Hello and welcome to the fourth session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him right now. Okay thanks for that. I think that my intro this week probably will be perfunctory even by my standards. so in the in the school room I put a reference to some burn-back materials I was hoping that we could sort of we've mostly been on the sort of political economy side of the accelerationist question and I thought we it would be a good thing to try and round things up at the end of this first phase by bringing
in the question of technology a little bit more definitely and so that's what I was really hoping to sort of provoke this time. And it's I think a really interesting text, the one that I said is especially relevant from from boom back's huge book and and from that particularly the the paragraph that i'd like to focus on all the section it's not a whole paragraph it comes from part one four dot seven where he says the distinction between production from hand to mouth and production which employs
roundabout and fruitful method is so fundamental that is eminently desirable that a special conception should be coined for the latter and so that's to say for these as quote roundabout being the crucial word and fruitful methods this is done if not as we shall see in the only possible way here in a way that is not inappropriate in grouping together under the conception of capital the intermediate products which come into existence in the course of this roundabout production and in the surrounding paragraphs of this text he also makes special put special emphasis on the fact that there is a an intrinsic ambiguity to
the notion of capital that he's wanting to introduce sorry just one second where he says just in the next in the next paragraph where he's trying to defend his usage saying again the solution suggested is the most conservative one without laying any particular weight on the fact that the historical origin of the capital indicates a relation to an acquisition or a gain and that our reading remains true to this it preserves the double relation the relation to acquisition of interest on one side and to production on the other which was imported into the conception of capital by adam smith and since his time has been adopted in scientific usage and then there's much more about
this intrinsic and he thinks uh it's a it's a real productive ambivalence it's not a it's not a artifact or confusion that's introduced into language by the fact that there are the terminology associated with the economics of capital in terms of return on investment coded in monetary terms and the techno productive aspect which is to do with this extremely I think important notion of roundabout production are ultimately coincidental and they're and open to this purely aspect or um variation and in emphasis
um i'd like to tie this notion which we i think we'll get back to hopefully a bit um with a quote that I've already quoted a hundred times and I'll probably quote a hundred times more it's absolutely I think vastly vastly important and and even it's kind of the spoofs of it and plays with it and transformations of it are I think among the most interesting sentences kicking around which is this John Gilmore quote from 1993 quoted in Time magazine where he says the net interpret censorship as damage and roots around it so I think you know as a
provisional hypothesis that I guess I'm fairly committed to defending pretty doggedly is to say that these root arounds and the roundaboutness spoken about by Bumbach it's really indistinguishable things that they're both of are capturing this essence of technology which is to do with the indirect path in both cases um the and in a sense i think with a slight transformation again of emphasis it both are saying the route around is the quickest path i'm obviously putting it in that in those terms in
order to say that there's an inherently accelerationist germ already to this notion and that if you're looking at it either as this technological and productive process or you're looking at it as a as a as a form of um um navigation in in cyberspace as in the in the uh john gilmore sense in both cases the direct route is uh you know as the crow flies is an illusory construction of um
speed you know the fastest route is not the direct route the fastest route is the indirect route and so capitalism is systematic self-propelling route around or roundabout productions and in doing so that it is captured as a technological process at least as much as it is captured as a financial process I'm leaving Adam's comment is totally crucial but I'm I'm gonna just try and pretend I haven't seen it for the moment so in terms of where we've been already in this course and looking at the sort of left accelerationist critique of
of these things um this is we we this comes pre-framed in a in a sense that there's a left accelerationist question in the in the haunting us or whatever in the in the background here saying well is it really the case that this this process of roundaboutness or route arounds is essentially capitalist and and and obviously the burn barrack passage here is is is making a case but but the there is a kind of as we've seen a left accelerationist objection saying that we can do this we can do this evasive maneuvering into and through
technology in a way that is somehow not restricted to the the capitalist mode of that of that process um so what i want to go on to but i think i probably won't do it in monological mode i'll feed it i'll drip feed it in is some of the some of the material from uh my own teleoplexy essay because which i think is relevant to this question um and to the things we've been talking about in terms of again agency means and ends teleological structures um and the way that
we think those things in terms of capital and the way that capital uh distorts and twists those things um and at the most colloquial level this this ties in with the kind of dimension of critique that seems most informal um you know was alex williams in the xenoeconomics piece which i think we've agreed is not a it's not a particularly ferocious critique of capital compared to the things we're going to see later in a distinctively left accelerationist lineage but he describes capital as a nightmarish Lovecraftian creature the the the manifesto acceleration politics says
you know starting with this repeating this quote from last week which again I just would like to emphasize how amazingly time twisted it is we need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism it so i i'm sorry for the repetition here but it's the most fantastic time collision going on in that center um but then so colon what is that what is that argument traditionally made and it is quote not only is capitalism unjust and perverted system but it is also a system that holds back process uh progress sorry and so perversion twistedness
warpedness the the the case made in the teleoplexy argument is that this has a rigorous sense to it and the rigorous sense of that is that capital is peculiarly abominable because it is structurally it's a structural warping of teleology that's to say um it's the reign of the tool that which is supposed to be purely instrumental which is supposed to be a means is transformed into an end and i don't think the relation between those two things but between that and this question of
roundaboutness is exactly analytic um there's room for some maneuvering and complexity between those two but i think there's obviously a relation that the process of roundaboutness feeds this later abominable twisting of teleology because self-propelling capital inevitably tends to make of its means an end it begins by systematically incentivizing and reinforcing this process by which one gets to the goal through certain kinds of technical
and economic intermediaries any kind of machine gadget technological device on the one hand or associated economic financial institutions whose whose um justification is that they are the best way to an end that is the same end as that of what bernberg calls hand-to-mouth production um so you see this in sort of obviously liberal economic liberal in the old sense uh still today i mean the the number of people who would
actually dispute this is is tiny i think that the purpose of the of capitalism of productive indirectness of roundaboutness and and the route around through capitalism that the for the final justification for all of that stuff is still what it was in the at the beginning primordially it's the satisfaction of these hand-to-mouth uh needs um and obviously if you just follow this in this almost um paleoethnographic sense of the origin of technology so you know someone wants someone wants food and they can directly go out and try
and strangle a kangaroo or they can spend some time making a boomerang and that time making a boomerang is obviously being deducted in a certain sense from the time available to go and strangle a kangaroo and the implicit technological logic of it is that with a with a boomerang you'll take down a lot more kangaroos than you would by going out and strangling them and um the implicit uh teleological structure of that is that it's still all about dead kangaroos and and the the primordial human needs that we're going to be satisfied by those dead kangaroos it's just that if you do it with a boomerang if you pass through this roundabout production and equip yourself with some boomerangs
you will more satisfactorily, more efficiently, faster, and more efficiently over the medium term satisfy those original needs. And this is exactly what you still see in contemporary political economy. So that even what accounted as extreme apologias for capital will still say well the final justification for capital is the satisfaction of human needs as expressed by the maximization of consumption production is for consumption consumption is the end consumption is the is the teleological um justification for this roundaboutness
that just intensifies it on the way. So the very fact that that is being persistently defended, almost as if it were something just axiomatic and unquestionable, I think adds force to the sense. It shows some almost anticipation, some dark cryptic anticipation of the fact that were it the case that capital was actually engaged in a radical teleological perversion of this relation such that the accumulation of capabilities of means had itself become the the governing end the sovereign um criterion of the of the process that that would count as
perverse and and and the whole language that goes along with that and perhaps even arguably would finally envelop your um understanding of what would be meant by injustice that that injustice at the at the most abstract level involves this form of uh radical teleological warpage that provides the the most fundamental philosophical critique of capital so anyway yeah that's I'm not gonna I'm saying that basically to try and plug this plug this set of concerns onto the things we've been talking about before but just in in the little remaining part of this monologue phase
I want to introduce a little science fiction story which I've only come across a few days ago and been absolutely stunned by it sorry just before doing that it's just one last thing that I just add which is just to say you know perhaps the most compressed way of capturing this sense of teleological perversity i think is nietzsche's notion of will to power if you think what is what is what is really being said with this notion will to power it is extremely scandalous notion i think in a way that is not really fully recognized in the sense that will obviously
is the index of this sort of teleological structure but power is capability power is means power is instrumental power is what allows you to fulfill your uh your purposes your goals you know it's the it's the actual um lubricant of your sort of teleological process and so to say will to power to compress anything down to this formulation will to power is precisely to say that the means have become an end that that capability as such has become itself an end and so I think it's like
what what is said in that you know almost now hackneyed cliche little phrase everyone everyone has already buzzing around in their brain but I think it's extremely it's provocative in a stunning way and it's provocative in exactly the way that this whole discussion is provocative that it's a it's a it's an extreme summary of radical modernistic teleological perversion even though obviously that's not the framework in which Nietzsche predominantly wants to put it but sorry I'll let me get back to this science fiction story, which is by a writer called Ted Chang,
whose big sort of breakthrough into sort of popular culture came from the fact that one of his short stories, and I think he only writes a short story, was made into this movie called Arrival, which I don't know whether people have seen. It's not a bad movie at all, but the story is absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant and is of such utter relevance to to all the things we're talking about it's it's extreme and it's a little bit hard to capture in quotes so i'm not going to quote big chunks of it i'm going to try and summarize this discussion a little bit very quickly um um so anyone who's seen the movie knows it's about this process of communicating with aliens
and it's about language a lot the whole story is very very tied up with linguistics and semiotics and so was so was the movie on that level but what the movie tended to i think to downplay a little bit was how um essential the question about uh time anomaly is to the story it played a big role in the movie but it wasn't spelt out anything like as clearly as it is in the story and the narrator of the story is a woman and
she's a and just making a certain amount of progress slowly constructing the the language of this alien which they called heptapods and they are radially symmetrical so they did have a very weak sense of backwards and forwards just it built into their physiology and their written language is completely divorced from their spoken language and is in the movie based upon these rings complicated rings it's not so clear that they're ring structures in the story but they're not um they're not linear that is very important but the physicists
trying to communicate with the aliens are unable to get to first base for a long time they just can't there's a rift of mutual incomprehension on basic science that they're finding very confusing and eventually they make a a breakthrough and they make a breakthrough by showing the aliens the image of the very classical optical illusion of a twig or something broken in water you know you put you so the weird refraction of a of a twig or pole or something put into water and you and you
and it's bent by the water and and there's a obviously a familiar human scientific understanding of this process and and the key to it is something that is called which i have to confess i hadn't heard about before firmat's principle of least time um i might put that in the in the it's about pathways and it's about time and it's also as we'll see about economy and it and other things even more
strikingly relevant and according to this principle if you want to understand why the exact angle of the bend that you see when this line hits the water it's it's because um light travels faster through air than through water and so The time it spends traveling through water is inefficient relative to the time that it spends traveling through air. So the complete vector consisting of these two parts, one part through the air and one part through the water, always coincides with the fastest possible route of light to the object.
