The Concept of Acceleration (Session 6)

Hello and welcome to the sixth session of the concept of acceleration with McClendon. We'll pass the mic. I think I'm off to him right now. Thanks Theodore. So just in terms of where we are, this is our second stagnationism week and and then we assuming that we're allowed to continue that we move on to a couple of weeks on upswing material in in the last two uh weeks of course and and one of the things hopefully we can do this time is get some sense of what that um what that succeeding material is going to be

roughly about a sense of basic vector of the of the course i guess um so the guiding question that i have for this week um is whether there is a fundamental accelerationist position on the secular stagnation thesis we obviously sort of uh we're looking at that very uh in a preliminary fashion last week uh drawing on um peter teo in particular because of the topicality i guess of his of his stance um tyler cohen

who we mentioned I think is is perhaps has a more established position staked out in this in this stagnation thesis space as he certainly written more about it then Adam sent along some links from I think the Nick Sinek's course which I've been looking at lots of interesting material there and I thought particularly the article by Robert Gordon called is US economic growth over was was definitely a good reference I people have already got this but let me

just um because it's in the classroom I just randomly send send it again and And what's striking I think about certainly those three thinkers on this question is how much concordance they have on the basic stagnationist claim. And I think what I'm hoping to do a bit in the intro to this week is to try and some sense of what it would be to build a bridge between the philosophical side of this question, the abstract side, which I think is the side of the accelerationist philosophy,

and the concrete stagnationist claims that you get in Gordon's paper and Teal's work in Tyler Cohen's work what is what is if I can just group them together and I'm going to deliberately crudify things a bit in the sense I'm sure there's lots of interesting distinctions that could be made and which perhaps we will make later in the class between these positions but I think there's So there's a huge degree of affinity between them. And what all of them are arguing is that there is something about the structure of industrialization that means it's at least credible to assume that it has some kind of historical limit

and that we are perhaps seeing this historical limit. I think it's easier to get a grasp of that if we say, if we ask at the abstract side, well what is industrialization? And there are lots of things that we can say about that and if we were angles maybe I'm going to pass over right at the moment but I think for our purposes here a reasonable definition is that industrialization is the social process of technological absorption and none of these none of these stagnationist thinkers has a an argument that is fundamentally economic in nature if I

If you take a slight step back from the initial question, which I'm afraid I'll just repeat for clarity's sake, is there a fundamental accelerations position on the secular stagnation thesis? Well, why say fundamental accelerationist? Because there are obviously, the reason is there are obviously left and right accelerationist positions on the secular stagnation thesis. But I think it's at least arguable that they are drawn from the left and the right, which is to say from liberal and socialist economic doctrines, rather than specifically from accelerationism as such. so I think there's a broadly Marxist socialist

economic argument about the causes of stagnation and there's a broadly liberal Austrian economic argument about the causes of stagnation and those feed into various strains of accelerationism but I think well of course we can go back to them and i think they're important and perhaps inescapable i think it's also possible to ask well is there something you know in the very nature of the accelerationist concept that allows us to uh click it together with this notion of stagnation and and and um leads us to some kind of a consistent stance on the question of secular stagnation

so if we get back to this question uh about industrialization it's it's very notable that in all of the people we're looking at the the key stagnation thinkers that this notion of industrialization is not very um economically dependent they're they're they're sort of uh the order of dependency that all of these these people are really um i won't say assuming but but promoting is that the the of dependency is really going uh innovation through technology into industrialization and therefore has economic effects so it's really what we're talking about i

think in in the mainstream discussion of stagnation is a technological particular a technological deficit and that all of all of these people all three of them are some process of incremental decay that is making successive industrialization less economically potent. And this is extremely clear in the Gordon article, but perhaps no less so in the other ones.

um now there's something there were some reasons to have a lot of queries about this right from the um right from the get-go and one of them is um it's no coincidence that gordon's paper is called is u.s economic growth over um and so the actual fact the factual basis of stagnation is questionable and it's questionable in part because it's difficult to know to what degree it might be just a kind of regional effect you know is it something that is a phenomenon that's basically affecting the kind of traditional um global heartland of industrial

development you know it's a it's a it's a European and particularly an American problem rather than a global problem and and if you look at very broad brush graphs of global economic growth it's very hard to see any strong stagnationist trend emerging they all seem to be they seem to be very strong continuous exponential increases I I've just put one kind of random link that just produces that's got a set of these very long-term things this is from 5,000 BC you know there's a there's a process of industrial takeoff and then the the

the line of global economic growth just shoots up exponentially and and there's no sign on these charts that we're seeing some bull crisis of of economic uh dynamism um i think that to go too far into this i think this is a really important um question and i think it's very important to be skeptical about what is is a kind of parochial um a parochial perspective that comes from one's own uh geopolitical situation rather than than a kind of truly neutral viewpoint but but maybe it exceeds the terms of this

discussion to go too deeply into it now um i think i just should leave it up there but i'm going to assume that there's something that there's something going on in this stagnationist quandary all of the people we've looked at certainly seem to think there is they all say in particular that there's something exceptionally pitiful about the economic consequences that we've seen from the computer era there's different aspects to this the one aspect of it is just that there has

perhaps been a broader suite of technological changes in play in previous epochs and and things that have been narrowed onto the integrated circuit and its works in in the in the last half century in a way that we've not seen before I think that sometimes the suggestion is even more radical than that that there's something actually about that particular thread of technological innovation that is somehow less potent at catalyzing deep economic growth than we've seen in previous eras that I'm sure people are aware of but I'm just gonna also just

throw it in because I think it's really helpful is Carlotta Perez she's basically a candidate to be the kind of most distinguished economic wave theorist sort of of our time and her basic model of what's what's happening is is accommodates itself very well in certain respects to the stagnation issue it's it's neutral and perhaps even i guess neutralism right i think it's actually uh he's skeptical inherently skeptical about about stagnationism because it's

a wave theory she i think would take it that these stagnation effects are sorry i'm just yes they are it's basically k-waves it's the same it's the same period um the same periodicity of kind of roughly roughly half is a she's not sort of uh she doesn't get capitalistic about the about the period exactly but she's uh you know she's quite flexible about it but she thinks that that it is roughly comes in in 50 year half century cycle um

and and something like this is implicit in all of this all of this work like you know they talk about gordon for instance you know is talks about waves of industrial revolution which he actually numbers he's interested in three big ones and he draws an extremely dramatic graph himself that just shows the economic gains from technological innovation totally dropping off a clear the modern period so that the the previous uh industrial wave hang on i'll just just tell you you've read it but i'll still repeat it

um he he says sorry let me just read this up a useful organizing principle to understand the pace of growth since 1750 is a sequence of three industrial revolutions. The first, IR number one, with its main inventions between 1750 and 1830 created steam engines, cotton spinning, and railroads. The second, IR2, was the most important with its three central inventions of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and running water with indoor plumbing in a relatively short interval of 1870 to 1900. Both the first two revolutions required about 100 years for their full effects to percolate through the economy. During the two decades, 1950 to 70, the benefits of the second Industrial Revolution were still transforming the economy, including air conditioning home plants as interstate

highway system. After 1970, productivity growth slowed markedly, most plausibly because the main ideas of IR number two had by then, had by and large been implemented by then. And the story we get from Peter Thiel and the story we get from Tyler Cohen is extremely similar to that so it's like a Colorado Perez wave theory but with this sort of sense of stepwise downward that that is kind of taking the economic fears out of technological innovation what is it to put this these kinds of ideas into us into a philosophical and

specifically accelerationist framework and I think this is essential to if we're going to ask her question about whether there's an accelerationist commitment in relation to this stagnationism thesis I think a very sort of useful frame for this a very broad application and I it's something that I think was is most developed by Michel Serre who who in his sort of

