NCCP 700-216 - The Concept of Acceleration, Session VII

Hello and welcome to the seventh session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. And I passed the mic and camera off of me. Okay, thanks for that, Theo. So I'm hoping that this is going to be, on one level, it's going to be a uh block after our last little block um and we sort of promised last week that it was going to end on a hopefully a philosophical note next week about time and um and uh i i think

intensive quantities and and philosophical issues that are crucial to the discussion of accelerationism but the the theme that's kind of carrying us coming out of this sort of stagnationist discussion that we've been having for two weeks is really side of that and in terms of some of the skepticism that was raised by the people we were talking about in that frame to talk about some of the some of the trends that might lead us to kind of crystallize to some extent what the the impending wave of techno

economic change our next great wave is going to look like and i think as we as we saw even extreme quite you can be quite an extreme stagnationist a pessimist i'll say as it generally is um while still accepting that however feeble there's still going to be some perpetuation of this kind of wave-like dynamic of modernization or industrialization or whatever we want to call it um so i really want to do in my little opening remarks i really want to do two things i want to say a very few little things about that but mostly that's i think something to

um to open up in in discussion um and i also want to introduce a kind of a kind of modular topic um that i want to slot in now because i think otherwise it might just get lost and and i think it is very relevant to the basic course question about the concept of acceleration which which i call um accelerationist trolley problems but but so to get to the first the first thing uh initially I think the question is coming out of the sort of wave theory stuff we've been looking at

How can we begin to envisage an Infrastructure that is to the internet what the internet is to the telephone network and Very quickly this becomes beyond management i think that even in all our combined efforts are only going to lead to certain sort of suggestive clues about this because when you start simply just listing component technologies that all seem sort of viable candidates as something that is coming to maturity in this impending techno-economic wave it's it's huge i mean just

among i suspect a much longer list there's you know quantum computing seems to be about to kind of reach big time nanotechnology which is a long-term thing obviously has huge prospects computational genomics which or there are many other ways to describe this but various kinds of biotechnology that are becoming inherently computational virtual reality finally seems to be about to take off and and i've had people's make convincing cases that it could really be quite huge as a as a communication uh technology and for all kinds of social um a social process is not just as an entertainment medium but for kind of replacing a

lot of uh uh of offline meetings with with very high resolution online forums drone logistics is one i like obviously blockchains is something that people i think very reasonably are talking about a lot people expect intelligent agents of various kinds to just completely go nova very soon i think rather than try and draw all these strands into some kind of um convincing ensemble at this point which which i doubt my capability to do i was going to quote something from um kevin kelly actually from now he's written this book called the inevitable that i have to confess

I haven't yet read but it seems extremely relevant to this topic and I've seen various discussions around it there's a there's a massive sort of set of links and resources associated with this book that I'll I can just put in the sidebar um one of those pieces actually uses a techonomics which is something I like um but he but the first of these links is the one that I thought was a good as just a kind of for our purposes immediately I'll post that separately even though it's on that list it's entitled the internet is still at the beginning of its beginning

and he basically says I won't read the whole of the first two paragraphs because it would take too long but he the first sentence is can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an ambitious entrepreneur back in 1985 at the dawn of the internet you know at that time obviously any.com name you desired was available there's a funny little anecdote about someone realizing that the McDonald's hadn't claimed its its URL and so they they took it themselves and try to give it to the company and McDonald's had no idea what they were trying to do or why they would be interested in that and accepting this gift which I guess must have been worth many many millions of dollars says you

know having started with from 1985 30 years later internet your saturated the apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it among a miraculous abundance? But here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still the beginning of its beginning. It's becoming. If we could climb into a time machine, journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we'd realize that most of the greatest products running live systems in 2050 were not invented until 26 until after 2016. People in the future will look at their holodex and wearable virtual reality contact lenses and downloadable avatars and ai interfaces and say oh you didn't really

have the internet or whatever they'll call it back then and they'd be right because from our perspective now the greatest online things in the first half of the century are all before us all these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy no one told me it was impossible visionary start grabbing to now where with peter uh tyler comes thing the low-hanging fruit the equivalent of the dot-com names of 1984. so that seems to me a fairly obvious um anti-stagnationist uh thesis that kevin Kelly is making I have to say I find it highly convincing that doesn't mean that the kind of economic issues that we were talking about last week especially are simply dispelled and it's

possible for there to be a sort of massive self-propelling technological revolution in the internet while still involving massive cannibalization of value of the kind that we we were looking at last week um it's obviously he ducks the issue i think probably sensibly by saying you know they're calling it the internet or whatever they'll call it back then i think if we're to if we're really envisaging a change as dramatic as he's suggesting then it's very hard to imagine that there will not be some a new name there i mean we don't call the internet the telephone network um and

it seems to me that the change that we're talking about of a kind of ai saturated uh net is is at least as profound as the as the change from sort of telecoms to packet a packet switching network but I but I think I'm gonna I'm going to just leave that as a set of question marks I expect this is the most the thing that we mostly going to talk about and I think the sort of symptom of this a lot is a there are a whole bunch of symptoms I think one of them is the fact

that there seems to be this kind of re-catalyzation of accelerationism that that we're seeing and this is a kind of this course itself I think is a sub symptom of that I think this course is something that's kind of called called into being by the fact that obviously there's this this drag that's pulling pulling accelerationist themes back into the the public domain I think it's not no exaggeration to say but another symptom is this very large discussion that is that is seen on all the challenging topics that come out of a phase transition in the history of

automation and this is huge and here I'm sort of wandering I think almost automatically into another into another of the courses that that so I've done with some of you guys which is this sort of anthropol material and and starting from the basic fact that that industrialization in general and computerization in particular is driven by its techno economic in by process of substitution for human labor and that produces this full among other things

it produces a full threat spectrum that at one extreme has a whole bunch of questions last week we talked about luddism I think these these luddism questions are hugely bad everyone I don't think that's controversial to say lots and lots of discussion at the moment about the threat to employment that that's coming from the sort of robot revolution that where that is already underway and obviously at the far the far dramatic extreme of the of the threat spectrum there are kind of whatever Skynet scenario type things you know where the whole human species in visages itself as somehow being replaced

or substituted in toto by these mechanical systems and I raised that very very briefly just as a kind of a transition to this to this second little more to the topic that I want to to get to that there's a whole part of the reason that accelerationism I think is important it connects up to a whole series of ethical and political discussions that are driven by these kind of concerns obviously from my point of view that concerns traditional concerns about capital on one hand and concerns specifically with a technological focus about these new machines are basically the same so I mean I'll accept that

that's a a controversial thesis but it's it's one I'm stuck with personally um and for some people these get obviously very intense on on either of these kind of interconnected dimensions and you know everyone knows that the political discussion can get very intense but also the kind of threat discussions in a narrow sense can can get very intense for people who think that the human species is existentially threatened by them it would be surprising if they didn't become intense um and why i think that this is a particular concern for accelerationism

is not just because accelerationism touches upon these same topics although it obviously does absolutely centrally but because i think that part of what is the concept of acceleration is something that um implicitly reconstructs our sense of ethico-political dilemmas fundamentally and that's because what is normally if you look at a a uh if you look at the trolley problem as a kind of parodic but I think still helpful kind of model of a kind of

ethical political dilemma an attempt obviously to formalize it to a degree that that can seem ridiculous but at the same time is also in a certain sense and it's hard to kind of dismiss out of hand what is going on there or to say it's really not that kind of modeling is not pertinent to the sort of decisions people are discussing when they're engaged in any kind of ethical political conversation um what's missing from a trolley problem is the time factor um if i could actually at this point just quote a short paragraph from something i myself

said somebody it's not appeared in the public domain now but I might not be able to formulate this more clearly and it so I'm being lazy in doing this but I say in the context of acceleration and the problems it poses for the purpose of illustration it might be helpful to consider an accelerationist trolley problem, extracted from the idealist illusory form of a timeless dilemma. The stout innocent stranger by one side is no longer to be weighed contemplatively against the lives of some half dozen orphans who might be saved by his sacrifice.

rather unless the fat guy dies right now there won't be time to make a decision of any kind we have scarcely begun to formulate the problem in these terms whether philosophically or politically it would be surprising possibly even miraculous if there was still time to do so so what I'm trying to say with this with this with this issue is that the time factor goes missing in these in these discussions like it's a completely there are people in the past who I think have raised it in a very interesting way that perhaps the the most striking example being Paul Virilio who for whom this really was a

a central concern and his his deep skepticism and actually kind of spiritual terror of technology was precisely because he thought the sheer speed and of accelerating technological processes they would squeeze out the space of human decision making and you know he gives he gives examples of you know recent wars you know that he quotes an English in the Falklands War who basically is expressing a kind of trauma at the fact that the sheer speed of the military process that

he was confronted with was simply making decision-making impossible. and it seems to me that obviously this has to be a part of any conversation that people are going to have about these threats whether mundane or sublime precisely because they are technological threats and and as part of that technological process one these extreme quasi consistent acceleration it must be the case that the the space of decision itself is under threat by these processes that

means that there is a that there is a transcendental threat and not merely an empirical threat the empirical threat is there's some very serious problem that requires attention the transcendental problem is the possibility of attention itself is being technologically annihilated and you know one only has to sort of track these these curves up to a certain point to see how this will become a completely inescapable essential dimension of of these problems and therefore it seems to me that this is the this is the message that

accelerationism has to inject into all of these into all of these discussions whatever else it might have to say whatever else it might sort of think or contribute to these more kind of empirical dimensions of issue the transcendental contribution it makes is to say do not think that you will have time in the decision process that you are envisaging and this will obviously cascade down into much more concrete um institutional questions about how rapidly decision making is possible within certain contexts and whether the absolute urgency

of decision making will itself drive certain kinds of political perhaps psychological processes um and and be a factor in in the sort of reconstitution of the sort of political fabric just not because people necessarily have any strong first order preference for certain type arrangements but that only certain kinds of arrangements are able to be rapidly adaptive enough to even be relevant to the problems that they're trying to tackle and that and that certain perhaps far more attractive modes of human institutional organization would simply be too slow to address the kind of

problems that they're envisaging so yeah I think that's I think that's me done with monologue phase and I'll try and catch up with sidebar material my sidebar was truncated by the my computer fashion Yeah. So Theo, I don't know, do you want to kind of turn your question into something verbal? I don't have much more to add to it. I'll just say it out loud for the recording. But

It was a why even call it decision at this point if there's no time to calculate consequence. And I see this tying into this whole question of people trying to resuscitate this notion of agency when it seems to me that resuscitating agency doesn't grasp the scope of the problem. Because you can resuscitate agency or acknowledge agency and still have competitive arm races. Or, as you're suggesting, the inability to think through the consequence.