so even though it's it doesn't it's again it's not a crow's fly line it's not a direct line it's a it's in a very elementary sense an indirect line because when you sum together the time spent by like traveling from the through the air and through the water across the two parts of this vector it's always the fastest possible route um it's bent so that the amount of time traveling through air is maximized without there's obviously a certain point where it will become uh become inefficient but it's the fastest route when because of the fact that these two different media
have different light speeds um it the the the integrated vector of the two is the fastest possible route between a and b that can be established and what the book you know the the aliens find this notion format principle of least time um for them it's fundamental it's not something that emerges uh in some complex way out of a um a process of causal physical understanding they're not thinking of a of causal process that leads to this outcome
instead they see the principle of least time as something which uh sorry i'm jumping ahead here as being basic and they do that because the principle of least time is a teleological notion if i can just quote a little bit of that um this is her mathematical colleague um so she says no he's sorry he he already says the but fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal oriented terms it sounds like a commandment to a light been quote thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination i considered it go on him again it's an old question of philosophy of physics people have been talking
about it since fermat first formulated it in the 1600s plank wrote volumes about it the thing is while the common formulation of physical laws is causal a variational principle which is the a principle based on the maximization or minimization of a uh criteria like fermat is purposive almost teleological um so the aliens understand this and they build their whole their whole physics around this it's like it's it's based upon a totally different sense of time and ultimately all the time weirdness first of the aliens and then as as our heroine in the story
understands the language she begins to inherit this same characteristic of stopping of time no longer seeming to be something that happens in this directional pathway from the present into the future but instead as as teleological that the light has to know you know to use this deliberately absurd language from the beginning what the shortest path will be it can't start out on a certain route and discover that in fact it has to change of course it the whole light beam implicitly involves an understanding of the shortest path the fastest path between these two points this this curved kink twisted warped line is the one that for them is
natural because they they're thinking about physics teleologically rather than causally and there's much more in the story I won't I'm gonna I'm gonna stop in a minute but the one other ingredient that absolutely has to be brought into it is but chang is fully aware that this discussion is massively and centrally about agency the whole story in a certain sense is about free will and about how if someone understood something about the future they would not get into some kind of grandfather's paradox type logical contradiction in which they would act in such a way to forestall the future that they know
is going to happen from happening and that's really the topic of the story and it's explored in different ways I'm just actually if I can just pass on one more link which I hope I've put here conveniently I was passed on this reference which is just excellent about it it's but by Gwern he's got a huge multi-linked post upon this essay it's called yes the story of your life um so he but ted cheng does a whole bunch of different things
one of the things he does is the kind of oedipus thing where at certain points she by deliberately trying to avoid seeming to avoid the future brings it about by accident this is obviously the kind of oedipus tragic classical sense of this we have in the in the in the in the tragic tradition um but that's not the main approach she's got the main approach she's got is to say that on this other aspect um action is coordinated in order to bring about the event that it sees as necessary the story is proposing that there is this kind of um alternative consciousness that is outside
of our understanding of free will in which the understanding of the future and the direction of purposes towards the realization of that future are integrated necessarily um and I think it's it's not that I particularly at this point this isn't a place to try and defend that notion or even it's it's coherent but it's just to say that this problem and the solution that she is making to this problem is very very deeply connected with the questions that we've been discussing up to this point to do with time and agency and and these various strands of
accelerationist thought and it comes up an awful lot in terms of people saying you know if this is happening why not react against it or are you are you simply refusing to act um you know there's a there's a there's a a whole informal discussion around the politics of accelerationism that seems to me to be entirely embedded within the terms of this ted chang story and you know anticipated by it and explored and and negotiated by by that story um but i think i'll stop at that point and see if i
if if people remain mute i'll i'll get back into monologue might could you expound a little bit on the differences between teleology and causality that you're seeing and because they're obviously or at least in my understanding they're sort of connected yes well that it I think it's a really complicated thing and I do think that it's a topic in which you know I say our cultural legacy meaning something very
vague at the moment to do with sort of the predominant modernist culture is extremely structurally confused about it's and let me just try and justify that a little bit because I think the ground the ground source confusion can be seen in the fact that well firstly as we've discussed in the past the fight around teleology and mechanism was so epic in the sort of prehistory and early history of capitalism that the kind of battle
scars of that of that fight continue to sort of absolutely fester and and direct a lot of the way that the thing develops and so there's there's a huge amount of sort of highly conflicted cultural baggage that is involved in this relation that makes it very difficult for people to be cold about it and one of the things that comes out that I think is extremely strange and very very important to any discussion about the culture of capitalism is the fact that mechanism and volunteerism
you know the notion of strict causal necessity on the one hand and uninhibited human freedom on the other hand are in an extremely bizarre relationship with each other on the one hand they seem to be straightforwardly opposite and I think the culture when it's talking about it in those terms you know so there's a kind of determinism versus free will debate in philosophy it's obviously one of Kant's antinomies but but if that doesn't seem to have ended the discussion very well I think it's a popular thing people talk about and
there's obviously a tendency for science on this level to strongly take the deterministic side and the more humanistic dimensions of the culture strongly take the the human freedom side and everyone agrees that there's this deep incompatibility between these two ways of looking at things sort of enjoys on one level the antinomy I think it's it's kind of in some sense weirdly comforting um but that's that's only one part of the of the issue and the other part of it is that there is a strange tradition i'm not going to say it's completely occulted but it certainly
sort of tends to be repressed and it but it pops up in various places he prices book on time which we've talked about makes a very explicit uh reintroduction of this issue which is that free will has been used as if it were some kind of solid argument against reverse causality um so that for instance in the interpretation in in Bell's theorem and the and the interpretation of quantum mechanics um I think I'm I'm getting this from he price rather than from Bell's writings directly but I I'm pretty sure he says uh that
Bell explicitly says well it would be incompatible with free will if we were to take this uh possibility of reverse causation with any seriousness so that there's a kind of way of dissolving some of these um um quantum paradoxes that involves um a kind of backward production from the outcome of certain experiments to the um to the precursors of those experiments that were ruled out of court actually explicitly because they would contradict the notion of free will so so even within the sciences a notion of radical human freedom becomes a reason
for a certain structuring of temporality in this in this um asymmetric causal fashion um so yeah there's a lot more to be said let me just make one more point that i think is already um that is already sort of implicit in that which which is therefore that the the culture the public culture of capitalism has this strange characteristic of being at one and the same time hyper volitional and hyper mechanistic that there is this strange syndrome of mechanistic libertarianism or liberalized liberation of
mechanism that that is really deeply deeply embedded in the in the culture of capitalism in the culture of modernity if people are happy with that um and it's you know a raw contradiction on one hand and yet obviously as a syndrome it's actually an integrated syndrome and it's integrated syndrome in one way just because in the most kind of crass sociological fashion the the liberty of the natural sciences to pursue their researches without interference from certain social authorities that are associated with teleology it becomes a kind of rallying cry so the birth of the modern sciences is is is this claim for
intellectual liberty that is associated with the development of the origins of mechanistic thinking and therefore a mode of thinking within which the notion human liberty is exposed as a contradiction or certainly in contradiction with the the way in which sort of the development of scientific thinking is to proceed so i think it's absolutely inescapable to dig into this real pathology of teleology within modernity because because it produces such absolutely flagrant fantastically schizoid symptoms um that it's it's it's unavoidable
that one sort of returns to this thing and i ask what is going on here that can allow the these really naked cultural contradictions to be promoted from some obscure integral core and i think that that integral core is precisely the fact and the language of free will is a language about a certain interpretation of time and this is also what the Ted Chang story is saying and that the way in which Ted Chang uses teleology is is as something that is outside of that particular modernistic syndrome it's
deliberately been left outside it obviously historically because of the fact that it was associated precisely with those forms of social cultural power that the the modern liberation of science defines as its own origin so So just to clarify, are you saying that it's particularly ironic that even scientists reject, tend to reject reverse causality as conflicting with free will, because reverse causality is in fact a great way to explain goals and will?
