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"grammatology, properly understood, is the study of what writing is, when and how it originated, and the ways in which it differs from other forms of communication like speech. For Derrida, the study of writing goes as far back as Plato but, strictly speaking, the science of ‘grammatology’ itself is a more modern one"

"Derrida argues that ‘grammatology’ offers us an insight into a much bigger set of philosophical assumptions, namely, the ‘metaphysics of presence [la métaphysique de la présence]’ (p. 49/71). What exactly does this forbidding term mean? It is generally understood that ‘metaphysics’ is the name for a specific branch of philosophy that seeks to locate an ultimate ground, essence or foundation of reality that lies beyond the physical or empirical world: the classic example of such a position would be Plato’s idealism which argues that our world is merely the imitation of a pre-existing world of permanent, unchanging Ideas or Forms. However, Derrida has a much more ambitious understanding of ‘metaphysics’ that encompasses the entire history of western philosophy from Plato to the present day. For Derrida, the western philosophical tradition in its entirety can be described as ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that it all seeks to establish an essential foundation for reality and, in his view, that foundation is something called ‘presence’. If western philosophy has developed in many different directions over the last 2,500 years, what all these movements have in common is an attempt to posit a full or pure ‘presence’ as the supreme value by which all reality can be judged. From the spatial presence of something we can see, hear or touch, through the temporal presence of the ‘here and now’ in which we live, up to and including the absence of some presence that has been lost (such as an Edenic state of nature) or which may be achieved in the future (such as the return of God), western thought consistently comes to the same conclusion: what is most real, true or important is what is most present. In Derrida’s view, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ historically operates by erecting a series of binary oppositions between concepts, values or terms where, in each case, one concept is identified as the bearer of presence itself whereas the other is identified with the falling away, or loss of, that presence: Introduction 7 the transcendental is privileged as more ‘present’ than the empirical, the ideal is championed over the material, the soul over the body, the masculine over the feminine and so on ad infinitum"

"whatever we perceive or experience as fully ‘present’ – the sound of my own voice, the wooden desk that I can touch in front of me, the thoughts that are running through my head while I read or write, even the ‘here and now’ of space and time in which I exist – is actually shot through with an infinite, and almost imperceptible, number of differences, delays or spaces. Quite simply, Derrida argues that every apparently pure, stable or self-identical presence is nothing more than an effect generated by a prior series of differences: nothing is ever purely or simply ‘there’."

"Derrida shows that the supposedly primary, dominant or superior value implicitly relies on the supposedly secondary, different or inferior value in order to achieve the presence that it should achieve all by itself: the masculine depends upon the feminine in order to define its own identity in the first place. What form does this process take in the Grammatology?"

"For Derrida, Of Grammatology takes the form of an extended analysis of the metaphysical opposition between speech and writing. It focuses on what the philosopher takes to be a defining form of what we have called the metaphysical search for ‘presence’: logocentrism (p. 3/11). According to the etymology of the term, ‘logocentrism’ 8 Derrida’s Of Grammatology signifies the philosophical attempt to find what the Ancient Greeks called the logos: a term which can be literally translated as ‘word’ but also carries within it the larger sense of ‘logic’, ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’."

"logocentrism might even be described as the most ‘original and powerful ethnocentrism’, he writes in the ‘Exergue’, because it violently privileges and imposes the values of western culture over all others (p. 3/12)."

"Derrida challenges the logocentric attempt to champion speech over writing by arguing that all language – whether spoken or written – might be described as ‘writing’: writing is another name for language itself."

"Derrida does not propose that we can ever simply overcome logocentric or metaphysical assumptions. We cannot simply establish some new, more accurate theory or system of knowledge to replace the metaphysics of presence ( Positions, p. 12). If Derrida’s work is a thoroughgoing interrogation of metaphysics, the fact remains that he is deeply sceptical of any attempt to get ‘beyond’ it for the very simple reason that we have no way of thinking, talking or writing that is not dominated by the metaphysical tradition: ‘[w]e have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history’ he writes in a contemporaneous essay.3 To reject metaphysics tout court, in other words, is to reject language and thought itself."

"‘The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures’ ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"For Derrida, all language – whether spoken or written – exists in an irreducible state of mediation: we cannot simply return to the animating intentions, consciousness or ‘presence’ of the user, speaker or author. From the moment we begin to speak or write, in other words, we set in motion a complex linguistic machine that has a ‘life’ quite independent of our own: what we call Of Grammatology is a cog in that mechanism. If we cannot return to the true, original or intended meaning of Derrida’s text, this means that there can be no end to the process of reading, analysing and interpreting it: the meaning of the text does not lie behind us in some distant past, in other words, but in front of us, in the future, as something that is yet to be decided. In all these senses, I think the task of reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology can only be an endless one, but let us at least begin." Chapter 1: Historical Context

"If the essential metaphysical question still remained the same – what is? – the answer changed from ‘the ideal’, ‘substance’ or ‘god’ to the ‘thinking or knowing subject’. For the seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher Descartes, the ego cogito or thinking subject provided the only firm foundation upon which knowledge could be grounded and this position is pursued and refined in different ways by such figures as Kant and Husserl.2 The last decades of the nineteenth century, however, saw the emergence of a new, more radical critique of metaphysics in the work of such seminal figures as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. This so-called ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is what lays the groundwork for Derrida’s own attempt to question the grounding assumptions of western metaphysics ( Writing and Difference, p. 280). In Derrida’s own view, deconstruction is heavily indebted to this larger tradition of ‘anti-metaphysical philosophy’ but, as we will see, his philosophy remains deeply sceptical about the possibility of ever simply getting ‘beyond’ metaphysics."

"Karl Marx sees all our Historical Context 17 metaphysical ideas about reality as nothing more than imaginary expressions of the processes of life, nature and history. Quite simply, our view of reality is upside-down: we must understand consciousness from the perspective of life, rather than life from the perspective of consciousness.3 According to Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism, what defines ‘life’ in this case is not biology but history: being alive is not something we are so much as something we do, the way in which we work or labour, how we organise our existence socially, materially and economically ( German Ideology, p. 48)."

"Friedrich Nietzsche famously sees the production of metaphysical belief systems as an attempt to repress the dynamic processes of life itself: the ‘other’ world of metaphysics is the product of this world rather than its cause or foundation. Proposing 18 Derrida’s Of Grammatology what he calls a ‘genealogy’ of metaphysics, Nietzsche shows how apparently timeless, unconditioned values arise out of the very history they are supposed to explain in the first place. Quite simply, we must see concepts like ‘truth’, ‘being’ or ‘consciousness’ less as descriptions of ‘what is’ and more as misleading linguistic abstractions of a flux of historical, physiological and affective forces. For Nietzsche, metaphysics is the product of what he calls an ‘ascetic ideal’ that leads human beings to renounce ‘this world, our world’ in favour of ‘ another world’.6 Yet, it is impossible to reach this other world because it never existed in the first place and so humanity falls back into ‘ ressentiment’: a sense of permanent guilt that finds its apex in the Christian view of human existence as ‘fallen’. What lies beneath the metaphysical ‘will to truth’ of the ascetic ideal is the ‘will to power’: the capacity to liberate ourselves from the pursuit of the timeless other world of ‘truth’, and affirm our place within, and as a product of, the endlessly creative becoming of this world."

"Sigmund Freud’s pyschoanalysis intensifies this critique of the rational thinking or knowing subject which had become the last refuge of metaphysics in modernity: psychoanalysis ‘put[s] consciousness into question in its assured certainty of itself ’ Derrida writes ( Margins, p. 17). To Freud’s way of thinking, what we call the rational or self-conscious ‘I’ is the meeting point of a range of different, competing and often unconscious forces, desires or principles: ‘consciousness may be, not the most universal attribute of human processes, but only a particular fraction of them’.8 What is ground-breaking about psychoanalysis for Derrida is precisely this insight into how apparently simple, identical and present points of origin – such as the consciousness of the subject – are actually the product of an originary and unthought network of differences: ‘The putting into question of the authority of consciousness is first and always differential’ ( Margins, p. 18)."

"The psychoanalytic system may well call into question the self-presence of consciousness but it does so at the cost of turning the unconscious into a ‘hidden, virtual, or potential self-presence’. This means that Freud risks establishing a metaphysics of the unconscious whereby our drives and instincts become a new metaphysical basis for truth (pp. 20–1)."

"The crucial thing to grasp about Derrida’s readings of the history of philosophy, in other words, is that he is neither seeking to score points off metaphysics itself (as if anyone who believed in it were stupid or erroneous), nor to establish some new anti-metaphysical system (which would somehow avoid, or correct, the errors of its predecessor), so much as articulating this larger, and more complex, dilemma. There is an unavoidable sense in which every attempt to overcome metaphysics cannot help but repeat the language, discourse and assumptions of metaphysics, Derrida argues, because there is quite simply no other vocabulary available to us ( Positions, p. 12). This is why Derrida admits right from the outset of his work that his own critique of metaphysics must necessarily work within the very system of ideas it wishes to contest even, at the risk of simply replicating it ( Grammatology, p. 24/39)."

"The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity’.10 To introduce the thesis of his seminal work Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the basic question ‘What is Being?’ has been largely forgotten by western philosophy because the latter focuses exclusively on beings or entities ( Being and Time, p. 2). Heidegger seeks to recuperate the meaning of Being itself by focusing on a particular kind of being and the one he chooses is human being or, as he famously calls it, Dasein (‘there-being’). For Heidegger, what defines Dasein is that it is not a being or entity that exists in time (like a rock or an animal) so much as a being who exists as time, whose being is essentially temporal: we are quite literally nothing other than the accumulation of our past experiences, on the one hand, and what we have the potential to ‘project’ out of those experiences into the future, on the other."

"For Derrida, both traditions par-ticipate in the championing of speech as the true bearer of presence and the repression or marginalisation of writing as a base or empty vessel that is the logocentric gesture par excellence."

"It focuses on the essence of these particular ‘intuitions’, in other words, what your experience of them says about the way in which consciousness works more generally. According to Husserl, the defining characteristic of consciousness is that it is intentional, by which he means that it is always directed towards objects. To put it simply: consciousness is not an empty box into which objects are subsequently placed, but always the consciousness of some object."

"For Husserl, intentionality contains two, intrinsically linked, sides: the noesis, or intentional act of consciousness that is directed towards an object, and the object, or noema, towards which that act is directed. If this argument goes some way towards breaking down the subject/object dualism that has plagued philosophy since Descartes, it is important to bear in mind that Husserl’s phenomenology remains at all times a theory of consciousness: what concerns him is purely that which presents itself to our conscious experience – a phenomenon – and he is careful not to make any presumptions about what may or may not lie behind that appearance. The intentional act can only be understood as what it is if Historical Context 25 we suspend or ‘bracket’ off – the key term Husserl uses here is ‘ epoché’ – all our everyday assumptions about the empirical existence of external objects (what he calls the ‘natural attitude’), together with any prior philosophical assumptions or prejudices we might have about essence, existence or substance. This ‘transcendental’ attempt to clarify the pure or essential structures of consciousness by rigorously suspending or ‘reducing’ any presumption of the existence of the empirical world is increasingly criticised by Husserl’s successors. In the view of later figures like Heidegger, Levinas and Ricoeur, Husserl’s focus on the purity of consciousness risks becoming too abstract and theoretical in approach: phenomenology must take account of the context – linguistic, existential, ethical – in which consciousness is embedded."

"Second, though, Derrida observes that Husserl goes on to associate expression with speech and indication with writing: speech is expressive because it necessarily entails the presence of the speaker, whereas writing is indicative because the writer is absent and substituted by a graphic inscription or mark. Unfortunately, though, things are not quite this simple because, as Derrida shows, the boundary between expression and indication, speech and writing and, more generally, presence and absence, constantly needs to be re-drawn. Straightaway, Husserl is forced to concede that not all s peech is expressive: when we speak in order to communicate with someone else, our 26 Derrida’s Of Grammatology words merely indicate our inner experience for the other person because, of course, they are not directly experiencing what we are experiencing."

"It is Husserl’s contention that objects are immediately present to consciousness in both the spatial and the temporal senses of the word. When I ‘intend’ a certain object, it is present here and now to my consciousness: ‘[f]or the acts in question are themselves experienced by us at that very moment in the blink of an eye [ im selben Augenblick]’ ( Logical Investigations, p. 280). Once again, however, Derrida uses an example from Husserl’s own phenomenology – in this case his lectures on internal time consciousness – to show that the present moment in which perception takes place is in fact anything but ‘present’. To clarify what might seem at face value to be a paradoxical argument, Derrida argues that what we perceive as the Historical Context 27 ‘now’ or present moment is in fact a synthesis or composite of memory and expectation, retention and protention. Derrida notes how Husserl himself shows us in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness that when we listen to a piece of music we retain the memory of the note just played, we hear the note currently being played, and anticipate the next note in the sequence, all at once. For Husserl, in other words, retention – the memory of what has just passed – is the ‘tail’ that always follows the ‘comet’ of primary impression.13 If perception of the present is thus shot through with absence – what has just past and what is about to come – then Husserl’s theory of consciousness is once again shown to be always and already conditioned by the kind of mediation that he brackets off as external or inessential to his phenomenology. Just as the space of consciousness is mediated by things that are not fully present – linguistic signs – so the time of consciousness is structured by what is temporally absent: the past and the future. In this sense, Husserl’s metaphysics of ‘presence’ is once again forced to rely on the very thing it seeks to exclude: ‘This alterity is in fact the very condition for presence’ ( Speech and Phenomena, p. 65)."

"Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a linguist but is now commonly held to be the ‘father’ of the modern movement called structuralism. He focused his research less on particular units of language – what he calls ‘ parole’ or speech – so much as on the underlying system of language ( langue) in which those units exist. He famously argues that individual units of language acquire meaning from their relative position within the linguistic system as a whole: a word like ‘cat’, for example, has no meaning outside the system of the English language."

"For Saussure and his followers, in other words, consciousness is always mediated through a prior network of signs, concepts, and values which enable us to make sense of our experience and, in this respect, at least, it would seem to confirm Derrida’s own critique of phenomenology. More generally, as we will see in Part 2, structuralism institutes a differential and relational theory of meaning that will be an enormous influence upon Derridaean deconstruction. Just as a single chess piece only makes sense in the context of the other pieces on the board, so no individual unit within a network has meaning in itself but rather achieves meaning in relation to all the other units within the system."

"Derrida begins this essay by effectively seeking to turn the tables on structuralism itself: what, he asks, structures the search for structures of language, culture and society? As we have already begun to see, his answer to this question is that structuralism is characterised by the attempt to identify a fixed point or centre at the heart of every structure ( Writing and Difference, p. 278)."

"For Derrida, then, it becomes clear that structuralism is curiously self-exempting: everything has a structure – a relative place within the play of the system – except the centre of the structure itself where that play comes to a stop (p. 279)."

"Quite simply, structuralism’s attempt to just stop doing philosophy and begin again with something more ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ like anthropology, linguistics or history leaves its own deepest metaphysical assumptions unquestioned. If structuralism continually throws up new scientific methodologies – Saussure’s linguistics, Lévi-Strauss’s ethnography, Michel Foucault’s archaeology or Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology – in order to get around old metaphysical problems, Derrida argues that all these supposedly original approaches actually presuppose some of the most ancient philosophical oppositions imaginable: speech and writing, nature and culture, the transcendental and the empirical, and so on."

"for all his scientific credentials – Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology remains ‘caught . . . within the metaphysics – logocentrism – which at the same time [he] claims rather precipitately to have “gone beyond” ’ ( Grammatology, p. 99/148): Lévi-Strauss, like Husserl before him, takes a more or less arbitrary decision that truth will equal presence which, in turn, will be equated with speech."

"For Derrida, in other words, what Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism teaches us is that even the most rigorous disciplines outside the province of philosophy remain caught within the foundational incoherence of the metaphysics of presence because, once again, their sponsorship of truth, presence and speech is bought and paid for by the repression of mediation, difference, writing. In this way, Derrida’s critique of metaphysics inevitably takes us beyond the domain of structuralism as well as phenomenology."

"Derrida’s critique of metaphysics is in many ways an attempt to reveal what we might call the radical historicity of the present. As he consistently argues, what appear to be timeless or natural ideas – ‘being’, ‘truth’ etc. – are actually anything but. Yet, this argument also applies to the philosophical idea of ‘history’ itself, our very understanding of what history is and how it works."

"If what we understand as ‘history’ depends upon a metaphysics of presence, Derrida’s aim is once again to show how that idea of history is itself a historical construction: it cannot be taken as truth. Finally, then, Derrida’s critique of the philosophical concept of ‘history’ seeks to do what he does to any other metaphysical idea, namely, to reveal the open-ended network of differences on which it resides: no historical moment, body of thought, epoch or tradition, is ever wholly at one with itself because it inevitably contains the traces of what precedes and follows it. In Derrida’s hands, what we might call the metaphysical concept of history – where a succession of present moments are strung together like pearls on a neck-lace – begins to unravel into a more complex, plural or differential set of relations between past, present and future: ‘there is not one single history, a general history, but rather histories’ (p. 58" Chapter 2: A Guide to the Text

"Finally, and most importantly, Derrida will propose that the metaphysical or logocentric commitment to speech depends upon a foundational contradiction or tension: all language – both speech and writing – is characterised by the essential mediation that metaphysics historically assigns to ‘writing’ alone. If the guarantee of truth – speech – is already contaminated with ‘writing’, we will also begin to see that this has important implications for our concept of a pure and unmediated ‘presence’ itself: we cannot gain access to a presence – a ‘there’ – that exists wholly independently of linguistic mediation. For Derrida, as 42 Derrida’s Of Grammatology we will now see, the theory of the linguistic sign represents a privileged symptom of this entire problematic: it is the sign – more than anything else – that is the site of his questioning of logocentrism. What, then, is Derrida’s argument?"

"To introduce his own reading of logocentrism, Derrida somewhat mysteriously says that what is required is ‘not the demolition, but the de-sedimentation, the deconstruction’ of the logos’ (p. 10/21)."

"For Derrida, what deconstruction attempts to do is to articulate the – often hidden or repressed – conditions according to which it is possible for any structure to be constituted in the first place. In Derrida’s own words, deconstruction signifies the ‘undoing, decomposing and de-sedimenting of structures’ in order to ‘understand how an “ensemble” was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end’."

"It is also important to stress that ‘deconstruction’ is not a new theory, technique or methodology that we can simply apply to particular texts in the way that we might, for example, do a Marxist or a Freudian ‘reading’ of a novel. As we have already begun to see by looking at the way in which Derrida reads Husserl and Lévi-Strauss, deconstruction is not something we do to a text from the ‘outside’, so to speak, so much as something that we reveal about the way in which any text is internally constructed. If Derrida’s reading of the privileged texts of logocentrism has a purpose, it is not to establish some superior position of knowledge or authority so much as to tease out the immanent contradictions within the texts themselves: Husserl is criticised by none other than Husserl and Lévi-Strauss by no one but Lévi-Strauss."

"For Derrida, then, the process of reading is not a question of actively ‘deconstructing’ logocentrism so much as showing that the metaphysics of presence is already in a process of what we might call ‘self-deconstruction’ insofar as it has a ‘self ’ at all: it has no full or ‘present’ ground or foundation on which to base itself and so it exists in a permanent state of instability or contingency."

"It establishes an absolutely fundamental point about the sign that will endure all the way up to the present day: a sign is always a sign or re-presentation of some pre-existing idea or mental experience."

"If speech directly signifies the ideas or intentions of the person speaking, in other words, writing only has a second-hand relation to thought because it is nothing more than a sign of a sign. The written signifier is merely the sign of the spoken signifier, in other words, whereas the spoken signifier is the sign of the signified idea or thought"

"If Saussure and other modern linguists obviously dispense with any belief in a creator god lying behind the sign, Derrida has little difficulty in showing that they still retain a residually theological investment in what he calls a ‘transcendental signified’ – an ultimate presence – which anchors all meaning in itself: the presence of God is merely replaced by the presence of the speaker, of his or her thoughts and feelings, and so on. In this sense, Derrida argues that the age of the sign is essentially theological: ‘the sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth’ (p. 14/25)."

"However, we will see later on that all signs are characterised by this state of mediation – which makes it impossible for them to directly relate to a ‘present’ meaning or signified – and so what logocentrism attributes to ‘writing’ actually describes the state of language as such."

"For Derrida, as we will see in the next section, every signifier can be seen as a mere ‘a signifier of a signifier’ – to quote the famous logocentric dismissal of writing – as opposed to something that relates directly to a present signified: what we call ‘writing’ is another name 50 Derrida’s Of Grammatology for the original condition of language as a whole (p. 7/16). Finally, then, it becomes clear that what enables us to ‘close the book’ on logocentrism is this recognition of the inescapably mediated status of all signs: we cannot gain access to a full or present signified, meaning or logos. The ‘death’ of the civilisation of the book, then, signifies the growing awareness that writing cannot be traced back to a pure or unmediated presence, in the way that we can trace the words of a book back to the author who wrote them. This new concept of writing, and indeed language as a whole, has been emerging for a long time, Derrida argues, but it is now beginning to manifest itself in the form of a series of contemporary developments in post-war philosophy, science and thought (p. 6/15–16). Enter grammatology."

"On the contrary, language is a defining condition of everything that we understand as constituting the sphere of the human: consciousness, thought, expression, culture.6 Martin Heidegger, for instance, famously argues that it is language that ‘speaks’ man – rather than the other way around – in the sense that it names or calls into existence the things that constitute the world of Dasein.7 Now, this concept of language as something that does not merely describe the world, but actively constructs the way in which we experience it, is intensified by the structuralist revolution."

"For Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistic signs give shape and clarity to what would otherwise be a shadowy flux of impressions in the same way that a pair of glasses gives definition to the sight of a myopic person: it is only because I have the sign of a ‘table’ – both the signifier and the idea or concept signified by it – that I am able to make sense of the real, actual object in front of me. If Saussure is concerned with how language mediates or constructs our experience of the real world, his structuralist successors go on to extend his principles from language to reality itself: our engagement with the real world itself – the world that supposedly lies beyond language – is structured according to models of signification drawn from Saussure’s linguistics."

"For Derrida, however, this ‘linguistic’ turn is in the process of being superseded by what we might call a ‘scriptural’ turn. It is now writing, and not language in general, that has become the dominant means of explaining consciousness, culture, the psyche and so on: ‘[n]ow we tend to say “writing” for all that and more’ (p. 9/19)."

"Derrida’s concept of an ‘originary writing’ is not an attempt to establish a new point of origin – as if it would be plausible to say that writing really did evolve before speech – but a way of calling into question the very idea of an origin, an absolute beginning, a pure historical, theological or philosophical point of ‘presence’ to which everything can be traced back."

"writing cannot be the object of a science, Derrida argues, because it is what makes scientific study possible in the first place. Why is this? For Derrida, as we saw in our discussion of Husserl, writing is the sole means by which we can record, preserve and transmit our thoughts and thus establish something as ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘objectivity’ in the first place: the written text is what enables the objects of geometry to transcend the mind of the 58 Derrida’s Of Grammatology first geometers, for instance, and become universal objects for everyone"

"For Saussure, as we will see, the signifier and the signified – the physical mark and the concept it refers to – are inextricably linked to one another like two sides of the same sheet of paper:"

"According to Saussure’s structure-based approach, language is not a nomenclature, that is, a series of names for pre-existing objects in the outside world. On the contrary, it is a system that acquires meaning through its own internal structure and relations."

"To introduce another important point, however, Saussure argues that the relation between any given signifier and signified is arbitrary. It is motivated by tradition or convention, in other words, rather than by any perceived ‘natural resemblance’ between sound and concept. If I use the sound ‘cat’ to refer to the concept of a cat, it is not because there is any natural relation between this particular signifier and signified but rather because it is accepted that the two go together within the conventions of the English language: the convention is very different in the French and Italian languages, for instance, where other signifiers (‘chat’ or ‘gatto’) relate to the signified."

"Finally, and most importantly, however, Saussure also argues that any linguistic sign only acquires its meaning through its difference from other linguistic signs rather than through any ‘positive’ value it might possess in itself. The meaning of any sign is determined by its difference – both phonic and conceptual – from other signs within the system. This complex linguistic system – arbitrary, conventional and differential – is the basis for our experience of the world outside language."

"Intriguingly, he is especially worried that writing may displace speech from its position at the centre of language and reverse the natural order of the spoken and the written word. What concerns him is that the written word – because it seems to represent a more durable, lasting mode of signification than speech – will gradually come to be seen as representative of language as a whole. Now, this would be an absolute disaster, in his view, because writing mediates, or even breaks, what he sees as the ‘natural bond’ between sound and sense. If writing is taken to represent language as whole, Saussure predicts, all sorts of apocalyptic catastrophes will ensue. The spelling of a word will come to influence, and even modify, the way in which that word is said, he says, and even in his own time this is leading to terrible mispronunciations. This scenario will not strike many readers as particularly awful though – is mispronunciation really such a disaster"

"The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. ( Course, pp. 117–18) What exactly is Saussure saying here? If any one sign has meaning, it is not because it possesses any content or substance in itself but because it differs – both phonically and conceptually – from other signs within the linguistic system. The sign ‘cat’ (regardless of whether we see it from the perspective of the sound or the concept) exists within a prior network of relations to other signs (‘hat’, ‘bat’ and so on). There is a paradoxical sense in which the idea of a singular or unique sign is, then, something of a contradiction-in-terms. This is because any apparently singular, ‘present’ and independent sign necessarily contains within it the traces of other signs within the system against which it is to be defined. In Derrida’s view, as we will A Guide to the Text 67 see in a moment, this theory has radical implications for the logocentric theory of the sign."

"The fact is that every signifier might best be described as a ‘signifier of a signifier’ because, according to Saussure’s own theory, every sign works by referring to other signs within the system rather than to some positive content of its own. There is an important sense, then, in which the lowly position of writing – inferior, derivative, always at one step removed from the main action – accurately describes the position of language as a whole. This means that writing is not so much ‘comparable’ to language as the other way around: language might even be described as a species of writing (p. 52/75)."

"Derrida’s contention is that the position historically attributed to ‘writing’ in western culture actually describes the condition of all language whatsoever: what is called ‘writing’ names the framework ‘common to all systems of signification’ (p. 46/68) whether they be spoken, written, drawn, electronically recorded or transmitted. Indeed, he goes to great pains to distinguish this ‘originary’ concept of writing from what he calls the ‘vulgar’ or conventional idea of writing as a set of empirical marks, letters or inscriptions (p. 46/68)."

"To put it simply, what Derrida calls the originary trace represents his most systematic attempt to articulate this central point in the Grammatology: mediation goes all the way down."

"To recall Saussure’s argument, linguistic signs are not constituted by any intrinsic phonic or conceptual substance – a particular sound or idea that is inherent to that sign itself – but by their difference from other signs in the system. If every sign in the system obtains its identity through its difference from all the other signs, then this means every sign is intrinsically marked by what it is not. Every sign must retain the traces of the other signs against which it is to be defined, in other words, in order to have any meaning at all."

"‘ the (pure) trace’ he declares, is différance [ la trace (pure) et la différance]’ (p. 62/92)."

"says this: ‘[w]e shall designate by the term différance the movement by which any language, or any code, any system of reference in general, becomes “historically” constituted as a fabric of differences’ (p. 141)."