Yes, I think at a minimum that. I mean, I think that the reason that I think the trolley problem is good and why is because it totally It's a it's a concrete illustration of decision isn't it like decision which is obviously something that I think everyone Is at least accepting as a topic of discussion? Whatever skepticism they might have about it is the fact that there is more than one track things can go down and that however one is conceiving agency minimally um the the trolley can be can be sent down to alternative tracks and so you're weighing the consequences you know of of it going down one track or the other track introducing perhaps

factors of like how much it would cost to divert it down one track or the other track these kind of these kind of factors and at the point we simply said look they were just there's you know this if decision was totally annihilated be there would simply only be one track and and even if people might want to end up there it's not going to be that people will arrive there without controversy but controversy takes time um and the notion that there is a kind of an atemporal space of decision that can precede the actual switch of the of

the track or the other track is obviously something that I think acceleration is compelled to call into question I mean there's a going back to Theo's point about why even call it a decision from the perspective of political philosophy, I would say that it's basically it's the purest kind of decision what you're describing here. Look at, for example, Carl Schmitt's theory about dictatorship. The idea is that the state is often confronted by these conditions of absolute urgency in which it can't make decisions fast enough and so it needs to appoint what Schmitt calls a commissarial dictator who can then make decisions as fast as possible. And I guess you could even link

it up to to batai's theory of sovereignty as being unknowing that this is actually the purest form of decision making is the one where you have to do it instantaneously without knowledge of what's going on almost this is something that yeah it's an addendum i guess but interesting no no i don't think it is an addendum i think it's like you know i think there are various kind of uh threads to this but but one of the the that is certainly at least as fundamental as any of others i think is precisely the one that you're on um in the i think the schmidt reference is extremely good and and you know the wider question is you know does accelerationism is what is the

uh mode of of of linkage or engagement of accelerationism with some of the kind of heated um the heated sense of political crisis that that i think people can generally accept that we're immersed in at the moment we're totally tied up with what you've just said that that the demand the the acceleration driven demand for certain types of extremely uh rapid response executive agency are kind of promoting political trends that people find deeply disturbing because i think it is obviously the case that you know if we if we take it from the other side

you know democracy is an extremely complicated multifaceted term for sure and there's lots of different way things that could be emphasized in talking about it but it seems to me that one of the things that is very very deeply embedded in the notion of democracy is a certain kind of procedural languor you know that you know to go through the proper democratic procedures however they're conceived to do with consultation and certain types of feedback and you know a kind of processes is idealized as a kind of on the one hand educational and consultative and then providing a kind of feedback of opinion through some mechanism from the public into the political

process all of this uh circuitry this democratic circuitry is um time structured and it seems to me extremely hard to imagine someone denying that the urgency of dilemma of exactly the kind that you were just talking about is not in some sense essentially anti-democratic in its implications that what some way or another um that kind of urgent demand for decisions cannot but short-circuit democratic processes and obviously that happens in the in in the least

in the least sort of uh the way that happens that that people are used to and therefore is in a sense perhaps the least horrifying to people is just the fact that that through some kind of subsidiarity or whatever that low level agents corporations um individuals are delegated the the competence to make as much decision to as much decision making as possible because if they were not you know the the overall social process would just take too long you know there's a kind of there is that level of structural non-democracy just in having a decentralized pluralistic

uh polycentric social order that you can say is already uh an expression of a certain kind of imperative to urgency and decision making but but there's i think in our contemporary world a much more scary way that is that is coming to the fore perhaps more associated with with the kind of you know directly associated with the schmittian question which is just that is it a threat is acceleration as a sort of historical process intrinsically threatening to democratic institutions And it seems to me very probable that that is true. I think it's worth articulating Schmitt's argument on this fully, because this is precisely the problem for him,

except for him what you describe as Lange is actually characteristic of what he calls liberalism rather than democracy. It's the kind of parliamentary procedure, it's people talking to each other, it's the Rechtsstaat, the state of law, of rules and so on. so on. But democracy, Schmidt argues, is actually something which is radically different to this. And in the age of mass politics in which you get this kind of sense of urgency which you talk about, then the tendencies of democracy which are anti-liberal become more and more intense because the final form of democracy for Schmidt is the plebiscite. It's people making instantaneous decisions. And the person, the executive authority that can manage that best is not the parliamentary country state, it's not something like America, it's the dictator, it's the sovereign dictator

who can kind of represent the homogenous people in one point and make decisions which command popular approval. Because Schmidt draws this all the way back to the Germanic tribes, he says the king was acclaimed by the people, that's the pure form of democracy, it's kind of, it's a kind of irrational eruption constantly going on which is very very fast and kind of exceeds the capacity of parliamentary decision-making in the way that you talk about it. I mean, that's a very... Sorry. I was just going to say that there's a good... There's obviously a very good recent precedent because you had, obviously, Brexit, which was, I suppose,

your sort of instantaneous decision, popular decision. But then you had the... the sort of the times where it went up to the High Court and then to the Supreme Court and you had people trying, you know, rather transparently and you can support them or you can oppose them. but trying to sort of use the machinery of the state, you know, the constitution in the small C, dicey and British sense to try and sort of either thwart it or delay it or whatever else. I'm not sure. I mean, I think what Vincent's saying is right.

I think we tend to, and there's a big tendency with just thought to associate democracy and to sort of categorize all sorts of things that we have alongside democracy, yeah, but that aren't necessarily democratic. or you know and and in that instance you know you you could argue that the they were sort of firmly those sort of that machinery was was set up firmly in opposition to to a sort of the an eruption of democratic will i mean it was just an aside it was because it was just uh no no but it is a really interesting of extremely complex and um slightly sort of bedeviling question there's actually

i mean i sorry i won't go down i've been talking a lot anyway but just very quickly on this on this on the usage of liberalism and democracy because obviously i think you know in that anglophone context the essential content of liberalism as it is classically used is delegation of decision making I would I would have thought you know it's like it's the independence of low-level low-level actors in the social in the social system that defines it as liberal so it seems to me that this kind of schmidian continental usage of it is is very revealing in

the sense is it it really says it really explains why liberalism is not an ideological factor in Europe at all or or to a negligible extent in any sense that it would be understood in the English-speaking world and whether one wants to then you know the defense one may or may not put towards proper parliamentary procedures and debates and all of this kind of thing I think that all of that is highly tangential to liberalism in its anglophone usage and its traditional anglophone music but maybe that's maybe that's more controversial and then i had expected it would be well of course for schmidt liberalism is is english basically he derives this story from

the history of the english constitution for him the apex of liberalism is the 18th century english parliamentary state in which you have these representatives who can talk to each other without depending on special constituencies. They represent the people in some sense, but basically they're trying to get at the truth in parliament. And for Schmitt, and I think he's probably correct in this, this picture was overwhelmed by the advent of mass politics, when you get these people in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, David Lloyd George, who Max Weber calls the dictator of the electoral battlefield, people who very very vehemently represent special interests that for Schmidt is where liberalism stops and when democracy begins

and the contradiction between these two images one of them the kind of 18th century style parliament and the other being the mass politics of the 20th century that's the heart of the contradiction between liberalism and democracy for him right yes but I mean is that I would only sorry not going to just turn this into this is too big a thing to to to be handled here really but you know it seems to be essential that in the anglophone world things like property rights within the liberal within the liberal framework are simply not objects of legitimate political discussion

I mean, as soon as you move to a point where these kind of basic structures of agency and economic sovereignty, you know down to an individual level are matters of political debate at that point one has left liberalism and the democratic uh the democratic age um so you know i i'm just saying i you know to define democracy as what is happening in parliament seems already to me a kind of deeply questionable because because there's a sense where the only thing

that should be happening in Parliament from a strictly liberal point of view is the limitation of government agency as such yeah I mean it goes into a big question over the meaning of the term liberalism because liberalism is a very very fuzzy term in intellectual history and it basically it emerges I think at the end of the 18th century basically to describe aristocrats that being liberal is being like an aristocrat in England and then it kind of transforms in in very interesting ways until basically the modern narrative of liberalism emerges in the cold war retroactively to kind of summarize a whole bunch

of things which people in the 19th century wouldn't have recognized as being liberal. There's a great article on this by someone at Cambridge, Duncan Bell, which I could link in the sidebar if people are interested in. Well, I'm sure that would be good. Yeah. I'm also wondering, oh, sorry, someone else can talk to me. Let's just, where does the urgency come from?

Because we talked earlier, like right at the start about this concept of . Hey Adam, I think your mic isn't working that well. Is that any better? Yes, that's good. Yeah. So we talked about roundaboutness in economics and the path of technological improvement being this sort of process of investment and then rounding back in a way that is not a linear path essentially, right? so it's sort of essentially slow at the beginning um so where where does the urgency for the um

acceleration is trolley problem coming from because because these most disruptive leaps are inherently sort of roundabout leap that same sense yeah no this is great question i think and it should have been i think a topic last week already because i think you know what's what you're talking about partly there is about things um things being fluid or almost in this dowry sense behaving like water like you know i think the great example of this that i find really helpful is it is a military one about how um you know shocking everybody the germans broke trench warfare just before their

collapse at the end of the first world war with these these stormtroopers and and the way that these stormtroopers uh their tactical doctrine then became the model for the sort of you know for everyone who was paying attention who could do the same thing i mean the whole american military has just been obsessed with with what was achieved there which was you know to put it in a very very crude nutshell um by delegating massive amounts of uh initiative down to ncos you know and and low-level officers and they were told to like respond to circumstances as they found them

and move forward in whatever way seemed uh optimum given local conditions so so the higher levels of the command system were just simply abnegating their command control responsibility over these guys really and saying you know we we have to trust you who know what the hell's going on at the ground to make your own decisions locally in order to kind of advance optimally and therefore the the strategic effect is like water you know rather than having these rigid pre-programmed military maneuvers you know if people come to an obstacle they move around it they you know so roundaboutness is is kind of involved in this thing it's the fact that you know just a little

repeat if you come to an obstacle go around it but the effect is obviously accelerative in a sense that rather than getting stuck rather than the whole thing being seized up by maybe the kind of you know the single greatest obstacle of the whole um evolution is going to be the one that grinds everything to a whole the people will find opportunities they'll find cracks and fissures and ways of moving forward and being able to exploit local opportunities and the whole overall effect will be an acceleration and debt and it was devastating the effective you know that these trench lines that everyone had thought were completely impregnable suddenly these german

attacks were just flowing through them and and and completely uh breaking out of the of the deadlock um so what i'm saying about that is that even though it looks like you know i totally think you're right to say yes look isn't this kind of not going as the crow flies doesn't that look like something that's the opposite of acceleration i think that is kind of an illusion and the whole point of roundaboutness really is that it's a process of optimization and therefore acceleration that appears that appears to be a retardation and i i'm sorry i just see one more thing about this

and just take it back to its simplest example and you you know you've got your primitive hunters whatever and they're faced with this and they're faced with this question do i go out and try and strangle a rabbit with my bare hands or do i spend a day making some hunting instrument that will therefore improve my efficiency tomorrow when i go hunting and if it normally takes two days to hunt a rabbit but having sacrificed a whole day to make this tool you immediately go and kill two rabbits on the second day you've obviously very quickly accelerated your rabbit hunting process you know what i mean even though you've done it through this roundabout production and even though in the most straightforward sense of of the time structure

of the thing you've actually just delayed the start of the actual hunting process by some significant amount of time and i think that that is the technological story in a in a nutshell you know you you you introduce a kind of set of power looms and artificial mechanisms in order to do textile production it obviously there's a certain there's a time lag implied in that because it's a roundabout process but it so massively accelerates the production process that quickly it demonstrates itself to be accelerating and i would say that this quickly is something that become that is probably itself historically sensitive in that you know the cycle that in which

