So tired of "gen" in AI/computation/etc.

Hoping for new horizons of degen in 2026.. full-stack permadeath.. crypto-erasing.. stunlock design patterns.. fractal death drive..

full-stack permadeath -- one and done. you babies.

crypto-erasing -- asset forfeiture, guaranteed. like when the K Foundation burned a million quid.

stunlock design patterns -- for (int i = 1; i > 0; i++) { /*the fun begins here*/ }

fractal death drive -- the compulsion to repeat, at all levels of scale.

inverse Nyquist -- always set sample rates to less than half of audible frequencies.

actually, fuck it, 1-bit compression for everything -- that email you sent this morning? on/off. the King James Bible? on/off. all of Wikipedia? on/off.

SAaaS (Solar Anus as a service) -- convert the cloud to run on The Amnesic Incognito Live System.

hyper-GEN -- greygrey googoo.

one-time-pad alphabets -- `sudo kill -9 -1` but for Ferdinand de Saussure.

let's get ycombinator going on some of these ideas!!

Recently I've been revisiting the cinema of cuckoldry. You know, those films where a roving Lothario colludes with a married woman to cuck-n-kill her husband before getting whacked himself. There's Double Indemnity (1944), of course, and The Postman Always Rings Twice (both 1946 and 1981 versions). There's the peerless Body Heat (1981), where the woman wins in the end. There's Framed (1947), albeit with the essential coordinates slightly tweaked. Something about the mid '40s and the early '80s synched well with the logic of the cuck.

Forty years on, we're well into another cuck wave. I'm not thinking cinema so much as subjectivity and perhaps even society as a whole. Who are today's cucks exactly? I will refrain from the typical alt-right potshots: soy libs are cucks; wife guys are cucks; watching mainstream media is cucked; et cetera. (Spelling out etc. is extremely cucked, btw.)

Still, it helps to be specific. Those people who go jogging while making hands-free phone calls with a Bluetooth earpiece, those people are cucks. The cucks are the 100k follower Twitter accounts. The cucks are the Opinion writers in the Washington Post. The cucks are the military personnel who voted for Trump (three times). But, interestingly, Trump is also a first-class cuck, perhaps for different reasons. A proper cuck would be Kanye saying flattering things about Adolf Hitler. More cucked is Elon striking a Nazi pose several months later. And even more cucked are those downstream from Elon, his followers and enablers. The cybercucks bought Cybertrucks. We could go on and on through this pitiful roster. In fact, did you know that Charles Fourier once wrote a treatise defining 72 different types of cuckold? Continue reading →

We do not yet know what a computer can't do. Indeed, for nearly one hundred years, the computer has been defined capaciously, as a machine that can do the work of any other machine provided it can be defined logically (Alan Turing). Adopting François Laruelle's parlance, Turing's definition could be renamed the Principle of Sufficient Computation; the definition ensures that the computer can actuate any and all events, provided they are formulated as ideas.

The Principle of Sufficient Computation thus reveals a series of characteristics common in computing:

(1) The centrality of action or practice, understood as a series of commands that may be executed in order to alter the states of a system.
(2) The linking of idea to action, wherein if something can be thought it can be executed, and if something has been executed it was, perforce, previously thought.
(3) Practical omniscience, where knowledge swells to the very limits of knowability, even as those limits have been incontrovertibly demonstrated using logical proof.
(4) A system of judgment based not in morality or politics but in mimesis. Computers thus parrot the old question from the Poetics of Aristotle: Is this copy a well-crafted copy?

So we do not yet know what a computer can't do, mostly because the computer has been doing so much for so long.

And, still, indicators show a variety of alternatives, varieties of computation that reside not so much before or after mainstream computing, but along side it. The varieties of computation would include digital computing (the paradigmatic implementation of the Principle of Sufficient Computation), analog computing (formerly dominant, but today largely overshadowed), dialectical computing (unimaginable using today's chips and software), and non-standard or artificial computing.

Artificial computation was discovered by Laruelle, even as artificial computers have not yet been invented, similar to the discovery of Shor's algorithm prior to any machine capable of implementing it. Synonyms for artificial computation include: non-computation, non-standard computation, compu-fiction, and computer fiction.

Artificial computation is defined, axiomatically, as the withdrawal from the Principle of Sufficient Computation, and hence in terms of:

(1) The preemption of all commands and the neutering of the executable, in favor of pure process as a phenomenon immanent to itself.
(2) The delinking of idea and action as to be absolutely un-exchangeable with each other.
(3) Knowledge as radically finite, existing not as the total aggregation of ever-widening claims about the world, but as a series of axioms in the generic real.
(4) A non-Aristotelian technology of immanence, where technology is not understood in terms of craft or mimesis (whether effective or defective).

Artificial computation is thus not post-computational, but rather, somehow, along side it, as a science "liberated from...the neurosciences or cybernetics" (Laruelle). In this sense artificial computation enacts a generic form of thinking, which, ironically, has thus far remained unthinkable by that overweening discipline of philosophy.

