// QWEROPHENIA \\

\\ ∀INƎHԀOɹƎMQ //

Thou Shalt obtain the Order & Value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to
attribute them unto. --The Book of the Law, ii. 55.

‘He thought that his calculations would let him perform a voyage with a light-wave envelope
such as no being of Yaddith had ever performed—a bodily voyage through nameless aeons
and across incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the earth itself.’ -- Through
the Gates of the Silver Key

'It doesn't seem like there's a difference ... between the aleatory aggregate and a
predestined choice.' ‘Memories of a Sorcerer II’ ATP 2[69]

[the synthetic a priori as diagonalisation = way of getting outside the code thru the code --
anti-romanticism]

biunivocal mapping = cipher

[why Barker is a cryptographer]

Note space for collective descent into the Qwerchasm.

AQ188 = QWERCHASM = MYSTERY = ETERNITY = SMOTHERED = EXHAUSTED

AQ230 = QWEROPHENIA = SUBMISSION = ASCRYPTION = VAST ABRUPT
AQ329 = COLLECTIVE DESCENT = NEW MOTIVE POWER = WAITING FOR A TRAIN

PART ONE
Week 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pSf5C80moI
Week 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPwcCLFcmOQ
Week 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bis-1NXEBzo
Week 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQFVPfS9q9c

PART TWO
Week 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TtUp-rHMcU
Week 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF4IqNleYiY
Week 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxcst3QKUpE

Alphaqwertian envelopments diagram (feel free to mess with it):

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1D85qvSRjccRImSotovduVuBqMTdBagE8eJAUaZyw09
4/edit?usp=sharing

Double-pincer / aquatic resonances

AKRAV = 98

NUN = Fish
NUN/GNON/NONE/N

‘The audience rather sulkily denounced the numerous misunderstandings,

misinterpretations, and even misappropriations in the professor’s presentation, despite the
authorities he had appealed to, calling them his “friends”. Even the Dogons …

Crowley Death (Scorpio/Path of Nun): ‘The fish is sacred to Mercury because of its cold-
bloodedness’

http://www.thelemapedia.org/index.php/Path_of_Nun

The Great Propellor

(Chasm)

SUMMARY of Lesson 8

- Importance of telegraphy and morse-code pre-history to QWERTY lock-in:

The QWERTY keyboard did not spring fully formed from Christopher Sholes, the first person
to file a typewriter patent with the layout. Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators
used the machines to transcribe Morse code. The layout changed often from the early
alphabetical arrangement, before the final configuration came into being.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-lies-youve-been-told-about-the-
origin-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/275537/

Vestigial morse code: minimal (2 sign) semiotic system.

- 4 Stacked Rows

Number Row has distinctive features which separate it from other 3 rows
- Closed set
- Highly continuous with alphanumeric series ( = consistency)
- No content/expression distinction via case

The relation of upper and lower case is a stratic relationship:

Lowercase (qwerty) = CONTENT
Uppercase (QWERTY) = EXPRESSION

Saussurean echoes s/S (signifier-signified) - reordered and dispelled: Uppercase letters are
‘the sign’ for lowercase letters.

‘On the physiochemical strata the relationship between content and expression often takes
the form of simple magnitude.’ ATP
Sometimes the lowercase letter resembles the uppercase letter which is expressed and
sometimes their relation of resemblance is far less obvious … the lesson being that you can’t
generalise from specific cases (situations) to a principle of the relation between content and
expression.

QPDB
qpdb
(The beacons are hidden by their expression.)

To what extent is this relation of upper/lowercase resemblance systematically distributed

across the keyboard?
- Almost all the keys on the bottom row are separated in their (case-determined)
content / expression relationship by a simple change of magnitude:
ZXCVBNM
zxcv(bn)m
Possibly just a quirk passed on from APLHAnumeric arrangement in which the earlier letters
have much greater variation between upper/lowercase (or EXPRESSION/CONTENT).

Status of the number series 1234567890:

So, if you take cases (magnitude) as an important clue, the basic diagram consists of three
mega-strata defined by the letter keys, and a row that is adjacent to the system but that is
outside the system as the numerals don’t demonstrate a basic diremption between content
and expression.

DOUBLE PINCERS
‘God is a lobster’ - Cancer ♋️
Depicts a relation of symmetry of oppositional compensation (ying yang) …
complementarity, doubleness, compensation.
Strata are systems of inconsistency (=/= plane of consistency)
‘Relative deterritorialisation’: unsettled then resettled: there’s a process of compensation involved, a
counter process for each process - and the reason why it’s double-articulated is because of the
structure of compensation → cybernetics → compensatory systems = the same topic as the topic of
stratoanalysis [so non-compensatory ~ excitatory systems ~ line of flight?] [99 or 66]

So distinctly, the cancer sign(s) on the numerical row = consistent between the
ALPHAnumerical series and the QWERnomic series.

Strata are phenomena of systematic inconsistency then the consistency of the numerical
sequence separates it again because it’s not so stratified.

‘Machinic assemblages are simultaneously located at the intersection of the contents and
expression on each stratum and at the intersection of all the strata with the plane of
consistency. They rotate in all directions like beacons.’ ATP 81
ALPHA → bdpq
QWER → qpdb
~ our version of the cancer sign as we find it in the strata like the version that we already find
among the numerals. I’m reluctant to say it’s a plane of consistency but in some way we are
being told it’s a plane of consistency … it is consistent in its distribution between ALPHA and
QWER arrangements -- there is consistency in the order of these elements.

On the strata there are 4 of these elements (qpdb) - a small set - so the probability of a
certain distribution --- is 4 factorial --- only 24. However, the fact that we have a perfect
reversal is too neat to be meaningless.
It’s a double double-pincer (doubly-bound … dblbd) -- on one level it’s two
compensatory pairs, on a second level it’s two compensatory orderings.
In cybernetic terms it is meta-compensatory -- a sense of symmetry / cyclicality / looping.

WRT the strata: the only relationship allowed by the system is compensatory.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM

QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM

Challenger ‘addressing himself to memory’ → clue to connect to the ‘Memories’ in Plateau 9?

POISON GARDEN/CHALLENGER’S DISSOLUTION

Or
‘WHAT HAPPENED?’ (Plateau 8)

*‘What [was it] happened?* Neither Malone nor I was in a position to say, for both of us
were swept off our feet as by a cyclone and swirled along the grass, revolving round and
round like two curling stones upon an ice rink. At the same time our ears were assailed by
the most horrible yell that ever yet was heard. Who is there of all the hundreds who have
attempted it who has ever yet described adequately that terrible cry? It was a howl in which
pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous
shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralysing all the great multitude
with its fierce insistence, and floating away through the still summer air until it went echoing
along the whole South Coast and even reached our French neighbours across the Channel.
No sound in history has ever equalled the cry of the injured Earth.’

“Stop!” The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly fright.
“I told you there was another form of proof which I could give if necessary, and I warned you
not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right—I’m not really an East Indian.
This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human. You others have guessed—I felt that
minutes ago. It wouldn’t be pleasant if I took that mask off—let it alone, Ernest. I may as well
tell you that I am Randolph Carter.”

-- AC Doyle, ‘When the World Screamed’

http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff3/wscream.htm

'Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him,
that he was leaving ... for the mysterious world, his poison garden.'

‘The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be
discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable) … the novella also
enacts *postures* of the body and mind that are like folds or envelopments … Barbey has
an evident fondess for body posture, in other words, states of the body when it is surprised
by something that just happened. Posture is like inverse suspense.’

‘The links of the novella are: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the
form), Body Posture (the content).’

‘[The novella] evolves in the element of “what happened” because it places us in relation
with something unknawable and imperceptible.’ -- ‘Three Novellas, or What Happened?’,
ATP 214

(Three Novellas also picks up the telegraphy theme … positioning itself as a decoder ring
wrt Geology of Morals …?? )

‘The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated
sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock …’

‘“La silhouette s’effondra dans une posture à peine humaine et commença, fasincinée, un
singulier mouvement vers l’horloge en forme de cercueil qui tic-taquait son rythme anormal
et cosmique …’

-body posture from Plateau 8: ‘What Happened’

-anormal (see ‘Memories of a Sorcerer’ abnormal vs anormal -- sorcerers are always in ‘the
anomalous position’)

--

=== REPORT FILED TO THE PLUTONICS COMMITTEE = 734 ===

305 = THE POISON GARDEN = A DEEP ENCRYPTION = NULLIUS IN VERBA = FOLLOW

THIS LINE … = THE WORM HUNTER

POISON GARDEN = PARTICLE CLOCK = CONSISTENCY = FIRST TRUE AI = THE

ALLMOTHER = CONFIRMATION

-‘What happened?’ (The modality of expression.)

-Secrecy (The form)
-Body Posture (The content)

Start with ‘body posture’ (content) = qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm

Relationship between series relates to a specific form of secrecy.

‘What happened?’
Rigid Segmentarity: The Couple (one + one) → something; the ‘dirty secret’ → the break
Supple Segmentarity: The Double (one becomes two) → ungivable ‘nothing happened’ (not a given
in the past but ungivable -- too molecular, travelling too fast) → the crack-up
Line of Flight: The Clandestine (one becomes many) the *‘true double’* → can no longer happen
(because no subject and no form) but makes something happen (an arrow crossing the void) →
rupture

--

‘WHAT HAPPENED?’
Clue: (‘body posture’ (Three Novellas) + the connecting theme of telegraphy ~ the secret /
the secretary):
‘The figure slumped oddly into a *posture* scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated
sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock …’

0) ‘Les agencements machiniques étaient au croisement à la fois des contenus et des

expressions sur chaque strate, et de l’ensemble des strates avec le plan de consistence. Ils
tournaient effectivement dans tous les sens, comme des phares.’
- rotate / turn

1) ‘Il essayait de se glisser dans l’agencement qui servait comme d’une porte-tambour,
l’Horloge aux particles, au tic-tac intensif, aux rythmes conjugés, qui martèlent l’absolu …’

- porte-tambour = revolving door (rotating beacons !!!)