roundaboutness becomes it immediately pays off at least hypothetically is itself something that is uh subject to an acceleration process so i i just want to hop in here because this question of like uh do you make the tool that hunts more efficiently or do you just go out and strangle the rabbit immediately just brings us back to this question of decision again um yes or or or doesn't it um no i think it does for sure yes it's a model decision the model economic decision right i'm not so i mean on this topic i'm not sure this is exactly what you mean but

why is decision necessarily a constant in this? Or isn't decision-making itself something that could be transformed in a way that is kind of difficult to conceive of right now as a result of innovations in computational genomics or quantum computing or something like that? I mean, like, whoa. Could people speed up their decision-making process? Is that... Yeah, basically. Yeah, no, I think that that's a crucial question. And it's tied up. You know, Elon Musk has this whole thing about trying to kind of reconfigure our brains

with this neural lace idea, which he says is necessary to keep up with AI. I think it was extremely close to... But obviously the counter to this, or one of them, there's there's i think it's a crucial issue that has to be and will be raised in this in this framework one of the responses is what is is not that process of modifying the decision making process not itself a process of dehumanization that's taking place you know is it is not everything there's a there's a certain humanistic responses like is not everything being conceded at the point that you say we have to reconfigure our own most intimate ethico-cognitive processes in order to cope with the historical trend which i'm sure

could be deeply disturbing to certain to certain commitments that people might have Sort of partially on this topic of speeding up the possibilities of decision making, I'm not sure where this goes empirically, but sort of from a transcendental perspective, I find it really interesting that there's sort of a spatialization of the temporal moment or instance of decision that's sort of like repeatedly happening here, particularly as soon as you consider like having to make a rapid decision or a decision that's faster

than you're able to process its ramifications. Like, I mean, you're the military doctrine of, like, you know, local circumstances of the individual person in this sort of, like, locus or environment, like, that they are looking at the circumstances of, and then having to decide purely on that basis, as opposed to this sort of, like, presupposed field of consequences. Because, like, how we judge the consequences of things and, like, how we make this decision is like in a general way it's never been systematic like it's never been something that we have um an integral pro an integral process of how we do it like i mean that's the whole thing consequentialist philosophy and the decision problem you can never really estimate you know

the the maximum utility for all people on earth of a particular action and um i just sort of wonder if we're not getting to a point like especially with this takeoff and intelligent agents that everybody's expecting over the next few years if we're not getting to a point where we we develop like a prosthetic a generalized prosthetic faculty for decision-making an estimation of consequences like see a space in which you have this much space right now to decide or to preempt or to affect circumstance in that space the shape and volume of that space is something that's constantly changing on the basis of information that like our you know native neural faculties are not able to process by themselves but we've now we

now develop like this this integration with like putting putting these information flows together in terms of a space of decision right yeah I mean I'm like attempted actually Jake here to kind of crudify what you're saying a lot which is probably going to cut off kind of what you think is all the most interesting parts of it and just crop it back first of all to this question of locality that I think is really huge because obviously like you know you can see just from these kind of Einsteinian issues almost I think literally strictly Einsteinian issues that that that the demand the urgency of decision shatters space doesn't it it's like take take this obvious example of this HFT

trading where people are set up right next door to the stock exchange with these kind of laser beam um communication structures that means that you know given sort of uh light speed they're they're within a tolerable uh temporal distance of the information that they're dealing and they can make their decision effectively, that is, transmit it back to the stock exchange in a tolerable duration. And it's simply not possible for people to compete with them at all to actually enter the arena of making those kind of economic decisions if they're not actually strictly localized

by the stock exchange and hooked up with kind of light-speed photonic communication devices. so so you know there is obviously that level of like the space-time crossover um that i think is just like totally strict like that and and and has all kinds of political spin-offs because it's obviously means that insofar as the social totality is considered as something socially distributed it is essentially cut out of these particular processes of decision it will only learn about what has been decided or its peripheries or the you know if the peripheries

define the wavelength of the social organism taken as a whole they they will only they will only discover later you know belatedly what has actually been decided yeah I think the HFT and I mean James said this as well I think the HFT thing is like a perfect and fascinating example because like on the one hand you know you see this localization this extremely strict localization that occurs but what drives that localization is is sort of the search for a continuum right between like to maximize to arbitrage away like the tiniest differences in price between two exchanges and so like physical localization is driven by a search

process for abstract continuity or like absolute consistency between different far-flung like locations or prices in terms of you know those prices being matches arbitrage is always getting rid of those differences and like similarly with locality and warfare at the same time as you're seeing this like focus on the individual low-level commanders OODA loop and decision in response to local circumstance the purpose of that is to create like continuity for the whole military organization's control of micro circumstance and you see all this like you know network soldier like the the squadron you know functioning as a single many fingered hand kind of thing and it seems like those constantly are going together like the shattering and locality in order to create some sort of abstract continuity

which is again this sort of like abstract spatialization kind of thing yeah so by an abstract spatialization i'm wondering what you think is the relation about abstract space and like concrete physical space and and i'm by concrete physical space i you know for these purposes defining it like in einsteinian terms as that which given the speed of light necessitates temporal delay that under certain technological circumstances becomes significant yeah i mean it's a kind of like i think of frame drag like frame of reference drag whenever you experience like when you're acceleration gravity something like that um

the two frames of reference, like the one that's static and the one that's accelerating away, are getting dragged apart in terms of latency in their clocks or the difference in their clock time that they show. And so if we see these points of acceleration where sudden low-level conflict breaks out or something like that as a kind of frame drag, then it's sort of like, it's the problem of standardizing clocks across many accelerating frames of reference that might be accelerating in different directions or different ways of respect to each other and are trying to solve this Poin Carre problem that you pointed out of standardizing your clocks at these great distances at a relativistic level. It reminds me just loosely of one of my favorite problems

that I ever got, learning physics early on, which is who hears the ball hit the bat first at a baseball game the viewer 500 miles away on the tv or the person sitting in like the first row in the stands and it turns out that like pretty much anywhere uh in the tv network it's the tv viewer it's you in your living room a thousand miles away who hears it before the person 500 way in the stands yeah yeah that is interesting yeah definitely yeah very germane I mean do you see like this sort of like that is kind of what you're going for in terms of the the relativistic Thinking issue like these different frames of reference. I Don't know. I mean this last example is is is obviously tantalizing in the sense that you you can say

That it's a kind of there's an arbitrage opportunity between the speed of sound and the speed of light and that you could sort of transpose that into a political framework and say you know for a certain moment that you have some sort of verbal political procedure in a centralized political organ that was then being you know been swallowed into a into a kind of a electromagnetic mediascape and exactly the the kind of process that you've just referred to would mean that for the for just an instant in sort of socio-political time there's this opportunity to massively expand

the scope of like democratic simultaneity you know that the the the speed of verbal exchange within the concentrated political body is suddenly actually comparable to that of the entire distributed social body because of this because you know one's happening at the speed of sound and the other's happening at the speed of and the speed of light but it seems to me that that is a very peculiar moment um and you know to whatever extent it was enjoyed i mean perhaps it was enjoyed that you know perhaps there was a certain moment of democratic efflorescence that that um that reflected that you know and you know the the distance between the difference between a time

you know at which you would hear about decisions that have been made in your political organs by people traveling on horseback you know and therefore the kind of geopolitical fragmentation that was inherent in that was was neutralized momentarily but i think the thing is that when everything is moved on to the electromagnetic spectrum then you lose that you lose that difference um so you know nothing is happening live you know no one cares about anything that's happening live it's it's irrelevant everything is happening in cyberspace and cyberspace is is is fragmented by um these relativistic

considerations you know at a certain i mean you know i do think when we get back to the hft thing it's the most crucial example that we can we can see this kind of um absolutely radical return of locality in the fact that you just can't afford to you can't afford the relativistic time lag that would be involved in a distributed commercial in a certain respect like like there's a this John smart guy's got a really interesting thing where he says that eventually artificial intelligence has to try and collapse everything into black holes because if you're not actually

crushed in a black hole the the relativistic disturbance of integrative thought becomes too great to be tolerable and so even what we would consider negligible spatial distances become these these forms of certain intensity of intelligence become these massive impediments to cognitive integrity that are completely intolerable and I think we are seeing the germ of that in this particular case. Yeah definitely because I mean what counts as negligible space is so is standardized against a certain rate you know I mean a negligible space like

becomes non-negligible to the point that you accelerate so much that that time difference you know that is caused by that spatial interval is significantly different in terms of your like basically your computational cycles per second exactly yeah it wasn't oh yeah the the democracy thing is really interesting because you could kind of see i i think there's you could see that the mass audience advertising based like televisual politics that you know starts like arguably with JFK and then kind of reaches its ascendancy with the last couple electoral cycles as arbitraging this like incomplete cybernetization of democratic decision making. So that like really like what is getting piped out instantaneously rather than with a horse to everybody?

Well, it's the king's speech, you know, that everybody is now seeing what decision like individual political preferences about this or that policy are only spreading by, you know, comment thread chat room word of mouth like in the same ways more or less that they always have and it's that difference that's being exploited but with like you know e-voting like what i think of as demarchy i don't know if like here in the real world demarchy means like a mass e-voting system where everybody votes on every policy they want to but obviously i'm thinking of revelation space and the demarchist yeah yeah um which you know the problem with that or the problem posed to that has always been the attention costs are too high. So like, you know, how do you, how is everybody actually going to vote on all of these things all the time, even if they have

access to the ability to do so, which again, like brings back this intelligent agent, like, you know, your, your smart assistant who can effectively model what you would want to, you know, vote for out of these policies, and then does it for you and only pings you, you know, for a for an actual decision if it's highly novel you know if the model says like i'm not sure enough what the what the citizen would actually want to decide yeah yeah that's a that's a that's a sort of orthogonal issue which i i totally agree is there for sure but i mean there's also the i think the localization problem is additive to that like you know even if through some weird form of

ai supplementation one had effectively infinite attention capacity it would still be the case that in generalizing a political process across and across space you would be putting a certain durational structure on it that might be completely inadequate to an urgent problem so I mean if there was a general trend to the increasing urgency of problems it would tend necessarily to drain out political authority from widely spatially dispersed political entities you know whether in even more in orbit I guess then then see yeah

definitely it seems like there's this huge bifurcation and in one direction it's towards the rapid response team as like the paradigm of of executive agency and on the other hand you know maximally fragmented you know micro political micro decision on the other and it's like who decide who or what decides the split you know like that maybe it's like the ultimate mass political questions here is like where do you have this junction between the demos and the rapid response team the emergency management infrastructure yes yes yes I mean I think Vincent's totally right to say this is a it does connect very much with these schmittian problems but yes sorry adam yeah i was just going to say the the example of uh

you know infantry tactics which you brought in before i like i was trying to look for a good quote on it but i couldn't find it but a u.s marine doctrine based on the same stuff like in the absence of other orders, marine units do, they follow a basic sort of hill climbing strategy. First is literally find higher ground and the second is establish comms. So the second is get back in touch with the larger group so you can share information and be part of this larger organism that is able to take advantage of centralized information from the whole battlefield and not just your

