Tome1 - Nick Land's Writings From 2011

Reignition

NICK LAND'S WRITINGS (2011-)

Tome I - Urban Future: Views from the

Decopunk Delta
Reignition
NICK LAND
LAND'S
'S WRITINGS (2011-)
Tome I - Urban F
Future:
uture: Views from the Decopunk Delta
Reignition
NICK LAND
LAND'S
'S WRITINGS (2011-)
Tome I - Urban F
Future:
uture: Views from the Decopunk Delta
Edited bbyy
Uriel Fiori
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .................................................................................................. vi
BL
BLOCK
OCK 1 - URBAN FUTURE
FUTURE..............................................................................
..............................................................................9
9
BL
BLOCK
OCK 2 - TEMPLEXITY
TEMPLEXITY..................................................................................
.................................................................................. 63
CHAPTER ONE - THE BIGGEST PICTURE...............................129
CHAPTER TWO - THE ABSTRACT FORM OF TIME ...........136
CHAPTER THREE - NARRATIVIZATIONS ...............................171
SECTION A - APOCALYPSES ..................................................................204
CHAPTER ONE - CUMMULATION OF FAILURES ...............205
CHAPTER TWO - SUSPENSION ..................................................233
CHAPTER THREE - 2012.................................................................276
CHAPTER FOUR - CASE STUDIES ..............................................289
CHAPTER FIVE - COMPILATIONS .............................................310
CHAPTER SIX - POLITICAL INSANITY......................................317
CHAPTER SEVEN - ECONOMIC COLLAPSE..........................327
vi
Table of Contents
SECTION B - ACCELERATION ...............................................................341

CHAPTER ONE - EXPONENTIALS..............................................349
CHAPTER TWO - HISTORICAL TRENDS.................................364
CHAPTER THREE - DISTRIBUTED THOUGHT .....................371
CHAPTER FOUR - IMPROVING MACHINERY......................384
CHAPTER FIVE - SOCIAL DISRUPTION...................................394
CHAPTER SIX - ANTHROPOL.......................................................400
SEQUENCE i - ON LEFT ACCELERATIONISM............................423
BL
BLOCK
OCK 3 - BIT
BITCOIN
COIN AND BL BLOCKOCKCHAIN CHAIN TECHNOL TECHNOLOGY OGY .............
.............486
486
CHAPTER ONE - BTC FACETS ......................................................487
CHAPTER TWO - BTC DEATH? ....................................................506
CHAPTER THREE - BTC POLITICS .............................................525
CHAPTER FOUR - OTHER BLOCKCHAIN
TECHNOLOGIES.................................................................................534
CHAPTER FIVE - CHINA, BITCOIN AND WORLD
ORDER ....................................................................................................544
BL
BLOCK
OCK 4 - SINGL
SINGLOSPHERE
OSPHERE .........................................................................
.........................................................................585
585
CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS ............................................................586
CHAPTER TWO - SYNTHETIC CULTURE ................................598
CHAPTER THREE - ECONOMY AND POLICY ......................622
CHAPTER FOUR - URBAN DEVELOPMENT..........................647
CHAPTER FIVE - NICK LAND'S TRIPS ......................................711
SECTION A - NEO-TRADITIONALISM...............................................782
vii
CHAPTER ONE - ARTWORKS ......................................................788
CHAPTER TWO - CONFUCIAN RESTORATION ..................810
viii
BLOCK 1 - URBAN FUTURE
BL
BLOCK
OCK 1 - URBAN FUTURE
Introducing Urban F
Future
uture
What can readers expect from this blog? Since it promises to be
oriented towards the future, it makes sense to begin with some
preliminary forecasting about itself.
Most basically and predictably, Urban Future has been
programmed by its name. Its principal topic is the intersection of
cities with the future. It aims to foster discussion about cities as
engines of the future, and about futurism as a dynamic influence on
the shape, character, and development of cities. More particularly,
it scavenges for clues, and floats speculations, about the Shanghai
of tomorrow. It anticipates a global urban future in which Shanghai
features prominently, and a coming Shanghai that expresses, both
starkly and subtly, the transformative forces of global futurism. This
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is to get quite far ahead of ourselves, which is where we shall

typically be.
For some readers, ‘futurism’ will invoke the early 20th century
avant garde cultural movement crystallized by Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto. Futurism, they might
reasonably object, has been defined and even closed by the passage
of time. Like modernism, it now belongs to the archive of concluded
history. What exists today, and in the days to come, can only be a
neo-futurism (and a neo-modernism): no less retrospective than
prospective, as much a repetition as a speculation. Such
considerations, corrections, and recollections, with all their
attendant perplexities, are extremely welcome. The time to address
them will soon come.
Since Shanghai is cross-hatched with the time-fractured indices
of historico-futuristic ambiguity, from paleo-modernism to neo-
traditionalism, the blog will have every opportunity to discuss such
things. For the moment, casual reference to the strangely-twinned
architectural icons of such time-tangles, the Park Hotel and the
Jinmao Tower – each a retro-futurist or cybergothic masterpiece –
has to substitute as a mnemonic and promissory note.
Also, in time, the obstacles to forecasting need to be thoroughly
addressed: such topics as historical catastrophism, the efficient-
market hypothesis (EMH), Karl Popper’s critique of historicism,
Knightian uncertainty (or Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns”) and
10
the Black Swan theory of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In order to get up

and running, all these complicating thoughts have been temporarily
bracketed, like cunning and ferocious beasts, but they will not remain
caged forever, or even very long.
Because there’s something irresistibly twisted about starting with
the future, the first flurry of posts will head straight into tomorrow,
with topics becoming increasingly city- and Shanghai-focused as
things progress. An initial series of interconnected posts will outline
futuristic thinking in broad terms, including preliminary sketches of
principal way-stations on the mainline techno-scientific tradition
that supports it.
Ultimately, nothing relevant to the future of Shanghai is alien to
this blog’s purpose. It will draw upon Shanghai history, geography,
and culture, traditional Chinese philosophies of time (Yijing and
Daoism), theories of modernity and urbanism, evolutionary biology,
science fiction, techno-scientific discussions of complex systems and
emergence, the economics of spontaneous order, long waves,
technological trends, robotics research and developments, models of
accelerating change, and anticipations of Technological Singularity.
Things should get continuously weirder.
Tomorrow, it begins.
March 29, 2011
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Eternal Return, and After
If occult knowledge is una

unavailable,
vailable, futurology must rely upon historical patterns. Ultimately
Ultimately,,
some variant of eextr
xtrapolation
apolation is its only resource.
The hazards of extrapolation are manifold, and frequently discussed.