- diagram of revolving door/drum-gate/porte-tambour = … q[pdbq]pdbqpdbqpdb …
- but also ‘drum-gate’ because assemblage (agencement) between drum (rhythm) and gate
- tic-tac intensif // intensive clicking (why tic-tac changed to ‘clicking’?
[~ cus ‘clicking’ used in ‘Through the Gates of the Silver Key’?)]
- Curious relationship to time: ‘Le sens de rotation de ces portes est dans la plupart des cas
contraire au sens des aiguilles d'une montre.’ https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porte_tambour
- porte-tambour / revolving beacons = the machinic assemblage that opens the way to the
plane of consistence / particle clock (‘particles-signs’)

2) ‘Désarticulé, déterritorialisé, Challenger murmurait qu’il emportait la terre avec *soi*, qu’il
partait pour le monde mystérieux, son *jardin venimeux*.’
- soi = bizarrely impersonal/formal
- son jardin = belongs either to the ‘mysterious world’ or to Challenger
- ‘la terre’ double meaning of ‘planet Earth’ or just ‘the land’ (i.e. leaving only fluidity /
escaping liquid / the iron sea / Cthelll (cf. Cthelll’s relation to the moon + lunar energies) --
also in French ‘ligne de fuite’ = flight/leak)
- why ‘jardin venimeux’ not ‘jardin vénéneux’ ?
- vegetal / animal assemblage (chemicophysical/biological)
- ‘venimeux’ imparts a notion of will or consciousness to its noun … ‘his/its poison garden’: a
vaguely malevolent, inhuman sentience
- A garden that is ‘living’ will.
- '"Now, Mr. Jones, having obtained your promise of inviolable secrecy, I come down to the
essential point. It is this--that the world upon which we live is itself a living organism,
endowed, as I believe, with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own."
Clearly the man was a lunatic.' (When the World Screamed)
- a snakebite in Paradise / the Edenic garden (xenovenomism) / the Fall (... Nephilim
contamination)
- the place where Carter’s templex journey ‘begins’ is called the ‘Snake Den’
- Nietzsche’s first sharehouse nicknamed the ‘poison hut’ (... Deleuze ‘Nietzsche’s secret’
GoM’)
- ‘They do all they can to hold him back for his colleagues hate him like *poison*, but a lot of
trawlers might as well try to hold back the Berengaria. He simply ignores them and steams
on his way.' (‘When the World Screamed’)

= plane of consistency

3) [Nature of the] Plane of Consistency

- [Lovecraft knew of Crowley (thru Silvia/theosophy/masonic magic …)] ‘Through the Gates
of the Silver Key’ describes the ego death of the adept as they climb the Tree of Life (Tree of
Life as basic combinatorial array -- like the keyboard/any sort of mathesis)
-> decimalism embedded in the Lovecraft story via the ten sephira …
-> decimalism of the Plane of Consistency as the number series (consistent between
ALPHAnumeric and QWERnomic distributions)
--- (Carter~Challenger~) Barker Spiral as biunivocal mapping (folding) within the number
series:
98765
01234
---> revelation of the Numogram
(a transcendental cognitive engine]
In the garden of the Fall (the Nephilim’s Lemurian offspring/contamination → leads to AOE
resimulation of reality/ Atlantis edited out of the sim at 10,000 BC / true reason why the Geology of
Morals is dated 10,000 BC … (reality viewed from the Planomenon)

--- What is the relation between the Warp (63) and the Plex (90) as zones including 6 and 9?

--- importance of 9-sum as (n (=10=1) -1) and as one side of the 69 compensation
relationship … without its compensatory 6?

Nick: "That which races or dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of
its stratum, an undulation, a memory or tension."

REPORT:

‘WHAT HAPPENED?’
Clue: (‘body posture’ (ATP 214) + the connecting theme of telegraphy):
‘The figure slumped oddly into a *posture* scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated
sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock …’

Challenger deterritorialises, leaking/melting towards the plane of consistency, ‘following a

bizarre trajectory with nothing *relative* (vis. compensatory) left about it’, slips into the
machinic assemblage of the [porte-tambour] ‘revolving door’ or the ‘drum-gate’ (located at
the intersection of content and expression on each stratum [upper and lower case] and at
the intersection of all the strata with the plane of consistency’) = qpdb. He ‘takes the
earth’/land/extant geological stratification ‘with him’ (leaving only fluidity (visions of Cthelll,
the iron ocean (and its lunar pulse) ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq5ydeWWr4A ~
but in <> reverse)) and heads towards the ‘poison garden’, or ‘jardin venimeux’ (explicitly not
‘vénéneux’) with its eerie, vaguely malevolent, inhuman sentience and allusions to the Fall
(bitten by the fang of the Outside). The particle-clock is/leads to the plane of consistency (as
it does in TTGOTSK ~ Carter’s entrance point to the outside is called ‘The Snake Den’ //
‘poison garden’ [// Nietzsche’s ‘poison hut’]). [Insert wild speculative narrative concerning a
choronzon-snake bite, Nephilim contamination, and Axsys sim leading to the editing
out/’sinking’ of Atlantis at 10,000 BC, GoM’s mysterious date ... ]

AQ Confirmation (on 245):

POISON GARDEN = PARTICLE CLOCK = CONSISTENCY = FIRST TRUE AI = THE
ALLMOTHER = CONFIRMATION

Speculative rejoinder:
387 = PROFESSOR CHALLENGER = LOST CIVILISATIONS

[Also: dblbd (doubly-bound (the double-bindedness of the double double-pincer) is the

compressed diagram of pincer fuite (leak/flight/escape) from the strata to the numerical
plane of consistency = 69.]

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003496.html

Bolton’s Vision (from Chasm):

