Thank you Mo and welcome everyone to the third panel of incredible machines, digitality and modern systems of knowledge at the threshold of the 21st century. My name is Sean Williams, and I will be sharing this afternoon's event. So we'll first have two 20-minute presentations in succession by Daniel Sassiloro and Benedict Singleton. I think we'll then have the keynote by Reza, which will be followed by a response to the keynote by Julietta Arenda.
To conclude the panel, we will have a roundtable discussion generated by responses to each of the presentations. So I'd ask you to please keep your questions until then. Before we begin, I'd like to remind all the speakers that we are on a tight timeline this evening, so please try to remain on the allocated time. And the first presenter for this evening is Daniel Sassiloto, who is a fourth-year comparative literature PhD student at UCLA. His research focuses on the reconciliation of rationalism with materialism and the pursuit of a revisionary naturalism through the work of Wilfred Sellers, Robert Brandom, and Ray Breziers. He is currently finishing a full-length monograph tentatively titled Saving the Noumenon, in which he develops the idea that a materialist metaphysics requires the rehabilitation of a new transcendental epistemology,
which depurates the traditional Kantian account from its metaphysical envelopment. and the talk is called Platform Dynamics. All right, thank you. Can anyone hear me okay? Yeah? Is this okay? Yes. Excellent. So I want me to introduce myself first very quickly and then what I will do is outsource a screen for a powerful presentation that I have prepared for this talk. So, as we just heard, my work really consists in the attempt to reconciliate materialism and basically rationalism,
rationalism in the traditional modern sense of philosophy, a project mainly indebted to the work of Ray Brassier, Wilfred Sellers, and Robert Brandom. And what I intend to present to you today is how I believe these discussions within the domain of philosophy, strictly speaking, can help us address the question about the relationship between thinking as we understand it as pertaining to a human phenomenon or sapiens as pertaining to the homo sapiens on the one hand and the debates around computationalism, AI and the development of new technologies. So without further ado, I begin. So I will now outsource the PowerPoint presentation so hopefully this will work. The title is A Thought Disincarnate, What Does It Mean to Think?
The question, what is thought, seems particularly slippery. It is not easy whatsoever to say just to what discursive register it belongs or which discipline could claim it to be proper to its own domain. Is it a scientific question, adequate perhaps to the ranks of neurophysiology or cognitive science? Or is it a philosophical question, which, as Heidegger would have said, escapes the scope of any empirical scientific study? What is certain is that an answer to this question conditions not only our self-understanding as sapient creatures, but elucidates what it would mean to be able to replicate intelligence in a different material medium than our organic one. The question, what is thought, therefore conditions any understanding as to what is at stake
when we speak of engineering artificial intelligences through novel technological resources. Now, in what follows, I wish to clarify what is at stake in this question by tracing it back to the history of Western scientific and philosophical modernity, wherein the very conceptions of subjectivity, intellection, and agency were first thoroughly problematized. To do this, I propose to trace three possible readings about the relation between philosophical and scientific modernity, which give, in turn, three possible conceptions of what thinking is. An orthodox reading, a revisionist one, and finally propose a possible third post-revisionist reading, on whose basis, I argue, we can move towards an answer to a question.
So first, the orthodox history. According to the history I call orthodox, one finds a continuity between the scientific revolutions initiated by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and the philosophical modernity that emerges with the advent of epistemology in the wake of Cartesian doubt, leading to the critical method in Kant's transcendental philosophy. In a famous passage from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant himself describes his methodological guidelines by drawing an analogy to what he takes to be the primary hypothesis of the Copernican revolution, the realization that whatever nature is taken to be, its objects must be seen as somehow conforming to our knowledge of them.
I quote Kant, He should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator revolve and the stars to remain at rest. A similar experiment can be tried in metaphysics as regards the intuition of objects." End quote. Now, undermining the rationalist optimism born in Kant's epoch-grounding declaration, this stipulated continuity between science and philosophy would, however, result ultimately in a kind of fatal complicity, or so the story goes.
Thus, the hermeneutic scrutiny of 20th century continental philosophy would find already in the incipient epistemological enterprise the encroachments of an illegitimate objectification of subjectivity and of thought. So the narrative goes, familiar to Heidegger, Adorno and their successors, philosophy and science would share a pernicious, if not dogmatic, obsession with knowing, a restriction of thought to cognition, a radical forgetfulness of the essential and fundamental question of being, a blind trust in the powers of calculation, etc. The modern subject is to be exposed as a tyrannical fabrication, the corrupted offspring of the modern enlightenment in the advent of capital
and culminating the coruscating derail of Western metaphysics. Now, facing the question, what is called thinking, Heidegger tells us, we cannot hope to look within the scope of empirical science. The fundamental principle for this trajectory, the orthodox trajectory, is that of the irreducibility of the subjective. There is something about thought that resists objectification. Accordingly, at the end of this vector, Hubert Dreyfus, for instance, insisted whatever degree of technological sophistication AI research could reach empirically or technologically, materially, it could never in principle replicate the existential dimension of thought or consciousness, which remains irreducible to any kind of computational routine. Now I move to the second history.
Now, more recently, however, a revisionary reading on the history of modernity has stipulated rather a radical divorce between its philosophical and its scientific science. Refusing the wholesale denunciation of reason and its cognitive pursuits, this account sees philosophical enlightenment as encumbered by a profound conservatism that failed to align speculation to the solemn conquests of the epoch scientific revolutions. Thus, while the modern scientific break mainly worked to achieve the derogation of the theological conception of the world, opening a cosmological horizon of exploration for thought beyond the familiarity of our life world and human experience, philosophical modernity, along
with its epistemological invention, was rather a retrograde movement, binding thought to to the confines of an immobile earth and to the structures of a static transcendental subject. This Ptolemaic counter-revolution, as Clinton Mayasue has called it, far from being called into question by the hermeneutic, phenomenological, or deconstructive wisdom, finds itself further exacerbated through it. Thus understood, the secular vector brought about through the ruthless mathematicalization of nature proper to scientific modernity is domesticated, first in the epistemological cohorts of a transcendental subject, and later in an avowal of human existence that takes subjectivity itself as an unobjectifiable transcendence.
So, according to the revisionist history, the claim for an irreducibility of thought to the order of objectivity remains nothing but a covert form of religiosity or piety, the secularization of the world and subjectivity initiated by modern science. A real transcendental revolution would be something like a Promethean gesture, one by virtue of which the intellect would no longer seclude itself with regards to the rest of the universe, but through which thought pierces through its manifest life world outwardly into the inexhaustible cosmos of which it is part. The fundamental principle for this naturalist trajectory is that of that ubiquity of the material. Thought must be understood objectively as part of the material world
rather than as its transcendental exception. Accordingly for this vector, the emergence of AI does not only hope to replicate organic sapience, but more radically still, it is AI that promises to dispense of human life altogether by subverting the organism that produces it. So Nick Land, for instance, argues that the history of human thought and the modern advent of capitalist productivity is in fact, quote, an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space that must assemble itself from its enemy's resources, end quote. For Land, to understand what thinking is means to realize that it is not really up to us whether thought is objectified or not.