Well, Hugh Price's argument is basically that. he says um it's absolutely clear that the scientific duty is to discard any notion of free will that will get in the way of a consistent physics and by a consistent physics he means one that is time asymmetric at its at its fundamentals um so i mean that argument is is one that i'm simply just uh taking up from him it's a you know he he exposes i think very well how strange it is that science even as it seems to foster and promote this hard mechanistic determinism
um ends up being a repository of this of this defense of free will as something that is so indispensable even to scientific thinkers that they would rather avoid contemplating a consistent physics than part with this commitment to a notion of free will but but what Ted Chiang is showing I think really clearly and I think this is it is a crucial point is that free will as understood in this way and deterministic mechanical causality are both part of the same syndrome when
contextualized by this alternative orientation towards finalistic time you know if you if you have a notion that the future is actually thoroughly causally efficacious in the same way that the past and the present are then of asymmetric physical causality and free will are simultaneously sidelined by it because because they they both think that there is this ontological precedence of the of the past and present over the future I put a comment
in the sidebar here yes I was just looking at it yeah I mean to be honest I think this is a really complicated question which is which is not obviously a bad thing but it it means that I think a hasty answer to it is really difficult because because I guess what I'm saying is we cannot know yet what can really is saying you know when you say sort of
pre-cantine and pre-cantium you know if if if can ism is critique and critique is modernity in philosophy in its kind of essential structure I think it's something that we have yet to have yet to reach you know and in saying that I'm of course putting it I'm of course being traditional I'd say in sort of aligning us with with a kind of forward moving conventional linear temporal progression towards our understanding which of course is is it has to be on this but I
think even you know can't own thinking about teleology is very complicated it's obviously broken up in this weird way and it comes in late in the third critique as an explicit explicit issue so the sense in which the very notion of the transcendental has a teleological character I think is something that he on the surface his preferred way of conceiving conceiving his project we lost just that last line can you yes sorry no I'm just saying I'm just saying that um you know I think where
we take a curved and twisted course to this very problem I mean I think it's when you say haven't we become spinners again I think he price is a spin assist you know of a certain kind or if I'm understanding what you're saying by that i think i think so and and einstein too in the same way and in that case explicitly i'm not sure that that is the end point of this discussion um like it's it's probably also where ted chang goes actually like he he tends to say
that in the end the difference that we've been talking about between this kind of notion of progressive temporality on the one hand and this finalistic heptapod temporality on earth is aspect that every scientific statement can be translated between these two things and they're both consistent in their own frame and they can just be mapped onto each other and that seems to be very spin as this thing and and I guess you know again like Einsteinian um but I'm not sure that we don't have a more difficult problem than that which is to do with what it really is to do a diagram of a transcendental circuit
that um let me just try to you know if we have on the one hand the notion of efficient final causality and we have on the other hand a notion of progressive mechanical causality we can we can of course say that those two things are complementary with each other and consistent and compatible and we can see them as two different aspects of things but in doing that we're saying that they do not have any kind of actual dynamic mechanical relationship between each other and when i say mechanical i i want to use that in a sense that is not skewed to the side
of efficient progressive causality but is neutral between them that's to say if if you treat these two different um these two different models of time as actually being having a relation of circuitry relate relating them together so that they actually are involved in a dynamic relationship and not simply this just this static aspect or relation of compatibility then i think the problem becomes a spiral you know it's like you in going around this this circuit there is a dynamism to the relationship between the two
poles of the question that is not at all reflected by this notion of them as being simply two different perspectives on this on this same basic reality so yeah sorry oh um you you sent us a link to that Omohundro article last time yeah yes yeah and it was interesting so the idea that these these drives emerge inherently from AI and can you talk about that in relationship to this notion um is that is that related to this sort of spiral of teleological yes I think it
has to be I think it definitely has to be because yes because in the over 100 there are two distinct teleological dimensions to what he's talking about. On the one hand, he's talking about drives, which is itself an inherently teleological notion. And I'm using teleology here in a way that is, I'm trying to use it as thinly as possible, because as we were saying last week, teleology itself needs to be brutally critiqued. I mean, it is always inclined to fall into a metaphysical formulation in which the telos is an idea and therefore
teleology has a metaphysical structure of the kind that is outlined in the first critique so I'm wanting to use it much more diffusely than that and sorry so but to get back to this thing so a drive is teleological it's kind of directed towards some kind of goal but there's a second level of teleology which is that we expect certain kinds of teleological structures to be produced necessarily that's to say we're making we can anticipate according to omahundra that any intelligence will necessarily have certain predictable teleological structures
so rather than saying um in the way that i think is typical of this kind of friendly ai type of discussion about this that we can just we can decide how this thing is going to uh think in sort of teleological terms it's morality it's drives it's in some sense this this kind of thing can be programmed with some arbitrariness and there's a lot of this is backed up a lot by the kind of metaphors that are used in terms of information space where they where they say oh sorry intelligent the space of intelligence so there's this there's this abstract phase space in which all intelligences are located human intelligence is positioned somewhere in this
in this intelligence space there are all other kinds of intelligences possible and then implicitly from that we can sort of try and position deliberately engineering process and intelligence somewhere that we consider optimal within this um intelligence space but obviously omahandra is saying that there's something just being missed there totally which is exactly this omahundra drive discussion that that it will have to have certain drives they're not they're not arbitrary engineering preferences at all they are conditions of cybernetic consistency for any such being if it
if it lacks if it lacks certain drives towards self-perpetuation the self-optimization of its processes in certain ways resource acquisition these basic drives that are required in order to continue to function then it simply cannot exist it doesn't have it's not a consistent existence and so as soon as you make that argument you are saying that there is an inevitability about certain teleological structures being produced if you're going to have an intelligence at all you're going to have one that has these characteristics to it and it's and it's not therefore just something that comes
out of these particular engineering decisions that are made by whatever the AI lab the friendly I a community or however that agent of AI production is being conceived I mean there's loads of stuff happening in this so I'd buy at the moment everyone's being very quiet I'm sorry that's probably because I'm talking too much and can I just respond to one of these and then I'll really try and control
myself a little bit better which is that Amy says how is time mutation different for shifted transcendent was a transcendent is open to feedback grasp just a circuit i mean i wouldn't necessarily say that there's a difference except if that is what we're looking at then that is what the transcendental is you know so it means that in a certain sense by saying by qualifying notion of the transcendental as a shifted transcendental and implying there's such a thing as an unshifted transcendental which of course is a kind of traditional tempting even classical reading of can i think um you know as soon as we think such a thing as a shifted transcendental in some rigorous fashion we're saying well we we had got the
transcendental wrong um and you know if the transcendental can shift then the shift of the transcendental is what the transcendental actually so that's why I think this thing you know that the pre-critical error would always be to fall into thinking that the circuit can be inscribed within a set of transcendental structures rather than the transcendental structures and circuit being fully coincidental um yes
but yes so sorry i'll stop on on this i mean i'm trying to get amy to come out of the sidebar I guess but but you know is if Kant's transcendental is the human transcendental ie not the actual transcendental but something inscribed within the transcendental as it would be as it would be fully explicated or diagrammed by transcendental circuitry then what how are we drawing those limits because it just seems to me that the machinery of of the critical machinery the machinery of critique is itself always actually doing this escape process already you know it's like if we could say in the fashion of the history of german
idealism or whatever this is what can is unable to think because he he doesn't establish the machinery the conceptual critical machinery to make this move beyond a certain set of determinate limitations if we could say that if we could say you know this box is is cantinism and we can draw the boundaries of that box with confidence and then we ourselves can then using some some cognitive tool not available or formulated by can can move outside that box then totally that would be right but it seems to me that actually the the most powerful tools that we're using to make this
are themselves tools that be part of the critical machine and so it's not that that's my problem with this with this move if if the critical machine is the machine that's allowing us to to make the escape from the box of cantonism as conceived in its limited form then to what extent is conceiving Kant in that limited form actually adequate of Kant it seems it can't be because you know that he's providing the machinery that we're using that are allowing that that model to be formulated in the first place or or formulated through escape I say it's you know sorry I'm really
going to try to talk a little bit less I just I have to just say one more thing because I think this is totally critical point in both senses of the word because this is exactly this is exactly the problem we have talking about capital you know it's it's it's the notion that we can delimit it in a way that is defined by some movement of escape that is external to what we have delimited it in in describing it you know so we can we can think post-capitalism because we can fully define capitalism and we define it by escaping it to a superior frame
and that movement of escape to the superior frame is is conducted by means that are not themselves capitalist even in the widest sense so you know I think to be if you to say we can be post-cantium or we can be post-capitalist is the same structurally the same and what allows us to see that structural similarity exactly is critique you know we can only make that strong analogy because critique allows us to see how both those systems are working and so the the rejoinder that i'm just obsessively
and repeatedly making to this is to say well but isn't that movement of escape that we're taking advantage of and is allowing us to define the box in the first place isn't that already part of the thing that they supposedly inside the box you know it just that that's that's what I'm constantly seeing here can I can I hop in if no one else is gonna say anything here um I I sort of harped on this last week I think about why give either de-territorialization or re-territorialization
a prime or you know thinking think of one is more fundamental than the other and you said that you could see a strong talic vector towards de-territorialization and I suppose that's connected with how you're seeing the role of critique functioning here um I guess I'm wondering if critique can ever act as a purely negative critical function or if it necessarily has to posit positive objects so when we were talking about this last week, the dissolute nihilism means that all our