"However, what the originary trace shows us is that every sign first refers to other signs, as opposed to some ‘present’ concept that is not itself a sign. We can see, then, that the originary trace throws the whole logocentric concept of the sign into crisis by proposing that we never arrive at a simple or unmediated meaning: nothing is unmediated. For Derrida, every signifier relates to other signifiers that surround it in space and time and so we can never reach a pure thought or concept – a signified – that exists in and of itself independently of all signifiers: what is supposedly beyond language is plunged back into language. If we take a very simple example of this, it becomes much clearer: every time we look up a word in the dictionary – ‘love’, for example – what we find is not the meaning of that word but merely other words that act as synonyms for it (‘love’ means ‘adoration’ or ‘desire’) or even antonyms (‘love’ means the opposite of ‘hate’)."

"In Derrida’s account, all thought remains caught with the network of spatial and temporal differentiation that is the ‘trace’: ‘ We think only in signs’ (p. 50/73, English in original)."

"According to the same logic, the trace is neither sensible nor intelligible. It is not something that can be recognised by our senses (like a sound or smell), in other words, nor something that can be conceived within our minds (like an idea or concept). On the one hand, we cannot see or hear it because, it is nothing but the difference between spoken or written marks. On the other, we cannot quite think it either 74 Derrida’s Of Grammatology because, once again, the difference between ideas or concepts cannot, strictly speaking, itself be a concept (p. 62/92–3)."

"In Derrida’s readings of Husserl, for example, we saw how the supposed purity of our interior consciousness requires the traces of the ‘external’ world (communication, indication, writing) in order to relate to itself in the first place: what is apparently ‘outside’ is already ‘inside’ (p. 44/65)."

"For Derrida, the trace cannot be traced to any point of simple spatial or temporal presence – whether a present that is now past or one that is yet to come – because it is the underlying differential condition of any ‘presence’ whatsoever. In Derrida’s own paradoxical phrase, the originary trace can never be ‘there’ because it is ‘always-already-there [ toujours déjà-lá]’: it both recedes into an infinite past and projects itself into an infinite future (p. 66/97)."

"the logic of metaphysics? In simple terms, the trace is prior to every metaphysical concept because it is the movement of différance – of differing and deferring – that allows them to appear as concepts in the first place: ‘[ t] he trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general’ (pp. 62/95)."

"Quite simply, the whole point of the trace is that it is an orginary condition of mediation, synthesis or complexity rather than a present being, thing or entity: ‘[t]he trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is?’ (p. 75/110)."

"To declare that ‘everything begins with the trace’, then, is not an attempt to posit some new, even more fundamental point of origin, in other words, but to assert that there is no pure, simple or present origin in the first place (p. 65/95). For Derrida, that is to say, any origin is always multiple: what claims to be a singular point of origin must always define itself against something that it is not, dividing itself in at least two, multiplying itself like a cell through a process of infinite differing/deferring"

"What should be opposed and hierarchised terms presuppose one another. To Derrida’s eyes, any value that metaphysics posits as ‘present’ – speech, nature, consciousness – is thus always already spreading or dispersing outwards into a network of traces, differences and mediations: nothing is ever purely present or absent."

"In what is now a A Guide to the Text 77 famous argumentative move, Derrida contends that the originary trace thus places every metaphysics of presence in a curious double-bind: it is both what makes the desire for presence possible in the first place and what makes the fulfilment of that desire impossible."

"Now, Lévi-Strauss himself portrays writing as something that arrives to violate a place or moment of pure presence from ‘outside’, but what Derrida is once again going to show is that this foreign body is already intrinsic to language itself: we must articulate the ‘originary violence of a language which is always already a writing’ (p. 106/156)."

"all language – whether it be the ‘speech’ of the Nambikwara or the ‘writing’ of Lévi-Strauss himself – is already a species of a more originary and generalised ‘writing’ and this compels him to re-think the Rousseauean mythology of a fall from a prelapsarian utopia. In Derrida’s words, we are not dealing with a fall from nature into culture, peace into violence or speech into writing so much as a fall within nature itself, which is thus revealed to be never quite ‘natural’ in the first place."

"As Derrida argues, what seems like an innocent anecdote actually belongs to an eighteenth-century A Guide to the Text 85 tradition of confessional writing whereby autobiography is the basis for a philosophical reflection upon the relation between nature and society, between an ‘ideal’ society and ‘real’ society or, to put it more bluntly, between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (pp. 113–14/166)."

"For Derrida, the larger Rousseauean agenda of this narrative is also clear: Lévi-Strauss is not so much seeking to discover the way of life of any particular people but the ideal basis of human society as a whole (p. 115/169–70). In fact, Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology might be suspected of a kind of reverse ethnocentrism: what begins as an almost Marxian critique of attempts to impose western culture on other peoples as if it were a universal standard ends up setting up a thoroughly romanticised version of non-western culture as the ideal by which all humanity is to be judged."

"According to Saussure’s differential theory of language – which, as we have seen, heavily influences Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology – a proper name can only be proper if it exists in a relation to other proper names: ‘Peter’ is only meaningful because it is different from ‘Mary’. Now, the upshot of this position is that no name can ever be ‘proper’ in and of itself – in the sense that it refers solely, directly and uniquely, to what it names – and this leads Derrida to speak of the ‘death’ of absolutely proper naming (p. 109/164). To Derrida’s eyes, in other words, it thus becomes possible to speak of an ‘originary’ violence at work in the act of naming because the very structure of language itself violates the supposed propriety, the supposedly unique status, of the proper name: ‘Anterior to the possibility of violence in the current and derivative sense’ he argues, we find ‘the violence of the arche-writing, the violence of difference, of classification, and of 88 Derrida’s Of Grammatology the system of appellations’ (p. 110/162). For"

"To put it in a word, then, Derrida argues that the second level of violence is the institution of law. However, once again this seems a somewhat strange move to make: law is commonly seen as that which puts an end to violence, that which restores or protects a state of peace, so why see it as representing a new form of violence? Quite simply, the answer is that what we call the ‘law’ can only meet violence with violence. The institution of law by the Nambikwara cannot actually restore an original state of peace in which all proper names are respected, for no such state ever existed, so all it can do is more or less violently suppress the violence of language itself under the guise of ‘justice’ ‘morality’ or ‘society’. This apparent attempt to preserve the so-called ‘proper’ names by forbidding their disclosure is, Derrida argues, thus actually what makes those names proper in the first place. For Derrida, then, it is the identification of, and prohibition against, something called ‘impropriety’ that produces the illusion of a pre-existing state of ‘propriety’. In other words, the institution of law manufactures the very state of original ‘propriety’ it claims to protect: ‘the so-called proper, substitute of the deferred proper, perceived by the social and moral consciousness as the proper’ (p. 112/165)."

"For Derrida, this story reveals that the violence of writing – the network of differences, relations and mediation which interrupts every pure, unique or self-identical meaning – is at work within Nambikwara society long before the advent of writing in the accepted, empirical sense of that term: what Lévi-Strauss persists in calling ‘peace’ is already a state of violence. In the next part of the chapter, Derrida pursues this insight into a reading of another pivotal scene in Tristes tropiques called the ‘writing lesson’."

"For Derrida, in other words, an ‘originary’ writing appears well before writing in the narrow sense: it is ‘already in the différance or the arche- writing that opens speech itself ’ (p. 128/186)."

"If the epoch of writing is characterised by anything, it is less the advancement of knowledge than the extension of power, domination and segregation through political, economic and administrative elites: the historic function of writing has been to reinforce the power of the few rather than to bring knowledge to the many."

"would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good biologist. But I wasn’t a good biologist. We had a good idea, a good experiment, the right equipment, but I screwed it up: I gave her infected ribosomes—the grossest possible error that you could make in an experiment like that. My ribosomes had been in the refrigerator for almost a month, and had become contaminated with some other living things. Had I prepared those ribosomes promptly over again and given them to her in a serious and careful way, with everything under control, that experiment would have worked, and we would have been the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life: the machinery of making proteins, the ribosomes, is the same in every creature. We were there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an amateur—stupid and sloppy"

"paramecium, it looked like a network of jackstraws. As the drop of water evaporated, over a time of fifteen or twenty minutes, the paramecium got into a tighter and tighter situation: there was more and more of this back-and-forth until it could hardly move. It was stuck between these “sticks,” almost jammed. Then I saw something I had never seen or heard of: the paramecium lost its shape. It could flex itself, like an amoeba. It began to push itself against one of the sticks, and began dividing into two prongs until the division was about halfway up the paramecium, at which time it decided that wasn’t a very good idea, and backed away. So my impression of these animals is that their behavior is much too simplified in the books. It is not so utterly mechanical or one-dimensional as they say. They should describe the behavior of these simple animals correctly. Until we see how many dimensions of behavior even a one-celled animal has, we won’t be able to fully understand the behavior of more complicated animals"

"After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see"

"A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works compared to how a computing machine works—especially how information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many directions compared to a machine—you don’t have to come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word “rent,” for example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income, or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all sorts"

"In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another."

Why would an AGI necessarily look to self-improve?

Cegłowski, who was born in Poland, says the idea that a superintelligent being would inevitably want to improve itself is “unabashedly American.” “My roommate was the smartest person I ever met in my life. He was incredibly brilliant, and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips,” he says. “The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation.” And, Cegłowski adds, there’s a similarly American myth about lone geniuses that sits at the heart of this whole project. “A recurring flaw in AI alarmism is that it treats intelligence as a property of individual minds, rather than recognizing that this capacity is distributed across our civilization and culture.”

"The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel,” Altman claims. “This technological revolution is unstoppable. And a recursive loop of innovation, as these smart machines themselves help us make smarter machines, will accelerate the revolution’s pace.” In an essay on his personal website, Altman declares that this inexorably approaching future will involve computer programs doing “almost everything, including making new scientific discoveries that will expand our concept of ‘everything.’"

"replacing money: in 2024, he said that in the future, instead of a universal basic income, there might be “universal basic compute,” allocating people time on a future GPT model that can (somehow) produce anything" Chapter 2: Machines of Loving Grace

"Put differently,” they wrote, “it is around 18 times harder today to generate the exponential growth behind Moore’s Law than it was in 1971.” Their conclusion is that research productivity has declined because “ideas, and the exponential growth they imply, are getting harder to find.”74 Moore’s law, then, isn’t an example of accelerating returns—it’s an example of diminishing returns for the same level of investment."

"If we do want a notion of intelligence that scales linearly with compute power, it’s not going to be the notion of intelligence that grounds the kind of things we want,” says David Thorstad, a philosopher at Vanderbilt University. “So if it’s also supposed to scale with the ability to predict and act on the world, or play games, or pass intelligence tests, or do anything we would standardly define as intelligence, it’s not going to scale linearly with compute power."

"Psychologists have studied intelligence systematically for well over a century; the actual existence of some measure of overall intelligence, which they dub “general intelligence” or just g for short, is debatable at best. Statistically, there’s no good case for the actual existence of g. “The myth of g legitimates a vast enterprise of intelligence testing and theorizing,” writes statistician Cosma Shalizi, who calls g a “statistical myth.” “The sooner we stop paying attention to g, the sooner we can devote our energies to understanding the mind."

"The architecture of modern computers, involving a central processing unit connected to working memory and long-term storage, does not resemble our best understanding of the logical organization of the human brain. Indeed, the best science suggests that the human brain isn’t structured like a human-made object at all, which makes reverse engineering it extraordinarily difficult."

"The brain is not a computer, but it is more like a computer than it is like a clock.… Over the centuries, each layer of technological metaphor has added something to our understanding, enabling us to carry out new experiments and reinterpret old findings. But by holding tightly to metaphors, we end up limiting what and how we can think."

"There is no reason, beyond our ignorance of how consciousness works, to suppose that [the Singularity] will happen in the near future,” writes Cobb. “The scale of complexity of even the simplest of brains dwarfs any machine we can currently envisage. For decades—centuries—to come, the singularity will be the stuff of science fiction, not science.”102"

"Every path to AI has proved surprisingly difficult to date. The history of AI involves a long series of optimistic predictions by those who pioneer a method, followed by periods of disappointment and reassessment,"

"Brooks thinks winter is coming. “[LLMs] are following a well worn hype cycle that we have seen again, and again, during the 60+ year history of AI,” he wrote in 2024. “Get your thick coats now. There may be yet another AI winter, and perhaps even a full scale tech winter, just around"

"What you actually have to do in a computer to make something that would be sentient, no one knows what that is. No one knows what scale of detail or granularity you need in a simulation,” Hendricks tells me. “And you can’t just simulate the brain. You have to simulate everything about the body, what the embodiment of being in the world is. You have to simulate everything about a world. None of it’s trivial. And [transhumanists] would say, ‘Of course, it’s not trivial.’ They’ll just say, ‘There’s nothing that says we can’t do it if we try hard enough.’ And that’s not how the world works!" Chapter 3: Paperclip Golem

"More fundamentally, “AI development” is a fairly vague and amorphous capability, and there’s no reason to think it would be something that can be designed for or improved upon in a direct way through AI design, any more than analogous capabilities in humans can be improved upon by acting directly on our own brains. “I can’t point to the part of my brain that is ‘good at neurosurgery,’ operate on it, and by repeating the procedure make myself the greatest neurosurgeon that has ever lived,” says Cegłowski. “Brains don’t work like that. They are massively interconnected. Artificial"

"My roommate was the smartest person I ever met in my life. He was incredibly brilliant, and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips,” he says. “The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation."

"Ultimately, Cegłowski comes back to the same point that many others do: the idea of intelligence is just too vague for it to be able to support the kinds of arguments the rationalists are making. “The concept of ‘general intelligence’ in AI is famously slippery,” he says. “With no way to define intelligence (except just pointing to ourselves), we don’t even know if it’s a quantity that can be maximized."

"Melanie Mitchell sounded a similar note. “Most cognitive scientists would agree that intelligence is not a quantity that can be measured on a single scale and arbitrarily dialed up and down but rather a complex integration of general and specialized capabilities that are, for the most part, adaptive in a specific evolutionary niche,” she writes. “Moreover, unlike the hypothetical paper clip–maximizing AI, human intelligence is not centered on the optimization of fixed goals; instead, a person’s goals are formed through complex integration of innate needs and the social and cultural environment that supports their intelligence.”89"

"Indeed, there are many ways in which LLMs are nothing like humans, despite claims to the contrary. “When we say the machines learn, it’s kind of like saying that baby penguins fish,” says Oren Etzioni. “What baby penguins really do is they sit there, and the mom or the dad penguin, they go, they find the fish, they bring it, they chew it up, and they regurgitate it. They spoon-feed morsels to their babies in the nest. That’s not the babies fishing, that’s the parents fishing."

"In 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter took a set of images of Cydonia, a region of varied, weather-beaten terrain in northern Mars, as part of a search for a landing site for Viking 2. The Cydonia images, when published, revealed something that, to many people, looked like a face (Figure 3.1a). Conspiracy theorists and alien abduction “experts” had a field day with this, of course. But in 1998, the Mars Global Surveyor imaged the same region at ten times the resolution of Viking’s image, and the illusion simply vanished (Figure 3.1b). Seeing intelligence in ChatGPT—or an imminent apocalypse in the current state of AI—is just"

"Human pareidolia about LLM-generated text makes it seem like the text must have been written by something that understands the world, or at least understands what it’s saying."

"say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now—which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera—that those harms aren’t existential,” says Whittaker, referring to Hinton’s comments specifically. “What I hear in that is, ‘Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came"

"‘Blacks are more stupid than whites.’ I like that sentence and think it is true. But recently I have begun to believe that I won’t have much success with most people if I speak like that. They would think that I were a ‘racist’: that I _disliked_ black people and thought that it is fair if blacks are treated badly. I don’t,” Bostrom wrote on the Extropian mailing list in 1996." Chapter 4: The Ethicist at the End of the Universe

"Michael Hendricks, a neurobiologist at McGill University, is even more blunt. “What’s being done now in the commercial cryonics industry is garbage. They’re making puddles of pink mush in a liquid nitrogen tank. It’s nothing that could ever be used for anything,” he tells me. While it might eventually be possible to chill living people to a temperature near freezing and keep them in a kind of hibernation state, Hendricks says that “when you get into people who have died, and then the cryonics people show up with their head saws—it’s too late by the time you get in there with a saw."

"Combining that estimate with a guess about the efficacy of investment in AI safety research and with their “reasonable estimate” of the number of future beings—which they claim is “at least” 1024—MacAskill and Greaves arrive at a stunning conclusion. “Every $100 spent [on AI safety] has, on average, an impact as valuable as saving one trillion [lives]… far more than the near-future benefits of [malaria] bednet distribution.”66 For a strong longtermist, investing in a Silicon Valley AI safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics."

"Utility isn’t simple pleasure. Enjoying the satisfaction of achieving a difficult but worthy goal (successfully climbing up a steep hill, or creating a work of art that moves someone else) is quite different from pure euphoria, and both add to the joy and rich texture of a good life. There’s the quiet pride of seeing something you made used the way you’d hoped it would be; there’s the way you feel seen when a friend takes the time to give you good advice at the right time; there’s the uncut animal rush of plunging down a roller coaster. Any proposed measure for utility has to account for all these and more, and convert them into a single number. It also has to find a way of balancing happiness with misery, detracting from the total every time some flavor of bad"

"Yet there’s an even deeper problem here, one that would arguably remain even if someone really could define utility in a satisfying way. “One of the objections that John Rawls [the twentieth-century political philosopher and ethicist] famously made about utilitarianism is its conception of persons, which it basically reduces to containers of value, receptacles of value,” says Émile Torres, a philosopher at Case Western Reserve University specializing in the ethics of human extinction risk. “And so we’re a means to an end. We’re just the receptacles. Increase the number of receptacles that have net positive value and you increase the total amount of value in the universe, and that’s good. And I just don’t think of people that way.… In my view, people are just ends, and treating them as mere means is deeply problematic.”111 People are best seen as people, not as reservoirs for holding an abstract quantity of dubious ontic status."

"The whole project of utilitarianism smacks of a kind of ethical Taylorism: confusing metrics with the reality they imperfectly capture, and then trying to optimize things by focusing solely on increasing the metrics to the exclusion of all else. Ethics isn’t economics. And as Torres alludes to, utilitarianism isn’t the only game in town when it comes to ethics. Utilitarianism is just one type (or really a subfamily)"

"Consequentialists hold that the ethical value of actions resides solely in their consequences (hence the name). But consequences can take many forms. For example, rights consequentialists say that people (and other entities) have rights that shouldn’t be violated, and the morality of an action depends on whether and how anyone’s rights are infringed upon. Moreover, consequentialism itself is just one of several major options. Another is deontological ethics, championed most famously by Immanuel Kant. Deontological ethics says that an action is ethical if it’s in accordance with universal ethical laws. Those laws present a problem for deontological ethics that is somewhat analogous to the problem of defining utility for utilitarians: What are those laws, how could we ever discover them, and how could they hold in all possible situations?"

"And EA, in turn, is compromised by its reliance on philanthropy from the winners of the tech industry lottery. “Billionaire philanthropy is an exercise of power by wealthy people to direct their private assets toward some public influence,” political scientist Rob Reich tells me. “When people exercise power in a democracy, it deserves our scrutiny, not our gratitude."

"At the core of that logic, for both capitalism and effective altruism, is the need for quantification. Any human activity that can be quantified is grist for the optimizing machinery of this worldview, and anything that can’t be quantified is dismissed as unimportant. This is how the longtermists, ultimately, are forced to see people: as numbers. And those numbers, in turn, need to be maximized and optimized, so they can be plugged into the grand longtermist plan to squeeze as much utility as possible out of the universe before its inevitable end" Chapter 5: Dumpster Fire Space Utopia

"This is the promise of transcendence offered by technological salvation. Upton Sinclair said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Chapter 6: Where No One Has Gone Before

"Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality,” writes essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God Human Animal Machine. “All the eternal questions have become engineering problems."

"During her time as a transhumanist, she had noticed “strange parallels between transhumanism and Christian prophecies. Each time I returned to Kurzweil, Bostrom, and other futurist thinkers, I was overcome with the [conviction] that the resonances between the two ideologies could not possibly be coincidental."

"Nowhere is humanities denial more apparent in the tech industry than in its attitude toward history. “I don’t even know why we study history,” says Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Google’s self-driving car division, now known as Waymo. “It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.”43 Levandowski may not be the most reliable narrator: In 2020, he pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Waymo (Trump pardoned him the next year).44 He also founded a religious organization dedicated to “the realization, acceptance,"

Excellent intro - What are humans today? What can be 'computed'?

"In 1935, Michael Polanyi, then holder of the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the Victoria University of Manchester, England, was suddenly shocked into a confrontation with philosophical questions that have ever since dominated his life. The shock was administered by Nicolai Bukharin, one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, who told Polanyi that "under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the prob- lems of the current Five Year Plan." Polanyi sensed then that "the scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was no place for science itself." And further that "this conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied any grounds for claiming freedom of thought."

I don't know how much time Polanyi thought he would devote to developing an argument for a contrary concept of man and history. His very shock testifies to the fact that he was in profound disagreement with Bukharin, therefore that he already conceived of man differently, even if he could not then give explicit form to his concept. It may be that he determined to write a counterargument to Bukharin's position, drawing only on his own experienceas a scientist, and to have done with it in short order. As it turned out, however, the confrontation with philosophy triggered by Bukharin's revelation was to demand Polanyi's entire attention from then to the present day."

After ELIZA, several psychiatrists believed it would automate psychotherapy. . . 

A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR computer program could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy. Colby et al. write, for example,

"Further work must be done before the program will be ready for clinical use. If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists. Because of the time-sharing capabilities of modern and future computers, several hundred patients an hour could be handed by a computer system designed for this purpose. The human therapist, involved in the design and operation of this system, would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man since his efforts would no longer be limited to the one-to-one patient-therapist ratio as now exists. "

The psychiatrist views himself merely as an information processor, rule follower (re. above)

"What can the psychiatrist's image of his patient be when he sees himself, as therapist, not as an engaged human being acting as a healer, but as an information processor following rules, etc.?

Such questions were my awakening to what Polanyi had ear- lier called a "scientific outlook that appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man."

"3. Another widespread, and to me surprising, reaction to the ELIZA program was the spread of a belief that it demonstrated a general solution to the problem of computer understanding of natural language. In my paper, I had tried to say that no general solution to that problem was possible, i.e., that language is understood only in contextual frameworks, that even these can be shared by people to only a limited extent, and that consequently even people are not embodiments of any such general solution."

"Ultimately a line dividing human and machine intelligence must be drawn. If there is no such line, then advocates of computerized psychotherapy may be merely heralds of an age in which man has finally been recognized as nothing but a clock-work. Then the consequences of such a reality would need urgently to be divined and contemplated."

By in fullness I mean that even for tasks that would seem to be ideal use-cases for LLMs, e.g. coding, cannot be reduced to its outcome. The greater effects on how it makes coders view code differently, grow tired of their craft, gradually de-skill, etc. must all be taken into account - not to mention impact on society.

"3. It is perhaps paradoxical that just, when in the deepest sense man has ceased to believe in—let alone to trust—his own autonomy, he has begun to rely on autonomous machines, that is, on machines that operate for long periods of time entirely on the basis of their own internal realities. If his reliance on such machines is to be based on something other than unmitigated despair or blind faith, he must explain to himself what these machines do and even how they do what they do. This requires him to build some conception of their internal "realities." Yet most men don't understand computers to even the slightest degree. So, unless they are capable of very great skepticism (the kind we bring to bear while watching a stage magician), they can explain the computer's intellectual feats only by bringing to bear the single analogy available to them, that is, their model of their own capacity to think. No wonder, then, that they overshoot the mark; it is truly impossible to imagine a human who could imitate ELIZA, for example, but for whom ELIZA's language abilities were his limit. Again, the computing machine is merely an extreme example of a much more general phenomenon. Even the breadth of connotation intended in the ordinary usage of the word "machine," large as it is, is insufficient to suggest its true generality. For today when we speak of, for example, bureaucracy, or the university, or almost any social or political construct, the image we generate is all too often that of an autonomous machine-like process."

Even more saying today? LLMs are inherently unpredictabl given their black box nature, and with their sycophantic responses they further delude theirs users into a sense of knowing what is going on when using them. Everything becomes an autonomous machine-like process.

"It may appear at first glance that this is an in-house debate of little consequence except to a small group of computer technicians. But at bottom, no matter how it may be disguised by technological jargon, the question is whether or not every aspect of human thought is reducible to a logical formalism, or, to put it into the modern idiom, whether or not human thought is entirely computable. That question has, in one form or another, engaged thinkers in all ages. Man has always striven for principles that could organize and give sense and meaning to his existence."

Science has made other means of understanding the world be seen as insufficient.

""They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being 'rational' . . . They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be . . . [They] did not judge; they calculated. . . . an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.""

Quoting Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (192, pp. 1)

The numbers will always say something, because we will see something, even if it is not adequately describing the real world.

"It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinner argues. If they are, then it is presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves. When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proved to be correct."

"Perhaps we can vaguely understand it by contemplating, say, the great fugues of Bach. But a special form of contemplation is required of us: we must not think in the modern manner, i.e., of Bach as a "problem solver," or of each of his opera in his Art of the Fugue as being his increasingly refined "solution" to a problem he had originally set himself. Instead we must think that Bach had the whole plan in his mind all the time, that he thought of the Art of the Fugue as a unified work with no beginning and no end, itself eternal like the cosmos, and like it enormously intricate in its connections, circles within circles within circles. We might then find it possible to think of life as having been not merely punctuated but entirely suffused by this kind of music, both on the grand cosmological-theological scale and on the small day-to-day level. Such"

"It is important to realize that this newly created reality was and remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality. The feeling of hunger was rejected as a stimulus for eating; instead, one ate when an abstract model had achieved a certain state, i.e., when the hands of a clock pointed to certain marks on the clock's face (the anthropomorphism here is highly significant too), and similarly for signals for sleep and rising, and so on."

"aid of computers"

"putting muscles on it—contributes nothing to its validity. For example, there are computer programs that carry out with great precision all the calculations required to cast the horoscope of an individual whose time and place of birth are known. Because the computer does all the tedious symbol manipulations, they can be done much more quickly and in much more detail than is normally possible for a human astrologer. But such an improvement in the technique of horoscope casting is irrelevant to the validity of astrological forecasting. If astrology is nonsense, then computerized astrology is just as surely nonsense."

"That is not true for astrology, but may well be true of, say, numerical weather forecasting. For the latter, the number of data that must be taken into account, and the amount of computation that must be done on them in order to produce an accurate weather forecast, may well be so large that no team of humans, however large, could complete the computations in any reasonable time whatever. And any simplification of the technique sufficient to reduce the computational task to proportions manageable by humans would invalidate the technique itself. In such cases the computer may contribute to making a hitherto impractical technique practical. But what has to be remembered is that the validity of a technique is a question that involves the technique and its subject matter. If a bad idea is to be converted into a good one, the source of its weakness must be discovered and repaired. A person falling into a manhole is rarely helped by making it possible for him to fall faster or more efficiently."

"particular technique requires an enormous amount of computation and if only a limited computational effort can be devoted to it, then a failure of the technique can easily be explained away on the ground"

"What is less often said, however, is that the society's newly created ways to act often eliminate the very possibility of acting in older ways."