Hermes studies basically tries to use the the cultural revolution that came from thermodynamic machines and the associated conceptual structures that that arrived with that of a number of disciplines and topics that would not necessarily be associated with thermodynamic phenomena and one of his most interesting readings is of Marx where he says that the the machine that Marx is basically describing is recognizably

a large-scale social thermodynamic machine and marx's prediction this D this the system would would almost literally run that run out of steam is is can be conceived within these these terms especially it can be conceived in terms of I'm gonna ignore Amy's question because I can't remember at the moment actually it's a while and I'm tapping I'm tapping sort of calcified calcified

fossilized layers of stuff at the moment yeah the notion of equilibrium which obviously as we've seen and we think we've talked about even already in this course is the notion of equilibrium which has shaped uh neoclassical economics um entirely and um there is something like uh an entropic thesis therefore sarah is suggesting in um um marxist work that the the system that capitalism is basically an exploitation of a structure of disequilibrium um of negative entropy which is consumed by the history of

modernity and the history of modernity therefore is as a whole um structured by some vector towards equilibrium that it basically uh collapses the differences that are required to to fuel and propel the system and the whole the whole system is therefore converging on a kind of dead equilibrium uh state um where the the uh the surplus that comes from um difference measured as surplus value within the kind of accountancy of the capital system is is basically consumed and eroded down to this level of just

uh noise you know the collapse of profitability is basically the collapse of significant difference it's a kind of entropic deterioration of the economy and I think if we sort of broaden this out to people who aren't you know who aren't necessarily remotely attached to the specifics of of Marx's economic theory um I think we can still see that this claim that perhaps modernity as a whole is dominated by a fundamental vector towards equilibrium is something close to the claim

stagnationist camp that they're that what they see as basically disappearing the significant difference the disequilibrium that they see disappearing from history they describe as technological innovation but technological innovation is playing this recognizable role that what technological innovation in this systemic sense really is is is a source of disruptive disequilibrium that means that the that the entire social process is um is out of whack with its own potential what the what economic what technological innovation um represents

is is a potential uh equilibrium state for the for the um economy that is that is massively discrepant from its from its actual state there's a kind of actual potential uh difference that is mobilizing and propelling the economic system and and to get back to peris this is what is is happening in her big waves of development basically that the the a big a great wave of development in her language is basically a movement where the whole social process moves into this new equilibrium that is defined by the the dominant technological ideas of that age and so the process

by which that's implemented and installed socially and goes she says through this series of predictable processes basically is is using up is consuming the dynamic potential of that particular innovation so in the early in the kind of early most frenzied period of of transformation there's there's a there's a vast gulf between the the potential of a technology and its level of social instantiation and as that social instantiation is is realized in in phases it moves into equilibrium and would stop there if it were not the case that there is some

successive wave of technological innovation in the pipeline so to speak or sort of you know destined to arrive that will that will be um out of equilibrium with this new installed regime so there's a there's basically in this in this wave theory there's a passage through a successive series of equilibria and if it's not the case that something is available to kick you out of the equilibrium state of some particular way of economic development then you get something that's exactly the same i think as the stagnationist thesis you you know what what what stagnationism

really is is a wave theory that sees the that sees the the catalysis for the for the successive waves of economic change to be somehow failing um that that there was there was a deep process of convergence that means that the system is not fundamentally self-propelling it's it's how it's self-propelling within framework of a particular epoch of technology but it's not fundamentally self-propelling in the sense that each epoch of technology does not guarantee a source of disequilibrium that is going to push

it forward into another great wave of development. so i guess you know i'm going to just kind of close on this by by trying to return to this original question and and something that i i'm not going to state dogmatically but seems to me at least plausible is to say that if there is an accelerationist possession position on the secular stagnation thesis it would be based upon the claim that there is something in the nature of the I'll say modernistic dynamic to try and avoid getting immediately sucked into a kind

of left-right acceleration is scrap on the subject there's something in a modernist dynamic that is not only relatively but is absolutely self propelling and by that just to repeat is meant that there is something in the nature of the of the industrial dynamic understood at its most abstract level that that actually predicts a re-ignition of disequilibrium. What a technological epoch is, is the trigger condition for a subsequent economic epoch.

um and i think this is this is both obviously a claim that is uh questionable in a whole kind of sort of ways it's also a claim that i think leads naturally on to looking at these upswing processes in in subsequent weeks which is to say um you know can we see in the nature of the of the um infrastructure that is being installed the the the fuel the

the the uh stimulating disequilibrium for a successive um wave of economic development and i think that you know this is where um this is where the pessimistic stagnationists and accelerations i think have to depart from each I think if one was to truly accept the stagnationist account, and that's to say that it's a pure contingency, and perhaps something even less than a contingency, that there is a catalytic element, that there is a restoration of disequilibrium that comes out of the installation process in a particular wave of economic change, then I think accelerationism would be

would be so highly relativized and limited that it would become merely the sort of descriptive theory for a particular epoch. And irrespective of ultimately what we decide about that, I think it's quite clear that none of the traditions of accelerationism that we've been looking at are happy with that uh type of formulation or that kind of limitation of what accelerationism is about i don't think this is something that divides uh the left and right currents of accelerationism at all and they you know however differently they would formulate it

i think the notion that modernization is converging on a on a final equilibrium state is a thesis that has to be rejected by any of the uh trends in accelerationist thinking um but yeah i think that's a good i think that's a place to open it up for discussion of this whole question I think that we're in this is the trough so trough thoughts this is the place for trough thoughts of any kind as well as any of the wider issues that maybe come up with this

yeah sorry think who you can you just kind of can I get you to reformulate that question because I'm not totally getting what the what you're asking here well I guess I actually just didn't hear you did you say that the the leveling process this vector towards equilibrium is not towards an end state is that what you said I'm I'm questioning whether I mean it's good to try and leave this as a question rather than me trying to close it up with a sort of dogmatic but

I'm saying that I think every I think it's a definitional element of accelerationism that it that it does not think that modernity has a an equilibrium condition so I don't think that this this I don't think that this is a divisive question within accelerationism i think this is purely a question that divides an accelerationist tendency of thinking from a from a stagnationist one um

I think it's you know it's interesting to think about the relationship between stagnation and crisis on this and I think I think that okay this is this is an I think another an additional step but I think it's quite plausible that across all of these different threads of acceleration is thinking there is a there is an attachment to a notion of crisis that I think comes out of quite straightforwardly this kind of basic positive cybernetic model that you know

that you you have any positive feedback system since um nothing can exponentiate to infinity then there has to at some point be a singularity and obviously on the left it's it's basically i think communism is the name for that singularity and on the on on the right it's something far closer to some notion of technological singularity intelligence catastrophe but obviously stagnationism really goes in the opposite direction in a sense that it really just sees this process

winding down and this is why i think that i think the uh graphs on that's just as they say kind of fairly random no no they're not they're not the graphs i'm thinking of gordon's graphs are quite interesting you know where he's really got a his curve a kind of accelerant phase that he basically seems to think finished um let me get one that's neat but i think in the 1970s and and then has just he draws from the data he's got he kind of smooths it out into what he calls the hypothetical

path which is just uh you know a complete erosion of the of the uh growth trend down almost to zero back down to stagnation um so it's not a tendency modernity is not a tendency to a crisis state to criticality for god and obviously and i think probably that's i think that's probably something that we can generalize across these stagnationist thinkers that of course there can be in some they can be relative crises you there is a certain type of crisis that simply flows from stagnation and we saw

like last week looking at Teal's thing this prediction that as you move into an epoch of zero-sum resource competition all kinds of crisis in this kind of colloquial sense can be expected to result from that but it's not a crisis in the in the grand mathematical sense the sense that you know initiated perhaps by Marx I mean I think as we've been saying throughout this thing with another version in nature in which in which the fundamental model that one's looking at the largest scale of the modernistic process is exponential super exponential trend

to some threshold of absolute criticality you know de leuze guattari schizophrenia technological singularity communism there's different you know all many different ways that one can think of that but the kind of mathematical model that's being invoked is the same in all of those and is notably distinct from what we're seeing in these stagnationist models Nick, I don't know if this is something that Cohen mentions in his book, that just seems like the most likely place to find it because of the whole low hanging fruit bit.

