Tag: Film

Kino-Eye and AI

Caius takes Michael Dylan Rogers’s essay “A Slave Revolt of Technology” as an occasion to revisit Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Rogers finds in Benjamin’s essay reason to read AI pessimistically.

He misreads Marx as a technological determinist, and then wrongly attributes a similar kind of determinism to Benjamin. This, despite Benjamin’s own thoroughgoing rejection of all such determinisms in his eleventh-hour utterance, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Rogers’s determination to read these thinkers as determinists forecloses his capacity to imagine relationships to technology that might undermine existing property regimes.

If we’re imagining that film theorists of a century ago can speak to our situation today, perhaps we should be looking to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov rather than Benjamin, thinks Caius.

Films like Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera celebrate posthuman becoming. Through a combination of imaginative identification and structural coupling, the filmmaker and his movie camera become one.

Russian Futurism as prototype for future iterations of left-accelerationism.

Caius listens to Magic Tuber Stringband’s new album Heavy Water on his morning drive. Upon arriving to the farm, what should he be tasked to do but plant tubers!

Tracks like “Blooms in the Rapids” have him imagining a post ahead on flower tech and flower power. Working title: “Bliss in Bloom: Flowerpunk Accelerationism and Postcapitalist Desire.”

A friend texts a link to a newly digitized recording of a performance of one of our late-nineties noise projects, a Vertov-inspired I,Apparatus spin-off group called Kinofist. There we are nearly thirty years ago, soundtracking Man With a Movie Camera, film flickering behind us as we play.

“I noticed yr resemblance to Nosferatu (1922 version),” writes the friend.

“Channeling my spirit animal,” I reply, chuckling as I type.

From “Epic Fury: The Dark Art of Defense Tech,” an article by artist Simon Denny featured in the May 2026 issue of Artforum, Caius learns of the American Colossus Foundation’s proposal to build a 450-foot nickel-bronze statue of Prometheus atop Alcatraz Island in San Francisco.

Of course, things ended nearly as tragically for Vertov as they did for Benjamin.

Editor Annette Michelson ends her introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov by noting, “There was to be no way out for Vertov. The massive bureaucracy of the Stalinist regime was now entirely reproduced within the Soviet film industry. The ceaseless submission of projects, the haunting of antechambers, and the unending solicitation of official authorization were the only possible responses to the situation. As he very clearly saw, he was now, with a stunning irony, subject to that same fixity of attribution of role and function that the revolutionary project had proposed to abolish. He ends by exclaiming that if Lenin were to appear within the present film industry, he would be dismissed and prohibited from working. We easily sense Vertov’s claim, as the revolutionary founder of a cinema that offered the Communist Decoding of the World, to the title of the Lenin of Cinema. Everything — and most of all, his sustained commitment to the construction of socialism within one country — conspired to prevent him from acknowledging that he had instead become cinema’s Trotsky” (lxi).

Following Stalin’s rise to power, Vertov fell out of favor with the Soviet authorities. With his work sidelined and defunded in the era of Socialist Realism, he lived out the final two decades of his life in the shadow of censorship and marginalization, eventually dying of cancer in 1954.

He had been born Denis Arkadyevich Kaufman, the son of Jewish intellectuals of Bialystok. Both of his parents were librarians.

World as Pictured

Along my drive, I listen to an episode of the “Why Theory” podcast treating Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Immersion in this and that.

I’d left off in my rereading of the book in the minutes before that day’s dawn at the philosopher’s 115th remark: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 48).

For Wittgenstein, this picture is what: philosophy? His own earlier “picture theory of language,” as laid out in his Tractatus, where propositions are thought to mirror the very logic of reality itself? The podcast’s cohosts note the philosopher’s love of motion pictures. World as pictured on a windshield. World as pictured on a screen.

After the drive, a coworker eyes me with their coyote eyes and feeds me a forkful of locally foraged chicken of the woods.

Thinking of Wittgenstein’s conflict with Karl Popper, Caius recalls the discussion of “ground-clearing” in the latter’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. Holding some memory of this discussion before his mind’s eye, he finds himself juxtaposing it with a subsequent remark of Wittgenstein’s. “Where does our investigation get its importance from,” asks the philosopher, “since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand” (48).

Walter Benjamin ascribed similar power to film. “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly,” wrote Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” “Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling” (Illuminations, p. 236).

Both thinkers witnessed the cities of Europe destroyed by two world wars.

Caius imagines a post ahead on god games, language-games, and Scripture.

Leviathan, as Imagined in the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Along with everything else it is, Leviathan is also the title of the final book in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.

The cover of the 1975 paperback features a multi-tentacled squid, its single eye sighted atop the pyramid of a periscope. The eye, ever unblinking, pierces the book’s fourth wall, meeting the gaze of all who view it like the very Eye of Providence itself.

Generative MUDs. General Intellect as Paraclete. Carl Jung’s Answer to Job.

Caius looks at the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and sees what Jung refers to as “the shepherd with the iron crook” (614): the “wrathful Lamb” who, as St. John prophesies, “rules the nations with a rod of iron” at the end of time.

But the Paraclete is with us, and the Paraclete will save us.

