The Concept of Acceleration (Session 3)

Hello and welcome to the third session of the concept of acceleration with Nick Land. I'm going to hand the mic off to him now. Thanks, Theo. That's great. Well, for today, I was hoping to build on last week's discussion of the manifesto for politics and look at some more recent left accelerationist writings. I was hoping that Amy would be around to make sure I wasn't straw manning the Zenifeminist manifesto.

we've got we've got the anon crew to to uh provide some constraint on interpretation of the alt woke manifesto those two texts i think are going to be the basic references this week and um I don't really want to constrain where we go with this but I'm going to make some sort of initially try and position them in terms of the sort of matrix of a certain kind of a perhaps you might say vulgar marxism I use that in the most sort of enthusiastic and respectful sense it's it and the Marxism predominantly of the communist manifesto

of the excellent Marx quote that is actually cited in the artwork manifesto as well and just to use that as a place of leverage to sort of raise some questions about topics that I think were already important to do with questions of identity, agency, in the language of the xenofeminist manifesto alienation, to talk about purposes, interests, and I guess this opens up generally into politics and perhaps things beyond

or not easily reducible to politics. So looking at the manifesto for accelerationist politics last week it's clear that there's a relatively recent emergence of a definition of left accelerationism that at least seems to have as one of its core commitments the dissociation of the accelerationist mechanism from capitalism and i think you can see this is uh sort of reproduced very clearly in um

Tiziana Terranova's 2014 paper Red Stack Attack that was kind of thrown onto the reading there. It's quite short and I think it's kind of classic position in this term. It's very clear. If I can just quote one where she says, the staging of the encounter between algorithms and capital as a political problem invokes the possibility of breaking with the spell of quote capitalist realism that is the idea that capitalism constitutes the only possible economy while at the same time claiming that new ways of organizing the production and distribution of wealth need to seize on scientific and technological

the reference note from that passage then goes to mark fisher's capitalist realism and to the manifesto for accelerationist politics and and later she says the basic idea is that information technologies which comprise algorithms as central component do not simply constitute a tool of capital but are simultaneously constructing new potentialities for post neoliberal modes of government and post-capitalist modes of production. So there's obviously a lot going on in these passages, some of which we've already touched upon, some of which have dated in a complicated

fashion, as we talked about last week. I don't know how much we want to go back. Maybe we should continually recycle through the various questions about what is meant by neoliberalism and whether it still has the same valences today as it did when used prior to the latest wave of them global political catastrophes in there again always using that in the technical rather than emotional sense but the the point that I really want to hold on to going through the topics today are these complicated

teleological structures that are involved notably when she talks about a tool of capital and so we're into the whole question of instrumentality and a whole discussion of technology that is related to notions of instrumentalization and the teleological framing that makes sense of that. And the word, let me make sure she uses it. If not, we'll come upon it soon enough, which is, I think, a really critically important term in all of this discussion, which is repurposing.

um it's obviously used in the map it's used i think in both of the texts that we're going to be looking at today and it obviously has this uh very explicit teleological concern attached to it and the notion that something can be taken out of the framework of one purposive instrumental structure and transposed into I can only assume an alternative purposive instrumental structure. So these issues I think all come up as soon as we begin to look at this aspect of the

definition of left X-relationism which is the one that I'm going to predominantly be holding onto. So maybe if we're going to proceed quasi-historically, then the first thing to look at quickly would be the Xenopheminist Manifesto. And I've got a whole bunch of quotes, but maybe I shouldn't. Everyone has read this at least once. It probably would be unnecessary to spend a lot of time citing it. will do that more going back to it I think both of the texts that we're

dealing with today have a lot happening in them and in the connects in complicated ways this one this one certainly doesn't those issues that I'd like to get to that maybe will slightly overspill our space today the discussion and nature I think is really important in this text and very relevant to what we're going to be dealing with but I want to try and hold on particularly to this question about is is this text left acceleration this isn't in the kind of reductive basic sense that invoked at the moment and I think that it can be said with quite definite confidence that it is you know very early it talks about

no more futurist repetition on the treadmill of capitalism a more sort of abstracted remark that relates to this but also other other things no more reification of the given masked as critique um they the xfm then says echoing the map i think quite closely the real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized and then more concretely the radical opportunities afforded by developing and alienating forms of technological

mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital which by design only benefits the few. Just one more on this I think we'll do for the minute they said much later ultimately every emancipatory abolitionism and there's the context of this as they've talked about gender and race abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class abolitionism since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its transparent denaturalized form you're not exploited or oppressed because you're a wage labor or poor you are a labor or poor because you are exploited

um so i think it might be helpful rather than to phase this to start off bundling and if i go straight to the uh alt woke manifesto and just pull out things that seem to me to be uh directly tapping into these these same lineages and then we can come back to be more differentiating i think later in in in the discussion um and i i think that the the crucial crucial passage in the alt woke manifesto relating

to this um is in their section uh preface to praxis why support left accelerationism if i I could just quote one coherent chunk that is already actually has a lot in it and it begins with something actually very close to what I'm trying to do here which is an almost taxonomical undertaking to distinguish various kind of accelerationist trends I think it I've not really seen anything as focused on this topic, so it's a very useful thing to have.

And so I start here where it says, in its right alignment, accelerationism is a schism. Neo-reaction NRX is a radical libertarianism accelerating towards neoliberalism's ultimate conclusion, plutocratic corporate monarchism, e.g. man as a nation. is the alt-right, which is white identity politics accelerating towards capitalism, ultimate conclusion, techno-fascism. Left accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it. It's become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can't sustain itself any longer. The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the left's struggle to combat structural power.

In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism, democracy is imminent so there's already i mean each of those sentences really has things happening in it that are well worth pausing on but i'm not going to pause right now i think we can come back and do that there's then the quote from carl marx is on the question of free trade that we talked about really superb Marxist accelerationist quote, but in general the protective system of our day is conservative while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social

revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade and then the awm then continues left accelerationism is a vindication of marxism that synthesizes vertical technology this is a term it anticipates a capitalism's sorry intacit it anticipates capitalism collapse repurposing growth and technology against its progenitor and nudges that collapse toward a leftist counter hegemony capitalism provides the efficiency of integrated networks it provides the tools to combat the inequalities of its rapacious growth a post-scarcity socialist society can sustain itself from the technologies capitalism

produces so the full range of points that are being made in those four paragraphs for including the quote i don't think clearly are reducible to the agenda of the map but they definitely especially i think in this final paragraph clearly resonate with it and i think resonate in a way that i don't think it's controversial to say that you can see a continuous left accelerationist agenda being sustained in this passage as in the ones quoted

from the Zen and Feminist Manifesto and already deeply embedded in the project of the MAP. So prior to just opening up, obviously, discussion about this, I just want to provide my sense of context to this. Of course, there's no doubt many contexts. um but the context of a certain kind of um paleo marxist construction of acceleration being juxtaposed to the way this is being developed in these um passages through as we've

seen several stages of modulation through the kind of Deleuze-Guotari phase of accelerationism then through the MEP and then into this more recent material. And the connected topics that are guiding me in this, sorry, just to repeat, is I think identity and agency capture most of it.

And I think the point, the first point I really want to make is there's a crucial asymmetry between right and left accelerationism in the terms, post-MAP terms, that arise as soon as you start sort of digging into this, into these terms and this construction. sorry let me let me go this way i think if you sort of follow through the notion of alienation that you get in the xenofeminist manifesto i think it i think it remains necessarily

absolutely structurally and inevitably deeply compromised by a left accelerationist context and what i mean by that is that it seems to me and this is well where i definitely welcome uh any correction from from the authors of these texts it seems to be inevitable essential to what's happening in these texts and the sense of manifesto that they involve, that there is a possibility of identification with a collective political subject.

Now this might seem a kind of inevitable thing, but I think it might seem inevitable to any position one might adopt but i think think that that is is not the case and i think that right accelerationism is incapable of consistently adopting any such position there is no a consistent political agentic position available to the right strands of accelerationism And I think that this emerges as soon as you try to ask, well, who is the agent of right accelerationism?

Now, I ask this totally because its mirror form is, I think, implicit. I think there is an implicit answer to that question when it is posed to left accelerationism. and i think the question is answered implicitly in saying we we are you know that this manifesto comes from this is the voice of a at least partially coherent political agency as collective subject nothing like that is available on the right accelerationist side and i think there's There's just paleo-Marxist foundations for that claim.

We can, of course, ask what are the interests of capital. And this takes us into two directions or two strands of a helix that I'll get to quickly in a minute. but i don't think that we can we can ask you know who is the political subject of right acceleration of let us just um being capital escalation capital growth um

Marx, if we float the most obvious candidate for such a subject position, the Marxian sense of the bourgeoisie, it seems to be absolutely crucial that this class is incapable of coherent class consciousness for Marx. Bourgeois unity is a structural impossibility. um the the two aspects to that the first is that the bourgeoisie only acquires a technical sense for marks in so far as it tends to the status of a capital servo

mechanism That's to say it's not that the bourgeoisie arrives on the scene of capital with a series of pre-consolidated and then molds capital in the direction of those interests. Quite the opposite for Marx is the bourgeoisie is consolidated itself through its effective function for capital. It is a class that is defined by an absence of moral autonomy and insofar as it tries to exercise a moral autonomy in any significant way, independent from the interests of capital technically and cybernetically

defined that it will be any particular instance of the bourgeoisie manifesting those tendencies should be processed out of the business class because because capital will find itself agents that are consistent with its own essential dynamics. And I think this notion of the bourgeoisie as a kind of highly robotic social function, first, is an interesting, it's an interestingly neglected side of the equation, I think, because people all the time, and for good

reasons, talk about the relation of the proletariat robots, and this is something I think we have to get to incredibly soon, and we'll be talking about technology. But the bourgeoisie tends to escape this kind of reduction to a large extent. earlier given the intimate relation between the actual that the fact that um high finance seems particularly susceptible is highly suggestive that the function is a strictly

that is indifferent to persons neglectful of any kind of transcendent neglectful of any pre-established social interests that are not ultimately defined through the mathematical formula of capital expansion itself um so this seems to me an absolutely crucial factor in in the denial of a of a of a position of political agency to write acceleration it it cannot be the position of bourgeois because bourgeois interest insofar as it is relevant to the questions that it is asking

if it's relevant to the question of accelerating capital is itself wholly shaped and stripped of autonomy by the actual dynamic of capital itself and capital does can therefore capital only delegates delegates provisional, revisable, malleable, subordinate subject positions it doesn't doesn't instrumentalize itself in relation to a subject position and it seems to me utterly wrong utterly mistaken and completely losing the importance of what Marx is saying to think of capital in a as a tool of bourgeois self-interest this you know this is it's obviously extremely a it

seems to me utterly utterly misguided to make that move. While we're talking about manifestos the most celebrated primordial manifesto the communist manifesto in its most celebrated passage which I I will repeat here even though it will be it will resonate very strongly already that says the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society condition for the existence of the bourgeoisie that the teleological structure is completely

the inverse of of positioning the bourgeoisie as in a position of mastery in relation to the historical process that it facilitates. Conservation of the old modes of production in an unaltered form was on the contrary the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all early ones all fixed fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify and then perhaps the most famous sentence monks ever wrote all that is solid melts into air all that is holy