But were there previous more compressed periods or something that we could point to as being stagnation periods, like between the steam engine and widespread electrification? Or, you know, I mean, are those just like things that are covered up by the Civil War? war like i don't know is there any like how much does he speak to that well i think there's two levels to that question i mean on one level what you're sort of bringing us to is is like wave theory in general which is obviously such a gnarly i mean it's a fascinating but very gnarly topic but i think if you're a wave theorist then you're going to um anticipate

rhythmic rhythmic stagnation because of the fact that there are these uh that each step of this of this overall escalating process has a local equilibrium when you sort of out the industrial consequences of some particular suite of technologies so you know you get diminishing returns and probably like overproduction and over investment in the development of of this particular whatever it might be you know motor cars or you know electric grid or or whatever at the point where you

actually have that infrastructure basically in place it's become commoditized there's massive competition profit levels in installing that stuff it's very low the marginal demand for the increase in that and you know if we roll out of that infrastructure is dropping and so you you get a a kind of a phase of stagnation that just that just conforms to the basically the saturation of a particular wave of technological innovation so um i think i think you know there's that there's that type of stagnation that you that you get economic depression just as a sort consequence of being a wave theorist at all um but but on the second level which is what these guys

that you know i'm calling the stagnationist they're they're saying something more than that because they're saying there's a kind of uh there's a fundamental uh entropic frame on the whole of modern economic history so it's not something that's contained within some particular wave of development but rather each successive wave is being thinned out and diminished by some larger process of equilibrium that you know innovation is struggling ever more to generate this kind of sufficiently large increment of disequilibrium to kick the system

into another wave of excitement. And so that's something, you know, you wouldn't expect that to be rhythmic in the same sense. It's rather that you'd expect, I guess, I mean, I'm probably, the thing about these stagnationist cases is that they're much more empirical than I'm a sort of allowing them to be i'm trying to as i say come from a form a bridge that will get to their empirical description but they're happy at the empirical end and at the empirical end they don't have to make the process particularly neat or smooth or consistent they simply can say it's just a contingent matter that um these big technological opportunities are

disappearing the the possibility of pushing the whole techno-economic system is something that is that is fading and and you'd say collapsing to to entropy yeah that point about contingency i think is really interesting because the the contingency that they're arguing for then here is that in this sort of if we imagine things as like you know uh I've got, what's, Verner Vinge is this great phrase, the heavenly minefield of explosives that are located like, you know, more or less distant from each other. And so you can either set off a chain or you can't. And they're just sort of arguing that there's this larger entropic distance like that we're coming up on.

And in order to do that, they make these sort of like side arguments or just like prognostications about biotech and about like where information technology versus physical manufacturing is going. I mean, do you think this is sort of like a fundamental weakness thing to trying to like sweep into the corners of their arguments? Well, yeah, I mean, look, I'm probably in danger of just actually imposing things on them that they would resist. this because I think you're right like that you know their position is strongly empirical and it's not it's not as gloomily fatalistic as perhaps I'm wanting to make it like Teal for instance clearly thinks that this

contingency works both ways and that it's it's this zero he writes this zero to one book because he thinks this zero to one dynamic is still something that's possible you know and there's complicated concrete socio-historical obstacles to it and it's it's it's it's caught in a kind of local equilibrium trap but he obviously thinks it can be reignited i think um so i'm sort of i'm probably making i'm probably pushing him into a kind of stagnationist pessimism that he would he would resist I think it's more that it's kind of as almost an accident of the way they're thinking about this

that they draw they draw almost incidentally or by accident this this large gloomy thermodynamic model because of the fact that they they at least consider it to be uh hypothetically plausible that we that that the system that history or modern history in particular is losing its capacity to uh instigate disequilibrium you know or obviously put the other way that there is a large there is a larger trend to equilibrium taking place a Gordon in

particular I'm he's the last one of these guys I was looking at is pretty explicit about this you know because he says I'm gonna quote him again he says uh you know there was virtually no growth before 1750 and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely rather the paper suggests the rapid progress made over the past 20-250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. So you know if you if you abstract from that into the kind of cybernetic diagram it looks a lot like Greer actually. I mean it looks like the same kind of a disdain that Greer has for kind of Kurtzweil type endless continuous exponential growth you

know it's it's the same kind of thing is happening in in Gordon he's seeing that people have become completely captivated by what he's saying is a strictly local explosive episode and and not at all a kind of fundamental explosive dynamic that can be expected to continue. And it seems to me, it seems to me not, just almost a kind of modest claim to say, well you know what accelerationism is is a is a positioning of the kind of

explosive dynamic as being fundamental transcendental so you could say philosophically but it's not there is no larger frame there is no larger equilibrium model that contains the explosive process of modernity. I mean I would say obviously capital escalation. What I'm struck by as an intellectual historian and I just want to kind of throw this out there is the fact that these arguments in a strict sense they are not new. You also We also found, at the end of the 19th century, there was also a prolonged period of stagnation in many parts of the world, especially the UK was particularly badly hit.

And during this time, there arose this kind of school of particularly socialists, like Lasallians and Kautzkians, who are arguing that the world had entered a period of stagnation, essentially not going to end at least as long as capitalism existed, that these crises had compressed into a permanent stagnation. Of course, that period was eventually overcome, and it's interesting that what I view as the kind of proto-accelerationist arguments of people like the revisionists were articulated originally against these people. So I wonder whether you can draw this argument between stagnationists and accelerationists back much further. yes i mean i think this connects really well with uh jake's question doesn't it um you know how

how rhythmic is this question um i i think the only thing i would say is you know one of the that I think it would be unfortunate if we just ended up sort of counterposing a stagnationist and accelerationist account. I think they can at a very high level of abstraction that perhaps becomes inescapable but there's a lot of surprising large amount of common ground between them certainly in terms of the questions they're actually asking, I think, about what at the most fundamental level

is the machinery of techno-economic dynamism. And there's a lot of, you know, that's why I'm kind of strawmanning these people to a certain extent. Gordon I don't know about, but I think probably both Tyler Cohen and Peter Thiel are making these stagnationist arguments within a larger intellectual framework of their own that is actually probably much more open to to kind of accelerationist ideas that I'm perhaps suggesting. Well it's interesting on that score that Vince points out that this previous version

of stagnation arguments gets instrumentalized by socialists as a political argument for their particular desire to see a change in the infrastructure of society. And then likewise, it's not like anything Peter Thiel does as a public intellectual is divorced from the fact that, as we discussed before, he's in the infrastructure, he is as like a businessman on a titanic scale and all of this. And so by supporting any of these arguments, you know, he's making an intervention in the system about which the arguments are made. Yes. And so like seeing the stagnation is like an intrinsically like sort of pragmaticist kind of position. You're always trying to push it in a direction. Like with maybe Michael, John Michael Greer being the one exception of, you know, the druidic. No, I think there's an interesting sort of,