A seemingly robust trend can be illusory, the shape of its curve can
be misrecognized, and coincidental processes can disrupt it. Even
more insidiously, the recognition of a trend can lead to responses
that transform or nullify it.
Yet, since governments, businesses, and individuals necessarily
act in accordance with models of the future, forecasting is an
incessant, inevitable, and often automatic feature of social existence.
Whatever the complexities of prediction, survival depends upon
future-adapted decision-making. A base-level futurism is simply
unavoidable. Radical skepticism – irrespective of its intellectual
merits — does not offer a practical alternative.
There are only four fundamental ways things can go: they can
remain the same, they can cycle, they can shrink, or they can grow.
In reality these trend-lines are usually inter-tangled. Among complex
systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved
through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components
of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.
The historical imagination of all ancient cultures was dominated
by great cycles. In the Vedic culture of India, time unfolded as regular,
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degenerative epochs (yugas) that subdivided each ‘Day of Brahma’

(4.1 billion years in length). Chinese time was shaped by the
metabolism of Imperial dynasties. “Long united, the empire must
divide. Long divided, it must unite,” begins the Romance of the Three
Kingdoms. Mesoamerican civilizations envisaged world history as a
succession of creations and destructions. In the West, Plato
described the history of the city as a great cycle, degenerating
through phases of Timocracy (or rule by the virtuous), Oligarchy,
Democracy, and Tyranny.
The ages of mankind described by Hesiod, and later Ovid, are
less obviously cyclical, as is the eschatological time inherited from
ancient Judaism by the Abrahamic faiths. In these cases too,
however, the course of history is understood as fundamentally
degenerative, and guided to the restoration of a sacred origin (as
described by Mircea Eliade in his analysis of the myth of Eternal
Return).
Even Karl Marx remains captivated by this mythic historical
pattern, in its Abrahamic variant. His epic of human social
development begins with an Edenic ‘primitive communism’ that falls
into the alienated degeneracy of class society, subdivided into a
series of ages. The eschatological culmination of history in
communist revolution thus completes a great cycle, sealed by a
moment of sacred restoration (of authentic ‘species being’). It is no
coincidence that this mytho-religious ‘big-picture’ aspect of Marxism
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has impinged far more deeply upon popular consciousness than its
intricate mathematical model of techno-economic dynamics within
‘the capitalist mode of production’, despite the fact that Marx’s
writings are overwhelmingly focused upon the latter. A great cycle
feels like home.
In modern times, the clearest example of history in the ancient,
great cycle mode, is found in the work of another German socialist
philosopher: Oswald Spengler. Modeling civilizations on the life-
cycles of organic beings, he plotted their rise and inevitable decay
through predictable phases. For the West, firmly locked into the
downside of the wave, relentless, accelerating degeneration can be
confidently anticipated. Spengler’s withering pessimism seems not
to have detracted significantly from the cultural comfort derived
from his archetypal historical scheme.
Eliade describes the myth of Eternal Return as a refuge from the
“terror of history.” Firmly rooted in familiar organic patterns and the
cycle of the seasons, it sets the basic template for traditional
cultures. By identifying what is yet to come with what has already
been timelessly commemorated, it promises the pre-adaptation of
existing social arrangements and patterns of behavior to
unencountered things, psychologically neutralizing the threat of
radically unprecedented eventualities. We have been here before,
and somehow we survived. Winter does not last forever.
It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that the conception of
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progressive historical time has been so slow to consolidate itself.

John M. Smart summarizes the conclusions reached by historian J.
D. Bury in his The Idea of Progress (1920), noting: “… the idea of
progress in the material realm was missed, amazingly, even for most
of the European Renaissance (…14th-17th century). Only by the
1650s, near the end of this cultural explosion, did the idea of an
unstoppable force of progress finally begin to emerge as a possibility
to the average literate mind.” The idea of progress, as continuous,
innovative growth, is unique to modernity, and provides its defining
cultural characteristic.
Moderns found themselves, for the first time, cast outside the
cosmic nursery of Eternal Return. A strange new world awaited
them.
March 31, 2011
Be
Beyyond Urbanization
‘Urbanization
‘Urbanization’’ doesn
doesn’t
’t capture vvery
ery much of what cities are up to
(This post is basically a pre-emptive footnote. Please feel even freer

to ignore it than you usually would.)
The principal topic of Urban Future is the development of cities
(with Shanghai as exemplary case). It is peculiarly frustrating,
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therefore, to find that no single term exists to describe a process that

is arguably the most important of all social phenomena, and even the
key to whatever meaning might be discoverable in human history.
One thing, at least, is clear (or should be): urban development is
not urbanization.
‘Urbanization’ is a comparatively rigorous and well-defined
demographic concept, referring to the dynamic re-distribution of
populations from non-urban to urban existence. Because it describes
the proportion of city-dwellers within a population, it can be
quantified by a percentage, which sets a strict mathematical limit
to the process (asymptotic to 100% urbanized). When plotted
historically, the approach to this limit follows a steep curve, echoing
the (open-ended) exponential or super-exponential trends of
modernization and industrialization.
Whilst theoretically indispensable, clear, meaningful, and
informative, the concept of urbanization is inadequate to the
phenomenon of urban development. Cities are essentially
concentrational, or intensive. They are defined by social density,
uneven distribution, or demographic negative entropy. Urbanization
describes only a part of this.
Within the entire demographic system, urbanization provides a
measure of the urban fraction (based on an at least semi-arbitrary
definition of a city, by size and by boundary). It says nothing about the
pattern of cities: how numerous they are, how they differ in relative
16
scale, how fast larger cities grow compared to smaller ones, or in