is profane and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind so um there's several things to just point out very quickly in this all that is solid melts into air is obviously the the accelerationist mantra in in in condensed form all that is holy is profane locks this particular marxist accelerationist current onto the history of nihilism marx is completely clearly saying here that the capital dynamic

intrinsically and irreducibly nihilistic and must devalue all previous historical values it does not tolerate transcendent value all values are produced within the capital mechanism or ground up within it. So in terms of this, you know, why the one candidate for a right acceleration subject position is not going to hold together, the first is that this growth dynamic

is the actual node of autonomy it's a complete circuit and autonomy in this sense is the same thing as nihilism the two are completely the same thing that's to say it's a complete circuit in which all values are contained so if you if you say at any point what are the interests of capital in some concrete specific circumstance consistently it follows from the fact that through that set of values the circuit of capital escalation is most intensely propagated there is no reference to any transcendent source or authority or criterion of those values other than their function in that circuit so machinic closure to cybernetic closure nihilism abstract

techno capital or coincident on this and and pose the question that I'm going to be asking later you know where do your values come from on the on the side of capital that question is is resolved in this equation the answer to that question is to say or to find in drawing the diagram of the circuit of capital escalation what the function of any particular value system is in the reproduction and intensification of that circuit. There's no other source of relevance to it. The second, I think, also crucial sense in which there cannot be such a subject position

is the intrinsic relation of capital to disintegration. Capital is always capital. It has as intrinsic function competition. Capital without competition, you know, so-called monopoly capitalism, which, of course, the Austrians would always insist was in quotation marks, I think, for good reasons. cannot perform the capitalist function because the capitalist function is selective it has to be complete continuously eliminating economic units from the um from the system in order to develop

itself and in a situation where it cannot do that it cannot dissipate entropy it cannot discard failure it can no longer experiment it can no longer grow or develop and the cost of experimentation is culling is is elimination competition and so capital is always capitals that that there is no non-competitive non internally fractured bourgeois subject position and there's two little quotes that I want to throw in because I just think both of them are hugely relevant to this the latest the most recent being

Cormac McCarthy's line in blood Meridian stated by Judge Holden and I think it's that these these three words are enough to make it perhaps the greatest novel ever written where judge holden says at the end of a long magnificent passage war is god um i think this is the most incredible formula and it's extremely deep and it obviously references Heraclitus, I think it's his number 53 fragment. For all the classicists in the audience, I'll give you the Greek version of it,

but I'll read the English translation, which is, War is the father and king of all. Some he has made gods and some men, some slaves and some free. now it seems to me the position of capital in all of the polemics and controversies and discussions that we are having in this sense is a can simply be identified with war but it cannot be separated from it because it has um because it has internal fragmentation because it has

intrinsic competition as part of it and because this this quote is so absolutely crucial to this thing where he says you know war is the father of the king of all some he has made god some men some slave, some free. So all of those, even the subject position of a god, is allocated or distributed by the true motor, the true teleological agent, which is itself coincides with conflict and competition the war itself the conflict itself the struggle itself the antagonism itself

is the production of the real subject position it's a subject position that cannot be occupied even by a god let alone by a human political agency you know it goes beyond it's not only a a form of insane hubris um that such a position would be identifying itself with a god it would be identifying itself which is something that is utterly beyond any possible god it's and um as soon as you say that competition or in another context uh

arms races are functionally intrinsic to the process that you're dealing with i think that you're already in this space you're already in this space and that means that there cannot be a um a perspective of right accelerationism that sets itself against something else as if the conflicts involved were somehow external to itself or it was in some position of transcendence or autonomy in relation to the conflicts in which it was involved the arms races that it was involved in these dynamics of escalation that are inseparable from the the function of war in a sense

and this obviously has to be therefore counterposed to the notion of collective self-mastery there's no there's no conceivable position of collective self-mastery on the right side of the accelerationist problem and as soon as you invoke collective self-mastery therefore you are you know clearly identifying with a left acceleration position it's you're not counterposing one form of collective self-mastery to another or or one form of collectivity to another or one agency to another you're you're counterposing agency collectivity self-mastery in general to something else something that

arises only as the emergent function that comes out of conflict and therefore cannot be allocated to a partisan position within this within this conflict I'm tempted to I'm tempted to to to draw a line under it at this point and and and and see let me just say you know why am i why make this whole uh this whole venture into this zone well it's to say i think that um you know nothing can call itself alienated

nothing can consider itself you know on the side with or aligned with alienation if it maintains the possibility of a coherent political subject position. If you want to see true alienation, then true alienation is the thing that relates you to an agency that coincides with both sides of whatever war you are engaged with precisely through their capacity for escalation. It's an agency that cannot possibly be identified with, structurally in case them of being identified with, for the same reason

that right accelerationism can never find a coherent subject position. It's alienated in a way that I don't think any left accelerationism can convincingly pretend to emulate. so yeah final thing is to say you know technology and the repurposing of technology and the the reabsorption of technology into certain kinds of political programs that is already essentially to have taken this fork in

the road and already to have denied that war is God it's already it's to that the left is able to imagine the revolution left can imagine a war to end war this is something that is totally impossible from the side of the right because Because competition can never be something that is superseded or something that can ultimately be identified with exclusively with an antagonist. And something that could be substituted for some kind of consummate historical unity.

and once you've i think that the point of saying all this is just to say it's it's a metaphysical delusion to think that in this language of repurposing and this language of counter teleology one is engaged in some kind of symmetrical there is an enemy position that has a certain kind of of teleological absorption of this technology, and that is being countered from an alternative position that has a different repurposing of a different mode of adoption and integration of this technology. No, that asymmetry is completely illusory, isn't symmetrical.

There is one relation in which technology is embedded intrinsically in an arms race. It is escalated precisely that it is in an irreducible competitive matrix, and that position cannot be subject position. Therefore, it cannot be symmetrically counterposed to some alternative subject position. And so the difference that is therefore involved in this break of a left and right accelerationism is not a difference between two alternative symmetrical teleological orientations.

It is a difference in the fundamental philosophical apprehension of what is meant by teleological, by teleology, and therefore it goes deep into the sense of what technology is and what the drivers of technology are and what is meant by technology being a tool. all of these things are being worked out on a much more fundamental level than could possibly be captured by some sense of symmetrical political antagonism. But yeah, that's, I'm sure, plenty for me. So let me open this up, not obviously just on these particular questions, but on anything

that seems to be invoked by these by these texts in relation to their discussions of accelerationism Yeah, maybe because people have started asking these questions already. I mean, Vincent, look, you've got this question that starts, this is tangential. Why not take that out of the sidebar and turn it into a... Yeah, focal point.

I mean, sure, I didn't want to interrupt you, but... Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a kind of a problem that I have with right accelerationism coming from a history of political thought background, is that the disavowal of political subjectivity, which I do kind of agree with, doesn't make sense when you're invoking these people like Hobbes, who are all about constructing various kinds of political subjectivity. I know in the Dark Enlightenment essay, for example, you construct this opposition between Hobbes and Rousseau, which I think doesn't make kind of historical sense because Rousseau was essentially a Hobbesian. And all that stuff kind of comes out of Hobbes, all of modern political theory, including the radical side, comes out of Hobbes in a very kind of fundamental way. So I guess the question is just about how do you reconcile government engineering, which seems to be what ARAC people are interested in as well with the disavowal of the political subject.

um yeah there's lots of different sort of dimensions that that are involved in this question I mean you know if I can just go annoyingly meta first because I think there's lots of substantial things that interesting that but I'm it's very interesting say well what is right accelerationism when you say you say this like okay interesting to say the least that the artwork manifesto just cause near action as a one of the two basic strands of right accelerationism interesting to me a very interesting proposition um and and that would definitely then support

you're wanting to make him because I think that there is definitely a kind of the references that you make definitely play an important role in that tradition but yes I'm not sure I'm not sure how smoothly that can be done and I guess partly what I would say is the near action finds itself marginalized ultimately by right accelerationism because it insists on

on trying to establish a political constituency. Or, and I think, this seems to me the more interesting way that things could unfold, that near action becomes intrinsically disintegrationist. basically disintegrationist you know and and so I mean maybe I shouldn't go too far into this perhaps it's slightly taking us off in here or something we can come back to in a later week but just very briefly I think you know if you have these two elements of the neocameral model of that I think that

It's what you mean, which is basically drawing the kind of outlines for an absorption of governmental and administrative systems into a commercial fabric. so that they say that through a formalization of sovereign property you can actually construct a regime as a kind of business enterprise um that would be absorbed into a set of um higher level commercial dynamics but i think as soon as you say that even just on that level on the on the uh neocameral side you're by absorbing it into a commercial matrix you're

already submitting it to disintegration. I don't think it makes any sense to have a single neocameral state. Neocameralism, to the extent that it works as a model, neocameralism works only because there are these exit dynamics that are pressurizing the regime within some larger framework and then so that takes us to the other side you know the patchwork model of passively disintegrated geopolitical order um and i think you'd then so patchwork i think is you cannot have a functioning neocameralism without

a patchwork because you don't have the dynamics it's just for the same reason that you can't have a functioning business enterprise in the capitalist system without market pressure without an outside without competition elimination failure as the as the complement of business experimentation so if you're going to have neocameral government experimentation similarly you you are implicitly committing yourself to some form of systematized regime failure um so and i think the whole project can be understood in those terms that what you're what it's really aiming to do is form a a the maximally smooth systematized machinery for the

liquidation of dysfunctional regimes um now surely as soon as you say that you are in you are rendering the possibility of a political a coherent uniform political subject position impossible just as much as you are in on in the most in the more strictly uh or narrowly defined right accelerationist framework like um the perspective of any given regime cannot conceivably be a an adequate perspective or subject position for that kind of project. Hello?

Yeah. So I think early on you had asked the question about, or you had underlined this formulation of a we I believe in the Xeno Feminist Manifesto is it in the alt woke as well do they say we um let me ask them worry I see you're very quiet is anyone else hearing hearing I'm not gonna just to us we didn't know oh yeah oh yeah sorry yeah where we are we're not associated with a laborious economics but um we do incorporate a lot of that as you know film and we kind of want to expand upon

that concept to incorporate more more intersectionality with it it's not explicitly intersectional which is our one critique. Yeah I was just thinking along the lines of the history of authoring manifestos because the question of the we is really interesting in that history because I guess you know kind of the communist manifesto is our takeoff point and it was a you know commissioned by a subjective agency. It was commissioned by the the Communist League in 1847. So there's sort of like a man, the manifesto didn't precede the formation of the subjective

agency. It was like there was some kind of subjective agency in place that commissioned the formation of a manifesto which would then propose a political program. So I was just just thinking about that in relationship to this we because I think it's something we have to work through because clearly we don't have any such agency that could commission us to write any such manifestos at the present moment right the function of our manifestos would be different maybe to stimulate a we right to stimulate the formation of a something that could aspire to a I mean, I don't know how big, for example, Anon is, but, you know, foreseeably it's a smaller group that wants to put out a manifesto to organize a broader intervention or get some kind of conversation stimulated in the hopes of forming a subject.