transcendental objects eventually are dissolved but then are reconstituted in imminent reality. Isn't then critique not simply dissolving those transcendental objects but has to posit one as an alternative and I'm completely open to being schooled yes I don't know I don't I don't think there's any question of schooling on on this because it's a crucial question maybe can I just step
back a little bit from but i don't i don't think i'm leaving it behind which is to say you know what we call if you're trying to say in the most abstract sense a certain tradition of post-modernism post-philosophy on a more narrow sense post-structuralism um that defines our recent philosophical epoch what is the basic characteristic of that type of thinking and it seems to me that it's extremely close to what you're engaged with in your question I think which is that which is that if you say that critique necessarily
reconstitutes a metaphysics and so it opens this interminable process of of it cannot realize a final critical system that is not itself then some kind of metaphysical fabrication that provokes some further way of critique if people will use that word and and the point is if you follow this if you one way of following this and the way that I think is typically done is to treat it as a demand for the continuous revolution of vocabulary so you say you
know we can't use the word critique anymore we can't use the word object we can't use the transcendental all of these things because they were used to take us to some particular to a point of demolition of metaphysics but then themselves settle into a kind of a new metaphysical structure and will require um some subsequent move of destruction or deconstruction with a heideggerian vocabulary a deridian vocabulary some other successive waves of of anti-metaphysical vocabulary that will always need to be replenished and revised and refashioned and put us in this position of
interminable, interminable critique. And that seems to me really what postmodernism is about. And I guess what I'm saying is attitude to vocabulary is part of, is what turns it into a pathological syndrome. in that in that in that as soon as you say look we can't use any of this vocabulary any any of this original you know late 18th century conceptual machinery anymore because it has frozen itself in some medical system and we have to revise it and revise it and revise it and constantly be replacing our our words we can't use the word being anymore you know we can't use the
the word time anymore um they all need crossing out and put under erasure and boom boom boom boom boom and even difference is going to have to be put under erasure and replace something else i mean that it's this has become to my mind there's something real being seen there you know what's real is being seen is that there is this dynamic of perpetual revolution that is inescapable once critique has been ignited i think that's absolutely right um but to to say that we um we're going to deal with that in some effective way by allowing all of this machinery to just be
refashioned and and terminologically revamped is a way i think of actually evading the problem that is really at stake here and i think it's notable you know just to be kind of partisan about it that i think that one of the things de leuze and qatarie do that is really valuable is they don't play that game i mean of course they invent new words but they don't but they hang on to they hang on to the classical language of transcendental philosophy to it to an extraordinary extent compared to some of these other uh other types of thinking because they fully realize that um there's no there's no real advantage by this continual terminological migration you know it itself knows that it's going
to just reconstitute the same problems it's the only thing that that it does is it um it makes that that space of perpetual revolution sort of comfortable institutionally it's it's very it's very comparable to kind of in a way the most frivolous approach that capitalism has to its own you know perpetual revolution where you you're just shifting brands these minor variations in product quality and product type and all of these things to so things are new um but they're not new in a way that is actually um really engaging the fundamental dynamic that that
novelty is is about um sorry i'm kind of i'm i'm getting myself into a long ramble that i should try and terminate about this but so just very quickly to take it back to your to your point about this that i think yes there is that problem um and i think that that problem is the problem that comes with the fact that we're dealing with a circuit you know and if we didn't have that problem we wouldn't have something that was capable of fundamentally revising or escaping itself and if we didn't have something that was capable of fundamentally revising or escaping itself
then it would indeed be the sort of thing that we could imagine could be put in a box and left behind by something that could be confidently said to be post that thing post-capitalist post critical post transcendental post whatever we we would have we would be able to to do that if if it was the sort of thing that didn't have the inverted commerce problem that you're attributing to it but I think that that problem is just the fact that the critical machine is more powerful than any of the instances that can be um realized by that machine so that it's you know it's constantly dissolving
itself and creative destruction is essential to it um that there's no realization of capital or critique that acts as a resting place because the because the the dynamic of capital and critique is is uh unsatisfied by any particular actualization so i mean just to be contrarian and yeah do um i mean towards the end of kant's critical endeavors like the idea of the highest good becomes central um it becomes a sort of cornerstone and I think it becomes evident what he's sort of working
towards but the highest good for Kant is this point because without the highest good it is just sort of an endless critique in a way that he would see as utterly hopeless but um yeah I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about that I it's obvious like Kant's Christianity but yes I mean the whole history we we could obviously do this whole course and partially maybe a little bit are doing in these terms um you know of the the history of european christianity equals the history of
nihilism um and um so you know it's by no means can be treated as a kind of arbitrary accidental feature you know kant's christianity is clearly crucial but what is his christianity and i think that then we're looking at another motor of the same kind which is the motor of reform christianity i mean it's the question of like what is protestantism and i think protestantism is just like capital or critique and not by analogy but by integral identity in the sense that you it too can't ever be confidently placed in a box because the schismatic dynamic
of Protestantism is always involved in the positioning that places it in that box so I mean we know exactly what does what does it mean to call something Protestant and and in the critical sense it means that it is involved in a schismatic revolt against some kind of theological orthodoxy so where does that where does that stop you know it has its own complicated circuit to the usage of certain scriptures of course the proliferation of new churches the the role of
the fact that there's no authority that is actually able to override this dynamic that is introduced by this notion of them private conscience and and where private conscience in relation to scripture in these particular institutions will take this this process is obviously totally open-ended in the same way that all of these dynamics are you know and i think it would be i mean sorry if i'm it seems like i'm really wanting to simplify this a lot but i i do think you could put exactly the same argument um in these cultural theological terms and say you know of course nature self-admittedly
is a protestant christian you know in the sense that he thinks it's inherent to it that it's going to do this this thing that nihilism um that nihilism is the inevitable outcome of christianity in general and and expresses itself particularly through protestant as he has this endless perpetual revolution in the direction of kind of theological called schism um and he you know he's another schismatic schismatic phase and we we can see them you know continuing um so so again sorry i'm going on too long but i just want to say i
the last thing i want to do is to try to uh downplay kant's christianity i just want to say that his Christianity like his critique like his modernity like his relation to the dynamic of capitalism all of those things are not delimitable and they're not delimitable for intri for reasons of an intrinsic dynamism Thanks for entertaining that. I mean, do you think, I'm sorry if I just wandered completely off. No, no, I think you're answering my question really well, actually.
I mean, the irony of Kant's type of Protestantism is that the highest good becomes this new despot. and I think that's the importance for the categorical imperative for him too but maybe that might be a sort of a sideways conversation well I mean I guess I would say about all of these things that they are so abstract that they tend to escape their use so um you know i think kant's practical philosophy as again i'm probably being repetitive and saying this but but i think that that
praxeology in its austrian economic uses is just kantian practical philosophy taken another critical cycle you know the the reason that mises and all of these guys say that look this is not we're not making empirical claims about um economic history we're saying economics what human action must be like um and and the sense of of a priori transcendental necessity that the austrians sort of um take up is is straight out of kant um you know and obviously from a certain position of empiricism it seems to be um highly objectionable and and even
you know people laugh at it sometimes the notion that you could have an april right praxeology but but i think it's a demonstration of how um again the abstraction of the notion of a transcendental practical reason um it escapes the usage that you can associate with it at any particular time for reasons that the just the rigorous pursuit of critique itself will will accomplish I think I should know more about Cracker Barrel. Oh, sorry.
Oh, don't let me interrupt there. I just wanted to ask. No, I was just going to do about Cracker Barrel, so that's good. I don't know. Maybe you should. Clarification. And then you can talk about cracker barrels. I'm not going to ask about it, yeah. So, like, I'm still kind of a little bit confused about if we can understand the transcendental as being inside the circuit. And the transcendental itself involves, like, the abstract of the a priori, the abstract and the empirical interrelationship of a priori synthesis. What is being fed into that circuit that then kind of allows the transcendental to mutate?
And is it some kind of alternative temporality? And if so, can it be understood in terms of the way that Delias talks about Nietzsche's eternal return as involving these two moments of chance and fate? So the kind of thing that would come into the circuit if it's affirmed both times and continues to to kind of spiral is like the outside whatever chance could possibly bring it what allows the shift to happen well sorry let me start with a really trivial point on this which is just to say I'm reluctant to say the
transcendental is inside the circuit i would really want to say coincides with the circuit you know i think if we if the transcendental can't be inside anything if the if transcendental is to still function critically you know it becomes a dead metaphysical construction of the kind that would you know deconstruct and destroy and we're into kind of pomo revolt against the transcendentals as soon as we say it's it's inside anything so it's the circuit that is transcendental in and the ambivalence there being that equally the the circuit can't be subordinated to some
kind of frame we're not drawing the circuit inside some um some some framework of transcendental um cognition or intuition that that escapes it um so then there's elements so so then the next part of your question and is where the delers delers is describing the same thing and here's in his description of eternal return is that right um sorry to be like really slow on this and then the out we won't be outside because yeah the
first question was yeah sorry um I should have I should have quoted that um better but um okay so does that then mean that the kind of outside element in this relationship has to be the empirical how is that related to temporality and if it is related to temporality can you think about that in terms of Deleuze's description of eternal return thinking of that particularly because it combines these two moments of like determinism and free will in terms of chance and fate. In terms of two rolls of the dice, the first one is you
affirm chance because you throw the dice in the first moment and and it I forget I forget how the metaphor that the description works but it hits either the sky or the earth and then you get the number the combination comes back on the dice and you have to affirm it in order for the chance to then be reaffirmed and the dice to roll again if you don't affirm what you get back in the throw and you don't love your fate then that's it you kind of get turfed out of the loop and the spiral continues. Right, selected. Yeah, selected out of the spiral. Yeah, I mean look, that whole problem, I think it's like, yeah, sorry Amy, yeah.
