crinoline bear

0.0

If the leading conditions of complex societies are systems, infrastructures and networks rather than individual human agents, human experience loses its primacy as do the semantics and politics based on it. Correspondingly, if the present has been the primary category of human experience thanks to biological sentience, this basis for the understanding of time now loses its priority in favor of what we could call a timecomplex.

-Suhail Malik

more and more people, misfortunate enough to be caught up in the discussion of land’s work have wondered WTF is up with this time shit? is this at all rigorous? why does it feel just like fuckin tarot? why when we are clearly approaching a realm of conversation about techno socialism and the materialist potentials of contemporary technocapitalist power/production arrangement do we suddenly veer into straight faced claims about the agency of the future, of the future (or capital, or other nonhuman entities) as historical subjects on the level of the productive class?? and what does all of this have to do with human agency? what is the meaning of all of this ‘mysticism’ that keeps sneaking in?? (the hell crypt wtf?)

that is what i’m going to try and write my way through here loosely.

at some point in my past engagements with this sphere of thought i kind of absorbed and accepted this time fuckery as workable and don’t think i have entirely put into coherent thought what precisely this time fuckery consists of, what claims are being made about time, by whom, and to what implicationse/effect…So, as to just casually tap my foot along with a kind of chronospirophilia, I am going to try to trace my thought back via downloads and other memories. t is maybe strange to state this so explicitly and is probably implied heavily by the fact that this text exists. not used to writing! hello is this thing on testing testing. what is my voice? anyway that’s me here, welcome to the show, anyway lets loop it back.

i find it hard to give a compelling or useful account of the future’s agency while staying within strict newtonian causal logic, unfortunately almost of necessity. if i am to just like close my eyes and start riffing about it many things leap to mind.

eternal recurrence. feedback loops. investments. promises. codes of honor. models. forecasts. rumors. legends.

but i think this can all be waved away potentially as either forms of planning or mysticism. kind of recapitulating the free will vs determinism question. insofar as that becomes the lurking question (Free will or determinism? Human agency or nah?) that drives the discussion, the human security system has leaked into the convo and re-routed it into safe territory, away from research & development. and crucially the stakes of the convo are weighed heavily on a centering of human agency.

as researchers into postcapitalisms, technosocialist & popular modernism, and cybernetic cultures, we are repeatedly reminded of the increasing and immense complexity of the technological situation we find ourselves enmeshed within. the question of human agency is up for grabs(/on the cutting board), and to philosophically excavate the contentious virtual space of Human Agency as a historical force writ large requires a perpetual exhausting of and reckoning with that comparatively minuscule unit of human agency that one pilots as a subject. sucks that my brain is so though effectively e-uthanized and hung twitching, spider-webbed.

speculative realism jumps in at this moment, mostly just curious as to see what it will find, and takes our recognition of increased complexity and problematized agency as a license to speculate. with this license, we are able to devalue/deprioritize the free will/determinism cycle of discussion, because it is simply to periphery to some of the core. things that we want to try and wrap our heads around.

so i guess - the impulse towards speculation is justifiable largely as an attempted response to one’s realization of humanity’s cybernetically decentered actually-functioning agency.

an observation about the fisherman maxim that ‘everyone is already an accelerationist’ - part of how this plays out is that many of the insights that a lot of thinking through accelerations will bring you can be seen from the other side as quite benign, intuitive facts of reality…this speaks to the all-consuming and vast nature of the thing. but like, it is quite impossible for us to imagine our subjectivities without access to internet during formative cortex times. so in a real sense we ARE ‘doing the thing without meaning to’.

what doing the reading/thinking proper, only to arrive BACK at the start at same intuition one had when beginning, is all about making use of is the directional path itself - - is to develop mechanisms of shorthand, tools of thought and frames of reference, so as to better interface with such an unwieldy thing. so its not as if something particularly shocking is being uncovered…..hmm..how can what is so obvious be so horrifying?

but - something as totally benign as the fact that i have an accumulated PDF library over the past like 7 years of hundreds of PDFs….and I can literally just ctrl+F each of them for ‘future’ or ‘time’ etc etc etc, and find so many potential starting points for thinking with…ahhh

— - - - so like what do? bc traditionally or, one instinct, would be like, fuck well i have all of this shit, all of these potential sources of research. but, i wouldn’t be able to understand any of it with competence or well enough esp because its all so complex*. so like, i should just slow down and focus on one thing?

well ya but also what about a mode where you just dive in, ctrll + f a shit load, and then you’ve got that as a body of raw material to experiment alchemically with.

sometimes you can surprise yourself with what you create. any sense in which a circumstance or emergence an seem inevitable or convergent in retrospect, always a sense that is intensified to a greater or lesser extent by co-incidence, is also perhaps a strange vertigo that our perceptual faculties quickly confront when tinkering with such basic empirical givens as our sense of chronological flow.

to succeed in the tactical absorption of landian insight it is crucial that you allow thinking with and through his writing to complexity rather than annihilate your speculative & rational abilities.

what if i just posted a bunch? this was all very rough stoned and melatonin ‘starting point’ in my brain but now seeing that i have filled up the default-sized textedit box and thinking about those fields of kpunk posts in which there are nearly daily updates….fuck it, gonna just post this before i pass out. feel the melatonin pulling.

been listening to dj rashad-double cup for most of this time.

anyway, its just a thought, y’all have a good day.

To learn more HTML/CSS, check out these tutorials!