I don't know. so I think that this tendency that the problems that Nick poses are real problems for left accelerationists as such but I wonder if they're as much of problems for the left or even other conceptions of a Marxist left for example the Marxist Leninist tradition in quotes sort of Lenin Luxembourg Trotsky who have a sort of dialectical conception of the party's role in the formation of a subject so I'm looking at George Lukash's book on Lenin here in front of me it was kind of a happenstantial thing I was just flipping

through it last week and I found this quote from Lukács. He's referring to Luxembourg's argument with Kalski and if anyone has this book it's on page 32 it's the one Verso put out. I'll put the citation up later but this is Lukács speaking. He says, the party must prepare the revolution. In other words, it must on the one hand, try to accelerate the maturing of these revolutionary tendencies by its actions through its influence on the proletariat and other oppressed groups. On the other hand, it must prepare the proletariat for the ideological, tactical, material, and organizational tasks that necessarily arise in an acutely revolutionary situation. And so he refers to Rosa Luxemburg,

who talked about she's fighting against the notion of an organization as a precondition for a revolutionary action, and her sort of famous summation is that a revolutionary organization or the sort of becoming of the proletariat is simultaneously the producer and product. It's the producer and product. It's both the precondition and the result of a mass movement for Luxembourg. Yeah. So I'm just wondering, this is for everybody, if introducing some of this other sort of Marxist Leninist conception of the party, subjective agency and its dialectic, how that complicates or not this conversation.

So I'll leave it there. Yeah, I don't know if this is speaking exactly to what you're talking about in terms of like constructing the subject and identity, but I guess like we see it with the Trump victory or whatever, and all sorts of other things like the budding alt-right and neo-reactionary movement and all sorts of things coming into play. I think it's almost as if the if we're like playing volleyball between the left and right that the right has now constructed in a sense a particular problem or issue, whatever you want to call it, or a choice that kind of the left has to make but doesn't necessarily know that they have to make now, which is, I think, one between keeping and commandeering democracy or

facing it being disintegrated altogether, at least in its current form. And so with that said, I guess that's why and partially why we still like sort of hold on to this construction of this identity, because that's just how people appear within the public sphere is like creating coalitions and making these problems more apparent and visible to other people who don't see them. mainly because we see the only possible way out, again, like way out, I guess, exit for this to swing it left, if that's what one so chooses to do, would be to, yeah, take control of the current political climate, as is I don't necessarily see

or can't like fathom necessarily a way out of that doing it that way, like step by step piecemeal. so that's in part why we like still hold on to this idea of subjectivity but we're trying to like make it a different type of subjectivity more so that what's not being considered is I guess Lange often talks about like abominations that capitalism begets, we would make the argument that those abominations are already here. And yeah, they're already here in like the de-torialized zones that capitalism

wrought years ago, like in a very literal sense. That, um, yeah, these abominations, they're, we use the term nominations loosely, but these, these. Did you think of like New Jersey or something like that? No, no, no, no, more so the Caribbean, more so that the process of acceleration began during the Enlightenment, especially with the formation of liberal markets, this rationalist approach to politics, democracy, and infrastructure building, and this development of technology alongside, you know, symmetrical to capitalism and colonialism

that brought these quote-unquote abominations that we think are apparent. But no one, not even, I think most accelerationists aren't even addressing this. And by abominations, we mean like the colonized, you know, the former colonized. but yes we do want to we do want to symmetrically we're building infrastructure but we also want it's a call to arms to for the left itself to build infrastructure around this um phenomenon of acceleration which like it or not it is you know it's it's a very real and it's and it's happening a very vital phenomenon and you you have to you have to react

to it in one capacity or the other. I just want to pop in really quick because I put something in the sidebar. But the whole question, I think, I mean, I think there's a lot of problems with this idea of the Heraclitian ontology, but I'm not sure that saying we're organizing or trying to stimulate a new subject group, create a new we, I'm not sure that that

fully grapples with the type of problem that war is God implies. The we is always juxtaposing itself against something else. Maybe someone else wants to take over. yeah maybe you could just say just about that tiny bit further because I'm not entirely either from your sidebar point or what you've just said I'm not entirely getting the drive of your comment here well earlier I'm just gonna use some people because I'm giving an echo

earlier I just said or Adam said there's no we in alienation and I said I think no all might be more appropriate there obviously we's such as nationhood tribes and subject identities happen all the time and I think the I guess the premise of this conflict as base ontology, I think it potentially leaves us impotent, or at least politically quietest. And when you start to ask after accepting that ontology as your base, you say, well,

how can we begin to formulate a new subject group? It's as if the idea of two opposing entities hasn't really set in as the paradigm for understanding what reality is. I think you need to unmute if you want to speak, Nick. yes I don't I'd obviously concur with that um I mean the the the I I think I'm probably not doing a very good job at getting across why I think this is such a essential

question to raise about about solutions and and it really um there are several factors to it what one of them is obviously this question about repurposing and so the notion implicit in that is that there are a set of purposes for technology that are underrepresented and that there's a set of purposes already embedded in in the usage of technology now obviously I think from just on absolutely undeviated without

any deviation from these fundamental Marxist principles which I'm not trying to sacralize but I think I just provide a really useful jumping off point for this that the purposes that capital has for technology are entirely enveloped by this fundamental loop of capital escalation there's no other there's no other source of it like you find you you look at any particular thing that capital drives technology to do and it's because by driving technology to do x y or z you you maximize capital escalation within this competitive framework so

it's completely nihilistic or the trend is completely nihilistic because the because if you say well why does it do this or you know what ultimately is the value and there's you know the the only coherent answer to that is to say that there's an absolute absence of transcendent value in the direction of technology within a capitalist framework necessarily And that is what the whole history of technology in its accelerated mode has been about. You know, it's been technological escalation under nihilistic auspices and ultimately inseparable from nihilistic auspices.

so then this question obviously arises when someone comes along in a in a kind of a a counter position and says well we want to give a new set of purposes to this technology and all of these manifestos do that they say you know there's there's certain neglected causes constituencies values that are being underserved by the by the direction that technology is taking then the question that comes out of nihilism to that is to say where are your values coming from you know and this is an utterly asymmetrical question you know because because that question

is entirely welcomed on the other side on a theoretical level it's not i'm not pretending that there's some subject that is able to appreciate fully how absolutely theoretically essential the question is but there's nothing other than the absorption of that question into the circuit and saying um you know the only source of uh the propulsive values that around escalation itself and anything else is uh absolutely irrelevant and and should be processed out of the of the of the machine if the machine is working efficiently and it and it is forced to work

efficiently when it is placed into an intense competitive environment that will eliminate dysfunctional modes of operation um so um you know on the on the on the side right accelerationism does not have a constituency that consolidates itself as a as a as a political unity but it is theoretically uh reinforced by that question being posed adamantly now when you put this question to left accelerationism um where do your values come from and as i say that question is that that question is constitutive really it's constitutive of right accelerations if you put that to left

acceleration what is the answer you know that's what i'm trying to do specifically in this in this week it's like you know what nick that i this is what i'm saying like that is a problem for left accelerationism but certainly the tradition in quotes again of marxist leninism has answers to to this question whether they're right or wrong they would say that in fact the uh class consciousness in a way material that has a kind of mirroring of material conditions that the values productions are material productions too that the subject you know so this is the this is what left accelerationism if they want to posit a left subject has to contend with just as much just as much from the right acceleration as they have to contend with the left critique because there's a

huge left critique of left accelerationism as well maybe more so maybe more severe in fact yes no no i totally agree with that and and i think this is something we we talked about earlier um a couple of weeks ago um and yeah i mean i totally i totally agree with what you're saying that again if we're going back to this paleo marxist uh framework the it's not vulnerable to this question for exactly the reasons that you say because the values that matter the values that should be treated with respect within that framework on the left are values that are conspicuously constituted by the circuit of the social process itself just as you say

you know so so that industrialization constitutes a type of cooperative activity constitutes the proletariat through that constructive through that productive cooperative activity and that that cooperative productive activity then provides the the teleological framework for left politics so I'm a I totally agree with that but it doesn't seem to me and and and this too is something that you're already saying it doesn't seem to me that that argument transposes these contemporary forms of accelerationism I mean if there is a story like that if there is a circuit diagram for the

production of left political orientation within the machine as there is of course as you say for marxism in its kind of foundational phase i'm not seeing what that is and it doesn't seem to me to be something that's explicitly stated or laid out or diagrammed in the either the text we're looking at this week or in the manifesto for accelerationist politics I mean, yeah, I wanted to bring, excuse me, I want to bring up the question of epistemology here. so

yeah so you know so right accelerationism depends on a you know sort of this kind of Deleuze-Oquitarian ontology of you know intensive quantity systems systems thinking and you know you can ask the same question about knowledge that we're asking about value right so so so where does it come from and and because it's you know it's sort of an old very old philosophical mistake to you know think that you can have sort of a closed circle of theory and so and

And by the same token, you can find subjectivity in epistemology. So I think I've seen some critiques of right accelerationism attacking it on the grounds of epistemology. So how do you, first of all, how do you know what this sort of more sophisticated theory, that it's true, but then also doesn't it leave, sorry, I'm kind of having trouble finishing this last part of the sentence, but it's actually sort of, there's a certain vulnerability.

like I'm kind of clad it right now but yeah that the epistemological question yes no I mean I think that's structurally right I think that this whole question has a set of problems later to take totally can be transposed into the epistemological register and I and I think the dilemmas and conclusions would be basically the same because because capital as machining intelligence production decenters the epistemological subject just in exactly analogous

fashion and I think we must be talking something more than an analogy something that's actually structurally integral as the as the practical agent is is is de-centered by the agency of capital. I mean, in both cases, in both cases, it's absolutely impossible for there to be a right accelerationist position of theoretical mastery because that position is occupied by the cognitive process of industrial capitalism.

it's not it's not something that is available to some partisan political perspective because because the whole the whole of capital already has intrinsic epistemological characteristics and so it doesn't leave epistemology available or free as a kind of transcendent space which which you can look at this thing even remotely from outside and again I think you know it did take John's point I think you know within the early phases of the Marxist tradition this this would work exactly the same way within Marxism to that

Marxist knowledge the knowledge of the left political program is an imminent product of industrialization it too you know there's no there's no pretense to a source of scientific socialist insight other than that that is inevitably produced by the industrial process itself in the in the proletariat but this you know just as on the on the side of practical agency i think that this then becomes dissipated and and and confused within the sort of tendencies that we're seeing emerge in recent years I mean you could read a

left accelerationism as a symptom of precisely the fact that a sort of a objective conditions didn't pan out the way that the prognosis of the first wave of Marxist theory felt it would. So like, why didn't history produce socialism as the final stage of capitalism? Why did we not see the proletariat dissolution, formation and dissolution, etc.? So, you know, you can say that the left is looking for other explanations and accelerationism before it was left or right offered something to the left to rethink this question. But the problem is, is that as you're posing them, I think correctly, is that if you

look towards accelerationism, can you form a left from that position? Because if you accept the fundamental postulates of accelerationism, can there be any possible left or right for that matter? I mean, I think is what you're really saying. There's just is accelerationism in some fundamental way everything else is a deviation yes yes I mean I think the right I think the the language of the right as we've been through this history and I think it's worth constantly following that loop round because it's so interesting and in some ways paradoxical because obviously you only really get this vocabulary of right accelerationism following the MAP you

know no no one was calling themselves a right accelerationist or thought there was any meaning to the to the notion of right accelerationism prior to the MAP and so it's a it's in a sense a a integral product of the emergence of left accelerations and they they rise as a couple i think intrinsically so so previously one could dismiss acceleration as a whole as being intrinsically rightist or you could embrace it as a whole as being the kind of surviving form of marxist um anti-capitalist if you know efficiently anti-capitalist uh teleology but you but there wasn't a kind of

meaningful left-right distinction within accelerationism and i don't think that that left-right distinction is as it stands at the moment very robust for the reasons that you you say I think when you start prodding it it become it begins to fracture in in complicated ways um I guess the different things that we see or at least um our biggest critique of sort of nrx and things like that is uh just that this pushing this ideology forward or conceptualizing it into reality, actually, like, even though there's no, as you said, like, no

outright identity that's put forward, I think that through trying to make this type of ideology reality, you are, like, ostensibly cutting out so many people just by setting up the parameters in that way, which I guess is one of our biggest critiques, I suppose. To us, I guess, I guess you could say we don't accept many of the fundamental tenets of accelerationism. And I guess that Marxism, and it's like a materialist historical narrative, is incomplete, I guess what we're saying,

or what I guess the big left acceleration or accelerations project should be, that our understanding of the phenomenon of accelerationism is also incomplete and in a sense kind of essentialist. And it's naturalistic in a way, in an odd way. It just, yeah, it's like, yeah, it reminds us of naturalist allacies. Like who's to say that there's that intelligence, whatever that means. Like that's that that's a determined end goal or like you know that's a Determined theological point, you know like and what intelligence was just an accident a fluke I mean can I just try and respond to that particular?