general whether the urbanized population is becoming more or less
homogeneously distributed between cities. In fact, it tells us nothing
at all about the distribution of the urbanized population, except that
it is somehow clumped into ‘city-scale’ agglomerations.
Once ‘clumped’ – or drawn within the spatial threshold of a city-
sized cloud – a demographic particle switches binary identity, from
non-urbanized to urbanized. Registered as a city-dweller, there is
no more to be said about it. Yet the city is itself a distribution, of
variable density, or heterogeneous concentration. Within each city,
urban intensity can rise or fall, irrespective of the overall level of
urbanization. The limit of urbanization sets no restriction upon
trends to urban intensification, as exemplified by high-rise
architecture.
Urbanization is a proportional concept, indifferent to absolute
demographic scale. In contrast, measuring intensity, or negative
entropy, provides fine-grained information that rises with the size of
the system considered (since the entropy measure is a logarithmic
function of system scale, defined by the totality of possible
distributions, which rises exponentially with population). Whilst
social scientific or demographic phenomena are highly intractable
to quantitative intensive analysis, their reality is nevertheless
intensive, which is to say: determined by distributive variation of
absolute magnitudes. The measure of urbanization is not affected
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by the doubling of a city’s population unless the overall population

grows at a lower rate. Urban intensity, in contrast, is highly sensitive
to absolute demographic fluctuation (and not uncommonly hyper-
sensitive).
Intensities are characterized by transition thresholds. As they rise
and fall, they cross ‘singularities’ or ‘phase transitions’ that mark a
change in nature. A small change in intensive magnitude can trigger
a catastrophic change in system behavior, with the emergence of
previously undisclosed properties. When measuring urbanization, a
city is a city is a city. As an intensive concentration, however, a city
is an essentially variable real individual, passing through thresholds
as it grows, innovating unprecedented behaviors, and thus becoming
something ‘qualitatively’ new.
Whilst summoning the courage to float an adequate neologism
(‘urbanomy’?), Urban Future will stumble onwards with awkward
compounds such as ‘urban development’, ‘urban intensification’,
‘urban condensation’, or whatever seems least painful at the time
(whilst meaning, in each case, what ‘urbanization’ would describe if
urbanists had managed to grab it before the demographers did).
Yet, despite this linguistic obstacle, a surprising amount can be
said about the urban process in general. Making a start on that
comes next.
April 15, 2011
18
An Introduction to Urbanom
Urbanomyy
However irritating neologisms can be, they are sometimes near-
compulsory. When a compact, comparatively simple thought is
forced to route itself, repeatedly, through crudely-stitched
terminological tangles, the missing adequate word fosters the
linguistic equivalent of a nagging hunger. Word invention becomes a
simple prerequisite of smooth cognitive function.
Urban development of the individual city, or the typical process
of urban maturation, is a quite basic but linguistically underserved
concept of exactly this kind. The absence is aggravated by the
presence of another word — one that sounds superficially suitable,
but which actually designates an entirely separate idea.
When a city grows, it does not ‘urbanize’ (only a wider social
system can do that). Urbanization applies to a society that becomes
proportionately more urban, as rural people move into cities, but
when an individual city develops – and in fact individuates – it
undergoes urbanomy (on the model of ‘teleonomy’). Urbanomy –
urban self-organization — is far more critical to this blog than
urbanization is. Coining the term is a declaration of theoretical
commitment to urban individuation as a structured – and thus
cognitively-tractable – social, historical, and ultimately cosmic
reality.
The foundations of urbanomic understanding were laid down by
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Jane Jacobs in her book The Economy of Cities. In this work she
outlines a simple and powerful theory of urban self-organization,
driven by a spontaneous economic process of import replacement.
Cities develop by autonomization, or introversion, which occurs as
they learn from trade, progressively transforming an ever-greater
proportion of their commercial flows into endogenous circuits. This
(urbanomic) tendency need not isolate cities from the world, but it
necessarily converts stable dependency into dynamic interaction,
driving continuous commercial modification. The logistical and
informational advantages of local urban producers – minimizing
transport costs and maximizing feedback intensity – tend to
encourage the internalization of productive activity, teaching the
city what it can do for itself, and consolidating its singular identity (as
a real individual). The growth, complexification, and individuation of
the city are integral to a single urbanomic process.
It is urbanomy that produces cities, with urbanization – typically
– occurring as a secondary phenomenon. Functional cities are not
demographic dumping grounds, but endogenously maturing entities
which draw things (including people) into themselves.
Among the many side-consequences running off Jacobs’ thesis,
one in particular is so historically-suggestive that it merits a short
digression. Since cities are not nutritionally self-supporting, it has
been natural to assume that they presuppose settled agriculture,
which they relate to in a way that is – at least calorically – parasitic.
20
Jacobs turns this assumption upside down, proposing instead that

the commercialization of food production which accompanied the
emergence of cities was itself a crucial motor of agriculturalization.
By providing concentrated, comparatively large-scale markets, cities
made the production of substantial food-surpluses economically
rational for the first time, automatically supporting their own further
development in interactive lock-step with the Neolithic revolution.
The basic urbanomic insight of greatest relevance here, however,
is more abstract. The Jacobs thesis establishes a framework for
systematically exploring the time-structure of the urban process,
conceived not solely as a (prolonged) episode in time, or history, but
also as the working of a chronogenic, or time-making social machine.
The concept which Jacobs tacitly introduces, as the guiding
principle of the urbanomic trend, is autoproduction. As it grows,
internally specializes, self-organizes, dissipates entropy, and
individuates, the city tends to an impossible limit of complete
productive autonomy. It appears as a convergent wave, shaped in the
direction of increasing order or complexity, as if by an invisible hand,
or according to an intelligent design. The pattern is exactly what
would be expected if something not yet realized was orchestrating
its self-creation. Even after 150 years of coherent evolutionary
theory, such processes – in the absence of a dominating creative
agent – appear extraordinary, and even uncanny, because they seem
to run backwards, against the current of time.
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Time as it is lived and explored is tensed. It is occupied from the

