a certain sense, Deleuze and Kortari are only excavating something that is already happening in Marx. I mean, they're not really distancing themselves in any way from what Marx is doing or even from his configuration of critique. They're simply elevating it to an unprecedented point of lucidity.
so you know maybe what you're saying is that there is a kind of a subterranean rightist implication even in what seems to be at a certain point in history it's absolute antithesis well how about this what if we step out of the the ideological question and let me ask you um a sort of question embedded in some of this, but without the ideological fetters. Specifically, I want to go back a little bit to all of these notions and ideas that you spent a lot of time theorizing, which I mentioned before in the 90s. Just aside from the ideological confusions,
what I'm curious is, you know, there's a lot of pretty concrete mechanisms or tactics, if you will, that you theorize in those early writings, ways that people can basically re-engineer social reality. I referred to some of them before. I won't go over them again. But what I want to ask you is just empirically, like has your empirical model of society changed in such a way that those kind of tactical ideas of re-engineering social reality that you developed in the 90s, Do you believe that they no longer work or you were wrong to think that they worked?
Or is it just that those tactical abilities that humans have to kind of alter social reality, you think maybe they – you would maintain that those ideas still empirically describe, you know, real possibilities and kind of available to people. but that perhaps, you know, they're just not being pursued for idiosyncratic reasons. So I'm curious, like, how you see that. Okay, I think there's two dimensions. There's two dimensions to this question. Both are very interesting. So on one level, there's a question of tacticality.
I'll just repeat your language, various types of tactical potential. But let me just, you know, I want to just abstract them from any attribution of a subject, because that's what we're going to then get onto on the flip side of this, which complicates things. Now, and if we can do that, if we can just, of a subject, you know, I think because on one side we're talking about the question of humanism, you know, in its in its widest sense, you know, who who is it who's doing this stuff or whatever? I mean, and in a way you formulated the question, it's very much like individuals or groups, you know, conceived as agents in a kind of relatively conventional way are using or exploiting these these certain sort of tactical opportunities, which therefore serve them as tools.
You've got a clear kind of teleological structure there. You know, coming along with that, therefore, you have some kind of notion of political guidance at the level of these kind of agents, whether individual or collective, that is in some position of mastery over their tools or equipment or resources. so you know to divide it down by this the second question the second aspect is obviously I think much more complicated the first aspect I think I'd straightforwardly say you know that absolutely there's absolutely no need to withdraw from this oh damn it what's going on sorry sorry I thought I had a technical hitch there um that that you know this is partly back to
this whole Facebook slump is the negative of this. But I think we've come out of that into an absolutely incandescent new phase of technological and economic possibility driven by this fundamental dynamic vector of the internet. You know, the sort of so that the basic socio historical conditions right now are every bit as exciting as anything that was was around in the 1990s. Totally. And I would obviously say, you know, these blockchain technologies, I mean, they were envisaged in some sort of extremely abstract philosophical sense, I'd say, in the 1990s.
You know, everyone thought that who was looking at these issues at all, everyone could see that what the Internet was going to do was produce these distributed structures that escaped the kind of established structures of governance that would be in some insurrectionary sense, apolitical. And, you know, and you look back at some of this early, you know, cypherpunk and crypto anarchist writings, you know, Tim May, people like that. And, you know, they catch a hell of a lot of this stuff and what it's going to and what it's going to mean. And I think people were seeing that in the late 1990s and then they lost it.
And, you know, the Internet just looked like this extremely sad opportunity for kind of this narcissistic implosion back into the most pathetic forms of subjectivity. And then we've had an absolutely incredible resurgence of massively exciting processes in the last few years, the last decade, maybe you say. I don't know how you were dated exactly. So that's all easily said. And, you know, I would, I'm not, I haven't at all become sceptical about those kind of processes. But where I've always been sceptical is with the structures of agency that are supposedly employing these things.
And, you know, the big – I'm sorry if I'm relapsing back into kind of ideological terminology you're hoping to escape on there. But, you know, my sense of just absolute distancing from the left is that I think it has a massive myth, a massive humanist myth about the fact that it – that, you know, there are these human agents. They can be trusted in the final analysis to have sound political orientation. We should listen to them. We should trust their political judgments and instincts, you know, and that all of this technological and economic resources properly belong in a state of teleological subordination beneath their political projects.
And so you have this whole thing about praxis is on top and capitalism, to summarize it, the kind of technological and economic materials are subordinated in principle. Even before you have your, you know, your revolutionary suppression of capitalism, you have a theoretical suppression because you're thinking of it as just a toolkit to be put in the hands of various kinds of human agents to pursue their projects. And as you've already said, you know, that's not for me a new problem. I mean, all of this, that's the human security system.
I don't trust the human security system. You know, it's not my friend. I'm not trying to empower it. I'm not sort of cheering it on. I don't want it to kind of, you know, improve its position of mastery in any way. I don't see capitalism as its toy or tool. You know, so my relation to that is just utterly antagonistic. Well, that's very interesting because so basically it sounds like what you're saying is that all of the stuff you were thinking about in the 90s trying to theorize, you know, these what I think a lot of people would would say are pretty, you know, they have a left wing flavor, a very kind of emancipatory kind of motivation or drive or connotation or I don't know what exactly you want to call it. But these very emancipatory seeming ideas that you're theorizing in the 90s, you actually have not disavowed them at all.
And interestingly, you're kind of saying that, if I hear you correctly, you're saying that you actually think they might be, you know, these sorts of opportunities for the, you know, alteration of social reality through these kinds of tactics might actually be more salient now than ever as we come out of this kind of web 1.0 or 2.0 slump. So that's very interesting. that... Sorry, Justin, if I can just interrupt you for one minute, because again, this is a two-sided thing, because yes, I'll nod along to everything you were just saying there, but the language of emancipation is fine with me, but what is being emancipated? I mean, so already in the 1990s,
my interest is in the emancipation of the means of production. I am not... I haven't zero commitment to emancipation in any way defined by our kind of dominant political discourses. You know, I'm not interested in emancipating human groups, emancipating the human species to reach its species being, to emancipate human individuals. None of that to me is of the slightest interest. so you know in using this word of emancipation you know I'm sure as I say I will totally nod along to it if what is meant by that is I would now say
capital autonomization that's I don't think something that isn't already there in the 1990s but it's something that I think is you know I'm no longer interested in playing with weird academic games about this and pretending, you know, that this is the same thing as, as, as what the left really means when they're talking about emancipation. I don't think it is. I think what, what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization. You know, right. I see, I see. Yes. I definitely see the, the conceptual landmines here. the way that certain words here seem to kind of have certain ideological affiliations that you're very keen to, you know, be on guard against.
So I think I understand you clearly. I guess where I'm coming from, though, and I think this is a really important point, is that people who read, you know, your work and read accelerationism and are aware of this sort of school of thought, There is a very popular kind of interpretation in which it's seen as, oh, accelerationism is that school of thought that says basically you should just accept the reality of capitalism. And not only should you just accept the reality of capitalism, but you should more or less accept and even kind of push forward its increasingly kind of brutal tendencies.
And so that's obviously for a lot of people, that's a non-starter. So the reason that I'm interested in the questions I'm asking right now is because I think that that common way of seeing accelerationism is really, really misguided. Because on the one level, there's everything you're saying about how, yes, accelerationism does mean the foreclosure of human agency and the subject and the increasing autonomization of capital. And a lot of these things that, you know, in the popular imagination are associated with kind of oppressive dynamics. But what I remain very interested in trying to understand and also trying to kind of explain and model is that what a lot of people see as this kind of oppressive, pessimistic horror show.
And in some sense, you kind of play that up a little bit when you talk about things like horrorism. That's sort of a separate sideline. But what I'm interested in is actually there is a different way of reading the same empirical phenomena. Yes, it's desubjectifying. Yes, it is capital autonomization. And yes, there will be really brutal consequences. But at the same time, if what you're really interested in is, you know, if you see the world through categories such as freedom and, you know, liberation and emancipation and kind of escape from oppression, you know, if that is how you see the world, well, actually, the accelerationist perspective still has a lot for you to be interested in.
There's still, in some sense, a lot for you to do. And you're right, I'm kind of lapsing into a humanistic language, which is just an unfortunate convenience. And you're right, you have to be careful to not kind of reproduce or resuscitate naive notions of the human subject. but correctly understood these processes of, you know, what we might call whatever, K-War or Lemurian Time War or hacking the human security system, all of these sorts of tactics that you very richly kind of help people to see their way into in your early texts, those are still there. And those are things that human beings who feel oppressed today can do. And if and maybe it's not the naive human subject that's going to be doing it, maybe it's actually going to be kind of tearing asunder the human subject in the very act of doing it.
But my point is simply, and this is what I wonder if you agree with, that that whatever that is, it's as close as we can get as human beings to whatever it is we've some of us have been, you know, calling with under the labels of of of of freedom or emancipation or liberation, that there are still things we can do in this accelerationist paradigm that are a lot like what people had in mind when they whenever they whenever they've talked about liberation and and and freedom. That's kind of a really important set of upshots from the accelerationist worldview that I am extremely kind of interested in and I'm actively pursuing. And I find it very actually kind of – I do find it liberating. I find it actually energizing and propelling in a way that I consider to be emancipatory.
And I think there's lots of research to be done on how to do those things and how to work those things out. But a lot of people can't see that because they think this whole accelerationist thing is just a kind of reactionary capitulation to everything that they see as being terrible and oppressive. Does that make sense? I wonder. Yes, that whole thing, I think it's like, it's an extremely rich field, you know, and I mean, as you obviously know, because of your deep involvement in it, I mean, the accelerationist landscape right now is absolutely extraordinary, you know, in terms of the incredible stuff people are doing. You know, there's a whole flourishing of just fantastic accelerationist resources and blogs and discussions.