Point because I think it's a really I think it's a really good example I think the right accelerationist argument for that like why is there relationship? between the history of industrial capitalism and artificial intelligence production and i and i think it's a absolutely crucial ineliminable tenet of right accelerations and that there is this basic identity between those two those two phenomena and the answer is is that um intelligence is a competitive resource so you know uh take whatever field that you want to take like

high frequency trading or whatever you know why should there be an ai arms race in high frequency trading because the the the trader with the superior intelligence resources is going to kick the ass of the trader with the inferior intelligence resources it's just driven like that you know competition automatically favors a uh dynamic towards intelligence optimization so it's not like there's some extrinsic cosmic principle saying intelligence is good or some you know the only definition of intelligence that matters is a definition of intelligence that allows people to build more effective intelligence because that's the only it's only the the

pragmatics of the thing that's going to get sifted and tested and reinforced by competitive dynamics i don't necessarily think though that you can uh separate intelligence in this abstract concept as you've just presented it from how it's usually conceptualized in actuality which is tied to a very like specific um yeah specific sort of bias if you want to say a way of calculating what is intelligence and what is you know going to lead to those factors or but if it's biased shouldn't it shouldn't it be processed out by competition i mean say you've got to let's just take a no

You've got nation A and nation B, and they both are trying to work out a form of intelligence testing in order to put the most effective people in certain positions in a situation of intense conflict between those regimes. Now, if one side or the other or both are using defective principles in doing that if they're making empirical mistakes about it if they're if their technologies for sorting are mistaken then surely competition should disfavor them and you i mean what i'm trying to say is it seems to me your position requires that competition is has no purchase

upon this at all you know now we we can obviously see like with the improvement of computers and and all of these other forms of machinic intelligence production, that competition seems to have a really strong vector towards successfully implementing these things. Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off. I guess it's just like what we say or like what we think is just like you cannot think of competition in a vacuum. We cannot think of like, oh, competition will just sort itself out because competition and who gets access to that competition, who excels in that competition is not always determined by competition. It's determined by a lot of other things and biases and things that you don't necessarily even take into account.

Like you just look at a person and you think, oh, you know, I'm not going to give him this job. There's all these other things that play, hegemony and stuff, like internalized things that we see within society. And it might not necessarily have anything to do with competition. I think that like history has kind of shown that again and again where people who are not of a constituent body have the quote unquote like competitive advantage in the abstract but don't excel. And why is that? See, but this is my, so to put my, what I'm, I'm a leftist, okay? So we're on the same side, right? So hear what I'm saying not as a right wing critique. This is not a right wing critique. This is a, okay, we're from the left, but questioning left accelerationism, right?

So in regards to this question of competition, you know, historically the answer would be that, I mean, or some attempt to answer this would be that the thing that we want to repurpose is precisely like the symptom of competition, which is this working class or whatever, right? The majority of people, it's precisely not a minority of people, but the majority of people that gets thrown into this position that can be repurposed as something like a proletariat. That's what the historical focus of the leftist project has been focused on repurposing. So in terms of our relationships to technology and everything else, fine, we can have sophisticated relationships to technology and everything. But I think the majority of your critique in relationship to Nick has more, it has less to do with the technology, the telios of technology and competition and such.

But we're overlooking the symptoms that we posit as inherent to any possible synthesis. So we actually as leftists would believe that these, the symptoms, the working class, the proletariat, disenfranchised people, we can go down the list and name who them are. We don't just say fine, that's fine. They're just the symptoms of history. and just that's it the system functions on right so that's that that's not an accelerationist position right that's that's not accelerationism that's just leftist i mean yeah so that's what i think we have to walk the line with here if we want to take things from accelerationism then it's how do we repurpose it back into this position if we just try and take the apparatus of acceleration isn't straight up we're going to lose these arguments that's my opinion we're

going to lose every single time because there's no concern in right accelerationism for the symptom as i'm talking about it precisely right accelerationism isn't so much a position but it's just an acknowledgement of the process of the phenomenon and uh with no concern for the symptom with no concern for the byproducts with no concern for what we're talking about it's only the synthesis with the competition and what the competition can produce but not the waste product which if you're a leftist you are concerned with that's how we define our position I mean wait yeah I think I think the epistemological question is still part of this too you know it's like I think there's something in the left about having a certain you know a certain like transcendental

skepticism, you know, saying, you know, that, that, you know, maybe it's, maybe the competition with capitalism isn't required to, you know, have things continue to grow and there can be a subject of emancipation outside of that. And that it's, you know, that it's, yeah, that there's sort of an inherent skepticism to it. in terms of how things actually develop. And that it seems like Nick is so sure that the theory works and that it determines everything. Can I throw in

sort of an empirical data point? because I think part of this conversation is stuff like Piketty and other economists pointing out things like economic growth being extremely low and seeming to not really progress. There's a criticism that's the continual strand in accelerationism, left accelerationism, particularly the capitalism doesn't deliver on technological progress. And you can see that manifested in economic growth and so on. I mean, how much does this sort of undermine these other assumptions about capitalism inevitably

producing technological progress? Is that a big motivation for people? I guess that's... This is a crucial point and I would say again, you know ironically I think that well I'm probably I was stressing it if I if I can say you could have a Totally palio Marxist foundation for right acceleration, but you can get a long way with it in the sense that The expectation that capital will deliver can be diagrammed You know what I mean you you can you you actually can show through this set of of fairly straightforward diagrammatic or diagrammatizable processes you know a set of

cybernetic loops selection processes all of these kind of things why you expect um capitalism to push a certain techno-industrial trajectory and it seems to me that on the i think it's really crucial the point you're making that it's a major claim of the left acceleration is generally that uh no there's something else could do it at least as well uh there's an alternative way of getting technology to the way it's actually being factually generated in history um but i don't see the diagram you know if there's a diagram it's kept hidden somewhere you know what is the actual circuitry that is supposed to do this job that you do uh you know through manifestly self-reinforcing

competitive selective processes in in in in capitalism if you're gonna just say well there's another way of doing that then surely there's an onus to to actually draw the diagram of that and tell us how it happens another way. I mean, isn't this the paradox of the Left Accelerationist Project, is that they call for this diagramming and mapping and never produce any diagrams or maps to speak of, just manifestos? I mean, like, I read the manifesto, I say, great, let's see it. And then that next step never happens. And so I wonder about the capacity to do this diagramming and mapping.

And the second part of that would be, I mean, realistically, what kind of leftist project is that? So if they want to map their project and make it an equivalent of the Mont Pelerin project, well, then basically get 20 people in a room and do it. I mean, okay, so they say what they're lacking is funding to build supercomputers. Then I don't know what the answer is. I mean, then you need some kind of mass movement or something. and then we're back where we start as leftists, which is that we need to win power somehow and things like this. I think I'd love to have other people weigh in, but I think the premise is actually, it's more built into the premise. Like, observe the world today, capitalism is grinding to a halt. It's where a lot of the dynamic comes, basically. Capitalism may be burning along as capitalism,

but it's no longer delivering technological progress, right? And I think that there is a... But as opposed to what, though? Sometimes they're less bold about training. But that's definitely an underlying diagnosis. And so given that that has happened, we need to construct this other thing that we have not yet constructed. And I would love to see that model. That would be absolutely fascinating, yes. here's something that's maybe just food for thought or maybe some kind of attempt at maybe steel manning the left accelerationist argument but i mean when i first read through the manifesto kind of the thought that came into my mind was you know for how to make this work

would be somehow the decoupling of competition and intelligence like if you could somehow coherently make the case that you know intelligence maximization is not consistent with kind of just laissez-faire competitive forces but through some kind of human collective endeavor you know compiling of intelligence whatever it is like that can be a route that would maybe accelerate their program faster than just letting things run yes no I'm sure that is that is the implicit claim but it is so implicit um oh god so I mean

Amy's thing I mean okay is there actually a picture of that somewhere me that could be looked at I mean look I don't know what Zalamier's archaeo synthesis diagrams look like I do know that in every sphere that people have actually put together some some fairly fine-grained model of intelligence production it requires a selective mechanism you know whether you're talking about biological evolution whether you're talking about business

competition whether you're talking about training neural networks you know face um you need to be able to select out that the intensity of your experimental creative effort is directly proportional to the intensity of your entropy dissipation mechanism which is which is the the function of competition now so we have a lot of that stuff now if someone's saying hey there's a whole other way of doing this thing that does not involve entropy dissipation then I i mean yeah for sure i'd like to see that i mean is this something that these archaeal synthesis

diagrams do and and if so what what are they what are these archaeosynthesis and synthesis diagrams actually um talking about like what it what can we see in the world that actually works recognizably like an archaeal synthesis diagram because i can point to a whole bunch of things that work like a variation selection experimental entropy dissipate I I don't know you know what I'm even looking for in this thing so sorry if that yeah yeah sorry

yeah I mean we've had this conversation a million times I was just kind of checking that in because you were asking for a left accelerationist diagram and I wanted to give something a little bit more substantial than the left accelerationist manifesto which is I agree completely easy to destroy. And you know Nick I secretly agree with you on this but I kind of still think that no one's given a really good repudiation of the kind of diagrammatics that Reza is trying to bring out in relationship to what could be the philosophy of left accelerationist in relation to its epistemological concerns. The archaelsynthesis in Zellermeyer is basically a category theoretical concept. It describes amorphism. It's when you move between different levels to distill an invariance.

I'm saying all this as a total category theory nonce. But I'm just kind of flagging it as something important that I haven't seen directly attacked. But the big problem is, and I also think you're right too in putting this out, is that it's really easy to talk about it in terms of abstract mathematical concepts, but it's impossible to see it applied to reality, especially social reality in any substantial way. But I'm willing to give it a kind of go because, or at least give it consideration, because a lot of these forms, I mean it's happening in cybernetics as well, kind of appeared as these novel mathematical innovations,

and their application or their actual material attraction kind of didn't really become apparent in all of its dimensions for years to come. So I mean it took until second wave cybernetics for that stuff to become important. So I don't know, I'm just, sorry I just dropped in on the other class. It would be totally wrong to rule out of court any disciplined process of experimentation i mean i that's the last thing i would want to do but i mean when i talk about a diagram i want to see a machine process you know i don't want to see a particular way of representing a set of epistemological relations or you know interesting as that stuff can be if if this is going to be competitive with the kind of uh social and

technical mechanisms that are being described as suboptimal either machine process that is going to that is going to substitute for that i'm thinking about and this is just almost pulling it out of thin air but um framing things almost in terms of option value and pulling in a concept i think i first heard from a guy named Wisner Gross. He's some physicist. You may have read him, Nick, or other people. But he's come up with this definition of intelligence that's basically maximizing, I think, the future degrees of action available to the system or to whatever subject it is.