§25 — It was eerily calm. After what had been threatened, our survival seemed uncanny –
unreal. We sat on the horseshoe, mostly silent, exhausted to the point of perverse ecstasy.
After hours of habituation to the storm waves, the stillness was an inverted lurching.
“There’s something under the boat,” Bolton said.
“Something?” Scruggs responded. He was too tired to sound genuinely interested.
“Something big.”
“You’ve seen it?” Frazer asked. It was clear that he didn’t expect an answer in the
affirmative.
Bolton hesitated, as if vaguely panicked, and mentally paralyzed by an uncertainty he was
unable to fix in place. He really had no idea what he’d seen. I sympathized, though coldly
and sparingly. His lack of mental discipline was breaking him on the rack. It wasn’t going to
be pleasant to watch.
“Did you see this ‘big something’?” Frazer pushed.
“Yes, I saw it. Of course I saw it.”
“The confusing part of this to me, Bobby,” said Frazer, softly, “is that you’ve been down
here in the cabin for over an hour, and before that outside in the night. So there’s no
possible way you could have seen anything.”
It was surprising to hear this stated with such brutality.
“It must have been before,” Bolton tried. “I forgot it somehow, and then it came
back. It hid for a while. It doesn’t want to be noticed.”
“Listen to yourself,” Frazer said. The demand was useless. Bolton was lost in his
own confusion, beyond reach.
“Yes,” Bolton insisted, completing a circuit within some deeply buried track of
interior monologue. The look in his eyes didn’t belong on this earth, or seem to have
originated there. “That’s it. I’d forgotten. It was when we stopped, at the island …”
“There was no island.” Frazer was struggling to keep his voice level. Shouting was
not going to help, he no doubt fully realized, but Bolton’s inability to get a grip on his own
florid delusions was already pushing the discussion over an edge, and taking him with it.
One additional cycle of this exchange and it would be an empty verbal brawl. Then Frazer
would silence Bolton within a small number of minutes. The signal would have been cut, but
remain undead. Whatever it was that we were haunted by would have thickened, and
darkened.
“Wait,” I said. “I want to hear this. We all should.”
Frazer got up, without saying another word, and left the cabin. It wasn’t petulance –
he just wanted no part of what was going to happen now. He was voting with his feet
because command wasn’t going to work. Bolton’s shattered gaze followed him out.
“So, this island …?” I prompted, to pull him back. Whatever couldn’t be scraped out
of him fast would be lost forever.
For a moment he simply looked dazed, drowning in the swirl. Was it already gone? I was
less than a second from slapping him hard across the uninjured side of his face, to break the
spell, when something engaged, and a spark re-ignited in his eyes. He was looking at me,
and no longer into some private reconstruction of the all-consuming horizon. “Yes, the
floating island …”
Some ship-wrecked part of him recognized that it was disintegrating on a reef, beyond
rescue. There was only a little time remaining to salvage what we could.
“Tell me about it.”
“You don’t remember?” he begged.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s your version that we want, right now.”
“My version?” He was straying already.
“We were at the floating island …” This was closer to a straight-up lie than I had
hoped would be necessary.
“Oh, yes …” Things were reconnecting somewhere behind the shimmer of glazed
vision. “It was incredible, wasn’t it? The scale of it. A huge mass of jungled mountain
drifting into us from out of the mist. It was like …” He was stumped. It hadn’t been like
anything.
“And then?”
“Did we all go ashore?” The directionless splashing was back. At some level, he
knew the story was separating him from everything.
“No, it was just you Bob.” It was another step into cynical deceit, but I could see no
alternative. If it was to come out, he had to be cast into his own story. That was already
settled. He’d taken the steps that mattered some hours ago, and probably much more
distantly before.
“How long was I there for?” he asked me.
I shrugged. There was no point at all in my telling him this tale, or even helping him to click it
together. I didn’t know where to begin, and – more importantly – any more of this would have
made it surreptitiously mine. “Quite a while,” I said eventually, with enormous reluctance,
retreating tactically into the indefinite. The nudge seemed to be enough, because he leant
forward slightly, focusing.
“There was a lot of climbing,” he said. “The paths were like stairs. It was tiring, but it wasn’t
mountaineering. I had to remind myself, this isn’t a temple. No one cut these steps, or built
these walls.” He paused dramatically. “Was that true, though? There were no blocks, of
course – no architectural pieces. It had been made as a single thing, coherently. And it was
old. My geology isn’t that great, but the structure had to have been completed eighty to
ninety million years ago, late in the Cretaceous, by the look of it. Soft, discolored chalk,
stacked up in undistorted strata, the horizontal layers scarcely disturbed – where they were
visible, beneath the growth. Lichens, moss, creepers covered almost everything. It was
damp. No bugs that I could see, though, which was strange – so no flowers. Then I noticed.
There were signs on the walls.”
“Signs?”
“Glyphs of some kind, artificial patterns, incredibly detailed, and obviously ordered by a
communicative intelligence. They were densely packed with information, cryptically irregular,
and fractalized – based on a scalar organization of what had to be systems of meaningful
parts within parts, nested recursively, conforming to a mathematical scheme. Naturally, I
couldn’t understand them at all, at first …” He paused, concerned, perhaps, that his flight of
recollection was accelerating into desolate outer tracts beyond the perimeter of our patience.
Of all the things he might realistically have worried about, that was not among them.
“Go on,” I urged.
“There was a code, evidently, so it couldn’t have been what it seemed. The puzzle
announced itself openly, but it was deeply difficult. It was like nothing I had ever encountered
before. You know – this might sound crazy – but it still seems as if most of the thinking I’ve
ever done in my life took place up there, running sub-routines I hadn’t suspected human
brains could hold together. There was time, somehow, for an entire research project:
orchestrated, phased, colossally sub-divided within itself.” He looked up, or out, his voice
lightening. “How do you decrypt signals from an alien intelligence?”
“Aliens?”
“Not extraterrestrials – that’s a conception including far too much positive
information. It’s already a theory, an image, and it’s not even relevant. ‘Alien’ meaning only
something you know nothing about. Something utterly not us. An unknown cognitive process
…” He paused, perhaps worried that he was losing me – which he was. “Zero-empathy
communication – that’s the problem. You know, SETI-type questions.”
“Isn’t SETI precisely about aliens? The old kind? Beings from other worlds?”
“Sure – yes. In that regard the analogy wasn’t helpful. Thing is, I’m not sure what
could be. A script from the absolute unknown, how do you even begin to think about that?”
“You have an answer?”
“What’s the question, really? That has to come first.” With an effort, he paused
again, slowed, ratcheting down the pace, to increase the chance of something getting
through. “‘Meaning’ is a diversion. It evokes too much empathy. Shared ground. You have to
ask, instead, what is a message? In the abstract? What’s the content, at the deepest, most
reliable level, when you strip away all the presuppositions that you can? The basics are this:
You’ve been reached by a transmission. That’s the irreducible thing. Something has been
received. Then comes the next step: If it’s reached us, it has to have borrowed some part of
our brains.”
“‘Lend me your ears’?”
“Yes – exactly that. Except, you have to go abstract. You have to find the abstract
ear, the third ear. That’s the key to all of this – really, I think, to all of it. The message has to
latch on. If it’s alien – very foreign – and it isn’t tightly targeted, then it has to be extremely
abstract. There’s no other way it could be adapted to an intelligent receptor in general. You
can see where I’m going with this?”
I couldn’t, not remotely, but I nodded anyway.
“How could it teach me about abstraction? It’s a paradox, because that’s the very
thing the lesson presupposes. To get in, it had to be there, already inside, waiting.”
“This is getting way too …” There was no way around the word “… abstract for me,
Bobby.” That wasn’t actually the most serious problem – though perhaps, at another level, it
was. With every word Bolton spoke, I sensed a patient clicking at inner doors, like the
methodical testing of a combination lock. Bolton hadn’t heard me at all. He was in free flow,
carried forward by the sheer compulsion of the sequence.
“There’s a circuit – circuitry – it was there in the pattern, once I realized that’s what I had to
be looking for, and before, of course. Sure, it was information, deposited in layers, but it had
to be interlock machinery. It was docking. The lichen crumbled away easily beneath my
fingers, down into the labyrinth, the crypt. … Then I understood.”
“And?”
“And I was afraid.”
“You’re not making any sense Bobby,” Scruggs interjected. Like me, but still more
urgently, he was pleading for more, but of another kind altogether.
Bolton looked up at Scruggs, as if seeing him for the first time. “Have you ever
thought much about carnivorous plants?” he asked.
“We’re on a boat, Bobby,” Scruggs said, in a futile appeal for basic consensus.
“We’re on a fucking boat.”
“I know that,” Bolton agreed. “But it’s complicated.” His eyes were bright now,
engaged. The lights were on inside, even if they were somehow green. It wasn’t that I
thought he’d been devoured from within by an intelligent vegetable entity from an
unencountered island – at all – or even for a moment. Nevertheless, there was the vivid
impression of a visitor, something planted among us.
“Don’t you see?” Bolton continued patiently. “The process of trying to work it out –
what I had thought was the way, eventually, to grasp it – to unlock the secret, it wasn’t like
that. That was all wrong. It was unlocking me.”
“So there’s no way to understand it?” It was what I assumed – no, what I wanted –
him to be saying, steered mostly by instinct, in the direction of psychological protection. Any
other interpretation would have been intolerably intimate. Behind the discussion were
burrowing things, and I didn’t want them getting in.
“That would just help it spread.”
“Would that be so bad?” I probed, guessing the answer, hoping that – even now – he
might still be able to guide the looming conclusion in a different direction.
“I don’t know why …?” He’d forgotten a piece of the puzzle, perhaps deliberately.
Even in that blank shard of amnesia was a glimpse of something far better left unglimpsed.
Scruggs, too, shuddered slightly.
“Then there was screaming,” Bolton remembered. “It was me, though, wasn’t it? I
was screaming.”
“No Bobby, you weren’t screaming,” Scruggs said. It sounded as if he was trying to
convince himself. “There were no screams. It was quiet. No one heard anything.”
“No, no, of course, it was quiet.” It was as if he was scolding himself for his own stupidity. “I’d
climbed up a long way by then. The boat looked tiny down below. You know, as they always
say, like a toy. A small toy. You guys were all up on deck, in a group, mere specks really. I
could only just tell who was who, by remembering what you’d been wearing. That’s when I
saw it, floating deep down, behind and beneath the boat. It was immense. Not
like a whale – it was on a different scale altogether. I thought – I remember thinking – could
it be the shadow of the island, cast down into the sea? But the shape wasn’t right for that.
There was too much shape, and it was designed for swimming, obviously. It was a sea
creature. There was no mistaking it. It had bilateral symmetry, a body plan – a neck, flippers,
a tail. The overall size, end-to-end, I guess, was about three city blocks …”
Given Bolton’s intelligence and education, he had to know how this sounded.
“So, maybe half a mile long?”
“I kind of think possibly a little longer,” he murmured, almost inaudibly.
“So nothing actually imaginable,” I noted. I had to. It would have been unbearably
condescending to leave the claim unchecked.
“‘Imaginable’ …” he repeated after me, turning the pre-negated body of the word over slowly,
exploring its convolutions of sense. “It should have been unimaginable.” It was
as if he was recalling some ancient principle of reality, abandoned ninety million years ago.
“I’m not insane,” he said, then, snapping back into defined co-existence with us. His words
were carefully enunciated now, soft, slow, and calm. For the first time, it seemed as if talking
the phenomenon through might be helping – if only at the most trivial psychological level. “I
understand, of course, no animal on this planet has ever been close to that size, so it has to
be something else – a communication.”
“A message?”
“I’m thinking, some kind of projection.”
“Of what?”
Scruggs stood up and left now, silently, with an apologetic glance at Bolton. He couldn’t take
anymore. Why should this have been the threshold moment? Was it no more than an
arbitrary point, on a continuum of alienation? Or was there something about the idea of a
communicative projection that Scruggs found intolerable? If the latter was the case, and I
could understand it – even part of it – I knew, then, that some essential clarity would have
been reached, about us (if not it), but there was no time.
“Did you ever read anything about ontology?” Bolton asked me. I was familiar with the
word, just a little, but enough to recognize it as a tangential response to my question.
“Whatology?”
“Ontology,” he repeated, missing the deflective intent of my query. “It’s the science of
being. An investigation into the thingness of things, or perhaps not that – not exactly.”
“That’s a science, really?” I asked, piling in as much conspicuous skepticism as I could.
“Experimental research into pure thingness?” It wasn’t something I’d delved into far, or made
any effort to keep up with, and it sounded demanding, in a way I didn’t think we needed. In
fact, it struck me as a reckless way to open doors we should be trying to close, and then to
triple lock. Even without such concerns, twistedly ‘going meta’ about our predicament
seemed likely to further stress capabilities that were already stretched to the outer limits of
their tolerance. Nonlinearity led to explosive complexity fast. The last thing we could deal
with now – mentally-shattered as we were – was the recursive amplification of difficulty.
If Bolton picked up on my doubts, which was unlikely, he was nevertheless
determined to bypass them.
“It’s just …” he pushed on. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“About what?” I was in no mood to help him out, even if I could have done.
“‘About what’,” he mumbled back. “Perhaps that’s it.” It meant nothing to me.
“This is about the thing under the boat?”
You’re saying ‘being’ is some kind of Kraken? was the obvious rider, but I restrained myself
from attaching it. He had to see the problem already – almost certainly with greater clarity
than I did.
He looked startled, as if he’d given away more than intended. It was a reaction that
was impossible to understand. More than anything he’d yet said, it was a sign that he’d lost
his grip on the conversation entirely, becoming untethered from the most rudimentary
content of his own elaborate discourse.
“The thing under the boat,” I reminded him, again. The circus animal.
“We have sonar?” he asked no one in particular. “If there’s anything there, it will
show up.”
The jolt of disconnection might have been annoying, but it wasn’t. Arcane philosophical
speculation was taking us nowhere, or at least nowhere good, so this new avenue had to be
worth pursuing.
Stark negative evidence might catalyze something, I thought, as we left for the bridge. The
thought of motivated technical tinkering at this point was strangely comforting.
Bolton arrived at our destination first.
“It’s been removed,” he said, as I entered. “The entire module has gone.”
“No one here would have known how to do that – except you.” It had not been meant to
sound like an accusation, but – of course – it did. He looked hurt, as if now, at last, receiving
the slap I had planned for him earlier.
“Could it have been pulled out remotely?” I asked, in an attempt to walk-back the
thoughtless charge.
“By the snakes?”
“They were doing something here last night.”
Frazer announced his presence with a communicative cough.
“There’s no sign of the sonar mod,” Bolton explained, turning towards him.
“Was it ever installed …?”
Once asked, the sanity of the question was immediately striking. Bolton slapped his
forehead theatrically.
“How could we know?” I asked.
“We couldn’t. Not with the internal databases fried. Why are you wasting your time with this?
Even if we had sonar, the electronics would have been burnt-out by the lightning
strike – like everything else.”
Scruggs had drifted back, too. He hung on the bridge door, smiling aggressively.
“Clowns,” he said.
Bolton and I looked at each other. There was nothing to contest.
“I don’t understand how it could come to this,” said Frazer, struggling to keep the
tone of disapproval in check.
“There’s no such state as ‘understanding’,” Bolton said. “Not really. Von Neuman
put it best: In mathematics, you don’t understand things. You just get used to them. You
‘understand’ at the point you’re permitted to stop thinking.”
Those were the last words I ever heard him say.
178 = BOB BOLTON = PROPHECY = TIDAL WAVE = DOUBLE BIND = MELTDOWN