And it's never remotely been in this state of flourishing. And the kind of questions that you're raising just then, I think, are very much, you know, integral to that and being thrashed out very much by all kinds of people within these different interlocking, interacting strains of accelerationist theory. So for sure, that conversation, I think, it's not only that it's interesting and to be encouraged, but I think it's probably absolutely inevitable. And, you know, something that we can just confidently predict is going to just be one of these explosive, explosive dynamics.
Okay. So, yes, I mean, there's all kinds of, I mean, I would tend to put myself predictably, you know, on the dark side of that whole ecology of discussion. Because, you know, because it just comes back to this set of questions about humanism, the human animal, you know, it's kind of ideological sort of self-aggrandizement. and what is going on in that. And, you know, so I guess I'm sort of drifting somewhere very close to agreement with you in saying something like, you know, true emancipation as something that is just intensely
and really produced corresponds strictly to a process of dehumanization. That would be the way I would say it in trying to be in maximum resonance with what I took it that you were saying. Okay. Well, I think that that's actually a really nice and relatively neat way to perhaps wrap up that segment of the conversation, then maybe we should not beat a horse, as it were, and move on a little bit. If you're not too tired, that is, are you happy to comment? Yeah, I mean, look, I think, without wanting to sort of seize the steering wheel,
it seems to me like this is a really good place to go into the sort of artificial intelligence discussion. Because, you know, because I think that the kind of problems and questions that you were just raising are obviously extremely pertinent in that, again, that huge field that I think sort of intersects with accelerationism in a huge way and is precisely sort of haunted by the same kind of terrors of kind of oppression of, you know, whatever is wrapped under this umbrella term of unfriendly AI, which is kind of an update on a lot of the kind of old sort of old terrors of what capitalism is delivering for us.
And, you know, obviously has, again, cuts across all these questions about agency, human identity, the kind of our definition of intelligence and subjectivity. So it seems that we just are right there already at this stage in the discussion. Okay, sure. Yeah. Is there a particular point about AI that you think feeds in directly to what we were just talking about? Well, if I can just backtrack a tiny bit, I think there's one point about this whole AI landscape that we reached right at the beginning of this whole discussion, which is that the model of intelligence explosion,
as it comes out of the kind of more, I think, rigorous, but still speculative side of this artificial intelligence world. And I'm thinking, obviously, particularly of this amazing essay by I.J. Good, just called it. Sorry, I'm going to forget the name now, embarrassingly enough. It's been blotted out. The first intelligent machine. Yeah, sorry. I won't try and do it. But he launches the term intelligence explosion in that essay. And, you know, it's an extremely good fit for the kind of core,
the core commitment of acceleration. And intelligence explosion is the name for the sort of thing that accelerationism is looking at. And this notion is obviously controversial within the whole AI discussion. I don't think anyone would doubt its importance, but there are definitely people who have questioned it and questioned its plausibility. So there's a certain way in which I think accelerationism finds itself committed automatically on one side of those internal debates around intelligence explosion in the AI camp. So there's a popular kind of image, I would say, of the intelligence explosion, in particular the possibility of catastrophic failure mode
in which basically superintelligence, sort of one fine day in the near future, something clicks into place and suddenly there's a kind of rapid takeoff. That's, I think, a picture that has been put into a lot of people's minds in large part through Bostrom's influential book. You know, he outlines a bunch of possible pathways. But I think now when people think of, you know, really catastrophic possibilities, this is something that kind of commonly comes to mind. And something that I think about a lot, I've thought a lot about kind of in connection to your work is I'm, you know, I'm very skeptical, to be honest, of that picture of the situation. because I think if you look at capitalism
in the kind of light that you do, in other words, if you see capitalism as this kind of pan-historical, almost substrate of reality itself, as this kind of cybernetic, you know, capitalism is almost in the nature of things in your model. Correct me if you see it differently, but that's kind of how I read you. If you think of intelligence as this, how should I put this? It's almost like you almost see all of human history as a kind of intelligence explosion. And that capitalism as we know it is already this kind of long-term explosive historical process. And so it's always kind of seemed to me that, I mean, I take the very catastrophic malignant failure modes of superintelligence very seriously, but it seems to me like you could say it's already happening in the form of capitalism.
In other words, it's kind of where I'm driving at. And I feel like there's a lot of reason to read your work as kind of saying that, but I'm not sure at all if you agree with that or not. What do you think? Well, what I would say, I mean, I think it comes down, again, just to these very, very basic cybernetic diagrams to do with positive feedback. And that, you know, one sort of image that it's entirely satisfactory image, you know, once it's accepted that it is, you know, in a certain sense figurative, is obviously this of a critical nuclear reaction. So you have a pile of radioactive rods that are damped down by kind of graphite containment rods.
And you start pulling out those graphite rods. And at a certain point, it goes critical and you get an explosion, which is obviously, it's just absolutely, it's not a metaphor that it's a positive feedback process. It just is a positive feedback process that passes through some threshold and goes critical. And so I would say, you know, that's the sense where capitalism has always been there. It's always been there as a pile with the potential to go critical. But it didn't go critical until the Renaissance, until the dawn of modernity, when for reasons that are interesting, you know, enough graphite rods get pulled out and the thing becomes this self-sustaining explosive process.
So in certain sense, the kind of a lot of the actual fabric, the social historical fabric is actually a containment system. And I think that that containment system had a failure mode in a Renaissance. You know, I think that the, you know, if we're flipping just a slight dip back into the kind of hyper ideological space, is that what the extreme kind of what I call paleo reactionaries get right is that they totally see that. You know, they obviously I share nothing of their kind of mournful sort of affection for the for the medieval period.
But I think they're totally right to say that that there was a catastrophic failure that unleashed this explosive process. And that is what modernity is from from the perspective of the ancient regime. You know what any social system is for is to stop this nuclear pile going off. You know, you look at sort of Chinese civilization and you say, well, what is it really doing? What's it for? It's, you know, from a certain perspective, it's a capitalism containment structure that obviously worked better in this traditionalist sense
than the European one did. The European one was too fractured. It was too subject to a whole bunch of wild, uncontrollable influences. You know, sort of unprecedented feedback structures kicked off that no one was in a position to master in Europe. And so, you know, we get capitalism and modernity in Europe. and capitalism and modernity is brought to China by Western gunboats, it's not like they're bringing a gift. What they're bringing is they're coming over to pull the guard down graphite containment rods out, you know, from outside. I mean, that's what that process of Chinese modernization is.
It's a process of the indigenous Chinese process of containment being dismantled from outside until it then obviously, in a way, no less spectacular than the one we've seen in the West, then goes into this self-sustaining modernist eruption, basically in the early 1980s. Okay, so that's really interesting. And I really like your vivid kind of metaphor of the radioactive rods and the containment system. I think that that really helps someone picture what's at stake. so is this all to say that do you think all of the people today who are talking about
AI alignment and basically the people that are trying to ensure that if and when there's a super intelligence take off that it won't be catastrophic do you view those efforts as doomed? Yes I mean look catastrophic obviously again is a word that's going to wander all over the place, isn't it? And I'm a massive critic of the most popular catastrophist models, you know, epitomised by, I think, honestly, this pitifully idiotic paper clipper model that, you know, was popularised by Yudkowsky, that Bostrom still is attached to, that, you know, is very, very widespread
in the literature. And I think for reasons, maybe we can go into at some point, is just fundamentally mistaken. So that notion of catastrophe as basically something very stupid happens as a result of an intelligence explosion, I find deeply implausible. But catastrophic in a technical sense, you know, as it's used in catastrophe theory, is a point of there being some trigger point where you enter into a self-feeding, positive dynamic, I think is absolutely right. And as I say, the reason that I sort of came back to the history of capitalism is that, as you say, this is all about the history of capitalism, but that doesn't mean that
we're not talking about catastrophic failure modes. On the contrary, it's precisely why we're talking about catastrophic failure modes, because we've seen in the case of modernity that that is what happens. That's what, you know, again, to get back to another language, that's what liberation looks like. What liberation looks like is pulling out enough of the containment structure that this new self-feeding dynamic process erupts. And so, again, I think that the kind of, you know, I think that there's these kind of reactionary voices that say, you know when liberals talk about liberalism they're really talking about some kind of disaster i don't think that's a trivial or stupid thing to say i think you know there's obviously
room for very different sets of um evaluative responses around that but i think there's a thought there that's actually profoundly realistic and i definitely think is more realistic than the kind of the kind of facile liberalism that just says you know you know everything just gets better and better and better I mean I think that that's that perspective from which things are getting better is just deeply artificial and and constructive it doesn't correspond to any real agents you know the real agents are the significant agents are the guys who are running the containment structure.
And for them, disaster, a disaster, a civilizational disaster. And I think the wig spin on that is kind of deeply disingenuous. Right. So, okay, so that's really rich. Now, one thing I'm thinking about here, though, is that how you read this problem of intelligence explosion, say the difference between, you know, Nick Bostrom's book and the larger historical narrative that you get from your writings, let's say, you know, the difference is really significant in terms of almost like cosmology. You know, like it's a fundamentally different picture of what human society and human history is.
And in some sense, the history of the universe, even. Everything people like Bostrom are highlighting right now has been a possibility baked into the nature of reality, basically. It's basically the cybernetic kind of substrate of, you know, the evolution of everything that we've ever known. So long as there has been intelligent processes, there has been the specter of positive feedback of intelligent processes that take off and leave behind all carbon based deadweights. All of this stuff gets strangely close to traditional religious worldviews. Have you ever noticed that or have you ever thought about that?