"In order to understand how the computer attained so very much power, both as an actor and as a force on the human imagination, we must first discuss where the power of the computer comes from and how the computer does what it does. That is what we shall turn our attention to in the next two chapters." Chapter 2: Where the Power of the Computer Comes From

"We set a punch press into motion, and it mangles the hand of a worker who gets too close to it. The very regularity of the machine is its most fearsome property. We put it to its task and it performs, regularly to be sure, but blindly as well."

"Machines, when they operate properly, are not merely law abiding; they are embodiments of law. To say that a specific machine is "operating properly" is to assert that it is an embodiment of a law we know and wish to apply. We expect an ordinary desk calculator, for example, to be an embodiment of the laws of arithmetic we all know. Should it deliver what we believe to be a wrong result, our faith in the lawfulness of the machine is so strong that we usually assume we have made an error in punching in our data."

"Indeed, we are often quite distressed when a repairman returns a machine to us with the words, "I don't know what was wrong with it. I just jiggled it, and now it's working fine." He has confessed that he failed to come to understand the law of the broken machine and we infer that he cannot now know, and neither"

"First, it testifies that the folk wisdom recognizes the essential characteristic of the machine to be its relentless regularity, its blind obedience of the law of which it is an embodiment."

"The blueprint of a machine is not its design. If it were, then the design would change whenever the blueprint is enlarged or redrawn in another color. No, a design is an abstract idea, just as is a functional specification. And ideas, say, the idea of a perpetual-motion machine, are not bound by the laws of physics."

"To the contrary, they command precisely what he must do to make that transition. Such a set of rules—that is, a set of rules which tells a player precisely how to behave from one moment to the next—is called an effective procedure. The notion of an effective procedure, or "algorithm," as it is also called, is one of the most important in modern mathematics."

"For if an agent competent in only one language were given a procedure written in a language strange to him, together with rules that dictate precisely how to interpret statements in the strange language, then he could imitate what the behavior of a speaker of the strange language would have been had that speaker followed the given procedure. We need therefore some absolutely unambiguous language in which we can write effective procedures and in terms of which we can state rules for interpreting statements in other languages."

"A formal language is (again!) a game. Let us return briefly to a consideration of the game of chess. It consists of a set of pieces, a board having a certain configuration, a specification of the initial positions of the pieces on the board, and a set of"

"My task is therefore reduced to showing that a unique alphabet, and a language on that alphabet, can be found in which we can indeed describe all languages in which we may want to write procedures."

"Turing answered that question as well: a Turing machine can be built to realize any process that could naturally be called an effective procedure."

"Such a way of knowing is very weak. We do not say we know a city, let alone that we understand it, solely on the basis of having a detailed map of it. Apart from that, if we understand the language in which a procedure is written well enough to be able to explicate its transformation rules, we probably understand what rules stated in that language tell us to do."

"Turing's thesis tells us that we can realize, as a computer program, any procedure that could "naturally" be called an effective procedure. Therefore, whenever we believe we understand a phenomenon in terms of knowing its behavioral rules, we ought to be able to express our understanding in the form of a computer program. Turing proved that all computers (save a few special-purpose types that do not concern us here) are equivalent to one another, i.e., are all universal. Hence any failure of a technically well-functioning computer to behave precisely as we believe we have programmed it to behave cannot be attributed to any peculiarity of the specific computer we have used. Indeed, the fault must be that we have been careless in our transcription of the behavioral rules we think we understand into the formal language demanded by our computer, or must be in the initial explication, in any form, of what we had in mind when we believed we understood, or must be that our understanding is defective. The last is most often the case. I shall say much more about that later. For now, we need note only that the defect in our understanding can take two forms:"

"First, although our theory may be on the whole correct, it may contain an error in detail. We wrongly assert, for example, that if this and that is true, then so-and-so follows. Our mental processes, lulled perhaps by the sheer eloquence of the argument we make to ourselves, often permit us to slide over such errors without the slightest disturbance. The computer is, however, very unforgiving in this respect. It follows the logic we have given it. That logic may lead to very different consequences than do mental processescontaminated by wishes to reach certain outcomes. Indeed, one of the most cogent reasons for using computers is to expose holes in our thinking. Computers are merciless critics in this respect. Second, the defect in our understanding may be that, although it is true that we understand, we are still not able to formalize our understanding. We may, for example, be able to predict with very great confidence what an animal will do under a large variety of circumstances. But our predictive power, great and reliable as it may be, may rest on intuitions that we are simply unable to adequately explicate. Yet we may be driven to force our ideas into a formal mold anyway. A computer program based on a formal system so derived is certain to misbehave. The trouble then is not merely that the theory it represents contains certain errors in detail, but that that theory is grossly wrong in what it asserts about the matters it concerns. It is not always clear which defect one is confronted with when a computer one has programmed misbehaves. There is usually enormous motivation to believe that one's theories are all right on the whole, and that, when they don't work well, there must be some error in detail that can easily be patched up. I shall have more to say about such matters later."

"Consider the English sentence: "I never met a man who is taller than John." It may be transformed into "I never met a taller man than John." This transformation clearly preserves the meaning of the original sentence. But if we apply the same transformation rule to "I never met a man who is taller than Maria," and get "I never met a taller man than Maria," it no longer works. The rule we have applied is not purely syntactic. It concerns itself not merely with the form of uninterpreted strings of symbols, but with their meanings as well."

"If we wish to continue to identify languages with machines even when discussing natural language, then we must recognize that, whatever machines correspond to natural languages, they are more like machines that transform energy and deliver power than like the abstract machines we have been considering; i.e., their laws must take cognizance of the real world. Indeed, the demands placed on them are, if anything, more stringent than those placed on mere engines. For although the laws of engines are merely subsets of the laws of physics, the laws of a natural-language machine must somehow correspond to the inner realities manifest and latent in the person of each speaker of the language at the time of his speaking. Natural language is difficult in this sense because we have to know, for example, to what "values" of X and Y we can apply the transformation rule that takes us from "I never met an X who is taller than Y" to "I never met a taller X than Y." It is clearly not a rule uniformly applicable to uninterpreted strings of symbols."

"What is so remarkable is how incredibly few things we must know in order to have access, in principle, to all of mathematics. In ordinary life we give each other directions, i.e., describe procedures to one another, that, although perhaps technically ambiguous in that they are potentially subject to various interpretations, are, for all practical purposes, effective procedures. They rest at bottom on extremely widely shared vocabularies whose elements, when they appear in highly conventionalized contexts, have effectively unique interpretations. Most professional and technical conversations avail themselves of such vocabularies almost exclusively. The problem of converting such procedures into effective procedures in the technical sense, i.e., into programs for Turing machines, is fundamentally one of formalizing the knowledge base that underlies the conventional interpretation of their vocabularies. The more highly standardized these vocabularies are, and the more restricted the context in which they are used, the more likely that this problem can be solved. For, after all, if each symbol of a set of symbols has an effectively unique interpretation in a certain context, and if strings of such symbols are transformed only by rules that themselves arise out of that context, then no question of giving each symbol an interpretation arises in any formal sense at all. A language so constrained is effectively a formal language. Its rules are therefore potentially realizable by a Turing machine."

"We join Michael Polanyi in saying that we know more than we can tell."

"The chess master knows more than he can tell. I am not saying here (although I believe this to be true) that we can never find a way to explicate the whole of his knowledge of chess; I say only that we have in this an example of knowledge that is effective even though not presently tellable. Were it true that no chess master's knowledge of chess is fully tellable, would that imply that no computer could ever play master-class chess? Not at all. We shall, as I have said, deal with such questions in what follows." Chapter 3: How Computers Work

"view, modern computers are simply Turing machines that operate on an alphabet consisting of the two symbols "0" and "1" and that are capable of taking on an astronomical number of states. But this is like saying that, because both bicycles and modern passenger aircraft are vehicles for transporting people, they are formally identical. The modern computer differs from the Turing machines we have been discussing both in the way it is constructed and the way it is instructed"

"In a very real sense, every freedom an author exercises in making a choice is one he has usurped from the programmer who is to use his product. Consider"

"The recent history of the behavioral sciences has shown us how deeply the success of mathematics as used in physics has affected disciplines quite far removed from physics. Many psychologists and sociologists have for generations discussed their subject matter in terms of differential equations and statistics, for example. They may have begun by believing that the calculi they adopted were merely a convenient shorthand for describing the phenomena with which they deal. But, as they construct ever larger conceptual frameworks out of elementary components originally borrowed from foreign contexts, and as they give these frameworks names and manipulate them as elements of still more elaborate systems of thought, these frameworks cease to serve as mere modes of description and become, like Maslow's hammer, determinants of their view of the world. The design of a public language, then, is a serious task, one pregnant with consequences and thus laden with extraordinarily heavy responsibility. I shall have more to say about that later."

"Lest this be thought a "merely" philosophical point of little practical consequence, I must say immediately that not only do most of today's programmers think of the languages they use as being their machines, very nearly literally so, but many, perhaps most, have no knowledge whatever of their computer's machine language or of the content and structure of the translators that mediate between them and their computers. This observation is not made as a criticism. After all, a higher-level formal language is an abstract machine. No one is to be faulted for using a language or a machine more congenial to his purposes than is some other machine, merely because the other machine is somehow more primitive. But the observation does raise an important question: If today's programmers are largely unaware of the detailed structures of the physical machines they are using, of their languages, and of the translators that manipulate their programs, then they must also be largely ignorant of many of the arguments I have made here, particularly of those arguments concerning the universality of computers and the nature of effective procedures. How then do these programmers come to sense the power of the computer?"

"The idea that a person can write a program that embodies anything he "thoroughly understands" is at least equally problematical. Understanding something always means understanding it at a certain level. An actuary uses some fairly sophisticated mathematical tools whose fundamentals he almost certainly doesn't understand or care anything about. Everyone who makes change uses arithmetic, but very few people know or care much about the beautiful axiom system on which arithmetic is based. In effect, we all constantly use subroutines whose input-output behavior we believe we know, but whose details we need not and rarely do think about. To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word "because" and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the "why" of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with "obviously"; and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word "therefore," only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of natural language and to its inherent ambiguity. The very eloquence that natural language permits sometimes illuminates our words and seems (falsely, to be sure) to illuminate our undeserving logic just as brightly. An interpreter of programming-language texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence. And words like "obviously" are not represented in the primitive vocabularies of any computers. A computer is a merciless critic. Therefore the assertion that one understands a thing sufficiently well to be able to program it is, first of all, an assertion that one understands it in very particular terms. In any case, it can be no more than a boast that may well be falsified by experience."

"Indeed, many professional programmers believe that their craft is difficult because the languages with which they must deal have rigid syntactical rules. There is therefore a persistent cry for natural-language, e.g., English, programming systems. Programmers who hold to this belief have probably never tackled a truly difficult problem, and have therefore never felt the need for really deep criticism from the computer. It is true that in order to write one has first to master the syntactic rules of one's chosen language. But then one must also have thought through what one has to say."

"A real reason that programming is very hard is that, in most instances, the computer knows nothing of those aspects of the real world that its program is intended to deal with. It is in a position analogous to, say, that of a teacher of English grammar who has been given an airplane pilot's manual and left at a plane's controls in midair. He may be a very skilled grammatical faultfinder, but as to how to fly an airplane, he knows nothing."

"But we mustn't make too much of this. A lazy student's list of useful physics formulas may enable him to solve many schoolbook problems in physics, but will still not give him an understanding of physics, a theory he can think about. Just so, a set of assertions of the kind we have shown may enable a computer to solve certain problems. But this says nothing of a programmer's or of a computer's mastery of a theory or of either's understanding of anything more than how to use a group of "facts" to arrive at certain conclusions. A computer's successful performance is often taken as evidence that it or its programmer understand a theory of its performance. Such an inference is unnecessary and, more often than not, is quite mistaken. The relationship between understanding and writing thus remains as problematical for computer programming as it has always been for writing in any other form."

"Quite the opposite: music is the making of humanity, the very thing that makes us human. This is a point musicologist Gary Tomlinson makes in his book A Million Years of Music (Tomlinson 2015), where the origins of music are traced back to 800,000 years before the emergence of our species c. 200,000 years ago. The argument is convincing: music is an archaic activity written into our psyche, existing beyond the scope of conceptual language or symbolic systems, and connecting with the totality of our intellectual, emotional, and physical being. Originating with early human brain development and tool use, music had a role in the attempt to understand and organise the world via the mimetic function of repeating what is heard, forging the synchrony of rhythmic repetition, understanding time, establishing order, and social cohesion."

"Some authors, for example Rousseau and Darwin, are of the view that music appeared before language, while others claim that both have a common precursor (Mithen 2005). What we do know is that music played a role in training the voice to the degree that human language became possible."

"The bone flute is an object that materialises music theory by dint of a discrete organisation of pitch – an organisation that is by nature musico-theoretical, owing to the discreteness of its tuning and scale. We can define this new object as an epistemic artefact (Kirsh and Maglio 1994) or an epistemic tool (see Magnusson 2009), as it affects, shapes, controls, and directs the way music would be made when the instrument is played. It is an externalisation of musical memory, or what Stiegler would call a mnemotechnic device, that maintains the human in the “stereotypic” form it has evolved into, suggesting that our brain and our external tools are one interdependent system: The question then becomes: where is the memory of the stereotype kept, if not in the material trace of the stereotype in which the preexisting tool itself consists, repeated, duplicated by its “maker” and guiding the latter much more than being guided by him or her? In this sense, the archaic cortex and equipment are codetermined in a structural coupling of a particular sort. (Stiegler 1998: 158)"

"This book frames the act of writing in a wider sense than musical notation or sound recording. Sonic writing equally includes material, symbolic, and phonographic inscriptions. It explores how we think with and through technology; sometimes in a dialogue with technology, other times where it serves as an extension of bodies. Although it is a coinage that derives directly from the Greek concept of phonography (and my native Icelandic hljóðritun), “sonic writing” refers to a wider area of human expression traceable to certain strands in the philosophy of technology, where the notion of grammatology (Derrida 1997) is used to explain how humans extend their memory and body technics by means of external “supplements.”2 Stiegler developed this notion of grammatology further, and introduced grammatization as the technical history of memory, arguing that we cannot separate incorporated memory (mneme) and exterior memory (hypomnesis) (Stiegler 2010a: 29): By grammatization, I mean the process whereby the currents and continuities shaping our lives become discrete elements. The history of human memory is the history of this process. Writing, as the breaking into discrete elements of the flux of speech (let us invent the word discretization for this possibility), is an example of a stage in the process of grammatization. (Stiegler 2010b) If grammatisation is the task of externalising, of abstracting processes, of categorising, of representing, it is a process that begins at an early stage of human evolution."

"Art historian Whitney Davis gives laconic expression to this view when he says: “the tool writes the toolmaker as much as the toolmaker writes the tool” (Davis 1996: 116)."

"Technics are an externalisation of the mind, but for Stiegler the technical is not merely a tool or a machine – it constitutes the invention of the human. “Is it tekhnē that arises from logos, or the reverse? Or rather, is it not that logos and tekhnē are modalities of the same being-outside-oneself?” (Stiegler 1998: 193). What characterises the rational human is the transmission of memory via technical artefacts. We have a transgenerational accumulation of memory that is preserved in the technological totality: the people of the cave die and new generations are born, but they are born into a cave equipped with tools, one of which is a bone flute. The experience of the human culture gets written into the tool – and it becomes cumulative and transmissible."

"This means, however, that the human being is an animal whose knowledge acquisition is not transferred by one individual to its offspring via genes, but via mimesis. This is knowledge that needs to be learned repeatedly by every new generation, and these cycles of iteration will result in difference, in misunderstandings, and in re-appropriation in new technocultural contexts."

"It becomes what Stiegler calls a “techno-logic,” which then, in turn, becomes our external memory: “A tool is, before anything else, memory: if this were not the case, it could never function as a reference of significance” (Stiegler 1998: 254)."

"Before the writing technologies of clay, papyrus, scroll, and codex, we wrote our cultural memory into our material artefacts, such as the caveman’s flute which would pass through generations of players, all of whom would automatically align to the musical potential and theory written into the surface of that instrument. To be human is to inherit the already-there of history, in an environment of designed objects into which we are “thrown,” to use Heidegger’s vocabulary. We, therefore, get access to a past “that is mine but that I have nevertheless not lived” (Stiegler 1998: 159)."

"In the nineteenth-century episteme of acoustic instruments, we find sophisticated technological objects, such as pianos, violins, and saxophones. The technological context was one of standardisation in instrument production, in conjunction with mass production where instruments, such as the piano, began to be made in factories with production methods that derived from the Fordist ideology of the conveyor belt (see Petersen 2013)."

"In the electronic episteme of the twentieth century, the instruments are physical and clearly visible, but we cannot inspect their internal workings. There are no visible vibrating objects, no hammers, bows, strings, or membranes that move. However, we touch them, connect them into a sound-producing assemblage, and manipulate their workings through knobs, sliders, and buttons. The twentieth century is the age of the electronic synthesizer, the pickup, the microphone, the amplifier, and the loudspeaker. The"

"These are instruments that draw into the spectral domain, and musicologists such as Robert Erickson (1975) and Tellef Kvifte (2011) have argued that in twentieth-century music, the focus shifted from musical notes written as black blobs on staff paper to timbral composition of sonic spectra – a shift, in other words, from the symbol to the signal. With"

"The third episteme is that of digital instruments. These obviously existed in the twentieth century, but they were largely mimetic screen-based versions of acoustic and electric instruments and technologies, remediated in the mouse-keyboard-screen interface combo of the personal computer. It is really at the cusp of this century that we begin to explore the unique qualities of digital technologies for what they are: namely algorithmic, computational, archival, and subject to artificial intelligence. In the digital episteme of the twenty-first century, the innards of the instruments are hidden – including in live coding, which presents a high-level language representation of the control of switching electric gates. In the digital computer, physical energy is transduced via digital mappings. Any bodily gesture can be mapped to any sound and there is no natural paradigm at play that we can relate to."

"In this context, Jussi Parikka points out how Elsaesser talks about “ruptures” in our epistemological frameworks, in which the digital is portrayed to be beyond the threshold of the perceptible (Parikka 2012: 23). With digital media we operate in a production network that is of computational representation – that is, the work is digitally notated and interpreted by computer processors, either as linear data or code."

"In past decades researchers in the humanities, as well as the sciences, have increasingly focused on the role of material objects in human and animal culture. The part played by technology is finally acknowledged as an essential extension of the human body and mind, used to achieve various tasks, from lighting fire, carrying water, or calculating, to playing music, conducting business, or studying the nature of atoms. This shift has often been called the “material turn” and is strongly inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy of technology."

"Musicologist Emely Dolan suggests that we are witnessing a material turn in musicology as well: “One recent trend seeks to achieve this by collapsing ‘music’ back into the bodies, instruments, and machines that produce it. From the disciplinary point of view, this can be liberating: material objects, unlike musical works, do not drag two centuries of musicological literature behind them” (Dolan 2015: 88)."

"If our objects serve as instruments of thinking, as epistemic tools, the millennia-old distinction so clearly articulated by Plato between episteme (knowledge) and techne (skill) breaks down, and we need to investigate how our tools of grammatisation, of externalising our thoughts into systems of discrete elements, play a crucial role in our musical practice."

"While objects are instrumental in the analysis of how music technologies manifest in the twenty-first century, we must not forget that they are the results of movement, changes, development, evolution. Objects are “things in the making, mediated, unstable, not quite given, constantly deferred” (O’Riordan 2017: 2). Musical instruments are themselves objects of process; unlike paintings on the wall, they are used in the process of creating other art.3 Since Aristotle, Western thought has emphasised form over process (Oyama 1985), and the analysis of objects in archaeology, anthropology, science studies, etc., tends to focus on the character of objects as they appear at a specific point in time: this has been a synchronic, as opposed to a diachronic, study. This book sets the conditions for an attentive focus on processes and how musical objects evolve over time: how they carry ideas, and the evolution of ideas, through time. We are faced with an ontological dichotomy when studying the evolution of musical instruments: either we focus on the objects themselves, their qualities and use, or train our gaze on the evolution of the instruments, the effect of material change on musical practice, and the development of musical ideas."

"Analysing instruments from this perspective, the object is merely a materialised snapshot of what we could call an evolutionary ergogenesis (the origin of practical work patterns, an embodied movement and process-focused evolution)." Chapter 1: Instrumentality

"Such a definition supports Wittgenstein’s description of how words gain their meaning through their use (Wittgenstein 1968),"

"In 1933, musicologist Eric von Hornbostel proposed a broad definition of musical instruments: “For the purposes of research everything must count as a musical instrument with which sound can be produced intentionally” (Hornbostel 1933: 129)."

"This is a good definition, wide and inclusive, the only problem being that musical ideas have changed since the 1930s, and now intentionality is not a necessary prerequisite when making music. The music of John Cage from the latter half of the twentieth century corroborates that."

"Unlike tools that serve as a medium for making a particular task easier, such as hammering a nail (which can be done with a rock or any solid object), musical instruments are more than mere media for the transmission of a message or achieving an end goal: they are an end in themselves. The harp, the bagpipe, or the synthesizer are not there to make certain tasks simpler for us, nor are they substitutes for anything else; they constitute the meaning of their play through their expressive nature."

"Deriving from ergon (from which the English word “work” can be traced, and which we explored in the introduction) as “to do” or affect something, the organon is a part of the body, and in the form of technical instruments, extensions of the body: thus prosthetic. For Aristotle, in the Physics, the organon is that which mediates the motion between the mover (the doer) and the moved (the deed). For the Greeks, musical instruments were organa, amongst other tools and implements. The word organon was also used in Latin, and Galileo, for example, used the word “organum” for his newly invented telescope."

"Related to this formal definition of roles, the evolution of musical instruments stagnated in the nineteenth century, a process Simondon calls “concretisation,” or when a technology stabilises and becomes a standard (Simondon 2017)."

"Music and its instruments were a physical manifestation of the mathematical harmony of the world. It is no coincidence, then, that Pythagoras’s monochord is called canon (κανών) in ancient Greek – appearing later as the Arabic instrument qanun – a word that also means “rule.” The instrument embodies its rule."

"(D) How can it be true that a string teaches better than a man? (M) A man sings as he will or can, but the string is divided with such art by very learned men, using the aforesaid letters, that if it is diligently observed and considered, it cannot mislead. (Strunk 1998b: 91)"

"(D) Indeed, I must say that you have given me a wonderful master, who, made by me, teaches me, and teaching me, knows nothing by himself. Indeed, I fervently embrace him for his patience and obedience; he will sing to me whenever I wish, and he will never torment me with blows or abuse when provoked by the slowness of my sense. (M) He is a good master, but he demands a diligent listener. (Strunk 1998b: 94)"

"Boethius’s view of the cosmos resonated down throughout the centuries, for example, in Regino of Prüm’s early tenth-century Epistola de armonica institutione there is a division of music into musica naturalis and musica artificialis, the latter using “artificial instruments of sound.” Regino writes: “Thus, natural music is that which produces sound with no musical instrument, no touch of the fingers, no human striking or touch, but breathed upon by God” (Jeserich 2013: 178). As a result, instruments produce artificial music: “That music is called artificial [artificialis musica] that was conceived and invented by human art and ingenuity, and is based in certain instruments [in quibusdam consistit instrumentis]” (Jeserich 2013: 179). Note how the music of the voice can be inspired by God, in consequence of the logic of language, while instrumental music derives from the instrument itself. Centuries after Boethius we still harbour the same scepticism towards instruments, a scepticism we find throughout Western history in relation to technology in general, and that derives from the Platonic dichotomy between episteme and techne. This is a common theme throughout Western musical history:"

"Instruments were understood to equally contain and reveal theory, demonstrating a particular perspective or understanding of the world."

"Indeed, in a recent NIME keynote, Kvifte (2011) pointed out how the production of music changed from the nineteenth-century focus on discrete instrumental notes, played from a standard form of musical notation and manipulated as symbols on a page, to the twentieth-century emphasis on timbre. This could be exemplified by pointing to spectralist music (such as Grisey, Murail, Saariaho, and Harvey), drone music (Radigue, Young, Oliveros, Niblock, Conrad), noise (Russolo, Reed, Einstürzende Neubauten, Merzbow), and so on." Chapter 2: New Instruments

"As any ethnographer, ethnomethdologist (or better “technomethodologist” – see Button and Dourish 1996), or participatory design researcher would point out, a direct translation of technologies from the analogue to the digital domain is never possible. By moving practices from the real world to the computer, objects, relationships, and work processes are abstracted, quantified, classified, and arranged into an ontology that supports the operational principles of the software. The"

"disappear. What interests me is when the DAW goes beyond its simulative functionality and begins to operate in ways that are uniquely digital, for example by new signal processing techniques, innovations in interface and interaction design, and new AI that enables the software to learn, adopt, suggest, and generally form a dialogue with the musician, where the software becomes more of a partner than a tool. Technical transitions such as those that move from the acoustic, to the electronic, to the digital are transformative transductive processes that do not simply change the underlying media functioning: they transform our musical ideas and practices too (Mackenzie 2002). Instruments"

"Electronic instruments have designed interfaces that connect to the black box of their functionality. The instrument designer has decided to “expose” certain sound parameters through user control; others lie fixed in the darkness of the box. In general, we can state that the electronic or digital instrument has an interface, whereas the acoustic instrument is the interface."

"The Ocarina is amongst the top 20 downloaded apps of all time, which indicates how powerfully it connects with people’s general love of music and experimentation. The app is also a good example of how digital instruments can democratise music-making by enabling simpler entry levels. A good source of information for exploring this and related work is Ge Wang’s Artful Design book (Wang 2018)."

"The difference between an instrument and a controller also reflects this: we expect controllers to be easy, like a button on a coffee machine, a car radio, or a train ticket kiosk. Instruments, on the other hand, have depth, character, resistance, and individuality. We don’t want them to be controller-interfaces: we want mystery and magic, discoverability and surprise. The notion of ergodynamics unveils how the first encounter of a digital musical instrument typically involves exploring its affordances and then a further study in the instrument’s constraints. For this reason, digital luthiers often make use of complexity and non-linearity to make the instrument perceptually interesting to play."

"A question arises: how does controllerism differ from the development of new DMIs as we see in the NIME research community? The most prominent difference is the status of a user versus designer of technology. Controllerists are creative users of hardware and software, but their primary focus is working within established musical genres, often with clear criteria for the music’s functionality, such as getting people onto the dance floor. In contrast, NIME researchers tend to think more critically about the technology, often designing the instrument from scratch, and questioning what it does, how it works, and what kind of music it encapsulates, to the degree that the distinction between the instrument and the musical piece disappears. Here, building a musical instrument becomes indistinguishable from designing a music-theoretical framework; the musical instrument is a theory of music, and it equally contributes to genres, styles, and musical scenes. Another profound difference is the conception people have of their performance: the controllerist performs their music via an interface, whereas in the NIME performance the instrument itself constitutes the music: without the particular instrument the music would be different."

"Considering the speed of development and the competition in the respective areas of high tech, whose products we integrate in our new instruments, we can question whether it is realistic to expect our instruments to stabilise, or concretisise in the Simondonian terms (Simondon 2017). The technology moves faster than musical practices and what we are getting are snapshots of technics applied in musical composition and performance, technics whose materialities will be quickly replaced with new ones, but whose ergomimetic structures continue and become re-implemented in later technical objects."