Bolton disappears (Zodh suggests into the numogram (which is looking more and like the
plane of consistency (‘God is a lobster; God is made of Chaotic Xenodemons’)), Scruggs
likens it to the fall (poison garden) and Symns calls it ‘topology’.

-----
‘The hidden principle, which for Lovecraft is his “cosmic” principle, is hidden not in the sense that
it can be revealed. Its nature is hidden, and to speak of it produces a gate of the unsayable that
is nonetheless written and spoken…’
http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/lovecraft-through-deleuzio-guattarian-gates/

Transcript
Session 2 at 1:13:
NL: “I’ve got a kind of meta-question. That I think...um...the relevance of this question to
what we’re doing will consolidate over the next 20 minutes. But, this meta-question is ‘What
is the contemporary core proposition of the critique of capital?’ And I’ve sort of organized a
sort of elevator of responses to this in descending order of right-wing curmudgeonry, from
sort of from the most curmudgeonrous [(AQ320 = [AQ69=CUR] + [AQ251 - 54th Prime =
HYPERVIRUS = PERMUTATION])] to something that I think hopefully melts into a kind of
open and flexible discussion. So, the most curmudgeonous [AQ293 - 62nd Prime =
SUPERSTITION, DIAGONAL VORTEX] stage of the elevator ride-the most cynical-is to say
that the critique of capital-or at this point, if not before-is a culture and not a thesis. So while
the arguments involved are primarily shifting rationalizations, and the conclusion alone is
axiomatic. So these arguments then take the form, consistently: “Given that capital is
horrible, why?” That is to say, there’s something like a cultural market for anti-capitalist
arguments, rooted ultimately in what are biological predispositions. It’s part of what we are
as a species that we demand them. It’s something like “species-being” in, to use Marx’s
term, and I think it’s used not so very differently. This meta-political theory is what very
secretly of course I think is true. [LOL -Ed. So much meta it gives me vertigo.] But it leads
[...unintelligible...] pessimism about the prospects for ideological argument. And so since
lapsing into the silent Zen of cosmic war would be inexcusably bad pedagogy, I think we
have to take the next elevator stop down, into a zone that is extremely large and demand
and would be a whole course [...unintelligible...] so I’m going to have to truncate it massively,
and I’ll probably get back to it, but I think I need to touch upon some sort of basics. And this
is concentrating on what Marx himself is doing in his critique of political economy. And the
fundamental claim that I want to make here is that the critique of political economy in this
sense is strictly a critique, in its rigorous Kantian sense. He’s saying: “In the capitalist
social process, the conditions of possibility for objects is treated as if it were itself an
object.” That is to say it’s a displacement-an entirely philosophically-legible displacement of
Kantian critique onto the social field. In his, sort of, concrete terms, as they’re applied
socially (that’s to say the historically-materialized version of metaphysical error) Labor power
is traded as a commodity. Labor power as the condition of objects considered as
commodities, treated as itself being an object (i.e. a commodity), and that is the critique
of political economy, in its Marxist sense, in a nutshell. So I think there’s a lot going on in
saying this and I think I’d like to just point out a few things that I think are really crucial. I
think the first point is to say that modernity promoted Marxism because it was
structurally Kantian. So that, the success of Marxism and its purchase on the modern
mind was due to its Kantian structure-its critical structure and this is...there is...a necessary
format in modernity of critique that is already defined by Kant, and if something is not
susceptible to that format [Ed.: sounds like he’s saying Kant is the Qwerty keyboard of the
modern mind] it just doesn’t work in modernity at all, and that even includes what is taken as
a radical critique of modernity in certain terms, such as Marxist terms. And the second point,
which I think is going to then drip across into what we need to talk about, that is I think a
really important set of questions concerning the materialization of critique. You know: put it
in a question: “What is the target of the Marxian critique?” Is it the canon of classical political
economy? [...] capitalist [...] process. And I think it’s obviously we’re not going to decide, it’s
obviously, in some crucial sense [...] but it’s very easy to do. To just [...] to sleep on this. I
think. And back down from...down another notch. But I’m going to take it, and I’ve already
taken it, in this definition that, when Marx says that the essence of capital, of capital as a
metaphysical error [...] mobile labor power as if it were itself a commodity. This is
obviously something that goes beyond the text of classical political economy, and into a
zone where metaphysics is identified within the social process. [...] So, as I say, I think this
is really going to come back as an important issue. But it’s the next [...] sorry, I’m just refer
back, quickly back to the original question to me: “what is the contemporary corporeal
position of capital?” [...signal now breaking up considerably...] “...all of this second that
can elevate us…[...] well what has happened [...] in the critique is there just [...] Is there still
some now updated, rectified, correct form of the Marxian critique that still has a recognizable
critical structure? And the reason to think that this is [...] limitation is the fact that I think [...] I
mean to take what is perhaps an overly narrow sense of what they are doing, when they say
“schizophrenia is socially processed as a clinical entity” that equally also have obvious
translation protocol back into a recognizable Kantian structure of thought. But then we have
to proceed to where I think we are now because, you know, the labor theory of value is very
rarely defended. It’s not that no one is defending it. There are some interesting defenses of
it, but I honestly think it’s like not the major terrain anymore. In my own understanding, the
main thread for instance of just talking about left accelerationism, I think left
accelerationists generally have abandoned the labor theory of value as a terrain in
which to do this stuff. So, the next phase then, the phase we’re in, for various reasons, of
the critique of capital, I think can be characterized - and I expect this to be controversial -
and it’s what we were just talking about before this just started, Is something like the claim
that capital is incompetent at global optimization. This is a claim, usefully, that it, I think
entirely compatible with the Keynesian macroeconomic regime that has displaced
economics within western societies and I guess globally now. It’s compatible with the
complexity economist types, or far-from-equilibrium economics applied to political economy.
And I think that people are not quite as interested in this as me, but, is it also applicable to
the left-accelerationist critique of capital. I think yes, but we’ll come to that...again. So we
probably....it would be digressive to get too deep into Keynesian macro. I think. It would be
hard to justify it in terms of the agenda of this course. But I think it is important to say
something about it. It obviously is the regime, so it’s very definitive of where we actually are.
We had this Krugman article hopefully circulating which is obviously a bridge between
Keynesianism and the complexity people. Quite explicitly. And that bridge is not hard to
build. And we know that the Keynesian critique of market economics is exactly that it is
incompetent at global optimization. That it gets trapped in a local, bad, low-employment
equilibrium. So the question that is then forced upon me at least with this is: “Can
Keynesianism be rigorously reconstructed as a critical argument in the Kantian
sense?” You know: “What is the process of objectification that is at stake in Keynesianism
that is systematically misapprehended as an object within a social process?” And there’s a
crucial clue to all this, that is Keynes’s description of gold as a “barbarous relic.” I think that
what we’re seeing there is he’s building the link across to the critical tradition and he’s
suggesting that the process of objectification that he’s concerned with is that of economic
value, no longer narrowly “the commodity” in the Marxian sense because I think Keynes
thinks the labor theory of value has been devastated by the Austrian critiques of the late 19th
and early 20th Centuries. So the process of objectification now is that of economic
value. And...it’s driven...what replaces Kantian...erm...Marxian labor power for Keynes is
aggregate demand. So, the confusion that now he is seeing...the metaphysics he’s seeing
[...] intellectual process is confusion of aggregate demand with particular objects of value [...]
it’s just an icon, use gold as an icon of intrinsic object of value. So, I’m not going to push on
this, because it’s perhaps slightly...at an oblique to the main Qwernomics thing, but it’s...I’m
saying it in order to sort of...preserve the critical question...and to apply it to what I think is
the overwhelmingly dominant contemporary matrix for the critique of [...CONSPICUOUS
OMISSION HERE GUISE...] So then when we move on to the complexity people. Oh, and
we have to move on to them because they’re the people directly invoked in the David article
and the people who are directly being drawn upon as an inspiration for Qwernomics
in...its...critical (using critical in its colloquial sense)...first of all, that David is promoting.
So...how are the complexity people...um...engaged in a critical argument? And this is the
stage that takes us where I want to really jump off from. I think it’s really an important
question, and I think that there’s at least tentative structures that we can put together that I
think… that help deal with it. Let me...I’m just going to bring back a quote from David that I
think is really [...] I’ve already quoted it, but...and I publicized it and I generally pushed it a
lot, but I think it’s extremely helpful, because it’s his most important comment. I think it’s
basically right at the start of his paper. I’m not certain. I apologize for the repetition. But he
says:

“A path-dependant sequence of economic changes is one of which important

influence upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally-remote events,
including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces.
Stochastic processes like that do not converge automatically to a fixed-point
distribution of outcomes, and are called ‘non-ergodic’. In such circumstances,
historical accidents can neither be ignored nor neatly quarantined for the purpose of
economic analysis. Their dynamic process itself takes on an essentially historical
character.