middle, which is always now, and from which the past recedes
(partially remembered, or recorded), as the future approaches
(partially anticipated, or forecast). The time-line crossing ‘now’ or the
present is asymmetric. It has an ‘arrow’.
The mainstream scientific currents which support the modern
understanding of the world describe this arrow of time in two very
different ways. Both are easily intuited and generally accepted, at
least in their broadest outlines.
Firstly, we are told that the arrow of time corresponds to an
increase of disorder. Things break, erode, age, die, and decay.
Presented with two photographs, of an intact egg and the same egg
smashed, there is no doubt about which came first. Eggs don’t
unsmash, time doesn’t reverse.
Except that (secondly) we generally anticipate progress, or
improvement. Knowledge accumulates, inventions are made,
economies are expected, normally, to grow. Even those most
resistant to modern messages – such as evolutionary ideas — work
confidently to produce order in their lives, when tidying, sorting,
assembling, organizing, or composing. Eggs might not unsmash, but
there are eggs, and they’ve been made somehow (there weren’t any
500 million years ago).
So how do our time intuitions align with the arrow of time? Which
way is forward, and which is back? Between increasing and
22
decreasing order, which seems normal and which strange?

These questions are complicated by the fact that we mentally
process the world in two very different ways, dividing it as neatly as
possible between people and things, agency and inertia, the animate
and the inanimate, teleology and mechanism. This very basic dual
system of perceptual classification – almost certainly supported by
deeply archaic neurological structures — corresponds to a twin
cognitive apparatus of profound expectation. Categorical violations
are viscerally unsettling.
When people – or even ‘lower’ animals — behave as things, they
primitively evoke the dread of morbidity, mortality, and more radical
varieties of cosmic wrongness, partially captured by the figure of the
zombie. The intermediate zone, of the ‘living dead’, can be entered
from either direction, triggering an archaic revulsion from
monstrosity – the most fundamental of all things that should not
be. Horror fiction dwells almost entirely in this twilight world of
categorical slippage.
When order emerges spontaneously among things, it seems like
magic (in the ancient, soul-seizing sense), and panicked spectators
reflexively grasp for the hidden agents of ‘animistic’ or religious
interpretation, compelled by categorical intuitions far older than the
human species. Calm apprehension of such ‘teleonomies’ is
grounded, perhaps invariably, in an attenuation or vagueness of
distinct perception. Were a biologist to truly perceive the
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evolutionary process, its integral, primordial horror would be

ineluctable. Urbanomy, likewise, belongs to the realm of real
monstrosity. That is one reason why cities cannot readily be seen for
what they are.
Spontaneous animation, horror, and time-reversal are
inextricably knotted together at the root of their apprehension. The
human nervous-system cannot register a deeper wrong than an
inversion of time, as demonstrated by a thing that comes to life.
Cities, eventually, will scare us. In doing so, they will draw us out
beyond what has been – to date — the horizon of intelligible time.
July 29, 2013
Ev
Event
ent Horizon
People gr
graavitate to cities, but what are cities gr
graavitating into? Some str
strange
ange possibilities suggest
themselv
themselves.
es.
Cities are defined by social density. This simple but hugely

consequential insight provides the central thesis of Edward
Glaeser’s Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes us
Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier (2011), where it is
framed as both an analytical tool and a political project.
“Cities are the absence of physical space between people and
companies. They enable us to work and play together, and their
24
success depends on the demand for physical connection,” Glaeser

remarks.
High-density urban life approaches a tautology, and it is one that
Glaeser not only observes, but also celebrates. Closely-packed
people are more productive. As Alfred Marshall noted in 1920,
‘agglomeration economies’ feed a self-reinforcing process of social
compression that systematically out-competes diffuse populations
in all fields of industrial activity. In addition, urbanites are also
happier, longer-living, and their ecological footprint is smaller,
Glaeser insists, drawing upon a variety of social scientific evidence to
make his case. Whether social problems are articulated in economic,
hedonic, or environmental terms, (dense) urbanism offers the most
practical solution.
The conclusion Glaeser draws, logically enough, is that
densification should be encouraged, rather than inhibited. He
interprets sprawl as a reflection of perverse incentives, whilst
systematically contesting the policy choices that restrain the trend
to continuous urban compression. His most determined line of
argumentation is directed in favor of high-rise development, and
against the planning restrictions that keep cities stunted. A city that
is prevented from soaring will be over-expensive and under-excited,
inflexible, inefficient, dirty, backward-looking, and peripherally
sprawl- or slum-cluttered. Onwards and upwards is the way.
Urban planning has its own measure for density: the FAR (or
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Floor-to-Area Ratio), typically determined as a limit set upon

permitted concentration. An FAR of 2, for instance, allows a
developer to build a two-story building over an entire area, a four-
story building on half the area, or an eight-story building on a quarter
of the area. An FAR sets an average ceiling on urban development. It
is essentially a bureaucratic device for deliberately stunting vertical
growth.
As Glaeser shows, Mumbai’s urban development problems have
been all-but-inevitable given the quite ludicrous FAR of 1.33 that
was set for India’s commercial capital in 1964. Sprawling slum
development has been the entirely predictable outcome.
Whilst sparring with Jane Jacobs over the impact of high-rise
construction on urban life, Glaeser is ultimately in agreement on the
importance of organic development, based on spontaneous patterns
of growth. Both attribute the most ruinous urban problems to policy
errors, most obviously the attempt to channel – and in fact deform
– the urban process through arrogant bureaucratic fiat. When cities
fail to do what comes naturally, they fail, and what comes naturally,
Glaeser argues, is densification.
It would be elegant to refer to this deep trend towards social
compression, the emergence, growth, and intensification of urban
settlement, as urbanization, but we can’t do that. Even when
awkwardly named, however, it exposes a profound social and
historical reality, with striking implications, amounting almost to a
26
specifically social law of gravitation. As with physical gravity, an