Oh, I think that, you know, the fact that people now are seeing more and more of what is happening in terms of religious lineages is a hugely important and extremely, in its core, realistic development. So, yes, absolutely. I think this has been a huge thing I've seen really in the last decade, this massive, massive explosion of saying, hey, look at this. Isn't it just actually, you know, intelligible within a particular religious lineage? You know, the very frontiers of science, the very frontiers of philosophy, even the very frontiers of, you know, the radical, critical kind of anti-institutional sorts of projects and kind of traditional religious worldviews.
views, they're all kind of converging, it seems, in a kind of shared underlying model of reality, you could almost say, because we are rapidly and more rapidly than ever approaching a place, approaching a limit. And we don't know what's behind that wall, but whatever it is that's behind that wall was something there from the beginning. in some sense it's you know you talk a lot about how um on some level you can't really justify talking about the the past causing the future and that on on some level of abstraction um you can just as well say that the the future causes the past if you take those ideas seriously
and and i think all of this stuff about intelligence is uh making us take them increasingly serious. You know, you have people like Bostrom who takes very seriously and lots of other people also who take very seriously the simulation argument, the very possibility that perhaps everything we know in some sense, I interpret that as, as having some sort of creator in some sense. Um, all in other words, there are all of these very, very strange loops in which, you know, the most hardcore rationalist line of thought, uh, seems to converge with, basically very traditional models of the world that in some sense, I think early pre-modern human beings always kind of had a sense that our ability to intelligently exploit the environment was going to end
really badly. From the time anomaly, the relation of science and religion, this final, your end note there about things ending really badly. You see, I think this is in a way to regress a little bit in our discussion, but I think one of the things that is coming into crisis is our sense of the relationship between humanity and intelligence. And I think there is a certain way that that couple, became very thoroughly soldered together,
even in positions, even in places where it seemed unlikely. So, for instance, for certainly popular modes of theology, the notion of a supreme cosmic intelligence as a deity comes accompanied with this massive anthropomization of what that being will be like. So it's in some sense recognizable. So, you know, we're created in its image. There's all these resonances between God and man that sort of cements this notion that there's some profound relationship between the anthropomorphic and the intelligent. And I think that this structure
has been being really badly pulled apart by modernity and has been coming to shreds, and people have obviously seen that happening long ago. And the discussions that we're having around artificial intelligence, I think, are deeply connected with that. I think, for instance, the notion of friendly AI, I'm not saying it's reducible to an anthropomorphic, a kind of new synthetic anthropomorphic model of intelligence, But it's not completely separate either. You know, I think I think it's anthropomorphic pretty much to the same degree as as theology is anthropomorphic. And, you know, a sophisticated theologian will say, oh, it's only, you know, the vulgar, low grade versions of our religious tradition that actually anthropomorphize superhuman intelligences.
And the same way someone in the AI will say, oh, it's only the kind of it's only a vulgarity, a vulgarization to to think that we're anthropomorphizing this notion of a friendly AI. But in both cases, it's actually the predominant cultural phenomenon is the anthropomorphization. And there's a kind of fringe of sophistication that can, with some credibility, say it's not fallen into that culture. but you know where humans find themselves like there's this I'm sure you're familiar with I think utterly brilliant for remark by Elon Musk where he says I won't actually get it exactly right it would be unfortunate if the human species was to turn out to be the biological
bootloader for artificial intelligence now I think there's a huge amount going on in there you know all our Our terrors are going on in there, all of this kind of notions of what a catastrophic failure in this domain is going to be like. But also what you see happening here is this rending of the kind of fusion of humanity and intelligence, where suddenly you begin to think, well, you know, and a lot of people are explicitly now thinking this. Well, hang on a minute. You know, actually, we're not abstract intelligence. You know, intelligence, our intelligence is supposed to be instrumental in relation to our humanity. We are a specific biological species with a set of interests that are determined in terms of species preservation, not in terms of intelligence optimization.
and maybe intelligence optimization is runs you know collides in an extremely vicious way with our biological species interest in terms of human self-preservation whether you know as something recognizably human whatever that means or you know at the extreme like you say even as a carbon-based life form or as something whose basic mode of reproduction passes through the DNA molecule. I mean, all of these things are open to, you know, open to a whole variety of extreme scenarios.
But it makes perfect sense now for someone to say, look, I am, you know, what science is telling me is that I am a transmission device for a certain kind of hereditary piece of DNA code. And that's where my interests lie. You know, I don't have any interest at all in the optimization of intelligence insofar as it's going to kind of move the whole reproduction of complex chemistry on this planet onto a new reproductive substrate. That's extinction. You know, that's a disaster. But it's a disaster that could still be intelligence optimizing.
It's a disaster that could still be in cold, neutral terms, the most glorious thing that has yet happened in planetary history. And it's entirely compatible that that could be utterly consistent with the worst nightmare in our biological history as a species. Right. Or again, I mean, it's all extremely religious because it's like it could very well be that, you know, the greatest catastrophe of the species is also, you know, the saving grace and the greatest glory of the species. You know, I mean, these are all these are all notions that are embedded in the world religions, right?
At a low resolution, for sure. But, you know, I find it very I find it especially interesting that it's like whatever is going on, it we can't help but be we're constantly falling back onto this vocabulary of it. You know, it seems like there's something there's something else doing the work that's not human agency. When you think about how unfashionable religion is in the West, I find a symptom there. I think that there's something symptomatic going on there that might be a bit of a clue as to the mass kind of ideological insanity that's kind of wreaking havoc on the public sphere today.
rationalism is obviously the order of the day. It's the order of modernity. And on the one hand, it seems like if we have any chance of navigating what is coming down the pike and what is already underway with the explosion that is modernity, it seems undeniable that intelligence is a valuable asset, an undeniable necessary asset in figuring out how to survive, how to live, however you want to think about it. And yet, it also seems to be that this kind of headlong collapse into unbridled rationalism is also
the cause of so much of our so much of what horrifies us. When you take these things together, the fact that religious or traditional worldviews are being very strangely vindicated by the frontiers of science and critical philosophy. But you also take note that people are kind of rabidly, how should I say, afraid of taking religion seriously. I think that that is kind of a symptomatic knot, if you will, of what is kind of driving people so insane yes i mean i i would just say i think this is it's it's at a kind of like diagonal to what you're saying it's definitely not just a translation of it because i i agree also with
something that i think you know that that you're you're saying that you know there is a there is an archaic well well partly we're back on i think these strange these strange loops you know and And there's one loop that definitely goes back to the most kind of, the most archaic forms of religiosity are found at the end. You know, they're not, time is not simply taking us away from those things at all. So I agree with that. But I think that the diagonal to that is also a set of revisions to a lot of public conversations or niche public conversations that have come, certainly as far as I'm concerned, and I think generally, actually, I don't think this is just from my perspective, from Mencius Moldbug's work.
You know, which is basically, if someone was going to say to me, well, what really, you know, what is he mostly talking about? He's mostly talking about religion. And he's mostly talking about the fact that, you know, secularism is cladistically religious. You know, it's not that it's simply put religion behind it. It's a particular type of development within a religious tradition. So that you get other people now. I mean, I see so many people say this, that, you know, it's become difficult to sort of attribute it to anyone in particular. But the claim that atheism, as it is generally understood in Western societies, is a particular variant of extreme Protestantism.
you know it's not at all outside it's not escaped our religious tradition it's just the currently dominated phase of our religious tradition and I think I'm seeing lots of people beginning to move into this mode of analysis it's really like I think what's collapsing is a certain kind of extremely smug notion of transcendent secular rationalism, as if it was really looking at the world's cultures from outside and above, you know, in some position of perfect neutrality.
Whereas instead, it's massively historically and culturally embedded, and it's looking out of its own very specific cladistic branch of cultural development at, you know, other parts of the kind of planet's cultural shrubbery. And, you know, something, it's not that that doesn't have roots. I mean, you could say that the whole, you know, the whole crisis that was visited upon the West by the fact that, by the introduction of a comparative religion, where for the first time people couldn't help but see their own religious tradition as something that was relativized by these other religious cultures that were being discovered around the world.
You know, it obviously had a very corrosive kind of cultural impact. But I think what's different about this is it really is about losing the sense of transcendence completely. You know, there just simply are no perspectives that are not imminent to cultural history. And, you know, once that's taken seriously, then I think the notion that people have put certain religious problems behind them just begins to look, as I said, just to repeat my snarky description, very smug. And it's a kind of smugness that I think is becoming increasingly fragile. And to loop this right back to what you were saying, I think that that fragility is making people very bad tempered.
I think that there's a wide sense in a lot of people that these very basic structures of sensibility are disintegrating. They're becoming unsustainable. And that makes people furious, you know, often. They want to lash out at what they worry. are the big challenges to it or to things that they think are somehow exhibiting less fragility or as a way of demonstrating the fact that they still have remained in the same place or for all kinds of reasons. I think that, you know, when these basic belief structures enter into a crisis, it does produce this extreme sort of atmosphere of vituperation and resentment
I do agree we're seeing on a huge scale. Hey, everybody. This is where we took a break and then we resumed a couple weeks later to finish the second half of this session, which is mostly about blockchain. Well, I think what I want to say is really that Bitcoin can be used safely as being the carrier of the blockchain. There's a couple of reasons for that. I mean, the first one is just network effects or first mover advantage that it just it has installed itself. And it's part of the fascination of the thing that obviously it's an open source protocol.
Anybody can just take that code and, you know, today launch Bitcoin 2 or whatever. That's absolutely indistinguishable from Bitcoin 1 except the history. So the history is everything. The fact that all our Bitcoin has is the fact that it's the first one. It has this first move advantage. If it has these network effects, it's like, why would you move from Bitcoin one to Bitcoin two? You know, it could be made, the clone could be perfect. So there would be absolutely no reason you could say not to, except for this, except for this massive accumulation of network effects that's already there with the first version of the thing.