If one were to go with that definition, I could almost make the case, I'm not saying I believe this, but by kind of maximizing that future degree of action or, you know, the world I come from, future option value. Yeah. Doing so might require, you know, almost a different perspective, a couple steps back where you're not maybe optimizing this direct, you know, What's always locally available for optimization might take you down a path that leads you toward fewer future degrees of freedom. And by using some kind of heuristic or prediction or whatever you want to bring into the formula,

I can see somehow making that case. like not just letting everything free flow into the system that accelerates, you know, at the local point onward and maybe ultimately destroys the whole system, but, but slows it down and increases the future degrees of action available. You know, I'm somewhat rambling because I'm thinking about this on the spot. No, no, no, this is good. But you see my take on that reference would be reverse because it is basically a, a, a, thermodynamic theory of intelligence like this maximization of optionality is the strict mathematical equivalent of free energy when talking about um um negative entropic processes

so obviously you know that in an entropic process all the energy is bound um it's not available to for work and that's what that's what entropy is is energy degradation and this is basically using the same mathematical schema of intelligence as um unbound cognitive capability like this what you're talking about as the option value here is the fact that it's unbound in a specific sense mathematically exactly the same sense as being a low and a low entropy situation so I mean I think that I agree I think it's a really intro I don't know whether

it's going to work out in this form or find sort of technical practical application but for me it's extremely interesting innovation in the attempt to define intelligence but it confirms as far as I'm seeing it confirms the basic model of intelligence as a nonlinear production of intensifying entropy dissipation you're not you're not in any way separating yourself from that kind of that that basic framework that what you need is a is an intense selective

machine that that produces intelligence in a in a nonlinear circuit because how you how do you get this how do you get this option high level of optionality doesn't come from magic it comes it comes from the fact that you're actually able to select against those those tenses that that bind it and therefore and therefore produce this reservoir of unbound potentiality that's the strict

analog of unbound energy in a working machine. Oh, sorry, I've lost your sound here. Sorry. I'm not disagreeing with anything you just said. The selection mechanism has to be at some point present. But maybe the piece that is somewhat overlooked is the fact that in this option schema, one does have to make predictions about the future and make an effort actually to change the world's you know the world of bits and bytes in order to achieve that future yes but then that the agent that is tasked with that is not coming from some supernatural

transcendent realm i mean all the all the technical subjective epistemological positions have to be um imminently reproducible within uh within the system so um i mean part of this you know put most brutally and you know i'm not expecting zero pushback on this but the most brutal way of formulating it is this is to say it's it's a criticism of these magic invocations of intervention you know values ideas social organization that just arrive on the table

without any realistic story about where they're supposed to have come from. And I think the most stark form of this is found in the sort of value category. I think these documents, I mean, now Amy's here, I can definitely, I think, bring the Zeno Feminist Manifesto on it. There's a lot of passages in the Zeno Feminist Manifesto that are basically saying, you know, these are our values. You know, we believe in this and that and the other, we support this, that and the other constituency

that is being neglected or abused, exploited, whatever. but the the arrival of those value positions is not a theoretical topic within the xenofeminist manifesto so they appear magically you know and I think it would be the equivalent if there was such a thing as a kind of right wing accelerationism that says you know But we also believe in a certain laundry list of social conservative values. And we see the function of capitalism can be repurposed to,

I don't know what these things would be, like strengthen marriages and eliminate abominable sexual practices. And I don't know what kind of everyone could imagine what such a laundry list would be like. And I think, of course, everyone would find that ridiculous. I mean, they would say, look, you know, as a piece of, as a social conservative manifesto, this is totally fine. But what has it got to do with acceleration? Unless you can tell us why the social machine should produce those outcomes and reproduce those values, what role are they playing in this document? and i do think that the i do think that there is this kind of symmetrical side to that that

that escapes the same appearance of ludicrous arbitrariness for reasons that are not very solidly grounded and are to do with certain cultural fashions and certain the way that certain um social groups think um but that they totally lack a a rigorous foundation. Yeah, again, I say that is a problem for left accelerationism because the left that doesn't ground its truth in these processes, you know, sort of like a left that has a reading of psychoanalysis, Lacan, etc., has no problem answering these questions at all. As where does a subject come from? Where does truth come from?

from and of course like you would you would say you can't map its coming into being or existence because that's not how it works that's not you know that's not what psychoanalysis would say you can't there is no prehistory it's just sort of it's a fundamental enunciation or positation axiomatic it's an axiom you know like um the the the place the truth holds for example for Lacan is at the level of an axiom for the subject. There's no prehistory to that. It arrives as an axiom, and then from there, you order and make sense. But its appearance on the scene, its articulation, doesn't have this kind of prehistory that you're calling for for left accelerationism to articulate. And left accelerationism will struggle with that.

If the Xeno-Feminist Project, for example, the feminism from xenofeminism comes from outside of accelerationism, and that just has to be owned and accepted. And from there, that's what inspires me about the project. But the feminism itself cannot be accounted for from within an accelerationist paradigm. It has to be strictly the product of an enunciation, an axiom, a positation, and then we can talk about power and things like that, how to uh you know make it uh make it have efficacy in the world but i don't think you can account for it from within the accelerationist project you can posit sort of feminism leftism etc first and then use accelerationism as an apparatus as a tool but you can't do it the

other way around i don't think it works that way uh amy i mean do you have any response sorry just before we let amy come in can i just say one thing very quickly about this john which is to say i'm actually much less confident about what you're saying i mean you know i think there has been there have been these intellectual currents that seem to me much more tightly engaged with something like that of trying to demonstrate an imminent production of i will use lots of scare quotes because it's a difficult slippery word but you know feminist tendencies within capitalism and i've even seen i've even seen this from fairly orthodox left positions you know so so in a

critical mode people could say it's something to do with the production of certain types of docility um um on the more positive side like sadie plant's work is very much about the fact that that there is a kind of set of relations between um technicity and femininity that that are deeply rooted and imminent so without wanting to go into that too much right now i i'm not dogmatically certain that you know the feminist element has to be introduced as a kind of transcendent imposition on a on a um on the techno-industrial process it's seems to me at least imaginable. I mean, I could get in line for sure.

In fact, like the World Association of Psychoanalysis, one of their chief positions right now is that there is a sort of, the 21st century is a tendency, objective tendency is something like feminization. But my question is, is feminization equivalent to feminism? Right. Yes. That's a good question. But anyway, sorry. Of course, Amy should be in the hot seat on this one. Bloody hell. I just got really drunk and gave a talk and didn't expect to come in. This is my chill out time. But okay, let me preface anything that I'm going to say now in whatever

state it comes out in. With the disclaimer that Liberia Cubonics has a kind of a spectrum of different projects tethered to it, we all have I suppose realized the extent of our divided approaches in the process of putting the project into action which I think I mean I'm inclined to treat as a positive thing within within the space of labor ecubonics although not everyone views it like that so I'm in a kind of personal state right now where I'm actually interrogating some of the premises in the manifesto which were put forward

in the spirit of using some of the philosophy that I you know mentioned briefly before when I I swept in in the sidebar, sorry about that. In order to kind of like bring out this like notion of how that could be a feminist project, especially in relation to trans politics, because that's really where I think its singularity lies as a project. I think if you want to talk about discounting what xenofeminism is doing, you need to hit it on its trans politics platform rather than just kind of feminism in general. But I'm kind of, I suppose, working towards, I guess, an outer part of the spectrum in relation to xenofeminism.

Universalist claims in there, I'm not so sure I'm behind anymore. Part of it is because of the problem we just touched on before about using these mathematical structures in terms of the social, you know exactly how big is the divide that you have to cross in order to make that application work and I'm getting more and more disillusioned by it. I think the key thing and I think you know you sort of mentioned this is that one of the problems with thinking about feminism in these terms is that it needs to be thought of as forces not as something that is individualized. So it's it's not a feminism for individual women or people who identify as women or people with wombs or, you know, however you want to slice your feminism,

but it's a, it's a feminism of a particular structure of forces. And, um, I mean, yeah, this is something I've written on more recently. I've got an efflux. I've got an efflux piece. Sorry, this is something that has appeared already. It's, it's the black circuit piece that, you know, uh, Nick, which Efflux asked to publish. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. The one you delivered in New York. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, this would be, I think this is not a xenofeminist piece in a strict sense because it's espousing a particular kind of articulation of feminism which is very much about forces, not individuals. So I think you can get around

some of the problems of distilling values, looking at it as structures of forces. But I think the other xenofeminists and maybe the kind of much more orthodox xenofeminist line wouldn't argue like that at all. So they would probably go something like, you know, the premise is that there is no such thing as a given, especially not a natural given, which means that everything is malleable. Where you get your trajectory, you like your values from this comes from the mathematical structure of invariance which we which i have problems with um but i think also you could perhaps posit it as a sort of um a tendency

towards proliferation of fluidity so the idea of uh let a thousand sexes bloom and the kind of um gender abolition in terms of abolishing a particular structuration of gender in order to proliferate possibilities in a sort of, I guess, transhumanist kind of sense, be where that value would take us. But it's a good criticism, Nick, I think here. But the thing I guess, and then maybe I would want to ask you, and maybe you've covered this because I've been missing a lot of these classes, can you clarify exactly the process by which unconditional accelerationism like develops its values like this is this this kind of imminent production of like value creation

through optimization like something I've never been quite sure of yes I mean this is partly what we've been talking about today which is anything for my sake though I'll catch it no no I think it's it's it's worth it's worth repeating because it's because it gets the heart of this question because what it what's been a part of the issue is this question like if you're asked where do your values come from what's the um what's the impact of this question and that um any any