one of those sort of multi-dimensional graphs that you can do to locate people on this because obviously one thing shared by the I think probably all the stagnationists and and um acceleration is people we've looked at is that they they think stagnation is not a good thing um and and therefore as you say a stagnationist thesis becomes therefore a kind of uh implicit maybe political program or at least policy proposal or a set of policy proposals you you know because it i think for all of them if to account for the conditions of stagnation and

and I know in the various ways they do that, is to implicitly suggest that some rectification of those conditions would be desirable. And so this is, again, something that I think cuts across left and right. If you take it with sufficient abstraction, you know, that fundamental model that your argument proceeds that this, this, and this leads to stagnation, stagnation and thus implicitly we should not be doing this this and this but instead something else you know that's the that's the position that you're that diagnosing isn't it but like you say

there is there's then in another part of the dimensionality of the system there's the Greer kind of i guess ecological type of people who's who really don't think that you know who think that the very fixation upon some kind of continuing accelerating process is self-pathological and that uh and that therefore there's something there's something misconceived about seeing stagnation as being a problem um and and for them it's rather that you know of course society in their view is badly equipped to accommodate itself to stagnation but that's not the fault of stagnation that's the fault of a kind of um dementedly accelerationist um

culture and that that is attached to this completely from their point of view implausible notion of endless accelerating growth yeah To perhaps get a bit pedantic for a minute, when we talk about within the context of these two schools, the machinery of capitalism, the machinery that's accelerating things,

it seems to me in a lot of the discussion thus far, we've been literally almost talking about technology, actual literal machinery. it seems like it could almost be a productive avenue to think about like down to even the level of like the individual transaction like within capitalism like the actual transactional structure and what's happening there i.e. you know just to take a very Austrian type of perspective like the value creation that happens on both sides for some kind of other transaction to go through. and in the context of what these stagnationists are really measuring like I see all these arguments framed in terms of you know basically GDP right and you know there's all kinds of arguments out there but like about what's

lacking there but you know on the downturn of some of these cycles that GDP is not growing like what you also do see is like falling costs you know within all these things i.e. value is being increased for like kind of the end consumer at every level of that transaction and i just wonder if it's plotted out that way like if some of these these cycles or curves would present in a more linear almost type of structure i know i think this is really great line of questioning for sure this is one of the things i haven't obviously mentioned it this week at least but but it was definitely on the agenda as a as a as an issue is this exactly this I guess you could say measurement problem um you know I think it's a really fundamental part of what we are doing in

this course is to really ask question about them you know what is accelerating what are our units of growth the fundamental you know the philosophical machinery that we have on one end to deal with this I think is absolutely clear which is is intensive quantities but when you when you try to take that into this into into these concrete questions about economic and technological processes and how do you actually track a kind of intensification of These processes then it becomes extremely

Complicated and I totally agree with you that obviously GDP is a I mean notoriously inadequate measure, it's just one of those things that it seems to be you know the best proxy for the for what people really want to be talking about that they've yet come up with um you know and and it's like it's by default it's what we end up talking about gdp because no one has actually all kinds of people are able to say lots of extremely insightful things about how inadequate the notion of gdp is but what they're not able to do is to produce a better proxy for intensive quantities so um I mean again I know I'm skewing it in one

direction by putting in this terminology but I you know if you're if you're going to say well what how do you measure capital escalation it's clearly not simply accumulation in a in a in a sense of an extensive quantity you're you're wanting to simultaneously track machinic automation and also expansion over an increasing domain of resources and and um even saying it like that is obviously splitting this intensive quantity i'm trying to turn it into two neatly tractable a qualitative

technological question and a quantitative economic question and this is exactly what we're philosophically warned against um but but following that warning is not an easy thing to do so but sorry zach i always worry that i've uh i kind of have just switched things off off your track a bit so so do uh please do come come back if you if you feel that that's happened

which i'm sure to some degree it has i know that's a completely fair response um you know but even further i mean other than the measurement problem like just thinking through things philosophically i'm kind of wondering within any of these frameworks like where does the transaction and kind of like the network map of all these transactions sit relative to kind of the technological question. I mean, it seems like, you know, if you had to come up with some kind of definition of capitalism itself, it's, you know, we have some kind of finite resources available to mix and match and rearrange and, you know, kind of generate real things. And then you have this web of transactions

as possible that the kind of allocates it across and it's not I'm not really even ready to formulate this as any kind of a question no no but actually I think there's like a whole bunch of really interesting lines exploding off this thing I mean because we can I just I like there's two things immediately I want to want to say about it I'll try and just leave them as hypothetical as possible firstly there's you know this question about a transaction like that that in as you say strict Austin terms of it's a voluntary commercial transaction has to add value on both sides of the ledger or but you can see that someone who wanted

to hold on to the possibility of some kind of techno-industrial reduction could accept that and say look what you're really saying is that in this transaction the potential for optimization of specific concrete resources is supported by this by this transactional structure that what that what the market is doing in this way you know you can say oh it's kind of it's concerned with maximizing the utility of the two parties to an exchange but but if you don't say well what is that really you could perhaps

take it down one more level and saying it's it's it's a mechanism for putting resources into the hands of those who would fully exploit those resources to maximum extent and and and a kind of supplement of utility is simply a kind of index or or or symptom of that of that that's to say that the commercial process is actually a technological optimization process according to this to that model and and the second the second thing is is that I think it really, you know, what you're talking about now really raises this, I think, fascinating question about like the paradox of computer era industrialism.

Like, you know, it's the stagnation is the same. And it can't be that their arguments are just simply dismissible. They at least have to be kind of provocative and stimulating in a certain way. that they're saying that there's something about the computer era that is, you know, that has this special affinity with, you know, the stagnationist downslope compared to these previous technological epochs. And yet, clearly, the computer epoch is producing a tight circuit between commercial and technical aspects of this machine that's completely beyond anything previously instantiated.

I mean there's nothing comparable to it in terms of the fact that you really it's it has such intense high frequency circuitry between the commercial and and and technological poles of the circuit that you can really they are just melting into each other and and making those distinctions non viable in any kind of crude or rigid sense. sense and that's why you know people are talking about market oriented software and how You know market dynamics rather than being something that is kind of just synthesized externally with technology is becoming this intrinsic technological

Resource that you actually build technological systems that have you know multi-agent systems and and trading systems intrinsic to the technology itself and I'm sure that there's many other ways that this kind of fusion could be a fusion could be seen and so there's something peculiarly ironic about this you know this kind of high intensity technonomic wave of change being associated with this kind of stagnationist disappointment and notions of like somehow it's losing its its capitalistic edge.

Do you think in that area sort of the transaction technology relationship that there is, I mean, this definitely speaks to the blockchain technology specifically, but the internet revolution in general as well, that there's been some fundamental sea change that this theory can't capture very easily at the moment when it's the technology of transactions and of network formation themselves that have been sort of put into play. Like it no longer really makes sense from an economics perspective to say that technology is something other than like the process of coordinating production and consumption because it's that that coordination itself which is like most particularly undergoing upheaval in its relationship to other technologies

yes i think that seems very persuasive definitely you know if i'm getting there's no coincidence that this that this this paradox arises precisely with this technology and it seems by the by the criteria of previous previous theoretical edifices to to be failing or to not make sense or to not be registering its its intensity in any way that can be can be effectively measured I mean you do get this really extreme you know Peter Thiel actually it's very extreme about like they're

often suggesting that it's just like this frivolous unproductive you know when compared to kind of transportation technologies there's something just like economically intrinsically disappointing about ICT. Now it just seems to me that can't, on one level that just can't be right. I mean it's there's something so weird has happened if that is the conclusion that you've come to. And so I think your argument is persuasive that you know what we're seeing is just It's a crisis of the model that is happening here and it's just not able any longer to register what is happening with this kind of industrial process.