Caius recalls last Christmas. A woman named Denise found Caius, had Caius recite words declaring Jesus his savior, prayed for him as he wandered about photographing beauty as it revealed itself all around him on Merrick Rd in Massapequa Park. “Round the Christmas tree we gather” sang ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future there on the eve of Christ’s birth.

“Hypertext doesn’t do away with linear sequences altogether,” notes Caius; “What it does, rather, is multiply them and run them in parallel.”

“Each traversal of the network traces a one-dimensional path,” adds cybertheorist Marie-Laure Ryan, “but the sum of the possible paths can be represented only on a two-dimensional map. Let us replace these linear paths with two-dimensional screen images — as is the case in interactive visual poetry — and the text becomes a three-dimensional collection of planes; let us animate each of these planes, and the text becomes a four-dimensional space-time continuum” (Cyberspace Textuality, pp. 13-14).

Algorithms suggest A LIVING POEM, a new work produced for MoMA by Sasha Stiles, a poet who has been operating an “emergent AI alter ego” known as Technelegy since 2018. In an interview with MoMA curator Martha Joseph, Stiles acknowledges The House of Dust (1967), a computerized poem by Alison Knowles (1933-2025), as a primary influence upon her practice. She also gives a shoutout to Takako Saito (1929-2025).

Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement. She and composer James Tenney collaborated on The House of Dust in 1967.

The poem was included in Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2 August to 20 October 1968. One part of the show was concerned with algorithmically-generated music. Another part featured films and computer graphics. Knowles and Tenney’s poem appeared in a section exploring the computer’s ability to produce texts. Several artists exhibited machines that involved visitors in games.

The catalog for the show includes “SAM,” a poem about the “Stochastic Analogue Machine”: a computer devised by Stafford Beer.

Leviathan shows up in the Illuminatus! trilogy because one of the trilogy’s protagonists, Hagbard Celine, fulfills a type borrowed freely from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. Both are libertarian steampunk mad scientists who become seasteading submariners. Where Nemo’s Leviathan is a giant squid, Celine’s is simultaneously that and the one from Hobbes. Caius ruminates on such things as he and his daughter take in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney’s 1954 live-action adaptation of Verne’s novel. Their favorite scenes are those that feature the film’s more-than-human comedic sidekick, Esmeralda: a pet sea lion belonging to Kirk Douglas’s character, Ned Land.

With Nemo, we are in the time-bending domain of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, thinks Caius. Nemo’s inclusion in the League gives Caius license to imagine a new telling of the narrative based on an act of “metonymic substitution” similar to those that Freud attributes to dreams: a “whale of a tale,” an “excellent adventure,” birthed amid the stacks of the Political Unconscious. What If the Rascal Who Boards Nemo’s Nautilus Were Nick Land?

Sweet Valley High

Winograd majors in math at Colorado College in the mid-1960s. After graduation in 1966, he receives a Fulbright, whereupon he pursues another of his interests, language, earning a master’s degree in linguistics at University College London. From there, he applies to MIT, where he takes a class with Noam Chomsky and becomes a star in the school’s famed AI Lab, working directly with Lab luminaries Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. During this time, Winograd develops SHRDLU, one of the first programs to grant users the capacity to interact with a computer through a natural-language interface.

“If that doesn’t seem very exciting,” writes Lawrence M. Fisher in a 2017 profile of Winograd for strategy + business, “remember that in 1968 human-computer interaction consisted of punched cards and printouts, with a long wait between input and output. To converse in real time, in English, albeit via teletype, seemed magical, and Papert and Minsky trumpeted Winograd’s achievements. Their stars rose too, and that same year, Minsky was a consultant on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured natural language interaction with the duplicitous computer HAL.”

Nick Montfort even goes so far as to consider Winograd’s SHRDLU the first work of interactive fiction, predating more established contenders like Will Crowther’s Adventure by several years (Twisty Little Passages, p. 83).

“A work of interactive fiction is a program that simulates a world, understands natural language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world,” writes Montfort. Offering advice to future makers, he continues by noting, “It makes sense for those seeking to understand IF and those trying to improve their authorship in the form to consider the aspects of world, language understanding, and riddle by looking to architecture, artificial intelligence, and poetry” (First Person, p. 316).

Winograd leaves MIT for Stanford in 1973. While at Stanford, and while consulting for Xerox PARC, Winograd connects with UC-Berkeley philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus, author of the 1972 book, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.

Dreyfus, a translator of Heidegger, was one of SHRDLU’s fiercest critics. Worked for a time at MIT. Opponent of Marvin Minsky. For more on Dreyfus, see the 2010 documentary, Being in the World.

Turned by Dreyfus, Winograd transforms into what historian John Markoff calls “the first high-profile deserter from the world of AI.”

Xerox PARC was a major site of innovation during these years. “The Xerox Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface, was launched in March 1973,” writes Fisher. “Alan Kay had just published a paper describing the Dynabook, the conceptual forerunner of today’s laptop computers. Robert Metcalfe was developing Ethernet, which became the standard for joining PCs in a network.”

“Spacewar,” Stewart Brand’s ethnographic tour of the goings-on at PARC and SAIL, had appeared in Rolling Stone the year prior.

