I’m sorry to inform you but I’ve been thinking a bit more lately.
The issue is that I absolutely detest the way that I write when I feel like I have something to say. I feel like often people first become good at speaking or writing, and the unfortunate thing is that it takes them a long time to come up with something worthwhile to say. Of course, I feel like this because I don’t see the swath of raving schizos who have unlocked the truth of the universe and are unable to convey it’s extralinguistic force with their current writing skills. And in all likelihood I have nothing to say and no words with which to say it.
In any case, I’ve been thinking in particular about zero feedback. In cybernetics systems are classified as negative or postive feedback (cybernegative, cyberpositive). But in math, there is a third sign, zero, which behaves a bit differently from 1 and -1. I feel like zero feedback is a bit undertheorized because it seems to make for very boring control systems. However, I find that cybernegative systems are a bit limiting, and cyberpositive systems are a bit judgmental, but that cybernetics maybe has not fully run out of steam, and moderation appears to be a virtue.
A precursor to this feeling is a worry that the left maybe has a bit of a limited imagination at the moment. It’s fun to talk about chile and the people’s republic of walmart, it can feel subversive to tap into the retrofuturistic semiotic systems (lord knows I do it also…) but really? Must our future be redwashing cybernegative neoliberal command structures by better redistributing the treats?
Another is that AI is this massive thing we have to contend with. Maybe it’s the exact same as it always was, nothing ever happens, before large language models, scrolling was communion with planetary computation, before that, television etc… Maybe. But it seems to me that the network is getting bigger and the actor is getting smaller. When I engage with social media, the session is mediated by an algorithm but the interaction is mediated by identities, whereas with AI, there’s a lot more computation happening, and a lot less thought goes into it. And if you think about older forms of media, I think that the network is just a lot smaller, compared to the actors involved.
This relative increase in the scale of network computation alongside the relative decrease in the scale of actor consciousness I think is supported by a decentralization of control mechanisms. I think that it is useful to turn around and look at how capital is really this cyberpositive circuit (I didn’t yet read much land, I might be oversimplifying), but I think that on the other side of any positive feedback, there has to be some amount of negative feedback which is distributed that balances the system out. This is just what makes sense to me mathematically. I am biased. I want the answer to be zero feedback, because when you’re jewish, it’s comforting if there’s no god.
As capital valorizes through macro-positive feedback, at the exact same time it has to create micro-negative feedback mechanisms of price which allow for its continued valorization. The more it grows, the smaller they have to be to allow it to metabolize on entropy: the accessing of temporal-deposits.
So this is the same process that I see at play in AI and media.
Having your consciousness harvested by invisible networks in service of perpetual growth doesn’t exactly feel good, in my opinion, whether or not I’m provided a pencil with a snazzy eraser in exchange.
The other side of things is aligning yourself with cyberpositive feedback. Voluntary surrender, falling in love, seeking out slopes and getting on one. I can’t exactly take issue with various accelerationism because they are all so sexy, sweet fizzy poisons. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. Perhaps. But it seems to me that accelerationism is less love than lust, and it’s post-nut clarity appears tragic. Instead of allowing for an amor fati, it exhibits an eternally frustrated libido fati.
The structure of accelerationism is millenarianism. Again - god every week nick land this nick land that, I need to just set aside some time, at least this morning I read the introduction to Thirst for Annihilation, you can see it in mu first paragraph… Again I don’t know enough about Land to have an appropriate response, but I can say about Amy Ireland and Maya B Kronic that they see in millenarian edging the plateaus that are opposed to the orgasmic climax that is the object of A Thousand Plateaus. Possibly. I just see it that although I guess there could be a truly immanent accelerationism, climax is still basically the goal of edging, to put it really crudely. If I’m an effective accelerationist, I think that this accelerationist virus, although from an exterior position the purpose of the system is what it does and thus, ultimately is driven by a feeling that at some point in the future, there’s gonna be orgiastic rapture, even if it’s eternally deferred. For this reason, I don’t exactly see it as particularly liberatory I guess.
That might not be so satisfying a response as the first one, idk. As I was trying to say last week, you’re always being driven by some positive feedback ideology, and of course, you’re always being maintained by negative feedback mechanisms telling you to eat and not starve to death. So zero feedback at it’s face feels like a pretty stupid idea.
Well first, it feels the most honest. You don’t recieve feedback from god if your morals are good or not. Any naturalism here fails, I think. You can view hunger as a bad thing and that you feel it so that you will not starve, but that presupposes that starving is a bad thing. & you can say that which presupposes that death is a bad thing, presupposing that extinction is a bad thing, etc… So, there is zero feedback from god about morality or meaning. And precisely this lack of feedback is what inspires us to create religion. An interesting passage in Land’s intro to Thirst For Annihilation was that beggars become religious because it is never in the interest of anyone to respond to them, so they “inherit the tradition of unanswered cries encrypted in monastic cells.”
There are different kinds of zero feedback. First, you can destroy the sensors, the processors, or the motors. I think without senses, you have religiosity. blind judgment from the heavens, blind wanderers in the desert. I think without reason, you might have stoicism. It’s feeling without allowing it to affect your judgment. And I think without action, I think you have something like bartleby the scrivener.
IDK if I have all too much more to say at this point in time. This is just the beginnings of this concept that may or may not bear more fruit.
This past week I created my first atproto record through OAuth. There are still some things to figure out with it but I think soon in addition to profiles, channels and messages should also work on xcvr. (this week). After that, I think that I need to figure out how to create records with a normal password, and then I will create the signet mechanism. Once signets work, I just need to hook it up to the jetstream or firehose & then atproto will enter the hyper-real-time.
rotpolitics now!
-rachel