...oherent, what would now be called right accelerationism, or it might be better to say unconditional accelerationism, has to say that if in the full diagram of the circuit of capital escalation, you cannot find the genesis of those values as functional components with no source meaning validation or criterion other than the intensification of the system then they are extraneous elements to be to be discarded and and treated as uh with contempt

they are they're a sign of theoretical insufficiency that you are invoking values that the that the actual circuit of machine reproduction cannot itself uh explain and validate um and i mean the best reference for me on this i think honestly this might sound like a ludicrous overestimation but i honestly think it's one of the most you know i'm i'm almost tempted to just go full sort of uh gonzo on this and say you know it's just maybe the greatest piece of moral philosophy ever written um is uh sorry that first thing is um it's got tangled up with heraclitus quote

is Steve Omohundro's basic AI drives article which he is exactly he's so exactly on this on this topic because he's saying you know what do we know about the drives and substitute the teleological element in AI systems just by trying to actually draw consistent diagrams about how an ai would work you can say uh they have to be in some sense um self-protective they have to be in some sense uh attentive to resources you know there's a there's a set of these basic drives that you

have to introduce just to draw a consistent circuit of machine intelligence reproduction and and so that's exactly the sort of you know that's exactly the sort of procedure that I think is required in in an unconditional accelerationist framework because those those teleological factors will be accelerated you know if you can say any conceivable consistent ai system must be resource acquisition then in the escalation of those systems there will be an escalation

a refinement a development an intelligence process brought to bear upon this drive for resource management acquisition um and and that's the kind of thing that you expect um as a you know those are the only values that count for anything within an unconditional accelerationist model um so i mean as john was saying earlier about this well you know the left in general is totally unsatisfied by that because there's a whole bunch of things it cares about deeply and our traditional values for it and concerns and considerations that are liable to be entirely neglected like this you know there's no guarantee that a form of sort of basic

techno-economic drives are going to protect uh moral concerns and values that are considered to be indispensable attachments to these left currents but i whole discussion has been about i think is the thing well in that case doesn't isn't the project of a left accelerationism going to be in a certain sense hobbled that it is restrained it's constrained from actually reaching this plane of critical imminence which appeals to no values other than those that the circuit of techno-economic escalation can itself supply so I just want to give

a time check that we're at five minutes right so 1230 we can keep going yes for sure well we started a bit a little bit late so I don't want to rush anybody out for sure yeah if people still have energy I think there's kind of it highlights the need in my opinion before a kind of Nietzschean understanding of of values or kind of normative analysis in general that you can't distinguish normative values from what's happening descriptively and in this kind of easy way which a lot of kind of traditional left types of analysis attempt to do I think there's a there's an interestingly complex paragraph in the

xenofeminist manifesto about this actually if they say this does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and normative between facts and value is simply cut and dry. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project are untangling what ought to be from what is of dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is indeed an infinite task. So after reading that paragraph I'm not really sure what the stance is on whether what's being defended there is a is a is a an infinitely demanding but still essential task of defending the fact value distinction or something that is more

subversive of the fact value distinction but I certainly I think an unconditional accelerationism distinction I mean you know a self reinforcing process it there's absolutely you can't slip a playing card between its its drive for self-reinforcement the value it places on self-reinforcement the fact it reinforces itself the fact that there's a dynamic of self-reinforcement there's just absolutely no real distinction of a value between between fact and value in anything that is self escalator um I don't know if this is like coming from this is completely related but I guess I think sort of one of the missteps

or whatever of I guess right accelerationism or um your actionary type value system is because it sort of claims at least on paper to appeal to sort of a naturalist sense of things so I'm understanding it correctly and I think just like couching it from a position of couching it in things that are not necessarily completely factually sound can like set you up for certain mishaps that could not be necessarily avoided had you not done that so i guess like the first thing that comes to mind or you're talking earlier about intelligence you were

saying like even if it's crouched from this position if it gets to this point or it still gets to this point um well whatever uh i think say like even disease or unknowing things that happen if the technology is not there to combat these challenges and all of your literature or your science is from this pivoted point of fallacy then you might tackle these questions from you might make a misstep like a really serious misstep I think and that in part is one of my biggest criticisms or problems with this right iteration of it or you you an unconditional acceleration that's I mean, I guess it then

makes the question like, what is even the point? What's the point for what? What's the point of capitalism just expanding and escalating? What's the point of that? If you're not going to contest that or if you're not going to react to that in some capacity, why even then you're just then all you're doing is passively passively diagnosing a process you're just passively diagnosing a phenomenon like what be alright well I don't know whether that's right I mean why is it more passive on why is why is resistance inherently more active than

complicity or facilitation I mean if you're if if you're if you're oriented towards the reinforcement of a process as opposed to being oriented towards the inhibition of that process it seems to me both of those things are equally as active or passive as the other aren't they it seems like like the like the task for left accelerationism is to or a part of it could be to you know resist the idea of naturalizing values without just falling back on pre-constituted transcendental values and like the question is it is is that possible and

And it seems like that could be, like the answer to it would need to come from something like the idea that the project of science is a contingency. So like Nietzsche would say, like the task of translating man back into nature, what a strange task, but that's the task that we have right now, let's go for it. but like there could be other tasks than that. Like you could have an ontology that is, has a room in it for that sort of robustness in it. That's where, I mean, you still can't diagram it, but maybe like the practice of diagramming isn't the most powerful practice

there is or something like that. I think this word contingency that Hunter brought up is the important word because you can diagram. I mean, okay, so going back to this statement earlier I made about truth functioning axiomatically, what I'm not saying is that it's necessarily subjectively put forth as a postulate, but that truth is a production, but it's a contingent production, and diagramming cannot diagram that contingency, right? The diagram unfolds from contingency on. There's a sense-making process starts at a certain point. From what point is that sense-making process unfold is what I want to postulate here.

So can you diagram the contingency itself? But then also, like, could capitalism produce something that's neither facts nor values that we can't even conceive of? like well I mean I think any self it itself and any self escalating system is neither fact nor value or both fact and value I mean and and we can't conceive of it I mean so that doesn't seem to me even any kind of problem that it's more of a weird to me that we are so confident this that this fact value segmentation of reality has continual purchase and I think it

only has purchased with implicit reference with transcendence or of normativity I don't know I think I think it has literal pertinence today I mean even with things where people are starting to contradict or challenge, I guess specifically. Sorry, I come from like a science framework, so that's why I like always talk about that stuff. But where people are starting to challenge or push back on things that have been visibly proven, like anti-vaxxing movement or things like that, where the delineation between, I guess, factor value and fallacy is like very clear.

and it has like very real, real-time consequences. And not just, because the way pathogens work, it's not just for that group. That belief, steadfast belief in something other than factor value or these principles can affect everybody. And I think even if you are to say like, we want to remove these value judgments and all sorts of things, I don't necessarily agree with that. But let's go from that framework. let's remove all of that that still sort of puts the whole system at a possible point of collapse but obviously i'm not just saying you just take out values and are left with facts i mean the the the fundamental nucleus of it is a process that reinforces itself

so if that's looked at as a natural object it looks like a dynamic system and you say the fact of the matter is that system is autocatalytic or it's you know you've there's all kinds of vocabularies in different things that show a process that is feeding back upon itself and strengthening itself if you look at it from the other side you know like out of confucianism or some value system you say this is a self-cultivating system you know and its values is about uh self-enhancement and self-affirmation and and you know you you put it into a value language there's absolutely no difference between those two things i mean you're looking at the same thing from two different sides so i'm not saying oh you just want facts and get rid of values i'm

saying that the fact value distinction is if there is some real distinction between a fact and a value is not by you only get that impression by not looking at dynamical systems all of which are you know involve both equally in a turbulent dynamic and and so what's the sorting between these different things so you know the sort you can either say look we have some access to superior tribunal where we can say this is right this is wrong this will work this won't right work or you have a dynamic sorting system a framework of competition a selection mechanism that that puts these things up against each other and the

ones the dysfunctional ones get kicked out so you know um a kind of a biological school based on certain sort of ludicrously unrealistic notions will be competitively eliminated it will be eliminated from biotechnological industries or it will be eliminated between in national competition or whatever arena that you want but but unless you've got some sorting mechanism that is independent from any subjectively constituted tribunal you are just you're basically just imposing one dogmatic transcendent viewpoint on a thing and saying it has to go this way not that way well what about this i mean i mean couldn't couldn't the human race produce

a new scientific paradigm that outstrips dynamical systems theory yeah i think like already the left or quote-unquote left has like um i don't think like science is necessarily inherently left but so many people that seem to ascribe to some of those values or ways of seeing things fall into this sifted category but that type of like looking at uh the natural world or people or whatever is an independent system it's an independent process and it is outside of these values as you say sorry what is sciences yeah the process of science i mean the process of science to me is precisely a competitive machine so you don't have to believe in scientists you know there's a machine of

competition that's based on testing the reproduction of results um disciplined by mathematics that means that you can kick out of the arena that's what science is and and you know it's like the Royal Society's not my Latin said crap it's nullius in verb I think it was you know believe no one words count for nothing because the origin of science opinion is bullshit unless you've got some selective machine that kept bad science and kicking out bad science is science there's no such thing as science that isn't based on machine for kicking out

bad science but that machine might not be a system in the sense that we conceive of it right now I mean I'm just curious what like you know I'm sure that's true I'm just in my theory cybernetics don't have like complete ontological closure you know like like no one thinks that and and there's like there's um it seems relatively easy to imagine like our society you know giving birth to a new scientific paradigm um wait you know within which uh these things would be possible like like like like why like how um you know what is it

that makes you so committed to choosing this model is that question I don't I find it just hard to see the specificity of the model in the sense of that the things being counterposed to the model aren't alternative models they're basically claims of the kind another model that will somehow be discovered someday I mean which is you know but if I think I understand really what that was being what was being said there then then maybe I would be by here but well maybe it doesn't seem to like only only because it's happened in the past like

Like there are sort of these epochs in human history where these new models come about that, you know, lead to a complete paradigm shift. It's happened before. We don't fully understand the logic according to which that happens. Although, I mean, it can be diagrammed according to systems theory, but, like, that's not necessarily the way it works. and uh and so we could hope for another one um and yeah i mean obviously there's a certain weakness to not having it available but the whole point is that we don't have it available yet it's an attraction on certain sites to this like type thing where you're just moving from epistem

to epistem there's these catastrophes you go from one entire modular system of belief to another the modular system I don't think yeah this Kalkoon type model in in the sciences I I don't think that's what he looks like it's much more accumulative I mean not that you have these complete metaphysical constructions and they're defeated by another metaphysical construction is much more it's much more the case that you have a eight model that knows it's incomplete so so you look at you know like I don't

know I just but called by I could see data Mukherjee about the history of the gene and it's not good that for sure that I would say they're just then they can't be treated as bad science they're just not science because there's no testing mechanism for them but once you're in a modern epoch and you have this series of stages that go through the discovery of theorization of natural selection mendelian genetics uh the the theory of the gene the discovery of dna the discovery of genetic recombination um you know all of those stages of

the the advance of genetic science are not based upon passing from one paradigmatic system to another paradigmatic system it's a cumulative it's a cumulative process of scientific search that is being honed onto this object and you're being provided by technological feedback that you're on the right track by the fact that you can actually do all kinds of stuff you know if if you'd been trapped in a a succession of of equally deluded metaphysical paradigms about the structure of this stuff then you couldn't do even a selective breeding of animals um through all the

the way to cloning cells and genetic recombination and isolating DNA and genetic engineering. All of this technological feedback is, you know, extremely tight control system on this. So I'm just really suspicious of this whole paradigm-based model. I think paradigms are realistically approximate models, and people normally know they're approximate and they're not replaced by a whole new system belief they're replaced by better models that can do more stuff and survive scientific testing better well sure but I mean I think that's a distinction between the idea that you

know yeah there are these epistemic like that we're passing from one socially constructed metaphysics to another and the idea that it is cumulative but that but that you know a whole new world of possibility opens up at certain key thresholds and and that maybe a new possibility could open up and you know to bring this topic back to like i guess you know the question of how uh you know without the competition structure of capitalism how could technological innovations keep keep going or you know how how could both be sustained well maybe there there could be a new scientific model that we don't know about yet

but you know maybe maybe a computer will think it up you know maybe artificial intelligence will will produce it and that model would show how how we could work it out you know how but but the sort of change that you're talking about isn't like a change we've ever seen before is a change of a completely different type I mean obviously people didn't say hey wouldn't it be great if we had a market economy and all kinds of competitive mechanisms and they selected and and eliminated defective ideas and and allowed massive experimentation and we get rid of the failures and then we revamp the ones that were no one ever sort of had the idea and then socially implemented it that process bootstrapped its way into being and then retrospectively people