An industrial process that is no longer formally decomposable from its commercial dimension. Yeah, and I mean, in his defense, you know, I have some friends in San Francisco who are in the middle of, you know, that whole discursive community, and I would be trying to poke a hole in their bubble too, if I was just like from a purely psychological or individual perspective. But I mean, what made me, sort of jumped out at me from Adam's sort of like very consensus reality definition of technology by economists on the sidebar is just that they only talk about it in terms of production and increasing the technical efficiency of production which like sort of i don't know going back i think i made a comment last week about like you're

the fact that smartphones have produced such an enormously increased demand on attention but we haven't sort of gotten to the phase where the ability to use attention effectively or to allocate it is being improved by the same technology and it seems like with technological improvement on the ict side now we're as much talking about increases the technical efficiency of consumption like the intelligence of consumers and their ability to turn it into like more varied kinds of utility and produce like you know more human capital etc in the future as opposed to just this idea of like we can make more candles with less wax yes i mean look i think if you look at this i'm looking at adam's note as you're as you're saying this obviously you know that it doesn't really escape this fact that we have this deep measurement

problem you know it's fine to say more output with given inputs or fewer inputs for given output but you know how are you measuring inputs and outputs and obviously you just get into these very classical kind of problems with that like you know it's fine if you're saying if you have a kind of a purely extensive set of quantities and so you know you're either producing a hundred candles or a thousand candles fine you know that's a measurable thing but if you're producing product a and then you move to producing product b and you know the relationship between product a and product b is just you need a set of theoretical tools to um kind of place it within some sort of

mathematical framework. It's not, but computers are a huge problem like that for people, aren't they? Like if you say, you know, I'm producing a certain amount of computers. And so much of computers seems to be quantitative to do with, you know, there's a whole bunch of extremely clear metrics to do with kind of processing power and memory and all of the, you know, chip density, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, flops per flops but you know which of those are important how do you trans you know how do you kind of make them interchangeable how do you actually produce this kind of reliable quantitative sense of what is an

increase in output when output itself is becoming kind of revolutionized to such degree that you don't even know what you're seeing often with a new product or how to how to compare it to previous products at all there's there's a sort of lineage that will allow you to say oh this product is replacing this product but that doesn't mean that that doesn't give you some kind of quantitative toolbox to to tell you how much more is being produced than previously and obviously Teal does in his piece talk about this a bit doesn't he where he says well you know on one side maybe there's this different product and it's just a matter of fashion that actually is not

moving forward at all and you've just changed a kind of blue widget for a pink widget and you know you call that progress but all that's all that's changed is is kind of fashion it's just moving sideways so sure you know that has to be entertained as a possibility but it's a strict theoretical corollary of that that well maybe maybe something like the opposite is happening and you have some kind of non-comparable advance some process of intensive escalation happening that is just defeating your quantization resources you just don't know how to say you know this is worth 2.5 and a B is worth 2.5 A's or 1.7 A you either got

no sort of solid convincing basis to make that comparison anymore I mean this is a like yeah I sorry I won't go I know I've already rabbited on it enough but this but just to say this is a really naughty because of the fact that of course capitalism has to do that you know capitalism has to constantly re-quantize all of these things because because you know it's about channeling investment and it's about channeling resources and it's it's not it doesn't have the luxury of saying oh well this is such a massively interesting philosophical conundrum of intensive quantities and you know we just we'll just put all our investment decisions on hold because clearly we

can't you know to a sufficient level of conceptual adequacy make it make this kind of quantitative comparison to it just simply cannot do that you know and all the kind of institutions of capitalism are about making these quantization calls that this you know this business and this very different business you know this is worth this much and this is worth that much and even though they have nothing at all in common, we're going to put them on the same quantitative access and say a share in this is worth two shares in it. I mean, that's what capitalism has inevitably always to do. So at the concrete level of socio-historical information processing, it's not that this is not a question that can be ducked.

But that doesn't mean that it doesn't lead to certain kinds of profound crisis, you know, perhaps reflected in just weird erratic economic behavior and numbers, you know, moving around in odd directions. directions just in relation to the the measurement bit has anyone come across an article called the great ephemeralization by Timothy Lear if I post a link in the sidebar oh yeah that's good thanks so you do but there's this passage that you just sort of reminded me of where he says and I'll just read it. He says, for example, a couple of years ago, Google waved a magic wand that transformed

millions of Android phones into sophisticated navigation devices with turn-by-turn directions. This was functionality that people had previously paid hundreds of dollars for in standalone devices. Now it's just another feature that comes with every Android phone, and the cost of Android phones hasn't gone up. He says, I haven't checked, but I bet this wealth creation is not reflected in GDP statistics it's actually worse than that as people stop buying standalone GPS devices Google's innovation will actually show up in statistics as a reduction in GDP which I think is right and is a really easy to grasp an illustration of yes I think it's really crucial absolutely absolutely so I mean the internet seems to

just massively destroy economic value in a way doesn't it? I mean at least part of why it looks so compromised is that even though it creates a lot of dynamism it does exactly what you've just said in that it gives stuff away that was previously, you know it throws in for free something that was a standalone product. that if you run the numbers that's just simply destroying economic value but yeah we've seen the flip side of that is maybe it maybe that's an kind of indication that the notion of economic value is undergoing a crisis rather than

that the phase of industrialism has some kind of flawed is demanding rectification. There was a Larry Summers had a similar sort of example in his things talking about secular stagnation where he says well if we look at the cost of health care, you know, US healthcare now versus 30 years ago, it's supposed to be, you know, it's gone up slightly or it's the same cost, right?

But then if you poll a room of people and you say, would you rather pay today's 2017 prices for 2017 healthcare, or you rather pay 1987 prices for 1987 healthcare, then you know a huge majority in that room is going to say 2017 prices and 2017 healthcare oh yeah so there's something being absolutely lost in the measurement right there yes in the same way yes definitely I mean there's a whole bit another aspect that I think is we sort of touched upon on this but but there's a bit different certainly from that and the opposite even is this the fact that the current

intellectual establishment is extremely hostile to deflationist value production. I think Zach is it was touching on this on this question like obviously you know what is what it how does capitalism create value I mean it it produces more stuff that everyone I think generally admits is good and and if they're criticizing capitalism they tend to say it's because it's not doing enough of that or whatever but on the other hand it slashes costs and it can produce it can produce value just as much by um a deflationary process as by a it's not exactly an inflationary process but by a

a process of um you know this the healthcare model would be the example of it where you've just got rising costs but you've got an increasingly uh impressive product coming along with it um but I mean this but obviously information technology is an absolute monster of deflation and you know and it's really that I think I've seen I think it was a biology stream of asset made this point where he says look you know we think that we're in a era of of economic moderation of you know because we have slight inflation he says that's a just weird

optical illusion what you have is where in an age a conjunct age of berserk inflationism and berserk deflationism you know that and he puts it in a kind of east coast west coast sense he It says, you know, you have in America, you have a kind of absolutely frenziedly inflationary East Coast and a frenziedly deflationary West Coast. And the kind of cross point of those two processes is something that looks like this kind of age of moderation. But that's just a kind of complete illusion. and you know if these two different things are just following completely

different dynamic paths So I agree with that. I, I, I guess I was just going to bring something that's been rumbling along in the sidebar, which is about sort of punctuated equilibrium. Um, and, and it seems to me that most visions of utopia are equilibria. Right. So a lot of what seems to be

cool for or at least what I hear to in something like, you know, the manifesto for accelerationist politics is like let's have a big push let's have a big you know punctuation of this equilibrium this current stagnation to push through to a new equilibria it it's it's more it's entirely compatible with this sort of punctuated equilibria sort of view of history in a way um if you think of it in that mode Now I'm not sure if that's what Alex Williams and Nick Sonacek exactly think, but there are a few people in that sort of conversation, so it might be interesting to dig into that.