Rather, thought itself is an object whose functional thirst for productivity dispenses of the flesh and oviates any palpable register of meaning to which humanity might want to mortgage its existence. Third stage. Now, from this doubtlessly schematic outline, we appear cornered between an orthodox transcendentalist view according to which subjectivity and thinking is irreducible to objective phenomena and a resolutely materialist conception of thought that reinscribes thought within the natural order. For the latter, the former must appear as the last cry of religious piety. For the former, the latter appears as the ensuing vestige of metaphysical dogmatism. For the former, radicalizing critique
demands that we claim that subjectivity is utterly irreducible. For the latter, overcoming critique demands that we claim that subjectivity is totally irreducible. Where do we go from here? Now, from the revisionist reading, I propose that we draw the following lesson. In diverse subjectivity radically from the world of matter, we renounce the possibility of understanding how it is that thought could emerge in different material configurations, delegating our self-conception to the authority of our our phenomenological or hermeneutic wisdom. The orthodox reading ironically begins by seeking to expose unquestioned prejudices as latent in the modern philosophical enterprise, but ends up instead reifying a given phenomenological, natural linguistic vocabulary as being ontologically beyond revision.
So like the existential vocabulary of our circumspect everyday in us for Heidegger would be a good example. To traverse the orthodox reading means to denounce this piety for what it is and to render our manifest self-understanding as liable to revision as any of our postulates concerning the natural world. Yet it remains just as true that to simply dissolve the critical exigency to adjudicate our thesis about the world threatens to slip right back to dogmatic metaphysics in all of its forms. Thought must think of the conditions under which it can think being, or indeed anything whatsoever. And this dimension of thinking, and it is this dimension of thinking which Kant tells us is non-objective. Insofar as to ask about the conditions of possibility to think of
what there is, is not itself to undertake an empirical investigation into the material structure of the finger who questions. It is rather asking what criteria must be met so that any empirical investigation could be carried out? What must obtain so that empirical knowledge can ever take place? So, with the orthodox history, we must also accept, however, or minimally, a critical attitude which curbs our ontological enthusiasm. But how is it possible to reconcile these two things? The idea that intelligence is on the one hand something that occurs in a resolutely material universe bound by objective laws like everything else, and the idea that there is a dimension of thought which remains nevertheless not tractable by an empirical account of its material conditions.
And it is with this dual task in mind that I believe we can move towards a third post-revisionary stage, citing an appropriation of the critical method that once depurates the metaphysical conservatism leading in the Kantian edifice, rejoining it to contemporary science, while salvaging the methodological and epistemological scruples that provided a critical filter against the metaphysics. Following the work of Wilfred Sellers and with all of us, I provide a brief sketch of how this revisionary naturalized Kantian view allows us to understand the status of thinking in its material and irreducible dimensions, as well as how these dimensions relate to contemporary debate surrounding computationalism and AI. So the first thing to note is that Kant's distinction between the transcendental subject and the empirical self
is coordinated with a fundamental one between the order of reasons and the order of causes. In short, whereas we can understand the human subject empirically, as a body integrated in the chain of natural events that abide to physical loss, understood transcendentally, as an agent of thought, the subject belongs to, quote, the logical space of reasons, where it sets aims for itself, undertakes commitments to which it can be entitled, and in doing so participates in a public space of conceptually articulated norms to which it binds itself. As James O'Shea has elaborated, the major principle for this trajectory is then that of the causal reducibility, come logical irreducibility of thoughts.
Thinking is causally reducible insofar as only in virtue of being instantiated in material bodies that intelligence can operate, but thinking is also logically reducible insofar as it is the concept of the subject as a logical unit which provides the functional kernel of agency, intelligence, and reasoning, and it is this dimension which can be abstracted and specified irrespective of the material constraints of the system. Subjectivity is in this functional sense transcendental with regards to empirical constraints. For to specify what a system ought to do in order to count as rational, how it ought to to behave in order to count as sapient is, again, not to say anything about what it must be,
even if it turns out that the pragmatic routines implied by intelligence can only occur under very specific material constraints. Now, to make a useful analogy, if we were to ask someone playing chess, what is a pawn, and she were to respond by citing the material properties of any given pawn, say a pawn made out of wood, we would be rightly justified in responding, but not all pawns are made out of wood or have such a shape. And indeed, when we ask about what a pawn is, in the context of chess, we are more perspicuously inquiring about the role that pawns play in general in the sense of how any object, regardless
of its internal structure, ought to behave in relation to other pieces according to the rules of the game of chess in order to be a pawn. We do not ask about the material constitution of this or any given pawn that exists, ever existed, or will exist. We ask about the function that invariably pawns acquire in the context of the rules that define the game of chess in relation to the roles that other pieces and components play as well. And these conditions can be individuated in pawns made out of wood, glass, computer screens, and who knows what else. Similarly, Kant tells us, Sellers tells us, I'm sorry, quote, grasping a concept is mastering the use of a word, end quote. Explaining thought and epistemic practices that articulate it demands thus that we acknowledge the socially articulated,
norm and rule-governed linguistic behavior which characterizes rational deliberation and purposive action, as that to which sellers does not shy to call the game of giving and asking for reasons. The game of giving and asking for reasons. For, quote, to characterize an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not given an empirical description of that episode. We are placing it in the logical space of reasons of saying and justifying and being able to justify what one says." End quote. In the broadest terms, this means that concepts are not things, but norms or rules which articulate a symbolic economy in a space of inferences. To be a rational system capable of thought entails the capacity to adhere to norms of use that determine the content of our expressions by situating our performances within a space of implications.
Expressive states become concepts to the extent that these do not only have circumstances, but consequences of application. The parrot can, perhaps reliably, respond to the presence of red objects by uttering, there goes a red object, in the right circumstances of application, and so in accordance to a rule that we can state as describing its behavior. But in responding thus, the parrot does not undertake a conceptual act. Its utterance does not count as an assertion to which we would say expresses a belief which we would say the parrot is responsible for. This is because the parrot cannot integrate or discern the consequences of application of undertaking a commitment to count a saying about something that it is read,
integrating the response to an inferential positive reasoning. It cannot infer that if the object is read, it follows that it is colored. that if it were green, it would not be red, that had the object merely looked red because of the changing normal lighting circumstances, one would have warrant to modify their belief. In sum, we do not attribute the concept red to the parrot, as we do for rational agents, since the former lacks the capacity to assess its own states and those of others. It cannot be taken to be responsible for believing anything, and since it is beliefs that are possibly true or false as potential objects of knowledge, follows that the parrot is not capable of having properly epistemic states. The ability to integrate our experiences into practices of justification and assessment
sets apart the capacities of properly sapient creatures from those of merely sentient ones. Nevertheless, just like the reliable differential responsive dispositions of merely sentient systems cannot count as yielding intelligence by virtue of not being able to track the consequences of applications of concepts in a space of implications, it is just as true that the formal inferential routines of a standard computer program with closed operational loops is also incapable of sapient thought, at least for now. For sapience requires not only that a system be capable of deducing rules in accordance to a system of axiomatic principles in syllogistic form, but that it be also able to abide by implicit norms of inference without the mediation of sophisticated logical vocabulary. The inference from it is raining outside to I shall bring my umbrella proceeds by implicit
conditioning and not by the formal deduction through a mediating conditional rule such as quote, if it rains then one ought to bring out their umbrella. And from which a syllogism detaches a consequent. This means that the kind of inferences that articulate and stratify the space of reasons are what Sellers and Brandom call material inferences, whose transitions are implicitly inculcated, acquired as a result of conditioning and interaction with one's environment, sapient systems follow implicit norms and not only obey explicit rules or act in accordance with them. And it is this capacity which allows them to operate at different levels of cognitive generality under varying epistemic constraints, where what counts as a reason for or against something in one context may not count for or against the same in another. In short,
Reckoning the implicit normative force of material inferences allows us to see how the behavioral routines of sapient thought are radically non-monotonic in character over and beyond the monotonicity of computational routines. These non-monotonic conceptual routines bind a system to the space of reasons by integrating four distinct levels of processing. First, language entry transitions. A system non-inferentially goes from non-linguistic input A to linguistic output B. For example, system S sees Barbara as others, there goes Barbara by a non-inferential response. This is what is canonically called perception.