understanding of the forces of social attraction support predictions,
or at least the broad outlines of futuristic anticipation, since these
forces of agglomeration and intensification manifestly shape the
future.
John M. Smart makes only passing references to cities, but his
Developmental Singularity (DS) hypothesis is especially relevant to
urban theory because it focuses upon the topic of density. He argues
that acceleration, or time-compression, is only one aspect of a
general evolutionary (more precisely, evolutionary-developmental,
or ‘evo devo’) trend that envelops space, time, energy, and mass. This
‘STEM-compression’ is identified with ascending intelligence (and
negative entropy). It reflects a deep cosmic-historical drive to the
augmentation of computational capacity that marries “evolutionary
processes that are stochastic, creative, and divergent [with]
developmental processes that produce statistically predictable,
robust, conservative, and convergent structures and trajectories.”
Smart notes that “the leading edge of structural complexity in our
universe has apparently transitioned from universally distributed
early matter, to galaxies, to replicating stars within galaxies, to solar
systems in galactic habitable zones, to life on special planets in those
zones, to higher life within the surface biomass, to cities, and soon,
to intelligent technology, which will be a vastly more local subset of
Earth’s city space.”
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Audaciously, Smart projects this trend to its limit: “Current

research (Aaronson 2006, 2008) now suggests that building future
computers based on quantum theory, one of the two great theories
of 20th century physics, will not yield exponentially, but only
quadratically growing computational capacity over today’s classical
computing. In the search for truly disruptive future computational
capacity emergence, we can therefore look to the second great
physical theory of the last century, relativity. If the DS hypothesis
is correct, what we can call relativistic computing (a black-hole-
approximating computing substrate) will be the final common
attractor for all successfully developing universal civilizations.”
Conceive the histories of cities, therefore, as the initial segments
of trajectories that curve asymptotically to infinite density, at the
ultimate event horizon of the physical universe. The beginning is
recorded fact and the end is quite literally ‘gone’, but what lies in
between, i.e. next?
April 15, 2011
Implosion
We could be on the brink of a catastrophic implosion – but that’s OK
Science fiction has tended to extroversion. In America especially,
28
where it found a natural home among an unusually future-oriented

people, the iconic SF object was indisputably the space ship,
departing the confines of Earth for untrammeled frontiers. The
future was measured by the weakening of the terrestrial gravity well.
Cyberpunk, arriving in the mid-1980s, delivered a cultural shock.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer still included some (Earth-orbital)
space activity – and even a communication from Alpha Centauri —
but its voyages now curved into the inner space of computer
systems, projected through the starless tracts of Cyberspace.
Interstellar communication bypassed biological species, and took
place between planetary artificial intelligences. The United States of
America seemed to have disappeared.
Space and time had collapsed, into the ‘cyberspace matrix’ and
the near-future. Even the abstract distances of social utopianism had
been incinerated in the processing cores of micro-electronics.
Judged by the criteria of mainstream science fiction, everything
cyberpunk touched upon was gratingly close, and still closing in. The
future had become imminent, and skin-tight.
Gibson’s cities had not kept up with his wider – or narrower –
vision. The urban spaces of his East Coast North America were still
described as ‘The Sprawl’, as if stranded in a rapidly-obsolescing state
of extension. The crushing forces of technological compression had
leapt beyond social geography, sucking all historical animation from
the decaying husks of ‘meat space’. Buildings were relics, bypassed by
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the leading edge of change.

(Gibson’s Asian city-references are, however, far more intense,
inspired by such innovations in urban compression as the Kowloon
Walled City, and Japanese ‘coffin hotels’. In addition, Urbanists
disappointed by first-wave cyberpunk have every reason to continue
on into Spook Country, where the influence of GPS-technology on
the re-animation of urban space nourishes highly fertile
speculations.)
Star cruisers and alien civilizations belong to the same science
fiction constellation, brought together by the assumption of
expansionism. Just as, in the realm of fiction, this ‘space opera’ future
collapsed into cyberpunk, in (more or less) mainstream science –
represented by SETI programs – it perished in the desert of the Fermi
Paradox. (OK, it’s true, Urban Future has a bizarrely nerdish
obsession with this topic.)
John M. Smart’s solution to the Fermi Paradox is integral to his
broader ‘Speculations on Cosmic Culture’ and emerges naturally
from compressive development. Advanced intelligences do not
expand into space, colonizing vast galactic tracts or dispersing self-
replicating robot probes in a program of exploration. Instead, they
implode, in a process of ‘transcension’ — resourcing themselves
primarily through the hyper-exponential efficiency gains of extreme
miniaturization (through micro- and nano- to femto-scale
engineering, of subatomic functional components). Such cultures or
30
civilizations, nucleated upon self-augmenting technological

intelligence, emigrate from the extensive universe in the direction of
abysmal intensity, crushing themselves to near-black-hole densities
at the edge of physical possibility. Through transcension, they
withdraw from extensive communication (whilst, perhaps, leaving
‘radio fossils’ behind, before these blink-out into the silence of
cosmic escape).
If Smart’s speculations capture the basic outlines of a density-
attracted developmental system, then cities should be expected to
follow a comparable path, characterized by an escape into
inwardness, an interior voyage, involution, or implosion.
Approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city
becomes increasingly inwardly directed, as it falls prey to the
irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic intensification, whilst the
outside world fades to irrelevant static. Things disappear into cities,
on a path of departure from the world. Their destination cannot be
described within the dimensions of the known – and, indeed,
tediously over-familiar – universe. Only in the deep exploratory
interior is innovation still occurring, but there it takes place at an
infernal, time-melting rate.
What might Smart-type urban development suggest?
(a) Devo Predictability. If urban development is neither randomly
generated by internal processes, nor arbitrarily determined by
external decisions, but rather guided predominantly by a
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developmental attractor (defined primarily by intensification), it