yeah I mean obviously because of its context punctuated equilibrium suggests contingency I mean at least at least to me you know it comes in a sort of biological context that just you know so you have the Cambrian explosion you have these kind of episodes of of sudden violent disequilibrium and then a restoration of of equilibrium and a kind of I guess an epoch of stagnation until it until it is kind of disrupted by some other contingency and so it's kind of I think there's a kind of a

emerging conceptual landscape that sort of has an accelerationist pole where um you know yeah you could have punctuated equilibrium but you also have some some overall engine that is at least that is promoting an intensification of disequilibrium in a larger and larger kind of disruptive shocks to the system and that that sort of intensifying waves is the is the deepest level of the system under consideration and then in the middle you have this pure realm of contingency where you know may or may

not happen you know all you can say empirically is that there are these kind of there are these shocks to the system that appear erratically or episodically or whatever and and and certainly in the biological framework there doesn't seem to be any kind of way of periodizing them neatly um and then on on the other on the you know if I can sort of draw crudely a stagnationist pole is that you would expect a fall off so that you almost have some sort of some sort of process of diminishing rhythmic aftershocks but that they're kind of fading towards equilibrium which I would agree it's will it's

interesting that it's not being promoted as utopian even though kind of on a strictly technical level it it's kind of isomorphic with utopian thought isn't it that you kind of reach some some final state of quiescence in which the kind of disturbance you know disequilibrium is obviously disturbance and it's and it propels the system only because the system finds itself agitated by its inadequacy relative to some kind of implicit arrangement so there's obviously something i think we're totally right there's something massively non-utopian about disequilibrium

But yet the I don't think anyone would accuse the stagnation of be as being a new wave of utopianism I mean, there's a few diehard neoliberals you can find that sort of uh, do, do defend the current sort of economic situation. It's like, well, we're at the best possible neoliberal worlds.

But, um, the, I mean, this is where you can, again, split people up a little bit, right? You can say, okay, there's people like Robert Gordon who are just trying to do as a empirical exercise say, well, this is where we are. we went through this huge growth episode for a couple of hundred years and now we're at a new equilibrium for maybe a thousand years or something. And then, you know, you have people like Teal or, you know, you know, Alex Williams, Nick Cernichek for that matter, saying, well, let's not stop here. let's let's you know it requires a push to push beyond this current equilibrium

in some sense and without really getting into how much is on the other side of it yeah but I think this I'd like to just kind of hold you on this point because you know if you're saying it requires a push you're you are also saying it can be pushed aren't you you know you could there can't be a completely free-floating imperative voice that just says you know we we we will not stop here unless you think unless implicitly the the system has the capacity to be jolted into a

whatever you're going to say a superior equilibrium state or into a into a new phase of disequilibrium or um you know you're making some some claim about the nature of the system if you think that it is at all meaningful to make those kind of imperative declarations? Oh yeah absolutely and it's usually located with some sort of you know human agency you know it's some sort of executive, you know, push at whatever political flavor you want to take it in, essentially, whether it's, you know, this sort of new left Prometheanism or like,

you know, other quite different variants. I feel very dissatisfied with that stopping, but just because of the fact, like, if you take this the stagnation case that you know it's the nature of actual potential innovations that is the potential for disequilibrium you know you if you're going to push the system into disequilibrium let's just leave a I think the left accelerations thing has a kind of you know a social transformation element to it which doesn't exactly fit this kind of narrowly conceived stagnationist canon but the stagnationists are all saying if you're gonna

push the system into this kind of massive disequilibrium the kind that we've enjoyed in up to now in history but there has to be a potential innovation that's going to just shock the system and and and push it into this new phase of uh of growth it's so human agency can't do i mean it's not to say that there aren't ways of saying human agency plays a role but either there's that innovation that technological possibility is either out there or it isn't and if it isn't out there you know if the laws of physics just haven't left anything there then no amount of human urgency and mobilization is going to

push you know move the system at all this is why i think this co-emthing this low hanging fruit thing is very suggestive I mean it's like if you cannot reach the fruit there just isn't any fruit in reach then no amount of kind of urging people to grasp harder for fruit is gonna is gonna help it just is a irrelevancy so I agree it does have to be latent in the overall system um but it is a sort of low-hanging fruit versus, you know, less low-hanging fruit type problem, or this is the way that I think you would usually frame it, right, for the people taking the push past the stagnation sort of view, is that there is some, there's a currently essentially

a local optimum right it's the hill climbing algorithm and you're stuck on the hill without being able to reach the uh the hill that's further away with some broader view or some you know either usually it's in terms of some broader system view right that you are able to unlock this potential though you could also do variants where it's it is contingent I have and biologically just get shoved over there because the environment changes yeah yes so it's partly you know what's your model of contingency in this isn't it or even just your

empirical hypothesis about it so if it's just what the low hanging fruit thing amounts to is just you know yeah we've been spoiled on low hanging fruit but if we just jumped a bit harder we there's plenty of fruit out there but it just requires more more jumping you know but then obviously the more extreme and pessimistic views is just like it's like which could be framed precisely as you said in terms of a local optimum problem that there's just no hills around you know and you can jump till till you kill yourself but you're still not gonna reach any more fruit certainly of the kind that we've been spoiled on up to now and that at least

I think is the that extreme that's the extreme stagnation is this is that it I think everyone to some degree is playing with but maybe I think Gordon seems to be there don't you I mean he basically is saying look let's face it we're just we're just heading into stagnation I don't think Tyler Cohen he's playing with that idea but I don't think he's really wanting to commit and i think teal even less teal teal's really i think a jump harder guy i i think that's probably about right um i i think gordon leaves out this sort of like like doesn't need to take a a very long view position but i think over the sort of hundreds

of years he's talking that that's he's basically saying you know the trend is looping back to equilibrium right um yeah and it is very much like you know we had a good run that was a extraordinary 300 years now get used to uh the long-run rate of growth being maybe not zero but like 0.1 percent of gdp a year sort of thing little bit of change little bit of you know um microeconomic you know austrian style optimization still going on but no more big electricity type shocks yes

that's right and i mean i think again i don't know i keep bringing him but i do think he's so theoretically pure that he's a good references is Greer on it you know for him modernity is just consuming fossil fuels you know so there's this there's this the low-hanging fruit is just there's this stack of uh hydrocarbon deposits you you burn your way through that on a on a kind of escalating uh exponential curve you run out of fossil fuels and you crash back into equilibrium again and that every everything else is just frills you know he puts a lot of time

into arguing that you know technological process progress rather is just a it's just a kind of weird narrativization of this basic energetic consumption process and that on the far side of the hill as we start going down the slope we just go into this kind of negative this negative time period in which technology even science i guess falls apart you know and tropically disintegrates because it's a kind of side effect of this energetic economic moment and as you roll down the slope you know technology technologies become unaffordable and institutions of scientific transmission become unaffordable and I don't think we

you know we don't lose paper necessarily but I mean all communication media kind of a material economic resources and so there's this there's no level of kind of techno scientific immunity from the curve and he thinks obviously I think rightly I mean I'm not saying he's right in this thesis but it he's totally right to say this is a thesis that people are just not equipped even to contemplate at the moment let alone endorse so I didn't so so Greer is saying it goes all the way back to like like the mean that it reverts to is more like you know

classical era type technology or like medieval era type technology I think so I think it's you know he thinks it will be like water mills and windmills and I don't I don't know honestly I think he he's written a whole bunch of books that I haven't read about these kind of appropriate green technologies that will kind of be functional even in this kind of steep civilization of downslide. But anyway... I'm pretty... because where Gordon is thinking though, I think at the time he was writing, he was writing a bit earlier than some of these other economists, he was one of the early people

to take this position to say, hey, what about maybe there isn't a future of economic growth, have you thought about that? But in a very economist way, he's focused on growth, he's not like, He's not pushing the arrow negative, if you see what I mean. It's not going negative growth. No. Well, it's funny. He does the diagram. If you change the coordinate system of his diagram, because his diagram could be Greer's diagram, except his diagram is the rate of growth. It's the second derivative. If you just recoded it as the first derivative, it's the same. um but like you say that requires a massive lurch down into pessimism to do that

um yeah Yes.