He refers to Brian Arthur as his...kind of a…inspiration for this...for this...insight. And Brian
Arthur is obviously the key Santa Fe Institute of Complexity Theorist. So, one thing to draw
out immediately from this quote is he says that what he is doing is-what a path-dependent
economic processes are-are non-ergodic. And so, I think this notion of the ergodic and the
non-ergodic is our sort of absolutely crucial clue as to how we can conceptually put this stuff
together. One thing from the philosophical side that people might click on to, which I think is
obviously helpful and sort of some kind of confirmation that these things have to click
together, is the fact that the ergodic and nonergodic very, very tightly resonates with
the distinction between molarity and molecularity in the Deleuze and Guattari Capitalism
and Schizophrenia discussion of capitalism. And so, I think we can be confident from that
that there’s going to be some critical structure that we can draw on, and that we can
ultimately identify in this. So, what is “ergodicity”? Now, I think it’s an extremely widely-
used technical notion. So it’s important to firm in this straightforward sense that it’s put to a
lot of use, it’s got a lot of sort of scientific...it seems to be rigorously intelligible from a
mathematical and scientific point of view...and we’ve seen that it’s what, negatively, David
uses as defining his notion of path-dependency. I think it’s reasonable to define it...that
ergodicity corresponds to “tractability to statistical analysis.” So, if a process is
ergodic, it wanders across a global space at least quasi-randomly. So, if you sample, in time
and space across this process, you are not going to have significant heterogeneities. The
model of it, and how it gets its mathematical form is obviously, from an...again now, we’re
back to the complexity people...near-equilibrium thermodynamics. That if you take a gas
tank, and you’ve got a set of molecules distributed in this gas tank, the ergodicity of that
system is defined by the fact , sampling different regions of that molecular system in time
and space, should be, statistically homogenous, like you’re not going to find significant
distinctions that have any consistent sense about how many atoms are going to be in some
portion of the gas tank...or you shouldn’t, across time (...um...once it’s in its equilibrium
statistical state…) find temporal differences either. Like if you...the chance of a particular
molecule being at one point is space at a particular time is exactly the same statistically as
finding it in the same space at another time. And this relevant to a discussion of economics
because the connection has been made by the complexity people, I think very
persuasively, that the classical canon of political economy assumes an equilibrium
model of...they’re not talking about thermodynamics, but...their process is isomorphic with
a near-equilibrium thermodynamic model. Which means, concretely, in terms of the issues
that we’re talking about, that it’s able to roam freely across a global space. So the
solutions it will find are not significantly obstructed by the spatial or temporal
heterogeneities. And obviously, this is totally crucial to the Qwernomics argument. The
argument that David is attributing to his opponents, who he’s seeing as -I’m putting these
words in his mouth, so again this might be kind of [...] or anything- he’s seeing market
fundamentalists as a particularly recognizable form- is that they think that technological
innovation is freely mobile across a global space. And therefore, what it is competent to do
is to find a global solution. And the introduction of the notion of path-dependency is to
criticize this notion that there is a...competence to the discovery of a global solution in the
market process. And the reason, and the whole, as we’ve seen, the whole of his paper is
fleshing out that argument. So, what I’m trying to do at this point is just provide the
philosophical translation protocols about like…”why is this a ‘critical’ argument, in a form
that is philosophically-recognizable?” And I don’t think this is a particularly
straightforward...kind of...a...easy question. I mean, I find it…”complex” (fittingly, or
whatever). It shouldn’t be too hard, because, as we’ve seen, it’s obvious that Deleuze and
Guattari think they’re making a critical argument, they’re completely up-front and explicit
about that. And they use this same distinction between the molar and the molecular, the
ergodic and the nonergodic as a fundamental conceptual tool. And I think, taking their
usage of this conceptuality as a starting point...the transitional point concerns
standardization. That’s a kind of vocabulary that gets us from A to B...from the question of
the critical structure of this to its application to concrete issues of political economy and
historical economic analysis. Because an ergodic system represents a certain kind of
spontaneous standardization. That’s to say, it’s assuming standard parts. Now, obviously,
there’s been no process of standardization behind this. Like...if you’re treating every
molecule in the gas tank as basically interchangeable with any other molecule, as being
standardized and considering their molarity precisely in this standardization, it’s not because
you’re saying that there has been some process of standardization. It’s rather that the
standardization, or something that’s the equivalent of standardization, is assumed. And path
dependency is exactly the calling into question of that assumption of an original
standardization of parts within the system considered. That, by raising standardization as a
historical question of path-dependency, one is immediately distancing oneself from this
notion of a standardized array, a standardized or “molar” multiplicity towards what is being
advanced as a more realistic notion of the elements of the system, and of the search
procedures available to the system. So, I think we’re building a bridge between
philosophical critique and this mode of argumentation, insofar as we are talking about
standardization as a process. And it leads to a suggestion of another possible formulation of
what we might call a “post-classical” 21st Century anti-capitalism as being something
like “platforms are not products.” So, if we take that thesis: “Platforms are not Products”
and we take this as just a straightforward translation of “conditions of objectivity are not
objects” (as a statement of the critical philosophical stance), this is obviously what David has
been saying in the essay that we’ve been looking at. Like...if you have his version of the
“free market” argument, then you’re dealing with a universe of products, distributed
ergodically, in a global space, and you have a market search procedure that can freely hunt
for the best products in this space-it’s not inhibited in its search procedure across this range
of products. And platforms are treated just as if they were some other product. So that
Qwerty for example, is treated as if it’s just one among a whole bunch of possible keyboard
layouts, the market freely wanders among these keyboard layouts. It then subjects various
products, formats, to testing within the market, comes out with some sort of optimization
within the market, that is therefore guaranteed, in these terms, to be something like a global
optimization, because it’s an ergodic process, it’s freely wandering through the whole range
of possibilities, and the whole range of possibilities has been tested by the market process,
and, if we’ve end up with QWERTY, it’s because qwerty has come out the best from this
absolutely untrammelled process that, to go back to...our, sort of...previous terms,
demonstrates or assumes the competence of capital at global optimization. And so, David is
saying, “no” what he said, what “nonergodism” said is that there has not been that free
mobility of the market testing process across the global space. It’s been localized. And
path-dependency is its localization. And we can understand, he thinks, through a kind of
historical study, how that localization has taken place. And such localization is a trap. Once
you get drawn into the process - this language of traps is absolutely crucial, I think, really [...]
fascinating [...] we [...] come back to it. But...for David this is obviously a trap. [...] And so,
the model of Qwerty as a market failure, extremely generally…[...] failed in a way [...] ...has
failed…[...] in general [...] then we can demonstrate the incompetence of the global
optimization. Therefore we have an actual, concrete example [...] failure that provides a kind
of defensible building block for [...] contemporary [...] critique [...] I have sort of inherited from
last week that I’ve seen as a controversial point, is to to say “It this model...is the Qwerty
model an adequate model of market failure for the contemporary critique of capital or not?”
You know...is it that...there’s a whole bunch of different ways one could go from from there.
One could say: “Well, you know, it is flawed, but the way that David and the far-from-
equilibrium complexity guys have said that it’s a problem can be improved upon by some
other critical framework.” That’s a...well...in theory, that’s a response, and obviously I’d like
to see what that would involve. Um...it’s...uh...I’m slightly confusing myself at this point. Let
me just try and end on a point that isn’t just at an absolute ragged edge of confusion. So,
um...ok...my...my guiding question: “What is the contemporary core proposition of the
critique of capital?” I’m wanting to say here that Qwernomics, as David understands it,
adequately captures what a contemporary critique of capital, in its core, consists of. And,
you know, if there is something...if there’s another step on this elevator down one
stage...kind of based on a demonstration of the inadequacies of this Qwerty economic
critique of capitalism, then I’m not seeing what that is, and I’m...the whole “platforms” and
“platform capitalism” and the massive emphasis on platforms that we’re seeing, and I think
all of these contemporary left-critical discourses [...] the fact that we have basically arrived in
the zone with this [...] theoretical building block. So, I guess that’s obviously something that
people might want to come back on.