follows that the future of cities is at least partially autonomous in
regards to the national-political, global-economic, and cultural-
architectural influences that are often invoked as fundamentally
explanatory. Urbanism can be facilitated or frustrated, but its
principal ‘goals’ and practical development paths are, in each
individual case, internally and automatically generated. When a city
‘works’ it is not because it conforms to an external, debatable ideal,
but rather because it has found a route to cumulative intensification
that strongly projects its ‘own’, singular and intrinsic, urban
character. What a city wants is to become itself, but more — taking
itself further and faster. That alone is urban flourishing, and
understanding it is the key that unlocks the shape of any city’s future.
(b) Metropolitanism. Methodological nationalism has been
systematically over-emphasized in the social sciences (and not only
at the expense of methodological individualism). A variety of
influential urban thinkers, from Jane Jacobs to Peter Hall, have
sought to correct this bias by focusing upon the significance, and
partial autonomy, of urban economies, urban cultures, and municipal
politics to aggregate prosperity, civilization, and golden ages. They
have been right to do so. City growth is the basic socio-historical
phenomenon.
(c) Cultural Introversion. John Smart argues that an intelligence
undergoing advanced relativistic development finds the external
32
landscape increasingly uninformative and non-absorbing. The search

for cognitive stimulation draws it inwards. As urban cultures evolve,
through accelerating social complexity, they can be expected to
manifest exactly this pattern. Their internal processes, of runaway
intelligence implosion, become ever more gripping, engaging,
surprising, productive, and educational, whilst the wider cultural
landscape subsides into predictable tedium, of merely ethnographic
and historical relevance. Cultural singularity becomes increasingly
urban-futural (rather than ethno-historical), to the predictable
disgruntlement of traditional nation states. Like Gibson’s Terrestrial
Cyberspace, encountering another of its kind in orbit around Alpha
Centauri, cosmopolitan connectivity is made through inner voyage,
rather than expansionary outreach.
(d) Scale Resonance. At the most abstract level, the relation
between urbanism and microelectronics is scalar (fractal). The
coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial
brains, dominated by traffic problems (congestion), migration /
communications, zoning issues (mixed use), the engineering
potential of new materials, questions of dimensionality (3D solutions
to density constraints), entropy or heat / waste dissipation (recycling
/ reversible computation), and disease control (new viruses).
Because cities, like computers, exhibit (accelerating phylogenetic)
development within observable historical time, they provide a
realistic model of improvement for compact information-processing
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machinery, sedimented as a series of practical solutions to the

problem of relentless intensification. Brain-emulation might be
considered an important computational goal, but it is near-useless
as a developmental model. Intelligent microelectronic technologies
contribute to the open-ended process of urban problem-solving, but
they also recapitulate it at a new level.
(e) Urban Matrix. Does urban development exhibit the real
embryogenesis of artificial intelligence? Rather than the global
Internet, military Skynet, or lab-based AI program, is it the path of
the city, based on accelerating intensification (STEM compression),
that best provides the conditions for emergent super-human
computation? Perhaps the main reason for thinking so is that the
problem of the city – density management and accentuation –
already commits it to computational engineering, in advance of any
deliberately guided research. The city, by its very nature,
compresses, or intensifies, towards computronium. When the first AI
speaks, it might be in the name of the city that it identifies as its body,
although even that would be little more than a ‘radio fossil’ — a signal
announcing the brink of silence — as the path of implosion deepens,
and disappears into the alien interior.
April 29, 2011
34
Scaly Creatures
Cities are acceler

accelerators
ators and there are solid numbers to demonstr
demonstrate
ate it
Among the most memorable features of Shanghai’s 2010 World

Expo was the quintet of ‘Theme Pavilions’ designed to facilitate
exploration of the city in general (in keeping with the urban-oriented
theme of the event: ‘Better City, Better Life’). Whilst many
international participants succumbed to facile populism in their
national pavilions, these Theme Pavilions maintained an
impressively high-minded tone.
Most remarkable of all for philosophical penetration was the
Urban Being Pavilion, with its exhibition devoted to the question:
what kind of thing is a city? Infrastructural networks received
especially focused scrutiny. Pipes, cables, conduits, and transport
arteries compose intuitively identifiable systems – higher-level
wholes – that strongly indicate the existence of an individualized,
complex being. The conclusion was starkly inescapable: a city is more
than just an aggregated mass. It is a singular, coherent entity,
deserving of its proper – even personal – name, and not
unreasonably conceived as a composite ‘life-form’ (if not exactly an
‘organism’).
Such intuitions, however plausible, do not suffice in themselves to
establish the city as a rigorously-defined scientific object. “[D]espite
much historical evidence that cities are the principle engines of
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innovation and economic growth, a quantitative, predictive theory

for understanding their dynamics and organization and estimating
their future trajectory and stability remains elusive,” remark Luís M.
A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and
Geoffrey B. West, in their prelude to a 2007 paper that has done
more than any other to remedy the deficit: ‘Growth, innovation,
scaling, and the pace of life in cities‘.
In this paper, the authors identify mathematical patterns that are
at once distinctive to the urban phenomenon and generally
applicable to it. They thus isolate the object of an emerging urban
science, and outline its initial features, claiming that: “the social
organization and dynamics relating urbanization to economic
development and knowledge creation, among other social activities,
are very general and appear as nontrivial quantitative regularities
common to all cities, across urban systems.”
Noting that cities have often been analogized to biological
systems, the paper extracts the principle supporting the comparison.
“Remarkably, almost all physiological characteristics of biological
organisms scale with body mass … as a power law whose exponent
is typically a multiple of 1/4 (which generalizes to 1/(d +1) in d-
dimensions).” These relatively stable scaling relations allow
biological features, such as metabolic rates, life spans, and
maturation periods, to be anticipated with a high-level of confidence
given body mass alone. Furthermore, they conform to an elegant
36
series of theoretical expectations that draw upon nothing beyond

the abstract organizational constraints of n-dimensional space:
“Highly complex, self-sustaining structures, whether cells,

organisms, or cities, require close integration of enormous
numbers of constituent units that need efficient servicing.
To accomplish this integration, life at all scales is sustained
by optimized, space-filling, hierarchical branching networks,
which grow with the size of the organism as uniquely
specified approximately self-similar structures. Because
these networks, e.g., the vascular systems of animals and
plants, determine the rates at which energy is delivered to
functional terminal units (cells), they set the pace of
physiological processes as scaling functions of the size of the
organism. Thus, the self-similar nature of resource
distribution networks, common to all organisms, provides the
basis for a quantitative, predictive theory of biological
structure and dynamics, despite much external variation in
appearance and form.”
If cities are in certain respects meta- or super-organisms, however,