Like, sorry to think about that in terms of temporality, sorry we've got a bit of a lag I think. I mean this sort of chance would be some eruption of some other kind of like temporality possibly. in terms of it not kind of working in the linearity that's described by fatalism i i just want to really insist on the fact that whatever this outside is is the transcendental or the transcendental is nothing so there cannot be an outside to the transcendental transcendental without the transcendental having been radically misconceived um because it's the transcendental is the ultimate frame and if there's something outside the ultimate
frame then what you had taken to the ultimate frame wasn't the ultimate frame because we we can see that it itself is has an outside and therefore is in some sense framed or or position and and and so that means in terms of this spiral circuitry of of production that that that the transcendental is being the transcendental is self shifting to use your language or self displacing or whatever the outside of the transcendental is is what the transcendental in reality is and whatever the so whatever the element that we want to introduce cannot be
introduced to something that is going to be consistently beyond the transcendental unless we're wanting to to to discard that language you know so we're back with this we could you know we're necessarily going post-modern in a sense if we if we if we want to introduce something that's going to definitively dethrone the language of the transcendental from its usage as the ultimate frame then of course we can we can go this way and but i don't think that but the the weakness of postmodernism is that it's it has no it has no way of mandating that change it only has the forces of fashion and social consensus and
very weak very philosophically weak forces agree to say let us no longer use the word transcendental in the way that we know critically it has to be used to to to maintain its its transcend its philosophical sovereignty you know we know that that if we're going to use that word seriously then it cannot have an outside if it has an outside it has a frame you know we've put it in a box and we're implicitly saying oh there's some other vocabulary some other words that we're using that you know depose it
um but there's no there's no resilience there's no philosophical resilience to that decision there's only really fashion there's only it's you know a a a sociological decision it's not a it's not finally a philosophical decision because you're just deciding that you're wanting to rather than use the word transcendental as machinery you're wanting to use it as a a determinant your history as something that you've overcome or that you've delimited but that's that's but those kind of maneuvers of delimitation and and insertion into some other frame is exactly
what is predicted or anticipated by the by the the language of of the transcendental so um yeah i know i'm sort of hitting what you're saying is an oblique here but i think it's not and we're not it's not totally missing it it's no no yeah like it you're completely right um i'm just thinking about it in a kind of like a strange way because i've come out of some conversations about these these ideas of shifting transcendentals from people who are obviously entering from what you're kind of positing then is capitalism as like a transcendental circuit has no outside and i guess i've been talking to people who are kind of like axiomatically asserting that there is an outside to capitalism therefore there is not there is an outside to
describe it as a transcendental which yes i mean i i think that's in this case okay your own position yeah yes but but i don't want to at all suggest that it's a trivial trivial thing and obviously i think the question of the outside is absolutely crucial but what that question is doing is expressing the perpetual revolution of the transcendental machinery it's not effectively framing the transcendental machine so you know it it not only is it important to hold on to that language i think it's absolutely
inevitable that it will be continually perpetuated whether whether we're talking about capital or critique or protestantism or any of these same modernistic dynamic machines they continually engage a relation with the outside but that relation with the outside is not one that can culminate in a framing of the critical machine or at least i mean there's probably a sort of dogmatic element to that i mean so so it's to put it more as a challenge it's it's like if you think you can frame critique then what is the what is the actual
cognitive protocol that is itself non-critical but is competent to delimit critique and so it's that that's the that's the challenge that as we've seen you can put in all of these particular aspects it's you know it's it is the same as the as the question poster any discussion of capital and and post capital can I ask one more question while we're still using the transcendental terminology so um I guess what sort of I'm confused about is this relationship between the transcendental
and the empirical in this sense it's not that you're saying on the one hand it seems like you're saying the transcendental is the driver you know it is the driver of empirical reality it's the outside mover um and then on the other hand you're saying but um but transcendent the transcendental is constituted in imminent material reality and it's because it's constituted in imminent material reality that it's constantly being dissolved and reformulated that but doesn't if if it's being constituted in material reality why isn't that a constructivist position rather
than a sort of like hard hereditary and determinist position. Sorry, the last sentence, it just seems to involve a leap that I'm not quite... Okay, yeah, I'll... So if the transcendental objects, which are constantly changing over time, are formulated in material reality, in imminent material reality, um why why isn't it then that we're left with a constructivist notion of transcendentals transcendental objects rather rather rather than maybe or can i just one last thing rather than a transcend rather than a
transcendental as the driving motor of what imminent reality is sorry my problem here which i should have picked up before actually is that i'm not very happy with the notion of a transcendental object right you know i did not actually quite get what said by that expression because obviously the transcendental emerges with the rift between the object and its condition of possibility so the so that
if that is collapsed back into the object that is the very definition of metaphysics and and it's only it's only in a rift between the objects and its and its conditions of possibility that you have transcendental philosophy and then of course that you know the machine of perpetual evolution let's say in its straw man form this postmodernist dynamic is then by saying oh but you know you've produced a new field of objectivity and that too has its condition of possibility and that condition of possibility requires a new vocabulary to distinguish in a in a in a fresh way between this this new higher level domain of objectivity and
its conditions and that in turn will then be objectified and boom boom boom you know we have this we have this continuous cultural mechanism of in to be generous i would say innovation but but I think that is generous. I think more its tendency is to just degenerate into this dynamic of fashion, you know, that is just kind of fetishizing a kind of migration of vocabulary without actually doing any interesting philosophical work. So that's my problem with this talking about a transcendental object. But I know that there's a bit of what you're saying. yeah I think it sorry continue yeah I do think it is in a certain sense
constructivist necessarily so I'm not arguing with you about that I think social constructivism as it is generalized within the contemporary Academy it is the most popular of contemporary critique and it is critique strictly and rigorously I mean I've got problems with the way it's used but there's no denying that the fundamental inspiration and and function of social constructors is just is just critical and saying that you shouldn't confuse conditions of production with their objects so so I think that it's true
that you would end up with some kind of necessarily some kind of constructivism if by that you mean exactly exactly that that you are diagnosing and critiquing the objectification of conditions objects however whichever field or objects you're talking about right I have a question that I think is sort of related to this which is and it might sound like a dumb question but uh so the question is what exactly is the relationship between the transcendental and the language of cybernetics so so are they you know literally one in the same
um or is it like like i'm thinking about um like for example in in delanda's book on delu's uh intensive science virtual philosophy he it seems very important to him to use these you know to outline these structures manifolds and vector spaces and group theory and then but then he wants to extract concepts that are actually not mathematical from them because he has a problem with he you know He thinks that using actually using mathematical structures presupposes essence or identity or something and I'm curious what you
like what what is Maybe the word exact is kind of word word to use but like what um I think you get I think of the question Yeah, sure. No, I don't think it's at all obviously a dumb question. I think it's excellent question and I if a kind of fast or dumb answer to it would be to say I think that there is a process of convergence between these two types of language taking place and they've obviously you know from being very diverse to the point that people were not seeing a connection between them I think that they've passed through threshold of convergence
I was writing was critical step which comprehensive cool for between science dental philosophical vocabularies and the lander is one of the people who has most and perceptively followed up on that but it seems to me a process in motion and and the and in in making references to transcendental circuitry i'm really trying to just indicate a a point a full convergence point between these two
vocabularies i think that you know it would be in both cases what's at stake is a philosophy of time that is fully adequate to the ridicule rigorous prosecution of critique and fully satisfactory for the formulation of cybernetic models and I think that's inevitably So both from the philosophical side and from the scientific side, basically, that cybernetics
is being updated and our ability to conceive is being updated, and they will literally reach a point of convergence, and that's like absolute knowledge or something like that. well i'm not sure what's meant by absolute knowledge so but i would say for instance look artificial intelligence seems to me obviously marking the kind of uh the gradient of both of these lineages you know what i mean it's cybernetics means nothing something that reaches a kind of relative culmination in the development of artificial intelligence and similarly um a
transcendental philosophy which was not the way a super intelligence thought would not be would not be a transcendental philosophy of any significance so i think it's it's in that way completely inevitable that these two languages have to come together if they weren't going to come together we would have to be saying that there's something about the destiny of machines and the destiny of philosophy that that produces this perpetual distinction or even divergence between them and and so I guess that's a that's a that's a thesis that I'm being sort of dogmatically averse to but for
reasons that seem to me both cybernetically and transcendental philosophically compelling. When you talk about cybernetics and artificial intelligence in that way, as kind of the future trajectory of cybernetics culminating in artificial intelligence, is this kind of somehow like link to the way that like Deleuze describes the problem and the kind of the way that it feeds back into learning like if you cybernetics system as soon as you can deal with mistakes and you know to use Bobberworks language to root around them are you thinking about it through this kind of like Deleuze
Guittarian or Deleuze's kind of like discussion of the problem in terms of learning and feedback maybe that's a really boring question no no it's not boring but but I miss I'm afraid I'm not sure I'm fully getting what the question is maybe maybe I just agree with what you're saying too much to kind of see it as a as a what would it be to disagree with with it that's the thing like um to say that this language of learning and feedback is somehow not something that can be philosophically digested or I'm not I'm not sure what how I would not begin to disagree with what you've said. Yeah, I mean, I think phrasing it as a question was just something that,
I mean, because it just occurred to me then, obviously. A proclamation. Yeah, okay, I'll take that. No, people are free to make proclamations, definitely. I hope I'm not suggesting that. The interrogative mode is mandatory. I'm sorry. Maybe another question I have that's kind of related is, can we bring in the topic of affect? So when we, when one invokes teleology and goals and self-monitoring, like the human cybernetic system, you know,
sort of affect is what drives it. And I'm wondering, let's see, I'm trying to formulate my question. I don't exactly have a question. Well, with a cybernetic model, I'm curious like how far affect can be extended or how far you think affect needs to be a part of teleological models. And then also, I guess, when we bring this question back to, or this issue back to politics and people who criticize you from the left,
I think there's a lot of... like one of the criticisms of capitalism is that it causes so much suffering. And I guess I'm interested in sort of affect in terms of cybernetics and then also how that relates to the question of suffering and capitalism. Sorry, that's totally all over the place. Yeah, it's interesting all over the place. I'm not sure I can bring those two things together very easily. maybe they need to be compartmentalized unless you think there's a strong bridge between them. It seems like there's some kind of interesting bridge, but answer in whatever way you want.