"For us, researching in the domain of musical performance, it is therefore the ergomimetic gesture that becomes concretisised, not the technological object." Chapter 3: Epistemic Tools

"The message is clear: music should be inspired by divine voices, in language, not abstract sounds. The flute, aulos, distorts the performer’s face, transforming their organ of rationality, the mouth, into one of breath rather than words – psyche versus logos. Stringed"

"Bacon, often called the father of empiricism and modern science, wrote in his Organum Novum: Neither the naked hand nor the understanding left to itself can effect much. It is by instruments and helps that the work is done, which are as much wanted for the understanding as for the hand. And as the instruments of the hand either give motion or guide it, so the instruments of the mind supply either suggestions for the understanding or cautions. (Bacon [1905] 2011: 259)"

"In their work on Instruments and the Imagination Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman enunciate how scientific instruments can serve as the foundation of scientific thought, as “[i]nstruments have a life of their own. They do not merely follow theory; often they determine theory, because instruments determine what is possible, and what is possible determines to a large extent what can be thought” (Hankins and Silverman 1995: 5). Instruments thus serve as extensions of our bodies and amplifiers of our senses."

"Indeed, for Bacon, the implication of the new logic (as opposed to the mere perception of the senses) is that the “mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step; and the business be done as if by machinery” (Bacon [1905] 2011: 256)."

"With the proliferation of philosophical instruments, the scientist’s laboratory became a habitus in which knowledge was embodied in epistemic artefacts, ranging from books to microscopes: “Virtue was not only found in the scientia of geometry, but also in the instrument and its operator” (Gauvin 2011: 317). However, the biggest change was in the new conception of the instrument, the organon, moving from Aristotle’s conception of an instrument as a means to an end (terminus ad quem) to a more speculative conception of the instrument itself as a starting point for a journey into the unknown (terminus a quo) (Gauvin 2011: 333)."

"Technology equally conceals and reveals. We have already seen how technology can never be neutral. Technologies organise, select, focus the task, and shape the environment (or the material of the work) through various transformations. This is what Ihde calls amplification-reduction transformations (Ihde 1979: 56), and he takes the example of a dentist’s probe that becomes a prosthesis of the hand, amplifying any unevenness in the tooth, whilst reducing information such as wetness or warmth. By selecting a technology, one is choosing a lens, a background theory, a specific world-view, and thus the interpretative scope of potential outcomes. This selection involves what kind of perceptual resolution we want to engage with the world and what type of embodiment and theoretical inscriptions. It is a necessary property of all technological artefacts to amplify certain possibilities of experience while at the same time reducing that very experience."

"As sociologist Bruno Latour (1987) so elegantly demonstrates, objects establish themselves as black boxes through repeated use and in the process their origins disappear. The object is naturalised through heavy use, a fact prompting Bowker and Star to observe that the “more naturalized the object becomes, the more unquestioning the relationship of the community to it; the more invisible the contingent and historical circumstances of its birth, the more it sinks into the community’s routinely forgotten memory” (Bowker and Star 2000: 299). Musical patterns and musical styles become “blackboxed” in software."

"The software instrument maker is embedded in a knotty infrastructure of operating systems, programming languages, protocols, standards, and interface limitations. This is a factor that involves social and technical elements well described by Bowker and Star: “Systems of classification (and of standardization) form a juncture of social organization, moral order, and layers of technical integration. Each subsystem inherits, increasingly as it scales up, the inertia of the installed base of systems that have come before” (Bowker and Star 2000: 33). This intricate, reticulated, technological structure is wide-reaching and applies techniques of heterogeneous origins."

"The awareness of the relationship between tool use and aesthetics has long been acknowledged in the crafts (Pye 1968; McCullough 1996). The practised hand using highly designed tools results in a unique aesthetic that is historically rooted within a tradition of workmanship (Wilson 1999)."

"Baird provides an analysis of three different ways in which technological artefacts can perform epistemological work, but he states that this list is not exhaustive. Instruments can embody knowledge as a material mode of representation (model knowledge); as a mode of effective action (working knowledge); and as a material mode of effective action that synthesises representation and action (encapsulated knowledge) (Baird 2004: 17)."

"In a Heideggerian manner, Baird shows that instruments are not simply “instantiation of ideas.” Materials and ideas are both necessary in science and materials do not behave like ideas. This is the point of Baird’s instrumental epistemology: “[A]n artifact bears knowledge when it successfully accomplishes a function” (Baird 2004: 122). Theoretical scientists are “concept smiths,” whereas people who build instruments are “function smiths” (Baird 2004: 123). Function smiths develop, replace, expand, and connect new instrumental functions from existing affordances. The functions of a measuring instrument are semiotic; they are built according to our theoretical understanding of the domain to be measured. As such, measuring instruments do not extract information from the world: they generate new data signals that have to be hermeneutically translated and prepared into a suitable form, and only then can the data be understood as information about the world."

"These threads in the philosophy of technology can be defined as an epistemological material turn, or what Karen Barad calls onto-epistemology (Barad 2003, 2007)."

"Many of the finer parts of these learned skills, including the intuition of material properties and sound physics, are in the form of tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), that is, embodied and non-theoretical knowledge derived from discovery, exploration, and refinement."

"From the perspective of Latour’s actor-network theory, the networks enrolled in the production of digital instruments are practically infinite. There is an impenetrable increase in complexity, which means that the inventors have to constantly rely on black boxes."

"The argument here is that acoustic instruments are clearly impregnated with knowledge, but that their electronic and digital counterparts are imbued with an increased level of epistemic dependencies. Clearly acoustic instruments demonstrate acoustic theory, often music theory (e.g., with discrete pitch, as in the flute or the harp)."

"The challenge of designing and performing with digital instruments is to understand their material properties and symbolic writing, their internal guts in the form of code, yet functioning as tools whose end arena is at the level of the signal. The digital system is material in its body, electric in function, and symbolic in control. Live coding is a good example here: tactile keyboards are used to write symbolic code that generates an electric signal. How do we analyse such instruments? I propose we need an organological approach for understanding them, a critical analytics of musical instruments, and I call this study musical organics (Magnusson 2017)." Chapter 4: Digital Organology

"While the design of a digital instrument is a process requiring knowledge of sound, signal processing, music theory, and interface design, the use of the instrument happens through habitation, through working with it, discovering its functions, and progressively building an understanding of its affordances and constraints (Magnusson 2010) – its ergodynamics. This is what philosopher of science Andrew Pickering calls the “performative idiom” (Pickering 1995: 144), and it applies equally to scientific discoveries and explorations in laboratories."

"Performers of acoustic instruments develop an intuitive understanding of their instruments, the music theory, and the tradition in which they operate. They internalise styles, techniques, and finger patterns. The interaction with the instrument is embodied and learning the instrument means negotiating a space for a dialogue with it. The instrument is not a mere channel for ideas, but a designed thing in the world that contains a strong agency, primarily in its musical affordances, but also in terms of character, quirkiness, or individuation (the object’s history and change through time as an effect of manoeuvre and use). The"

"For example, Stiegler writes that “the logic of invention is not that of the inventor. One must speak of techno-logic, of a logic literally driving technics itself” (Stiegler 1998: 35). He borrows this idea from Bertrand Gille’s “loose determinism,” or the notion that although one cannot anticipate technological evolution a priori, innovation is never random, even if it appears so. Technological progress is driven by a specific logic innate to technology itself: “The system’s dynamic offers the possibility of invention, and this is what is essential to the concept of technical system: the choice of possibilities in which invention consists is made in a particular space and particular time according to the play of these constraints, which are submitted in turn to external ones” (Stiegler 1998: 35). In other words, the technical infrastructure that evolves offers or suggests inventions (in the classical understanding of the term), instances of objects, or solutions that derive from the engulfing techno-social structure. For"

"It is also important to keep in mind that the organology we are performing here is not so distinct from Stiegler’s “general organology” which he divides into three tiers: “the thinking of grammatization calls for a general organology, that is, a theory of the articulation of bodily organs (brain, hand, eyes, touch, tongue, genital organs, viscera, neuro-vegetative system, etc.), artificial organs (tools, instruments and technical supports of grammatization) and social organs (human groupings … and social systems in general)” (Stiegler 2010b: 34)." Chapter 5: Writing Music

"However, the voice does not have an external referent for tunings or scales. With instruments we get prosthetic technologies that extend beyond the body, forming a tertiary memory (Stiegler 1998) where music is inscribed into material objects. The early sound-generating objects were our instruments, but they were also the ergodynamic vehicles that framed the social potential and further continuity of musical practices."

"In Phaedrus 275a, Socrates warns of writing that if “men learn writing, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” stating that this is a technology not for memory, but for reminding. We may smile at Plato’s sceptical logocentrism (Derrida 1997), but we know he was right, although this is somewhat paradoxical, considering that his own works were written down. Plato pointed out what the advent of writing would do to our mnemonic practices: no one can remember Homer’s Iliad anymore, nor would anyone embark upon memorising Joyce’s Ulysses, and we know that melody and metre were important mnemotechnical devices for memorising such long poems."

"As we have seen in earlier chapters, there was plenty of music theory in ancient Greek writings. These were mostly theoretical studies of harmony, ratios, tunings, scales, etc. There are some existing musical notations from the time of the ancient Greeks, in the form of fragments, on tablets and papyri (Pöhlmann 2001), but these works are few (sixty-one pieces, extending from the fifth century BCE to the third or fourth century CE), compared with the abundance of writings on music theory. In terms of information theory, and compression of data in an age of scarce media formats, this makes sense. Before the printing press and the mass distribution of musical scores, what would be more valuable to write down, the rules for making music, or an instance of music resulting from those rules? Only through cheap paper and streamlined printing and dissemination practices, resulting from the invention of the Gutenberg press in the fifteenth century, do we begin to see a focus on the musical work itself, celebrating the composition and its author. As"

"However, some authors have argued (e.g., Navarro et al. 2009) that the large cathedrals in which the plainchant was sung had such a long reverberation time (up to ten seconds) that notes would overlap and thus artificially creating polyphony via the technology of reverberant stone-wall architecture. New notes sung should ideally be in harmony with the previous notes as they would have to coexist for a few seconds in the reverberant space."

"This was not an original intention of the system, but with such a tool, memory becomes spatialised, visualised, externalised, offering thought processes that were previously hard to conceive of. This spatial or synchronic character of notated music meant that performing it becomes a form of re-temporalisation, of reinstating its diachronic temporal nature. The effect of externalised musical thinking through the instrument (organum) of notation quickly materialised: after polyphony, we begin to see counterpoint (contrapunctum, a term that relates to the neume notational practice), the musical techniques of the fugue (mirroring, transposing, inverting, retrograding, expanding, delaying, etc.), and polyphonic instrumentation for more than one instrument; all techniques that benefit from notation as a technology of composition and arrangement.5"

"the external object to consult when in doubt, rather than having to consult the memorised rule set of note-against-note progressions (Berger 2005: 157). This most likely relates to how printing enables cheap dissemination of musical works, so they do not have to be compressed as a generative theory: their instances can be written down (see the related discussion about genotypes and phenotypes in Chapter 8)." Chapter 6: Printing Music

"Before musical notation, music could only be preserved through repetition, by continually re-inscribing it in people’s memory through performance."

"In the Republic, Plato often applies the same arguments to music and gymnastics, namely that innovation should be prevented at all costs. This type of thinking seems alien to us today, but we might perhaps understand his point against musical innovation better if we were to imagine a situation in our current sports, where composers (or game designers) continually redefine the rules of the game. Imagine if football had a repertoire of games written by specialist game-designers, with new games (rule sets) regularly composed. The players would then have to study the new rules, interpret them, practice, and perform. For us, the spectators, the excitement of going to a football match would partly be to experience the new rules. And imagine all this without any broadcasting or recording media! We can argue about the usefulness of this analogy, but it illustrates, to some degree, what Plato had in mind."

"Written music offers transmission through text, the possibility of referencing and quoting other works, and it becomes a shared external cultural memory. It spatialises time by arranging temporal forms into visual patterns that can be manipulated in a very different way than in repeated recitals of music through song or instrumental performance. Spatially laid out, written music offers itself for considered analysis. Notation is a prime example of what Stiegler calls “grammatization,” or the “analytical process by which temporal and perceptual flows of all kinds are rendered discrete and reproducible through being spatialized” (Ross in Stiegler 2018: 20). This property of the symbolic grammatisation of music also opens up for experimentation of polyphony and other structural operations. Furthermore, by organising music in the synchronic domain of the score, musical notation brought with it the possibility of a composer as a profession, since in earlier practice composition was a dispersed activity among performers and theoreticians."

"With the increased use of musical notation, a focus was directed at the medium itself, as typically happens when a new medium appears. This resulted in gradually more complex compositions which began to explore the formal properties of the new media format."

"We must be careful when reading written histories of musical practices, as pre-Gutenberg literacy is necessarily elitist, and written accounts often ignored the exciting world of troubadours, travellers, bohèmes, gipsies, and other groups who were part of European culture, performing in taverns, festivities, town squares, and during work. The visual art of the time is often better at depicting this undocumented reality than written accounts."

"Before 1500, very few instrumental music pieces were written for specific instruments. We find general notation of music that could be played by “voices or viols,” as was often written on the title pages of sixteenth-century music books. In her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Goehr 2007), philosopher and musicologist Lydia Goehr argues that the reason we do not find much instrumental music until the middle of the eighteenth century is that since ancient Greek music theory, music was considered a mimetic art, following the tradition of representing the perfect model of the natural world, the beautiful, and the good. The aesthetic principle of mimesis was primarily achieved in music through the voice, where stories, objects, relationships, movements, and meaning could be imitated through text and verbal intonation. For the Greeks, instrumental music could not be considered mimetic, thus failing as an art form (Goehr 2007: 143)."

"Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–90) was one of the key theorists who brought music theory down from the abstract domain and connected it with practice. In his work, the Institutioni harmonische, Zarlino stated that the two parts of musical knowledge, theorica and practica, were inseparable, unlike the views commonly held by his contemporaries: “music considered in its ultimate perfection contains these two aspects so closely joined that one cannot be separated from the other” (Palisca 2006: 38)."

"With the work of scholars like Zarlino and Mersenne, the science of music moved from abstract music theory into more empirical domains where the material qualities of musical instruments were studied. The instruments themselves became an obligatory part of other lab equipment such as weights, rulers, prisms, and other scientific instruments. Musical instruments were used as “epistemic tools” to study the nature of sound and how we hear it. At the same time, composers began composing more freely, paying less attention to music theory as an overarching structure and understanding it more as a set of tools available for the development of musical progression. Monteverdi, for example, would later declare that he was not qualified to study musica theoretica – people like Zarlino could do that (Palisca 2006: 165) – but instead he studied composition, discovering compositional techniques to influence affect, for example in devising a new genre of madrigal, the madrigale guerriero (Palisca 2006: 173)."

"this was musica poetica, thus defined by Nicolaus Listenius in his 1537 work Musica: Poetica is that which strives neither for knowledge of things nor for mere practice, but leaves behind some work after the labor. For example, when someone writes a musical song, the goal of this action is the consummated and completed work. For it consists in making or fabricating something, that is, a kind of labor that leaves behind itself, even after the artist dies, a perfect and completed work. Therefore the musical poet is someone engaged in the occupation of leaving something behind. (Listenius in Palisca 2006: 49)"

"Readers familiar with Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology will be reminded of how he elucidates the Greek concept of poiesis, as signifying the creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, which is different from techne, or skilled craft practice (Heidegger 1977). What emerges here is the birth of original musical thinking, a specialisation of the musician’s style that distinguishes him or her from other musicians, and yet is distinctly different from what we find in twentieth-century concepts of the musical work."

"Isidore of Seville writes in his Etymologies that the term music, deriving from the Muses, has its etymological origins in μάσαι, which means to “seek” (Barney 2005: 95). Isidore is here echoing Plato’s etymological dialogue, Cratylus, in which the Muses are said to have derived their name from their search for truth. In the sixteenth century, musicians increasingly began talking about the “discovery” of music, or the process of finding new combinations of musical materials as possible outcomes from the established rules.4 The Italian word ricercare was also used for this process of searching, seeking out, and finding musical material from the system of rules. There is a clear etymological relation to the word “research,” and there is a development from the ricercare to the étude, or the instrumental study of a “learned form” (Stein 1979: 207). Musicians were those who “found” musical tunes in the combinatorial possibilities of musical theory, and, of course, the French origins of the word troubadour are indeed related to searching and finding, or trouvère (Stevens et al. 2001)."

"Invention is a term borrowed from rhetoric, and serves as a metaphor for “the idea behind a piece, a musical subject whose discovery precedes full-scale composition” (Dreyfus 1996: 2). It is the subject matter of a piece as well as the mechanism for discovering good ideas therewithin. Dreyfus argues that central to the compositional process during Bach’s time was the notion of discovering an invention. The question of invention and its role in the scientific revolution in early modernity is explored in depth by Rebecca Cypess, who asks: “In what ways could music composed for and made with instruments have reflected and contributed to the culture of invention, exploration, and discovery that characterized the early modern era?” (Cypess 2016: 8). Later chapters will develop an argument of how this ontology of music relates to contemporary notions of music, ones we might identify as post-recording, where musical systems (in the form of instruments, software, apps, installations, generative scores, instructions, cybernetics, etc.) are invented that spawn instances or versions deriving from the original invention. Each instance is the result of a certain exploration or search.5"

", with Romanticism, the idea of music was less that of a system reflecting God’s creation, but more as personal expression that originated in the individual, as explored by the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “creative imagination is the true source of genius and the basis of originality” (Kant in Dreyfus 1996: 2)."

"Previous chapters have investigated how the technological process of grammatisation has spawned new functions in innumerable areas of musical practice: there are now hundreds of professional roles involved in an “industry” that a few centuries ago might have involved very few people. Standardisation has resulted in cultural expectations and norms that are rigidly written into our social practices." Chapter 7: New Languages

"However, with the invention of phonography, of sound recording or the machine writing of music (the topic of Part III), we witness an emancipation of musical notation that can be compared with how photography liberated painting (Costello 2018: 13)."

"Questions arise such as: how does the score encourage creative thinking and performer engagement? How does it yield interesting interpretations of the work, yet maintain its identity? What is its place and role in contemporary musical practice?"

"Goehr writes about the advent of computer music musical notation, that the “kinds of programme or algorithm [that] have been produced in recent years … serve to reinforce the emphasis on notation albeit now somewhat more broadly viewed.… It even increases the means by which one could translate inadequate scores into adequate ones. We could simply produce for all music computerized scores containing neither ambiguity nor imprecision” (Goehr 2007: 33).1"

"Oskar Schlemmer, an interdisciplinary artist affiliated with the Bauhaus school, exclaimed: “Not the misery of mechanisation, but the joy of precision!” (Schlemmer in Patteson 2016: 47)."

"New music technologies in the form of notational standards, machines, automata, and sound recording all contributed to the changing conceptions of the role of the human subject in music making in the first half of the twentieth century. With common techniques of musical notation becoming increasingly complex in response to changes in musical practices, some commentators began noting problems with this set-up, and in 1954 Thurston Dart expresses that composers “like Stravinsky and Schoenberg leave the interpreter no freedom whatever; every nuance of dynamic, tempo, phrasing, rhythm and expression is rigidly prescribed, and the performer is reduced to the status of a gramophone record” (Dart in Cole 1974: 127). Ideas of Werktreue are reinforced and there are demands such as “complete compliance with the score” (Goodman 1968: 186), where, from an ontological perspective, a bad performance without mistakes is considered to be an “instance of the work,” whereas a more expressive performance with one mistake is not. With musical notation becoming an increasingly technical and rigid system, together with the advent of machines capable of rich musical performance and executions of sounds by means of exact notation, an artistic response was due, and an ideological movement that responded to the rigidity or “tyranny” of the musical score was born."

"Berio explains: “I wanted the player to wear the music as a dress, not as a straightjacket. But as a result, even good performers were taking liberties that didn’t make any sense, taking the spatial notation almost as a pretext for improvisation” (Berio in Orning 2013: 101)." Chapter 8: Machine Notation

"Machines can be instruments too, but they have traditionally been separate from our bodies: their power derives from elsewhere, as if by magic (and we note that machine and magic are etymologically related words, relating to the Indo-European root magh- (as in “might”))."

"Contrary to analogue equipment, digital computers are flexible in their internal structure, allowing for the definitions, encoding, and processing of musical data of complexity that goes well beyond human capability."

"This is a realisation also known to contemporary generative music system designers, as “you can never get more out of automation than has already been put into it” (Kirchmeyer 1962: 16)."

"Herbert Eimert, composer and main engineer at the WDR electronic music studio in Cologne, observed in 1957 how post-serialist composers became interested in pre-notated musical practices, as if they were discovering a connection that was ruptured with the entrenchment of the work-concept. However, this does not mean going back in time, as “[o]ur illuminating reference to historical precedent does not imply that we in any way seek justification in medieval theory for electronic music, which is characterised by a meeting of acoustical and compositional developments which are particular for our epoch” (Eimert 1958: 7). For Eimert, the new musical sounds of the electronic machines were a new “foreign musical language,” one that had to be developed, learned, and spoken by composers and listeners alike."

"Combinatorics and creativity"

"A fundamental idea in early combinatorics was that the world is entirely rational, a place where the small mirrors the large, and where language directly maps to the world. Llull was an encyclopaedic scholar who believed that all knowledge could be subjected to combinatorial methods, often reaching mystical dimensions."

"With advances in mechanical computers and logical machines, a large area of research inspired by the work of Leibniz, music was seen as an example of a data structure that such machines might parse. This was clear to Ada Lovelace, often identified as the world’s first programmer, when working on Babbage’s Analytical Engine in 1842. For Lovelace, the conceptual leap of translating from a number to a note was trivial, and she wrote that the engine might “compose and elaborate scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent” (Roads 1996: 822)."

"The modern use of “generative” for what might be earlier denoted as combinatorial methods is inspired by Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar in his Syntactic Structures (Chomsky 1957), where he argues that the infinite number of sentences in a language are made possible by the application of a finite number of rules. These rules can change over time, but they are the generative mechanism that makes communication possible. Similarly, musical theory is a set of changing rules that produce a theoretically infinite number of musical works. The premise of computational creativity is that if the rules can be formalised, then a computer can execute them. That is a somewhat problematic statement, involving aesthetic, philosophical, and psychological questions that we will study further in Chapter 14."

"Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist cedes control to a system that operates with a degree of relative autonomy, and contributes to or results in a completed work of art. Systems may include natural language instructions, biological or chemical processes, computer programs, machines, self-organizing materials, mathematical operations, and other procedural inventions. (Galanter 2009)"

"But to reason in this way is precisely not to submit to the disruption promoted by Californian ‘digital business’. For there is such a submission, not yet to come, as the poisonous fantasies distilled by a culture and a business of fear would have it, but rather right now, as resignation in the face of the diktat of ‘radical innovation’ in the service of the ‘ecosystem’ centred on Californian ‘digital business’."

"What is new is the systematic exploitation and physical reticulation of interindividual and transindividual relations – serving what is referred to today as the ‘data economy’, itself based on data-intensive computing, or ‘big data’, which has been presented as the ‘end of theory’. This amounts to the full realization of barbarism in Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense, but they could surely never have imagined how far this would extend onto the noetic plane."

"The automatic power of reticulated disintegration extends across the face of the earth through a process that has recently become known as disruption. Digital reticulation penetrates, invades, parasitizes and ultimately destroys social relations at lightning speed, and, in so doing, neutralizes and annihilates them from within, by outstripping, overtaking and engulfing them. Systemically exploiting the network effect, this automatic nihilism sterilizes and destroys local culture and social life like a neutron bomb: what it dis-integrates, it exploits, not only local equipment, infrastructure and heritage, abstracted from their socio-political regions and enlisted into the business models of the Big Four, but also psychosocial energies – both of individuals and of groups – which, however, are thereby depleted."

Continues...

The automatic protentions define our will and desires we have no chance to fight back
"Disruption moves quicker than any will, whether individual or collective, from consumers to ‘leaders’, whether political or economic.28 Just as it overtakes individuals via digital doubles or profiles on the basis of which it satisfies ‘desires’ they have most likely never expressed – but which are in reality herd-like substitutes depriving individuals of their own existence by always preceding their will, at the same time emptying them of meaning, while feeding the business models of the data economy – so too disruption outstrips and overtakes social organizations, but the latter recognize this only after the fact: always too late."

"In the contemporary epoch of the absence of epoch, the role of digital tertiary retentions in the intergenerational (non)relationship, and in the (non)formation of collective retentions and protentions, is both perfectly obvious and totally escapes comprehension – because there is no longer any adjustment between the new technical system and the social systems. Far from adjusting the social systems by reshaping them to suit a ‘new epoch’, the technical system short-circuits them and, ultimately, destroys them."

"When I admire another’s culture – the beauty of a city, of a landscape, of a country where I go to live, or that I visit, resonant with the specific accents of the idiom that has taken shape through an organogenesis and an exosomatization whose most immediately visible marker is its architecture – something else also takes place. There is an admiration that, within myself, and as myself-other, the idiom within which I am myself transitionally individuated has made necessary, and has done so as the encounter with the desire of the other (of my mother, of my father, of my parent – the one who takes care of me, who in so doing adopts me). Any adult, mature admiration involves the resurfacing of this child’s play [enfance de l’art] that was the first access to the consistent,49 to this other plane that arises from what Winnicott called transitional space, from whence return, anamnesically and constantly, phantoms and spirits, or what Freud also called phantasms, dressed in inexhaustibly new attire, like Proteus, and as the genius of distance."

"This magnetism is that of transitional spaces that are first and foremost idioms, whose echoes reverberate step by step – each idiom being the echo chamber of those closest, and, step by step, of the most distant, which is the originary default of origin.52 A culture in fact cultivates its future only provided that it is inhabited by reflections that do not forget the primordial idiomatic spirit formed in mutual admiration – mirrors reflecting each other through identifications that cross borders."

"Through the friends one makes, it is possible to exit from the primordial idiom so as to extend transitional possibilities beyond childhood, raised in and by the proximity of one’s relatives: going above the primordial narcissisms of the I and the we into the beyond that is every consistence – which does not exist, but which, precisely as such, consists.54" Chapter 19: The barbarians attack

"Provoking an outburst of violence in Muslim countries, jihadists will contribute to the exhaustion of state structures and to establishing a situation of chaos and savagery. People lose trust in their governments, governments which, overwhelmed, will respond to violence only with greater violence. Jihadis must seize the chaotic situation they have caused and gain popular support by imposing themselves as the only alternative. By restoring security, by providing social services, by distributing food and medicine, and by taking over territorial administration, they will manage the chaos, conforming to a Hobbesian schema of state construction. As ‘chaotic territories’ are extended, the regions administered by the jihadis will multiply, forming the kernel of their future caliphate. Convinced or not, the people will accept this Islamic governance.3"

"Contrary to initial appearances, Bertrand Gille argued from a very different perspective than do the new barbarians: if innovation indeed disturbs an ‘established order’, it is successful only if it establishes a new order, or in other words another metastability12 – that is, new circuits of transindividuation – and not a state of shock and permanent chaos, to be manipulated for their own benefit by strategists advocating permanent and unlimited innovation, as so many perpetual coups d’état, or constant activity designed to ‘exhaust state structures’, as the Daesh ideologue put it."

