Aesthetic Materialism

  It will probably cause me to lose friends all across the political spectrum when I say that the problem with Lenin was that he was too moral, but that is indeed my position. Perhaps the chief innovation that Karl Marx brought to the socialist and communist movements was that Marx presented a non-moral critique of the capitalist system.  By this, I do not mean to imply that Marx was personally either immoral or amoral, but simply that his economic theory was not an argument based in morality - just as a chemist, when analyzing a chemical compound, does not present moralistic reasons why a molecule should be composed of such-and-such elements.  There had been many socialists and communists before Marx came along, and there had been many economists who analyzed the capitalist system, often in quite critical ways, pointing out, for instance, the massive inequalities between classes that capitalism produced: see, for example, William Thompson, John Bray, John Francis Bray,...

  Becoming David Brent   Slavoj Zizek once observed: “A typical boss no longer wants to be a boss. Imagine these postmodern companies, like some digital programming company or some creative agency: the boss comes in jeans, embraces you with all vulgarities - 'Did you have a good fuck last night?' or whatever – but then – fuck you! - he remains a boss. He nonetheless gives orders. But the social game is, now you have to pretend that we are friends and so on. In these relations, the first step to liberation is to force him to really behave like a boss: to tell him, 'No! Fuck you! No comradeship. Treat me as a boss. Give me explicit orders,' and so on.” He's right, of course, but what he passes over here is the pathos of the boss in the postmodern age. It is truly a Hegelian drama of the struggle for (mis)recognition. The Office began as a British TV show, on BBC2, in 2001. It only lasted 2 seasons, each of which were just 6 episodes long – plus a 2 part Chri...

    Many years ago, in a booze-fueled conversation with my friend Dan Pontillo, I made a joke. I said (I'm paraphrasing; it was probably a lot more sloppy and incoherent the first time around):  When you look through the archeological record, you'll find, for instance, arrowheads that were made many centuries apart that look so similar to a layperson that it takes a specialist to identify which one was made first. This is the pace of technological change that human beings can handle - psychologically, socially, legally, politically.  The only way I see the current predicament ending well is if an ASI - an artificial superintelligence - takes over the world, and then slows down the pace of technological change to a rate that humans can handle. I call it ASIAD: Artificial Super-Intelligence-Assisted Deceleration. It's becoming less of a joke. 

  Jill: Imagine a number line. Bill: Okay.  Jill: So, at one point, there's zero, and then, what's to the right of it? Bill: 1, 2, 3, and on to infinity. Jill: What about to the left of it? Bill: -1, -2, -3, and so on. Jill: Are there any other numbers? Bill: What do you mean? Jill: Like, 1/2, say. Bill: Sure. Jill: Where's that? Bill: Halfway between 0 and 1. Jill: And what about 0.9?  Is it there? Bill: Yes, just before the 1. Jill: And  π ?  Bill: That's a little bit beyond 3. Jill: Okay, great.  How does adding work here? Bill: The same way it works elsewhere, I suspect. Jill: Like, say I said to you, add 3+4.  How would that work? Bill: It would be 7. Jill: But, I mean, on your number line, how would it work?  You've got 2 points, each of them to the right of the zero, one at 3, and one at 4.  They're 1 apart from each other.  What do you do with them? Bill: Well, you start at 3, and then you count 4 steps to the right: 4, 5, 6, 7. ...