B, language-language transitions. A system moves from a linguistic state A to a linguistic state B according to a normal rule of inference. One says A is red and then says A is colored. This is both material and formal inferences, basically transitions between two linguistic or symbolic states. C, language world transitions. Uniformity is taking a system from occupying a position in the language game to outside of it. A system goes from registering the state, I will drink this glass of water, to going ahead and drinking the glass of water. Action. And finally, this is my own aggregation to this, I owe it to Peter Woffendell, non-language to non-language transitions. This pertains to uniformities of behavior or know-how, but note that in what concerns sapient behavior, the capacity to undertake inferences mean
that we can also learn to modify our non-conceptual behavior. So for example, we can go from reading IKEA manuals in language to knowing how to do that circumspectly without having to think about it inferentially. With this in mind, I would suggest that the distinction between the functional and material levels can be mapped onto the distinction between the software and hardware of a system. In short, computationalism as a paradigm towards the engineering of AI has two corresponding vectors of research. First, it must understand functionally what kind of routines can ape the non-monotonic, inferentially bound behavior of sapient systems, integrating the four levels of processing described above. Second, it must understand how to individuate these routines by engineering material mediums capable of supporting these behavioral routines. The level of hardware or implementation,
to use Marx's classical terminology. The important thing is that these two levels of explanation are nevertheless relatively autonomous. It is my contention that this typology allows us to provide a very straightforward response to the question about whether the engineering of new technologies capable of replicating intelligence implied the destitution of the human or its transformation. It allows us, in other words, to confront perhaps the most daring and obscure of Kant's questions, the one reserved for the very end, what is man? To this we say, if, a conditional, the kernel of the Homo sapiens can indeed be taken to be its sapient dimension of its behavior, and so if the question what is man corresponds to the question what is thinking, then the elaboration of further technological mediums to instantiate or enhance intelligence
would by definition preserve the core of humanity, insofar as that which defines it, that is thinking, remains. If, on the other hand, we understand humanity in terms of its material constitution, then the destitution of man by the emergence of new technologies that obviate the dependence of sapiens on the organic appears ever less remote and even likely. Obscurity only results when the two levels of explanation, the functional and the material, are thereby conflated. The destitution of the organic, likely as it might appear, nevertheless preserves a thinking that severes us from the blunt ubiquity of life. compulsion, severs natural impulsion, as it rests the agent to meet reason's own ends. And just to conclude, by the way, this is a graph that explains the different levels
of processing. And just to conclude very shortly, it is thus not sufficient to claim that intelligence is not ours by right. Intelligence is in the last instance no one's, and is by itself nothing. It is indifferent to whether its host is organic or inorganic, utterly blind to the order of life and death. Its powers desecrate the mandates of the living as they transcend the phenomenological horizon of death. For intelligence bears no sympathies for the inertia of the inorganic any more than it does for the interests of the living. Abstraction designates nothing but the power for thought to extirpate itself from that which gives it birth and potentially annihilates it. And yet by the same token, nature cannot but be indifferent to the demands of reason.
The ubiquity of matter can annihilate the reason that it supports without ever having known of the force that guides it or subverts it. It is not, as Hegel would have said, quote, what is real is rational and what is rational is real. For nature's blindness to the kingdom of ends is the very object of thought itself, the end of its own kingdom. procreate and enhance the practical power whose navigational scope reaps through the flesh, disarms the safety of our circumspect world, and obeys a truly secular rule whose interests, as Ray Brassier says, quote, do not coincide with those of the living, end quote. That is thought's only limit and only purpose. Thank you.
on the history and future of design technology. Please welcome Benedict Singleton. Can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, okay. Cool, I can just about hear you. Okay, well, thanks very much to Merlin Co. for inviting me to speak to you or something. Okay, so as the little intro said, I am a strategist which largely involves, on a good day anyway, people pay me to work out how to do relatively interesting things. And my background is in design and philosophy,
which both bear on what I'd like to talk to you about this afternoon, which is the concept of the platform. So the platform is an odd kind of object which bears particularly on the contemporary questions of ambition and what it is to mount an ambitious project. Ambition is long out of fashion, to be honest, across the political spectrum. Either you have, you know, kind of right wing, conventionally right wing points of view that say the market will take care of things, and it will be the ultimate arbiter of whether something is successful. And on the traditional left, the whole idea of planning has kind of become anathema.
In the first case, it appears to basically be directly contradictory, contradicted by any sort of serious appraisal of complexity. the world which unknown contingencies which will almost inevitably overturn the best intentions. And also there's something kind of politically unwholesome about the desire to mount some kind of large scale plan as well. It sort of implied that if the world is not correctly configured on the plan, which of course it can't be, and something goes wrong then the kind of mind that likes to plan is also the kind of mind that likes to put on its jack boots and stamp people into shape and try to fulfil its ambitions through less savouring means.
So the platform kind of emerges in the ruins of the idea of planning and the platform is a strange kind of entity that at once is very obvious and immediate as I'll describe, it's easy to grasp, the sort of basic principles that underlie it, but at the same time it has a kind of paradoxical status within habitual patterns of Western philosophical thought. So in some senses it's like a plan, but it relies on the unforeseen to work. In another sense it's like a static object, but it's mostly valuable for its dynamic qualities. And it's also a constraint that is able to produce some sense of freedom as well, which all of which don't tend to sit well with a lot of what Redstone has recently called,
I think it's Pete Wolfendale's term originally, critical reflexes on the left. Okay, so basically, let's talk about what a platform actually is before I get to any more of that. So, I mean, the term platform has been around for a while in its current sense, but it's become particularly prominent in sort of tech business literature. which is driven by engineering and sort of subscribes to kind of default free market economic vocabulary. But I mean, what a platform is, is still what it originally meant when the word emerged in English in the theatre in the 1500s, which is a spatial structure that hosts external activity, when the platform in a theatre was the stage.