I'm pleased to announce a new book due out next month. This is a collaboration with some scholars I respect a great deal: Beatrice Fazi, who wrote the first chapter, and Matthew Handelman & Leif Weatherby, who co-wrote the final chapter. I contributed the middle chapter, and we all wrote the introduction together.

Save 30% on preorders:
In the Americas: Use code MN93310 at z.umn.edu/20197
Rest of world: Use code MNMNGF25 at z.umn.edu/m20197

My friend Eivind Røssaak wrote a book about Cory Arcangel, and I was honored to contribute a short preface. NYC friends, please join the three of us at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 in Long Island City on Saturday, November 15 at 4pm for a book talk.

The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice
Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Saturday, Nov. 15, 4-5:30pm

University administration

The antihumanism-to-computationalism pipeline

Paul Thomas Anderson

.epub

The Turing Test

Topology

Hamlet

Saying "rest in power"

Journalism

Misspelling tl;dr. No, it's not TL;DR or tldr; or tl:dr. Yes, there are reasons.

Digital scholars who can't code are you kidding me

History not repeating but sometimes rhyming

Interdisciplinarity

Benjamin Bratton

Group chat

Gabriel Bortzmeyer recently interviewed me for the French journal Les Temps qui restent #6.

In the previous issue (#5), I also have an essay titled "Du bon infini," translated by the talented Pierre Schwarzer. Also available in English.

I am happy to be included in Informatics of Domination, just recently published. Each contributor's task was to comment on a pair of terms from Donna Haraway's famous informatics of domination chart from 1985. Each contributor could also opt to propose a third term. I wrote on Haraway's two terms perfection and optimization, adding a third term, absolution. Thanks to Zach Blas, Melody Jue, and Jennifer Rhee for putting the volume together.

Perfection, optimization, and absolution are all terms that originate in moral and metaphysical discourse. Something may realize itself, it may be guided or adjusted, and it will eventually unloosen and dissolve. Perfection refers to something having been fully accomplished, to something in a state of completion. From a Latin root verb meaning “to make,” perfection entails a process of production. To perfect something is to intervene positively in its development, to push it in a particular direction, to craft it and finish it and make it shine. Perfection connotes maturity, development, flawlessness, purity, completion. In this sense, perfection will always have a target in its sights, the target of the ideal form. The perfect soul, or the perfect body, or the perfect society—all these things must be built and polished and pushed toward whatever ideal has been determined (the ideal soul, the ideal body, the ideal society). A metaphysical logic is particularly legible here; the developmental goal or end is the thing that most characterizes perfection, over and above the particular quality of the goal.

Similarly, optimization refers to the most favorable state. The word is derived from a root meaning “best.” Yet optimization is more sober and pragmatic than perfection. Universals matter less here; identities are not determined in absolute terms, but rather provisionally, nominally. Ignoring thorny questions about essence or purity, optimization means playing the cards as they lay, making the best use of one’s predicament, whatever it may be. If perfection is theological in spirit, always aspiring to some higher end, optimization tends to be more stubbornly secular and mundane. The best is not eternal, or essential, and certainly not given by God, even if kings and elites try to claim divine authority. Rather, the optimal is simply one arrangement among others. The optimal is the most efficient organization, the most pleasing assemblage, or the most suitable configuration. Continue reading →

(I started researching the material below in 2018 and had mostly given up for lack of success in confirming the historical sources. Yet considering the times we live in, it seems relevant and necessary to pass along these fragments and unfinished investigations in the hopes that someone else might undertake a proper study of Vincent Hollier, who by all accounts was an interesting fellow and an important pioneer. I was able to make email contact briefly with Hollier in early summer 2020, yet he didn't respond in depth to my interview queries and I decided not to pester him further. Hollier passed away last month at the age of 77.)

First, the basic coordinates. Anthony Wilden published a book in 1972 called System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. A lost gem that few people read anymore, System and Structure is an unclassifiable cocktail of cybernetics and continental theory that contains one of the first significant philosophical reflections on the digital and the analog.* Wilden's book would go on to influence another key text in this discourse, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. In fact I first learned of Wilden's book by reading Sedgwick and Frank's essay.

Now the important part: Inserted as an appendix between chapters seven and eight of System and Structure is a six-page graphical essay by one Vincent Hollier titled "Appendix II: Analog and Digital" (196-201). Hollier's appendix is significant because it is one of the earliest instances of Digital Studies composed by an African American.

My colleague Charlton McIlwain has written on the history of African Americans and computing in his book Black Software, extending that history earlier than one might expect, while also undoing the notion that Black Americans were mostly non-participants in computer history. Perhaps the story of Vincent Hollier might add another page to that history. Is Hollier's the first work of Black Digital Studies? I'm no historian. And certainly the quest for origins is a fruitless endeavor, if not also politically suspect. Regardless, Hollier's graphical essay is doubtless an important early contribution from an era with a relative paucity of archival sources. Continue reading →

Happy to see Uncomputable translated into Chinese, just recently published by Nanjing University Press. The book is now available in Chinese, Italian, and Korean translations.