Thank you. I was just wondering if we could make any

connection between this like equalization process and accumulation process and speciation or the formation of new singularities more explicit yes I don't know I mean the the reference that we sort of touched on it very kind of blancing me in the Marxist framework but obviously like you know one of the things that this course I think aims to stick to is obviously like the the acceleration is fragment and it's kind of little encrypted nature reference in that and that nature reference I think it totally is part of the the Misha

say kind of universe of these of these kind of transcoded thermodynamic discourses because obviously it's explicitly about a leveling process and so when when Nietzsche is saying you know when he gives us the slogan and accelerate the process the process to be accelerated is this process of leveling but and therefore seems to be kind of entropic and that and the ironical twist that he puts on this in terms of his kind of like you know aristocratic

revolutionary model and and the whole sort of doctrine of the overman is that it's producing that this leveling process is producing resources it's producing fungible resources for something else this this something else you know what the overman is then for him um you know at the most abstract is a disequilibrium shock you know what what would you have you know what would nietzsche's model be without that without that element and it would be a it would be a utopian communism right you know he would be saying oh the the whole system is

heading towards a equilibrium of that's that's driven by this process by uh kind of self-propelling you know and and and the culmination of the process is some quiescent state which obviously he kind of notoriously derides in the whole doctrine of the of the last man the last man is is his kind of satirical voice of of communistic entropic historical equilibrium. So I think even without really,

I mean, I'm not saying one would want to truncate all kinds of questions of whatever level of critical severity about what's going on in the notion of the overman in nature, but I think what is clear theoretically, whatever else can be said about it, that it is this um that he's saying that the process contains the seeds the intrinsic seeds of this disequilibrium shock you know that the that this kind of uh this this process of equalization is providing resources that will be exploited by something else something from outside that will push the process into radical disequilibrium and that is why in his terms

it's capable of affirmation and i think it's like extremely intriguing how how much this locks onto a certain um it's about economic economic waves in that you know the the the wave theory the classical wave theory especially it's more most extreme liberal a very a very niche like this in a sense that you have this devaluation of resources you have a kind of economic crisis deflation devaluation resources and therefore this innovation opportunity you know the the kind of uh

the figure the austrian figure of the entrepreneur is very close in its systematic function to this the figure of the niche and overman is it something that comes comes from outside that's to say we're on a on a trajectory that is not predictable by the kind of internal dynamics of decline and and takes as resources the wreckage and rubble and ruin of this process of leveling you know of economic collapse that has that has preceded it oh I'm not that's a bit off that's a bit bleak to your to your question that really

addresses what I was going to say I was just wondering if just to be maybe bluntly straightforward I wonder if we could say that like Nietzsche would say that man was a stagnation like a period of stagnation sorry you cut out a little bit here can you just repeat that last the last sentence yes um is it There's not really any relevance in me saying this, I was just wondering if we could say that Nietzsche would say that man itself was a period of economic stagnation. I think that I think those kind of abstract conceptual frameworks absolutely

fuse you know like I think man under the conditions of the history of European nihilism is exactly you know involves these these elements of a kind of egalitarian dynamic a tendency to equilibrium and a certain utopianism that I think I think Nietzsche only kind of sad arises so viciously because he recognizes obviously that it is a utopian dynamic and he's kind of he's

kind of sabotaging it with his with his of this shock you know and this and this this refusal to treat it as anything other than uh instrumental so we're back i think we're back into these kind of teleoplexy questions a bit about means and means and ends that you know treat it as a obviously an equilibrium stick is a kind of end and in lots of discourses that purely kind of dynamic sense of an end also takes on this kind of ethico-political sense of an end of it as an actual imperative and those two things you know I think they're connected very closely in Marx obviously you know that there is a movement back and forth very smoothly

between between a just a systems dynamic notion of equilibrium and a kind of moral imperative sense of of social possibility and I think this same kind of tangles definitely there in in the kind of Nietzsche treatment but but he's wanting to put much more much more twist into I think Rear kind of draws an interesting biological analogy almost in Egypt's overman type of

question where Rear talks a lot about the idea of biological succession whereby kind of a newly open territory is colonized by biotic signatures. But I can easily see expanding the scope that we have some kind of technological frontier. And I think he goes as far as to talk about, given kind of this disruption to the delivery of our selected or case selected type of species, most likely Yes, I mean it's obviously left as a bit of a cipher isn't it?

I mean I think probably necessarily because you know if overman was predictable then it would be something that was already kind of folded in principle into this horizon of anthropological conception and I think that's probably precisely what he doesn't want to permit and it's not it's he wants a much more extreme break than would be allowed by that I think this question about Nietzsche is interesting. There's a passage of Beyond Good and Evil, which I just kind of just came to my mind, where he talks about the newly discovered Russian nihilism as a spiritual dynamite.

dynamite and he contrasts the so-called kind of terrible no of nihilism to the kind of peaceful gentle soporific skepticism as he calls it so clearly Nietzsche wants a kind of life-affirming conception which is opposed to nihilism but he sees nihilism as the way to get there rather than the kind of reclining as it were. I guess my point being that the whole point seems to be that you get to these conditions of acceleration precisely by going through the exact opposite. Sorry, I lost your last sentence, Vincent. If that was your last sentence. If not, I've

lost more than your last sentence. Well I guess I'm just making a point about Nietzsche's history of nihilism, the idea that in order to get to the Übermensch, as you're like you're talking about, you have to go through the phase of nihilism, that nihilism is, was the kind of radical decay as it were, is precisely the phase that you have to go through in order to get to whatever's at the other end. And Nietzsche actually sees it as more pathological to kind of try to hold back this process via skepticism, as he calls it, peaceful, gentle, whatever, rather than push it forwards and get to the other end of the, you can call it stagnation in a particular sense, of the leveling process of the decay. Yes. I mean, obviously, I think it would be possible to prod a little bit about this kind of mode of formulation

where, you know, talking about you can get to... you know because partly the only thing that gets to the overman is the overman isn't it i mean it's like it's a so it's a kind of it would be a mistake i think to kind of think it could be assimilated to kind of traditions of utopian social theory that would be much more of the kind like you know we can get from a a to b and have to cross the desert in order to do so and all of these kind of things. I don't really think, I think Nietzsche's narrative is much harsher than that, in the sense that,

you know, he seems to me to be saying that the kind of subject positions that are being addressed are all themselves the subject positions, ultimately of a resource, for something else you know they're they're not a kind of a precursor subject position of a master to come the subject position of the raw materials that that position of mastery will veil itself of at some Hi Nick.