and more generally it's a set of relatively fixed components which not only become sort of involved in diverse behaviours around it but actually enable those behaviours in the obvious example of the stage like the fact that it's a clear space and it has certain affordances to be able to bring people on, take people off, put up stage dressing and so on. In the kind of literature where it's been discussed at length which doesn't lack sophistication although it's a sophistication of a very particular kind It's usual to advance software businesses of various kinds, especially social networks like Facebook, as examples of what a platform is today. So with Facebook you have a core of a platform which involves proprietary source code, data
centres, algorithms and organisational structure, brand and this kind of thing. And it's windowed with various kinds of interfaces that allow people sort of selective access to that core. So there's the user interface with which we're all familiar. There's also an API for app developers. And we'd be remiss not to mention there also appear to be back doors for intelligent agencies like permanent wiretaps built into it and this kind of thing as well. But what makes Facebook platform is the fact that you have this core and then other people can come along. It's designed so that people can pick it up and use it within their own projects. There's no real kind of appropriate use of what Facebook is. There's only a compatibility requirement that whatever you do operates through certain
channels. So rather than specifying an appropriate use in advance, it solicits appropriation, basically. Now platforms in general, I think the concept of a platform is much richer than you've acknowledged in the literature where it's largely discussed. The platform in a sense, it certainly doesn't have to be enormously complicated, you know, sort of infrastructure ecology of various actors and this kind of thing. It can be honed right down to, as I said, its original meaning of the stage. really anything can be understood as a platform insofar as the platform generalizes the principle of the leader. So it's a kind of island of predictability and stability, a patch of kind of resistance
in the world which is precisely what it enables it to kind of host other behaviors and to make them possible. So the configuration of a platform is that if you're able to know what it does and how it behaves, not necessarily how it works in any deeper way, then you're able to leverage it within your own projects. So as this can really apply to anything, any kind of object, any kind of process and so on, can be understood as a platform. And an object achieves the status of a platform really in the moment of its operationalisation through appropriation, which is something like actually the basic gesture of Artifice,
I think, you know, sort of taking something and saying, well, what can me plus this object do? How can I reconfigure this object to be a part of this particular project? So far, I mean, so much of a factional concern with infrastructure, basically, which is something which a lot of people are talking about futurists and social futurists. And this kind of thing, you know, the infrastructures that underpin our everyday life and in various stages of dereliction, or especially like how do you produce new ones when large-scale investment and coordination is necessary to produce them. that the whole idea of planning within the sea is ridiculously realistic. And I think it also has a more general relevance as I'll endeavor to describe as well.
So, platforms really haven't had, I was having a conversation with Ben Bratton and Nick Sernacek about this, and both of them made the point that platforms really haven't had a Hayek or a Hobbs or a Marx or another figure that has really kind of like brass them and explored the implications of them. And I think that perhaps this is merited in the case of the platform as I'll describe. So the reason why I think they're so important is because they show a particular kind of logic at work which is a logic that William Wimsatt, philosopher engineering, cause generative entrenchment. So if a platform produces new behavioural possibilities, it also organises them to some
extent. But if it works by fixing behaviour to some extent, it doesn't rule by decree, it doesn't over-determine, as I was saying. In fact, it under-determines how it's going to be used, but the very fact that one's behaviour has to be compatible with it exerts a kind of shaping effect. And this allows it to infiltrate the projects in which a platform is implicated. It becomes incorporated and under certain conditions becomes not just integrated into whatever project or process, but actually integral to it. So this is what WimSat understands to be a principle of generative entrenchment, basically. entrenchment describes the way in which some kind of system of whatever material, some
element is taken up and then other things are built on top of it and come to rely on. So this process embeds a component in the system, making it more and more important even though it may have initially been trivial. And this works because the process of entrenchment is generative. kind of component, the original platform precipitates other phenomena around it and then becomes a necessary part of the structure in a sense. So the idea of the platform is extremely extensive from that point of view. It's a grasp through the functionalist language that someone like WimSat or William Bechtel the users. But not only in terms of artificial systems and so on, in fact it's kind of got
an incredibly broad commitment. I mean you can understand like DNA for instance to have operated as a platform precipitating certain other developments. The same with photosynthesis or the tetrabeval body plan of organisms that emerged in Cambrian explosion and so on. In each of these cases you had some kind of development which may have been trivial originally but then it became an essential component of things which over time accumulated on top of it and it became thoroughly embedded in an incredibly difficult to extract usually. The problem of extracting a platform from a situation in which it's generatively entrenched is the proverbial problem of rebuilding a ship while you're sailing or relaying the foundations of a house while you're inside.
And in fact this goes, I think, just as kind of aside, but I think this probably goes all the way down to notoriously difficult systems which humans can't find, which are involved in social functioning very deeply and inextricably, but are also very difficult to understand. So things like language, for instance, I suspect that the resistance the language has to kind of absolute formalization has, is part of the means by which it's kind of generatively entrenched. It's sort of, it can be understood to the level where it can be played with, it can be adapted and so on, but it'd be very difficult to actually sort of fuck with the basic syntax and grammar and this kind of thing, the language that you speak in profound kind of ways.
It's just an aside about kind of like the limits of the platform and the way in which certain platforms may actually become embedded for a long period of time precisely because they're so difficult to extract and they're so rich in their generative possibilities at the same time. So this means from kind of like a more active participatory position rather than just thinking about it as an interesting way to understand a particular system dynamic is the idea of platform design as an operationalisation of generative entrenchments. This is basically an organisation like Facebook fully expresses this kind of project where
it's deliberately set up not only to allow people to appropriate it but to be able to record and metricate their appropriations so that its internal structure can be adapted in future to more effectively catch a wider range of behaviours. And you see this in systems like Facebook or in digital tech software in general, because the timeframes are very compressed in terms of their evolution, they're very kind of They easily proliferate through the internet, those digital network protocols and so on. But it's more generally present. It's kind of like a logic of the Industrial Revolution, actually, that really brings it to the fore.
It's interesting how many 19th century industrialists, right through to kind of early modernists, Bauhaus and so on, would talk about, you know, a genuine ambition that they had in order to reformat bits and pieces of people's lives through providing certain kinds of environments and this sort of thing that would enable new behaviours. But there's something very interesting I think and more significant than the fact that we can set up systems in order to capture or attempt to capture these kinds of dynamics, Which is the platforms actually reformat in a subtle but important way certain particular Western habits of thought, especially the relationship between means and ends.