I mean, I'm going to take our factors, again, being back to this question about Spinoza's relation to all of this thing and the fact that it's obviously... trying to to think a sensation perhaps or if you're going to use an inappropriate philosophical register as in is intrinsically practical so it's kind of you you talk about affect by because to to show that actually you're thinking um from the start of as of a kind of practical mechanism and that effect is is always from the beginning primordially a driver it's a
it's part of a kind of a uh not spinosis language but de leuze's or uncle tory as a machine um so i mean that language of affect like that seems to me obviously i can't understand why people would want to use it and find it helpful whatever you you might be asking something more about that um suffolk capitalism and suffering I don't know I mean it's obviously like something people are going to continue to want to talk about and it's interesting how do you start talking about it I mean
the the the implicit frame already in place on this is like you know you have some moral philosophy in which suffering is positioned and then on the basis of that you gain some leverage on the on the target of criticism let's say in this case capitalism so there's a whole empirical question about how much suffering does capitalism cause and you know what are the alternatives and is it actually you know ultimately justified by some utilitarian calculus and all of this kind of thing all of those discussions could be having and most of them happen within kind of um at a fairly pedestrian level which i don't mean entirely dismissively of sort of socio-political
critique you know pretty liberals and socialists and all that there's about about about the utilitarian case for against against capitalism but effective of from the nihilistic perspective that I think is inherent to your acceleration none of that discussion really gains much purchase because I think you know what is the moral valency of suffering within accelerations well I mean it's not obvious that has any moral valency at all you know if you're if you have an
unconditional accelerationist posture then you're saying necessarily that some anything that comes in as transcendent moral objection is discounted like the only question is does this or does this not promote the self escalation of the system under under consideration so i don't know i mean obviously that's why i think unconditional accelerationism has to come over as being you know utterly heartless in relation to these kind of particular moral frames because it is utterly heartless I mean it's utterly morally nihilistic in
the sense that the only values it recognizes are those enforced by the escalation of the system under consideration and if you then say but doesn't that hurt people then whatever I mean there's the it shrugs imminently at that at that objection I'm afraid I think I mean I'm open to anyone to suggest a thing an alternative but It seems like it might depend upon your implicit assumptions on, and you know, I don't speak for left acceleration or right or anything, but what's the implicit assumption about,
you know, what the telos of capital really is? It's something I kind of wanted to bring up in this discussion anyway with relation to Boehm-Bowork and maybe if you could just help lead me along a little bit about you know how his idea of roundaboutness might might have some answers like leading us there. Yes okay it does all connect. So what's the what's the key loss of capitalism well the only it okay again i'm going to put this in a sort of a dogmatic form i don't think it's necessarily i think it's not actually a dogmatic argument but um for brevity i'll do this
and with the expectation that people will will push back if they they want to but it seems to be the only accelerationist argument to what is the telos of capitalism is to say that it's more capitalism i.e that it is the accent the acceleration of capitalism is the only t loss of capitalism and any other t loss requires critique as being a transcendent metaphysical imposition and as um theo has been saying it's you know the processing out of those transcendent impositions are something that has done completely imminently like oh an unconditional capitalist dynamic dynamic will of necessity process out any conditional
capitalist dynamic just because it is by definition a stronger variant of capitalism if this is if there's you know capitalism a wants nothing but uh itself and variant b has a whole series of what de leuze and cradari call axioms you know that it it wants to work but it also wants um you know to keep people happy and it wants to preserve the environment and all of these things above and beyond the point that those things are imminent conditions of its own perpetuation you know i of course it it is related to social and ecological issues because it has to be purely to
survive and perpetuate itself but as soon as it actually becomes a an extrinsic goal a goal that can not be defined or reformulated purely in the optimum path of its own self escalation then then it is departing from the accelerationist assumption the accelerationist model and going somewhere else and and how does burn backs sort of argument go with that well I think it's back to this I think burn back just the whole thing buckles but it doesn't quite snap it buckles because he's basically showing that from the
origin the essence of technology you could say and the the way that becomes self-propelling in capitalism the nature of the machinery is that it reinforces the incentives to roundabout production so you know there's always a social hesitation about roundabout production because the because roundabout production is a deduction from hand-to-mouth production to use burn packs term which I think is good you know you've got you've got a certain patch of labor time you can either use that to directly try and satisfy some need or you can put it aside for roundabout production now if
you put it aside for roundabout production you are necessarily within a certain short-term frame deducting that from the satisfaction of hand-to-mouth production inevitably you know and I can't overstretch over stress how much inevitably it's absolutely crucially essential to the nature of roundabout production that it comes in a sufficiently tight timeframe as a cost that must be to some extent socially inhibited um you know it by by the very nature of the thing there have to be certain social forces that say look rather than put aside these resources these
time this effort this capability for the production of means even if those means are going to lead to the greater satisfaction of of our need somewhere down the road that should not happen because instead we want maximum hand-to-mouth production right now and so within any part even agent there is at least some inclination towards that refusal of roundabout production so roundabout production there's a conflictual element in it automatically um that it it it it is basically trying to um constrain hand-to-mouth production in order to set aside resources for roundabout
production and so that's what i mean by this buckling that even that burnback you know predicts or anticipates there's going to be necessarily a social conflict about capitalism by the very nature of what roundabout production is but the break the schism is where at some level capitalism becomes wills power you know it becomes teleological inversion it becomes the sovereignty of the tool it becomes the fact that the means end relation is shattered and there is no persuasive pretense any longer that the ultimate goal of capitalism is the
maximization of consumption and it's rather that the expansion of capability expansion of production the escalation of capital has become a self-directing self-affirming accelerationist process so yeah and how he lays it out and basically how you have is you know i round about it in some ways it's almost a little bit misleading it's almost like a layering of different productive layers on top of a process ultimately
currently serving human consumption. Or at least that's part of it, maybe an understressed part of it. There's kind of network effects, but there's also this almost operating type of leverage where your basic boomerang example is kind of one step away from hand to mouth. Sorry, Zach, I'm losing you a bit there. You broke up a bit. What was that? I missed your last probably two sentences. I got you. But it was a long-winded way of saying basically, you know, as it's constructed, this idea of roundaboutness is layers built on top of a system to serve the human need. Yes. And, you know, where and how exactly does it go off the rails to where that fundamental piece is no longer needed, I guess, is what I initially was trying to get at.
Yes. and of course you know mainstream liberalism in again I'm not using that in the modern American sense in the in a traditional sense classic liberalism would say oh it doesn't ever go off the rails you know it's still orthodox even within hardcore capitalist currents you know like the Austrian school I think almost everyone within that tradition would still maintain that the final telos of capital is the maximization of consumption so there's an absolutely robust humanistic teleology that i i don't want at all to pretend has been disrupted i think that why i
tend to find myself in a certain sense intellectually more attuned with the marxist left and the liberal right is that I think what the Marxist left sees is that capital breaks from this humanistic framing and you know it becomes a completely nominal exercise to account the performance of capital in terms of some endpoint human consumption optimization function that I think it just it does I do think does tend to optimize that function but purely as a simulation at a certain point you
know as a side effect of of its escalation and the real diagram of capital is acceleration and by acceleration i mean self-reflexive you know it's it's it's a non-linear self-generative self-productive self-propelling with that reflexive uh circuit that becomes the social engine of capitalism and and you know the fact that we can still do the accountancy in terms of some final as if the whole of that massive historical process was some was still to be considered as just a detour back to the optimal satisfaction of human needs you know i i see a
skepticism about that on the in the marxist tradition that i i think needs to be encouraged just for philosophical reasons. Yeah, I'm skeptical as well. And, you know, seen from the outside, it does present, you know, as you say, this self-perpetuating system. I'm just wondering, like, you know, if today you pulled out that one little piece, that end level of consumption that so much of the superstructure has been built up on top of, like, does it cascade back? And, you know, is that particular cog in the machinery You know small as it may be Like essential in some way just because it kind of bootstraps back into the larger
the larger picture Well, I think the thing is a layering model I'm not saying come useful, but it also has its dangers attached to it doesn't it because in the sense that It's not as if hand-to-mouth production continues alongside or underneath roundabout production. Consumption obviously continues, but that consumption is entirely rooted through the technological capitalist media. And the notion of local economic autarky in the sense of subsistence agricultural production or something like that is not something
that is being perpetuated as a layer you know within capitalism it's rather that character that it's being uprooted and replaced by these roundabout roundabout routes to consumer products I'm sorry, Zach, if I lost a bit. No, you didn't lose me at all. And I'll start harping on it if everyone else is sold.
I guess I'm just missing the piece. So which piece? So again, what do you mean by the piece? Or how you're positioning the piece? I mean, as I see it today, like the entire capitalist superstructure is built on top of producing goods and services to be consumed, you know, kind of by human desires. Right. And I'm wondering, like what kind of connective glue can we put in place there? Like if we directly have to substitute something out, like is it? Yeah. and it's survival there's kind of a I think that this is going to be crucial
because obviously this is I think directly interlocks with a big discussion what's going on now about automation about the future of labor about the relation of technology to unemployment you know if it is the case as as classical Marxism maintains that at the end of the day labor power is essentially anthropological then there will never be a time where you have to switch that accountancy around and it will always be the case that the satisfaction of human consumer needs becomes remains a fundamental requirement of the of the
perpetuation of capitalism if however labor power is only transiently identifiable with an anthropological subject then that suggests that the kind of historical crisis that a lot of people are seeing could be in fact real and substantial because you know why does let's let's just i mean i'm going to kind of um i'll be a little bit crude about kind of um reifying capital i like generally think reification if done well is good but I'm going to be particularly crude about it just for the
purpose of this from that and just say you know treat capital as as just that this alien organism with its own with its own purposes so you say well why does it um produce human consumer goods you know it produces human consumer goods in order to provide them to workers who will then who will then perform productive services for capital and that's the basic exchange you know so so the whole consumer side of capitalism is is is based entirely on the fact that those consumer goods convert into money convert into into wages basically and and those
wages command labor power to engage in a set of productive services that are required for the reproduction and escalation of capitalism at the point at at which it's beginning to kind of come apart that there is that human workers are the fundamental pool of that productive capability that capital is in the market for, then of course the consumer sector as its anthropologically defined is going to shrink and decay. It's not like capital, sorry I'm just getting some weird beeping and stuff on the system.