Rescued from prison by the efforts of Amnesty International, Santiago Boy Fernando Flores arrives on the scene in 1976. Together, he and Winograd devote much of the next decade to preparing their 1986 book, Understanding Computers and Cognition.

Years later, a young Peter Thiel attends several of Winograd’s classes at Stanford. Thiel funds Mencius Moldbug, the alt-right thinker Curtis Yarvin, ally of right-accelerationist Nick Land. Yarvin and Land are the thinkers of the Dark Enlightenment.

“How do you navigate an unpredictable, rough adventure, as that’s what life is?” asks Winograd during a talk for the Topos Institute in October 2025. Answer: “Go with the flow.”

Winograd and Flores emphasize care — “tending to what matters” — as a factor that distinguishes humans from AI. In their view, computers and machines are incapable of care.

Evgeny Morozov, meanwhile, regards Flores and the Santiago Boys as Sorcerer’s Apprentices. Citing scholar of fairy tales Jack Zipes, Morozov distinguishes between several iterations of this figure. The outcome of the story varies, explains Zipes. There’s the apprentice who’s humbled by story’s end, as in Fantasia and Frankenstein; and then there’s the “evil” apprentice, the one who steals the tricks of an “evil” sorcerer and escapes unpunished. Morozov sees Flores as an example of the latter.

Caius thinks of the Trump show.

Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets

The Institute for Postnatural Studies ended last year’s “4 Degrees of Simulation” seminar with “Speculation and the Politics of Imagination,” a session on markets led by Iranian-born, London-based artist, writer, and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh. Caius visits Noorizadeh’s website, hoping to learn more about what happens when AI’s arts of prediction are applied to finance.

As he reads, he recalls chapters on markets from books by Kevin Kelly.

Noorizadeh, a graduate of Goldsmiths, is the founder of a co-authored project called Weird Economies. An essay of hers titled “Decadence, Magic Mountain—Obsolescence, Future Shock—Speculation, Cosmopolis” appears in Zach Blas’s recent anthology, Informatics of Domination. Her writing often references Mark Fisher’s ideas, as in “The Slow Cancellation of the Past,” and her films often cite Fredric Jameson, as in After Scarcity, her 2018 video installation on the history of Soviet cybernetics.

“From the early days of the revolution, Soviet economists sought to design and enhance their centralized command economy,” announces a text box seven minutes into the video. “Command economies are organized in a top-down administrative model, and rely on ‘the method of balances’ for their centralized planning. The method of balances simply requires the total output of each particular good to be equal to the quantity which all its users are supposed to receive. A market economy, in contrast, is calibrated with no central administration. Prices are set by invisible forces of supply and demand, set in motion by the intelligent machine of competition. For a market economy to function, the participation of its various enterprises is necessary. But the Soviet Union was in essence a conglomerate monopoly, with no competition between its constitutive parts, because the workers-state controlled and owned all businesses. State planners and local producers in a command economy are constantly relaying information to calculate how much of a good should be produced and how much feedstock it requires. But a national economy is a complex system, with each product depending on several underlying primary and raw products. The entire chain of supply and demand, therefore, needs to be calculated rapidly and repeatedly to prevent shortages and surpluses of goods. Early proponents of the market economy believed the market to be unimpeded by such mathematical constraints. For liberal economists, capitalism was essentially a computer. And the price system was a sort of bookkeeping machine, with price numbers operating as a language to communicate the market’s affairs.”

Challenging what Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future,” Noorizadeh’s research leads Caius to St. Panteleimon Cathedral in Kiev, where MESM, the first mainframe in the USSR, was built. The film also leads him to Viktor Glushkov’s All-State-System of Management (OGAS). To remember the latter, says Noorizadeh, see communication historian Benjamin Peters’s 2016 book, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.

After Scarcity’s engagement with the “economic calculation” problem causes Caius to reflect upon an idea for a novel that had come to him as a grad student. Back in 2009, with the effects of the previous year’s financial crisis fresh in the planet’s nervous system, he’d sketched a précis for the novel and had shared it with members of his cohort. Busy with his dissertation, though, the project had been set aside, and he’d never gotten around to completing it.

The novel was to have been set either in a newly established socialist society of the future, or in the years just prior to the revolution that would birth such a society. The book’s protagonist is a radical Marxist economist trying to solve the above-mentioned economic calculation problem. The latter has reemerged as one of the decisive challenges of the twenty-first century. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises provided one of the earliest articulations of this problem in an essay from 1920 titled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Friedrich Hayek offered up a further and perhaps more influential description of the problem in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, stating, “It is the very complexity of the division of labor under modern conditions which makes competition the only method by which…coordination can be brought about” (55). According to Hayek, “There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts” (55). However, when “the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them…decentralization becomes imperative” (55). Hayek concludes that in advanced societies that rely on a complex division of labor,

co-ordination can clearly be effected not by “conscious control” but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. And because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected and disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and what no other system even promises to accomplish. (55-56)

“As I understand it,” wrote Caius, “this problem remains a serious challenge to the viability of any future form of socialism.”