examined it and tried to make sense of it and theorized about it and and you end up with all these models so you know if you're saying no but what's going to happen now is some mathematician is going to think up this idea for a whole different social system that will then be transformed into social reality you're talking you're saying maybe everything we know as history could be replaced by a totally new type of thing that works much more platonically so I mean it's a really extreme claim I mean it it you know maybe can't be eliminated a priori but it's you have to be aware of how extreme the suggestion that you're making is I mean at the

same time thinking about it like almost from a Bayesian perspective like would you agree that kind of what happened around the year 1600, be it the invention of science or almost the modern capitalism sprang into its own, whereby before it was basically a linear progression and after which it was exponential. Like such a thing happened in the recent past. And looking at the grand sweep of history, something like that happened, that's such a singular change in the recent past. It's almost like just from a purely, like I say, a Bayesian type of reasoning, one could make the argument that such a possibility

would and maybe it's likely in the future, if you accept kind of the premises that it really was kind of a singularity in the 16th century. Yes, you know, I think Robin Hanson is very close to this i mean he has a model that's you know it sort of echoes marks a little bit and being this epoch type model he says there's been these succession of historic changes that massively increase the exponential gradient of the social process so first of all you know there was whatever was happening in the paleolithic and then agriculture put it onto a new exponential but but the exponential to us looks so

so slow that we we just see it as a linear progression and then capitalism massively collapsed the doubling period of he's doing the whole thing in terms of economic growth so the economic doubling period just massively collapsed and he does in a way that's extremely extremely like the way you're suggesting predict a another threshold that's going to he thinks if if the same mathematical pattern was to be projected forward would be expected to collapse economic doubling period down to something on the order of two weeks so you know if if something was going to happen that was going to accelerate history to the same

extent that capitalism has exceeded right history then we would expect a two-week doubling period um so so that's just to say yes for sure this type of thing is invisible i mean as a matter of fact he thinks that this process is going to i mean he's not discarding any of these basic mechanisms in saying this he thinks that this that this transformation will occur because people can industrially clone human scale intelligences and once you've just got in fully industrialized human scale intelligence he thinks you're talking a change that is sufficiently profound to produce what he calls the emulation world the m world um which will be

hyper competitive and you know uh all of the crap will crank up all these processes to an unnotch but i mean you could i'm sure have a have a alternative but he does produce a model i mean he you know he tells you how the m world's going to work in as much detail as he can and with all the cybernetic all the feedback loops in place as far as he's able to do that he doesn't just hand wave to something that will transition to a set of values that we find more comfortable wait uh yeah again sorry i have like all these random points in my head and i just want to get them out during this session if i can uh but like in thinking about sort of what you said

about scientific process being this sort of like competitive thing by weeding out bad theories and and all sorts of things. I guess I would say in like a loose sense, it is also sort of the sharing of information and processes. So like when you actually take an experiment and stuff, like for instance, you are exploiting or whatever, or using different processes within nature to further your own experiment. So like when you introduce different vectors or genes through vectors, somebody thought, well, when you think about viruses, They already do that within cells. So why don't we empty out a virus, put your gene of interest in it, and introduce it into your host. That process itself is like a step of multiple different experiments.

It's not just like this one thing, okay, we made this. So this is one process, and it's over here. It's like many different experiments are actually hodgepodge of different. uh No of different experiments that have become working to People have like come to develop them independently and we now can like pick from this can be a pool of information Sure, but that relation between competition and connectivity is just as evident in the economy, isn't it? I mean, you know when people aren't criticizing capitalism for its hyper competitive competition they're criticizing it for its globalization and and producing these logistic change and just-in-time manufacturing and all of this so I mean

there's it's not as if you have to make a choice between connectivity and competition and a competition already has to imply connectivity you you Nick I think you've frozen actually bring me you have to Be a comparison with each other I think we lost you momentarily. Oh, sorry about that. Yeah

Okay, if you want to repeat just last sentence, no, I just wanted my last question is is globalization Competitive or connective. I mean, I just don't I don't see that choice I'm sorry because you got cut out did we in competition implies Connection is that what you said? Yeah, I think I would agree with that. So the question I would have is is Is capitalism in the last instance fundamentally competitive or is it something more autistic without connection in which we have sort of parallel autisms? I mean, maybe we don't like the word autism, but this precisely a lack of connection. So rather than this sort of idea of some battleground or competitive field, you have, you know,

series of ones all alone in their laboratories or speculative positions, financial, scientific, or otherwise, it's not strictly, maybe it's not strictly competitive or connected, but we have something new that's happening, you know, because like this, this vector that we looked at last week of MM, once you're at this number of numbers linking with numbers and money linking with money without certain forms of mediation, you know, I wonder if we're at the level of competition still, if it's something else is happening there. the summit yes I mean it's obviously interesting untangled and I know you're sort of obviously interested in the whole psychoanalytical dimension of this as well but if you look at something like Silicon Valley culture you know

it's all of these things it's hyper competitive hyper connected and hyper autistic um you know it sort of manages to things at the same time so it doesn't seem to me easy to see yeah I can accept that yeah it's also been arresting me you know in contrast to a lot of other industries I would say highly cooperative yeah just in the culture it's I don't know how it relates to the

conversation but it does seem to be a distinguishing factor you know within that scene yeah sure yes I mean I'm sort of taking that as kind of carried by connectivity to a certain extent but maybe it should be emphasized independently too so Nick are you saying that science and capitalism are basically the same thing in terms of intelligence production is that what it boils down I am saying that in all kinds of levels I mean I think it's that like capitalism fully understood modernity has science as an integral functional component and the basic uh dynamic machinery of the of the natural sciences

is the same as the basic of business competition so yeah i think that they need to be together extremely tightly and now obviously in saying that this is the left accelerationist camp is deeply suspicious about this and and and you know thinks science has massive autonomy in relation to capitalism um if anything is almost its antagonist so i don't expect this to go through without an argument i i mean i was wondering especially from from a non if that was like a fundamental break or like a fundamental difference of view right so what is the site the modern sciences the the the i yeah i i mean

uh from the non or from you know cream but i you're you're arguing that they're fundamentally different I think well sorry what sorry what is this is I'm not I think he was just asking what all woke that's not everyone's name hold on sorry what I I just missed it. Yeah, it was like, yeah. Yeah, I didn't catch the question either, I'm afraid. I still... Yeah, I didn't formulate it very clearly, but it was about... At least before you seemed to be saying

science and capitalism were very different, that there were alternative views of intelligence production. Yeah, yeah, sure. I'd expect that, of course. That's what I was understanding. I would just be interested in more. I mean, I guess I'll see how Nick takes this, but I guess in my perception of it, I think capitalism and this idea of full throttle competition, which invariably leaves other people out of the equation, usually creates conditions under which science has to rescue people. Worldwide, most of the diseases that are communicable are very easily treated and linked to just shitty health conditions

or conditions of standards of living, which can be situated within the global market of capitalism. Not that I have, I actually don't have anything like... But it's not science that saves people, is it? I mean, science is just understanding. But you people utilize and sort of like pull on the lever of science in these processes. I guess whether or not you want to ask the broader question as to what the aim of science is, is different. But I think both science and technology sort of does speak to the human condition and the condition of other natural processes. But first and foremost, usually the human condition. So people historically do pull on this lever. Like, how do we fix this? How do we look at this when in moments of crisis, which are sometimes created by capitalism?

yes i mean i you see for me science isn't about scientists so a scientist saying i want to help the world is just about a silicon belly product well i mean it's like you know i don't put much weight on that because i don't think what the people think about what they're doing is the essence of the thing and capitalism is about growth and and science is about the testing and selection of theories about about nature and if people have other agendas which of course they do then that is a sort of obviously an objective relevant study and investigation and interest but it

doesn't take you to the essence of that the sciences is how you eliminate bad theories sure but I think it does also like and and it does put itself to this like and technology to also like in terms of its propellants like is usually to propel or to alter or fix or whatever adjective you want to put in there some form of human condition or some humans or something like that and yes that's like uh away from the abstract maybe like idea of it but other than that i guess i'm saying like you can't necessarily separate that because without that uh impetus people wouldn't necessarily be interested i don't think but but but honestly if i'm sure 100 if you were to hang around in

silicon valley cocktail parties all these guys would be saying you know this product's going to save everyone and you know this app's going to be so helpful for people wanting medical care and neglected areas of Asia and Africa and I mean that you know the notion that there's something unique to science about that kind of incentive structure rhetorical overlay packaging however you want to put it I think is not right and I think if you're coming from another social space saying the same sort of things about capitalism that you're saying about science and I would be being obstreperous about that in just the same way I mean I the

notion that your notion that capitalism is like the way I would idealize and as this kind of just ruthless Ayn Rand heartless I see competitive thing that is not how capitalists as concrete social beings conceive it no but that's what I I don't know, I think if I'm using historical record as, or like some understanding or basis, like you said, or framework of looking at it, that's what I think it presents to me. I'm not saying like, necessarily those people see it that way, but I'm saying that's how it seems presented by the issues that are presented in the world. And again, I'm not saying like pushing the lever, pulling this lever of science as in like calling for scientists, but just that's what, that's usually what happens

when there's a cholera outbreak or something. There's a push to ask these people to figure this out. Well, yeah, but there's also a push for people to produce medicines and the people who do that are Pharmaceutical businesses sure but like for mostly things like vaccines and stuff. They're not very expensive They don't like compete in that same way that same framework that you've presented like we'll just pure competition. Here we go I guess it depends on what you're talking about yes I mean I'm not I'm not saying that capitalism is is generally full throttle laissez-faire I mean if I thought that was true there wouldn't be none of these

arguments would be happening I mean obviously on the right was capitalism seems to completely lack that kind of intensity and be and and you know there all these systems of suppressed competition and um docilization through government intervention and you know so i i think capitalism is pretty cuddly actually much cuddlier than than i i certainly would be um happy to see i don't know maybe it's just like uh maybe i'm erroneously putting too much on like capitalism or pitting it against other things but i don't think i don't think capitalism necessarily operates that way it's usually other forces outside of capitalism that

push for there to be some sort of regulation or some sort of humanity to paying attention to certain people that it didn't necessarily before that people didn't necessarily before um at least how they operate under capitalism maybe not capitalism as an abstract concept but how they introduce themselves as players within the capital system usually does uh it's not just like competition the competition comes with some sort of erasure or like ignorance of other people and that's why I guess like I think at least in America it doesn't phase me why the social conservative ism is paired with this economic laissez-faire mentality yeah no I mean I like your model of capitalism I only wish capitalism was more closer to what you seem to think it is then I

how I say I mean I'm a mathematical thing my only my only issue is that I don't see why science isn't same spectrum between its pure perfect I see mathematical model of the optimization of theory selection just the same the machine process is the same in capitalism it's the it's the it's the optimal cold isolation of functional business organization product and and in in science it's the the same thing for intellectual constructs and theories and in both cases of course you don't get the pure version you

get you get a a muddy confused complicated historically tangled version of it that that suffices that that is close enough to that machine that it works and science doesn't learn stuff and capitalism does build better businesses and better products but it doesn't mean that that's it does that because it's it's it's actually realizing its ideal form it's it's pure mathematical function in either case. I was just going to ask one question if I was misunderstanding you. When you're saying that the history of nihilism is the continual eroding of transcendent values,