Okay, right. Okay, that makes sense. I kind of just wanted to clarify whether or not you were remarking about specific features of Bitcoin relative to other cryptocurrencies, or if you're more generally really talking about the properties of blockchain itself. And it sounds like the latter. I think both are really interesting. And, you know, if you get into the discussion, then you have to or you would very quickly start talking about other instantiations of the blockchain and other altcoins and all of this stuff. Definitely that I don't think can be just ignored or put aside.
But I would weight that in the sense that if people are doing that in order to somehow dismiss the predominance or preeminence of Bitcoin, I think that's a mistake. And I think, you know, insofar as there's a Bitcoin, a blockchain revolution, it's because Bitcoin is going to continue to feature very, very significantly in that. Okay, interesting. So maybe we could just dive in right away to the relationship between Bitcoin and philosophy. Because I think that very idea will sort of confuse or surprise a lot of people.
When people think about blockchain or Bitcoin, they think, okay, this is a very interesting and potentially very important financial technological innovation. But how on earth could this have implications for philosophy? So maybe you could just help us understand how you see the philosophical implications of Bitcoin. I mean, obviously, in some sense, that's what we'll be unpacking for the better part of this conversation. But just as a kind of first jump into that question, how do you how did you first make that connection in seeing, you know, philosophical implications here? Well, I think there's two sides to this, from my point of view, that lock in the importance of the topic.
One of them is, I think, already a sort of philosophically freighted issue, but to a sort of second order, which is the fact that this something like Bitcoin is baked into the modernist cake extremely deeply. I mean, you know, that there's been the actual possibility of technically instantiating is a set of incredible achievements, technical achievements that have been made. But those achievements that they would be made one way or another has been extremely predictable.
because the whole tradition of spontaneous order, you know, in the old sense, the liberal tradition of modernity, passing through, you know, sort of notably passing through the Scottish Enlightenment and then passing through the Austrian school of economics, has had broad schemas for the kind of technical and economic developments that it considers to be, in a sense, kind of compelled by modern development that really draw a profile of something very like Bitcoin. And so, I mean, if you look more recently sort of into the kind of computer age
and the Internet age, you see a lot of sort of old texts about crypto anarchy, about the way that anonymous internet transactions are going to sort of impact on society that obviously were formulated before anyone had actually worked out how to make a blockchain. But at the same time, when you get to the blockchain, Jane, you have this aha moment of saying, oh, this is what people were seeing. This is the actual realization of something that people were only seeing in much more abstracted terms before that.
So that's in the broad framework of political economy and political philosophy. I think, you know, Bitcoin is something that you recognize when you see it as having already been in play in a much longer tradition. But I think then for the real sort of more crunchy philosophical side, the argument that I think I would strongly want to make is that there is a really powerful isomorphism between Bitcoin and critique in its Kantian sense.
and you know i'll just try and run through that really quickly and then we can pick pick over it like like bulges later but um the main so the main way this i think works is um the sort of the most abstract formulation of critique is something like objectivity should not be confused with an object. And if you can, if you can, if you make that confusion, you're then doing metaphysics and recognizing the error of that move of confusing objectivity with an object.
It's basically the whole of the critical enterprise. And the way that translates across into the technosphere, I think there's probably several ways, but I'll just reduce it to two. First of all, with the internet itself. And obviously people know in broad sort of sociocultural sense to socio-cultural and technological sense, the story of the internet, and the fact that it begins from this series of strategic military imperatives for a robust communication system that would survive a nuclear exchange.
And the reason it would survive a nuclear exchange is because there are no nodes, there are no indispensable nodes in the system. So you can sort of, to an arbitrary degree, take out important nodes in the internet. And of course, if you carry on doing that enough, you finally eliminate the system. But the robustness of the internet is the fact that you have to kind of work a long way down, taking out these hubs successively until you finally get to a point where the thing becomes dysfunctionally shredded.
And, you know, the further down you have to go to do that, the more powerful the internet is as a distributed system. And you get all the internet effects from that, of the fact that it's relatively censorship resistant, that it offers a lot of autonomy to low-level nodes, the fact that it can root around obstacles. Because, I mean, when on the internet you root around an obstacle, you just emulate a hostile nuclear strike. You just say, you know, I don't want to go past this or that gatekeeper And I will just assume that they have been vaporized by a foreign nuclear device and just go around them some other way.
And there's always more of these other ways being brought on stream all the time. So with the Internet, the kind of formulated in terms of critique is you make a metaphysical error if you misidentify the system with any node or group of nodes in the system. So that's the isomorphism between the kind of, you know, the relation between objectivity and the object or the media system and the nodes in that system. So the Internet is already a materialization, a technological instantiation of critique.
And Bitcoin then builds on that and takes it to the next stage. And Satoshi Nakamoto is completely explicit in his kind of repeated sort of almost mantra about Bitcoin, that it's about bypassing trusted third parties. So that's what, you know, the trusted third party is in the role in the kind of Bitcoin realized, materialized thought space that a central commanding hub would be in terms of the Internet or the supreme metaphysical error of these metaphysical objects.
for pre-critical philosophy. And, yeah, so I don't know whether, do you think I've said enough about that to get the basic point of that across? Like, Bitcoin is a critique of trusted third parties that is deeply isomorphic with critique in its kind of rigorized Kantian sense and then with the history of historical and technological instantiation of critique. And that's why I think it's a philosophically rich topic. Yeah, that was an excellent sort of opening summary of how you see the philosophical implications.
Maybe we could try to unpack it a little bit, because I think there's a lot of stuff there that's really kind of fascinating, but won't at all be obvious to a lot of listeners. So, I mean, one thing that I'm kind of thinking about listening to you give that summary is whether or not the story that you tell, which sort of begins with modernity and begins with sort of modern traditions of philosophical critique, whether or not the process you're delineating really actually goes back to the beginning of time, as it were. in the sense that Bitcoin is a more perfect informal realization of technological and economic dynamics,
of which the internet was an original kind of best shot given the technological frontier at the time the internet appeared. But the internet was also really just the frontier manifestation of the same phenomenon that the printing press essentially was as well. and then further on down the line of historical time. In other words, especially sort of relating what you're saying now to some of your other work and some of the other interesting ideas I think we both might be equally interested in about the nature of capital itself and the nature of kind of the long-run nature of human history or even life on this planet in some sense,
seeing it as this kind of more or less continuous cybernetic evolutionary process. I wonder if there's a reason why you begin your discussion with modernity and why you could not tell one kind of continuous story in the framework that you're presenting. Or could you? Well, you're right that I would be reluctant to do that. I definitely think that modernity is a singularity that there's a, there's a, a huge historical discontinuity involved in it.
And, you know, I, I, I can totally see that that question, that that's a controversial argument. And historians obviously treat it, I think, quite explicitly as a controversial point. And people will argue both ways on that. But, you know, the crudest level of response is it just seems to me empirically, there is a sort of stark historical discontinuity that happens roughly in the Renaissance, where it really seems that something new has begun to happen.
Right. And so basically that thing that's new with modernity, it's very hard to pin down the primary variables because really it's a cluster of variables. As you've kind of indicated, the very idea of applying human rationality to traditional institutions and thinking about them critically. Also, early capitalism, early technological innovations such as things like joint stock corporations and double entry bookkeeping. All of these are candidates for the key causes that sends modernity off into the exponential takeoff or singularity, as you put it.
But I think it's exceedingly difficult to try and pin down the primary variable among all of those variables, which was sort of most importantly responsible for the takeoff that we call modernity. They seem to kind of happen more or less in a self-reinforcing kind of cluster phenomenon. And I'm tempted to make two quite disconnected remarks about it. I mean, one is the fact that the arrival of zero in Europe does strike me as overwhelmingly synchronized with the catalysis of modernity.
Now, people obviously say, well, zero was around a long time. I say, what's so special about the arrival of zero in Europe? And I think that's a good and important question to ask. And it maybe then bounces us onto the other side of this, which is to say, which is to put a lot of emphasis on this notion that I think, as we've already seen from where we started this conversation, is still entirely contemporary and probably intensified right now in a way it's never been before, is the notion of the route around. I think it's utterly crucial to this. I think that once you really have robust route arounds,
you have this process in motion. And I think what you're trying to understand is what, you know, what is it that happened in Europe in the Renaissance with the arrival of zero that was different to what had happened in India. I think it's quite clear China had a functional notion of zero. It was obviously so prevalent in the Muslim world that people often even call the numeracy, the Arab numerals. That was certainly how they were received by the West at the time. In none of those cultures do you get that same dynamic of escape. You know, modernity just isn't able to escape from the prevailing systems of social organization.
And there's something about the European situation, I would say, it surely has to have as one crucial component the massive amount of regime fragmentation that you find in Europe relative to these other cultures. Right. that it was able to just get out of the box in a way that was prevented in its other social context. Okay, right. So the way you see it is that perhaps for contingent historical institutional reasons, it's in Europe that something which human civilization up until then had tried to contain
and was able to, to some degree, contain, was able to get out of the box, as you put it. And you think that that is especially uniquely related to the arrival of zero in human kind of mathematical capacities within Europe. within Europe, you think that that kind of was a profound qualitative rupture that allowed something to escape and something that we've really never been able to put back in the box since then? Yes, I would say that's exactly what I think. And so maybe we could think a little bit about what exactly is that thing that escaped? Because I mean, I guess one plausible candidate would be some, you know, perhaps we just call
this intelligence itself. I don't know. The crucial notion, I think, is intelligence production. You know, there's always been intelligence kicking around, but what I think is specifically modern is the fact that you're actually able to lock in a positive feedback circuit on intelligence production. And And, you know, to have, therefore, an intelligent, a runaway, intelligent process. This is something that I think is uniquely modern.