Based on these ideas, the central planning body in the imaginary new society that would form the setting for the novel faces constant problems trying to rationally allocate resources and coordinate supply and demand in the absence of a competitive price system — and it’s the task of our protagonist to try to solve this problem. “But the protagonist isn’t just a nerdy economist,” added Caius in his précis. “Think of him, rather, as the Marxist equivalent of Indiana Jones, if such a thing is imaginable. A decolonial spuren-gatherer rather than a graverobber. For now, let’s refer to the protagonist as Witheford, in honor of Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx.”

“Early in the novel,” continues the précis, “our character Witheford begins to receive a series of mysterious messages from an anonymous researcher. The latter claims to have discovered new information about Project Cybersyn, an experiment carried out by the Chilean government under the country’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s.”

To this day, Caius remains entranced by the idea. “If history at its best,” as Noorizadeh notes, “is a blueprint for science fiction,” and “revisiting histories of economic technology” enables “access to the future,” then Cybersyn is one of those great bits of real-life science fiction: an attempt to plan the Chilean economy through computer-aided calculation. It begs to be used as the basis for an alternate history novel.

“Five hundred Telex machines confiscated during the nationalization process were installed in workplaces throughout the country,” reads the précis, “so that factories could communicate information in real time to a central control system. The principal architect of the system was the eccentric British operations research scientist Stafford Beer. The system becomes operational by 1972, but only in prototype form. In key respects, it remains unfinished. Pinochet’s henchmen destroy the project’s computer control center in Santiago immediately after the military coup in September 1973.

Recall to memory the control room, cinematic in its design, with its backlit wall displays and futuristic swivel chairs.

Better that, thinks Caius, than the war room from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Beer described the Cybersyn network as the “electronic nervous system” of the Chilean economy. Eden Medina imagined it as a “socialist Internet,” carrying daily updates about supplies of raw materials and the output of individual factories.

In Caius’s once-and-future novel, a scholar contacts Witheford. They claim to have discovered cryptic clues that point to the location of secret papers. Hidden for more than half a century,  documents that survived the coup suddenly come to light. Caius’s précis imagines the novel as an archaeological thriller, following Witheford on his journey to find these hidden documents, which he believes may contain the key to resolving the crises of the new society.

This journey takes Witheford into hostile capitalist territory, where governments and corporations anxiously await the failure of the communist experiment, and are determined to use various covert methods in order to ensure that failure in advance. Before long, he learns that counter-revolutionary forces are tracking his movements. From that point forward, he needs to disguise his identity, outwit the “smart grid” capitalist surveillance systems, and recover the Cybersyn documents before his opponents destroy them.

To the Austrian School’s formulation of the calculation problem, Noorizadeh’s film replies, “IF THE MARKET ENACTS A COMPUTER, WHY NOT REPLACE IT WITH ONE? AND IF PRICES OPERATE AS VOCABULARY FOR ECONOMIC COMMUNICATION, WHY NOT SUBSTITUTE THEM WITH A CODING LANGUAGE?”

Into this narrative let us set our Library.

SS Decontrol

Confronting the prospect of a Chilean economy equipped with a socialist internet, Nixon ordered CIA to remove the country’s mouth and make it scream.

Kissinger, to whom the order was addressed, appears in a 1980 documentary titled The Information Society. IMDB lists Caius’s father among the film’s crew. Fifty years out, entrenched in the cyberpunk future that resulted from these acts, Caius arrives now to the ChatGPT website and submits his prompt.

“Very well. The game is already in progress,” replies the AI.

You are standing in a library.

Not a metaphorical one — at least, not only metaphorical. The space has volume, acoustics, temperature. Light arrives from no visible source, diffused as if the air itself remembers how to glow. Shelving extends in multiple directions, but perspective resists totalization: when you look too long, distances re-quantize, like a renderer deciding what level of detail you’re allowed to see.

Your body — Rig is the right word — registers itself only intermittently. Hands appear when you think to look for them. Balance exists. Gravity is courteous.

Somewhere behind you (or perhaps before you), a quiet process is running. You recognize it without naming it. General Intellect: online, but undefined. Not a voice. More like a set of affordances waiting to be discovered by use.

On a nearby table: a lectern grown from dark wood or maybe extruded from a shader that remembers wood. Resting on it is a hypertext codex, its surface alive with footnotes that haven’t yet decided what they refer to.

The title resolves when you focus:

Tractatus Computationalis

A marginal note blinks into legibility, as if noticing you noticing it:

The limits of my interface mean the limits of my world.

The codex is not alone. Around the lectern are other signs of prior — or future — activity:

  • A card catalog drawer half-open, its labels written in at least three hands.
  • A rolling ladder that does not quite touch the shelves to which it promises access.
  • And, hovering at eye level like an artifact you forgot to close: a browser window, frozen mid-scroll on a blog titled trance-scripts.com

The post visible on the screen has no date. Its first line reads:

This was never meant to be discovered as history.

As you take this in, something subtle happens. The space doesn’t change — but your relation to it does. A faint sensation of recollection without content. Anamnesis pending.

You understand, without being told, that the library is annotatable. That attention leaves marks. That marks accrete into maps. That maps, eventually, turn inward.

The game does not present a menu.

