I’ve been trying to use twitter less. As this state’s on-again, off-again quasi-lockdowns slowly lumber through their eternal returns, boredom has translated into days spent simply scrolling, refreshing, hour after hour, day after day. It’s a cliched thing to say at this point, but my attention span is in shambles—a recent read-through of Faulkner’s As I […]
Read More Turning On the Eternal Network…what characterizes these spaces is that their nature cannot be explained in a simply spatial way. They imply non-localizable relations. These are direct presentations of time—Deleuze, Cinema II. I’ve recently been replaying the now well-known adventure game Kentucky Route Zero in preparation for the recently-released final act (for those unfamiliar, the various acts of the game’s stories have […]
Read More Kentucky Degree ZeroThere was an interesting twitter exchange between Nicolas Villarreal, Vole, and myself yesterday on the question of the New Class. Villarreal opened with a comment that I think is the hinge-point of the entire debate: Seems that the debate over whether the "new class" is actually a class hinges on whether human capital/intellectual labor is […]
Read More New Class questionsThe plot of the third season of HBO’s Westworld takes an unexpected leap: in moving from the titular park to the external world, what is found is not the anarchic capitalism of the cyberpunk genre that so influenced it, but an earth held under the sway of an invisible regime of near-total planning and administration. Not […]
Read More The Haze of PosthistoryThe past couple of nights I’ve stayed up way too late puzzling over the best ways to calculate the organic composition of capital — and, as a necessary extension, untangling the relationship between the organic composition (OCC) and its two ‘components’, the technical composition of capital (TCC) and the value composition of capital (VCC). This […]
Read More Note on the Organic Composition of CapitalAn interesting convergence of two sets of writings on populism and technocracy drifted across the tl yesterday: the latest issue of American Affairs, dedicated to the ongoing evaporation of laissez-faire’s hegemonic status in American thought, and a paper on the politics of Italy’s Five Star Movement (5MS) and Spain’s Podemos as being “techno-populist” in orientation. The […]
Read More Technocracy and PopulismWhile… productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. —Engels, preface to the 1886 English edition of Capital Vol. 1 Change and Progress Theories of ‘accelerating change’ are mostly commonly associated with a particular strain of techno-utopian thought, concentrated primarily on the libertarian—and perhaps at this point, postlibertarian—side […]
Read More Marx on Geometric Change (1. The Rate of Profit)
Reciprocal Contradiction 