And that, you know, it's often when you're looking at the highest examples of intelligence in a culture, you're looking precisely at the way that it has been fixed and crystallized and immunized against that kind of runaway dynamic. The kind of loops involving technological and economic processes that allow intelligence to sort of go into a self-amplifying circuit, I think are quite deliberately constrained.
You know, often by the fact that the figure of the intellectual is in a highly coded way, separated from the kind of techno social tinkering that could could make those kind of circuits activate. And so I think what we're talking about with modernity or capitalism is the fact that the inhibitor system on that kind of circuitry becomes dysfunctional and ceases to obtain. to obtain what is unique about zero you think that kind of unlocks something like why would the arrival of zero specifically uh perhaps be a candidate for for the profound shift that occurs
the most striking thing about the the explosion of modernity in in all of its dimensions is it has this immensely mathematical character, you know, and, and when you're saying, look, has, has, uh, modernity, uh, erupted yet, you're, you're looking, you know, if you're looking at the natural sciences, you're looking about the fact that it's about the mathematization of, of, of theories of nature. If you're looking at, at, at business, you're looking at obviously the absolutely fabulous explosion of these systems of accountancy that were completely unprecedented in like scale and
complexity and sophistication before. Obviously, you know, technology, similarly, it's to do with applied mathematics. And so, you know, on one level, the arrival of zero in the culture is the arrival of a truly functional mathematics, you know, just out of that arithmetical semiotic. And if you go back the other way, you can say, well, you know, so, you know, if in the mirror, when we're talking about modernity as a singularity,
We're actually engaged in a study of social control systems, dampening devices, inhibitors, a whole, you know, exotic flora and fauna of these systems for the constraining of explosive dynamics. And it seems to me clearly in the Western case, what we can see retrospectively, one crucial inhibitor mechanism was the radically defective nature of the arithmetic or semiotic that was then dominant in the way.
And so, again, you know, we're really talking about sort of negative phenomenon that zero just liquidates a certain system of semiotic shielding that is kind of dampening down certain potential processes. You know, the pre-modern worldview can be sort of thought about as an artificially constrained scale of the relative values and magnitudes of things, right? This is perhaps most famously encoded in the notion of the great chain of being.
So if we kind of just very crudely simplify the pre-modern worldview as this worldview in which everything has a place, everything has some sort of positive value, in other words, starting at zero and going up to God or something like that. And so everything in the world, everything that's real, everything that exists, you know, has some value greater than zero in some sense. And those values are known. They're enforced by traditional authorities. And, you know, they even make a good deal of sense relative to human heuristics about what is valuable and attractive and what's not. And so that can actually work fairly well in a limited way for some time.
But what's interesting about that is you can see it as a kind of suppression of zero in some sense. or it's like what it doesn't quite, what it's not quite, what it's not quite able to intuit is that in fact, the number line goes from, you know, negative infinity to positive infinity. And there is a, you know, smack dab in the middle of that, a unique quantitative value of zero that actually has no value whatsoever. and the reason why I think that this way of thinking about it might be relevant or just useful
heuristically is because it seems to me that part of the catastrophe of modernity as it unfolds, especially for kind of human experience and our ability to process what's happening and to you know, interact with each other in, in at all healthy and sustainable ways. There's this very peculiar symmetry or kind of really chaotic, chaotically cycling, uh, nature to, to intelligence where it really is kind of the basis of all good and the, and the basis of, of much that people call evil. And I wonder if, you know, your idea about zero has something to do with this because in some sense you can think of the pre-modern worldview enforced by traditional
authorities as as keeping a kind of forced lid on precisely that that chaotic cycling around the zero point the liberation of mathematics is kind of the unmooring of uh rationality's ability to anchor itself ethically um it seems to me that the the the pre-modern traditions and especially that you know the world religions um perhaps i have in mind catholicism in particular is is almost you can really read it as precisely um uh one dedicated solution to to that very problem um and perhaps that's why zero is unique if if in fact your hypothesis is right because it sort of makes possible this this chaotically perverse um you know symmetry around around the number line or
something like that where you started off it seems to me it's worth isolating in itself because it is it's super convincing even before you then spin it out into the into the larger picture which is which is this question just about the scale of available magnitudes you know if you if you look at i mean i totally i think this is a really great insight um and um it's obviously uh hugely characteristic of this transition of arithmetical semiotics. You know, if you're using Roman numerals, every new magnitude has a letter. I mean, you run out of letters. Like, they don't even use them all.
You know, exactly as you say, that the range of conceivable magnitudes would therefore be hugely constrained by that semiotech. And it clearly is a characteristically modern phenomenon to have this massive explosion in the range of conceivable magnitudes and something that the semiotech obviously just pushes hard. And I think we really, it's a really reliable index of acceleration. You know, the fact that we now talk about billions and trillions, quadrillions, in a way that's very recent.
I mean, you know, you don't have to go back very far before, you know, billions seemed like an almost preposterous number. You know what I mean? And the notion that you would just be throwing it into casual conversation, that it's something that's just marked on your memory chip, was totally inconceivable. So I think that that's definitely right. I think that there's an imagined, if we can use your language, like great chain of being that involves a relatively limited number of conceptually manageable magnitudes, you know, marked fairly adequately by the letters of the Roman alphabet.
And that is just blown to pieces into this screaming cosmic immensity that the new numbers open for us. Yeah, I guess zero is also uniquely abstract, if you think about it. So it might have something to do with a certain opening onto abstraction. Totally. You can't say that strongly enough. I mean, it's the absolute definition of the absolutely abstract, isn't it? So that's, yeah, I can't nod along enough in agreement with that. At a certain point, our technologies for abstraction reach a breaking point where intelligence itself becomes auto-productive, if I understood you correctly.
I mean, well, I don't know. I think that, you know, that actually is a model closer to something like a kind of Kurzweil type historical model. And it's not that I don't think there's much to that, but just at the risk of being really repetitive here, the thing I would really want to emphasize and keep on the table with this, I'm talking about what we mean by the pre-modern, is we're talking about entirely positive inhibitory apparatus. You know, and this should be difficult for us. I mean, in the sense that, you know, in the early stages of control engineering of cybernetics, all the emphasis is on inhibitory apparatus.
I mean, the inhibitory apparatus is just considered, you know, into mid-century, mid-20th century, being obviously what control engineering is about. So the explosive element is systematically themed as pathological, dysfunctional, as disturbance, as some kind of social threat.
And that's why, you know, I'm slightly reluctant to see that it translated into the point as if, you know, there's this long term trend struggling towards getting to takeoff point, you know, as if the historical impetus is basically straining towards this explosive outcome. As if it finally arrives at the capacity for modernity. I mean, this is not the model that I think is realistic. I think it's rather that there is a regime failure that allows modernity to break out.
Okay. That's interesting distinction. That's definitely worth making. So you actually don't see kind of the explosive dynamics of intelligence accumulation over time as a process that begins in the beginning of time. Yes. I mean, look, it has to be said in saying that, that, of course, you only have a sophisticated, complicated inhibitory structure if there's something that you're inhibiting. So, of course, you know, in any complex information system, unquestionably throughout the history of life, there have been, you know, processes of positive cybernetic escape.
And within those fields, appropriate systems of the production of inhibitory apparatus. Right. So it's not that I'm wanting to say that that positive potential is something that only sort of miraculously arrived in modernity. I think, you know, I think I'm quoting Deleuze and Quattari where they say it's the kind of terror that's haunted the whole of history or something of that kind. I think that's totally right. You know, I think that when you're doing this, this concrete analysis of the actual machinery of a pre-modern regime, you're in, you're implicitly looking at the way that it prevents a kind of autocatalytic catastrophe happening in the, in the, under the conditions of that society.
One of the things that I think is really interesting about your work is the way that you really emphasize that critique, as we know it, is more or less the same thing. Or at least this is your argument, I think, if I understand you correctly, that critique is more or less the same thing as capitalism itself. Yes, I think so. And the absolute leap as modern thought, modern philosophy. Yeah. A lot of people today, I think, walk around with a kind of model in their heads in which rational critique and leftism are more or less synonymous. People think of, you know, Marx and the whole the entire tradition of criticizing capitalism as kind of the epitome of applying the human mind to social institutions.
And so a lot of people carry around this kind of natural presumption that rationality and intelligent critique is a kind of natural partner of creating social organizations and projects and institutions to make sort of the irrationality of capitalism more rational in some sense. so you've by by kind of holding this line that you've that you've held and really kind of working on it and killing this ground uh you know quite against the grain of what a lot of people's conventional wisdom is i actually think now it's it's super useful it seems to me that right now
everyone's sort of ideological codes are kind of being scrambled and uh if you kind of have this natural presumption in which we use our intelligence and rationality to criticize the stupidity and insanity of capitalism. That gets short-circuited pretty badly, I think, when you kind of look around. I wonder if you could maybe try to kind of back out this idea a little bit more, or if you could just speak to that a little bit more, I wonder. There's a lot of architecture in the history of philosophy that is basically putting this stuff into place.
I mean, you know, I think the most, the largest recent shift is, again, the joint work of Deleuze and Qatari, where I think that this fusion of the functioning of critique and the capitalist mechanism is really brought together with huge intensity already, very clearly. You know, you can't, when you're reading their account of history and their reading of Kant, they're exactly the same. They're exactly the same things. And obviously, you know, for them, the state is basically the ultimate metaphysical object.