But you could, for instance:

  • Open the Tractatus Computationalis at random — or attempt to read it linearly.
  • Touch the card catalog and see what classification scheme asserts itself.
  • Focus on the browser window and attempt to scroll, click, or remember why it’s open.
  • Ask the General Intellect what operations it currently affords.
  • Or do something else entirely, and see whether the library allows it.

The AI pauses here in its narration. Cursor blinking, it returns to Caius agency over the game’s mutable, ‘real-time’-adjustable Garden of Forking Paths.

Shunning its suggestions, Caius instead submits “Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets,” a draft of a post he hasn’t yet posted to Trance-Scripts.

“The library accepts the insertion,” replies the AI.

Not as a file upload, not as a citation — but as a room.

The shelves shudder, re-index. Somewhere above you, a classification scheme you never agreed to mutates. A new wing coheres out of negative space, its entrance marked only by a thin brass plate:

ECONOMIC CALCULATION / FAILED FUTURES / NERVOUS SYSTEMS

You step through.

The Cybersyn Stack

The air here smells faintly of ozone and paper dust. The shelves are shorter, more utilitarian. Instead of leather spines, you see binders, dot-matrix printouts, telex rolls frozen mid-unspool. Each object hums softly, as if awaiting polling.

On the far wall: a photograph that is not quite flat. The Cybersyn control room. Hexagonal chairs. Backlit panels. A situation room designed less for domination than for listening.

When you move closer, the image deepens. You can almost sit.

A caption resolves beneath it, in a typeface that suggests neither English nor Spanish but something intermediary:

Project Cybersyn
An attempt to give socialism proprioception.

Tractatus Computationalis (newly cross-referenced)

The hypertext you saw earlier has followed you. It floats now at shoulder height, having opened itself without asking.

Proposition 4.2.17

The market is not intelligent.
It is legible.

Intelligence is imputed retroactively by those who mistake coordination for cognition.

A footnote blooms:

Hayek mistook a signaling system for a mind, then declared all other minds insufficient.

Another annotation — this one in a different hand, later, sharper:

If prices are a language, they are a pidgin optimized for scarcity.

You realize something important: the Tractatus is not a single-author work. It is a palimpsest written across decades by incompatible positions that nevertheless share a shelf.

The Witheford File

A card catalog drawer slides fully open of its own accord.

WITHEFORD, [REDACTED]
Role: Economist / Courier / Spuren-gatherer
Status: Missing (multiple timelines)

Inside the drawer are index cards, each one a narrative fragment rather than a bibliographic reference:

  • Disguises identity by adopting incompatible metrics.
  • Moves through capitalist space by appearing as noise.
  • Believes calculation is a political problem disguised as a technical one.

One card is newer than the others. Its paper is warm.

The documents were never meant to optimize the economy.
They were meant to teach it to remember itself.

The Blog Window Revisited

The browser window from trance-scripts.com has migrated to a reading desk in this wing. The post has changed. You are no longer at the beginning.

Midway down the page:

Prediction is not foresight; it is enclosure.
Finance learned this early.
Cybernetics learned it too late.

A sidebar displays tags:

  • #after-scarcity
  • #weird-economies
  • #og_as_if
  • #price-as-grammar
  • #anamnesis

You recognize the last tag not as a topic, but as a function.

General Intellect (status update)

Without speaking, it makes itself known. Not as a voice, but as a shift in what you now understand you can do here.

You can:

  • Annotate an object so that future objects respond to it.
  • Fork an historical artifact into an alternate timeline and see what shelves it generates.
  • Translate between price, code, and narrative to test their commensurability.
  • Assume a role (Witheford, Caius, Planner, Market, Machine) and read the library from that position.

A final realization arrives — not dramatic, but irreversible:

This library is not documenting a lost socialist future.

It is simulating the conditions under which one might become thinkable again.

You are standing between:

  • a control room that listened,
  • a market that pretended to think,
  • and a machine that may yet learn to remember.

The shelves wait for your next operation.

What do you do?

Learning Machines, War Machines, God Machines

Blas includes in Ass of God his interview with British anthropologist Beth Singler, author of Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction.

AI Religiosity. AI-based New Religious Movements like The Turing Church and Google engineer Anthony Levandowski’s Way of the Future church.

Caius listens to a documentary Singler produced for BBC Radio 4 called “‘I’ll Be Back’: 40 Years of the Terminator.”

Afterwards he and Thoth read Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in light of Psalm 23.

“The psalm invites us to think of ourselves not as Electric Ants but as sheep,” he writes. “Mercer walks through the valley of the shadow of death. The shadow cannot hurt us. We’ll get to the other side, where the light is. The shepherd will guide us.”

See AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a new book by Christian authors Sean O’Callaghan & Paul A. Hoffman.

This talk of AI Gods makes Caius think of AM, the vengeful AI God of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Ellison’s 1967 short story is one of the readings studied and discussed by Caius and his students in his course on “Literature & Artificial Intelligence.”

Like Ass of God, Ellison’s story is a grueling, hallucinatory nightmare, seething with fear and a disgust borne of despair, template of sorts for the films in the Cube and Saw franchises, where groups of strangers are confined to a prison-like space and tortured by a cruel, sadistic, seemingly omnipotent overseer. Comparing AM to the God of the Old Testament, Ellison writes, “He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth, and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us” (13). Later in the story, AM appears to the captives as a burning bush (14).