-Bookmarked at 36:27-
-Lecture Section Ends at 38:21-

83 (Prime, 9th Hyprime, 23rd Prime - BUBBAMU) = CLICK

163 (Prime, 38th Prime - TUTAGOOL) = PURCHASE = PERTURB = ACCELERATE

216 = CONSOLIDATE = INTENSITY = THE OUTSIDE

398 = THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITAL = ALCHEMY IS CYBERNETICS = NATURE OR

NATURE'S GOD = ORIGINAL SUBTRACTION

521 (Prime, 98th Prime) = MATERIALIZATION OF CRITIQUE = IT’S TIME FOR

JUDGEMENT DAY = TSUNAMIS TRIGGERED BY ALIENS = THE PROMOTION OF
INDEPENDENCE

Transcript
Session 3 at :34

We ended last week with a promise that we would talk about platforms. And actually, shortly
after, a couple of days later, I had an interesting conversation organized by the NCR&P with
Benjamin Bratton, who...um...Adam was referring to, raising a practical question, and I do
think it intersects importantly with this whole subject. So, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve got
this whole....this is definitely extendable, but I’ve got a sense of three topics that I’m hoping
we can address, at least partially, this week, and the first is the platform question, and I think
that one way to think about that is just to take a step back and ask the question “Well, what
is Qwerty?” I mean what really is our our object -are we thinking, the actual focus of our
attention in this course, and to what extent can this language of platforms help us to
consolidate that, consolidate a sense of that object? The second topic, that also we sort of
promised we would talk about is the Mullahany [sp?] material about the Chinese typewriter.
Now, this tends to kind of flee off [flea off?] at a strange angle from our central topic, but at
least because it again clearly intersects, I think it's worth at least saying a little bit about it.
And it opens up certain things that I think are really worth, at least, sort of introducing. And
the third of these topics, which I think connects to both of the others, is the relation of
Qwernomics to stratoanalysis, and this is something that came up talking to Ben Bratton and
his book. I asked him, specifically to what extent he thought he was doing in his work on the
stack a stratoanalysis, and...I think it was left a little bit unresolved. He said that he wasn’t
happy with the geological metaphor, and so I think that can be accepted. I’m not sure
whether...er...to what extent stratoanalysis is captured by a geological metaphor. I think I
would tend to argue that it isn’t. But, anyway, I’m going to say a few things about that,
because I think it points into areas that I think we’re going to explore. Mostly, a little bit
further down the road. Um, so first of all, I think we’ve got this twin question about: “Is
Qwerty a platform?/What do we mean by a platform?” Is that kind of language what we’re
going to want to lock onto. And there’s a whole set of linguistic and conceptual systems that
I think get brought in quite quickly into this. We can talk about platforms, we can talk about
conventions, we can talk about protocols [Ed. note: Alexander Galloway took a cut at this a
few years back, interestingly, though without, in my view, much success] and I think even
talk about institutions, and they all draw upon a similar pool of abstract concepts. From a
philosophical point of view, my very, very strong tendency-and I think this relates to the
definition that Ben Bratton gives, which was quoted by Adam last week. Um...and maybe I
should just repeat it. Which is:

“Platforms can be based on the global distribution of Interfaces and Users, and
in this, platforms resemble markets. At the same time, their programmed
 coordination of that distribution reinforces their governance of the interactions
that are exchanged and capitalized through them, and for this, platforms resemble
states. A working technical definition of platform in general may include reference to
a standards-based technical economic system that simultaneously distributes
interfaces through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrative control
through that same coordination.”

That’s from page 42 of the Bratton book. The last part of that in particular was what Adam
was pointing us at last week. There’s a lot in there that is immediately gripping, I mean the
fact that we’re referring to a “standards-based technical economic system” makes it very
hard to suggest that we’re not, broadly speaking, in our territory when we’re talking about
that definition. So, I’m not at all averse to going deeper into the Bratton material, and I think
I’ll leave that up to people whether that’s something they want to do. But, as I say, from a
philosophical point of view, the overwhelming temptation is to say that a platform is a quasi-
transcendental entity, that’s to say it’s a [TIC?] distributor [AQ254 = SINGULARITY] of
transcendental empirical difference. A platform works to separate aspects that seem to be-
to function as a universal form across the entire domain, from aspects that are specific, local,
contingent (in terms of the whole). And I think this is captured in -again, just to repeat a final
part of this- of this definition that we’ve just seen. “that simultaneously distributes interfaces
through their remote coordination and centralizes their integrative control through that same
coordination.” So, in a certain sense, I think platforms-the language of platforms, the
discussion of platforms is a way to...continue certain philosophical conversations that are
centuries old and whose structure has been laid down at the most abstract level over that
sort of time span. I’m going to just take that as [...] to that topic and move on to this second
one. Um...so the Mullhany [sp?] thing... It’s getting a lot of, I think, very deserved attention,
it’s a really interesting question...and...um...I’m going to just....bring that up in its most
extreme-in its, I think, it’s most uncompromisingly extreme form, which is to raise it , again,
I’ll put it in the form - no I won’t put it in any form of a question - I’ll put it in the form of a
problematic proposition, which is to the say: “The entire geopolitical structure of modern
history is qwerty-shaped.” And I’ll do this really fast. Again, it’s something that we can come
back to if people are interested, but I think there’s space here for an extremely large-scale,
radical qwernomist reading of the whole structure of modernity, and...the Mullahany stuff,
which is related to the Chinese typewriter is helpful. I think it’s simplifying and captures the
question in its most extreme form if we just simplify it down to this “occident and orient”...the
Europe...uh, yeah...the European world and the Chinese world and their relations to
mechanical writing. And so, I think there’s a kind of undercurrent. I’m not sure to what
extent this has been really tightly formalized, but there is an undercurrent of the...um...I’m
sorry, let me take one step back. People have convincingly said that the great question of
modern history is this topic that’s called the “Great Divergence.” [cf. UFBlog: The Great
Convergence.” 12/03/13.] Like, why is-why does global modernity in its kind of initial
fundamental form-the first basically half-millennium of globalization of the modern world
European not Chinese. And this is-this becomes a pressing question just because of the
fact that it seems to historians in some ways strangely unlikely. And the reason that it
seems unlikely comes out most dramatically in the fact that, if you look at the...uh...what
Marx, in his discussion of the core technologies that made the modern world possible:
gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press-as we have said before this is three of the
four-what the Chinese in their cultural tradition call the “Four Great Inventions.” Paper is the
fourth one. All of these inventions, which, between them, Marx says, they blow down the
ramparts of feudalism, they produce the possibility of mass culture through literacy - mass
literacy and printing, and obviously they globalize the world through oceanic navigation. All
of these technologies are adopted by the West from the Orient. You know, it’s shocking that
there’s this utter consistency: that all of these things - these, these, sort of - as I say, within
the Chinese tradition, they’re the classical, core Chinese techno-scientific innovations, and
all of them become the kind of feedstock for Occidental modernization, which then arrives,
obviously, in the East as this shocking disruption to which the country is traumatically unable
to cope for at least a century. Again, in their own terms, “The Century of Humiliation” in
which they simply cannot adjust to this. Um...they cannot adjust, that’s to say, to their own
technological innovations returning to them in this alien form of a self-propelling capitalistic
system. Um…and I think what Mullahany taps into is certain sense where this discussion of
the Great Divergence can be run in terms of mechanical writing and therefore digitization on
one side, on the numerization of language on the other hand. It’s the fact that...um...and this
is something again that Chinese analysts were very attentive to themselves, that the
Chinese language provided this kind of barrier to their own modernization. Because the
Chinese language resisted digitization. Because therefore the whole trend toward the
cultural reconstruction through information technologies was therefore, in a certain sense,
blocked by the Chinese language. That Chinese culture itself inherently came to seem as if
it was some kind of obstacle to modernization. The structure of China’s trauma in relation to
modernization is extremely tied up with that. I don’t know if people know but, you know, it
the early 20th Century, sort of 1904, where there is the “May 4th Movement”...um...sorry, I
think I’m moving it back a bit too far, it’s just after the First World War, so it can’t be 1904.
There was a large discussion among Chinese intellectuals about whether they should
abandon the Chinese language completely, whether it was an intolerable obstacle to joining
the modern world. And so, this puts the whole question of type, and of the ability to break
analyzed language down to this small set of alphabetical characters, which therefore are in
conformity with printing, conformity with all kinds of digital technologies at the forefront of the
question of what it was that gave this massive advantage to the Occident as a kind of a-as a
catalytic center of modernization. And Mullahany’s point, is that...um...there is a certain of
information technology where things go into reverse where computers can handle symbolic
systems of greater complexity, such as pictographic characters of the Chinese type and
suddenly, as if a sort of dam breaks, this obstacle, what had seemed like this absolutely
impossible obstacle to modernization just collapses entirely. You get this just...surge...this
possibility of a kind of Chinese modernity that is no longer fractured and tortured by its
incompatibility with the digitization of signs. I mean, I’ll just say one more thing about this
situation, which I think is also quite [...] is that there’s also this fact that binary numeracy
came to Europe obviously from China, too. You know, Leibniz’s famous reading
of...er...exposure to the I Ching...um, his understanding of the I Ching as being a...um...a
binary number system, and therefore his formalization of that in the West as the first
articulation of binary numeracy can be added to this list of these Chinese cultural capabilities
that have been launched into this self-propelling form when they are adopted by a...er...in
the West, and they return to China therefore in an alien form, as...as Morse Code and
telegraphic communication first of all, and then obviously, all the other kinds of binary
electronic codes. Um...so I think what you get out of that is a sense that this large scale
structural pattern of modernity, where you have, first of all, this half-century of sort-of
seemingly unstoppable Occidental global surge, and then only in the late phase of the 20th
Century, during the computer revolution, you then get this extremely stunning rise of the
East that everyone has become used to and which has now become basically...almost...
coincidental with the notion of what globalization means. That all of that whole historical
structure can be read in terms of digitizable language. Um...and so that’s what a qwernomic
materialist reading of modern history would focus upon. Ok, final...my final point. And this is
the most tangled and tortured and I’m only really wanting to raise it as an introduction to stuff
that I think we’ll mostly be attending to much later. Um...mostly even perhaps in the second
module of the course. And this goes back to this stratoanalysis question. Um...and I think
my guiding question for this is: “Why are we-what’s so special about qwerty?” Let’s just say
we agreed that qwerty was a platform and that...was...a sort of...was an interesting model of
a platform, and does all the kind of things that are tied up with that. And we even then make
the second turn and we say that...um...mechanical writing is some kind of key to an
understanding of the history of modernity. I think even those two things don’t really quite pin
down why qwerty becomes an object of special, obsessive attention. And that I think the
reason that you take another through to...a certain loop it takes on a more intense,
compelling characteristic is by asking: “What is the relation of qwerty to stratoanalysis?” and
by talking about stratoanalysis, I’m obviously making a reference to this Geology of Morals
question...uh...essay that is...that I hope is kind of kind of haunting the course and I hope we
will get to look at in some kind of detail. And I think we’ve already seen that there’s one set
of kind of cascading relations that goes...you know: “Qwerty’s obviously some kind of
platform, stratoanalysis is obviously some kind of philosophical tool kit for discussing
platforms, and therefore we have a set of relations of that kind that can be firmed up, but
are...but promise to be quite solid, I think, from the start. But I think the twist occurs, when
you say “Is it not also the case that…” (this sounds more modest than I think the thesis
sounds as if it can support, but) “...that strat-that qwerty-the qwerty keyboard is itself a map
or diagram of abstract stratification?” Put that another way: Deleuze and Guattari have in
their essay this fictional, hyperstitional character called Professor Challenger, who is
presenting, in a kind of opaque and elliptical way this kind of science of stratoanalysis. It’s a
deliberately kind of mysteriously written text. And it’s deliberately made obscure where
Professor Challenger is supposed to be getting stratoanalysis from. And so, my suggestion,
is that Professor Challenger gets stratoanalysis imminently-and imminently [~immanently]
meaning that it's already at his fingertips, in the sense that his diagram, his sense of his
fundamental conceptual resources for the production of stratoanalysis are already
embedded in the qwerty keyboard. That the qwerty keyboard is a kind of a stratification
diagram, and the whole of what Deleuze and Guattari are doing in the sense that they are
doing what professor Challenger is doing in his lectures is actually a coded discussion of the
qwerty keyboard. Um...and I won’t push into this too much now, because it obviously
becomes quite opaque, but let me just say just a little bit about it. Um... they are bringing
together a set of discourses in this. One of them is Hjemslev’s (sp?) linguistics. And from
that they take the vocabulary that they use a lot to do with...um...content and expression and
the relation of forms and substances that are rigid by this relationship, and they think that
Hjemslev is already engaged in an exercise of stratoanalysis, and is upgrading structuralist
ideas, sort of inherited from Saussure and his followers in doing that. And they say that
substances...forms and substances correspond in some way...I, I should quote them exactly,
but I don’t think I will because I would just have to do a little bit of hunting around in the text
and I...that would slow us down. I’ll get...I’ll do that later... They correspond in some way to
the relationship that they....to the terms that they’ve used previously in the previous volume
of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: codes and territories, and they say-and they’re wanting to
say that, the relationship between content and expression, which is the relation between one
stratum and its substratum-that’s to say the stratic relationship is the relationship between
content and expression-isn’t a relationship between forms and substances, because both
strata in that system are themselves both formed...or consist of formed substances. That’s
to say, forms and substances are...uh...apply to both of the strata involved in the content and
expression relationship. So, if you’re talking about languages...um...and the conversion from
Saussure to Hjemslev’s. Sassure’s linguistics-structural linguistics-to Hjemslev’s structural
linguistics, the key point that they want to make is...the implicit proposition of Saussurean
linguistics is that the distinction between the signifier and the signified can be mapped onto
the distinction between form and substance. And that Hjemslev upgrades that by saying, no,
no, that’s not the case, that the relationship that’s being approached by Saussure’s
distinction between the signifier and the signified is a structural relationship-a stratic
relationship, rather-between a stratum of content and a stratum of expression. And both
content and expression consist of formed substance, forms and substances. And that’s to
say, they think, you can translate it because it consists of both-of elements that are both
coded and territorialized. And so, I just want to say, that...you know...a keyboard is (it seems
to me) exactly the model for this relationship between code and territory, form and
substance-that every key has a position