localized sort of space so like this trade-off or this constant aspect of communication back to the center and the recentralization of information still seems critical yes relevant For sure. So even as a decentralized entity, it's a kind of sense organ as well as a An executive organ, but yeah, sorry John. Yeah, I wanted to share a little story along these lines. So in the Landis book war in the age of intelligent machines because he's very interesting in Lowering decision-making thresholds in this book and he tells the story of the sort of Americans

grease monkeys who were able to work on their tanks and their jeeps, you know, spontaneously in the field and get them re-operational just by this kind of know-how that they brought in to the army versus the sort of, like if a German tank broke down, they had to sort of send an order into the German high command, send out an engineer. It took days and days. And, you know, he talks about this as one of the reasons why the Americans won the war. But I was thinking, you know, then alongside of this, you know, imagining sort of like Alan Turing working in, you know, alone or with a team of seven people in Britain, sort of fighting the same war at a different level. And the kind of dialectics of this matter that we're talking about, you know,

there's a narrative where Turing could say, I won the war, right? Or on the level of the field, the local decision making could say, well, the grease monkeys won the war. You know, I don't know where this all adds up but there's something there I think yes yes there's an anecdote in the in the Turing movie I think it was there which I thought was really was really germane to this which which is obviously this huge paradox of intelligence that that they found you know they they they broke their enigma codes and they got this German signal I think it's about bombing Coventry

actually wasn't it and and so they took this to the government and said oh you know we found out this information is going to be that they're going to be a massive bombing raid on Coventry and the the government response and I think it was actually mediated by one of the best characters is it's very very cold sort of intelligence experts is that we can't do anything about it because if we if we take any kind of make any kind of response to this information we are demonstrating that we've broken the code and so we're sacrificing our whole position of sort of informational leverage in order to just for this one off tactical benefit of saving people from being incinerated by this bombing

way and I think the point of relevance to this is the fact that that decision is obviously being made super locally isn't it so your grease monkey in the in the field is not being they're not in the loop at all about the fact that this collective social decision has made been made to let a town be bombed to pieces in the interests of the greater good and the reason for that it's not exactly the same as the reasons it is perhaps connected but it's not exactly the same as the reasons we've been discussing but it's still I think very related to the point that you're making like this thing well you could say who won the war but

there's also this kind of democratic question isn't there about who's involved in war who's sharing in the decisions that are being made in a war or you know, so for sure your grease monkey gets to decide to just do whatever they want to the engine of their tank without anyone interfering with that. But at the same time, they're completely excluded from these questions of strategic significance. Yeah. That seems like a great example of sort of like roundaboutness of preemption that Adam was talking about, like the Coventry bombing that is. You're giving up a certain amount of prerogative in the present in order to maintain longer

term, a higher level of prerogative in the future. That's just the perfect example of decisional roundaboutness. right yeah or like the the movie you know which is highly dramatic and everything in this regard just the construction of the touring machine itself as a process of roundaboutness there was all these attempts to shut it down and it's taking too long and you're not producing results right yes totally yeah no I mean I'm pretty confident that any any technological process is going to give you that sort of narrative you know the drama of technology is precisely that isn't it um you know as exactly as you say in this case it's taking ages there's a

lot of resources when are we ever going to see this it's you know there's an opportunity cost every day that you're devoting resources to this thing that isn't yet working um but obviously the dramatic turnaround is the fact that the advantages that you get once it does start working so overwhelm the cost that it makes a mockery of those previous chronological and economic calculations. The intersection of military decision making and democracy reminds me of an infamous quote from Max Weber which I just wanted to throw out there he said this to General

von Ludendorff who was one of the generals who led Germany during World War One explaining democracy Weber said in democracy the people elect a leader in whom they have confidence and then the elected leader says shut up and obey people may no longer meddle in what he does afterwards they can sit in judgment and if he has made mistakes to the gallows with him. no but that you see i'm taking that as implicit in what you're saying about the about the schmittian relations of democracy to speed you know like even if you ignore the time lag factors that are involved in the plebiscite and arranging it and the informational collation and all of that let's let's just say that that's relatively compressed at least within a certain kind of and but it can only act as a kind of as a kind of rapid response mode

if executive discretion is then given an absolute free reign content like there is a that there has to be a total surrender of of democratic control that goes with the democratic decision like in in making a democratic choice you're saying and and with this choice you know there's an irrevocable commitment and and an abandonment of all claim the control over the evolution of this process because if there isn't if that isn't implicit it then obviously you're not in any way producing the capacity for this rapid executive decision

making process so I don't know if I silence everyone. it's it's ominously as if I've as if my machine isn't working so no no no you're fine you're fine okay good yeah I think Theo's question there is like it is

really relevant and interesting like are the are the ends of um of forgoing prerogative now preemption of whatever it is are they explicitly clear and it seems like inevitably the answer has to be no or at least the fraction of the answer that is no is sort of like what's at stake it's that you're always it's always open-ended you don't know what decisions you're going to have to you're going to be pressed to make instantaneously or you're going to need this prerogative for in the future. Like, you know, when they, when they allowed the Coventry bombing to go through, it wasn't because they knew that in eight months they were going to want to stop this boat, you know, hitting this shipping route through the North Atlantic, you know, that just ended up being the case, but they knew that at the moment they couldn't,

they couldn't do anything about the bombing and still maintain the ability to do any of those N things in the future and like sort of modeling what those N things are and so like what you're purchasing essentially by forgoing prerogative in the moment is obscure right and integrally so yes i don't know theo if you had anything else yeah well i mean the the military strategy examples are really interesting because the objective is very very clear um i'm i'm wanting to pull that into like a more abstract territory, I suppose, where the objectives are not clear and decisions need to be made, or at least were forced into tracks.

Well, they are clear in a capitalist or, I suppose, right accelerationist setting, aren't they? Because it's survival, I suppose, is the key thing. because you know you've got these you've got the two paths you know you can't really apply your what was it catching a rabbit or building a spear but there you know there are there are decisions there's the I suppose the the short-term gain or the or the the other option to to sort of maybe it's invest in research and development or something like that and and in hindsight you know you see looking back firm X you know sure they they you know they did well over the short term but they they didn't invest

in research and development and you know few years later they fell behind and died whereas and this did the contrary one I suppose whether you know a firm that sort of never actually delivers but like one of those internet companies that never ever turns a profit ever yeah but yeah and that's the I suppose why the sort of if capitalism is your your structure or your measure it's very it's very easy to measure things and to see especially in hindsight what success means but if you like try and transpose it to like a left accelerationist you know and you look at like decision-making and things it's like well

how do you ever judge what the whether whether you've been successful because it means it seems to me that there's so much of the not the left accelerationist critique of capitalism it's this you know it's it's this really sort of hypothetical it's like well yeah sure this there's been a certain amount of success but you're actually being held back by this and we can't really show you why and it's like well I'm not expressing it very well but but it's it's the metrics aren't clear the way it's the aims aren't clear the end goals aren't clear at least well and if someone could correct me that would be fantastic I'd be very interested

to hear it but it seems so much simpler to quantify things and to judge things and to measure things um you know within that where it's basically profit and loss and um and succeeding um i mean i don't think we've got anyone here well maybe our non-guys are able to yes i would have thought they're by far our most plausible candidates as for the voices of left accelerationism can i just say it's a preliminary thing i i do think it has to be a really complicated question um but the term that

must be part of the answer surely for them is this thing they have about collective self mastery so there's some there's some implicit thing about the construction of a collective subject that no doubt would still have some of these problems of criteriology but but but would you know in some sense you know provide the basis for deciding which which was the preferable track to go down in these you know set of decisions um but but it's complicated with them because they have this big polemic against horizontality and as soon as you have this kind of you know um

this vertical command control system that's at least partially valorized i'm assuming maybe at least implicitly for some of the reasons we've been talking about for it for kind of a successive rapidity and responsiveness then it i think your problems then become even more acute because it's like it you're just you're just trusting that particular command control function to to make to make the right call and it's not even that there's some kind of tight collective feedback system that's holding it in check or or providing some criterion for it but anyway sorry I

I shouldn't try to argue for it because I'm obviously not a major left accelerationist. I'd forget. Well isn't one of the arguments of Cernicek and Williams that actually a kind of planned economy in the Cybersyn sense could be more efficient quantitatively than a liberal capitalist economy. I mean, I'd say so. Aren't they arguing basically that right at this moment...

Sorry, you're... Wait, can you say it again? You're going in and out. Aren't they arguing that basically right now we're just catching rabbits without their hands and we need to go build a sphere. We need to make a large executive decision to take a roundabout route to build a sphere. I'd say that's what they're arguing. But doesn't that get into trouble with this whole polemic that they have against purely quantitative, you know, brain dead speed, all these kind of arguments that they have against the purely quantitative criteria in which they're attributing to capitalism it seems in a lot of their rhetoric so now to now say well we're going to actually keep that criteria and

then it's just in those purely brain dead quantitative terms we can outperform capitalism seems to me a bit of a kind of rhetorical train crash there I don't know It's just one of those spaces where they leave it undefined, essentially, and there could be many interesting answers to that, which they sort of sidestep or they suggest there could be quantitative criteria which are not capitalist criteria, but they don't sort of pick some, they just suggest some, I'd say, which maybe, you know, it makes sense as a call to action,

but you'd sort of want to follow up, I guess. I don't know if this is right, and other people might have some sense of this, but my sense is that with Williams and Snernicek specifically, rather than like the broader left accelerationist project, that they've had some significant reflexing since the publication of their book in the manifesto because of their debates with the left and in a sense my my senses and I can't really I can only state it broadly that they're kind of sacrificing their accelerationism to for leftism if that makes sense right that I went to a debate with him with Badoo in New York sometime after the election

and they absorbed I mean his critique meaning they didn't challenge him at all they didn't argue for their position in the least they see it so they accepted the critiques all that all the critiques there are from the left about that book they seem to be absorbed in them into their new work I could be wrong I could be wrong but seems to me near in a sec seems to me to be more and more of a kind of Marxist in a more classical sense these days so but do you how how would you this is a lot to ask so please feel free to just duck it entirely but in terms of what you just said which it does seem to me to be very plausible how

do you think it um it actually relates to this question about what are the criteria for performance once you subtract once you subtract the criteria of business success and these kind of capitalistic these capitalistic metrics for success stock market valuations and all of this kind of thing if they're if that if those are being removed what are you now using as your metric to just decide whether or not something is succeeding or failing yeah I guess that's what I'm suggesting I think that they're moving more towards this you know for example in Badu's case right what does he want the the communist

hypothesis the communist idea it's an appeal to a kind of transcendent value or something I think that they're moving more towards something I don't know like that perhaps they're entering that side of the conversation more rather than because because of because of this question that you're posing it's hard to answer and there has to be a certain decision to be made at a certain point perhaps between what when you have left and acceleration is when you add the left to it are you more of an accelerationist or are you more of a leftists because they're not necessarily compatible perhaps I don't know I mean yes I mean it does seem that their decisions of the kind that you've been

saying do suggest that at least from their point of view incompatibility struck so you know people would might not agree with them about that but they seem to be that they seem to at least be suggesting that don't they that some decision was forced upon them they think between the between the attractions of those two terms yeah we'll see because I mean it's something I'm struck by that I see a lot of left accelerationist people following social media they they often share these articles arguing that capitalism is actually technically inefficient compared to planned economies. I know there's one article which was

written in the 90s suggesting that actually the Soviet Union had similar technical efficiency to the United States on a purely technical kind of quantitative basis and so I'm wondering how that can figure into how that argument can figure into this. Yeah I mean there's a very interesting Austrian riposte to to that type of thinking I don't know the specific argument that you're the specific paper you're referring to I'm afraid but I'll look at um you know I I'm trying to think I whether it was Mises or or someone subsequently I think the germs of this is already in the calculation problem in

the so in the socialist commonwealth piece which is that it's a very different thing to try to do this criteriology when you're in a world that is not wholly socialist you know if you have neighboring capitalist states putting prices on various economic outputs and services then you can simply borrow that information in order to establish metrics for your own socialist process so i mean it's not that's not in itself an argument to say that the within those limited terms the socialist process can work that's a separate argument but it is to say that the