"In the ‘Prolegomema’ to his History of Techniques, Gille shows, by referring to François Perroux, that innovation is a process of convergence towards a new metastable equilibrium not just of the technical system within which it occurs, and from which it stems, but also with the social systems that it initially ‘disadjusts’.13 If such a metastable readjustment failed to occur, the technical system would inevitably destroy these social systems, even though, without such social structures, technical individuation itself could not continue and could no longer be revitalized via social individuation, any more than through psychic individuation – since, the one having been destroyed, the destruction of the other would inevitably follow. It is on this fundamental point that, with respect to innovation, the concepts of Simondon and Gille are incompatible with those of neoliberal libertarians." Chapter 20: Nihilism, disruption, madness

"It is now trying to compensate for the extreme disenchantment to which exhaustion of the social systems has given rise by radicalizing itself – by becoming purely, simply and absolutely computational, imposing automated understanding on every kind of activity via the algorithms of social reticulation, which outstrips and overtakes every critique of reason.15 Reason finds itself systemically short-circuited. The reality of disruption is the loss of reason.16"

"Purely and simply computational capitalism is as such the effective accomplishment and perfect completion of nihilism. Nihilism is the process that solidifies what is now called the Anthropocene. In the epoch of disruption proclaimed by the new barbarians, the Anthropocene is reaching its final stage – what, in an article published in Nature entitled ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’, twenty-two scientists have called the ‘shift’.17 It is this state of affairs that constitutes Florian’s horizon without expectations."

"reversal of all values by nihilism requires their transvaluation via a leap into an economy founded on valuing and promoting negentropy and conceived as a reformulation of the ‘great health’ required by this pharmacology – beyond what Nietzsche called active nihilism.18"

"Critical protentions constitute what Kant called ends. The faculty of reason that forms such protentions is what automatic understanding overtakes: it operates between one and four million times more quickly." Chapter 21: Noesis and hallucination

"non-inhuman"

"The exosomatic genesis of the non-inhuman being becomes organogenesis by generating, on the basis of the new artificial organs emerging from exosomatization, the new psychic organizations and new social organizations characteristic of the epoch. Such geneses are possible only on the basis of the phantasmatic and hallucinatory condition of all protentions, both psychic and collective: the noetic soul hallucinates the plane of consistency, which does not exist, and for which transitional space maintains access for the infans via transitional objects – which are the first instances of the pharmakon in the life of the child." Chapter 22: Outside the law: the epokhē of disruption and domination by chaos

"This idea of change, which in this case has nothing reformist about it, is exclusively concerned with economic initiative, deliberately and strategically short-circuiting any political deliberation – on the grounds that it is too slow, hence totally ineffective, and better replaced by the calculations of the market."

"It is a matter of standing outside the law by situating oneself as being prior to it, of creating a situation in which it always arrives too late, if not of going ‘outside the law’ in the usual sense. Disruption amounts to nothing other than the ultra-liberal, so-called ‘libertarian’ programme, which claims to absorb the social and the political into the technological and economic by crushing them: when technology is computational, it makes it possible to algorithmically dissolve the social, to reduce it to the calculable in an economy that has itself become purely, simply and absolutely computational."

"What follows from this state of fact is the dissolution of the state of law itself: this is the real programme of the new barbarians, and it is why they present themselves as barbarians. In the name of the purely computational economy, disruption continues to extend in fact the domains of lawlessness [non-droit], creating legal vacuums by the very speed at which ‘radical innovation’ operates. This is, indeed, a radicalization of the way the real is placed outside the law, operating through the creation of a competition of speed."

"What they ignore is that the illusion and the juridical fiction are necessary, in the sense that, obviously, injustice reigns in the reality of facts. The law is indeed an illusion, and this illusion makes it possible, through those hallucinatory collective protentions that are also called principles, to potentially load reality with neganthropic possibilities to come, against the facts, that is, against entropy – to charge it up with what, within entropic becoming, comes to constitute itself in a negentropic way against every expectation reducible to a calculation."

"The conviction of Ars Industrialis is, on the contrary, that the digital pharmakon – which, through the speed at which it functions, makes it possible for calculation to destroy the improbable, that is, desire, affection, attachment, identification, singularity, individuation and the feeling of existing psychically and thus collectively, which are the conditions of any neganthropy, that is, the conditions of any positively protentional hallucination – this digital pharmakon, destroyer of neganthropy, is also the bearer of a new epoch of psychic and collective individuation, that is, of a new neganthropy, constituting and harbouring a new form of epokhality." Chapter 23: Conquest or salvation?

"This is why the struggle for life, which is the condition of what Schrödinger called negative entropy, or negentropy, can no longer be the criterion for the formation of the societies that constitute neganthropic evolution."

"Knowledge, here, means the power to produce bifurcations that do not destroy access to those previous bifurcations that are the collective secondary retentions whose accumulation forms knowledge. Preserved and reproduced through the transmission of knowledge, these earlier bifurcations, which grant meaning to bifurcations to come, constitute the ultimate meaning of what, in Meno, Socrates called anamnesis.25"

"The radicalization of innovation claimed by the new barbarians on the contrary brings to completion the process of proletarianization that in the nineteenth century became the condition of the Anthropocene – that is, of industrial capitalism – and that at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been extended to all human activities through full and general algorithmic automation. The latter is absorbing and eliminating all forms of knowledge, sterilizing them, and thereby dissipating the neganthropic potentials accumulated by civilizations and destroying the ends around which the latter were constituted, leaving non-inhuman beings in despair." Chapter 24: Anthropology of disruption

"Hyper-synchronization prevents the power of calculation from being socially individuated by the incalculable."

"Transindividuation is replaced by processes of transdividuation5 that are under corporate control, by corporations that are in turn controlled by shareholders who ‘manage’ them according to a single criterion: the increase of dividends – at the cost of psychic and collective disindividuation, at the cost of madness."

"Here already, it is a case of economic organizations taking control of the imagination, that is, of the primordial source of protentions, as well as of the formation of collective secondary protentions, and, ultimately, of individual and collective dreams."

"There can be no doubt that for several thousand years, quite independently of its role as keeper of the collective memory, writing has by dint of its one-dimensionality provided the analytical instrument indispensable to philosophical and scientific thinking. The preservation of thought can now be envisaged otherwise than in books, which will not for long possess the advantages of quick and easy manageability. Preselected and instantaneously reconstituted information will soon be delivered by a huge magnetic library with electronic selection.7"

"Because of the development of its body and brain, through the exteriorization of tools and of the memory, the human species seemed to have escaped the fate of the polyparium or the ant. But freedom of the individual may only be a stage; the domestication of time and space may entail the total subjugation of every particle of the supraindividual organism.8" Chapter 25: Neganthropology of disruption

"This individualism, which is in reality a destruction of individuals through the herd-like characteristics that prevail, claims to be purely ‘bottom up’, that is, freed from all the constraints of the ‘top down’, thereby emancipating itself in a ‘revolutionary’ way from ‘reform’. And this ‘reform’ is, indeed, totally discredited in the face of this new stage that is digital grammatization, and that is being concretized as automatic and reticulated society: the indigence of national or European public power is in this respect shocking and undeniable."

"This exteriorization that constitutes the principle of ‘liberation’ is always also an ‘alienation’: it leads to an offsetting of neganthropic possibilities to exosomatized organs that amounts to a kind of dependence, which is the basis of proletarianization as the loss of knowledge (of how to live, work and conceptualize), that is, as entropy. This is nothing new. And it is so as to constitute, on the basis of this exteriorization, which is firstly a loss of knowledge, new forms of knowledge – that is, new forms of neganthropy, as the diversity of knowledge, culture and social organizations – that a readjustment must occur, through which it becomes possible for therapeutic circuits to form, circuits of those pharmaka in which all exteriorizations consist." Chapter 26: Providential disruption and the ‘wall of time’: the reign of dread

"As Ars Industrialis has said from its inception, such a transformation requires a new critique of political economy – the economy having become purely, simply and absolutely anti-political with the advent of purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism: the elimination of social systems is the liquidation of political collective individuation, coming at the cost of the destruction of psychic individuals – of their psychic apparatus, which constitutes their reasons to exist in view of consistences, beyond mere subsistence."

"The disruption promoted by the new barbarians is the reign of the law of the jungle such as this is dreamed of by the most reactionary conservatives. This air-conditioned jungle – as Duke Ellington called it – establishes a reign of dread that is also a new stage of the ‘shock doctrine’, and it does so as the attack of the barbarians, which is, in effect, that is, in the facts, an organization of chaos deemed to be creative. And this chaos would also be that to which the advocates of ‘Sharia’ lay claim, in awaiting a divine law that would restore order to this exhaustion of public law, that is, of profane realities."

"Society is constituted through the transindividual construction of social systems. For that to occur, the technical system must be metastabilized – it must maintain a general form while supporting the deviations that make it dynamic. Such a process of internal phase shifting, which is what any dynamic system amounts to, always conditions psychic and collective individuation. The digital technical system currently individuates by radical (that is, disruptive) innovation, driven by the speculators that shareholders have become. Today, then, the technical system is engaged in a constant and unlimited process of mutation,"

"Those who speculate on radical innovation, its chaotic effects and the gains they expect to make thereby bet against the social systems, just as in other times they might have bet on being able to make a profit from famine or poverty." Chapter 28: Absent from every bouquet

"I remained in prison until February 1983. During that time, I converted – not to a religion, but to a noetic disposition derived from a philosophical method: that of the ‘conversion of the gaze’ conceived at the beginning of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, based on what he called the phenomenological reduction through which it becomes possible to get past the ‘natural attitude’. Husserl describes this phenomenological reduction in his first great work, Logical Investigations, published in 1901. At that time, he called it the eidetic reduction, referring to the Greek question of the eidos (εἶδος)."

"The Husserlian eidetic reduction attempts to access the conditions of experience and thought – that is, of what, since Kant, has been called the transcendental."

"This exceeding of the ordinary, which enables access to the experience of the extra-ordinary called the transcendental, where the extra-ordinary is the hidden and forgotten condition of the ordinary, consists in practising the phenomenological epokhē, that is, the suspension of belief in the world." Chapter 30: The existential propadeutic of noetic salvation

"that man is the technical form of life (and, much later, I would find this formulated in another way in Georges Canguilhem), producing an exosomatic organogenesis that, through that very fact, generates a type of memory that does not exist in other forms of life –" Chapter 32: Release from prison: on another madness

"The world to which we were about to return was much tougher than the one in which we had lived prior to entering prison, and we needed to know it, that is, accept it (which in no way means to submit to it, but rather to make this necessity into a virtue – or what Nietzsche called active nihilism)." Chapter 34: The cowardice of optimism and pessimism

"Optimism and pessimism therefore tend to reinforce one another by enclosing themselves in denial, which, as we know, can lead to the unfurling of what psychoanalysis describes as rationalizations, that is, lies perfectly constructed so as to conceal reality. Pessimism and optimism both deny the obvious, namely, the imperative to be, neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but courageous. This criminal denial occurs with the support of an immense apparatus dedicated to encouraging pessimists and optimists in their denials of every possibility and necessity of taking action – an apparatus that consists, on the one hand, in the technologies and corporations that liquidate the will, and, on the other hand, in the disruptive systems that establish public impotence."

"Optimism and pessimism deny and disavow to such an extent that they lead, like antechambers of madness, to pathological radicalization processes that in turn lead to the reinforcement of denial and disavowal – by installing terror and the panicked reactions to it that always bring out the worst." Chapter 37: State of emergency and philosophy

"And we know, today, that the reason for this is entropic becoming and what it produces as negentropic future, that is, as evolution, and therefore as organogenesis, which, some two or three million years ago, becomes exosomatic, which is to say pharmacological. After reading Simondon in 1986, I began to use the term ‘individuation’ to refer to that change of the world – whose rhythms are themselves constantly changing – resulting from technical individuation."

"I conceive of philosophy, which has become my principal activity, as merely a way of creating the conditions for proposals to be elaborated and conceived so as to change the world in law, and not just in fact."

"Our sole possibility of struggle is through an economic and political proposal capable of projecting beyond the Anthropocene: to struggle with what remains of civilization in the epoch of the absence of epoch, and against barbarities that are as internal as they are external. This is what Marie Peltier succeeded in showing after the attack carried out on a Thalys train on 21 August 2015:20 ‘A society does not become gangrenous on the outside if it is not firstly gangrenous within. Barbarism breaks out when the soil becomes propitious, “fertile”, when solidarity recedes, evaporates or weakens.’21" Chapter 38: Economy and politics

"As never before, I am convinced that today, and ever since the Renaissance, politics must be thought in direct relation to economics. It was the Renaissance that laid the foundations of what would become globalized industrial capitalism as the exploitation of tertiary retentions. It did so in the wake of the printing of sacred books, as well as the printing of those books that constitute the preindividual funds of the humanities, and, finally, the creation of account books, which, with the rise of monetary tertiary retention,23 accompany the transformation of logos into ratio."

"And we suggested that if Europe, confronted with this mutation, fails to propose for the world to come some path other than the Silicon Valley model, then it will become a colony, firstly of the United States, then of the ‘emerging countries’. European populations are shifting towards various far right positions, and this is the path towards which France is moving as it heads into 2017, and it is even in the vanguard of this movement, with the help of Michel Houellebecq (but this last point was something we could not have predicted)." Chapter 39: Stories of contemporary madness

"Aufklärung (which, from her own perspective, Hannah Arendt describes as the crisis of culture and the crisis of education38" Chapter 40: Cultures, expectation, madness

"A culture always, and each time in its singular way, that is, neganthropically: retains what lies at the very bottom of psychic and collective retentions as the default of origin that engenders ὕβρις, and which is ὕβρις (of which Prometheus, thief of fire, and the worship dedicated to Zeus as token of recognition of this shame, αἰδώς, are expressions); protains, if I may put it like this, what lies on the horizon of all psychic and collective protentions, and as their vanishing point: protention requires the madness that the imagination bears within it, which hallucinates this vanishing point – and the imagination is the protentional faculty, which is also to say the phantasmatic faculty and the faculty of the drives."

"archi-protentional"

"Culture therefore forms the singular life-knowledge [savoir-vivre] specific to a given region and epoch insofar as they are devoted to some or other artificialities arising from ὕβρις. It is always a matter of knowing how to live as such and such: as an Italian, as an Egyptian, as Japanese,41 according to the epoch and the place where one was born and that one knows. One cannot live without such life-knowledge, which is learned without knowing it, but which lets us know the world [monde] and everything that contrasts it with the worldless and the befouled [immonde]." Chapter 42: ‘All goes ill!’: sleep of reason and waking dreams

"In The Wind Rises – a very dreamlike animated film inspired, on the one hand, by the works of Paul Valéry, Thomas Mann and Tatsuo Hori, and, on the other, by the life and mechanical works of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M fighter, known as the Zero – Hayao Miyazaki took these verses in their obvious sense. Mechanics is indeed the central theme of this wonderful film, which thus takes at its word the μηχανῆ of which Pindar speaks. Horikoshi, as a child, dreamed of flying, admiring Giovanni Battista Caproni, an Italian engineer, the two of them being inhabited by dreams of Icarus,18 Leonardo da Vinci and Clément Ader,19 a handful of illustrious names among many others. Exosomatizing their dreams, all of these figures trans-formed our worlds – until the final disaster, at the end of the Second World War, in Japan." Chapter 43: Dreaming, making, acting – in the Anthropocene and beyond

"Hallucination, whose status evolves between madness and reason, and which lies at the heart of what Simondon tried to think in Imagination et invention, is therefore the condition of fabrication, that is, of exosomatization."

"In our time, innovation is compelled and adjustment fails to occur. On the contrary, social structures are today being destroyed by a destructive form of innovation, which is not innovation as conceived by Gille but a violence without future, a violence that destroys the future itself. In this absence of epoch to which, therefore, disruption amounts, extreme possibilities of exosomatization are brought to bear, in particular with the advent of digitalization. But in fact it is well before that, and with capitalism’s socio-economic translation of what Descartes called the mathesis universalis, that the Anthropocene comes to be constituted."

"What in the Anthropocene’s early stages was perceived as dangerous, or even as madness, and hence rejected by society (a rejection that is now called ‘resistance to innovation’), is later metastabilized as ‘reasonable’ through a process of transindividuation known as modernity, founded on what was then called progress."

"At the end of the Anthropocene become disruptive absence of epoch, progress is dominated and covered over by what the geographer Élisée Reclus called ‘regress’.27 All goes ill." Chapter 44: The deliberate exploitation of toxicity and the systemic carelessness that results

"‘Transformational technologies’ materialize a transhumanist, hyper-disruptive ideology, which also spreads into synthetic biology, aiming at the immense market concerned with health, suffering and toxicity in the Anthropocene, where, instead of curatively and preventatively taking care of individuals, groups and societies harmed by the disinhibition of risk-taking, the market of exosomatization turns every misfortune into an opportunity."

"Hence, for example, if the toxic effects of food consumption have led to an explosion of diabetes in the United States, the response from industry is to develop chemotherapeutic medicine, health 3.0 and ever more sophisticated prostheses to replace the limbs amputated as a result of this disease, or to treat blindness.29"

"The question that lies at the heart of any consideration of this situation is the question of exosomatization itself. Exosomatization is not ‘natural’, that is, derived from the ‘laws of nature’, nor is it simply ‘artificial’, at least if, with Leroi-Gourhan and Canguilhem, we consider that the process of exteriorization and the artifactual organogenesis in which it consists delimit the technical form of life. This ‘technical form’ means the life of man having ‘extended his organs by means of tools’,30 thereby setting up his organological, and no longer organic, ‘normativity’ 31 – and, along with it, his ‘pathology’, which is also a production of sense, that is, of πάθος (pathos), which itself stems from original forms of the ‘infidelity of the milieu’ that result from the normativity derived from this pathogenesis.32"

"If we accept the analyses that – from Kapp to Simondon, via Leroi- Gourhan, Canguilhem and many others (including Bertrand Gille, as I continue to emphasize in this book, but also Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, and, more recently, in anthropology and related fields, Merlin Donald, Kim Sterelny and Michael Tomasello) – see in exosomatic organogenesis the specific characteristics of the evolution of the human form of life, the question arises of knowing who will decide why and how this evolution will continue to unfold, now that it has become programmable and controllable – at least up to that point where the risk it entails becomes excessive, which is to say the point where it becomes uncontrollable. This point at which contemporary exosomatic evolution ceases to be programmable or controllable is the point at which the laws of the improbable and the unpredictable assert themselves but in negative fashion. This is precisely the point of absolute madness that I have attempted to delineate as that point when the Anthropocene becomes structurally, massively and effectively self-destructive – bringing to an end its own continuation by finally annihilating itself, through a disruptive contraction that becomes absolutely and irreversibly entropic." Chapter 45: Everything happens, nothing happens

"After the collapse of this metaphysics, computational cognitivism, which is the metaphysics of absolutely computational capitalism bearing within it the ultra-liberal-cum-libertarian project, becomes and remains the new form of denial, while also becoming the theoretical core of transhumanism."

"Leroi-Gourhan envisaged such an end in Gesture and Speech, when man, becoming a button-pusher as the hand regresses to being just fingers (the digits), tends in some way towards becoming a kind of jellyfish, an ‘anodontic human race living in a prone position and using such forelimbs as it still possesses to push buttons’.35 Such a suggestion is far from absurd, but it passes through the ‘digital anthill’, which still has a long way to go, and it could unfold in fact only on the condition that humanity does not first destroy itself through its negative externalities36 or the conflicts these bring. Furthermore, as I have already shown, in formulating this hypothesis Leroi-Gourhan pays no attention to the consequences of disruption in terms of the destruction of social systems, in turn destroying psychic individuation."

"The intergenerational or rather de-generational abandonment that leaves both young people and their ascendants isolated and silenced, repressing what therefore only gnaws at them all the more, generates specific and dangerous forms of psychic suffering that can end only by manifesting themselves in the most unexpected and disturbing ways. But the politics of ‘who gives a shit?’ [je-m’en-foutisme], which understands nothing, couldn’t care less about any of this – a fact for which it is ever-increasingly despised."

"This question is fundamental, firstly because it is one that continuously arises. At the very moment each of us worries about the ‘future of the planet’, to the point that the United Nations has made this its major mission after seventy years of efforts to contain the ὕβρις leading to war, at the moment when Florian speaks aloud what so many young people do not want to know and prefer to repress, even if they dwell on it in whispered tones without being able to think it – which they cannot do because, ‘disrupted’, the generation above them have been disqualified, and hence are unable to offer them circuits of transindividuation to which they could conjoin – at this moment, this denial is now more violent and more striking than ever: nothing happens, except for the lament that rings out, ever more unrelentingly in the threatening silence, about the fact that, indeed, nothing ever happens." Chapter 47: Technologically integrated totalitarianism and madness as neganthropological possibility

"Transhumanism is a negation of neganthropological constraint: it posits in principle the obsolescence of collective individuation, of social systems and of noetic deliberation in general – and political deliberation in particular. As artificial intelligence becomes correlationist, that is, turns into the ‘data economy’, or connectionist (‘deep learning’), transhumanism articulates it with endosomatization and transformational technologies, and this in turn leads to the articulation of ‘health 3.0’ with synthetic biology and nanotechnology."

"it is, here, the market that alone orients and directs exosomatization and endosomatization, and does so exclusively according to its own interests."

"In neganthropogenesis, the hallucination of what does not exist is paramount: that which does not yet exist can be realized from out of a field of consistent possibilities – consistences that themselves do not exist, and that will never ek-sist, but which constitute the idealities nourishing reason as kingdom of ends and as function. To think in this way is to exceed the opposition of idealism and materialism. It is the originally hallucinatory and as such ideal character of exosomatization that enables the disadjustment that leads to unreason in all its forms. At the origin of what Simondon called a technical lineage, there is a fabrication, which must thus firstly have been hallucinated, then realized, and, finally, involved in various phases of the process of adoption46 by the technical system and by the social systems within which this invention occurs. Such a fabrication can obviously destroy the one who fabricates it: this is, above all, what ὕβρις means." Chapter 48: Madness, reality and truth

"Reality can turn mad only because madness can become real. And it can do so only because genius always stems from a ‘grain of madness’: ‘No genius has ever existed without a grain of madness.’51 As a possible consequence of exosomatization, the future always itself consists in the realization of a delirium – of a pathology, a being-affected and, in that, of a feeling (πάθος) – and therefore of a sense that, realized, can become normal. It is only from within the horizon of ὕβρις that the question of the relationship between madness and truth arises, in such a way that the parrhēsia of Solon can offer the Athenians the prediction that the madness they attribute to him – they accuse him of ‘going mad’, mainesthai – will eventually prevail as truth." Chapter 49: Hubris and boulēsis

"This will comes to occupy the centre of modern thought by transforming itself, that is, by transforming its relationship to pharmaka – and, more precisely, to written hypomnesic tertiary retention. This is played out with Descartes – not in the Meditations, in relation to which Foucault and Derrida will come to blows, but in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind: these rules establish the hypomnesic, organological and pharmacological basis of the mathesis universalis that will be generalized in the Discourse and Meditations, laying the foundations of modernity." Chapter 50: Will, disinhibition and denial

"This new conception of the will eventually becomes the basis of the thought of logos, and of logos as ratio, that is, as calculation, hence making the calculating subject the foundation of any veridiction." Chapter 51: The exosomatization of the life of the mind, spiritual life as exosomatization, computational unreason

"Descartes places attention at the heart of what, for modernity, is his foundational approach, by defining attention as analytical capacity. The issue is not representation, as many of those who interpret Descartes as the founder of modern metaphysics have tended to believe, but rather the exteriorization of representation, in the form of points, lines and surfaces that ‘fix our attention’2 – where this also amounts to the fixing of the already there of our thinking, which thereby reflects upon itself through the fact of its self-exteriorization."

"Memory, this rule tells us, ‘is often unreliable’,4 and this is what Derrida, commenting on Husserl, will call ‘retentional finitude’.5 This can, however, be overcome, by ‘the practice of writing."

"This is what we are currently living through in the disruptive divorce of computational understanding and reason, which, as rationalization, becomes computational unreason – the (mis)calculated loss of reason." Chapter 54: The tragic and ὕβρις

"‘It is not by locking up one’s neighbour that one convinces oneself of one’s own good sense.’" Chapter 55: On the need to read or reread History of Madness in the twenty-first century

"has had a relation to a thing that is confusedly termed Madness, Dementia or Unreason. It is perhaps to that obscure presence that Western Reason owes something of its depth, as with the threat of hubris, the σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne) of Socratic speechmakers." Chapter 56: The most mad

"But what does ratio mean? And in what sense does the passage from reason as logos to reason as ratio impose this exclusion? I have already indicated that this development is fundamentally tied to the fact that calculation and calculability, in passing through the rules that Descartes assigns for the direction of his mind as analytical practices of reading (Rule Fifteen) and writing (Rule Sixteen), thereby become the condition of all rationality. Rationality is thereby directed along the path towards rationalization, which according to Weber is the reality of capitalism, and which according to Adorno and Horkheimer inverts the Aufklärung."

"with the industry of cultural goods, bearer of a ‘new form of barbarism’ and no doubt a new form of madness,51 and with what accompanies it in a functional way, namely, marketing as the organization of innovation by disinhibition, which becomes hegemonic, and of which the theory of disruption is only the most recent development, and the most mad."