So we're used to the idea that practical activity is somehow secondary, as in the formulation of theory and practice or idea and application, design and implementation and so on. So there's a sort of habit which you especially find in kind of political philosophy and so on, of like specifying ends and states of affairs that should be brought about with the hope that some kind of means will be able to affect them. And from that position, you know, success is judged by the degree to which you can approach, you know, a given end, like a picture of the world as you want it to be. But the platform kind of demands a reversal of this thinking, swapping out of the priority
of means and ends. So instead of elaborating an end and aligning means in order to pursue it, with a platform you begin with means and ask how you can move outwards from there. This tends to use logics which are kind of cryptic to a lot of popular discourse about how things actually work in the world. I'll stick with the example of Facebook just because it's an easy one. Facebook came into an awful lot of flack a couple of years ago because they developed a presentation around capturing the next billion users, as they put it, in Africa and Southeast
Asia and so on. And people were saying at the time, you know, you're just going through an IPO process and like you don't actually have any kind of, you can't say why you want to get all these people using Facebook. But from a perspective within platform logic, that's simply a nonsensical question. The fact that if you build the system, then people will take it up and will use it if you configure it effectively. And opportunities will show themselves. You are banking here on the unseen or the unforeseen. You are making contingency and the limits of your own ability to predict part of a structured plan in order to
develop some kind of infrastructure which will achieve its value through time. It will bring about its reason for being through its adoption and its use or its appropriation not through pre-specification. And it's striking that when organisations really recognise platform logic and pursue it, not only does it yield these kind of cryptic scenarios or apparently cryptic scenarios. But it also, it kind of loosens the role of ends as specific ends as things to achieve. The design of
designated finish line after which a project is complete. They tend to elaborate ends only in the most general terms in the case of companies like Google or Facebook, I mean Google has this mission statement to organize the world's information and that's it. Presumably the world isn't just the planetary surface either, seeing as they're getting into backing various deep space industries by planetary resources. And so from the perspective, what is stated as an end is really like an ongoing, minimal degree of coherence that allows a collective to coordinate their activities as part of this project rather than the attainment of fixed specific aims which only become really
relevant as ways to metricate progress, as ways to kind of like insight or define the pursuit of possibilities. In fact this actually kind of resembles the original meaning of the original meaning of ambition as in going around, which the word literally means, with the kind of implication that one goes around in order to drum up support for an agenda. But more generally, this reformatted relationship to the future where we don't try and pursue a utopia, but rather find ways to leverage ourselves out of the present, is expressed in the idea of the platform, and the platform is a means to escape the present or crowbar open the future.
It's not a plan in the same kind of rigorous, robust way, but rather a completely different kind of logic that sort of unfolds, which can be adopted, I think, as a kind of central device for a certain kind of thought. In particularly, it's an essential conceptual device in what is ended up being called accelerationism, which, as you guys know, has various models on the market present. There's kind of a Landian Shagothic capitalism, there's the Sir Leachet Williams Red Plenty kind of model, Reza's recent writing about self-constructing, revising intelligence and
so on. All of these things really have in common is that they try to align with the generative forces of what we tend to call identity. They start with an attempt to grasp how things get done. interested in efficacious means at the beginning and work outwards from there and say not what kind of worlds we want to live in but like actually how do we get things done and how can we move you know with that knowledge like what are the possibilities that can be opened up how can they be multiplied and pursued and this I think concept of the platform not only kind of captures that it also gives us an opportunity to reformat quite, well very extant structures, structures which
are in fact used as platforms both conceptually and physically. So things like the idea of markets and can be seen effectively as different forms of platform which have certain zones of complicity or compatibilities, but also conflicts and so on. And by recasting them in this sense, you can say, well, not only are they deeply embedded and, you know, gives an appreciation of the possibility of unpicking them, but the other alternatives are actually possible according to this general scheme. I'm not going to say, you know, I don't know what they are. But it at least, I think, enables us to kind of like rethink our relationships with these
things not as necessary constraints but as reconfigurable platforms which can be deviated, modulated and so on through various forms of intervention. That's it for me. Thank you. So this is going to be a response by Julieta Aranda, who is an artist born in Mexico City
who currently lives and works between Berlin and New York. Central to Aranda's multidimensional practice are her involvement with circulation mechanisms, her interest on science fiction, space travel, zones of friction, and her interest on possibilities for the production of political subjectivities by way of all of the above. As a director of EFLUX, together with Anton, Julieta has developed the projects Time Bank Pawn Shop and EFLUX Video Rental, all of which started in the EFLUX storefront in New York and have traveled to many venues worldwide. Since 2008, Julieta Aranda has been the editor of EFLUX Journal, together with Anton and
Brian Kwanwood. Thank you. Thank you. In welcoming her. Hello. Am I there? I hope I am there. Yes, we can hear you. Thank you. OK. So, well, I guess we have to start with a bit of a disclaimer. Unfortunately... Unfortunately... I can't hear it. No, yes, no. No? I think you did the same mistake. You changed the... No, no, no. Actually, this sometimes happens on Hangouts. I hope that it's not what is happening right now.
Every once in a great while, because I can hear Julieta perfectly. Can the other people on the panel hear Julieta? Hello, hello, hello, hello. Yeah, other people are indicating that they can hear her. For some reason, it is not coming through to the conference through that particular computer. Can we reboot and ask her to stop? We just do a reboot and then we'll do it because people are eager to hear her. Another way that we can do it is that Julieta can call my phone and I can hold it up to the computer. It will sound just fine. Let's just reboot. I think rebooting is better. People refuse to do the phone here. Just text her on the side and say, just stop,
and then we'll reboot. Okay. Please. I can do that, too, but I just can't find a window. It's just that it would be a lot faster, but sure. And plus, there's no guarantee that rebooting will fix anything, just so you know. Because that's one of the problems with Hangouts. This happens occasionally. So what do I do? Because we need to do this anyways, right? Because we just want to make... Actually, Mohamed, let's do it like this. You already have two computers that are up. So let's try to make the sound come through the other computer.
We can't do that because the whole thing is rigid. We're dealing with structural limitations here. We're back to all the stocks, right? On the level of structure is impossible. Okay. Just one sec. Let's see. We're going to try something. We're going to use the power of concept to get over the structural limitations. Let's see. I'm going to just be counting out loud, and then somebody just tells me when they can hear me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, ten.
Okay, can you hear me? I hear everybody. Okay, you're coming through fine, so go ahead. Okay. Wonderful. Okay, so, after all this, I have to start with a disclaimer. because unfortunately I did not have access to Ressa's presentation in advance, so I am not talking directly about computational tooling machines, but I am rather responding in a more general sense to certain ideas that have been put out by Ressa and that I would want to have opened up a bit more. For this I'll join both from the text Dead as Perversion, Openness and Learning Like That, which was published in the book Dark Trajectories, and also from the recent text, The Labour of the Inhuman, which was published in two parts
of the last two issues of Inflexione, and I hope there will be some conceptual overlap so I don't come off as well in the wrong party entirely. And if I do, please accept my apologies. I will go back to myself for a little bit to explain where I'm tackling this from. As an artist, I tend to call myself a sculptor in the most unliberous sense of the term, and this is a label that I use more to signal a relationship with the world than to signal an object-based production. That is to say, there is a conflation of material and material means of production in my work, which I am perfectly happy not to keep separate. Having having witnessed the taking body of what we call the digital over the last 10 or 15 years
and the material in the human cost and I guess in this particular case human cost can also be understood as a cloud of material of the production of the digital and its circulation keeping digital and cognitive production in the real, not the immaterial, seems disingenuous and improductive to me. So, I cannot hear myself too many times, sorry. So, at this point, I would say that I am much more interested in the taking of the notion of both objects and tools irrelevant of their solid forms, and the way these updated notions exert on the world.