So everything we started with in terms of this whole question of eliminating indispensable nodes, route arounds, all of this kind of thing plugs straight onto that. Like, you know, the state is that historical element that presents itself as the indispensable node, the great hub, the supreme object. And in that way is actually the material and historical incarnation of metaphysics as a kind of materialized social problem from the Deleuze-Guattari point of view. But then I think you can go back also, you know, before that, definitely.
I mean, in my sort of graduate education, I was lucky to sort of have some very smart Marxist teachers. I probably shouldn't name them because it will probably not do them any favors right now if I did. But the notion of a Kant capital complex was something that was totally in play for these people already in the late 1980s. I mean, and so far before that, that's just where I came across it. And so obviously, if that's the reference, then the dominant question is all about, you know, the overcoming of Cantonism is exactly the same philosophical task as the overcoming of capitalism as a socio-political task.
And I just want to say this was very explicit for them. I mean, it's not that that requires some kind of later interpretive overlay to make that kind of move. So if I can just say one just sort of appendix to that point. So it's just to say when you're talking about critique and rationality and these various notions, that can obviously be quite nebulous, or they can be very philosophically rigorized. But I think if they're philosophically rigorized from a leftist perspective, then they're probably being rigorized in relation to this notion of what it would be to overcome Kant.
And I don't think that Kantianism itself, except by the most extreme set of intellectual confusions, can be understood as an inherently counter-capitalist mode of intellectual or cultural process. Is it fair to say then that in some sense, one of the reasons that blockchain is so fascinating is because it is sort of this overcoming of Kantianism that is also a certain kind of overcoming of capitalism sort of philosophy in practice? Is that how you see it?
Well, that is how I would expect an articulate leftist to see it. I mean, I would not go that way at all. My position is that the stubborn vindication of Kantianism as the horizon of modern intelligence is the dominant phenomenon. And so, I mean, I see blockchain as being Kantian. I mean, there's obviously some kind of updating that happens through the process of technical implementation. But there's nothing like the kind of overcoming that is seen, you know, in the history of German idealism sort of leading into Marxism.
I just don't see that kind of thing at all. I think that you've got a much more stubborn isomorphism between the actual mechanism of critique and the process of the blockchain. Yes. well I mean who knows what's down the road but it certainly seems to me that it's kind of an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital which and which I think can be translated into
the robustness of these routes around processes. So obviously, you know, why there is a kind of left critique, maybe I shouldn't even use the word critique because I think it might lead to confusion, but the deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to me very rational and coherent and on point, is the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital that makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible. While blockchain is clearly sort of giving, as you said, root-arounds for capital to escape,
it's also undeniably on the side of liberation from control, right? So it's like you with the advent of blockchain, you if you're against blockchain, in other words, you and you want to suppress it and control it and you generally see it as a bad thing, you can't also pretend that you're interested in liberation from control structures. And I think that's a very valuable and quite attractive kind of byproduct of the way that these theoretical notions are getting manifested in the technology.
No, well, I don't think I would disagree with that. But it just seems to me to sort of, I mean, I just assume that, you know, what is seen as the kind of libertarian potential of these technologies and its capitalist potential are more or less synonymous notions. and that the dominant sentiment on the left is that these things are bad and that a language of liberation is the way that capital masks its actual process in a language of emancipation that I had sort of taken from the leftist point of view
is profoundly inadequate. you know, it's not sufficiently collective in its orientation. It's not, it's basically extremely cold in terms of any questions of amelioration of problems of social disadvantage and underdevelopment and all of these kind of things. So, you know, I mean, obviously, I don't see how anyone could disagree that there is a challenge to systems of control.
I would have thought that the question is whether, you know, the dominant political argument that continually comes back is whether certain systems of control are actually required for the collectivization of emancipation rather than it's more Darwinian variants. Some things might surprise me that don't surprise you. I guess perhaps the kernel of insight that was maybe more promising what I said, which is that it seems to me that leftism as a kind of sociological phenomenon that does still characterize the attitudes and behaviors of fairly large numbers of human beings today, it still traffics in kind of the connotations of liberation.
And it seems to me that that is going to become perhaps a prediction that emerges from this conversation about blockchain is that that will become increasingly less and less tenable as the technology becomes more widely distributed. and it will become increasingly hard to deny that leftism is simply, I think as you put it in our last conversation, that leftism is simply the break upon liberation in some sense. Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, that language is, it's not that I've got any problem with it really, except that it just sounds a little bit too easily triumphalist,
you know, from the right side. I mean, I do think insofar as the language of liberation is about the ability to escape and root around structures of control, then that is almost like tautologically inevitable. I mean, I just, I'm not even really seeing a coherent objection. But, I mean, I'm not, as you know, the world's greatest sympathizer of the leftist political orientation. And so I tend to see that the language of liberation in leftist, you know, in leftist rhetoric is often quite sophistical.
You know, I mean, I don't expect a lot of conceptual integrity from it. And I think the thing that blockchain is doing on this level is it just bypasses philosophical and political argument. You know, it's just that people just simply do a route around. It doesn't require some sort of collective affirmation at the barricade or any such thing. So it seems to me the rhetoric around it is in a certain sense very obviously secondary in a way that isn't true of a whole number of other sociopolitical projects
where it seems that the rhetoric and the political phenomenon are much more integrated. Could you say a little bit about how you think blockchain or Bitcoin affects our understanding of time? Because I think you have some particular ideas about that. Is that right? The whole of critique and the whole of capitalism can be translated into a discourse on time and on questions of time. So there's, you know, most famously, perhaps, you know, the sort of Heideggerian formulation of critique that seems to me conservative in its essentials. That's to say I don't think it is a candidate for a post-Cantonism,
But I think it's definitely enriching in the fact that it's quite clear about sort of adding certain insightful formulations. And they tend to be time oriented. So the Heideggerian translation of the basic critical argument is that the metaphysical error is to understand time as something in time. So you translate this language of objectivity and objects into the language of temporality and intratemporality. and I think have equally plausible ability to sort of construe the previous history of metaphysical philosophy
in terms of that now, that critical formulation of what it is to make an error. the basic error then at this point is to try to think time as something in time so that's just to say therefore if it wasn't possible to make some point about Bitcoin and time it would be strange Having already said that Bitcoin is the highest level of instantiation, technologically instantiation of critique, there's also a kind of obligation
that comes with that to say, so what is it saying about time? And I guess my argument is that it's the first serious candidate that we have seen for artificial time. And the context in that that I think has drawn the most interest from people that I've had the opportunity to discuss this with is really to do with Einsteinian relativistic physics,
where, again, the basic sort of gesture that I want to make is in a way a kind of reactionary one of saying there's a kind of revival of this, of a Kantian structure that had seemed to be destroyed, you know. So there's obviously extremely impressive, powerful scientific case for the destruction of time as an autonomous, I won't say dimension, because I think that one has already, in a way, taken a fatal step in saying that. But time, the autonomy of time from space is something that seems to have been destroyed by the notion of general relativity.
And I think Minkowski actually is the character. I'm obviously making no pretenses to technical expertise on the physics side of this, but I think Minkowski's space-time is where you get the most clear mathematical formulation of this new and what had been taken to be sort of modern take on this. And the background to it is very tied up with the eclipse of Kantianism in the late 19th century and early 20th century, where it had seemed that Kant was incapable, through what is seen as being his naive Euclideanism, of dealing with the new geometries that are being introduced in the 19th century and then their application to physics that we see in the 20th century.
So, okay, sorry, there's a lot of sort of preliminaries to this. But there is an absolutely fascinating little exchange on a kind of crypto mail board, I think around about the time that Bitcoin is actually being launched. and I'm reluctant to hunt it down right now on the internet because I think I might flip out the conversation so I'll just gloss it if I can but Satoshi Nakamoto in that exchange says that the system of consensus
that the blockchain is based upon distributed consensus that then later becomes known as Nakamoto consensus, resolves a set of problems that include the priority of messages, global coordination, various problems that are exactly the problems that relativistic physics say are insoluble. um it's it's in relativity physics between two sufficiently distant points in in space it's
it's simply impossible to say uh meaningless to say even which of which of two events comes first you know the notion of simultaneity is lost um time order is lost instead you have space-time coordinates. So from a certain reference frame, there's a certain ordering of events. But from another reference frame, that ordering of events might be completely inverted. So absolute Newtonian time is lost. Newtonian space as well is lost. But the blockchain simply cannot function, if insofar as the blockchain functions at all, it's because that kind of relativistic
structure does not obtain upon it. Were it the case that the space and time of the blockchain were modeled by relativistic physics, then what Satoshi Nakamoto calls the double spending problem would be insoluble. So what I'm wanting to argue is the double spending problem is exactly translatable into the kind of problems Problems of classical physics that relativistic physics describes as insoluble.
Like if the equivalent of relativistic physics within the world of blockchain would be to say you cannot solve the double spending problem. You know, it's, you know, if we believe if we believe Einstein and we believe it's translatable into into the blockchain, then the double spending problem is insoluble. The blockchain, since resolving the double spending problem is the main thing that the blockchain does, there cannot be blockchains. So the very existence of blockchains in some, I think, fascinating way shows that, you know, we cannot use the kind of thinking that characterizes, you know, Einsteinian physics when we're thinking about this world.
Okay, so that's fascinating. So you think that blockchain basically surpasses the relativistic theory of physics? Well, I think you could easily end up saying really ridiculous things. So I would really like to try to be cautious about it. The minimal claim is this, is to say that within an Einsteinian paradigm, the double spending problem is insoluble. So how do we square this stuff? I mean, in a sense, I obviously don't want to say, like, Einstein is wrong and Satoshi Nakamoto proves that. You know what I mean? There's a whole bunch of sort of inflated, weird claims
that the Bitcoin will overthrow modern physics or whatever that could flow from this and I think clearly have to be avoided. So what is the kind of acceptably sober conclusion that is drawn about this? And as I say, I think, you know, I think I can say with some confidence that blockchain preserves a distinction in type between space and time that is not Einstein. Einstein, yeah. Therefore, if we say, well, what do we mean by time? When physicists say, you know, that we've lost that notion, I have to do rejoinder of saying, no, that really is not right.