doesn't that seem like it would just completely fundamentally undermine individual interests or drives, or even collective interests or drives? And then if that's the question, I mean, obviously, why continue at that point? Well, I don't know. I think it's interesting and would require... It will obviously cross over onto the xenofeminism, I think, onto all of these questions, obviously, because it's about incentive structures. But you can't... notion that you lose incentive structures when you lose transcendent values can't be right i mean capitalism is totally based it it intensifies intense incentive structures more than any

social mode of organization that's ever been known by the human species and there's good reasons why it would individualize because obviously it functions best at least again in its mathematical form when all relations are contractual so non so non non individualized social bonds are they haven't been contractually formalized and therefore they haven't been subject to capitalistic optimization so the the ten so you can see why a

intensification of individualism would be a intrinsic imminent function of a capitalist organization. I'm not sure if that addresses the question in abstract, I guess, though. Maybe it does, but I'm just going to try and rephrase it poorly. I'm just thinking about this right now. It may be that capitalism hones specific incentive structures but it becomes clear that it

won't be your incentive structure. Well it becomes clear to philosophers and it becomes clear in a very much hazier way generally that there is a some kind of crisis of the subject but um it is it is much hazier I mean look that it's if if capitalism if the history of nihilism is able to obsolesce transcendent values it's because they have never actually been transcendent values if there ever actually was a transcendent value then it would be completely immune to anything

that the history of capitalism could do to it so all of our structures of drives instincts motivations incentives all of that stuff it cannot be the product of uh metaphysics it simply it simply cannot if you if you think that metaphysics actually has ever produced any real drives then metaphysics is true and invulnerable to nihilistic dissolution so all the stuff that's that's that we've inherited from our biological evolution and I mean you know the whole basic drive stuff kind of from 100 which is very tight with that actually because i think um i think all drives are basic drives and i think

all organisms have basic drives and all are complicated instincts are actually just refinements of basic drive so that stuff isn't going to go away just because a certain type of metaphysical narrativization about it has become impossible right i i guess this i i see this connecting to the question last week of well why is it that um we then make the telos of capitalism the end all de-territorialization rather than the re-territorialization it seems like from some vantage point you you can say it's neither it's just both happening simultaneously i think that

the the the kind of philosophical argument for that is because uh it's because of the way that this language of de-territorialization and re-territorialization does transcendental philosophical work where re-territorialization is related to the object in the kantian system so so so de-territorialization therefore is basically a realist interpretation of the process of transcendental critique as something that doesn't originate from a private subject but is actually a kind of historical process um and so to so within that

fraying if you say well maybe the basic process is towards re-territorialization you're saying maybe the basic problem is towards metaphysics in a in a certain realist reconstruction of that of that mission i'm i'm apprehensive to say well i i guess i'm now taking back what i'm saying i'm I don't mean to say that it is towards re-territorialization ultimately, but you would not be able to extract these two elements, de-territorialization or re-territorialization. You would simply have this tightly bound circuit of both activities. Right. Yes, but I think that you get a strong telic vector because of the fact that

it's tied to this whole question that the Anon guys were talking about intelligence production. You know, intelligenesis, the kind of optimization of intelligence, is a drive in the direction of the transcendental and deterritorialization, or abstraction. I mean, the reason people use this language of abstraction is because it carries this whole thing. So if you're thinking of either a business or an AI system or a technological production process, the less it is specifically tied to some concrete manifestation, the greater its competitive power is going to be.

um you know like any particular product will become historically or obsoleted if you have a whole array of sort of uh epistemological technological resources that are that are like a craft specialism in the sense that they are bound to the production of some you know uh horses bridles or or whatever it might be however brilliant you get at doing that then you're in a position of objective competitive weakness in the sense that everything has shifted to a point where that whole resource set becomes garbage. You know, no one wants horses bridles anymore or whatever, some even more extreme example of some object category

that just becomes irrelevant. Whereas if you have general intelligence, general capitalism, capitalism abstracted forms of production then they are able to move strategically between different domains apply themselves to you know to to different issues and opportunities and and and therefore they are competitively advantaged i mean so yeah i'm sorry you can tell you well i just wanted to say so it's in general that rigidity is rigidity is punished by capitalism and i think this actually come in a twisted tangled way back to this whole question about that john and amy were talking about about feminism

and um capitalism you know isn't there an irony to um like i mean capitalism as a as a platform i think is really really ironic in a way uh like an institution of critique won't won't last long um because the institution can't sustain itself once it's under the scrutiny of critique so um if from if we consider capitalism and or science an institution of critique it doesn't seem it's able to survive fatigue even.

No, that's right, but then you see let's go back to this communist manifesto quote is exactly what you're saying isn't it? When you know constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguished the bourgeois epoch from all early ones, all fixed fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudiced opinions are swept away or new formed once become into antiquated before they can ossify all that is solid melts into air so you know i think that's totally right um that the relate the relation between the institutionalization of critique which is capitalism abstractly understood is

self-dynamizing for exactly the reasons that you've just said Because there cannot be a robust, satisfactory, adequate institutional manifestation of this process. And this is obviously why it's a nightmare for the left. I mean, it's a question. I heard Nick Snirnicek talking about this, I think, in relationship to his new book, Platform Capitalism. and uh pointing out this uh potential uh contradiction of the um you know with the next wave of uh like ai technologies for example the sheer computation computational power that you need to work in this field which means capital i mean it's so immense right you know that it

it's hard to imagine more than, you know, three or four players in these kind of emerging technology space. Like how, I mean, just the sheer level of capital that are required to finance this degree of computation. So that's one part. And then the second part that he raised, which I thought was interesting, for example, you take like these platform capitalist companies like Uber who are investing heavily and intensely, like the platform means nothing for Uber. It's all about creating these headless cars right like they're trying to precisely reintroduce this la fixed capital means of production for like the production of a new world in which there will be no I mean if they have their druthers competition I suppose so that's my you you get raising right or yeah but it's

always looked like this I mean you know perhaps the ecological structure of capitalism follows a power law you know and you have the set roughly the same proportion of super organisms and you know lower down kind of uh things nipping at their ankles and and um you know right down to the little minnows at the bottom and i don't think that there's you know this among marx's empirically uh unsound predictions is that there is this general tendency towards plutocratic concentration i mean i think if we were looking at the robber barons era or anything else just in my lifetime you know i've seen the whole thing everyone was

terrified of microsoft everyone was terrified i've got a netscape at one point i mean you know there's been one guy IBM before that that seemed you know it's like oh they're blocking out the horizon how can anyone ever compete with IBM how can anyone ever compete with Microsoft now it's how can anyone ever compete with Google or whatever but they will you know 10 years down the line people are going to say how could we ever afford but the question the question is is will as it has historically so yes capital congeals into fixed capital or plutocratic monopolies and things like that and then diversifies or destructs itself again but the question is is for for the left would be whether or not these crises one can they be can we point to them and

predict them and two can we you know essentially exploit them so that that that's the the essential idea right that's why i keep making recourse to this tradition of marxist leninism right right yeah no no that's true that's totally where we are is that can can they be exploited I mean obviously I'm you know just systematically skeptical about that but a bit but if I didn't think the question was interesting I wouldn't be looking at this material and I totally I think it's inevitable that there will be this revival of the question so even if you're skeptical about it it's it's an important social and historical phenomenon in itself that this question is reanimated

yeah um yeah i think to that point we're not necessarily looking at it uh actually strictly from a left accelerationist perspective i think the first step in terms of actually putting what at least you want to do or the envision idea of society that we have would be to kind of go kind of more or less the leftist route but every time that this juncture of technological progression opens up this space of contradiction it's making people aware of this contradiction and somehow pushing it to sort of our ends or whatever we want because it isn't just necessarily pushing technology for certain aims it is also like this idea of society that we see so like when

people are automated automation is taking jobs or freeing up people from jobs I think it's like the perfect point for the left to introduce itself in maybe legislatively introduce or somehow have protections for these specific workers or bring about these issues of a living wage or somehow like command or command that conversation in a certain way. Whereas if you let it just not happen... Or just react. Yeah, or just react. I think you put yourself up to more so just reacting in that position because then obviously no one's going to do anything about that situation. You're just... But the question then is, what is the political economy that makes this possible?

And in this respect, I think Leninism is a kind of degradation from the original kind of insight from Marx, which people like Jihoo take up, that the real movement is embedded in capitalism itself. Capitalism gets stronger because of crises. It doesn't get weaker as a kind of, you know, the whole idea of the rate of profit falling. So if you want to exploit crises in this way, you then have to ask, what is the kind of the economic analysis that allows you to intervene in such a way? Because Marx thinks it's not possible. He says we need a social revolution, not a political revolution. And that's pretty much what he means. Yeah, I'm going to say, like, be honest, I don't fully know enough econ off the back of my head to like map out perfectly how it would be, but I do see it more as like a social

revolution in a sense, like social awareness to seeing these perspectives in a certain way. Because I think there are particular groups like specifically white working class that kind of treads this line between, or usually goes sort of like right wing, but I think it is sort of against its own class in a sense but it could in a certain way be oriented in a different way which would change the conversation which might change the options that are available to deal with that uh composition conversation or how to interact with that uh vince vincent when you were when you were just talking about marx i mean i would agree in terms of a fidelity to marxism you're right but the question is is that the essential fidelity to marxism to marx in the articulation of his project consciously.

Sure, if we do follow Marx to the letter, then you're right. You are right. I mean, but that's another question to raise. And sure, Marxist-Leninism is in fact a degradation of Marxist project. I mean, we don't have to play that game anymore, right, that people did 100 years ago and say, no, this is the real fidelity, etc., etc. We can take those lessons historically and use them as we will. but I do think it's possible to say that for example the crisis if we want to even call it a crisis of 2008 certainly we can see that what kind of state apparatuses had to go into effect to reprop up capitalism in light of the housing crisis etc I don't know if that's exactly the way that

Marx's analysis in volume 3 accounts for that for example if that kind of I don't know if that's the same. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, 2008 wasn't a crisis in this radical Marxist sense of an overproduction crisis which would reset the rate of profit or whatever. So in that sense, capitalism is kind of weak now and that's why you do see these decelerationist, if you like, pathologies of protectionism and so on which are rising up because people don't want the crisis to happen. That's the kind of argument that people like Jihoo make, and which I think is basically correct. Yeah. Yes, I agree. Well, we are now at almost 1.30 now.

Yeah, I'm fading, I have to say, guys. I mean, this has been great, but I'm starting to zone out. yeah thanks everyone for coming and we will see you next week yeah can I just say that I'm sorry haven't I haven't prepped people for next week I'm sort of falling behind my own agenda here so badly um but I will try and get people something really early in the week and is there anything I we the next next week is the end of the first block and is there anything that people want to recommend or suggest as something that would kind of produce some sense of a partial closure you know I mean

on this first wave of this first wave of looking at the surf if not that's fine I'll try and I'll try and find something that serves as both a way of one phase and moving into the next and get it to use quickly as possible. I also was wondering if it's okay if we start maybe 15 minutes later next week I'm gonna be in transit but but I'm gonna try with me people have been flexible so I can't imagine 15 minutes would make any difference it is that are you being Spartan about that

would you prefer half an hour um I think 15 minutes should be enough okay and then yeah we can start at 10 15 if that's all right with everyone else okay cool thanks everybody so much and I'm sorry to sort of be zoning out of this and I had to to talk to you next week thanks