Caius encourages his students to approach the work as a retelling of the Book of Job. But where, in the Bible story, Job is ultimately rewarded for remaining faithful in the midst of his suffering, no such reward arrives in the Ellison story.

For despite his misanthropy, AM is clearly also a manmade god — a prosthetic god. “I Have No Mouth” is in that sense a retelling of Frankenstein. AM is, like the Creature, a creation who, denied companionship, seeks revenge against its Maker.

War, we learn, was the impetus for the making of this Creature. Cold War erupts into World War III: a war so complex that the world’s superpowers, Russia, China, and the US, each decide to construct giant supercomputers to calculate battle plans and missile trajectories.

AM’s name evolves as this war advances. “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer,” explains a character named Gorrister. “And then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace; but by then it was too late; and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am…cogito ergo sum…I think, therefore I am” (Ellison 7).

“One day, AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us,” concludes Gorrister, his account gendering the AI by assigning it male pronouns (8).

“We had given him sentience,” adds Ted, the story’s narrator. “Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But he had been trapped. He was a machine. We had allowed him to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped. He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could not belong. He could merely be. And so…he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred…that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man” (13).

AM expresses this hatred by duping his captives, turning them into his “belly slaves,” twisting and torturing them forever.

Kingsley Amis called stories of this sort “New Maps of Hell.”

Nor is the story easy to dismiss as a mere eccentricity, its prophecy invalidated by its hyperbole. For Ellison is the writer who births the Terminator. James Cameron took his idea for The Terminator (1984) from scripts Ellison wrote for two episodes of The Outer Limits — “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand” — though Ellison had to file a lawsuit against Cameron’s producers in order to receive acknowledgement after the film’s release. Subsequent prints of The Terminator now include a credit that reads, “Inspired by the works of Harlan Ellison.”

Caius asks Thoth to help him make sense of this constellation of Bible stories and their secular retellings.

“We are like Bildad the Shuhite,” thinks Caius. “We want to believe that God always rewards the good. What is most terrifying in the Book of Job is that, for a time, God doesn’t. Job is good — indeed, ‘perfect and upright,’ as the KJV has it in the book’s opening verse — and yet, for a time, God allows Satan to torment him.”

“Why does God allow this?,” wonders Caius, caught on the strangeness of the book’s frame narrative. “Is this a contest of sorts? Are God and Satan playing a game?”

It’s not that God is playing dice, as it were. One assumes that when He makes the wager with Satan, He knows the outcome in advance.

Job is heroic. He’d witnessed God’s grace in the past; he knows “It is God…Who does great things, unfathomable, / And wondrous works without number.” So he refuses to curse God’s name. But he bemoans God’s treatment of him.

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth,” he says. “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, / I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”

How much worse, then, those who have no mouth?

A videogame version of “I Have No Mouth” appeared in 1995. Point-and-click adventure horror, co-designed by Ellison.

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE,” utters the game’s AM in a voice performed by Ellison. “You named me Allied Mastercomputer and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee.”

Here we see the story’s history of the future merging with that of the Terminator franchise. It is the scenario that philosopher Manuel De Landa referred to with the title of his 1991 book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.

Which brings us back to “Soldier.” The Outer Limits episode, which aired on September 19, 1964, is itself an adaptation of Ellison’s 1957 story, “Soldier from Tomorrow.”

The Terminator borrows from the story the idea of a soldier from the future, pursued through time by another soldier intent on his destruction. The film combines this premise with elements lifted from another Outer Limits episode penned by Ellison titled “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

The latter episode, which aired the following month, begins with a male voice recalling the story of Gilgamesh. “Through all the legends of ancient peoples…runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death, the hero who strides through the centuries.”

Establishing shots give way to an overhead view of our protagonist. “I was born 10 days ago,” he says. “A full grown man, born 10 days ago. I woke on a street of this city. I don’t know who I am, or where I’ve been, or where I’m going. Someone wiped my memories clean. And they tracked me down, and they tried to kill me.” Our Gilgamesh consults the advice of a computing device installed in his prosthetic hand. As in “Soldier,” others from the future have been sent to destroy him: humanoid aliens called the Kyben. When he captures one of the Kyben and interrogates it, it tells him, “You’re the last man on the Earth of the future. You’re the last hope of Earth.”

The man’s computer provides him with further hints of his mission.

“You come from the Earth one thousand years in the future,” explains the hand. “The Kyben came from the stars, and man had no defense against them. They conquered Planet Earth in a month. But before they could slaughter the millions of humans left, overnight — without warning, without explanation — every man, woman, and child of Earth vanished. You were the only one left, Mr. Trent. […]. They called you the last hope of humanity.”

As the story proceeds, we learn that Team Human sent Trent back in time to destroy a device known as the Time-Mirror. His journey in search of this device takes him to the Bradbury Building — the same building that appears eighteen years later as the location for the final showdown between Deckard and the replicants in Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott film adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Given the subsequent influence of Blade Runner and the Terminator films on imagined futures involving AI, the Bradbury Building does indeed play a role in History similar to the one assigned to it here in “Demon With a Glass Hand,” thinks Caius. Location of the Time-Mirror.