Capital doesn't produce consumer goods for altruistic purposes. It produces them because it wants to trade them for labor power, productive capability. And so the degree to which either of those are anthropological is the same. If humans aren't fundamentally the resource of productive value that is being purchased in the market then at that point equally production for human consumption becomes a a sorry I'm trying to think what's the word means deep promoted it becomes kind of downplay as a
as a as a motive or incentive of capital necessarily yes exactly but well i don't know but if they get ubi what is going on there you see that the ubi of course that discussion is the same as the one that we're just talking about um but but it's almost that yeah sorry well sorry oh oh universal income get it yeah yeah yeah yeah which is the which is the same argument exactly and in fact the ubi argument is is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the dilemma that we've just come to if you think that basically
productive capability is just going to come from increasingly automated machine sector and that that and that machine sector needs to just be directly traded with and that capitalist output is going to be increasingly the natural tendencies for that output to produce trade goods that just go in an internal robot cycle you know so that you basically produce what robots want so robots will work for you and the whole of the system can can close on that automation um circuit then of course there's a crisis there's a human species crisis and and the idea of ubi is a response to that crisis uh the pot you know the the ubi argument i mean doesn't it overstep the issue of
power and class struggle in the sense that in order what agency implements a ubi and then make sure that you know all the prices don't essentially just rise yes right etc you know that's that's the that's the this skirting of the issue of power and class yes I mean I'm sure UBI sounds phenomenal but okay under what regime I mean if you just introduced UBI as you know with the the capitalistic dynamic that we currently have, then that just means prices rise, rent rises, everything rises. Simple. No? I think it's a really interesting and difficult argument, and there's a whole bunch of ways
you can go with this. I mean, one, I totally agree that I'm not sure that inflation is the only issue here, but of course, UBI presupposes... see sorry if if we take this right back to the starting point of today's of today's thing in terms of these these teleological structures ubi is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what capital should be that's to say the benchmark against which is perversity injustice twistness warpness is to be measured which is what it should be is it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity and so you know if you have a governmental regime
structure that can compel capital to exist within that teleological framework that it exists for the interests of mankind then then ubi makes perfect sense you know that's the way it would do it at a certain stage of um of capitalistic evolution which is where where the previous contract between capital and and the and the human species defined as labor was was constituted um but obviously just like you're saying you need that regime you need you need capital to be teleologically disciplined so that it is a means to human ends and UBI is the expression
of that um of that teleological requirement. I think in some way um left accelerationism for that reason can be uh you know you're talking about why you have a certain sympathy with left Marxism which I think sometimes left accelerationism doesn't have the same empathy it's a bit utopian you know demand for automation demand universal basic income demand the end of work they're very utopian slogans they don't the the whole tradition of left Marxism I mean doesn't take advantage of that conceptual
apparatus in the least it's just demand them demand that demand I mean there's an interesting tension here because I think you're totally right to characterize it the way you do that that there's on a one hand a demand for what What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand that the trend to automation be continued to its zenith of actual full capitalistic autonomy. You know where every stage in the production process has been automated.
So rather than being a circuit that couples capital and workers together in a productive circuit, instead there's an autonomous capital circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole in that relationship. And that's the only thing automation can mean. and obviously that's the basis of this pessimistic let's say diagnosis or maybe that is unnecessary could be optimistic too that uh that at a certain point there's going to be this unemployment crisis coming from uh machines but on the other hand there is also the demand for the absolute
teleological subordination of capital to human interest so that finally it is this massive autonomous self-propelling productive machine behaves still in a way that is for humans and serving human interests and I'm not saying that there isn't some possible reconciliation between this I mean that would that would be to sort of forestall an argument that it still could be interesting to have but at least on the surface it seems like a massive tension going on profound theoretical contradiction that that on the one hand left
accelerationism as left is demanding that that the teleological subordination of capital be intensified and on the other hand as accelerationist it's saying that the the teleological autonomization and self-realization of capital as a as a self-propelling process be be realized and and it seems to want to hold together those two on the surface very very divergent you know basic historical trajectories together and that's not an easy thing to see I would have thought yeah there's a sort of a desire I don't
know for a capitalism without consequences I mean I think at least for accelerationism without conditions or right accelerationism at least people in this camp accept the consequences and just say okay those are the consequences so be it but the left acceleration is in a sense one capitalism without consequences. It's nice, clean vision that things can just accelerate. We can overcome that, you know, what was the post that Vincent posted last week from Alex Williams this earlier? Yeah, yeah. Somehow capital can be against humanity, and we can have this thing called, I don't know,
humanity without collateral damage, and somehow it's going to serve our interests at the same times explode our conceptions of humanity. Just one, one, both. This is the true without conditions in the sense of without limitation would be that conception, at least in accelerationism without conditions or right accelerationism, it accepts the huge human suffering as we understand humanity now that goes along with it. Just as, but fine, that's fine. There's an ultimate redemption perhaps later down the line around about late, but it would accept the contemporary arrangement of suffering as fine. That's okay.
Yeah. Maybe that's being too critical of left accelerationism on that point. but I sort of had a question that ties in with what you were just saying John when Nick when you say like when you talk about capitalism as a self-propelling process detached from human and you say like oh at the at the expense of human life while it shrugs isn't I'm I I'm confused because I feel like at that point it has become the transcendental object or sorry that I was gonna ask
that but but I got like my ability to double task is really weak and so I got pulled back into into discussion the it there was unconditional acceleration can only shrug and it can only shrug by definition I mean it's either unconditional or it's not you know if it if it is sensitive to any other any other extraneous considerations than the intensity of capitalist self-propulsion then of course it should surrender the the adjective unconditional to something that would in fact be unconditional so it's to me that's just an almost tautological thing like it goes inevitably with the very claim that one's
accelerationism is unconditional that any other any extraneous consideration whatever it may be is is greeted with rigorous indifference it's just that's what that's what you're saying already when the unconditional is being it's been used so it wasn't I mean I'm take I'm gonna just take it that you know that's they're not unconnected with with a capitalist it you know which is back to obviously this as we've been saying this this language the Xeno economics language of this you know sorry I just want to make sure I get it exactly right that Alex Williams that language what did you call it I just
lost it they'd love crafty a monster thing anyway you know that's I think what's being said there isn't that have this monstrous lovecraftian abomination and at the same time expect that it's going to be sensitive to a certain sea there is a anthropologically significant moral concerns I mean which which way is that right I mean in that way I think before we started we were talking about dualisms and I guess the maybe the traditional philosophic response is to privilege the human in response to that right is to
posit the human as the most important subject that organizes the imminent physical reality but you're saying that the physical reality macro level everything tends towards entropy and humans are included in that category I I don't actually I'm not sure maybe I'd have to think about that that's a kind of translation that wouldn't be at the front of what I'm saying right now for sure I mean I'd go back more to this this question of like a hand-to-mouth
production and the you know capitalism in a certain sense is a sort of mega parasite of human hand-to-mouth production at least from a certain optic you know that it has insinuated itself in history by being able to locate itself within this circuit and the the payoff the reason that human cooperation with capitalism has been established while it was at its weakest and most unformed was that it could deliver superior outcome that would be
achieved by hand-to-mouth production and but obviously there isn't a stable relation of power between capital and its host species I mean for one thing that the greater the sort of autonomy though and the autonomy of capitalism is something that's completely rigorously definable which is just whether to to what extent can you do these capital production circuits with minimal human involvement you know and everything we talk about as the history of automation is about that on one level isn't it I mean the the fundamental
dynamic of capitalism that's very very deeply automatized is to is to find a a zone of human dependency and seek out a machinic substitute for that and replace the the the human element in the circuit with this automated element now of course the liberal story which is not ridiculous i mean i think it's like really um needs to be treated very seriously i'm not wanting to dismiss it at all but is that well of course capital has not there is no extent trend so far seen of automation towards an expansion in long-term human unemployment like you know
that what's derided as the sort of Luddite fantasy is that that happens and it's certainly not happened up to this point that humans are just reinserted into these new expanded capital circuits they've pushed out of certain things you know and reinserted back into others and the aggregate human employment doesn't doesn't fall and if the liberal story is true it will never fall and so because of that capital we always want to trade with humans and because of that you can always account of the capital process in terms of production of consumption goods and you know so then the boom barack buckling would never snap it wouldn't it wouldn't be that the that the the fundamentalist critique of capital which
I'm sort of entertaining which is that it involves a complete teleological version in which in which really the means of production become fully sovereign that would remain a paranoid fantasy or at least it would remain dismissible as a paranoid fantasy because you could always tell the liberal story. I mean I'm not sure if this is a fair criticism but or description that
you could sort of flip it in a way and say that you describe some capitalism as parasitical on the human earlier in history, kind of the UBI left accelerationist vision that I'm reading from it is for the human to be sort of parasitical on capital in a way in that you have a product such a tremendous productive boards that it can sort of basically write off as overhead very generous fully automated luxury communism UBI or the rest of it.