But maybe this is also an investigation of what constitutes a solid body and how we negotiate the production processes of said body. So it is to this lens that I would like to explore the ramifications of the idea of inhumanism that Vess opposes a subrational system of commutants to being human. In the text, Death as Perversion, there is already the mention of a subversive commitment. There is the proposition of metrophilia as a radical openness, as a form of commitment to life in its most transformative sense, a life that does not insist on retaining its original container or embodiment, and the process not extinguishable by the finity of a given body, but it is instead committed to its own processes of transformation and
opens itself into the world by laying itself there and becoming something else, and then something else, and then something else, and so on. So, that would be bad committed to life, not in the restricted sense of being committed to life as say, life as televised, or life as William Amish, or life as a specific understanding of the world that was private with some of the man-made languages that are now extinct, but rather that executing a commitment to life understood as its next logical conclusion, and subsequently a commitment to all the logical conclusions that will come after that. What I find very important in that text is the opposition that rests the presence of necrophilia vis-à-vis to the regime of necocracy.
And I may be way of the mark, forgive me if I is the case, but in this particular text I understand necocracy as a political-economical conservatism, but that is presented as an inexorable terminal condition. And macrophilia on the other hand is presented not as a desire for death, but rather as the desire of death to germinate and open its own. The negation of a final extinction of intensity. So I see macrophilia as the manifestation of a manoeuvre of solidarity, a sort of machine of desire that cannot be extinguished. And I think what I want to focus on moving on to the labor of the human is precisely this idea of solidarity, but I'm going to get to that in a moment.
I would like to quote two short passages from the second part of the labor of the human, coming from here. From a rational perspective, a commitment is seen as a cascade of ramifying paths that is in the process of expanding its frontiers. developing into an evolving landscape. A certain point. Machine of desire that cannot be extinguished. And I want to focus on moving into the labor of the Am I coming through at all? Sorry. I'm sorry. I think I lost myself. Can somebody come over here? No, it seemed like somebody opened a YouTube window and it was playing your previous minutes, what other people are watching.
Just, you, future caught up with the past. Okay, so can I continue now? Okay. Please, sorry about that. Take off your headphone, apparently. Okay. And sit back from the microphone, that's what people say here. We are still managing people here because people outside are hearing you perfectly. Because I checked it on YouTube, so it's like, oh, like, for here. Okay, so, then I'll go back again to where I was. I'm going to quote these two short passages from the second part of Labor of the Inhuman. The first is, from a rational perspective, a commitment is seen as a cascade of identifying paths that is in the process of expanding its frontiers, developing into an evolving language state, unmoving its fixed perspectives, deracinating any form of rootedness associated
with a fixed commitment or immutable responsibilities, revising links and addresses between its old and new commitments, and finally, erasing any image of itself as what it was supposed to be. The second passage is, the practical elaboration of making a commitment to humanity is inhumanism. If making a commitment means fully elaborating the content of such a commitment, the consequent, whatever else, of what it means to be human, and if to be human means being able to enter the space of reason, then a commitment to humanity must fully elaborate how the abilities of reason functionally convert sentience to sapience. So, as I see, the idea of radical localness that was already present in the previous text is...
I lost myself again. Oh, sorry. So as I see, the idea of radical localness is being carried through the recent differentiation or an update, let's say, from the previous commitment that was described of death's commitment to life or death's commitment to being. As I understand the commitment to human that Reza is proposing starts with the determination, with the elimination of being into sentience and sapience and thus a commitment that's filtered through the space of reason so to speak and again in a way that is almost a commitment to sapience itself. As Reza put in the text, it is a commitment to the autonomy of recent revisionary program over which human has no hold. And here maybe is where I feel the need to slow down a little bit.
Because while I agree wholeheartedly with the need to constantly update and redefine the terms by which we define the world and ourselves and our relationships with the world, I also see the commitment to the revision and construction of the future as a political project, even at its most extreme and non-biological projection. For me, that entails the constant construction and revision of a political present, even if it is understood as in terms of a series of immediate futures. So I would like to move into closer detail to the possibility of commitment to human in terms of consecutive immediate futures. Going back to my interest on subjects that are being produced and that are producing themselves in the sense of actual friction, Lehef has been fascinated by an interview which was given by a Brazilian crime boss directly from jail.
And this is because it speaks to me about the claims and the construction of a political presence. So I might quote an excerpt from that. This is a moment when a journalist is asking this gangster, basically, if he's afraid of dying. His response was, It is you who are afraid of dying, not me. As a matter of fact, while I am here in jail, you cannot come in and kill me. But as soon as you leave, I can make a phone call and have you killed outside. We are human bombs. In the slums, there are 100,000 human bombs. We are in the center of the insoluble itself, really. You are stalking a discourse concerning good and evil, and in between you and us, there is the frontier of death, the only frontier that matters.
We are already a different species, we are already bugs, we are animals different from you. Death for you is a Christian drama that happens in bed, clutching a hamper cheek during a heart attack. Death for us is a daily meal, whatever, however, laying on a beach, dumped in a mass grave. Even during the lectures used to talk about class struggle, about being on the fringe, about being here, then it is we to arrive. My soldiers are strange anomalies in the distorted development of this country. No more politicalarians or unhappy or exploiting individuals. There is a third thing growing outside, cultivated in the mud, educated in the most absolute illiteracy, graduated in prisons like a monster alien hidden in the cracks of the city. A new language has emerged.
It is this. It is other lingo. We are facing what I would call post-misery. That's it. The post-misery begets a new murderous culture, aided by modern technology, satellites, cellular phones, internet, modern weapons. It is cheap, yes, but it is cheap with solid state hard drives, fast data transfer rates, and many terabytes of storage. My soldiers are a mutation of the social species. Their tongue is growing on a great dirty mistake. And to go back to Ressa, in the labor of being human, Ressa says that the task is to construct points of liaison, cognitive and practical channels source to a negative communication between what we think of ourselves and what is becoming of us.
And he also says that identifying ourselves as human is neither a sufficient condition for understanding what is becoming of us, nor a sufficient condition for recognizing what we are becoming, or more accurately, what is being born out of us. As I see it, this lack of recognition or understanding generates what I call the perspective of perspective, and that is a world that is mediated by a faulty image of the world. So, before considering going forward into the claim for a functional autonomy of reason in the future, my questions are, how do we deal with a faulty image of the present, if we don't want to simply chop it as collateral damage to the process of production of the future? If we have a we, there is no commitment to being human.
How is this we being constructed? How can we think about solidarity in this process? And in what terms of solidarity? Would this be a solidarity to life, a solidarity to human, a solidarity to reason? In the updating of the present, is there still space for a collectivity and for the modes of engagement of what it would be to be a citizen, Not a human, not a user, not a consumer, but for a citizen to be produced and updated, or a writer to produce and update herself, and that would be my response. Even if I heard it, that is. Thank you so much, Julioza.
So I'm going to step back. So maybe we want to put the sound back to the way it was. Thank you. To Matt over here. Can you hear us? Because we went through some change here. I just want to make sure that you guys are here. Yeah, we can hear you just fine. OK. So this machine probably, we may still not hear Julieta if she wants to speak later, but she can still hear us. So at this point, what we should do is go back and get all the other responses. Basically, responses that will begin with Danielle's response. So we have, why don't we start with somebody in the house? Ali, are you around?