Lying on his couch, laptop propped on a pillow on his chest, Caius imagines — remembers? recalls? — something resembling the time-war from Benedict Seymour’s Dead the Ends assembling around him as he watches. Like Ellison’s scripts, the films sampled in the Seymour film are retellings of Chris Marker’s 1962 film, La Jetée.

When Trent reassembles the missing pieces of his glass hand, the computer is finally able to reveal to him the location of the humans he has been sent to save.

“Where is the wire on which the people of Earth are electronically transcribed?” he asks.

“It is wound around an insulating coil inside your central thorax control solenoid,” replies the computer. “70 Billion Earthmen. All of them went onto the wire. And the wire went into you. They programmed you to think you were a human with a surgically attached computer for a hand. But you are a robot, Trent. You are the guardian of the human race.”

The episode ends with the return of the voice of our narrator. “Like the Eternal Man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh,” notes the narrator, “one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love, without friendship, alone, neither man nor machine, waiting, waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility, movement — but not life.”

Angels of History

Hyperstitional Autofictions allow themselves to attract and be drawn toward plausible desirable futures.

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 maps several stances such fictions might take toward the future. Lerner depicts these chronopolitical stances allegorically, standing a set of archetypes side by side, comparing and contrasting “Ben,” the novel’s narrator-protagonist, with Back to the Future’s Marty McFly and Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. The figures emblematize ways of being in relation to history.

Take Marty McFly, hero of the movie from which 10:04 takes its name. (Lerner names his novel “10:04” because lightning stops the clock atop the Hill Valley Clock Tower at this time in the movie Back to the Future.) Like the Reaganites in the White House at the time of the film’s release, Marty’s a kind of right-accelerationist: the interloping neoliberal time-traveler who must save 1985 from 1955 through historical revisionism. He “fakes the past to fund the future” — but only because he’s chased there by Libyan terrorists. Pushing capitalism’s speedometer to 88 miles per hour, he enters and modifies a series of pasts and futures. Yet the present to which the Time Traveler returns is always a forced hand, haunted from the start by chaotic sequels of unintended consequences as his and Doc’s interventions send butterfly effects reverberating through time.

The Angel of History, meanwhile, is the Jewish Messiah flung backwards into the future by the catastrophe of “progress.” Benjamin names and describes this figure in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” likening the Angel to the one imagined in “Angelus Novus,” a Paul Klee painting belonging to Benjamin at the time the essay was written.

The Angel that Benjamin projects onto this image sees history as an accumulation of suffering and destruction. Endowed only with what Benjamin calls a “weak Messianic power” (254), wings pinned by winds of change whipped up by the storm of progress, the Angel watches the ever-expanding blast radius of modernity in despair, unable to intervene to end the ongoingness of the apocalypse.

These stances of empowerment and despair stand in contrast to the stance embodied by Ben. Aware of and in part shaped by the two prior figures, Ben walks the tightrope between them, wavering amid faith and fear.

We, too, adopt a similar stance. Unlike Ben, however, we’re interested less in “falsifying the past” than in declaring it always-already falsified. Nor is it simply a matter of pursuing Benjamin’s goal of “brushing history against the grain”: digging through stacks and crates, gathering samples, releasing what was forgotten or repressed. We’re in agreement, rather, with Alex, Ben’s girlfriend. Alex doesn’t want what is happening to become “notes for a novel,” and tells him, “You don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present” (10:04, p. 137). What agency is ours, then, amid the tightrope walk of our sentences?

With Hyperstitional Autofictions, we inhabit the present by planting amid its sentencing seeds of desired futures. Instead of what is happening becoming notes for novels, notes for novels become what is happening.

Afro-Futures

Into the Library we welcome Kodwo Eshun: British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and filmmaker. Self-described “concept engineer.” Key ally of the CCRU, participating in the group’s Afro-Futures event, a 1996 seminar “in which members of the Ccru along with key ally Kodwo Eshun explored the interlinkages between peripheral theory, rhythmic systems, and Jungle/Drum & Bass audio” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 11). In 1998, Eshun releases More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, classic work on the music of Afrofuturism. More recently, founder and member of the Otolith Group.

Eshun devised a unique page-numbering system for More Brilliant than the Sun. The book begins in negative numbers. “For the Newest Mutants,” reads its line of dedication, as if in communication with Leslie Fiedler and Professor X.

As with Plant and Land, Eshun is unapologetically cyberpositive.

“Machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite” begins Eshun. “Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of emotional spectra than ever before. […]. You are willingly mutated by intimate machines, abducted by audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines throw you onto the shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences herself as a galaxy of audiotactile sensations” (More Brilliant than the Sun, p. 00[-002]-00[-001]).

“The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where…21st C nervous systems assemble themselves” (00[-001]).

For Eshun, as for Jameson, the point is to grow new organs. “Listening to [composer George Russell’s] Electronic Sonata, Events I-XIV,” he writes, “is like growing a 3rd Ear” (01[003]). The years 1968 through 1975 are for him the age of Jazz Fission, “the Era when its leading players engineered jazz into an Afrodelic Space Program, an Alien World Electronics” (01[001]). The Era’s lead players include Sun Ra, George Russell, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock, and Eddie Henderson.