Criteriology is totally parasitic you know that there's no endogenous process within the socialist society that is providing these price information about the value of its outputs and it would simply not know you know if it's a sacrificing a certain amount of iron production for school teachers for medical assistance for military capability or whatever trade-offs it's making without that external foreign price system to to to draw upon it would simply not know whether it was moving forwards backwards sideways or whatever it would be utterly incapable of that kind of a judgment

I mean, I sort of take them as meaning like say in the example of something like energy, that the fossil fuel industry has an interest

in suppressing progress towards really efficient and cheap solar power or something like that. And that if we could, in some planned way, focus massive resources towards that, it would be some kind of real game changer for human society. and that what's holding it back is this existing infrastructure for fossil fuels. That it's not actually the most efficient thing because it's, you know,

it's driven these interests that already exist. Like, when I read those passages in the MAP, that's kind of the kind of thing that I imagine them having in mind, but I'm not sure if it is. Right. and maybe there's something similar for like nutrition and the agriculture industry like we get you know or medicine whatever yes I mean I think that the comparison I was making to forcing functions in mask is very very right I mean but it still to me leaves the problem like in the absence of some reference to a market pricing system how would you or that's to say a system of price discovery in general how would you at all know whether this whether you

were succeeding or failing in the production of this new network you know it has a whole bunch of social inputs it requires a certain amount of trained engineers various kinds of equipment um you know a massively complicated set of economic inputs and it's outputting whatever i guess in the end you can probably just make it all into fungible electricity but you've got but you've got no way to uh to judge what the value of those those inputs it's absorbing are at all you just have this impressionistic sense of whether or not this this is something that is being successful and the more the more you try to rigorize that

intuition the more you realize that you just lack any basis for solid information about it it's also the question of you know that that that goal the solar power goal is is what you know what what what's being done is is you're sort of you're looking at as a capitalist framework and you're pointing out a deficiency from a certain point of view something that isn't being done adequately but like how do you if you know if you were to us were to assume that you know the the capitalist

economy is to be superseded by something else how do its future goals become set you know according to what I mean you know at the moment sure I say oh you know I would like more solar power and the you know the various other things you know a bit like they say um maybe you know we want to work less you know things like that it's like what you're doing you're criticizing criticizing something that currently exists where is the sort of the independent set of objectives and values and you know what once you've replaced the currently existing system with something else um where is where is the forward direction from there I mean what what is it propelling itself towards

yeah and you know all the other questions like who and then oh yeah this this is a something that I think we were talking about in the early weeks I mean the question is is that you know capital capital as an abstract system I I mean, does it require capitalists? Do we need to speak of capitalists? Do we need to talk of values or endorsing or anything? I mean, the impasse for the left or left accelerationism precisely is that it's not that there are these, you know, capitalists with their values, so to speak, who are winning a war.

I mean, capital is, I don't know, It's just the, we live in capital. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't know whether I'm on the right track with what you're raising here, Tom. But at the most abstract level, the only thing capital does or can value is the expansion of productive capability. so you know all its circuitry everything it just that that's the one fundamental imperative and so it fulfills consumer demands and it it accepts government regulation and

all its behavior is finally regulated you could say almost libidinally by the fact that it just seeks simply to expand itself as a as a as a stock of productive capability now obviously that doesn't involve anything recognizable as kind of specifically humane bourgeois imperatives or even class interests or anything like that and i would have thought there's a tradition on the left to say yeah if you captured in its most abstract form you you capture its monstrosity most clearly you know and that and that the left it's not really it's only

by proxy kind of at war with the bourgeoisie or war with particular business class you know what it's at war with is the capital imperative as the sole source of value that is really being generated in modern societies um but then that does take us back if i mean you know obviously people could reject that and say you know maybe reject 180 degrees and say no we can you know if we can really strip capital down to that pure machine function then we can somehow repurpose it or integrate it into some other kind of social arrangement um i would like to see that done but I guess it's imaginable but but um oh sorry I'm losing my own my own chain of thought there what

what I'm really trying to say is that if you do accept that this just abstract capital dynamic is actually the the the problem of capital that is being addressed by the layer then that does then return this problem about what what is the small so that was the substitute for source of values that is being introduced you know capital gives you this gives you this value system automatically you know and you're the whole price system then is is is is articulated through this this basic imperative to capital expansion if you take if you're you're stripping that out then you have have to have some other system for coordinated production of social values

I'm assuming sure but I mean I think that the other the other question is is if we if we accept at this distillation of capital in its abstract dimension then becomes a philosophical question of agency and subjectivity, meaning that like in a sense, you know, I don't think that this would have that the class struggle is preeminent. I think it's sort of a secondary effect and a necessary dimension to discuss, but that in a sense for the left to sort of win, the impasse

that it faces is precisely that history is running in the wrong direction and that the right whatever doesn't have to do anything if you accept capital is almost an ontological force even if it's not trans historical in a certain conception that it can be you know contingently and historically situated nonetheless this is where we live now so that's the question that that's where comes philosophical in a sense you know what what place is there for agency yeah I'm this this leads into what make make labeled transcendental miserable ism right I don't know the label transcendental miserable ism they can probably explain it better than I

can well it's a long time since i've been there actually and i'm not sure yeah i'd be interested to see how you see it articulating i mean that but that was part of purely a kind of a polemical a polemical moment about a certain a certain trend to a kind of simultaneous transcendental inflation of capitalism and negation you know so it was just uh it seemed to me there was a kind of a syndrome of saying everything i mean you know people like the situationists i think get really close this you know everything is saturated with capitalism um and that is this manichaean disaster you know this is this fallen nurse this gnostic horror um you know so it it

simultaneously blocks out fills the whole horizon beyond any imaginable practical negativity and then throws the whole of reality into into this pessimistic denial so that was transcendental I'm not sure exactly what Vincent's saying the connection is though to John's point. If you see capitalism as this ontological force and that basically history moves by its wrong side then the logical response is to oppose the progress of history which is what I take transcendental miserable is basically it's this gnostic pessimistic

impulse that you think is a dangerous trap yeah right so like the I think I posted a couple articles by post stone to moish post on I don't know if people know his work to the to the forum and I mean I think in a sense he would accept the accelerationist proposition but would not render it trans historical precisely it's not and ontological he would you know that would be a way doesn't it doesn't it doesn't answer how we get out but it nonetheless posits at the potential for an out right right yeah yes no I I know Jay who is is like a huge of stone fan so I'm afraid I'm not very versed in

his thing I've only looked at a few bits and pieces but he I take a recommendation by Jay who very seriously so I must if you're if you're redoubling that recommendation and I must definitely look at it yeah are we gonna there's a sort of suggestion that Afro pessimism answers the question of the subjects I'd like oh yeah we've got a link great I like that the reading list too

I don't mean to change the subject necessarily, but... Oh yeah, that's fine. Well, I just was actually interested in hearing you, Nick, say more about the first topic that you brought up um um sort of specific ideas about uh what technological changes are likely to take place in the future well i mean maybe this is actually a really good thing to throw open a little bit actually because yeah i i definitely expected us to be there a lot i mean it's a bit overwhelming isn't it the question and it's one of those

it's one of those points that like obviously if you really had confident insight on this question and couldn't convert it into a multi-billion dollar fortune then you're some kind of idiot you know so um there's that there's that whole if you're so smart weren't you rich kind of rider that goes with that and and should induce some humility I think on on the speculative side of it um so I guess I guess the thing is partly like to what extent to what extent do we agree that there is an impending there

is an an impending substantially novel techno economic infrastructure on the way you know like obviously that's what the wave there is would would predict it seems to me almost a kind of stronger speculative claim to suggest that there isn't one that there would be a kind of form of like radical stagnationism I think probably exceeding that of any of the people we've seen maybe the Gordon piece got close to something like that and but I think if you if you aren't tempted by that kind of extreme techno pessimism then it's you're almost by

default there's there's a placeholder for this new this new matrix this new infrastructure and i think it has to be more than just a kind of suite of compatible technologies you know like even when you have a whole interesting suite of compatible technologies it's like the defining character of the economic epoch is an infrastructure you know i don't think anyone says you know doubts that this is the age of the internet and before that it's like you know at various stages you know the telecommunications grid the electric the electrical grid the railway network these fundamental infrastructural

upheavals are the thing that actually give the economic e-pockets its its fabric um so i mean i'll only say one thing on this on the speculative side before just like maybe trying to solicit stuff from people about it which is just to say it surely has to be that uh intelligent agents are key to this new grid in some way you know it is to intelligent agents what the internet is to information exchange what the electrical system is to power exchange um um and that the the fundamental innovations are going to be

of that kind that it supports it can it supports intelligent agents as basic components artificial intelligent agent this is obviously the you know also kevin kelly's thesis he actually says artificial intelligence is going to be the electricity of the net of the next grid and cognification of everything is going to just like electrification of all technology was kind of was being rolled out by the electrical epoch and the informatization of of of all objects is you know goes with the first stage of computerization then this cognification of the world

is going to be the thing that we we see everything around us is is is saturated increasingly with artificial intelligence that seems to me highly plausible as a basic very crude schema for it. It's also as a side note, interesting, side note to that, interesting that there's sort of like a way that like a late development in electrification has sort of been tangled with making that possible, which is like, I posted these links at like the very last second, so probably nobody's seen them, but like battery technology, energy storage, has not seen like a zero to one non-incremental jump in about a half century but like there's a couple there's several groups sort of like

recently very successfully pursuing avenues to doing that like the most promising sakty 3 is talking about a two order of magnitude jump in storage density like 300 times the wow just an extraordinary and that's what a smart grid like an electrical smart grid needs to be able to you know do the whole renewable thing where you've got fluctuating levels of input from all of these small sources it needs to be able to store and release in a much more like fine-grained intelligent sort of way and i mean there's there's a hundred other things that battery technology like that would do that too and so if like the smart grid is sort of the first big way that this intelligent internet of things like mediation of physical quantities by

artificial intelligence takes off like you know electrification will have reached around the back to give it a to give it a jump start right yeah that would be stunning I mean obviously I don't want to maybe I shouldn't take everything too far down the battery line but just as a redistribution of power issue power in its political as much as it's a kind of energetic sense that that type of transformation of battery technology would be unbelievable you know I mean the the electric the electric grid would just become a kind of a facility for juicing up your batteries and and and and the the amount of kind of autonomization that it would offer to localized processes all kinds would be immense yeah so I think it would have extraordinary

implications in fact that was to come come around the electro grease monkey or electro nomad yeah totally yeah electro nomad is on the art I mean it is interesting this this I almost feel guilty about trying to press people about these things because there's literally no difference between asking people now what are their what are their speculative philosophical techno bets and asking them for stock tips isn't it i mean

it's it's exactly the same question it's like trying to garner for free kind of completely uh economically valuable information of people here form just absolute predation so So I find that slightly inhibiting. But having said that, obviously if people do have these long-range stock tips that they want to share, this is the moment for them. I feel like we're talking about what comes after the Internet age. To me, and I've written about this before, it seems like we're only just now beginning to enter the internet age in the proper sense.