Essentially live off machine slice that would be another way to describe it, right? you've got another sort of set of parameters there. And then I think they go beyond that a little bit in that they're willing to redefine the human. At another number of points, they say that it's not necessarily this exact sort of meat instantiation of human, but it's something more like a post-human sort of projection rather than something totally identified with this sort of mechanistic capitalism it seems to me.
but so how do you think that humanity as the target of UBI payments and humanity in this elevated or at least transformed abstracted sense as the general intellect or however it's being conceived how are you seeing those two things going together okay is it that I mean I I think there's a number of solutions to that but I think you know one of them is the utopian solution that was sort of alluded to not so long ago in this session but um like again this
is where I feel like though I'm sympathetic I think it's unfair to try and represent all of that from my point of view but I think to Jake's point there is kind of a you know almost like a master race sort of vibe to this particular version of it or you need to characterize you know the work of capital as as sort of a lesser but incredibly productive sort of force in identifying those things. I think that's part of it. Yeah I mean there is a weird Nietzschean resonances actually when you put it like that I think
because obviously this back to the acceleration is phrase and this whole thing about the great leveling and nevertheless accelerate the process is precisely because Nietzsche seems to be envisaging this new master-slave relationship where this kind of leveled flattened Nealistically disintegrated cultural mass would become the raw materials and putty in the hands of these new of these new masters so there is this strange those strange echoes like that i mean i would throw in one more sort of basic frame for looking at this which is the zoo one you know it really seems to me that actually like why is a ubi future not a human zoo
run by machines um like the notion that um some kind of productive super intelligence that is keeping these animals that are no longer that are just being kept because it wants to keep them i'm assuming it's somehow friendly ai has been realized at least in their sense and you know it's happy to support these things i mean are they not by definition then pets or zoo animals and you know they are being defined as kind of productively useless but you know for the productive capability of the planet being being kept around because they're because because the thing likes to keep them around well
this is the thing in the culture novels right so you have in one way the inheritors of this sort of great progressive tradition are the artificial intelligences in the spaceships and the planets that run everything right and the other and the humans kind of are kept around as zoo creatures that demonstrate the uh indulgent sort of uh you know uh progressive affection that that the ais have for everyone so so it kind of has it both ways in a way like um yeah in my yeah i mean it sort of gives both solutions but go on please can i ask like it seems like um this conversation is presupposing a sharp distinction between
artificial intelligences and human desire um but isn't there a sort of blend of these two to put it in a kind of straightforward way with, with like a general idea of wetware and you know, developments in genetic engineering where, where, you know, human desire is sort of transfigured in a way or optimized, but it's still part of the forward thrust of de-stratification because, you know, Something like because our brains are linked to machines in a way that we still sort of are the desiring machines, but we're different.
I just have a question. I just wanted to respond to that. I think conflict of desire becomes a crucial problem there, right? even you know even if okay you say a portion of the AGI community shares a portion of humanity's desires and then another portion of the AGI community shares a different portion of the AGI of human entities desires and then another AGI community actually has desires that are completely contrary to both of those other communities you just have rivaling competing desires right that may be at the expense of each other sure but then agi is like most you know like
we've seen from um from the 100 thing the agi teleological matrix is not going to come from any of those communities you know it has its own intrinsic cybernetic genesis that that is is not at all susceptible to sort of basic direction by some extraneous sense of it's some extraneous moral agenda it's just not able to produce a consistent system by doing that right But just to get back to Hunter, I guess that's why I don't understand when you say, well,
if the AGI share our, isn't it possible that AGI share human interests? And I still don't think that resolves the fact that if a portion of AGI does share interest, it doesn't necessarily mean that universally AGI will share interests with humanity universally. No. Sorry, I know that's saying that Hunter may be Hunter. I'm just trying to kind of conceive of a way that the human pool of desire get a piece of the action, basically.
I mean, because the AGIs don't experience their desire. I mean, this is kind of, or do they? This kind of goes back to my earlier question. Like, it sounds like we're saying that subjectively experienced desire and suffering is a sort of small subset of goal-oriented, self-organizing conduct. And they're so similar because norms and optimization are drivers of both. I guess my question, just going back to the question of affect and subjectively experienced affect versus a sort of, I guess, non-experienced abstract self-organizing affect.
I don't know. I don't really have a question, I guess. I'm just trying to think about these things. This is a comment, I suppose. Maybe a question, but it just occurred to me. So the schism of human, post-human, or human-transhuman, human-anti-human, whatever, from from my position overlooks the schism that's in the human itself it doesn't make sense in any order for me to talk of human desire that you know humans right that there's there's a unified human
desire or a unified human interest is precisely what demarcates any kind of leftist position worthy of the name from. I mean, that's how we identify the right precisely because of the it's oneness in this nature that there's human, inhuman, as if the inhuman too itself couldn't already i mean like we i can foresee you know with my small brain and inhuman that recapitulates schisms that we find within humanity yeah like if it's one agency flowing in the same direction within the inhuman as well it's hard for me to yes i mean certainly look there's two sides both interesting to what you're saying the job i
I mean, just on the machine side, it's incredibly easy to lose sense of where this machine intelligence is coming from. It's not coming out of the ether, you know, equipped with some sort of universal sense of either itself or the world or anything else. It's being used by finance companies to trade against each other. it's being used by militaries to get ready to defeat with their intelligence system it's being used by government agencies to survey and control population I mean all the actual substructure of the production of artificial intelligence
is absolutely cross-cut by massive amounts of conflict and the notion that that these things are gonna you know start off with some sort of universal insight of any kind of collector among different machines seems to be completely preposterous they they're all being basically programmed to beat other meet other teams including other machines from the start so yeah I would obviously underscore you know and it's why I think
this notion of some sort of single AI God that is invented to the world is completely preposterous sort of also looks the fact that capitalism has nothing to do with desire it's precisely on the order of drive you know that there's all these desires but capitalism is a drive that self perpetuates irrespectively of all of the desires in some sense the desire and drive aren't of the same order it's it's a kind of Marxist shift in Marx's own analysis from the which I don't think we necessarily have to abandon the some parts of early Marx to the late Marx but I mean the late Marx capital is
precisely concerned with this drive circuit of capital versus this competing desires and sort of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat this antinomy that animates history I don't think one needs necessarily be straightforwardly substituted for the other but we can say that one is over determinate which is the drive the one on the order of the drive and capitals self-perpetuation right yeah yeah I mean so look I said they want to be a pet party people but it's we've been doing three hours I mean I'm calculating that right so how
How people was definitely beginning to flake a bit I can hang on a bit longer if that's the if that's the That's the spirit. I know some people are in an even more disastrous time situation so far more disastrous ones than me so Man there in that element in this is who? um could i bring up one kind of like final remark i guess kind of along the the lines that we're trying to end today um yes and it's just that like humans and machines and all of nature needs rest needs refrain so i'm just really interested in
how you might approach um i guess rest or like relapse or even stagnation in a philosophy of acceleration like we started out today and not getting you i'm sorry is everyone else okay because you just keep freezing out from you Robin at a moment it maybe it's mine which am I am I cutting out I'm telling you clearly it's my side oh damn yeah so so I was just kind of bringing up the notion of like a stagnation or a stasis or maybe even just like
a weak acceleration, if you could even call it that, like something that is just barely, barely moving. How this plays into the whole program of continuing intensification, continuing accumulation, acceleration, when, you know, that's all speculative, right? Like the rate at which we're moving collectively, the rate at which this concept has accumulating value, it's all speculative. But one thing that we're damn sure of, that nothing lasts forever. It has to switch off at some point,
even if just momentarily. so and and i guess like you know i kind of i've been holding this in the back of my mind for the last three weeks or so but uh when we're talking about this sort of roundaboutness you know in this sort of non-linear approach to acceleration um it's i feel like this is it's an overlooked question to ask like what the importance of stagnationism. Not as an antithesis to acceleration, but just as like, you know, it's invariable, complementing facet.
Yes. Actually, this is firstly, I think Vincent's stuff is very tied up with this, and it's slightly sad he's not here. but but secondly I think it's like um a big enough thing I wonder whether this is something we could just chalk in as a major topic or even overriding topic next week like I because I do think it's like totally crucial there's this whole Tyler Cohen discussion about stagnation is and that I think is really important I thought I I thought I owned the rights to that word but I Didn't I didn't search hard enough I guess
Yeah, no, but I think it would be a really good thing to well. I'm just saying I'm Sorry if this sounds like a bit of a late-night evasive maneuver but but Maybe we should really dedicate a block of time to this because I think it's like obviously we haven't talked about it yet really Vincent's made a few remarks about it it obviously is highly relevant and as you say we've been within a certain kind of acceleration is and bit that quite frankly just a few years ago we wouldn't have been in you know I think I think there was a much more sort of baseline thing of what isn't there a stagnation is issue a few years ago and I think that's sort of kind of gone maybe because the whole you know
there's been a whole bunch of interesting sort of technological acceleration things that have been happening over the last few years but yeah I think it would be a good topic for some focused discussion so it's good I think it'd be interesting to just kind of keep looking at you know I don't want to derail whatever we had going yeah well should we call it a week then um is would that be okay with everyone because as I say I'm beginning to a and beginning to flake out personally um i i'll definitely put robin's thing as a gender item
and i know that as i've been terrible in this course of keeping ahead of the thing i think i'm going to treat that as fate so you know i as always owe you guys some some structure but i'll make this question part of it for sure um as as one one of the things we to talk about next week yeah okay oh thanks yeah thanks everybody yeah and hope to see you all next week and have a good week bye