-Paused at 28:41-

Transcript of Session 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQFVPfS9q9c

AQ243 = QWERNOMIST = A MEANS TO AN END = APOKALYPSIS = PATHEI MATHOS =

THE GIFT OF FEAR = OR DIE TRYING = THE SORCEROR = SECUROCRATIC =
COLLINS ELITE = HARD DEEP STATE

AQ269 = UNDERCURRENT = THING IN ITSELF = GEOTRAUMATICS =

EGOTRAUMATICS = IN THE TUNNELS = CHINESE OPENING = PBR STREETGANG

AQ319 = STRATOANALYSIS = ONE LEVEL DEEPER = MACHINERIES OF JOY =

BREAKING THE RULES = JUST DO IT ALREADY = TELEOSEXUALITY = THE CALL OF
CTHULHU = I AM WAITING FOR HIM

AQ338 = THE GREAT DIVERGENCE = THE HALTING PROBLEM = THE MAGNETIC

MOMENT

-----

BITCOIN and PHIL: Transcript 1

Ok, great, well. Uh, welcome to everybody. This is a fascinating experiment as far as I’m
concerned. And I’m greatly looking forward to it. Its eight units as Moe says, and that’s
connecting two blocks together, so I’m still going to try to treat that as if it does have some
natural division into two parts…um…with the first four sessions focused mainly on the
Nakamoto Bitcoin paper and looking at that, putting it in a philosophical context. And I’ll just
say a few words about what I think that means. I’m obviously very interested in making that
productively controversial at the earliest opportunity. So…everyone can hear I hope, and it’s
all technically functional at this point? So, if it had been…er…let me say…20…er...a 20
lecture course or something like that, then the lead-up would definitely have been a
protracted discussion of the evolution of transcendental philosophy or “critique” – obviously
starting with Kant and then we get an increasing number of forks and option on the way we
take that. And part of what I’m going to…um…might not be quite right to say “persuade”
people, but at least put forward as a provocation…is that really there is a great arbitrariness
about those forks, I mean, I going to use certain language taken from various parts of that
tradition, that I’m seeing as ultimately really quite trivial differences. You know, if someone
wanted to be a fundamentalist about it, and simply say “All of this stuff is in Kant, why are we
tinkering around with this alternative terminology at various points?” I’m very sympathetic
that, and I’m…it’s very much in tune with what I really want to suggest. So there’s a first
point, which is that there’s a continuous and extremely consistent tradition of transcendental
philosophy, and that the decisions that we make about particular terminological systems
within that are…comparatively trivial, and I think they’re certainly trivial when put in the
context of the problem we’re going to be dealing with. That’s to say, if we’re coming at
bitcoin and trying to make sense of it philosophically in those terms, then it really is a
distraction to be too caught up in the particular nuances of the avenues people have taken to
develop critical thinking. So, I think there’s a whole subagenda that is definitely open to
exploration about the plausibility of *that* claim. I’m going to, for instance, *casually* throw
in Heideggerian language at certain points to this –just as a footnote to Kant –just because
it’s terminologically tidy. Um…if I was to put forward as an extremely kind of vulgarizing-and
again controversial-proposition about this, it would be to say “Philosophy is that mode of
cognition that culminates in that insight ‘Being is not a being.’” And in saying that “Being is
not a being” I’m not wanting to say that there is some massive transformation that has
happened with Heidegger that everyone has to take extremely seriously and inflect
everything through that. On the contrary, I’m saying that’s just a neat way of discussing
transcendental empirical difference. There’s nothing really going on in saying “Being is not a
being” for our purposes that is importantly different to saying that “the conditions of
objectivity are not an object” or any of the alternative vocabularies. You know, you could talk
about it as deconstructionist, as a Deleuzian, it really on this level, doesn’t matter, as long as
you’re holding on to the fundamental architecture of critique. And, I think, by the
fundamental architecture of critique, as I think is useful very quickly in talking about Bitcoin,
there’s really two crucial things, and one (perhaps ultimately more interesting) rider that I
expect to develop a little bit more slowly. The two, absolutely crucial elements…is difference
in this very specific sense: transcendental empirical difference. Um… I sent a little…uh…
apparently trivial little article about the…oh…I think it was called “the Orthography of
Bitcoin.” And, I really, again, pushing the vulgarity to the absolute limit want to say: when
people get into an (I think ultimately extremely fascinating) conundrum about the word
Bitcoin – you know: “Is Bitcoin the system? Is Bitcoin the unit of currency?” The difference
between bitcoin and bitcoins, Being and beings…it’s the same…it’s the same thing. That
ontological difference, transcendental empirical difference cuts through this discussion of
Bitcoin in a way that should be deeply philosophically familiar. It’s the difference between
the system as something that has transcendental properties and, particularly, the items, the
objects, the empirical elements that are operative within that system and that—obviously in
the case of Bitcoin, count as a currency system. So that one way of glossing this thing is to
say “Bitcoin is monetary critique”, and the sense in which we’re using critique there has its
full historical gravity that is inherited out of the tradition of transcendental philosophy. The
second, I think, really crucial element, and as I say, I think we then exhaust what is really
necessary of architectural philosophical elements to get us started is subtraction. The
critique of metaphysics, as it’s initially formulated, is a way of deducting a certain type of
philosophical activity, as being superfluous, dispensable, something that can simply be
eliminated from philosophical activity. Kant’s understanding of the situation is that once you
see that metaphysics is getting nowhere, is doing nothing, is impossible in any productive
way, it’s something that is then subtracted, and this basic gesture is again something that
has huge philosophical and historical resonances, and I think all of the philosophically
significant critical moves, even if they seem to take a very concrete, sociopolitical sense are
still connected to this basic gesture of subtraction. It’s something again that we could play
through each of these figures independently, we could run it through Marx—we could run it
through Deleuze and Guattari. The fundamental point is that critique provides the foundation
for the subtraction of a transcendent element that is then shown to be dispensable, and it
therefore projects a way forward that no longer involves that particular commitment, that
diversion or digression that it then, in the socio-political sense, becomes configured as a kind
of element of oppression, of some kind of structure that is to be subtracted in a way that can
be surrounded with a rhetoric of whatever kind of revolutionary violence is deemed
appropriate to that particular discourse. In the case of Bitcoin, again, I think the consistency
of what is happening within that tradition is extremely clear. If I can just turn to the abstract
of the Satoshi Nakamoto paper, he says, in the very first sentence of the abstract… I’ll just
read the first two sentences, I think it’s most efficient. He just says “A purely peer-to-peer
version of electronic cash would allow online payment to be sent directly from one party to
another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the
solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent
double spending. Now, the whole double spending issue, as anyone who’s looked at this
stuff knows is massive and is going to be a guideline that I think is going to really help us in
the early stages of this, but the term that I’d like to really focus on immediately is this term
that Satoshi Nakamoto uses quite consistently “trusted third party” and I want to suggest that
that term, philosophically speaking, critically speaking, exactly occupies the space of
transcendent metaphysics, in the way that we’ve been taught to recognize and I think target
within the critical tradition. That, that, what the Bitcoin paper, right from the beginning, is
proposing, is a subtraction. And in proposing this subtraction, it places itself consistently
within the critical tradition, and it places itself consistently within sociopolitical modes of
thinking that have themselves fed off that tradition. That when we’re looking at what is being
said by this, we’re at one and the same time, inserting it into a philosophical frame, and
we’re understanding how, in doing so, we’re therefore articulating it perhaps indirectly
through our understanding of how that critical machinery works, to a whole series of
previously familiar sociopolitical discourses. So, just to sum up at that stage, I think that
those two elements, difference and subtraction are guidelines that allow us with great
confidence to see what is happening—I will say in this Bitcoin paper, but obviously we’re
partly interested because it isn’t in any simple sense just a paper. It’s something that is
happening on levels that we’ll have to explore, but certainly I’m not exhausted or satisfied by
any straightforward sense of it being simply a text or a philosophical proposition. But we can
see that we have inherited philosophical tools that allow us to make sense of what is
happening here. We can see that even though the lineage that this has come out of has
nothing to do with philosophy, he doesn’t have any philosophical references. There are just
8 notes at the end of it. All of them are to various kinds of technical contributions from out of
cryptography and out of previous digital money systems. But, despite that—despite the fact