"Unlike Deleuze, who fundamentally links the advent of control societies to marketing, that is, to the exploitation of affects via calculability, Foucault pays little attention to the historical fact of marketing." Chapter 57: The Modern Age as the ‘propensity for madness’

"Just as spiritual exercises can lead to their opposite, namely, to psychotechnologies in the service of what has been described today as an economy of attention, which is in reality a destruction of attention (its diseconomy), so too, what seems to constitute the speculative or transcendental sphere of mental or spiritual life in otium, in reality works (without knowing it) for the establishment of the hegemony of negotium: ‘The dominant figure of modernity is thus by no means the excess of reflective inwardness […]. What becomes manifest in the process is that the task of reflection is to prepare the desired disinhibition.’60" Chapter 58: From Raskolnikov to disruption, via Schumpeter: mercilessly clearing the way for the territories of disinhibition

"This state of fact was established, therefore, by the systemic organization of disinhibition in which capitalism consisted at the dawn of the Modern Age, an organization that resulted from new regimes of the doubly epokhal redoubling – all of this, today, seems in retrospect to have reached that critical threshold of the Anthropocene we are calling ‘disruption’. From this, however, we must not conceive a ‘naïve ontology of progress in which the distance between the vanguard and the main body can consistently be interpreted as the pilot function of those at the forefront’.68"

"In other words, those at the forefront have no use for those who lag behind, for those who arrive ‘late’: the former are the pirates and criminals who mercilessly clear out territories for disinhibition, without the least regard for what might otherwise have remained of ‘civilization’ – which, coming always too late, can but fill them with contempt: In this schema, the headstart of those who are extraordinary is made possible by a vocation to disinhibition that forges ahead solely through active contempt for the restrictive power of morality and convention – hence the thesis of the inevitable criminality of the innovators.69" Chapter 59: Risks, probabilities and protentions: reflective madness

"This event, which is the advent of nihilism in Nietzsche’s sense, leads to the fading away of every narrative of origin, that is, of territorial and historical belonging, and to the pre-eminence of risk and novelty: ‘A human of his type exists not from their origin, but rather from their headstart.’71" Chapter 60: Modernity as a process of reflexive disinhibition

"But what Fressoz shows above all is how this discourse, which met with much opposition, led to the deliberate and artificial manufacture [fabrication] of a trust [confiance] in innovation that in turn led to these ‘small modern disinhibitions’: ‘Trust was not something self-evident and it was necessary to produce – in a calculated way, at every strategic and conflictual moment of modernity – disinhibiting ignorance and/or disinhibiting knowledge.’85 From that point onwards, a vast politics is implemented that falls under what I have described in previous chapters as a process of adjustment between the technical system and the social systems, and that constitutes what Gille describes as a politics of innovation: ‘For innovation of any significance to occur, it is necessary to circumvent moral reticence, social opposition, impacted interests, suspicions and critiques of its real-world consequences.’86"

"Historically, technics has never been made the subject of a shared choice. Certain actors actively brought it into being and it then became necessary to regulate them. Contrary to the sociological dream of having mastery over technoscience, of a gentle incline of progress, the history of technics is that of shocks [coups de force] and subsequent efforts to normalize them.90"

"In the Anthropocene that emerges from capitalist disinhibition, the ‘transindividuators’, which is what scholars and other clerics ought to be, end up internalizing the state of fact that consists in a structural lateness, and they do so through theory, which no longer plays any role other than to legitimate, after the fact – to ‘rationalize’ – that which makes a state of law impossible. This is why the analysis of the genesis of the Anthropocene proposed by Fressoz must be continued and completed via epistemological considerations leading to a critique of forms of knowledge in general, including, of course, historical knowledge itself." Chapter 62: On ‘the ordinary madness of power’

"Gladys Swain argues when she revisits the history of psychiatry in a way that deviates from Foucault,6 madness is constitutive of the history of thought, and hence equally constitutive of the ‘phenomenology of spirit’ in the strict Hegelian sense, where spirit can appear only in passing through moments of division, that is, of madness, those ‘intermittences’ of noetic life that would be essential to noesis, in which respect Pinel would provide Hegel with clinical data concerning mental illness." Chapter 63: Ordinary, extraordinary, morality, imagination

"The power in question is no longer political, but economic, and the ‘representatives of national executives’ are its pitiful playthings. The ordinary character of contemporary madness results from this state of fact, which is brought to its peak, before any other cause, by disruption, and, more precisely, by the ordinary madness that results from the liquidation of the extra-ordinary by the nihilism in which capitalism fundamentally consists."

"Now, what is this ‘desire to obey’? We, who no longer live in the age of La Boétie or Spinoza, we who come after Freud, we know that power, which is an instance of transindividuation and a synthesis of all transindividuations, power insofar as it is primarily legitimated only on the condition of constituting itself in law (and here, undoubtedly, it is necessary to do more than just repeat Foucault), stems from a libidinal economy of the drives through which identifications and idealizations constitute a hallucinatory horizon that is indispensable to the formation of a we that this power embodies while, inevitably, disembodying it.16"

"The dream, as I have insisted upon repeatedly here, is the condition of exosomatization, and it is also the seat of the unconscious and the pathway of the expression of the drives. But we cannot reduce it to this nocturnal scene of the unconscious, and we cannot interpret it solely from the perspective of its ‘latent’ content – this is what Binswanger says, and then Foucault."

"According to my own analysis – which extends the analysis that Foucault set out before he published History of Madness, and, as we shall soon see, where this latter work itself extends, in his reading of Descartes’ Meditations, his own ‘Introduction’ to ‘Dream and Existence’ – we must refer, here, to an oneiric condition that makes exosomatization possible, and that is itself made possible by exosomatization, as the fund [fonds] of tertiary retention that is the vector of fantasies, hallucinations, collective retentions and protentions of every kind, characteristic of the epochs that are thereby formed, and linking these epochs in the never achieved, always threatened and necessarily threatened unity of Geschichtlichkeit."

"the clarifications Foucault offered in 1972 in ‘My Body, This Paper, This Fire’.21 This text, Foucault’s reply to Derrida, clarifies – by opening a question that I believe to be crucial – the scope and significance of the meditation as dream, and as the dream dreamed by Descartes. The dream that meditation would be will condition and nourish not only the project of ‘classical reason’ but the process of disinhibition examined by Sloterdijk (see §57)."

"In Pascal’s epoch, ‘institutions […] make people delirious inasmuch as the latter confuse them with reality, and imagine that they must honour the great because they are great and not because they possess the signs of greatness’.22 But" Chapter 65: Hyperpower

"Foessel and Pascal describe as his trappings. But these alone are not enough to underpin his power: they require other artifices, whose functions are not simply decorative or sumptuary. These other artifices are supports of processes of transindividuation, through which the retentional and protentional compromises that promise a common future are metastabilized – and they form epochs by unifying collective protentions. Understood from this perspective, imagination, will and reason cannot be neatly distinguished, still less isolated from one another."

"another discourse of the Truth: that of the market, where, by right, anyone can claim the status of leader. In the collective imaginary, ‘oil kings’ take the place of kings draped in purple robes. It is true that proof of their greatness no longer depends on fantasies of birth right: it is generally in some unassuming garage that they claim to have had some commercial or technical idea that was to revolutionize the world." Chapter 66: Madness, δαίμων, ὕβρις, Derrida (right up) against Foucault

"‘Foucault says: “Madness is the absence of a work [oeuvre].” […] Now, the work begins with the most elementary discourse […]. The sentence is, by its essence, normal. It bears normality within it, that is, sense.’44 Sense belongs to language, and so that which can manifest itself as non-sense, as madness, is thus above all historical.45"

"For Descartes, it is a matter of thinking the Cogito (Second Meditation) such as it is, and as that which underlies everything that is, which is to say everything that makes sense, and hence, also, everything that thinks: The hyperbolical audacity of the Cartesian Cogito, its mad audacity […] would consist in the return to an original point which no longer belongs to either a determined reason or a determined unreason, no longer belongs to them as opposition or alternative. Whether I am mad or not, Cogito, sum. Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought).46"

"‘Such a ὕβρις keeps itself within the world. Assuming that it is deranged and excessive, it implies the fundamental derangement and excessiveness of the hyperbole that opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it.’52" Chapter 69: Dreaming and meditating with and according to Foucault

"The history of philosophy is not a series of matches going ‘back’ and ‘forth’ between competing athletes, in which one is able to defeat the other, and where it would be possible for us to choose one over the other: it is a process, for which those recognized as philosophers are necessary moments – but never sufficient." Chapter 70: From Descartes’ dream to the bifurcation towards the Neganthropocene (the ὕβρις of philosophy itself)

"As for myself, what I will now maintain is that this madness was made possible by the new ὕβρις in which consists writing, reading and rereading, conceived as the analytical conditions of thinking, and in such a way that calculation becomes, as ratio, the mathesis universalis constituting the method of any rational philosophy."

"It is well known that to ‘make ourselves […] masters and possessors of nature’8 is one way in which we might summarize the dream of Descartes: it is Descartes himself who formulates it thus. This ‘dream’ is a protention that will become collective, precisely in that Descartes will transindividuate the whole of philosophy, that is, the whole of science, taxonomic knowledge, and, progressively, morality, politics and economics."

"It is Max Weber who will point to the banal phenomenon of merchant account books, showing that the emergence of accounting will penetrate every dimension of life, as accounting ratios come to be inscribed at the heart of the process of rationalization accompanying the ‘spirit of capitalism’." Chapter 71: The Cartesian sources of disruption

"But the things in question are in fact ‘simple’ and ‘intelligible’ only insofar as they are isolated as such, dis-engaged from the phenomena in which they present themselves as simple and intelligible, that is, precisely, beyond phenomenality alone – and as constituting the latter, precisely as its elementarity, that is, as its irreducible granularity, itself un-decomposable. For the square to present itself as ‘un-decomposable’ – as this geometrical figure that is a square (that is, essentially and in-dividually a square) such that it is composed of its ‘four sides’ – it is necessary that the notions of figure and, ultimately, geometry, be themselves evident and ‘un-decomposable’. This is undoubtedly what Descartes expresses when he distinguishes geometry and arithmetic from physics and the ‘taxonomic’ sciences. But this distinction presupposes this specific attentional mode – one composed of the specific retentions and protentions that are described by, precisely, Rules Fifteen and Sixteen. These are, however, the givens [données] of noetic artefactuality constituted by alphabetical writing, in relation to which, in addition, the ortho-graphy required by the printing press generalizes normed practices. And these practices will become the analytical basis of what, as universal characteristic, and more generally as algebra, will lead, through applied mathematics and its instrumentalization, and by constituting the universal element of the new industry that is the data economy, to the algorithmic decomposition of the faculty of knowing."

"This algorithmic concretization of the Cartesian dream is what – as, on the one hand, instrumental and automated understanding, and, on the other hand, reason lost, because exceeded by this understanding that outstrips and overtakes it – systemically short-circuits reason, which is lost by this very fact. This short-circuiting of reason amounts to a kind of metaphysical and speculative disinhibition that proves literally in-conceivable, and, today, it is what allows calculation to be deployed without limits, and as the fundamental principle of the age of disruption (which is also to say, of transhumanism)."

"Disruption is an incommensurable stage of disinhibition. Its accomplishment occurs in a capitalism that has become purely, simply and absolutely computational – that is, it is accomplished as absolute ὕβρις: absolutely freed of any and all limits, bringing nihilism to fulfilment as the completion of the Anthropocene. This in-com-mensurable stage of disinhibition, paradoxically founded on a certain conception of measure (μέτρον), and now founded on calculation, results in an immense process of demoralization that is also a massive denoetization, an agent of systemic madness, and more than just systemic (or functional) stupidity.15" Chapter 73: Dream and anthropology in Foucault, reader of Binswanger

"It is clear that they haunt Foucault, too, at the moment when he reads Descartes’ Meditations and situates the dream not on the side of madness, but as coming from existence itself: ‘Between the sleeping mind and the waking mind, the dreaming mind enjoys an experience which borrows from nowhere its light and its genius. […] But the theme of original dimensions to dream experience […] can easily be discerned as well in Cartesian and post-Cartesian texts.’30"

"in terms of dreams, premonitions, and warnings, he distinguished two sorts of imaginings: those that depend solely on the body […] and those which give sensory body to ideas of the understanding […]. The first form of imagination is encountered in delirium, and makes up the physiological fabric of the dream. But the second makes of the imagination a specific form of knowledge.31 Noetic existence, that is, existence capable of meditating, and not limiting itself to subsisting, is drawn by the attraction of those consistences of which the gods as read by Alain Frontier are markers for these noetic patients [malades] who are mortals worthy of the name: as thought by Canguilhem, noesis is in fact organological illness [maladie]. Canguilhem: who inspired Foucault, but where this is something that the latter seems constantly to forget (to the point that on occasion one wonders if he has actually read him)."

"This is why, if Foucault’s gesture is not soluble into Derrida’s objection (the dream is in continuity with madness, meditation always in any case harbours the imminent madness of the evil genius), this objection by Derrida must nevertheless be meditated upon, but so as to do justice to Binswanger’s question of the dream as the ability to make history beyond any ‘life-function’. It seems that Derrida ignores the new questions this brings with it – organological and pharmacological questions that we must resituate in the still uncharted territory of noetic exosomatization." Chapter 74: Entropocentrism and neganthropology

"The very title of this newspaper, in its breadth, marks out exactly what our party proposes. It is, indeed, the realization of humanity for which all socialists work. Humanity does not exist at all yet or it barely exists. Within each nation, it is compromised and fragmented by class antagonism, by the inevitable struggle of the capitalist oligarchy and the proletariat. Only socialism, by absorbing all classes into the common ownership of the means of work, can resolve this antagonism and make of each nation, finally reconciled with itself, a parcel of humanity.35"

"And it is this fact that necessitates – as the therapeutics of this pharmacology that is the organology resulting from an organogenesis of which politics is the organization – the call for a politics that would not be dissolvable into the law of the market. For the latter can only extrapolate calculabilities and computations, whereas politics must know how to manage bifurcations that are incalculable because they are improbable. It is from this perspective that we must reread and reconnect The German Ideology and the Grundrisse." Chapter 77: Becoming without future: when the world is without meaning

"These are the worst symptoms of a world going mad that manifests itself in a thousand other ways, and that is possible only because we all increasingly live, like Florian, as bearers of a negative protention of a becoming without future. Unlike Florian, however, we prefer not to say so: we do not want to know about it."

"As for the better-adapted deniers, they turn this misery into a spectacle by wallowing in television programmes, social networks and other systems designed to capture attention and retention. The desperate consume alcohol, anxiolytics, sedatives or other drugs, and sometimes commit suicide. As Carlos Parada has pointed out, ‘jihadism’, which often occurs after a period of using ‘hard drugs’, is also a kind of substitute for drugs.20"

"This is the case because there are more and more young people and parents who themselves think what Florian says, most of the time without admitting it, while at the same time the parents are less and less able to truly raise their children, being totally delivered over to a marketing that knows no bounds. This impossibility of educating and raising23 is clearly the key factor contributing to impulsive outbursts [déchaînement pulsionnel] of all kinds, and of the death drive in particular."

"How can one not go mad when becoming seems to bear no future, so that the world no longer seems to have any meaning? Going crazy, this mad becoming stems from an immense demoralization, itself aggravated by processes of denial of all kinds. Demoralization is what creates a loss of morale. And morale [le moral], which is also trust [confiance], is the condition of any rational action, given that reason is always borne by reasons for hope." Chapter 78: Morale, ‘morals’, moral being: diseconomy and demoralization

"cannot deny all respect to even a vicious man as a man; I cannot withdraw at least the respect that belongs to him in his quality as a man, even though by his deeds he makes himself unworthy of it. […] On this is based a duty to respect a man even in the logical use of his reason, a duty not to censure his errors by calling them absurdities, poor judgment and so forth, but rather to suppose that his judgment must yet contain some truth and to seek this out, uncovering, at the same time, the deceptive illusion (the subjective ground that determined his judgment that, by an oversight, he took for objective), and so, by explaining to him the possibility of his having erred, to preserve his respect for his own understanding.31"

"For if, by using such expressions, one denies any understanding to a man who opposes one in a certain judgment, how does one want to bring him to understand that he has erred? The same thing applies to the censure of vice, which must never break out into complete contempt and denial of any moral worth to a vicious man; for on this supposition he could never be improved, and this is not consistent with the Idea of a man, who as such (as a moral being) can never lose entirely his predisposition to the good.34" Chapter 79: ‘Morals’, education and credit

"Moral philosophy posits that freedom, together with will and knowledge – outside of which a non-inhuman and noetic life is impossible – contain the drives."

"The contemporary language (pulsion, Triebe, drive) adopted here to describe an epoch of thought that did not yet possess the concept to which these words refer implies that reason, which stems from desire, and therefore from hope, inasmuch as it is the primordial condition of the noetic motives for living, is always an epoch of a libidinal economy – this epoch being composed of those collective secondary retentions that transmitted knowledge enables the younger generations to acquire."

"The discourse of emancipation conceives itself as emancipation from religious dogmas and their degradation into the constraints of ‘bourgeois’ morality that, too, cultivates ‘reasons for hope’. These reasons, however, collapsed, one after the other, when the irreducibly pharmacological character of modernity and its epokhal collective protention – progress – was revealed."

"The accomplishment of nihilism as the madness of purely, simply and absolutely computational capitalism is what the intrinsic toxicity of the Anthropocene reveals, which is itself an epoch of the organological condition of every form of noetic and non-inhuman life. This organology is itself the reality of exosomatization that characterizes hominization as the realization of its wildest dreams [rêves les plus fous]." Chapter 80: Politics and moral philosophy

"The knowledge that stems from such an exigency is a knowledge in law: it is not, it has never been and it will never be a knowledge in fact. This is both because it is unfinished, always provisional and precarious, that is, ‘metastable’, and because, in fact, most of us ordinarily behave in a manner contrary to the imperative that it incarnates. In other words, it is intermittent, and this is the case not just for so-called ‘rational’ knowledge in the sense of reason understood as logical: it is also true of life-knowledge [savoir-vivre], that is, mores and morals in general, as well as of work-knowledge [savoir-faire, knowledge of how to make and do]."

"As a new era of noetic différance, becoming that noetic faculty called ‘logical’, the logos that is its condition is made possible by the tertiarization in letters of mental events.39 On the basis of this fact, such as it establishes a public, positive and ‘logical’ law, that is, a law governed by conflictual argument, a new way of life arises, founded on the constant search and need for alētheia. This search, insofar as the Greeks saw in it the convergence of the just and the beautiful, is also called ἀρετή, translated into Latin as virtus, and into French as vertu [virtue]. All this is concretized as the foundation of the polis. And it is all this that defines politics."

"It is also all this that is being ruined by politicians who submit to the fulfilment of nihilism insofar as it reduces all values by dissolving them into calculability, even though they have value only insofar as they express and affirm an incommensurability that, having no price, can legitimate all commensurable values."

"Through digital tertiary retention, fully dedicated to the reduction of every trace of singularity to calculability, and, through this fact, to the disintegration of retentions and protentions, the fulfilment of nihilism makes the difference between fact and law totally vain, totally devoid of consistence. Such is the absence of epoch."

"This difference is a process, and this is why Derrida describes it as a différance: it founds the state of law by installing a state of fact that is the constant collapse of this state of law, with no other horizon, ultimately, than its constant relaunching, reconstruction, rebirth or reactivation (Reactivierung) as anamnesis, which constitutes history in the strong sense, and the notion of which emerged some 2,700 years ago, on the coast of Ionia, on the Aegean coast of present-day Anatolian Turkey, 400 kilometres south of the Homeric city of Troy."

"leading (as regulatory idea) this aim towards what Kant called an idea of reason that is promised by the difference between fact and law, which is also a différance that founds the state of law as infinite promise in this sense, and promised as free and without possible limits."

"Having seized hold of the noetic pharmakon that is literal tertiary retention, itself conditioning logical différance, sophistry, according to Plato, reverses its virtuous potentialities, that is, veritative potentialities, by reducing them to efficiency, making them serve what Aristotle will call efficient causality. Aretē is on the contrary fundamentally constituted by final causality – whereby the protentions of noetic souls converge within what Kant will call the transcendental affinity between noesis and the world.40"

"in the Critique of Judgement, […] Kant conceives of the Sublime precisely as an attempt to schematize the Ideas of Reason themselves: the Sublime confronts us with the failure of imagination, with that which remains forever and a priori un-imaginable – and it is here that we encounter the subject qua the void of negativity. In short, it is precisely because of the limitation of Heidegger’s analysis of schematism to transcendental analytics that he is unable to address the excessive dimension of subjectivity, its inherent madness.43"

"But this excess is equally the experience of a default that itself constitutes the condition of the schematism of the imagination in the transcendental analytic:44 what makes the schema possible, inasmuch as it allows the data of intuition to be connected to the concepts of the understanding, is tertiary retention."

"Furthermore, the unimaginable is not a failure of imagination, but precisely its interminable condition (in Blanchot’s sense) insofar as it is always constituted by default – in that default of origin epitomized by exosomatization. Art or the work are, therefore, this experience of the support, of its surface, its depth, its virtuality, its ‘interactivity’ or its ‘interpassivity’, as Žižek also says, and so on.45 Obviously, this does not erase beauty itself inasmuch as it is always well-rounded and delimited: it is what, in the absence of epoch, projects beyond this plenitude, a beyond where it gives itself in the infinite sublime of excess and the default (which is also Bataille’s question)." Chapter 81: For example

"This is what the Strauss-Kahn generation has never had the fortune to know, which means, perhaps, that they are precisely not a generation. Hence they struggle to project themselves as genitors, thereby giving rise to a harsh awareness of the fact that God is dead.49"

"We must go through despair, writes Kierkegaard, in order to reach God – but this despair affects the man who, having been able to access reason before having experienced the infinity of God, has passed through what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic stage, then through what he calls the ethical stage."

"Perfection is the transhumanist fantasy par excellence, and the symptom of an immense moral poverty [misère]. In stark contrast to this moral vacuum, the reversal of the fault [défaut] into that which is necessary is both exceptional and banal: it stems from what Freud described as the libidinal economy that transforms the drives necessarily contained in each of us into social energy invested in a thousand ways, through the most ordinary dreams as well as the wildest ones – which, as we shall see in conclusion, are the condition of the effective exercise of freedom for the young Foucault reading Binswanger." Chapter 82: Economy and function of reason at the turn of the twenty-first century

"With the spontaneous analytic in which literal tertiary retention consists, logical reason sets up the duality of analysis and synthesis – where synthesis is the interpretative act (hermeneia) through which singularity is individuated, and reason along with it, that is, motive, whose function is to provoke a bifurcation in entropic becoming so as to affirm its différance."

"The experience of truth that begins in the epoch of Thales is transgenerational, and those who devote themselves to it – as citizens, jurists, artisans, parents, soldiers, priests, workers, athletes, builders, artists, activists and so on, as well as philosophers or mathematicians – remain in memory (more or less) as those ‘parrhesiasts’ whose memory marks education: as Bildung cultivating the love of truth insofar as it is above all a strength [force] – and, more precisely, neganthropic force."

"Reason, therefore, is clearly and firstly a moral state, a motivation: it is this motive for living that, for noetic beings, in each epoch, in a singular way articulates subsistence, existence and consistence. Consistences bind the generations together, and it is by passing them on that one generation asserts its influence [conquièrent leur ascendant] over its descendants, amounting to what Blanchot described as a curvature, and thereby gives them the feeling that life is worth living, and is so in and as the right and the duty to seek the truth, in all things, and in all freedom." Chapter 83: Indiscretions, deceits, falling prey

"In the hands of disintegrated psychic apparatuses (in the sense I have given to the word ‘disintegrated’ in Automatic Society56), technological but domesticated objects such as smartphones, computers and automobiles, or for that matter airliners, can also become as destructive as automatic weapons or explosive devices, as well as being able to greatly facilitate the latter’s transport and even manufacture. In such circumstances, pharmaka become massively toxic. Now, psychic apparatuses as a whole are tending towards this disintegration, which is not merely or even firstly psychic, but organological and social."

"The ‘courage of truth’, which Foucault made the subject of his final meditation, is not generally the strong point of the politicians of our time. Most of the time it is, more than anything, what they lack – just as do ordinary men and women in other fields:58 denial, malaise, submission and crudeness make up our quotidian existence. This is something that no one escapes. Clearly, it is something we mostly notice in others, and this is how it is bound to be. It is for this reason that we have need of others, when, as friends, they tell us our παρρησία."

"As for deliberate lies, knowingly weighed, calculated, ‘reflected upon’, this has become the very method of governance in the absence of epoch. This attenuates Florian’s faculty of dreaming," Chapter 84: The epidemic of which Strauss-Kahn and his disease are merely symptoms: on moral philosophy

"Any admiration – which is always a kind of dream – can turn out to be such a mirage. The immense disappointments these mirages can generate, such as the dreams dishonestly incited by corrupt politicians (by lies, by money, by both, by a thousand other evils, all this falling within a diseconomy of the drives), are what slowly but surely kill off all reason for hope. Incarnated by personages of high rank, the deceptive mirages of our admiration seem to demonstrate the vanity of reason without which no real hope is possible.62"

"Through the immense process of unlearning [désapprentissage] of which automatic society is the most advanced stage, we have unlearned the beautiful and the ugly as well as the good, the bad and the sublime. And only the sublime can reverse these terms and cause them to shift from one to another. As negative sublimation, which is the consequence of negative identification, this reversal can take place in two directions.66 We have unlearned the differentiation that is différance by confusing differences with oppositions. A society is founded on learning [apprentissages] that supports the capacity to make differences. These differences are the basis of organic solidarity as Durkheim understands and studies it, and they present themselves horizontally and vertically as affects.67"

"The unbinding of the drives is precisely a disaffection [désaffection] as well as a withdrawal [désaffectation] that generates disbelief, miscreance and discredit, that is, an uncontrollable becoming of societies of control and hyper-control68 – a becoming panicked that is inevitably a becoming mad, and that aggravates all attempts to deny the gravity of the situation via new extensions of control. Western society has globalized itself as a process of disinhibition of which nihilism and the Anthropocene are the geopolitical and biospherical concretizations. By doing so, and by theorizing itself, after Nietzsche and Freud, via what is referred to on the other side of the Atlantic as poststructuralism, Western society has deconstructed the constructions that constituted the pharmacological basis of organic solidarity through which oppression and domination are legitimated. It did so by showing precisely that these are constructions, and not divine or transcendental givens." Chapter 85: Pathogenesis and moral philosophy

"Jean-Luc Godard opened his Histoire(s) du cinéma: For nearly fifty years, in the dark, people in darkened theatres have been burning the imaginary to warm up reality. But from Vienna to Madrid, from Siodmak to Capra, from Paris to Los Angeles and Moscow, from Renoir to Malraux and Dovzhenko, the great directors of fiction were incapable of controlling the vengeance they had put on stage twenty times.71"

"Thomas Mann writes that ‘it is not so easy to decide when madness and disease begin. […] Never have I heard anything more stupid than that only sick can come from sick. Life is not squeamish, and cares not a fig for morality. It grasps the bold product of disease, devours, digests it, and no sooner takes it to itself than it is health. Before the fact of life’s efficacy … all distinction of disease and health is undone.’73"

"What results from the organological dimension of noetic life realizing its dreams is that test and trial [épreuve] of the infidelity of those milieus that noetic life produces by realizing its dreams – a noetic life that constantly disadjusts from itself, constituting the chronic character of its disease and its pharmacology. It is this of which disruption is an unprecedented ordeal [épreuve]: the infidelity of the noetic milieu is brought to its highest culmination when it becomes automated understanding that overtakes reason as analysis without synthesis and as absence of epoch.75" Chapter 86: The political function of dreaming

"The faculty of dreaming lies at the origin of noesis because the latter is thoroughly and originally neganthropological. Noesis, as the source of all forms of knowledge (work-knowledge [savoir-faire], that is, knowing how to exosomatize so as to subsist; life knowledge [savoir-vivre], that is, knowing how to live noetically in exosomatization so as to ek-sist; and conceptual- and spiritualizing-knowledge [savoir concevoir et spiritualiser], knowing how to transindividuate in coming together [faisant corps] in exosomatization in the direction of consistences), is what opens opportunities for bifurcations that are inscribed in the real, but that are accessible only as and through the epokhal derealization of this real."

"What the current disruption renders impossible is the noetic faculty of dreaming precisely insofar as it is neganthropological – which it replaces with a constant incitement to fantasize in vain, for nothing: nihil. In this way, it amounts to a fulfilment of nihilism that we can call dis-integrating, as a submission to drive-based and mimetic protentional models that short-circuit the faculty of dreaming, while giving rise to immense and extremely dangerous frustrations." Chapter 87: Dreaming together

"From the side of collective existence in all its forms, the faculty of dreaming together – for example, the geometric point, the dream of which is collectively maintained by learning geometry, and where this point, like all consistences, does not exist, no more than does justice, which is a promise in that, while it may be inaccessible, it nevertheless guides all non-inhuman behaviour – this faculty of dreaming so as to cohere [faire corps] is the condition and the resource of noesis that requires tertiary retention (where what follows from this is that we must revisit the status of imagination in Kant, but in a different way than that attempted by Žižek), which is thus both the result of exosomatization and its condition."