We still have time and the blockchain tells us that we have time and we have time for something totally different from space. And in the structure of the blockchain, the difference between space and time is carried by the difference between the chain and blocks. You know, every block is spatial when defined in terms of time. That's to say it's a unit of simultaneity. Everything which happens within a block in the blockchain has no differential duration. Whereas blocks, when they're put together into the blockchain, the articulation of the blocks in the chain is a time articulation.
And it's time articulation in a Kantian sense, in a sense perhaps of classical physics. I think that may be less important. It's irreducible temporality in the sense that it's not a spatial dimension. So we still have space and time left. Well, how is it possible that we have space and time left? And the answer to that, I think, is that there is a technical theorization of this that would be rigorously physical. It totally exceeds my competence in every dimension, but I'm able to see what it would look like.
I mean, maybe someone out there could do this thing, which is that the simultaneity of a block, the duration of a block, because Bitcoin has a pulse. It has a tick. It has a kind of a set goal of the average time takes to process a new block. Well, I shouldn't say it's a tick because it's not like a clock. It's not that it's set that you'll get a block every 10 minutes. It's that the parameters of the system are designed to hunt that, like in a kind of almost thermostat sort of sense.
That's the equilibrium. So it has a model of the kind of regularity of these ticks and the difficulty of mining the block is adjustable and is fixed in order to basically keep it going at this rate that is considered ideal. And that rate is a function of the spatial scope of the system. So it can establish a model of time. It still is subject to cosmophysics. So, you know, if I'm mining Bitcoin on Earth and someone else is mining Bitcoin even somewhere close like Mars, then we still have a relativistic problem potentially.
And if you're going to have a blockchain, it must be that the metabolism of the blockchain considered, let's say its tick, is sufficiently expansive that it's able to absorb any relativistic distortion that happens due to the time lag of signals passing around in the system. So because on Earth, the relativistic effects of large distances are pretty tiny. So, you know, you're just talking about a fraction of a second, probably. Then even quite regular turnover of blocks is completely satisfactory,
given the way the blockchain works, that it chunks time into these units of simultaneity called blocks and then stacks the blocks in this absolutely fixed chronological order. The blocks we have are quite long enough. The magnitude of the blocks measured in time is quite adequate to maintain this artificial temporality under terrestrial conditions. But were the blockchain to be fanned out deeper into the cosmos, then the block time would become larger and larger and larger and larger. And I think ultimately, maybe quite quickly, would become impractical.
So you'd be mining a block every six hours or something if you're just extending a blockchain into the inner solar system or if you go out into the outer solar system, And then you might need to spend days before you're allowed to, you know, for the system to tick forward and another block be added to the blockchain. So this is what, so just to, sorry, I know this is not very articulately said, but it's that, therefore, of course, I'm not saying that Einsteinian physics is wrong. I'm saying that the blockchain is in a substantial way autonomous of the most kind of extreme relativistic conclusions of that because we do still have absolute time and the blockchain instantiates it.
But what Einstein, Einstein in physics put constraints on the blockchain in that there has to be this relation between the regularity of block production and the spatial magnitude of the system. And that if you do then fan out beyond the Earth, they could become constraining and has the further implication that at astronomical scales, you probably just have to have a plurality of blockchains. I don't think the notion of the blockchain scales up astronomically for Einstein's reason.
Okay. So, okay. I mean, I think that's incredibly all very fascinating. And I would probably need to listen to what you just said a few times before I fully grok it. But I think I do basically understand you. And I don't think that you're making overly inflated claims about physics. It sounds like what you're really just trying to say is that blockchain is able to technically instantiate something that one would think is not possible if one were thinking according to the relativistic physical model. Yes, I think so. But that relativistic model itself has certain constraints in the fact that obviously, as in a way it knows, it doesn't apply on small spatial scales.
Or at least, I mean, it does apply in theory. There are minute relativistic effects, but they're so minute that there's a technical, an absolutely rigorous, reliable technical fix to relativistic problems on small scales. And blockchain does that fix and therefore restores a notion of time that means, you know, we simply don't have to treat the kind of foundations of critique, the Kantian foundations of critique, as having been obsolesced in this respect. We're under no, I think, intellectual obligation to do that.
without making any comments about Einstein or anything like that even it seems to me that we can say that blockchain is a system that supplies its own objectivity because the blockchain is this kind of self-validating trustless system in which in some sense it's like a technical prohibition on the possibility of lying in some sense. Once you have rational critique and rational critique is out of the bag and everyone's able to critique everything, you actually have some serious problems for the very possibility of rational critique because everything becomes relative to everything else.
And that's a kind of quick and dirty way to summarize the unmooring, the cognitive unmooring that modernity represents. You could kind of understand that on a spatial metaphor in the sense that we can create rational systems. In modernity, up until this point, we can create rational systems that are internally rational, but their relationship to other people or figures or spaces is totally relative and arbitrary. And people can just basically, people can, people can, you know, let's say tell lies, right? And in the most quotidian sense, people can lie and get away with it in some part because when they're caught out locally, they can just sort of move spatially.
You know, they can kind of leave the area in which they're outed as liars, move spatially and be liars somewhere else. In some sense, that sort of spatial relativity, and again, I only mean that in a metaphorical sense, that spatial relativity seems to be a kind of basis on which the cognitive chaos of modernity is possible. But in some sense, you know, if you're arguing that blockchain is artificial time, that at least in some non-trivial, meaningful sense, is able to instantiate itself in a way that is not subject to the relativism that we might expect,
then in some sense, does it not solve the basic problem of – does it not solve the spatial problem of lying and kind of cognitive disorientation that the current state of modernity could perhaps be described as a human being? In other words, within blockchains, you're going to have a perfect technical realization of objective truth. And there's no routing around that within the blockchain.
Now, you can have multiple blockchains, and this might result in something like a patchwork of blockchains, which is actually another kind of avenue of conversation we could very well go down. But you're going to have sort of perfectly objective internal systems. and I just wonder how that feeds back into what what you think about the nature of critique or you know is that like a perfection is in other words is that perhaps a perfection of critique in the in the sense that um just sort of wrap this this long tirade into a sensible punchline is this not the perfection of critique into a state in which lying or spatial displacement
becomes finally non-relative or impossible? I think that when you say about spatial displacement in relation to this question of lying, it's quite strongly analogous to what you then quite rightly end up with in terms of this proliferation of distinct blockchains. I think okay let me just get I think because this is something I think that's like sort of kind of haunted our discussion right from the start and maybe we haven't brought it out very explicitly in terms
of these questions about rationality and critique in its colloquial sense and I think what But, you know, the question that you've obviously been very interested, Justin, of this thing about the ideological valency of this notion of critique and how this applies to left and right. and I think in this context let me at least say test you to see to what a degree you think that this is right that the difference at stake is between a model
predominant on the left which is to do with some that what is meant by reason is really the formation of an intellectual community. Or, you know, you start off with people who have, you know, a disparate series of assumptions or drawing disparate conclusions or inferences. And the process of rationality is one that in a certain sense harmonizes that intellectual community.
Whereas the model on the right is much more open to fragmentation and enduring disagreement and the operation of various kinds of selective processes to resolve the issue. And so obviously the business corporation is the model of this in the sense that you don't try and work out in advance as a society what's the best way to run a business. You allow people to basically try almost anything that they want. And the businesses that work and the ones that don't work end up being liquidated.
And, you know, that selective process is the one that substitutes for a process for the necessity of of an intellectual community. So if that if that if first of all, I mean, I don't know whether you think that that way of articulating the differences is something that is convincing from from your point of view. Maybe I should pause and see. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think it is. In some sense, I feel like a recurring theme perhaps or a recurring implication that I've had a sense of throughout my conversations with you is that it's almost as if technological acceleration is simply going to obviate almost all of the conceptual baggage.
that we use to try and figure out our political situation as human beings. In other words, we have these kind of legacy categories, such as left and right, that are largely just byproducts of certain technological inefficiencies. You know, we need to sort of aggregate decision-making over time. We know we need to aggregate attitudes over time across large spaces. So certain concepts emerge to deal with the fact that we have faulty cognitive baggage. We have tendencies to all kinds of biases. We have tendencies to sort.
We have these kind of basic and faulty cognitive hardwares that we kind of operate on. And for most of modern political history and modern political theory, a lot of the categories that we use really are just really quite inadequate simplifying devices to deal with all of our kind of faulty pieces of hardware or something like that.
But as the rationalization of that technology and the actual construction of technical hardware or, you know, technical systems, combination of hardware and software, as the proficiency of that accelerates, we're just kind of finding that almost all of our concepts are becoming no longer necessary. They kind of just dissolve. And there is just a kind of imminent technical process that is occurring. And it becomes harder and harder to even make sense out of traditional kind of modern political categories. That's something that I think is that that's the kind of thesis that I'm as I'm listening to you, I'm kind of becoming perhaps a little bit more convinced of.
How would you, how do you make sense of the modern, you know, when I say modern, let me say contemporary political atmosphere, which seems to be coming, you know, if anything, more radicalized, more polarized, more heated in terms of the kind of, you know, the weight of these various kind of markers of ideological affiliation. I mean, I'm assuming you don't see any hint of those things, you know, ceasing to obtain in that sort of terrain.