Okay. Do you want to come? And remember to introduce yourself. Okay. Hello, everyone. Thanks for being partially still here. So my response to Daniel, before that, introducing myself, is that I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to be able to do this. I'm going to be able to do this. So my response to Daniel, before that, introducing myself. I'm a practicing artist. I'm Ali Ahadi. Practicing artist holding some conditional interest for philosophy or for what is known
as conditions of philosophy, if you prefer. My practice is constituted through procedures of rambling through the interrelations between the extent concepts within aesthetics and contingent forms of abstraction that are not necessarily reducible to the conventional artistic determinations. within politically charged situation, seeking to find a rupture that allows for transforming the information into the sensible. So speaking of situation would take me to no one but Alan Badia, whose conception of the situation, aka set, aka world, and politics as a truth versus you are extremely different with the political and subsequently to the theory of subject, which all provided a base for my practice
and my living in a hardcore fashion for a long time. My research during my studies in the MFA program at UBC dealt with politics of subjectualization that was formalized in a former paper in which I double-oiled my thesis on the concept of ephemeral subject and precarious object and the ethics of rambling, which these days making me think of Nagarastani's idea of navigation. Getting back to Daniel's paper on what does it mean to think, and his tripartite that he draws about the historical relation between modern science and modern philosophy from the orthodox to revisionist and to the post-revisionist.
his, his, I'm bringing the post revisionist one to the light of a materialistic metaphysics. So my question for Daniel would start on the side of metaphysics, which I can start by considering the history of metaphysics from a Kantian reading of it as the realm of the inaccessible to the traditional positivist reading of metaphysics as Auguste Comte would put it in that way, which says metaphysic as a, or metaphysic party as a form of mental illness that naturally inhere in our mental evolution. And finally, a dialectical critic of metaphysic, like Hegel, Marx, even Nietzsche, that considers metaphysic as a complete mutilation of a form of thought that dismisses the constant becoming
of ideas that are the result of the contradictions against and over of the unilateral entities within a situation. So having said that, all these critiques towards metaphysics, and now coming to the conclusion about a materialistic reading of metaphysics, my question to Daniel would be that where does your metaphysics, your materialistic metaphysics, sets its boundaries? Or I can put it in this way, that where is the edge of the outside for you, outside of this thinker creature, be it a homo sapient or a sapient? According to the tripartite and the history that you were drawing. The second question, and if your metaphysic is a materialist one, and if the ontology, first of all, is your metaphysic, can be assigned with an ontology?
So, if so, if your ontology is mathematizable, then what would be, what would potentiate the necessity of substituting this with epistemic strategies to understand that what are the criteria in which, or what criteria need to be met that we can calculate the ability of a sapient as a thinker. go into the other steps that whether we can replicate this like you know this this this faculty into other material configurations like as i said engineering artificial intelligence and and so on and so forth and the the last question that what is your subject the subject that you're talking about like i mean it is the form of being that i assume not is it a state uh or a process
in which a body is in the process of being constructed? What is the concept of this subject in this elaboration of thinking? What are its software, hardware qualities? Can it be explained that this human thinking can be explained in a functional way or in a material way, this subjective state of thinking? So, again, reviewing the question, what is your metaphysics and what is the materialistic metaphysics and where are its boundaries and where is the edge of the outside of this situation? Is the metaphysics towards a situation, a world, a multiplicity, or something that is out there and it's ultimately talking about being as a whole, as a one?
Yeah, pretty much these are my questions. Yeah, cool. Thank you. So yeah, like I said, I really just have three kind of brief, I have more questions than a response for Daniel. So, yeah, so the first question is if maybe you could talk a little bit more, unpack a little bit the way you sort of understand the feedback loop between, on the one hand, the functional levels of human cognition
sort of in the service of constructing AI, and on the other hand, constructing AI in order to understand the functional levels of human cognition. So there's a kind of, I sort of sense this dialectic cropping up, I know, in your work and in Ray's work as well. The second question would be, I was wondering if maybe you could get a little more specific about actually what type of artificial intelligence we're talking about, whether we're talking about discrete, localized artificial intelligences meant for kind of pragmatic, specific purposes, or are we talking about AGI, artificial general intelligence, because they both have quite different, quite unique demands and commitments.
And then I guess the third question would be sort of taking on Lorenzo Magnani's work on distributed cognition. If in a sense the further we, let's say, understand and describe and at a certain point leap to construct artificial intelligence, if in some sense thinking and thought might become more more and more diffuse by way of this kind of trajectory towards artificial general intelligence. So those are my three questions, really. Thank you.
You were very brief. I just wish you also introduced yourself, because I didn't get a chance to introduce you. JOHN MUELLER- I thought there had already been the introduction. I'm sorry. So you want to do that so people know who you are? It's fine. I'm Brian Rogers. I'm an artist and writer based in San Francisco and Beirut. I work kind of between new media performance and writing and sound. And yeah, that's fine. Thank you. So why don't we move forward with responses to or questions for Benedict. I see there. And probably Sam is around too. I'm not sure. But let's start with the one we see. That's Sam, right?
SAM SINGHALADIANI- Sam's not here. OK, why don't we get Gelare then? Sure. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Gelare. I'm an artist and a translator. And I also write. And I'm based in Los Angeles. I have a couple of short questions in regards to Benedict's presentation and first, I'll start with the first one. From what I understand, you kind of presume an inherent quality of commutability or a kind of malleability in the entity of platform. And through this process of, through the process of the entrenchment where the,
where according to you and obviously the platform gets integrated and integral into the structure, the platform also goes through a kind of transformation. And my question is that do you see this possible or helpful to think of designing platforms where we can ultimately move away from? I mean, a kind of platform that after the process of the entrenchment, and the structure itself will be able to live as an autonomous entity, and for that to be an answer or a solution to the limits of the platform and its compatibility and the limitations that it brings.
And so my second question is, I was wondering, it's a question of neutrality, and it might sound like a basic question, but I was wondering if you also think of neutrality to be a requirement or, again, an inherent quality to the entity of the platform. because I was, I mean, I got really excited about this whole idea of potentially looking at every object as a platform because I think, I mean, coming from where I come from, it's also very, to me, it's like a querying of the objects. And I was thinking of, like, I was just going on and on and I was thinking of all these different things as platforms
and off the top of my head I was thinking of, like, drone technology as a platform or war as a platform or contemporary art as a platform. And it was just fun to think about that and imagine its own hardware and software and OS and incompatibility issues and all of that. So, yeah, I guess those two. The question of neutrality and my first question, if it's possible to design platforms where we can ultimately move away from and kind of, like, shed, like, a skin so that the platform will be exactly like a trained platform where you use it to get on a train, and once you're on a train, you leave it behind. You don't even need to even think about the platform anymore.