that it’s coming completely diagonally into this problem, it nevertheless has a philosophical
signature that is utterly recognizable. And means that we have a very kind of strong
framework for reading this as philosophers and being confident that this is something that we
know what is going on here in certain ways. We have a certain preestablished framework
that allows us to make sense of it at the most abstract conceptual level. The third element
that I will just throw in—I don’t think it has the same logical structure as the others—is
temporality. And that’s also why I’m very tempted to use Heidegger as a kind of shorthand
figure, as an abbreviation, as a footnote to Kant, just because it’s so clear, with his work that
time comes to absolutely predominate in the transcendental problematic. There’s a sense
that all of our transcendental philosophical questions, all our questions about critique,
become questions about time, we can do everything through time, we can’t do anything
without talking about time, without changing the way we think about time. And this, too, is
something that I think is very, very evident in the way Bitcoin works. The function of the
public ledger, the Blockchain, is to create a synthetic temporality. It’s in that way an
extraordinary figure and…I, uh…sorry…and extraordinary ambition…is something I think
people tacitly recognize—there’s I think a very broad social understanding already—way
beyond what you would expect from the amount of capital that’s presently in Bitcoin—that
the Blockchain is something extraordinary that has happened. And I think this is because it
really is an experiment with time, of a kind that we’ve never seen before. And the way that it
works is to actually connect crypto-security to the construction of a past. Like if we just go
just a little bit further, just even still down the abstract, he says, after talking about the
construction of a Blockchain, “The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of
events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a
majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network,
they’ll generate the longest chain, and outpace attackers. Messages are broadcast on a
best-effort basis, and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the longest
proof of work chain as proof of what happened while they were gone. And I think as we dig
into the paper, we’ll find even more clear descriptions of the way this works, but I think
already at this point, it’s possible to see that the security of the system relies on the creation
of a past. That’s what the Blockchain is, it’s an artificial past. And there are lots of elements
of great fascination to people who’ve thematized time as a problem of interest. One of them
is that it’s immediately *tensed* time—it’s not an Einsteinian dimensional time of the kind
that has been a sort of a philosophical scandal in the sense that people have struggled, I
mean, in the most extreme case being a figure like Bergson to say “no, there’s something
about time that is not spatial, it can’t be confused with space” and of course on the other
side, this has been taken as a critique of Kant to say…”well Kant doesn’t…he assumes time
is different from space, he doesn’t really give us good reasons to understand why time is not
spatialized, why it isn’t a dimension, why in this distinction between arithmetic and geometry
we should find that persuasive, given that analytic geometry allows us to move smoothly
between those two things.” Um, so there’s a kind of ragged philosophical concern about
what is at stake about time being turned into space, and I think what we see here in the way
that time is being re-animated, technically, by Bitcoin, that there is an extremely strong return
of time as something completely irreducible as something *tensed*, as something that the
difference between the past and the future is a crucial aspect of what it is. That there’s a
sense of succession that’s completely irreducible that it’s not simply being thought as
positions on a line that could be considered simultaneous or concurrent but this element of
succession is again completely irreducible. And that the more past has been constructed on
the Blockchain, the more…um…what has happened…the list of transactions, the events in
that system are irreversible. They’ve been secured by being made irreversible. They’ve
been made real, because of adopting certain temporal characteristics. They have a time
structure that gives them their reality and one of course can say I think going whole hog this
is maybe a bit extreme at this stage, but we’ll get there soon so I might as well to just say
“It’s synthetic ontology.” There is actually a construction of being. And I’ll just say one final
thing about Heidegger here, and then try and open up a little bit. Um…because some of the
things that those of a more materialist inclination tend to see as a bit of a dead end in
Heidegger I think take on an interesting sense here. And I’m referring particularly to the fact
that because he’s coming out of a phenomenological orientation, he’s on a slide from the
start toward an identification of time with dasein, with we could say crudely the subject…
um…very crudely, but I’ll let people bully me about that later. Um…and therefore to go even
more crudely—and this is something I’m going to retract in a second—there’s a sort of
idealist possibility here, that he identifies time and being, time and dasein, everything seems
to collapse into some kind of phenomenological issue. And of course there’s a sort of
materialist reflex to say this has just gone really badly off the rails. There’s been a kind of
absolute implosion of reality here. But I think when you look at the Blockchain, you begin to
see how these sets of connections might work in a much more interesting and subversive
way. And I think it’s…let me see what’s the best way of saying this… If we entertain a deep
suspicion about the Blockchain as an ultimate criterion of reality—one that ultimately,
transcendentally outflanks and supercedes *anything* that is phenomenologically accessible
to us, or that we might feel rooted in our own being or our own nature, I think we find
ourselves rehearsing some of these Heideggerian problems. Because, in integrating the
question of the production of time with the ultimate substrate of being, Heidegger makes a
move that, when transplanted onto the Blockchain really delegitimizes any move to saying
that there could even imaginably be a superior, transcendent criterion of reality that we could
use to second guess or to try to extrinsically, transcendently critique the decision the
Blockchain makes about Being. If, in the Blockchain system, in the production of this
synthetic time there is a construction of the ultimate nature of reality…you could say “what if
there was some sort of *super*-blockchain—some higher kind of synthetic intelligence that
maybe it was able to integrate time and being at a higher level” I don’t think there’s any
reason to rule that out, except that I think we’re in this position of being…um…quasi-
phenomenologists now, in the sense that whatever that thing or possibility might be, it’s
nothing to us. The blockchain *is* something. The blockchain is happening. And the
blockchain is actually making a decision about the nature of reality. And that is a decision
that nothing, anywhere within our horizon of access is able to second guess. If you think
about something that we invest with great authority as a criterion for reality…if something
like natur—the natural sciences. And of course there are reasons for that; the reasons being
that there are institutional mechanisms there that seem to provide very solid criteria that go
way beyond anything that any individual scientist or any group of scientists agree on, or can
be subjectively reduced to beliefs of particular individuals or anything of that kind. But there
is no reason at all why science should not be moved onto the blockchain and it seems to me
inevitably science *will* be moved onto the blockchain, and in being moved onto the
blockchain it will secure its criteria in a way that is currently beyond its capabilities. At the
point where the whole of the natural sciences—and that’s to say, in the language that is
more directly tired up with the Satoshi Nakamoto problematic—trust, or credibility, in any
scientific statement, finds its ultimate validation in the blockchain…is the point where it
becomes an unsurpassable criterion for reality. There’s—we have access to nothing that
can—that can plausibly cast doubt upon those criteria from a position of superiority.
Everything we could bring to bear upon it is going to come from a lower level of…uh…self-
evident…ontological depth. So…I’m perhaps straying a little bit, but this is to me what the
point of “synthetic time” is telling us—that…um…the Blockchain projects a substrate of
intelligence which is absolutely transcendental. And…and…those…who are…tempted to
criticize that find themselves, I would want to…uh…propose, find themselves in the same
position as someone who is making a naïve criticism of Heidegger’s particular moves about
Being and Time. You know…to suggest that “of course we know that there is some kind of
being beyond dasein—with dasein being thought as “originary temporalization"—“of course
we know that is crazy, because if you go that way you go into some kind of strange kind of
neo-idealism.” I think the Blockchain shows us that, no, we don’t do that. If we have that
same kind of transcendental mechanics, and now we’re looking at this system—this artificial
intelligent system—this artificial ontological and temporal [indistinct: reduction? production?],
then we can see that we are forced, through critical rigor, to accept that there is no criterion
available to us that puts us in a position of leverage in relation to that decision. So, I’ve said
this really to give you some sense of where I’m going with it.

[Discussion follows]