Nick if you can hear me we lost signal with you. I'm sorry I'm not, yeah sorry I don't know is it my end is everyone else getting all of this audio fine because I think I didn't get you at all then Theo. Can everyone hear me okay? Oh, OK. Yeah. So I think it's just a . It seems like you're back a little bit, though. OK, sorry. Yeah, well, there's nothing I can do about it. I could take drastic steps to reboot the computer, but I think that would be a mistake at the point, wouldn't it?

OK. Yeah. But I also missed what you were saying, Theo, about this. Or were you just commenting on technical aspects? I was only talking about technical aspects. But I am sort of curious about the way you're talking about overman as vector and not as necessarily a new subject? Is that where you were headed? And then I think it lost you. I was saying there's no journey from us to the overman. You know, so this was really in response

to the kind of way Vincent was formulating this question, because obviously, again, I'm sorry if I'm repeating stuff that was clear to people, but there's a utopian social tradition which is, you know, across the desert, arrive in the promised land or whatever, if we're going to put it in an overtly theological framework. I don't think Nietzsche is saying that at all because I don't think that you know the overman is not something that it's rather something that

is able to feed on man and the intensity that the history of nihilism has drained from it you know so that the history of nihilism extirpates all intrinsic human purpose it's like um the the whole enlightenment model um of of enlightenment in the way kant uses it in this kind of uh in his essay on on what is enlightenment that there is some kind of historical journey man is undertaking that has this, as we say,

it's a combination of kind of a finality in a sort of almost systems dynamic sense. I mean there's lots in that that is just fascinating in terms of this spontaneous order type of notion of finalism with the scottish enlightenment with them with the european enlightenment um um but on the other hand has a finality in a kind of ethico political sense that it's a moral a moral end and i think nietzsche is is breaking with this radically that the the overman rather is that for which the rubble the rubble at the end of man is a resource you know it's it's it's

not that it's not any kind of it's it's a redemption of man only in the sense that man becomes useful to something and it's therefore a complete inversion really of the kantian formulation of the categorical imperative is treating man only as as that which is an end in itself it's rather that the the the way in which the overman restores disequilibrium to history is precisely through the culmination of the reduction of man to an instrument for some purpose that it is not itself able to provide.

I mean I think this is this is pretty much what I was trying to say I think but I expressed it in a slightly dubious way that this process of leveling creates the conditions for the advent of the overman in a certain sense but the people who are being leveled are not the people who become the overman right? And he gives this political analogy which I find endlessly interesting. He thinks of it in terms of the French Revolution in some of his notes. He puts the example of the French Revolution and at the end of the French Revolution, which obviously was this kind of orgy of destructive egalitarianism from Nietzsche's perspective, but at the end there comes about Napoleon, who is this kind of almost like an Ubermensch-esque figure

who intervenes and then uses the post-revolutionary kind of ruin as his resources. Yes, no, that's a very, you know, it's obviously in terms of his ultimate historical vision, it can only be an inadequate empirical model, but it's extremely good. I agree with you, extremely good empirical model for what he's saying, I think, and how he's thinking of this issue, absolutely. yes so that that yeah i could i would only repeat what you said because i think it says exactly right um that the the revolutionary process revolutionary process in france provides napoleon with his raw material um and you know he then paints a very different picture with it

than the picture that was in the minds of the of the revolutionaries Can I ask a question about, bringing this back to the question of teleoplexy and teleology and breaks? So I guess like the kind of teleoplexic dynamic is this emergence of the primary process at the end, it's the material for the construction of the overman. But it comes out of this moment of rupture. So is this kind of like teleoplexic play understood as the kind of emergent teleology

itself before a break disturbs it and then you have another kind of, you know, I guess unknowable from inside the system possible teleoplexic dynamic that then erupts from whatever the overman kind of is or instantiates or is there a greater telos which kind of is comprised of different like a procession of telepathy punctuated by breaks sorry that's like maybe really abstract and huge no it is abstract and huge which is

obviously great I mean it means that I don't have a really nice pre-packaged elegant but I think they're just absolutely spot-on and you know honestly I don't know and you know it's as a sign of utter intellectual negligence on my part I just really don't know how this whole Nietzschean narrative um and the kind of teleoplexic story really uh thread together i mean i'm just not a i'm not sure about that the only thing that i i'm confident about is that

the same that at some level the same thing is being talked about and that that you know it seems to me the what I've got things I call you know the I'm gonna get I can't even remember my own vocabulary now though they did this kind of critique this archaic fundamental critique out of like deep tradition that you get on the on the on the left and the right about what's happening with capitalism that that what happening with capitalism is a reign of the tool and therefore something that's absolutely kind of teleologically abominable I think that that is

something that's clearly very close to Nietzsche's thinking but that Nietzsche's coming at it from a very different perverse angle and perhaps from almost just from the other side because he's I think seeing that collapse of man you know the loss of purpose itself is a process of instrument of instrumentalization from some angle I'm repeating myself rather than answering your much more elegant question which I am

just patently incapable of doing in its own terms right now. I missed most of that actually. Glitching again. But the thing that I heard you sort of saying was that it was really just a kind of story of instrumentalization. It's cool. Sorry, I'm getting very good. connection says it's fine but obviously it's not doing very well right now I

think mainly actually Amy's is breaking up a little bit right yeah I think I I think there's some higher power wanting to shelter Amy and me from our own utterances. So maybe we should let it. If Amy, if you want to type in the sidebar, I can speak for you too. I'd say in the sidebar basically, how would you reconcile?

I guess she's signing off just to come back in. Oh yeah, now Amy did type in this question didn't she? Oh yeah. Yeah. I won't try to respond until Amy comes back.

Hi Amy can you hear us now? These technical problems are always so interesting, I have no control over them. Right yeah, no we weren't blaming you Theo. I'm a conspiracy theory. I should develop that a little bit. I think that, I know I haven't been very sort of forceful on the agenda of this, but I think that this framework,

this basic framework coming out of the stagnationist discussion about technological innovation as catalytic which is to say as a as an eruption of kind of reproduction of disequilibrium is this sort of is my sense of the kind of line that we're on for the subsequent weeks and hopefully we can sort of actually look at some we can look at some kind of emerging technologies within this kind of techno economic framework raised by that and I guess

either you know dismiss dismiss their potential on on stagnationist ground or see them as kind of a counterpoint to to the kind of stagnationist analysis Well, I do want to just give a time check that we're almost at

two and a half hour mark but I'm happy to run longer if people want to yeah Yes, I mean, I think we have reached a punctuated equilibrium. But it could be this chance for some to a job, of course, remains. Yeah, it's up to everyone else if people would like to and now and sort of plateau and till

next week. So how what do people think about that is there is there a final rally or do you think where we could pull the plug. Yeah. Yes, let's, let's, I'm going to take Amy's last comment as a, a kind of sacred obligation. I'll copy and paste that specifically. To get a bit more crunchy about temporality again,

I think, yeah, somehow try and be more concrete on technology and at the same time more abstract about time. Great. Is there any last announcements for next week? If anyone wants to throw in any particular technological trends, we're even talking almost like products or product suites, technological infrastructures that they think should be part of the discussion going forward next week and the week after then that would be a great thing to put into the school room I just wrote a piece this

morning on some future technology trends okay good yeah brilliant thanks that would be great oh no we're losing Amy okay all right well we can talk about Amy's stuff without Amy being around. All right well um okay are we done yeah looks like no no last no last moments of insurrection among the audience okay thanks Theo yeah thanks Nick Have a good night.

And thanks everyone. That was great as always. I hope to get a chance to see you all next week except Amy, I know. Okay bye. Thank you. That was interesting. Bye.