It's only now that we're starting to see the internet overwhelming politics. And what's to me this very interesting phenomenon, what looks like the emergence of a kind of subjectivity proper to the internet itself, rather than just being the kind of the use of the internet by exterior political forces, which I think to some extent the rise of Trump had something to do with that in 2016 and other phenomena happening now. In China even you can see the increasing effect that discussions on the internet are having on policy. So I think it's, we still have a long way to go in my opinion, and I think we still need to kind of grapple with the full implications of the internet age it hasn't really been done yet I think

yes no that's I think that's that's definitely good corrective to to a certain way of spinning it because I totally agree with that like the industries that just what we already know about the internet are clearly in the crosshairs for just massive creative destruction just is a huge swathe of the current social order, isn't it? I mean, you know, the financial industry, the academy, the publishing industry, all of these things, these structures are massively, massively threatened by what the internet already clearly shows it can do. So that's, yes, I would agree with you, of course.

Along these lines of Vincent's point, I don't know if anyone works in advertising or has friends who work in advertising, but I think the advertising that is now properly entering into the Internet age lays this dichotomy bare, because advertising before the age of the Internet proper was sort of this Edward Bernaysian inheritance of Freud PR thing, where you're sort of appealing to the populace's base interests and their drives. And there's the smart ad writers trying to figure out how to get into the consumer's unconscious or something would be a representation of it. And now it's sort of like they sell themselves in a sense.

They're really excited by the product too. And it's not a trick on sort of the them, the populace, but this kind of I think it's a byproduct of this internet subjectivity that there's something new that we're witnessing in which they you know the the the it was kind of what I was saying before in the sense of capital like I wouldn't say that these people who work in advertising are sort of sinister capitalists so to speak or or Silicon Valley or whatever they kind of sell themselves now I don't I don't it's this is a not I'm struggling to articulate what I mean but there there is this kind of new form of subjectivity right yeah no it is it

is very interesting I mean it's partly it's partly peculiar because so much of the internet has been funded by advertising and I guess continues to be you know it's sort of this again is back to last week's whole discussion about peculiar perverse economics of the internet so in a certain sense advertising increasingly takes on the the credibility of the internet or in all the cultural credibility of the internet sort of transfers the advertising industry in a certain way automatically because these are the people who actually on an economic sense are allowing this thing to go forward on

there so so for sure they might be selling fizzy drinks or whatever else but what they're also selling is this particular internet-based social process and that so for getting on board with the advertising process is getting on board with the promulgation of internet as well. Yeah. Yeah, so like I see someone put Pepsi in the sidebar, like that Pepsi ad would be a perfect example of this antiquated form of advertising that I'm talking about. That's why it didn't work. But there is still an interesting version of that, or I don't know if it is a version,

there's some sort of update of it, which is like these endlessly long Apple ads. And like the other, I think other people started doing it as well, where it's just like literally like a montage of beautiful and cute things. Like, oh, like kids blowing out candles, a mountain, like et cetera, et cetera. And then it's like, that was it. You know, like, and then. Yeah, that's sort of sad. Yeah. I think actually weirdly I I seem to without completely unconsciously without any strategy have cut masses of advertising out of my life like I mean for instance I embarrassingly I haven't seen this Famous pepsi I've seen masses of media content about it. I still haven't seen the damn thing you know

Which is yeah, I mean it is embarrassing, but it's also kind of telling in a weird way that about I think I think advertising is finding it it's in a kind of weirdly viscous environment of this it might but this might be a sort of being in China thing I guess basically what what has anyone looked at Adam strange link

So, like, if another thread is not going to come up immediately, I mean, along these lines, I can't help but laugh every week at what we're all doing on Google Hangouts in relationship to this conversation that it would occur to me that sort of, I don't know, younger people or people with internet subjectivities wouldn't tolerate such idiocy as like Google Hangout. This seems, you know what I mean? Like that there's something already very 20th century about what we're doing. Right.

I mean, it's difficult because I'm such an old fogey that I'm still, I'm still only now getting used to the Amazing facility of go Google hangouts. I mean when when I first kind of got involved with the NCR a B not not long ago, and I saw what Google Hangouts was capable of It completely blew my mind. So I'm sure there is this totally generational Fact I just simply cannot imagine what is there? Now that isn't is next so to speak I mean I guess in saying you're making your con point on you you must have a sense of At least vaguely of what is out there that people would be using no not necessarily

I mean I think for me, it's uh I Think that this is sort of like the height of technology what we're doing with all of its glitches and that that is a certain way that we need to think about technology to accept some of its glitchiness and that in fact and the these sort of internet subjectivities I wonder how much there is a toleration for the glitchiness of technology and its construction and issues of compatibility and process and things because I mean all of these two synocratists too low dimensional too personal yes all of these things I mean the fact that even though you're in China and I'm in New York but we're still like trying to attempt this interface model still where I'm going to talk into this camera and you're going to look back you know all of these kind of things yeah recapitulate sort of in quotations you

know human relations and simultaneously highlights how human relations are already technological without something like Google Hangouts it's it's still a circuit that's very you know it's a technological overlay onto a quintessentially 20th century set of social relations still I don't feel like it's remade remaking the social relation in any significant way this interface whereas some of the contemporary interfaces and seem to have more an effect on that right yes this was part of I think Jake's point too wasn't it which I read when Jake was talking about

it and maybe I'm missing part of what Jake's point was that the existence of these internet avatars is something just totally practical rather than being a kind of complex playful problematic experimental thing it's just something totally quotidian and and practical that you have these avatars you use them without even thinking about them they're just functional requirements of certain types of um activity in cyberspace and and obviously they have the same philosophical structure as the empirical ego so you know the fact that your empirical ego is taken more seriously

than any of your internet avatars at least from a philosophical point of view seems arbitrary and perhaps techno sensitive you know like um but it's it's by no means inconceivable that with a certain level of sort of deep and continuous immersion in in some of these internet channels that that the artificial selves that you're using to mediate your activities will become just as sort of real to you as your own empirical psychological existence and sort of either alongside it or modifying it or proliferating it or in some other ways taking people through this real

psychological crisis in a cold sense you know it needn't be something that people undergo as being difficult at all maybe the maybe the opposite is more likely but as I said I don't know whether this was Jake's point at all or something completely separate to Jake's point did you mean when I said that it's like too low-dimensional or was this at a different no earlier on when you were saying about um when you were saying about it um i'm gonna forget your terms because i i i've sort of obviously re reprocessed it already so it might be unrecomfortable by me now

and as you wish to do it but like the the space of decision the whole sort of like prosthetic like second level of like consciousness or identity it's just like your your partially automated way of interacting with all of these networks and these like different kinds of identities and yeah definitely i mean that's just it's interesting you say that because i've been yeah the the experience on twitter and like in our sort of corner of weird twitter that sort of intersects with the blue center and stuff over the last few years has just been like a roller coaster your experiment and exactly that psychology and kind of like losing or splitting yourself into these avatars at like in different ways at different times and I found like especially over the last year or so it kind of reconstructs your sense of intimacy or creates a whole new sort of

construct of intimacy which is that like you know sharing your legal name or your face or something like that with these certain very small element of these people that you talk to in your avatar form like every day like fosters i mean i've found that the people who do who you know know who i am or who i allegedly legally am or whatever on twitter like just almost by the act of doing that become like family-like like i get like a really strong like libidinal response to having done that sort of effects or something right i don't know yeah Yeah, so this is back to John's thing about this the kind of how traditional the social relations Remain within these media is there and so maybe actually the

You know the evolution of it threat in a certain phase to become more kind of high bandwidth and obviously according to certain quite explicit imperatives more sort of personalized median has actually been has resulted in a kind of neo-traditionalist wave you know in the sense that from these much more minimalistic abstracted perhaps high more highly anonymous kind of subject positions they've they've become they've tended to collapse back in a way onto onto prior psychological templates or whatever as they as they've been enriched I don't know yeah yeah definitely something like that and sort of the same vein of orthogonally I don't know I was

talking to someone yesterday um who has sort of like a startup that's going through its round of funding or something he was talking about how somebody in that company flew down you know flew from New York to Miami for a 15-minute conversation with a potential investor like face-to-face because despite all of this at least like the versions that we've got the hangout version like still as far as like moving large amounts of money you're making decisions right it still hasn't done to replace like the face-to-face yeah yeah that definitely no this is when I very very briefly mentioned virtual reality in this kind of list of these technologies because analogies in avasin has

you know a very strong sense that that that vr is going to cross a threshold where it can do exactly what you're just saying and just become a real collapse of geographical space into the net Of a kind that we've not seen you know with really high high bandwidth low glitchy kind of VR Telepresence that you can just have meetings with such high fidelity on the net that it would make it absurd to You know to to trip to travel in meat space or bring your private jet or whatever to some meeting it would become completely redundant

now I don't know whether that's I would take it as the sort of prediction that must in eventually be a hundred percent right but you just don't know what the time scale for that is really and we don't wouldn't seem crazy to see that as part of a kind of suite of kind of internet applications that we're gonna within a small number of decades at the next oh yeah yeah for sure I think it's in that respect it's sort of serendipitous that blockchain identity verification distributed identity verification is kind of taking off at the same time because that's the other piece right like the face-to-face this is one piece and the knowing like in the way that you may be irrationally that

you're like yeah yeah no it could actually be more highly verified it could be more highly verified and more high resolution i mean you know in the sense that you can call up all kinds of of supplementary information to kind of enrich the actual vivid face-to-face encounter and also as you say have strict blockchain verification that you are actually talking to the person that you think you're talking to rather than you know I mean plastic surgery already probably you know doesn't reach as has undermined that level of confidence in in meat space or whatever oh yeah absolutely I don't know if you ever saw the movie um American hustle but like the final the

the great hustle or whatever is that they hire somebody to pretend to be a lawyer and stage like an entire like investment meeting with the mob and all of this stuff and it's actually the entire thing has been like it's a setup it's a fake law office like lawyer they're just getting their signature on a document which is exactly this you know you enforce their identity in a fake context yeah totally well i think i think the the proliferation of identities or identifications is is probably one of the most important features of the internet age and this vr um the vr you talk about would probably be the kind of culmination of that where it's a kind of schizoidal process