Well, no, not necessarily in the short run anyway, but isn't it sort of an implication of blockchain that capitalism or, you know, the auto development of systemic processes that generate value over time, in other words, are less and less in need of human beings? At all, in some sense. So, I mean, once you kind of combine the idea of artificial intelligence with blockchain, I mean, it's becoming increasingly easy to simply imagine a purely machinic capitalism in which purely, you know, non-carbon-based machines, intelligent machines,
basically have their own kind of global capitalism and increase value on their own over time without any human beings even on the planet. I mean, that's increasingly just, that's almost trivial. That's increasingly almost trivial to imagine capitalism carrying on through artificial intelligence and blockchain as basically every passing generation, human beings find it increasingly impossible to even survive to the point that they're, yeah, that humans are completely bypassed. Is that how you see it or no? I think if we say bypassed, then definitely. I mean, I think there's a gradient of capital
autonomization and that as we, you know, what it is to be advanced in modernity is to be moving up that gradient. So, you know, autonomous machines are the index that is used to say how modern is this? So, yes, I do agree. But in terms of how that will play out ideologically, I mean, I don't know whether you saw, it was passed around Twitter quite a lot, that an article in the New Statesman by an English politician who I think is called John Cruddy here or something like that, about accelerationism.
And what he was basically doing, I mean, I've only read it once, like, fast, but it seems to me his basic thing was to say, look, accelerationism is inherently anti-humanist. You know, even in its leftward variance, it simply can't shake that. That's just essential to it in a way that's irreducible. And even though maybe this was more implicit in his argument, it seemed to me he was saying, look, the left, for this reason, the left cannot use this stuff. You know, it's that really the left has to align itself with a kind of new humanist resistance to these dehumanizing,
autonomizing technological processes. Now that seems to me very plausible. I mean, in terms of like, if I was asked what is going to happen to the left, I think it's going to become increasingly and explicitly and fiercely humanist in orientation. So nonchalance about this, the dehumanizing tendency of these processes, I think will be seen as a marker of right wing ideological affinity. Right. So I think that that's a very reasonable prediction and in large part that basically characterizes what seems to be happening right now. So I think you're on point. I think I would only add to that at least one alternative possibility.
And, you know, I should say very clearly, I'm not necessarily predicting. I'm really just kind of riffing and speculating about possibilities and also indicating what I think is perhaps the most attractive line of thought for people today who are interested in, you know, radical philosophy and thinking as critically as possible about the human predicament at this point in time, especially for people from a kind of left wing perspective. that, as I think you and I both agree, the traditional modern coordinates of which are being rapidly destroyed. But if you do still have an interest in the left-wing tradition,
personally, I think the most exciting lines of thought have to do with leveraging blockchain, to be honest. And I'm especially interested in potentially connecting blockchain to these ideas of patchwork. Because in my view, the most honest and intelligent position for serious kind of intellectual projects with a kind of left-wing flavor, in other words, people who are still interested in the idea of building kind of radical liberatory communities that are... in some part kind of insulated or that transcend the drudgery and oppressiveness that's associated
with market discipline. It seems to me that if you're really into that and you think that there's a way to organize life like that, that is superior and also kind of in engineering terms, possible and and empirically serious then we should be able to build a patch i think uh leveraging the you know the the most state-of-the-art technical possibilities uh to make something like communism a superior form of living that would actually function better than um you know, current, current forms of economic and political organization. And I'm actually fairly, I feel, you know,
I wouldn't put the probability of achieving that very high, but I would probably put it much higher than I think most people who are thinking about this sort of stuff in any kind of mature or serious way. I actually think that it's quite imaginable that a, a kind of communist patch if organized correctly could would actually outperform and out compete um you know more more reactionary flavored patches but i'm also aware that we've been talking for quite a while and i didn't mean to just put a huge provocation on the table uh an hour an hour and 40 minutes in no no that's that's good i mean Yeah, I mean, look, my position on what you've just said is I totally welcome this tendency, obviously from outside.
I mean, I'm profoundly skeptical about the prospects of these, as you say, I think in the most extreme way of describing it, of a communist patch. I mean, you know, I'm not going to be investing in them, but I entirely support the project, you know. And it seems to me that what's here, there's a lineage of, there's a left lineage that should be entirely unobjectionable to the liberal, in the old sense, tradition of capitalistic modernity, which is the tradition of experimental communes, of experimental cooperative organized businesses.
and now, as you say, of experimental left-flavoured blockchain innovation. I mean, I don't think there is any legitimate basis for a right-wing critique of such things being undertaken. There is, of course, much, much room for right-wing scepticism about their chances of success. But, you know, that seems to me an isolable and irrelevant issue, because I'm assuming you don't need you don't need right wing endorsement of these things at that level. You simply need social permission. And I would, of course, hope that social permission will be there and be ever easier to to find for this kind of thing.
it's ironic, but if there's a social permission problem, it's coming from the left. And that's just so bizarre. And that can kind of explain for you why I'm so obsessed with trying to sort of unwind these strange ideological loops. I know it's late for you, and I know we've been talking for some time now, but it's actually quite a natural segue to invoked social permission. maybe you could reflect a little bit or maybe share some of your insights from your experience becoming in a lot of people's eyes quite a pariah figure something that i've always been very curious about is you know when you when you first started getting a lot of condemnation
especially from the left in in in england and you know in the west at least or whatever um you know i'm very curious like were you were you even surprised how much condemnation was generated or or had you already kind of factored that into your model of the world in other words you kind of you were quite conscious of the provocations you were making and the effects that it would have or you were even uh stunned at how kind of offended people were by some of your ideas the model was precisely predicting the level of condemnation that uh that arose because the model i think the the phase of my um of my activity that has generated the the most
kind of thermonuclear hostility is obviously based is on my uh sort of encounter with Mencius Moldbard, and particularly with his basic model that we're dealing with, you know, what he calls the cathedral, is the state church of the supposedly secular West. And that state church engages in entirely traditional modes of cultural policing based upon zealous extirpation of heresy. And all you need to know is, you know, what are the significant heresies of the state of the church
that you're concerned with? And those responses are as predictable as the results from a particle accelerator given a good standard model of the nature of subatomic interactions. I mean, completely unsurprising. And in fact, if surprising, surprising only in that they are so completely and unironically falling into the pattern predicted by their enemies. You know, they are just, in a sense, I think the tragedy of the left, as I've seen it really in the last five years, is the fact that it lacks any sense of what it looks like outside its own framework.
And the fact that it does seem to be so entirely predictable in its set of responses. it your model of the world had already been updated such that you knew saying the things you wanted to say was going to trigger quite a lot of outrage but in some sense you were willing to do that precisely because your model of the world was such that you had really nothing to lose No, I mean, that condemnation was extremely valuable scientific confirmation, as far as I was concerned, of the validity of the mold bug thesis and played a large role in consolidating it, as far as I'm concerned.
now if nothing like that had happened I would have probably had to just dump mold bug in the trash and say you know not nice theory but clearly the world doesn't work like that it's like if you if you actually want to try and figure out the left wing project your your number one immediate enemy is all the people on the left today or at least let's say the people who kind of occupy the word and the associated vocabulary of leftism as a kind of recognized manifestation. These legacy concepts are just so overheated that they really don't
make that much sense anymore. I think you can overdo historical analogy to some extent, But because modernity is a coherent, you know, it's cross-cut by all kind of randomness and complexity and discontinuity. But ultimately, it's a coherent process. And I think it supports, to a considerable extent, cross-historical analogies within the history of modernity. We've made lots, probably this is more my voice, more my vice than yours, but over the course of this conversation. And the one I think that just is hugely, hugely relevant to this, maybe we even talked about it last time we were talking because it is so attractive to me,
It is the, you know, early stages of modernity and the processes of reformation and the interaction of this revolutionary new media system based on the printing press and the traditions of church authority. And I think we're seeing exactly the same. I mean, I think it fits extremely well with what you've just said. I think that there is a church. you know it's it's quite coherent it has a very definite sense of orthodoxy and heresy you know we we know it does you know we can argue about how fragmented or pluralistic or whatever society is but but you know you will get this uh you'll get this language from the left which i'm
which what i will continue to call the left um that it is is based upon the fact that any decent acceptable person will subscribe to this belief and you know this belief is completely unacceptable you know it should be uh no platform suppressed uh maybe you even should be imprisoned for the voicing of of certain you know extremely heretical opinions so of course it is a coherent cultural entity we can see if it was not a coherent cultural entity it could not possibly have any belief in its
capacity for doctrinal policing and we see that it has this confidence of doctrinal policing all the time it's just we're being bombarded with it it's the dominant sort of ideological phenomenon of our age is the crisis of, I would use Moabug's language, cathedral doctrinal policing. And of course, that crisis is being driven by new media technologies that I think are completely unstoppable. And I think that the cathedral in its modern form has roughly the same prospects that the notion of a universal authority of Catholic church had in early modern Europe, like none,
you know, there's, there's going to be wars of religion, the, the, the heresy of, of, you know, heretical thinking is not going to be suppressible. Um, there are questions about how much, and what intensity of violence and conflict and failed policing operations will be required. But at the end of the day, the media system, the technological and media system dictates that there has to be a retrenchment on the part of the established church into a more realistic, defensible position. enclaves, partition of various kinds,
zones of sovereignties, you know, that are based upon an acceptance of fragmentation and diversity and differential regime structures that as yet is not accepted. But I have absolute confidence that that's the trend that we're involved in. Well, Nick, I think I'm going to let you have the last word on that one because I mean, I could talk with you much longer about many more things, but I'm conscious that it's late there and I really don't want to overtax you. So you got to draw along somewhere. I should let you off here. Okay, that's great. That's I've really, this has been great fun, Justin. Best of luck. I've really enjoyed it. And I will even go as far as I say best of luck with your communist blockchain as long as you're not looking for investment.