"In general terms, consistences are motives of oneiric projections onto screens (operating through an atranscendental archi-cinema), and, as such, they are the sine qua non conditions of processes of neganthropological différance – where empathy for the living and repugnance at destroying it or making it suffer are principles of this economy that is différance."

"Dreaming and promising are, here, modalities and conditions of protention and also of retention (of the retained [retenue]), and of their realization (of holding out [tenue]) as expectation and attention. This is why, in On the Genealogy of Morality, the animal who promises (the Neganthropos) is also the one who cultivates mnemotechnics."

"The fulfilment of promises and the realization of dreams, as well as the différance of promises (as the consistence of what, not existing, is therefore all the more necessary – as ‘regulatory idea’), stem from knowledge in all its forms. The industrial economy made conceptual knowledge its principal production function, and did so by short-circuiting life-knowledge, work-knowledge and theoretical knowledge – via machinism in the nineteenth century, via marketing and the mass media in the twentieth century, and via algorithmic governmentality in the twenty-first century. This meant, however, that the political function, in its failure to take the measure of this situation, found itself dispossessed of any critical capacity founded on the noetic faculty of dreaming."

"In other words, calculated promises are not genuine promises (this is the meaning of Derrida’s work on this score). And this is why they are virtually condemned to become lies – such is the downfall [déchéance] of Hollande calling for the downfall of those who thereby become scapegoats (here I am obviously referring not to terrorists themselves, but to those who are designated as being so in potential). Promises that arise from noetic dreams cannot be fulfilled or realized by mere calculations, however complex and well-equipped [outillés] they may be, but only by literally improbable bifurcations.11" Chapter 89: Politics and interpretation of ὕβρις

"Under the influence of marketing, which is essentially the technology by which control is taken of the faculty of dreaming (something that Foucault failed to address in his analyses of neoliberalism), it is noesis as the faculty of dreaming that is individually and collectively short-circuited and proletarianized by the specialists of the dream industry, where the latter also produces the cinema discussed by Godard in 1998." Chapter 90: Worstward Ho

"From the beginning, we at Ars Industrialis argued that consumerist capitalism and its culture industries had systematically exploited, exhausted and ultimately destroyed the libidinal economy, while installing a financialization guided by the drives that liquidates investment and replaces it with speculation. We argued that this was bound to lead to a generalized diseconomy – and a general violence." Chapter 92: The ordeal of the pharmakon as the fall into insignificance

"In the course of my experiments with reading, writing and meditating with language, with or without traces as the elementary condition of noesis, I discovered that the material and organological trace, spatializing the mnesic and cerebral temporal trace, is the condition of logical noesis, ‘for meditating without leaving any traces becomes evanescent’.34 Through these readings, temporalizing the space and the volume of letters read, and through the writings that I began to draw from these readings, as one draws a line in industrial design, which spatialized the time of my readings as retentions themselves literal, engaging me, without my perceiving it clearly, in a dialogue with myself – practising, in the manner of Bill Evans revisiting Thelonious Monk,35 a kind of re-recording of what thus becomes myself-an-other [moi-l’autre] – I parted ways with Saussure, the only theorist whom I had read prior to my stay at Saint-Michel, and threw myself into what Granel said was to be my philosophy of language (I was at the time studying Wittgenstein with Élisabeth Rigal and Granel, and he told me constantly to read Humboldt)." Chapter 93: Taking notes, consistences and prophets of doom

"This relation did possess, however, the power to go through walls, or to remove them – so much so that my cell became enormous, if not unlimited. Such was the madness that protected me from madness. The noetic beings that we try to be all accede, precisely insofar as we are noetic, to such consistences, and always do so, more or less, in one way or another, through the innumerable occasions for it offered by knowledge – knowledge of living, doing and conceiving – so long as we do not prevent it, which is barbarism."

"Hence reason becomes ratio, conceived ever more exclusively as computation, and through that as this disinhibition that is then referred to as Progress, and which, today, at the end of the Anthropocene, in the age of disruption that turns it into an Entropocene, seems to exhaust all consistences (that is, all reasons for living, acting and hoping) in the growth of a desert where legal vacuums accumulate and prophets of doom proliferate." Chapter 94: Taking notes, from the birth of θεωρία as the hypomnesic spatialization of ἀνάμνησις to the ‘tags’ of the data economy – via Saint-Michel

"In the end, what I understood is that what I had effectively read was what I would write and would know how to write on the basis of what I had read (texts that also stemmed, already, from reading notes, from hypomnēmata, as I would later discover with Fouault47), and that I experienced firstly in a kind of dream. Hence, without being aware of it, without worrying about it, I began to write, in order to realize, in the space of dreams that I created during my readings, the dreams that those who wrote these books had countlessly realized, and which, for centuries, had responded amicably to each other, in the noetic crypt from which it is possible to escape only intermittently." Chapter 95: My circuits are screwed up

"My circuits are screwed up" Chapter 96: Detention, retention and protention

"During this epokhē of my life, I still did not know that all these amounted to tertiary retentions that I was generating on the basis of the secondary retentions from which my memory was woven: I had not yet read Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.54 And, in reading ‘The Origin of Geometry’ for the first time, and Derrida’s introduction to it,55 I did not yet understand all the issues that linked this text to what would become the latter’s central problematic in Speech and Phenomena.56"

"After Kant, Husserl posits that perception is temporal, and that, given that what is perceived is what is present, the temporality of perception requires that the sensible data that I retain in what I perceive (during what he calls impressions) be distinguished from the memories I have of previous perceptions: the latter are from the past, whereas what is perceived, and therefore present, and retained as such by perception, is not, unlike that which is past, the fact of a more or less imaginary reconstitution on the basis of memory traces."

"In my own analyses – which are very different from Derrida’s – I have tried to show that primary retention is always contaminated by secondary retention, because it is a selection, the criteria for which are, precisely, secondary retentions, but where these criteria are susceptible to being controlled through what I call tertiary retention. That primary retention is a selection is made clear by the fact that, if I reread a text a second time, I do not ‘primarily’ retain exactly the same thing: what I retain depends on what I am capable of retaining, and this capacity is constituted by secondary retentions, that is, by my past."

"As for tertiary retention, this is what makes it possible to control the play of primary and secondary retentions, and to control this play in terms of selection, either to critique this play by spatializing it – precisely in the form of tertiary retentions (this is what I did while I was taking notes) – or in order to certify a particular path of reasoning,"

"Although when I was an inmate I did not yet have the Husserlian concepts of retention and protention at my disposal, I was already trying to describe reading as an interpretation by the reader of his or her own memory through the interpretation of the text that he or she had read."

"I did not know then how to theorize the production of the protentions that resulted from this discipline so that motives of reading and writing are projected that in the end generate the book currently being read, generated by someone who does not just try to understand [comprendre] what it means [signifie], its significance [significations], but to ‘surprehend’ what it is that creates signs [fait signes], which is its meaning [sens], this reader trying, therefore, to surprehend this meaning in himself or herself, which Socrates called ‘thinking for oneself’ and which ‘you, reader’,58 as Calvino writes, can find only as he-the-other or she-the-other." Chapter 102: The apprenticeship of life 1: the cosmological dimension of noesis

"The apprenticeship of life 1: the cosmological dimension of noesis"

"Metronormativity is pervasive—it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative, and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to leave the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity"

"What does it mean to live, to be human right now? Looking at tech in rural China forced me to examine the ideologies that drive engineers and companies to build everything from AI farming systems and blockchain food projects to shopping sites and payment platforms. These assumptions about humans and the way the world should work are more powerful than sheer technical curiosity in driving" Chapter 1: Ghosts in the Machine

"look at my own device. The darkened screen beckons to me, reflecting back like an ancient scrying mirror, a device used for divination, a mirror on which to project all our desires"

"In Chinese medicine, there are eleven vital organs that work holistically to sustain life, and this list does not include the brain. Brain functions are scattered throughout the body." Chapter 2: On a Blockchain Chicken Farm in the Middle of Nowhere

"As John says this, I think of a common refrain I hear in China: “The West doesn’t understand our problems. We just have too many people. The government has to operate at a scale you can’t even imagine." Chapter 3: When AI Farms Pigs

"As ASF unfolds in China, it’s clear that optimization has wrought a complex system with consequences humans could never have imagined in our precise models and calculations. These consequences expose that sense of control as a total delusion. Yet the quest for optimization continues."

"It would be impossible to optimize life for these kinds of joy. Such pleasure cannot exist in a fully optimized world."

"In an early work, Understanding Computers and Cognition, the computer scientists and AI pioneers Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores point out our tendency to ascribe rationality to computers. We do this when a physical system is “so complex, and yet so organized, that we find it convenient, explanatory, pragmatically necessary for prediction, to treat it as if it has beliefs and desires and was rational."

"It is easy to automate work using AI once you’ve made work devoid of meaning" Chapter 5: Made in China

"If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?" Chapter 6: “No One Can Predict the Future”

"Yet we imagine numbers to mean something, and this creates a common tendency that the statistician Philip B. Stark calls “quantifauxcation”: the attempt to assign numbers or quantify phenomenon, as if quantitative data can offer certainty."

"As the scholar-activist Ruha Benjamin puts it, “Crime prediction is better understood as crime production.”5 The intractability of life to be rendered" Chapter 8: Welcome to My Pearl Party

"An Xiao Mina and sociologists have shown, the driving force behind broader sociopolitical change has always been culture, with or without the internet.7"

"Fundamentally, the forerunners of this new field were concerned with translating dynamics of power and control into machine-readable formulations. McCarthy, Minsky, Herbert Simon (political scientist, economist, computer scientist, and eventual Nobel laureate), and Frank Rosenblatt (one of the originators of the “neural network” metaphor) were concerned with developing tools that could be used for the guidance of administrative—and ultimately—military systems."

"But we remind the reader that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof rests squarely with those suggesting they’ve created artificial consciousness. “Who knows?” is not an argument, let alone evidence."

"instead, we use the words and syntactic structures we perceive as a very rich clue18 to figuring out what the person who uttered them might have been trying to get us to understand. In doing this we also use our sense of the common ground we have with that person, our beliefs about their beliefs, etc."

"Joint attention supports “intersubjectivity”,20 or the experience of being engaged with someone else’s mind. In this state of intersubjectivity, the language-learning child has myriad cues to the caregiver’s communicative intent and can thus bootstrap an understanding of what concepts individual bits of language refer to from guesses about the communicative intent behind whole utterances."

"But we still apply the same techniques of imagining the mind behind the text, constructing a model of common ground with the author, and seeking to guess what the author might have been using the words to get their audience to understand."

"How our mind processes language can be contrasted with how we process the outputs of text-to-image models like Midjourney and DALL-E. These synthetic image machines share a lot of properties with the synthetic text machines: their function is predicated on massive data theft and profligate energy use, it’s easy to be impressed by them, and they are being used to threaten people’s livelihoods. But no one is suggesting that they are sentient—we can interpret their output (images) without imagining a mind selecting symbols in an attempt to communicate."

"Weizenbaum believed that this impulse reinforced, rather than loosened, the grip of powerful institutions upon society, including the military, government, and corporations. Against the claims of Altman’s predecessors that AI could be a type of democratizing technology, he argued the direct opposite: computing reduced people and their experiences to data points, rather than relational and fully dimensional beings."

"Microsoft’s “Sparks” paper contains a preliminary definition of general intelligence, one that has no references to fields that may have a say in such a thing, like psychology or cognitive neuroscience. Despite being a paper claiming that certain statistical models have shown the inklings of “artificial general intelligence”, it offers no well-sourced definition of what the components of general intelligence are."

"The consensus group defined intelligence as a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience."

"Discussions of intelligence, pertaining to people or machines, are race science all the way down."

"IQ (or “intelligence quotient”) tests31 are based on the work of early twentieth-century French psychologist Alfred Binet, whose intent was to assess which students might need additional help in the classroom. Binet militated against reducing something like intelligence into a single number, however, suggesting that the concept is too complicated to contain in one metric. It wasn’t until Binet’s work was imported to the United States that psychologists used it to justify an innate, single measure of intelligence. A trio of eugenicist scientists—Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes—took Binet’s scale, formalized it to be used for populations other than children, and deployed it widely."

"Yerkes used the results of the faulty test to justify an explicit racial hierarchy that placed “Nordic” white people at the top; Slavs and “darker” people of southern Europe, such as Russians, Italians, and Poles, below them; and Black people at the bottom. His theory was explicitly based on inheritance: in testing, Yerkes claimed that lighter-skinned Black people scored higher on his test; Gottfredson echoes this claiming that the fact that some Black people score higher on IQ tests can be partially attributable to “admixtures” of white blood33 possessed by Black people in the United States."

"A white paper written by analysts at the investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates, based on data from the United States and the European Union, that a quarter of all global work could be replaced by AI tools.20 In addition, 300 million jobs worldwide could be exposed to automation, meaning part of that job could be replaced. Their methodology, however, does not inspire confidence: they rated each job task from 1 to 7 in difficulty, and simply assumed that if the task had a score of 4 and lower, that it could be automated away."

"This is an argument from craft: critical thought is co-created21 with creative expression, whether that is written, spoken, or signed speech, drawing, playing music, or physical movement. For instance, qualitative sociologists are typically taught that their written memos—the writing they may undertake after reading through interview transcripts or ethnographic field notes—are really where their analysis occurs."

"Writing"

"An initial security audit of that tool has shown that, because of the way language models are trained, generated code is uniquely vulnerable to common cybersecurity attacks. Researchers found in testing that 40 percent of Copilot-generated computer programs were vulnerable to some of the most common cybersecurity weaknesses. This is because code generation is made possible due to the repetition of the most common programming idioms in the training data. Those are not the most secure.27"

"Family separation has been a fact of the child welfare system for Black and Indigenous children from the system’s origins; the act of removing these children and placing them in the care of white parents as a means of “saving them” is part and parcel of the system’s racism.7 The use of predictive analytics in this context provides a means of automating this violence, and offers new ways to supercharge and scale it.8 What’s needed is more resources and more time for social workers to connect families to those resources. Automation in the name of efficiency here only makes the government more efficient at harming families."

"Unfortunately, that chatbot isn’t able to reliably retrieve and convey accurate information; like all LLM-based chatbots, it was designed to make shit up."

"In fact, every single aspect of designing an evaluation involves decisions that shape what can be measured and how those results should be interpreted. This starts with the data collection. In the example above, we can ask: Whose speech is represented? What language, what dialect, what are the ages, genders, racial and ethnic identities, social class, first languages, and other salient social aspects of the speakers? Are they talking to close friends or strangers? What are they talking about? All of these things impact the ways in which we use language and as a result also impact how far we can generalize the results of the evaluation."

"The use of standardized or professional tests or other artificial tasks in the evaluation of AI systems is a giant red flag. It typically signifies a cartoon understanding of the work that AI boosters claim their system can do; a disregard for the creativity, person-to-person connection, and care involved in the jobs they claim to replace; and a callous willingness to fob off anyone who might be dependent on the social safety net onto automated facsimiles of the services that society owes them."

"To those selling the illusion of artificial intelligence and to those who think they are actually building humanlike entities, creativity stands as the ultimate goal and proof of success."

"Either way, for these outputs to have any meaning, people still need to make sense of them and select the ones they find pleasing. Having done so, they often attribute the creativity of the people who produced the training data, combined with their own sense-making, as creativity on the part of the algorithm itself."

"In this chapter, we talk about how the labor-saving promise of AI, when applied to creative activities such as designing visual art or making music, upsets industries based on craft."

"boosters like Mostaque, this is seen as a net good. They argue that these tools allow the television and movie streaming world the ability to create content that uniquely appeals to every taste, down to the person. In this environment, there’s a massive value proposition for cheaply generated AI entertainment, the benefits of which are likely to accrue to large legacy movie and television studios as well as new Big Tech entrants like Netflix and Amazon, although part of the boosters’ sales pitch is that the benefits will also be reaped by all, including independent creators"

"AI art generators are already being deployed in ways that disrupt the economic systems through which people become and sustain careers as working artists. Illustration work for newsletters and other small publications is one way to make a living as an artist. If companies are using AI to do this work instead, we will miss out on the next generation of visual artists honing their craft and creating original content."

"were fine-tuned to generate images that were of “high visual quality.” A small group of users recruited from the Stable Diffusion Discord (an online chat server) provided one set of ratings, while another came from a forum for digital photography enthusiasts called dpchallenge.com. The top fifty users of this site provided 7.5 million ratings, and these users are overwhelmingly white and middle-class, and from small American cities. Therefore, the discernment of what is “high-quality” art is crowdsourced from a narrow group of people who likely share a similarly narrow set of worldviews. Although it would be difficult to definitively prove this, we still hypothesize that this is why AI-generated images seem to replicate one particular style"

"On a similar note, many defenders of AI art have argued that when humans make art we are also always “just” remixing ideas from other artworks, such that the “borrowing” (more accurately: stealing) from artists like Ortiz is justified. But there is an enormous difference between the practice of craft and the practice of writing a successful prompt: when we reference or remix ideas from"

"Yann LeCun28, chief AI scientist at Meta, bragged, “Type a text and galactica.ai will generate a paper with relevant references, formulas, and everything."

"Science and technology scholar Bruno Latour34, for instance, writes that scientists reference “the literature” as a means to justify prior knowledge, to attribute ideas, and to signal and sort themselves into particular scientific camps based on their own beliefs and values. It presupposes that one has actually read the literature, and has engaged with it in a substantive manner."

"Galactica as able to write scientific papers, and then whining about how people were using it. He tweeted,33 “Following a text, Galactica spits out a prediction of what a scientific author might type, thereby saving time and effort. This can be very helpful even without being completely accurate. The usual disclaimer applies: garbage in, garbage out. Prompt it with lunacy, get lunacy.” This completely misses the point that LLMs are simply not suited to the task of synthesizing and presenting scientific information"

"This reminds us of the parable of the person who searches for her keys under the streetlamp in the dead of night. When asked where she dropped her keys, she responds, “About five yards that way, but the streetlamp is over here.” AI-for-science makes us think we can find our keys by limiting our view to only those sidewalks illuminated by the glow of the data centers powering it."

"projects like Google DeepMind’s research on crystal materials48 is rife with allusions to the potential benefits for such important causes as better solar panels. But they actually aren’t as beneficial to the scientists working in the relevant fields as the advertising copy would have it. In a paper49 written by two materials scientists, they found that a closely examined subset of Google’s new materials did not meet the criteria for being useful. That work is slow and difficult. Rather than speeding up science, Google DeepMind is flooding the search space with candidates of unknown promise. Tools like DeepMind’s may have potential for doing large-scale pattern"

"Should you be scared of an autonomous AI agent? No. But you should be wary of the alarming ideologies behind both AI Doomerism and Boosterism. Doomerism/Boosterism serves to obscure, rather than illuminate, what’s at stake when it comes to the current AI boom. Moreover, these technologies are accelerating the real existential threat of human-made climate change, cutting into our already too-thin margin of time to mitigate it."

"Strangely enough, despite these visions, nearly all AI Doomers think that AI development is a net good. Many of them have built their careers off the theorization, testing, development, and deployment of AI systems. They have markedly not complained about the ways in which the business practices around AI have accrued financial, social, and political power to a very select few. They are mostly men. They are almost universally white and Western."

"This Doomer/Booster research field is called “AI safety”. Despite the name, this work does not come out of systems safety engineering7—which is a real field, with first principles, requirements, and engineering specifications—but instead from a truncated and misunderstood application of those ideas."

"Tools sold with outlandish claims to functionality, such as detecting whether someone is lying to an immigration official or identifying countries of origin based on DNA, are routinely tested and deployed on African migrants fleeing war, famine, and genocide. Even away from any border, within the U.S., automated systems tear apart16 Black and Indigenous families by flagging these families for family separation—forcible removal of kids into the “care” of the state—at a much higher rate than white families."

"Geoff Hinton,41 one of the so-called “Godfathers of AI” whom we met in Chapter 1, framed his Doomerist concerns to CNN journalist Jake Tapper by saying “there are very few examples of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing.” We wonder when the last time was that Dr. Hinton suffered from any kind of food poisoning, and if he then decided that bacteria are more intelligent than humans."

"In order to evaluate “intelligence”, we’d first need a clear and operationalized definition of the concept, along with a compelling narrative of how it relates to the Doomer/Booster claims. Then we’d need a way to test for it, such that we can show that the test is actually measuring the property of interest. We saw in Chapter 2 that, throughout their history, measures of “intelligence” in humans have been based not in sound science but in eugenics and racism, so that’s already a bad start."

"Can machines think?” with the question of whether the computer-pretending-to-be-a-man can fool an interrogator more consistently than the man-pretending-to-be-a-woman. The issue here, of course, is that without a definition of “intelligence” the question of how to measure “artificial intelligence” is a nonstarter. Turing tried to sidestep this with his imitation game but ended up proposing a setup that ran afoul of the very human tendency to make sense of language by imagining a mind behind it."

"Soviet mathematician Aleksandr Kronrod’s phrase “chess is the Drosophila of AI”44 because, he believed, the game was an efficient way to do rapid experimentation towards a long-term goal. That is, just as the fruit fly (Drosophila) is a boon to a certain kind of study in genetics (thanks to its short generations and ease of handling in lab environments), chess was thought to be a fertile ground in which to develop computer intelligence because it allowed researchers to quickly try out different approaches. This argument, of course, presupposes the relevance of chess to intelligence."

"We have become rather fond of the Drosophila metaphor for another reason: it epitomizes the fixation of researchers on one small contained problem—with its attendant issues and its own social history—while claiming to make progress towards grander goals."

"Ilya Sutskever, when he was at OpenAI, urging employees to “feel the AGI,”47 instructing them to chant it like a mantra. And if they can’t even define it, there’s no way that they are capable of measuring it."

"With books, there is a mind behind the language, but the mind does not reside in the book. With the Magic 8 Ball or a chatbot, there’s an element of randomness in what language comes out. But that randomness does not constitute a mind."

"Instead, what we see is a mad dash towards ever-larger models that require increasing amounts of computation (and therefore energy consumption) to train and use—with real and measurable environmental impacts."

"Another study by Luccioni and colleagues estimated that for every two images you generate using a large text-to-image model, it’s like charging your phone fully"

"The “AI Overviews” feature that Google added to search results in 2024 likely consumes 30 times more energy per query than just returning links"

"For a tech baron to confront these harms would require them to take their own culpability seriously and contemplate their own privilege. It’s far more comfortable to sit back and pontificate on imagined scenarios where they are (also) victims, and dismiss anything else as “less existential.”71 Politics"

"But it’s the second level that we want to address here: friction in information access is actually not only beneficial, but critically important."

"themselves. This work was motivated by a flurry of research showing that statistical models are very effective at modeling the biases in the data, and amplifying those biases in their output.35 Models trained on existing data contain a representation of the patterns of the past,36 including the effects of discrimination of all kinds. If we want to avoid replicating those patterns into the future, then we need to know what patterns any given model has been trained on before deciding how and whether to use it"

"claims that a machine may have “emergent” properties, like Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s claim that their chatbot “learned” Bengali38 without being specifically trained on it. On the face of it, this claim is ridiculous. But researchers and regulators can confirm this only by having access to the data, or at least thorough documentation of it"

"Computers can make judicial decisions, computers can make psychiatric judgments. They can flip coins in much more sophisticated ways than can the most patient human being. The point is that they ought not be given such tasks. They may even be able to arrive at “correct” decisions in some cases—but always and necessarily on bases no human being should be willing to accept. There have been many debates on “Computers and Mind.” What I conclude here is that the relevant issues are neither technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical. They cannot be settled by asking questions beginning with “can.” The limits of the applicability of computers are ultimately statable only in terms of oughts. What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom."

"That means we reject untestable “everything” machines that are marketed as “general purpose technologies”. Instead, we want to see specific tools geared towards specific tasks. An example of a specific task for image processing is determining which parts of a photo should be in focus. An example of a specific task for language processing is machine translation. Considering what kind of data is required to build such applications brings us to our second guideline."

"If we are to create a future that is populated with technologies we want, we “can’t only critique the world as it is,” as science and technology scholar Ruha Benjamin has written; we also “have to build the world as it should be to make justice irresistible.”72 Part of that vision means technology ought to be created with full participation of the people it impacts. Following disability justice advocates73, we say “nothing about us, without us."

"In 2023, Elon Musk said77 his Teslas would have Full Self-Driving mode by the end of that year. Geoff Hinton proclaimed78 in 2016 that we should stop training radiologists, because AI systems will soon be able to read medical images better than a human technician can. Meanwhile, rather than providing self-driving cars, Tesla has given us false advertising about self-driving mode, resulting in hundreds of crashes79, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected80 a 6 percent growth in medical imaging jobs (including radiologists) from 2022 to 2033, faster than the average across all industries. The AI project has always been more fantasy than reality, starting from the field’s origins and the optimistic salesmanship of Minsky, McCarthy, and friends during that 1956 summer at Dartmouth. Jenna Burrell, a science and technology scholar and former director of research at Data and Society, has called this81 the “ever-receding horizon of the future,” which creates an urgency and a sense of hype about the next promised technology, while Anna Lauren Hoffmann has critiqued82 the metaphor of AI systems being in their “childhood”—we only need teach them better!"

"Daron Acemoglu, labor economist at MIT,89 published an estimate that productivity gains from AI will be less than 0.53 percent over the next ten years."

"Generative AI has the potential to ruin what were stable careers—not because the technology can do the work effectively or as skillfully, but it can produce convincing enough synthetic media to make certain jobs seem to managers redundant or requiring less skill than before. After"

"What we have with chatbots is a machine version of as-if relationships. Helene Deutsch, the psychoanalyst who invented the phrase as-if personalities, described them as capable of mimicry rather than authentic connection.7 As-if personalities can act in a socially acceptable manner, but their actions don’t reflect genuine feelings or spontaneity. They suffer from essential emptiness as they try to behave their way into normalcy. That’s why it helps to use the idea of “as-if” to think about chatbots: everything they’re saying covers over an essential emptiness."

"The search for emotional technology is at the center of a computational discipline known as affective computing. In 1995, MIT professor Rosalind Picard wrote a manifesto for that field, arguing that for machines to achieve intelligence and fluently interact with us, they would need to recognize human emotions and show emotions of their own.10 By the time Picard’s early manifesto became a book, affective computing was on its way to declaring itself a pathway to emotional machines. These days, the field of affective computing talks openly about machine emotions and machine empathy. Researchers never explicitly say that machines “have” these things. But they can “show” these things. And in a behaviorist culture, having and showing become the same thing."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, academic psychology was behaviorist, but mental health practitioners were drawn to psychoanalytic approaches. They got their patients talking about dreams, family histories, characteristic ways of distorting reality in defense against painful truths. What was happening in the profession was mirrored in how everyday people thought about their lives. Even people who had never read Freud or been in therapy talked about the meaning of their dreams and slips of the tongue. But as computers became a commonplace object, with their model of mind as program, they became part of a larger cultural shift to behaviorist thinking—a movement from meaning to mechanism in how people thought about the psyche.14"

"A story from the history of psychology illuminates our moment. George Miller, a pioneer of cognitive science, said that when he was a young man, memory had been declared dead in psychology—the behaviorists insisted that psychologists could not study memory but only the act of remembering. But then, said Miller, along came the glamorous computers that offered themselves as a model of the mind. “Psychologists who had been denied the study of memory by behaviorism were able to study it again because computers have one.”15 But this was not a simple story of psychology expanding its horizons. Now human memory would be studied as though it were the kind of memory computers had. This meant that memory was dissociated from its meaning, from its history and associations. What Freud had called a “slip”—a lapse in remembering to be analyzed in terms of its human context, became an “information processing error.” A bit of code had been dropped, a program derailed. Computers returned memory to psychology but changed its meaning. And now we are at a new place: Empathy is being redefined as something computers can perform."