And if that's possible, or if that's a, what do you think about that? So those are my questions. Thank you. So to move forward, is Sam around? I don't see Sam in the room. Because Sam was going to also respond to Benedict. But he was in the last session. But I just don't see him here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I think it's a question of like maybe, actually no. We'll have Jason. Jason R. Jason, why don't you start? And then maybe if Geller leaves and watches the video on YouTube,
then maybe there's going to be room enough for Sam to join because I think Sam wants to join. It's just that the room is full. Yeah. Okay, Jason, you're on. Jason's going to respond or introduce himself and then hopefully respond. Go ahead. Me. Right. You're talking to me, right? Yes, we can hear you. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, there's a few Jasons around. So, hello, everyone. And hi, Mohamed. Thanks again for the invitation to the conference. It's been great so far. So my name is Jason LaRiviere. I'm a PhD student at NYU, and I'm currently working on a dissertation project which looks at questions at the intersection of technical compression, media art, and non-standard
or specifically Laurelian aesthetics. So basically things Alexander was talking about in his talk last night. So it was nice to hear that and all the great responses to that. And so I've been asked to respond to Nick's paper presented earlier today. And I mostly just want to underscore his emphasis on the importance of the concept of modeling in the current conditions of the overdeveloped world. I think he's absolutely right to point up the impasses of left politics of late, including what he called the, quote, romanticism of endless insurrections,
the ephemeral protest of horizontal movements, as well as the retreat into small-scale localism. As someone that lives in Brooklyn, I can attest to the utter bankruptcy of the last tactic in particular. I think Nick's call to rethink the Promethean venture, to think it beyond its heretofore limited potential, is extremely important today. As he said, we are already Promethean. The question remains as to what kind of Prometheanism we ought to strive for. To that end, I'd like to address in my brief remarks here the recent enthusiasm around strands of the so-called accelerationism, a body of thought that seems to animate this
conference in some significant way. So many of its critics have dismissed accelerationism as the great white hope of contemporary Marxists dispirited by the juggernaut of techno-industrial neoliberal capitalism and have pointed toward a barely sublimated messianism in its futurist visions. I want to be clear that that's not what I want to do in these brief remarks. My purpose here is to raise a more pragmatic set of concerns informed by contemporary geopolitical, environmental, and resource-related factors. Stated briefly, these concerns would be the following. So, one, many experts on the petroleum situation already predict that we've passed peak production
and that we have very little time to A, develop an alternative equivalent energy source, or B, get the necessary infrastructure that it would require to function up and running before the global technological grid suffers potentially catastrophic energetic supply shortages, possibly including the wholesale collapse of global civilization and here we might think of the work of Richard Heinberg in particular. The latter situation might necessitate an attempt to actually slow down petroleum consumption long enough to keep industrial R&D up and running and an alternate preferably renewable energy source or sources. In the meantime we also have the climate
situation to worry about and this too seems like something that is going to require a globally coordinated response entailing the necessity of an actually functional global communication grid and the continued existence of high technology. All these factors would seem to indicate that a massive acceleration of technological change and migration to all world colonies are both unfeasible and potentially dangerous in the context of the current global energy and environmental situations. Perhaps instead what we need is a sort of moderated acceleration of certain types of change such as alternate energy and climate change response and adaptation, supplemented by a slowdown at the level of fossil fuel consumption which in turn might entail that
scrap certain futurist visions whose actualization may require huge energy expenditures, such as visions of post-humanistic space migration, for example. On top of this, the social situation produced by the chaotic collapse of industrial societies would likely result in an ugly mixture of mass social scapegoating, finding someone to blame for the crisis, the eruption of irrational or apocalyptic religious energies, and the rise of fascist movements. And this in turn might encourage global elites to deal with resource depletion and its result in social tensions through war. I think we've seen this scenario play out before. So again, is an imperative to accelerate the best imperative
we can find now? And is the accelerationist motto that the only way to collapse is to accelerate it when accompanied by a flirtation with nihilist tendencies, possibly a sort of psychological insurance policy. Whereby if accelerationist policies are actually implemented and result in a massive global catastrophe, the accelerationist can claim that this is what we were aiming for all along. That is in the few moments that will remain for such retrospection. I want to briefly then, in conclusion, point to the kind of moderated dialectical acceleration that I think should guide us going forward. This is by way of a kind of a bibliographical plug, not that he needs it, to Frederick Jameson,
in particular his essay, Utopia as Replication, which is in the collection Valances of the Dialectic. Well this is Jameson at his most accelerationist, where he wants to, as he puts it, think quantity positively. So this echoes for me with what Nick was saying about facing up to the complex quantities of current capitalism and not rejecting them out of hand. Jameson's perverse gambit in this essay is to put forth Walmart as a utopian phenomenon. Dick mentioned that Wal-Mart engages in firm-level planning, and I'm not sure if this is where he was trying to go with this. I'd be interested to see the longer version of his paper.
In thinking the dialectical reversals of planetary economic modeling. But I'd just like to end by quoting a particularly powerful passage from Jameson's essay here, which I think speaks to a number of salient issues which have come up in conference so far. So this is Jameson in this essay, Replication as Utopia. He says, I am tempted to add something about the ambivalence of the dialectic itself, particularly with respect to technological innovation. It is enough to recall the admiration of Lenin and Gramsci for Taylorism and Gordism be perplexed at this weakness of revolutionaries for what is most exploitative and dehumanizing
in the working life of capitalism. But this is precisely what is meant by utopian here, namely that what is currently negative can also be imagined as positive in that immense changing of the valences which is the utopian future. And this is the way I want us to consider Walmart, however briefly, namely as a thought experiment, not after Lenin's crude but practical fashion as an institution faced with which after the revolution we can lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, but rather as what Raymond Williams called the emergent as opposed to the residual, the shape of the utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise
the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia. So I think this is precisely the kind of thought experiments that we need to be engaging with at this time. So that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Jason. And sorry for delay of getting you to respond to Nick. NICK BUTCHERBAUMNIKOVSKY- Oh, that's OK. So Sam, are you ready? Sam Forsyth. There we go. The true robotic man. We can hear you.
NICK BUTCHERBAUMNIKOVSKY- Yeah. There it is. Now, please introduce yourself first. Hi, I'm Sam, and I'm an artist working between new media and performance. I collaborate with Brian Rogers sometimes, who spoke earlier, along with some other people. And my response is to Benedict, and because there's already been a lot of really good questions and there's probably more to come, I'm gonna keep it pretty brief. My sort of question or I suppose sort of interrogation for Ben would be what struck me about the idea of this sort of platform or I was thinking if it were a verb, this kind of platforming, is that it seems to rather than rely on prior commitments to some kind of position, it relies
on commitments to sort of methods exclusive of any kind of original position or some kind of ideological commitments. So if platforming or if the orientation towards the appropriation of platform as some kind of pirate takeover or some kind of like constant jumping ship in order to always redesign and reappropriate anything that you can come across that seems to be sort of provide some kind of efficacy, what might be the conceptual methods for not constantly being overridden by the conditions that you're experiencing on whatever it is, whatever ship you happen
to jump onto? The example of language was very interesting in that in order to constantly try and re-appropriate language, you always encounter sort of traps and pitfalls and I I suppose if you were going to look at system building or the idea of moving into or appropriating or I suppose even just taking on the methods of what you one could perceive as a platform that's already given, what sort of, I suppose, theoretical methods could one deploy in order to constantly, always already be in the act of trying to deal with whatever traps and pitfalls you
can encounter while simultaneously sort of repurposing it for your ends. I suppose the metaphor of trying to rebuild the boat while you're sailing it is a good example. So, if my question has made any sense at all, then I suppose that's it. Thank you.