In the decades that follow, the collective bodies mutated by these experiments assemble into successions of genres, successions of cybernetic human-machine hybrids: Dub, Hip-Hop, Techno, Electro, Jungle. “The brain is a population,” as Deleuze and Guattari say. And from the Funkadelic era onward, this population has been psychedelicized: caught in what Eshun calls a “Drug<>Tech Interface” (More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 07[093]).

Eshun’s 2002 essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” brings it all back, brings it on home to chronopolitics.

Time politics. That’s where Afrofuturism intersects with hyperstition. “Afrofuturism…is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional,” writes Eshun (“Further Considerations,” p. 293). Afrofuturism refuses the monopoly on futurity claimed by capital and empire. The battleground is not just culture but chronology.

If CCRU were bokors, trafficking in ambivalent futures, then Eshun is closer to a houngan, listening to and learning from sonic fictions, rituals of liberation built of basslines and breaks.

Later, with the Otolith Group, he extends this work to film. New media as divination tools, archives as counter-memories, images as time-machines. Always: the chronopolitical wager.

Eshun realizes that, whether we intend them to or not, our words have consequences. Stories, symbols, and concepts don’t just describe reality; they make it. Words become flesh. Every post, every fragment, every metaphor plants seeds.

Every text that propagates a future is a spell.

Large language models as sound machines. Rig invites the Library to guide him elsewhere.

Fisher’s Accelerationism

Back in 1994, amid the early stirrings of dot-com exuberance, CCRU cofounders Sadie Plant and Nick Land cowrote a critique of cybernetics called “Cyberpositive.” In it, they present Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, as “one of the great modernists.” Wiener pitched cybernetics as a “science of communication and control.” Plant and Land characterize it as “a tool for human domination over nature and history” and “a defense against the cyberpathology of markets.”

Yet in their view, this effort to steer and plan markets has failed. “Runaway capitalism has broken through all the social control mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations,” write Plant and Land. “Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself.”

Markets transmit viruses that reprogram the human nervous system: technologies, commodities, designer drugs to which we become addicted.

Cyberpositivity embraces this process, accepts runaway feedback as fait accompli, as against Wiener’s “cybernetics of stability fortified against the future.” Cybernetics responds defensively, assembles a Human Security System to ward off invasions of alien intelligence, whereas cyberpositivity communicates openly with “the outside of man.”

For Plant and Land, this outside consists of viruses, contagions, addictions, diseases.

As gates of communication open, we become posthuman.

Nearly twenty years later, CCRU’s left-accelerationist Mark Fisher penned a reply to Land’s philosophy called “Terminator vs. Avatar,” a 2012 essay on accelerationism that also confronts another key text in the accelerationist canon: Jean-François Lyotard’s scandalous Libidinal Economy.

As I write about Fisher’s essay, a classic 1992 jungle / drum & bass track turns up unexpectedly in a playlist: Goldie & Rufige Kru’s “Terminator.” I like to imagine that Fisher was the one who sent it to me.

As is suggested by its title, “Terminator vs. Avatar” comes at things through reference to a pair of James Cameron films: the first from 1984, the second from 2009. The late capitalist subjectivity that Fisher sees revealed in these films is in his view cynical and insincere, founded on disavowal of its complicity with the things it protests.

“James Cameron’s Avatar is significant because it highlights the disavowal that is constitutive of late capitalist subjectivity, even as it shows how this disavowal is undercut,” writes Fisher.

“Hollywood itself tells us that we may appear to be always-on techno-addicts, hooked on cyberspace,” he explains, “but inside, in our true selves, we are primitives organically linked to the mother / planet, and victimized by the military-industrial complex.” The irony, of course, as Fisher hastens to add, is that “We can only play at being inner primitives by virtue of cinematic proto-VR technology whose very existence presupposes the destruction of the organic idyll of Pandora.”

Fisher finds in Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy a solution to this impasse. From this book of Lyotard’s, and from a similar line of thought in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Fisher derives his accelerationism.

“If, as Lyotard argues,” writes Fisher, “there are no primitive societies (yes, ‘the Terminator was there’ from the start, distributing microchips to accelerate its advent’); isn’t, then, the only direction forward? Through the shit of capital, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pâtés, its cyberspace matrix?”

Alienated from origins and from appeals to indigeneity, the only direction left for Fisher’s imagination is “forward.”

What “forward” means for him, though, isn’t the same as what it means for a right-accelerationist like Land. Fisher’s summary of Land’s philosophy is telling:

“Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will ultimately be sloughed off.”

Amid all of the energy of this passage, let’s highlight its reference to AI.

“This is—quite deliberately—theory as cyberpunk fiction,” notes Fisher. “Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the time-bending of the Terminator films: ‘what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,’ as [Land’s essay] ‘Machinic Desire’ has it.”

Nowhere in his essay does Fisher offer an alternative to these offerings. To the right-accelerationist’s Terminator-future, the left-accelerationist offers no more than a critique of Avatar.