they are also the inverse. Metabolically, cities are anti-organisms.
As biological systems scale up, they slow down, at a mathematically
predictable rate. Cities, in contrast, accelerate as they grow.
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Something approximating to the fundamental law of urban reality is

thus exposed: larger is faster.
The paper quantifies its findings, based on a substantial base of
city data (with US cities over-represented), by specifying a ‘scaling
exponent’ (or ‘ß‘, beta) that defines the regular correlation between
urban scale and the factor under consideration.
A beta of one corresponds to linear correlation (of a variable to
city size). For instance, housing supply, which remains constantly
proportional to population across all urban scales, is found –
unsurprisingly – to have ß = 1.00.
A beta of less than one indicates consistent economy to scale.
Such economies are found systematically among urban resource
networks, exemplified by gasoline stations (ß = 0.77), gasoline sales
(ß = 0.79), length of electrical cables (ß = 0.87), and road surface (ß
= 0.83). The sub-linear correlation of resource costs to urban scale
makes city life increasingly efficient as metropolitan intensity soars.
A beta of greater than one indicates increasing returns to scale.
Factors exhibiting this pattern include inventiveness (e.g. ‘new
patents’ß = 1.27, ‘inventors’ ß = 1.25), wealth creation (e.g. ‘GDP’
ß = 1.15, wages ß = 1.12), but also disease (‘new AIDS cases’ ß =
1.23), and serious crimes (ß = 1.16). Urban growth is accompanied
by a super-linear rise in opportunity for social interaction, whether
productive, infectious, or malicious. More is not only better, it’s much
better (and, in some respects, worse).
38
“Our analysis suggests uniquely human social dynamics that

transcend biology and redefine metaphors of urban
‘metabolism’. Open-ended wealth and knowledge creation
require the pace of life to increase with organization size and
for individuals and institutions to adapt at a continually
accelerating rate to avoid stagnation or potential crises.
These conclusions very likely generalize to other social
organizations, such as corporations and businesses,
potentially explaining why continuous growth necessitates
an accelerating treadmill of dynamical cycles of innovation.”
Bigger city, faster life.
May 5, 2011
Edward Glaeser on T
Triumph
riumph of the City
that’s Shanghai interviews the world’s most topical urbanist
Shanghai isn
isn’t
’t one of the featured cities in yyour
our book. It’s massiv
massivee and
massiv
massively
ely high-rise. Did yyou
ou e
evver consider writing about it?
Shanghai is one of the world’s great cities, but I don’t know the
city well enough to write about it. I hope to get to know the city
better and feature Shanghai’s successes in some later work.
China is a place where cities ha havve grown incredibly quickly and
39
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there
there’s
’s been a massiv
massive
eeexxodus from the countryside to urban life.
What do yyouou think China
China’s
’s cities should focus on as the
theyy grow?
Cities, today, succeed as forges of human capital and engines of
innovation. China clearly recognizes this and is investing massively
in education. That should continue. Just as importantly, China needs
to focus on fostering more entrepreneurship by eliminating any
remaining barriers to small start-ups.
You talk about how cities should be seen as “masses of connected
humanity
humanity,,” rrather
ather than agglomer
agglomerations
ations of buildings. Do yyou
ou think this
is well understood at this point, or are too man manyy places still
attempting to “build their wa wayy back to success”?
Unfortunately, too often political leaders try to garner headlines
with a splashy new structure. The key is to focus on those
infrastructure investments that will really benefit the people in the
city.
Are yyou
ou optimistic about city planners around the world finding
the balance between P Paris
aris and Mumbai, i.e. between Haussman-
style centr
centralal planning that risks sterility and a chaotic free-for-all?
That’s the 10 trillion dollar question. I wish I could be more
optimistic, but city planning is hard and many governments are
either unable to manage chaos or too inclined to central control. This
requires not just knowledge but political strength and that’s a rare
combination.
Which cities around the world are getting it right? Which aren aren’t?
’t?
40
I believe that Singapore is the best-managed city in the world

– good schools, a superb transportation policy, and a sensible
approach to regulation. But Hong Kong is also quite impressive, and
I personally prefer it’s somewhat more chaotic style.
The west has many urban powerhouses, but few of them are
really models of perfect management. For example, I am a big fan of
Mayor Menino in Boston, but despite more than 15 years of hard
work, Boston’s schools are still struggling.
Obviously, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan are all lovely, wonderful
cities, but they are not necessarily models of good management.
You’re cautiously optimistic in yyour our book, but what worries yyou ou
most about the future of the city?
The biggest challenges are in the mega-cities of the developing
world, especially Africa. We are a very long way from providing even
the core essentially like clean water in many places.
In the US, we have huge problems of fiscal mismanagement that
need to be addressed. Moreover, there is always the possibility of
really major physical disasters – either natural or man-made.
Is there an
anyy wa
wayy around the fact that the most vibr vibrant
ant cities also
become the most e expensiv
xpensivee – or
or,, as yyou
ou sa
sayy in the book, is this simply
the price of good urban health?
The laws of supply and demand cannot be repealed. If a city is
attractive and productive, demand for its real estate will be high.
The best antidote for that is abundant supply, but it is a mistake to
41
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subsidize urban housing. The best path towards greater affordability