where you can have as many identities as you like and they're all equally realistic in a sense i think that this will be catastrophic for politics which depends on certainly in the kind of liberal political theory way that we think about it it depends on people having a kind of single rational individual which makes political kind of political decisions once you get arbitrary numbers of identifications matching up with particular humans if you like then this conception breaks down yes I mean do you think that it's interesting like you obviously say about that we've seen sort of hints of this in this last election cycle in the United States I mean do you do would you go as

far as to say that this kind of this process that you're now introducing is also something that has already begun to work some kinds of political effects or is that still something that you're seeing as upstream I think it's it's It certainly started and 2016 was... I mean it's hard to say that the election of Trump was down to any particular one factor but I think this was probably one factor that led into it. Places like 4chan where at least ostensibly you can be completely anonymous and you get these so-called hive mind effects. The emergence of the internet as a hive mind into politics

is I think catastrophic in a kind of specific sense of the term catastrophe yes yes I mean it's interesting in some ways like that obviously there is also something weirdly traditional about this isn't there like you know in a sense that all the American founders had these elaborate pseudonyms and this whole you know so so much of these documents of the kind of of American independence and and liberalism as we now as you would say retrospectively understand it um were were conducted with processes that seem echoed in this in this usage of avatars and an

anonymous anonymous political actors and um but but you know at the same time that there seems to be this element of repetition obviously there's something also very novel about her yeah yeah like when you when you say the usage of avatars I think this is what the shift into this like new internet internet subjectivities is signaling is that we can I mean I don't know if we all can how old people are and things think of it still in terms of usage like avatar usage but I think people who are born sort of into it experience it in an entirely different way I don't think it's a run avatar usage you know I think that there's some

if if if there is some kind of new subjectivity being born with the internet it's that precisely it that there's no delineation it's not a fool that you take in hand an opera or something I think that's I think that's absolutely right and this also links up to something which I find very interesting which is I don't know if any of you have seen these polls that have been coming out regarding Generation Z or the generation after the Millennials basically people who are going to come of age within the next few years but there are these political polls which say basically that they're extremely right-wing compared to the people who come before them in fact they're the most right-wing generation extensively since the Second World War and this This applies in France, in Britain, in the US.

At least part of the reason for this, and I think one of the articles which I read about this, the researchers suggested this explicitly, is the internet. And it's not a matter of people becoming ideologically right-wing, it's a matter of people becoming desensitized to traditional issues of activism. And the internet is having this kind of massive effect on political subjectivity in that sense. Right. I mean, can you thicken that out a little bit more when you say desensitize to traditional issues of political activism? I mean, that's a suggestive sentence, but I don't know whether I'm fully getting what's been carried by that. I'm not sure what the specific mechanisms are.

But the general kind of tendency I guess that I'm trying to get at is this fact that from clearly with the 1960s this is when it reaches its kind of climax. You have this idea of basically youth being identified with activism, that people, you know, they rebel against their parents and they end up being very left wing, whatever. seems to have now started to disintegrate with generation C and they're not kind of acting out if you like in that same way. Okay so it's partly it's an absence of rebellion at least within the kind of psychological structure that that's been. Yeah in a political sense yeah.

Whether there are other kinds of rebellion whether there's some kind of deep subversion going on here well that's another question I mean well I mean obviously I'm it you know it's again a rebellion is a is a multi-valent term isn't it but obviously this there is a certain sense where there's a kind of frantic extremity of rebellion that is that is associated with this isn't it in the sense it's turning over what had seemed to be unquestionable basic structures of um you know consensual doctrines about the nature of society at the same time that it's ceasing to

perhaps have that short circuit oedipal rebellious character that as you say has has reproduced a certain kind of culture of well i'm tripping over the words here because i may want to say culture of dissent but I think what dissent is is obviously being tumultuous transformation. Yeah, in anarchist political theory, going back to Max Stenner, there's this distinction between revolution and insurrection, where revolution is the kind of what we normally think of as revolutionary activity, getting together, constructing new hegemonies, as opposed to insurrection, which is basically people doing their own thing. Right. And it seems to me that the internet encourages insurrection as opposed to revolution, so

you still have some kind of dissent spirit, if you like. It's not a matter of people becoming orthodox right-wing reactionaries or whatever, it's a matter of people, instead of acting in activist revolutionary ways, they act in insurrectionary ways because that's what cybernetic architecture encourages, I think. Right. Yes, that seems very plausible, definitely. Yeah. I mean, the sheer speed with it, which this transformation has happened, I think has shocked everyone, hasn't it? Like, to the degree that people had very, very confident expectations about what the space of possibility was in certain respects that just got shattered by this truck.

That definitely seems to be everyone agrees, I think internet related and just the level of just trauma trauma coming from just just broken broken expectations I think it's huge yeah because it must have something to do at least I think it does with the sort of or at least I see in the past sort of ten years there's been a sort of explosion in certainly right-wing political thought just in terms of the number of like new movements and

you know all different strange little communities and you know new rediscovered ideas and all sorts of things it's been I mean you use the term can be an explosion I think I think you used it maybe a week or two ago in this course in relation to something else but I think that has happened really be it's because the internet isn't it I don't see it or disagree that there's been a really similar thing happened on the left it hasn't been as pronounced you know in terms of you know you can list at least half a dozen new movements, right-wing movements, ideologies that are brand new.

I'm not sure you really can. Can you on the left? I was wondering about this and whether the reason for it is that the left is so sort of wrapped up in the academy that that sort of, I don't know, is it stifling in some way? Whereas all these new movements are just on the internet. I think I disagree on this. I think actually this kind of stunning explosion of ideologies is happening everywhere. It's happening all over the political spectrum. And there is stuff going on on the left too. I mean, stuff like all these debates between places like our socialism and lefty poll and all these other left-wing forums. The revival of, the strange revival of Max Stirner because Stirnerism basically didn't exist a few years ago as a serious force,

as far as I can tell. and is now a huge thing on the internet. Yeah. And he's a common internet avatar, actually, as well as interesting, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry to interrupt, yeah. But still, I mean, I take what you're saying, but I do think there is something to what James is saying, that, I mean, I think the Academy, hypothesis is quite interesting and I'd also say well is there just a kind of cyclic thing because of the fact that you know because we've only because you know there we've had eight years of Obama and you know there's a certain sense

where there was less there was less sense of being out in the wilderness in in that sense I mean it's difficult because yes maybe people just don't there's no consensus on whether this phenomenon exists at all as it is interesting um i i guess what what to me makes me makes me think there's something there is just the fact that the collapse of a certain sort of consensual sense of what conservatism is i think is part of the thing that's shocked everybody you know like in America really recently it was just like the center of gravity of it as it's basically very wrapped up

with with Christianity it's you know sort of doctrines to do is kind of free markets and free trade and and consensus on a whole range of things that was just really solid and I don't think anyone thought that that there was a place for stuff to come from you know and all of the the kind of dissidents that the paleo conservatives the libertarians were kind of very stably ensconced at the fringes no one thought that was going to change their candidacies would were jokes and then all of a sudden there seems to have been this kind of core implosion that everyone is saying what the hell is you know even if where they don't even people don't even know whether you

should call it conservative anymore you know what is happening on the right now I'm just not sure I'm seeing anything symmetrical on the on the left in that sense I think you'd have to go back to the 1960s I mean this notion that there is like something that is just gutting the basic core of what the the the Democrat Party was about and replacing it with something cryptic and menacing I mean it is there is imaginable that people are seeing that I don't know sorry I should leave it more open because I guess you know perhaps perhaps people could see that I don't know I mean again I

think that this right-left distinction we have to always situated against kind of tendency that's abstract and not situated against this left-right and and say that for you know for those on the left you know the right is constituted by it doesn't have to be a kind of affirmative position of the right it can just be constituted by a flowing with flowing with the objective tendency so to speak so like these subjectivities I don't see them as fundamentally right-wing I think Vincent's right about this insurrectionist tendency it's not a right-wing

and it's profoundly conservative in the dimension of, you know, I mean, we haven't until today talked much about the social dimension or the dimension of juicence and things, but because I think they're not necessarily, it's not necessarily, I mean, we're talking about political economy principally, you know, and they're not the political economy, let's say, determines the social, there has a more determinative dimension of the social in my reading or of modes of juissance and such rather than the reverse so I mean we could sort of I could imagine a world in which we kind of raise a wand and return to prior modes of social relations and things and nonetheless we still have capital so I mean it's a very interesting dimension that we're talking about

that sort of is more of a problem for the left than for, like if insofar as there is a right, the right cannot be identified with this insurrectionist tendency. So when we talk about libertarians or Christian conservatives or whatever, I mean, they're being threatened with their extinction as well in their proper sense. I mean, people can use that stuff as noise to pursue the, to support the flow of the objective tendency, so to speak. But like proper, you know, libertarians or proper Christian conservatives, I think, are being threatened with their extinction on some level just as much as any other 20th century tendency. perhaps.

Yeah, I think this is exactly right, and I think to me it seems like the division more and more is basically between people who represent a very kind of serious and officious sort of set of ideologies to do, as you say, with the 20th century and with products of hegemonic construction and so on, and a more kind of insurrectionary maybe ironical subjectivity which doesn't really have much truck with this. And this is happening all across the political spectrum as we understand it and beyond, almost.

I think what we're seeing is a Goldwater-like revolution that's utilizing the language, aesthetics of counterculture. I would make the argument that, you know, again, in the group, in the inbox, I made the argument that the right's kind of been gaslighting itself since the 90s. I think John is right. Their, you know, their prior structures are like in,

at the very least, they're being challenged. At the very least, they're being challenged, and the visibility of these new voices, the visibility of these new identities is challenging that, to them they feel that, it kind of pushes them to move like a voting block because they see themselves as a minority. It allows them to, whereas the left, it has this delusion that since the 60s, it has this delusion that you can reformat uh, this social structure. You can, by just, by, by, by integrating yourself with it and, pardon, continuing it, you, you know, the social structure will be, will reflect,

will, you know, will reflect, um, your, your, your goals. Whereas I, I start, you, you start seeing this in the 90s, the, the right kind of, like, um, it, it shifted a little bit. Like, I don't know if anybody remembers, but there was a magazine, there was a zine, an influential zine in the 90s it's called it was called answer me and um it was written by a couple of jim and debbie goad and um they that magazine is an influence uh is an influence on something like vice magazine and if you if you follow vice magazine you know that like in 2007 2008 they kind of outed um their founder um gavin mckinnis who was you know who was explicitly trying to create like a hip quote unquote hipster right right you know like um he flirted with you know

yeah he flirted with paleocons he would write glowing reviews of pat buchanan he he would write for alt-right publications like v there um he had a relationship with peter brimlow he would have someone like jared taylor like you know like jared taylor like um have a debate with Jared Taylor and an anarchist having a debate with each other. Of course, the anarchist is some strung out crusty punk. And Jared Taylor is this erudite New England well-spoken wasp with Ivy League education. So since then, I don't know. Our argument is that the alt right now

is kind of like a revenge of the audience. And I don't know, you're right, there's this insurrectionary force that it's able to kind of incubate itself online. But it appeals to younger people because it's framing itself as we are the new counterculture. You know? What's what I say about that? Is it wrong to present itself as a new counterculture? No, it's right. I mean, we, again, the alt-right's my personal, it's been my personal obsession since 2006. It's, we, they're not wrong. It's something different. It's different, yes. It's different, and it's, I'm, I, you know,

we would say that the alt-right is going, is going to be the new right. Like, the closest that you'll have to, like, a traditional GOP is the Tea Party, and the Tea Party has a foot in the alt-right. Like Annie Coulter, she's really heralded by the alt-right and she embraces it and I think she knows the rhetorical tools that they're using and stuff. The vulgarity is crucial. It's like a farther, even farther right, right. Yeah. And the media doesn't get it right either. Oh, it's still? Their description of white nationalism, they conflate someone like Jared Taylor with David Duke when in reality David Duke is just

some 1488er former Klansman who wants to be Jared Taylor Jared Taylor is a paleocon Jared Taylor is a paleocon with ethno-nationalist concerns sorry go ahead what's interesting to me Jake mentioned Le Pen in the sidebar this phenomenon that you're talking about it's happening all over the world Right. I mean, if you look at people like Duterte in the Philippines, in China you've got this new current of nationalist Maoism that's being incubated in the internet. All across Europe. I mean, I'm half Hungarian, so I have experience in Hungary where basically the far right completely took over the political spectrum there in a very short span of about four years.