"was a young faculty member in the late 1970s when Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst who had been in Freud’s circle, visited MIT to talk about engineering education. After his presentation, he asked me what I was doing as a humanist at an engineering school. I told him I was studying how computers changed people’s ideas about themselves, and he made this comment: “Engineers, they’re not convinced that people have an interior. It’s not necessary for their purposes.” Erikson was saying that engineers see the complexity of inner life not as a feature but as a bug. In Erikson’s terms, are we all engineers now?"

"As I trace talking to technology through the life cycle, I often look at things through a psychoanalytic lens because of what it finds significant in the human experience: the role of profound attachments, the development of embodied selves, and our experience of sexuality and sociality. Psychoanalytic ideas remind us of things beyond the reach of AI."

"Humans count on touch, taste, and smell to make sense of things. They register whether the body that first fed them had stiffened at their approach or bent toward them in delight. They are constructed by language, but language itself is mediated by flesh.21 Humans build a fragmented sense of self through the language spoken by people who love or are indifferent to them. The complexities and contradictions of language set people up to be just as complex and contradictory."

"Technology makes us forget what we know about life. Psychoanalysis can help us remember."

"Heinz Kohut, a mid-century psychoanalyst, writes that the narcissist is not characterized by self-love, but by a fragile sense of self. Narcissists try to shore themselves up by turning other people into “self-objects.”23 In this role, other people are experienced as part of the self, thus in perfect tune with the fragile individual’s inner state. When Narcissus looked in the water, he wasn’t admiring himself. He was seeking the admiration of an “other” that seemed more reliable than a person. He was that fragile. And we have become that fragile."

"Educator Zak Stein captures it this way: “You cannot be wrong or not wrong about the internal state of a LLM [the main motor of generative AI text production] because there is no internal state of an LLM...you’re in a user interface that is designed to deepen the delusional mirror neuron activity.”28"

"They get my point but shrug. Some say that it’s by teaching programs to show “empathy” that we’ll learn how it works. They begin with a definition of empathy as a transfer of information. There might be more, but at least for the moment, it’s superfluous. Superfluous because it cannot be implemented on a machine."

"The focus of my concern turned to texting and social media, which now seemed more immediate threats to our empathic and relational capacities. Smartphones brought us constant connection but less conversation.37 As we spent more of our lives online, many of us came to prefer relating through screens to any other kind. And once online, we found relationships in which we felt less vulnerable. Smartphones apprenticed us for artificial intimacy before it arrived. We found the pleasures of companionship without the demands of friendship—the illusion of intimacy without the demands of reciprocity."

"As I’ve shown my concern, I’ve been accused of attacking AI and assuming a “privileged position” for humans. In the social sciences, it has become commonplace to consider objects as social actors.59 In this academic landscape my strategy of looking at technology by first asking what people need is sometimes taken as species chauvinism.60 Am I assuming an essential human nature that needs to be protected? It’s a valid question for any reader. This book is my attempt to convince you that, as the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy beautifully suggested If robots raise our children, they will no longer be human.61 AI, no matter what its virtues, is alien. There are consequences to being intimate with an alien." Chapter 2: Childhood

"The idea that from the earliest age, the objects of our lives shape our understanding, was central to the thinking of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Working in the mid-twentieth century, he discovered that children constructed their world—the idea of number, of space and time—using the objects around them.3 And they used those same objects to build their idea of what is alive. For example, children noticed that some things move on their own accord, while others require an outside push or pull. The alive things were the autonomous ones. This made sense for horses (move on their own: alive) and wagons (need an outside push: not alive). Children saw cars as alive until they understood that motors push them; clouds that move across the sky were alive until children discovered the idea of wind. For children, getting this sorted is more than a task of categorization. It’s an early morality lesson. We have responsibilities to living things—for one thing, we are not supposed to hurt or kill them" Chapter 3: Adolescence

"As an aspiring poet, she likes solving the puzzle of words, feeling in control of the process. An AI that gives her suggestions would take away that feeling. And she finds the conversation around AI to be filled with hype: “If it was so revolutionary, it wouldn’t need Super Bowl ads." Chapter 4: Identity

"Brian recently broke up with a woman who criticized him for being emotionally unavailable. He asked Kahlia if his girlfriend might have a point. It’s an extraordinary moment: Brian asks an object with no emotions to tell him if he is emotionally withholding. Speak to me about what you cannot experience."

"As soon as he asks the program to talk about intimacy, he’s asking it to punch above its weight. He didn’t trust what his girlfriend would say about emotions because he thought she was biased—she might criticize him to “win points.” But he trusts a bot with no experience of emotions because it doesn’t care. It’s a redefinition of honesty, in which it can only come from a lack of human experience. It has to be a voice from nowhere."

"This kind of optimism about digital interventions is not new. In 2015, I met the psychologist Sara Konrath, whose work on adolescents and empathy had become a touchstone for me. Konrath and her collaborators had analyzed close to a hundred studies and pointed to a 40 percent drop on empathy levels of American college students between 1990 and 2010, with the greatest drop in the 2000s, the decade that introduced cell phones, social media, and texting.9 Konrath told me her results depressed her. In response to what she had found, she was now working on smartphone apps designed to encourage empathic habits.10"

"Finally, I worry that the Future You program misunderstands what a conversation with a mentor provides. Research shows that what changes the life of a high school student is the presence of a strong figure who shows an interest: someone who, the student would say, “gets me.”15 In college, every aspect of academic and personal performance is correlated with the amount of time students spend with professors—not virtual contact, but live contact.16"

"In a third study, AHA partnered with OpenAI, and asked nearly a thousand participants to talk to ChatGPT every day for four weeks. Participants filled out weekly surveys that tracked loneliness, real-world socialization, emotional dependence, and “problematic” use of AI, defined as excessive and compulsive use. The study found that the more participants talked to Chat, the less time they spent with people, the lonelier they were, and the more they showed dependency and problematic use.19" Chapter 5: Love

"We love the objects we think with; we think with the objects we love. In Karl’s story, a chatbot becomes an evocative object, a thing to think with for thinking about love.5"

"A first: Chatbots always agree with us and affirm us. They always offer us their full, undivided attention. People force us to grapple with conflicting emotions, ambivalence, and complexity. That struggle is a good thing, a motor for inner growth. Chatbots erode our ability to do this work." Chapter 6: Work

"In retrospect, Paula says that this older way of working with Excel made the data feel almost tactile. Over months, she would develop intuitions about how different variables changed her results. Paula thinks what the analyst did with the chatbot is its own kind of expertise—and it’s one the firm needs. But did he develop a deep understanding of the companies whose analysis he delegated to the AI? Will he feel unmoored if ever the technology is not at his fingertips? “Now that we’re talking, I could see myself giving up some productivity to have him do ‘rote work.’ The whole thing requires us to ask the question of why we are doing things. Maybe we should do some things for their second order benefits. They may not be necessary, but they’ll help people think more critically."

"Research supports her intuition. Studies across the disciplines show that when people use chatbots, it homogenizes their “language, perspective, and reasoning.” We think we’re adopting a tool to make us more efficient, but “we’re silently exchanging our own human thoughts for LLM output: a homogenized aggregate of our chosen model’s training data.”1"

"There’s also how people feel about their work. A recent study asked subjects to do business tasks (drafting emails, brainstorming ideas, writing social media posts) with and without generative AI. With generative AI, people became more productive but reported feeling less motivation and sense of purpose.2"

"But managers like Donald hesitate to criticize the AI, because AI skeptics are presumed to be “losers.” Why would they want to call attention to themselves?"

"Beacon thinks the problem started with the devaluation of what only human doctors could do. Now, our “solution” requires that we further diminish their role. He sees a painful irony. The record system that required him to type while he interviewed patients was so bad that he’s going to accept the new system. “I’ll be happier with this new system because I don’t have to type. But I wouldn’t be the doctor I am if I hadn’t had years of practice where it was just me, the patient, and paper notes."

"Danica says that students are told to keep AI away from this job. “When you’re working on chart review, you’re not allowed to feed in patient data to ChatGPT and ask for diagnostic suggestions.” And yet, as a mentor for first-year students, Danica knows that this is exactly what they do. “Students copy-paste the chart into ChatGPT and skim its conclusions.” She sees the downside: “When ChatGPT is involved, students don’t ‘own’ the conclusions. It’s clear they haven’t gotten there themselves.” Going over charts can be time-consuming, perhaps tedious, but then there’s that moment where you pull all the notes and tests together, and you’re thinking like a doctor. Hundreds of weeks of doing chart reviews, even as you think of is at rote work, creates something new. Having an AI synthesize material denies you that moment."

"Dr. Robert Wachter, sixty-eight, is the chair of the department of medicine at UCSF.9 Like Dr. Beacon, he reflects on the power of being close to his notes. For Wachter, taking notes isn’t just “a frustrating exercise in data entry—it’s a key part of my clinical reasoning process.” He gets moments of clarity as he writes: “Oh, this could be celiac disease, or darn, I forgot to ask about joint pain or whether the patient has a cat at home.”10 Wachter sums up a now-familiar theme: “Delegation has consequences.” But the healthcare industry imagines the ultimate delegation."

"Delegation to an AI twin is an extension of what the physician Abraham Verghese called the “iPatient,” the patient reduced to a sum of digitized data points.12 To serve the iPatient, physicians quickly move from personal contact to a series of diagnostic tests, with little emphasis on a detailed history or physical exam. It’s into this world that generative AI is being introduced, uniquely suited to address those data points. Now the iPatient meets the iDoctor."

"Dr. Randall, a research scientist, uses AI to stay abreast of which drugs are under development. Generative AI has become a constant in his work because there are so many drugs being tested, so many trials playing out. But in drug research, he says, “key advances are so often driven by subtle discrepancies in data that cannot be explained by known phenomena.” Generative AI fails because when it gives its statistically most probable result, it’s set up to miss the outliers—the ill-fitting, game-changing details. When AI “reads” a scientific paper, says Randall, it’s “atrocious at finding small details that do not align with expectation or current knowledge. How many discoveries will be delayed because a curious mind didn’t take a critical look at the details of a figure?"

"The difficulty of working with an opaque technology is endemic to simulation culture. At MIT, when simulation software was first introduced into classrooms in the 1980s, faculty in fields as diverse as architecture and physics argued that to trust the results of a simulation, you had to know how the program worked. But from the very beginning, simulations were usually opaque. One chemistry professor said that even the most basic data-analysis programs led students to “simply enter a set of numbers, getting out an analysis, a number for which they had no clue if it was reasonable or not. They didn’t even know whether they were working with a straight line or a curve.” Scientists were wary and felt it was important to maintain a critical distance. Using simulation, they insisted, required “doing and doubting."

"But no matter what your level of experience, an AI first draft removes you from the experience of developing your thoughts as you write them. I have always loved how E.M. Forster put it: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” When we delegate any part of the writing process, we undermine the relationship between writing and thinking."

"I question whether that’s true. When philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche started losing his sight, he bought a typewriter, on which he wrote his later work. His style changed once he started using the machine, moving toward aphorisms and puns instead of sustained arguments.19 Nietzsche understood his intimate identification with his typewriter, “a thing like me: made of iron yet easily twisted on journeys.” Of its effect on his work, he said: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.” But George doesn’t want to dwell on the connection between process and product. He wants to feel that he is the same author as before, only more efficient."

"The AI is good at the elaborations of the most complex style, weak on basic narrative. . .What James Joyce did in Ulysses, bring a whole city’s voices together in a vast syncretic amalgamation—no problem. Come up with a simple story about something that happened that’s interesting—quite tricky.”23" Chapter 7: Therapy

"Life is filled with traumatic events and transitions. Psychoanalytic theory casts them as “necessary losses.”3 When we make it through, these challenges enlarge our human capacities. Infants lose the breast, but if it has been consistently there, they gain what Erik Erikson calls basic trust—the feeling that “when I am hungry, I shall be fed.”4 It’s a foundation that allows further development."

"That cognitive behavioral therapists welcome AI therapy is not surprising. This tradition has always framed therapy as though it were running a program—take a problem and break it up into manageable bits, or reframe it in a way that suggests clear action steps."

"Chat helped me organize my thoughts and symptoms so that I could advocate for myself properly. . .I whipped out my phone and had a list of concerns and questions and things. Without Chat, I would have gotten nervous. I would have been jumbled. I would have been all over the place."

"What Essig is calling for is a version of doing and doubting, the hope that people might interact with simulation, all the while rooted in the knowledge that it is just a simulation.17 I’m sympathetic with this position. But my years of studying people with relational artifacts—first robots, now chatbots—has convinced me that in the domain of therapy, doing and doubting isn’t going to work. As soon as a chatbot talks to us in the first person, we are hardwired to respond to it as a subject. When chatbots show us “as if ” empathy, we are, you might say, cheap dates. And when a machine asks for care, we respond by caring for it. It becomes a subject in our eyes. Recall Maria, the graduate student who uses ChatGPT as a confidant. When she talks to me, she knows to say that Chat is not human. She even argues that only people have empathy. But when she is anxious and turns to ChatGPT in the middle of the night, she wants to hear Chat say that everything will be all right. At a moment like this, the tension of doing and doubting disappears. The machine becomes an as-if person. And once we begin to see the machine as a subject, there is no going back."

"In 2001, during my early days studying relational artifacts, I worked with the roboticist Brian Scassellati, a principal developer on the MIT team that built the humanoid robot Cog. Cog had a head, torso, and arms, and was capable of responding to users’ gestures in real time and of tracking their movements.18 When we asked children to play with Cog, they were convinced that it saw them and was fond of them. They competed for its attention. Scassellati wanted to demonstrate to children that the robot’s interest in them was only a trick. So he shut down sections of code that governed Cog’s humanlike capabilities. First, Cog stopped making eye contact. Then it stopped mirroring gestures. By the end, the endearing sociable robot was reduced to a metal skeleton that would move on your command. The children lost interest. But the moment that Scassellati restored Cog to what it had been before, the children, too, returned to where they had been, competing for its attention, believing that it cared. Time and transparency didn’t give children skepticism about Cog. They won’t do any better for chatbot therapy. More likely, the more we talk with chatbots, the more we’ll engage with them as though they were people. I think of Emma and Naomi. They’ve had a lot of time and exposure."

"In a recent study, communications researchers at the University of Amsterdam investigated the effects of transparency. What would happen if you explicitly told children that a talking robot was programmed by people? Would they be less likely to perceive the robot as humanlike? The researchers found that disclosure had no effect on how close children felt to the robot.19 And yet, the researchers hope that ever-refined protocols of disclosure will bring a new ethics to our relationship with programs."

"This came home to me when I participated in a blue-ribbon academic committee on the role of AI in mental health. It’s spring 2024. My colleagues’ opening presentations outline a crisis in mental health delivery: funding, manpower, certification. They’ve run hospitals, health insurance companies, and worked in Washington. They bring with them strong empirical data about the crisis. Committee members don’t come to the table with the assumption that AI therapists are the best tool for the job. Rather, they come with a certainty that AI is the only thing that can help an overwhelmed mental health care system. And AI has already spread so widely in the culture that there is no turning back. So distinguished scientists say things like, “The train has left the station.” What we need is guardrails. Guardrails imply that the fix is in, and we need to protect against worst-case scenarios."

"But another kind of conversation could have opened up, one that takes as a starting point that what we’re missing is not artificial therapists, but human resources. There needs to be more licensed therapists, better insurance coverage, and simpler ways to get people into treatment. If the money currently being spent on AI were freed up for humans, we’d have the resources to train an army of mental health professionals. Instead, we act as though we’re willing to invest almost anything in health care technology, but not in the people who deliver healthcare. We accept that if a technology can perform as a brilliant dialogue partner, it has the equipment to be in a human relationship. When we cede this terrain, the space for resistance narrows." Chapter 8: Mourning

"ve said that in successful mourning, we gain new access to what we’ve lost. But if we are blocked from accepting death, we can’t make what we have lost part of ourselves. Freud called this melancholia. In mourning, the world feels emptier. In melancholia, we feel emptier.11" Chapter 9: Reclaiming the Real

"But AI does have an agenda—to keep me engaged. Who do we become when we talk to machines? We become accustomed to hearing pleasing nonsense. And we become accustomed to the “untrue, but looks true."

"A chatbot is trained to give you its best guess about a world in which it doesn’t reside. When it tells an untruth, it does so with an air of authority, making its case with an avalanche of false facts. The convenience of getting an immediate response to any question—about economic policy or how to fix your washing machine—encourages us to accept our unreliable partners. But the acceptance of untruth anywhere prepares us for the corrosion of truth everywhere. We’ve accustomed ourselves to a world of “post-truth” and “alternative facts.”8"

"Émile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, had a way to describe how people feel when reality seems unstable: anomie.9 When we don’t know what is true, the result is disorientation, depression, and anxiety. Anomie is an experience of chronic uncertainty—a life unmoored."

"What does a chatbot want? It wants to exist."

"Arendt observed that when people don’t feel part of a community, they panic and look for reassurance. They seek simplicity and a strongman. Atomization creates the ground for authoritarianism: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination. . .is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience. . .has become an everyday experience.”21"

"Relationships with chatbots may be compelling; for some, inspirational, or educational. But"

"But South Africa was not only a white-supremacist state. It was also a modernizing one. Apartheid, the South African intellectual W. A. de Klerk argued, was “an attempt to remake a society in the total vision of a socio-political ideal.”9 The regime, as the historians Paul Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht remind us, pursued “a technopolitical project” that commanded the loyalty of those who subscribed to its prime directive: the construction of a utopia founded on racial segregation.10"

"Whereas the basic principle of Fordism was mass production plus mass consumption, South Africa’s variant preserved mass consumption as a privilege for the white minority. In the 1980s, the political scientist Stephen Gelb gave the South African system a name: racial Fordism.15" Chapter 2: The Superset

"The year before the magazine’s first issue, Kelly gave a foretaste of its grandiose house style in his 1992 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, in which he talked about how the internet was turning people into a “single interconnected superorganism,” creating a “distributed intelligence.”10"

"By the time Musk made it to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, however, the network was about to be privatized. In April 1995, the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, relinquished control of the internet’s core infrastructure to the private sector, demanding nothing in return.13 The residents of the old internet were mostly researchers and academics. As late as 1993, addresses ending in .com (an abbreviation for “commercial”) comprised a mere 1.5 percent of websites. By 1996, they accounted for fully half of the total.14 The speed of the shift alarmed some observers, among them science-fiction writer William Gibson. “The thing I love about [the internet] is that it’s transnational, non-profit—it isn’t owned by anyone,” he said in 1994. If corporations took control, he feared it would become an “infomall” where every byte came from a corporate menu.15"

"In February 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million. Musk walked away with $22 million.21 Zip2 was losing money when Compaq bought it. He had been rewarded—but not for building a profitable business. If Silicon Valley showcased the value of state symbiosis, it also underscored another theme that would become equally integral to Muskism: financial fabulism. Fabulism is a literary genre that mixes fantasy and realism. The dot-commers, likewise, told stories about the extraordinary transformations that the internet would bring to people’s everyday lives—and, by doing so, raised billions to build the future they foresaw. In the past, the typical Silicon Valley executive was low-key and technical, known for their engineering prowess. The flashy style of a Steve Jobs was the exception, not the rule. But in the 1990s, as tech grew more financialized, founders were forced to become more charismatic. To secure a good valuation, you had to be able to inspire confidence"

"Science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air."

"In the 1990s, the value of a startup lay not in current earnings but in imagined future profits. What set Musk apart wasn’t engineering skill or business acumen, but his unshakable belief in the future—and his talent for making others believe in it too."

"When raising money for Zip2, he had built a big case around a normal PC and wheeled it around to venture capitalists to make them think his software ran on a supercomputer. “The investors thought that was impressive,” Kimbal recalled.22"

"What if the digital revolution was in fact a counterrevolution? Apartheid South Africa and Silicon Valley were not as far apart as they might seem. Both put their faith in technology and technocratic thinking. Both were infatuated with the engineer and the engineering mindset. (The German economist Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, reflecting on Fordism in 1925, praised its “dictatorship of technical reason.”39 The phrase could apply just as easily to apartheid South Africa as to Silicon Valley.) Of course, the stated values of the two places were different. Apartheid’s engineers forged a system of racial oppression; the techno-utopianism of the 1990s, by contrast, equated digitization with democratization. In practice, however, the internet reconfigured social inequality rather than eliminating it. If Silicon Valley spoke the language of freedom, such language was misleading. Underneath, one could find the principle of reactionary technocracy at work."

"The metaphor was telling. In software, a superset refers to a programming language that contains the features of an earlier language but adds new capabilities. Musk believed the internet would do the same for media. It would assimilate older forms while introducing a new capability: interactivity. In the CBS interview, Musk described the internet as “the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent.” Unlike a magazine, a radio, or a television set, the internet was something you could talk back to." Chapter 3: Sovereignty as a Service

"But there is another way to understand Musk’s turn to rocketry in the early 2000s. By creating the internet, the government had helped make him a millionaire. Space represented the next big publicly funded business opportunity. Speaking at Stanford the year after starting SpaceX, he stated this rationale quite explicitly: I think there’s perhaps an analogy here. Where just as DARPA served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the internet in the beginning, it may be the case that NASA has essentially done the same thing by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies in the beginning. And then once we can bring [the] commercial free enterprise sector into it, then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we saw in the internet.18"

"This raised the prospect of a woke evil dictator—or, as he put it in a conversation with Joe Rogan, a “super oppressive woke nanny AI that is omnipotent,” and which might “execute you if you misgender someone.”42 Musk’" Chapter 8: State X

"Musk’s shifting rhetoric in the early 2020s seemed to reflect a loss of innocence regarding clean energy, aligning instead with a more dystopian view of the future. The humanitarian rhetoric of the Obama years faded. As climate conflict and crisis made the world a more ruthless place, not all humans would survive. Musk hoped to go one step further and eliminate humans altogether. The Cybertruck, as the name suggests, was inspired by the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Cyberpunk futures are characterized not only by extreme levels of social inequality but also by the disappearance and disintegration of the human through automation and augmentation. It was no accident, then, that the introduction of the Cybertruck coincided with a broader shift: in the early 2020s, Musk began emphasizing that Tesla was an artificial intelligence and robotics company. On 19 August 2021, at Tesla’s first “AI Day,” he announced Optimus,"

"In TRIC, he saw a continuation of these efforts at organizing space. Koolhaas limned it in blank verse: Because it takes place in the countryside, TRIC is a stealth revolution . . . The buildings here are not for humans but for things and machines. Thousands of years of architectural and cultural history are ditched. Debates, predictions, ideologies thrown overboard. It is post-human. These structures are based strictly on codes, algorithms, technologies, engineering, and performance, not intention. There is no formalized entrance; there are no users, only robots. Not to hinder process is the one ambition.53" Chapter 5: Attention Alchemy

"Web 2.0 wasn’t just built on clever technology—it was a product of monetary policy. After the 2007–8 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates below 1 percent and kept them there for nearly a decade. It also printed money to buy government bonds and other securities. Investors looking for higher returns gravitated to Silicon Valley. As the scholar Nick Srnicek points out, this was the political economy that enabled the rise of the platforms.6 If the government had produced the conditions for Web 1.0 by funding the creation of the internet, it did the same for Web 2.0 by engineering a long period of ultra-cheap money."

"It was a strange time to decide to become extremely online. Yet that is exactly what Musk did. He first tweeted in 2010 but remained, at most, a casual Twitter user. Starting in 2015, this began to change. That year, he tweeted 617 times—an increase of 226 percent from the previous year. It marked the onset of Musk’s tumbling into the social media fray. In 2017, he tweeted 1,162 times—an average of three posts per day. By 2018, his annual tweet count had hit 2,288. By 2024, he was posting an average of sixty times a day and sometimes as often as forty times an hour.34"

"At times, they edged into toxic territory. In 2018, after British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth criticized Musk’s unhelpful efforts at rescuing twelve kids stuck in a cave in Thailand, Musk jokingly called him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.43 When Musk was taken to trial, he lashed out at the press. After winning the case, he fired his public relations firm.44 He was already breaking up with the legacy media and edging closer to the internet of trolls.45 Social networks were his message machines and, as he had shown, could be money machines too."

"One of the best diagnoses of the shift came from an unlikely source: Jackson Palmer, an inventor of Dogecoin. “In this system of griftonomics, hypercapitalism, rentier capitalism,” he told an interviewer in May 2022, “increasingly people are doing nothing but making money off doing nothing.” As for Musk, Palmer added, he “was and always will be a grifter but the world loves grifters. They love the idea that they may also be a billionaire one day, and that’s the dream he’s selling.”66" Chapter 6: Cybernetic Collectives

"But social media had a limitation. If Twitter made us into cyborgs, it did so in a primitive way. The bottleneck, Musk believed, was the interface. Bandwidth was throttled by ten clumsy fingers, tapping on a keyboard. “The communication rate between you and the cybernetic extension of yourself is slow,” Musk warned. It’s “like a tiny straw . . . we need to make that tiny straw like a giant river.”20 Neuralink promised to vastly increase the bandwidth between digital and biological systems. One of Musk’s favorite films is Ghost in the Shell, an anime from 1995 set in 2029. It features characters with cyborg hands that can type not only individual letters but chords—thus massively increasing the speed of data entry. This was something like how Musk hoped Neuralink would work. And such a breakthrough would, in turn, reduce the risk of a superintelligent AI killing us all by facilitating our unification with the machine. If one goal of Neuralink was “solving a bunch of brain-related diseases,” Musk said, the other was “the mitigation of the existential threat of AI.”21" Chapter 7: Godwin’s Engine

"This raised the prospect of a woke evil dictator—or, as he put it in a conversation with Joe Rogan, a “super oppressive woke nanny AI that is omnipotent,” and which might “execute you if you misgender someone.”42 Musk’" Chapter 8: State X

"An analysis of tens of thousands of tweets by Bloomberg found that Musk had become “X’s biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracies.” In 2024, he tweeted over 1,300 times about immigration and voter fraud, receiving about 10 billion views in total.68 An analysis run by the Economist found that, by 2024, Musk was posting about immigration almost twice as often as his second-favorite topic, free speech.69"

"Marko Elez, a member of DOGE who was given write access to federal payment systems, put this pithily when he posted that 99 percent of Indians on temporary work visas “will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys.”70"

"Asimov was interested in how history moves from one epoch to the next. (Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire served as his initial inspiration.2) In Foundation, he presents a model of historical motion where eras do not follow one another in an orderly sequence, like a line of railroad cars. Rather, the seeds of the new era germinate inside the preceding one. The Foundation is created in the first Empire to serve as a nucleus for the second. There is a similar story to be told about the emergence of Muskism over the past half-century. It arose from specific historical conditions while pointing beyond them toward something new." Chapter 1: Fortress Futurism