So yeah, I think something is happening at a kind of structural level, I think, which is causing this. It can't just be internet, but it must be partly internet. The internet is just the incubation. It incubates it. But then, well, if you're going to reduce its role that much, then you need an independent sort of planetary catalytic mechanism don't you because it is striking how this is just erupting i mean i wouldn't say completely globally i mean but i mean you could even say

you know there's a relation to modi and the bjp in india for instance i mean it's like really uh vastly widespread so what is the what is the the thing that is triggering this this planetary insurrection one catalyst could be and maybe i've only looked at it in connection with the u.s so maybe it's not super global but the connection of authoritarianism to these policies and wants because not all, like we think the alt-right and all of these things are connected also to Trump, but like through different channels and ways. And not everyone who votes or voted for Trump was also obviously

part of the alt-right. But there's a commonality in terms of like fearing certain things within society and wanting somebody who will enact more harder right stances to protect them or in response to these fears or something like that like it's a radical normativity like um just i guess the normative like constituents they've adopted like these like alinskyist um these alinskyist techniques they're they are they're they're correct to think of themselves as the new radicals like they're honestly when we say left it's you know it's i guess it is just relative because

isolating it only to america yeah you know our argument that there is no left in america like with america the the left is just it's just liberal readers of marx there are no real Marxists in America they're just readers of Marx they're there also I guess I not to depart but also like with the right they they kind of have centuries of essentialist narratives to like pull from like one school of thought within the alt-right is and that's like related to anorex is HB human biodiversity which again human biodiversity relies on like what um 18th century theories updated about um about

racial dynamics you don't get something like the manosphere or something like well yeah or something um or the all yeah it needs that scientific basis you don't get white nationalism or identitarianism without something like human biodiversity you don't get white nationalists like Jared Taylor without paleo conservatism but what I'm missing from this story I'm getting from you guys is why suddenly you know within a small number of years I mean really we're talking yeah I don't remember when Modi first one I mean that was a big shock so we had this kind of Hindu identitarian whatever I'm going to put some scare at marks around it you can withdraw like authoritarian indian government rejecting the whole consensus that had been there

in that country since the kind of founding since independence um and you know within that within that time we've seen this huge kind of rash of things happening across europe and obviously recently the brexit upset the trump election um you yeah i'm happy to bring in duterte too i mean so something has really very very shockingly suddenly changed well i'm not seeing what you know that you guys have a have have a causal factor that's that's giving us any clues about why suddenly these things are happening well at least like in or particularly here there's all these things that already exist within society and i think in part one of the driving forces is the

internet creating like fully narrated alternate realities which i'm going to argue has been happening here for a minute but like with the internet you don't see you don't you can like exclude other realities from this narrative and you can completely immerse yourself in only these uh ideas and when these ideas are immersed almost fully in fear-mongering and alarmist alarmist-like terms, you will get people who react very extreme. Like, you need events like 9-11. Or, um, recently, um, I forget, um, God, um, the Islamist who made the... It was in, oh, I forget what Al-Qaeda's, um, you know, online

magazine's called, but he made the... His call to arms was, like, um, large-scale attacks, centralized attacks, like 9-11 can't occur anymore. And one way to to kind of like instill fear and like kind of destabilize like um that you know the decadent west is to have these like little micro little micro attacks so you get something like um and you know it's like it was prior to the election yeah a little priority election you get um and was it the was the west side 26th street 23rd street you yeah you had this bombing yeah you had this idea this uh this islamist bombing on 23rd then you had the orlando nightclub shooting yeah they've done this narrative or what we're trying to talk about with like dylan roof and they didn't just talk about like him doing what he did it was like when you search the terms

that he was looking for in google you will get like a lot of the white nationalist uh extremist rhetoric like all these sites will feed you this information um that plays off of this idea of uh white people being on the verge of extinction yeah on the verge of extinction and whatever but but obviously 9 11 didn't do this did it i mean unless you're unless you're wanting to trace the etiology of it back that far i mean so that's it 9 11 definitely catalyzed um an air of like hyper nationalism in the u.s yeah like um even on the arts it started to reflect this you saw like a revival of things like country you had alternative country

you had on you didn't have your life flag freedom fries yeah ridiculous things like that I mean it looks from the outside as if there was a retrenchment onto a fairly conventional and even at least in domestic terms more highly moderated conservatism after 9-11 right I mean this whole compassionate conservative mantra seems to me about like 180 degrees away from anything that would characterize the current wave of things isn't it? One thing that I would like to introduce as a possible kind of causative factor behind

this is this fairly unprecedented slowdown that we're seeing now of globalization and This ties in with stagnation stuff that we talked about in the previous seminars. It seems like this political polarization and the places where it's happening in the world tracks quite closely a process of economic slowdown. In particular, trade has started declining for the first time in a very, very long time international trade. so I don't know whether that's a causative factor or whether it's an interdependent factor but it's something to bear in mind yeah yeah I think it's sort of part of it I think that there is also the the fact that sort of by I

don't know when you'd say by say say 2008 2008 if you look at sort of both sides sides of the official political spectrum. They were controlled by, you know, both in, you had sort of, you know, you look at America, the Democrats and the Republicans are really very similar, they both, you know, both share ideologies that would be, you know, critiqued just sort of neoliberal and globalist from a sort of nationalist perspective. And I would sort of call them like Fukuyama, you know, they all shared this, and you know,

I suppose the people themselves would probably still like to sneer at Fukuyama, but I think they were in a real sense Fukuyama. They had this model of liberal democracy with a bureaucratic administrative state, with capitalism, you know, a welfare state. That sort of model seemed... It had no one opposing it really. And then as what Vincent was saying is you sort of run into these problems, there's no, everyone has the same point of view overall in relation to them. And so you've got the financial crisis, I suppose maybe 9-11, you know, you could think

about that as well. So at the same time you've got like a convergence of politics around the world, you also at the same time have like a loss of control of people less than ever before, you know, tune into, is it Walter Cronkite, the guy in the US, you know, for the nightly news and all receiving the same information. Right. You have these two things at the same time. You have, you know, a sort of like monoculture in politics and also in professions and elsewhere. But you have this sort of opening, this opportunity.

And, yeah, people can create these narratives, these alternative viewpoints, you know, coherent viewpoints, whether it's the, I don't know, the Jacobin viewpoint or the Breitbart viewpoint it's you know anyone can come up with their own one you know it's um but no but you said that's the internet again which i'm very sympathetic to as an explanatory factor um i mean i totally agree with you on this sense that the immediate preceding epoch was just stunningly compact wasn't it and it's the ideological spectrum seemed to have just almost disappeared and like so you've got the simultaneous thing of

like Bush and Blair supposedly one is sent to right and one is sent to left politicians and it could always be interchangeable I mean in terms of the fact that complete consensus about solutions to any issue whether it's geopolitical or economic or I mean you could hardly tell any difference at all in their in their responses to it so I think that's totally right but then what but then obviously that just did completely break down that's what we're seeing now isn't that that's that centrist consensus has completely imploded I think one of the things that Fukuyama predicted was that people might get fed up of the end of the history.

Yeah, this is something that I think happened to some extent in Hungary. There was a moment when people... there were some revelations from the socialist government at the time in 2006, where the Prime Minister had been saying that they were lying to private meetings of socialist kind of bureaucrats. And that went into the public and then people just kind of decided that enough was enough and they were going to restart history. So the entire political spectrum almost instantaneously collapsed and then various new things emerged, like the current Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is a big fan of what he calls illiberal democracy. So these are all new things. But it's something how quickly that happened and how it seems to tie into this kind of insurrectionary urge.

And it's synchronized. I mean, just to bang the same point everyone's been making. A lot of people made. The synchronization of it is truly stunning. Yeah. So I just wanted to give it a time check for people that were reaching the two and a half hour mark. Actually we've gone a little bit over it. If we could just say one more thing. You could interpret Islamism and Senators on 9-11 as something that's a product of like neoliberalism. Specifically something in revolts like a neoconservatism.

So it's an articulation of neocon. And from there you get conservativeism. Yeah, in response to Land's last thing that he said about 9-11, what we're trying to say is that 9-11, the heightened security and ideas there are neoconservatives. So it's the idea that we're going to go to other places and spread democracy, but in a way that is adopted by this conservative point of view. the RA and people within it Got disenfranchised and disillusioned with this neocon dream and thus now you get the paleocon dream Which is close all the borders by insecurity for domestic things. Let's make us a little bubble

Yeah, I do think I do think that's prior that obviously neoconservatism is a massively Universalistic ideology as and and I think that has there's been a massive backlash against that yeah because okay sorry uh yeah because when you look at uh even Alex Jones and a whole bunch of other uh alt-right figures say a lot like well they sold us the idea of weapons of mass destruction but that was a lie and stuff like that so it's like differentiating themselves from something within in what could be called a conservative current, but it's a different approach. It's a dissatisfaction with neoliberalism.

Right. Sorry, was Karim, I didn't get it, were you suggesting that you could lump in radical Islam with these movements? I don't know, it sounds very boring.

I think neo-conservatism wasn't it? Yeah, it was about neo-con. Neoconservatism, it's All right, Islamism it developed alongside Neoconservatism I Mean they're both universalist ideologies. That's sure right um yeah well yes yeah i'm getting i'm i'm sort of edgy now on the to

close things down i mean i i definitely can be persuaded to hang around a little bit if if if that's an if people have got something they want to do just talk about last chance for anyone all right see you Derek okay yeah yeah I mean I thought this was a great discussion it's to me sort of drifting a bit of our core topics but maybe what you guys decide to talk about is what's

going to happen you know so I definitely I'm not going to try and shut the door on that if people want to carry on with this stuff. It's all been great as always anyway. So thanks, everyone. Thanks, Neil, for your impeccable performance as always. Any time, yeah. Yeah, OK. So have a good week, everybody. All right, thanks, everyone. See you. Bye.

Thank you.