comes from private housing construction that is regulated only as
much as is absolutely necessary. Still, building up can be expensive
and that will always make prices in successful cities more expensive.
By functioning as engines of economic opportunity and as
refuges, cities tend to concentr
concentrate ate economic disparity
disparity.. Do yyou
ou think
a case might be made that such inequalities could be interpreted as
a symptom of urban success? Might yyou ou be subtly suggesting this in
your own work?
I am suggesting just that. National inequality can be a real
problem, but local inequality can be a sign of health. Cities don’t
typically make people poor they attract poor people. The inequality
of a city reflects the fact that it attracts rich and poor alike, and that’s
something to admire.
How can cities striv
strive
e to control inequality and aavvoid ghettos of
rich and poor? Should thetheyy e
evven be trying to?
Education is the best weapon against inequality. Cities should be
striving to make sure that the children of every parent have a chance
of being successful.
Some degree of stratification by income is inevitable, but
segregation can be quite costly because such separations mean that
isolated people lose the urban advantages of connection. There
aren’t great tools for reducing segregation, but governments should
make sure that their policies do not exacerbate segregation.
42
Geoffre
Geoffreyy WWest
est at the Santa F Fee Institute has been studying cities
as ‘‘comple
complexx systems’ and identified a number of reliable and
quantifiable patterns on this basis. Do yyou ou find this type of analysis
informativ
informative e or rele
relevant
vant to yyour
our work?
Cities are indeed complex systems.
Ev
Even
en in the modern world, with nationalism ascendant, city states
seem to be unusually successful. Do cities pro provide
vide a challenge to
dominant conceptions of large-scale political organization? How do
you rrate
ate the prospects of de devvolutionary politics, with a municipal
emphasis?
I don’t think that nation-states will be likely to surrender all that
much power, and cities can remain economically dominant but
politically weak. The path in the US has continued to be towards
more, not less, national power and I think that is probably a mistake.
In many cases – such as Mumbai – local choices would surely be
better than the choices imposed on cities by above.
Other than yyour
our own work, who do yyou ou consider to be the most
important writers on cities todatoday?
y?
I deeply admire the Columbia historian Kenneth Jackson.
June 20, 2011
43
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Our Cause
“So, what is Urban Future about, really?”
Basically this:
(That’s what mail-order capitalism seemed to threaten in the

1939. The cephalocommercial monstrosity has to have become far
more tentacular since. Image via @SlateVault.)
May 15, 2014
The Urban Factor

Project Syndicate linked to this (2011) McKinsey study of urban
44
contribution to world GDP. The top bullet-point take-away: “only

600 urban centers generate about 60 percent of global GDP.” Yet,
because cities, as nodes in a global economic network, are
distributed by a power law, any picture drawn by the top 600 urban
centers tends to strongly de-dramatize the reality.
Wikipedia has a helpful table of world cities with a variety of GDP
estimates. (The Brookings Institute figures are the most complete,
and also the most generous.) From these it can be seen that Tokyo, on
its own, accounts for almost 2% of world GDP. The world’s 10 most
productive cities — Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New
York, Osaka/Kobe, Paris, Seoul, Shanghai, and Tokyo — account for
roughly 10% of total global economic output between them. The
next thirty cities together do not quite double this figure, and from
then on, the contribution of each city added dwindles rapidly.
McKinsey estimates the economic weight of the world’s “23
megacities — with populations of 10 million or more” somewhat
more modestly, at 14% of global GDP. It expects them to contribute
no more than 10% of global growth through to 2025, while: “In
contrast, 577 middleweights — cities with populations of between
150,000 and 10 million, are seen contributing more than half of
global growth to 2025, gaining share from today’s megacities. By
2025, 13 middleweights are likely to be have become megacities,
12 of which are in emerging-markets (the exception is Chicago) and
seven in China alone.”
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UF anticipates that the combination of continued urban

agglomeration and economic concentration will tend to steepen the
distribution, but the secular shift of economic gravity from West to
East will dampen this pattern in the short-medium term. If, by mid-
century, there is not a single Chinese economic center accounting
for more than 3% of total global economic production, all our
expectations about the world will have been proven wrong.
ADDED: A mid-century prediction isn’t very audacious, but it’s
timidity is drawn from an important pattern of change. The world’s
two most productive cities, by far, are Tokyo and New York, and both
are likely to see their relative contribution to global GDP shrink
substantially over coming decades. In consequence, the near-term
shifts in the distribution of economic activity will appear as a dilution,
until a new ‘capital’ of world commerce emerges — in a process that
can be expected to take at least 20 years.
ADDED: An urbanization update from Reuters, linking to some
cleargraphics).
July 10, 2014
Urban Defense
There’s an easy solution to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ — abolish
the commons. It works in cities too.
46
Warning: such policies can produce an upsetting vibrancy deficit,

by deterring vagrants and panhandlers from participating in street
life within your urban enclave.
Liberal comment on the Neocameral City: “It was impressive in its
own way, I guess, but I was deeply distressed about the absence of
bums.”
February 22, 2015
London
Gentrification is the topic everyone is discussing, with the
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systematic pricing-out of problem populations (to provincial

demographic dump-zones) as the scandal no one in polite society
can admit to any ambivalence about. It’s unspeakable, of course,
especially since it is making the place so much nicer. An undertow
of London secessionist rumor — straight out of The Peripheral —
adds to the dark buzz. Also crucial is the “best horse in the glue-
factory” dividend from the implosion of continental Europe. Overall,
then, a vortical collapse dynamic of far more intriguing ambiguity
than expected by the civilizational exiles here at Outside in.
… And overlooking the process (at Marble Arch): the ‘She-
Guardian’ — make of her what you will.
June 26, 2015
London II
Surreptitiously recorded commentary on The Thing:
“It
It‘s started to spread from … to …”
“You see some remnants of the housing estate people around, and
they really seem as if they’re from another century…”
“Of course, the Conservative government is not going to do
anything to stop what is happening …”
“There are still islands of social housing …”
48
June 27, 2015
Par
arametrics
ametrics and Pro
Provvocation
This is from April last year (but I’ve only just found it). It’s quite
amazing how many lines intersect in it:
Both Schumacher’s and Hadid’s language propose an architecture
that’s “above” trivial moral and political hand-wringing, like worker’s
rights. Peggy Dreamer, in a recent CalArts panel, described
Schumacher’s style as “über-form,” meaning that it takes on the
aesthetic of the universal and inevitable in order to create icons of an
imaginary future. And that is what China and the Emirates are buying
— the Seoul Design Park, Galaxy SOHO, Guangzhou Opera House,
the 2022 Qatar World Cup Stadium. These are icons of future cities,
not current ones.
The reason it’s here, now, though is to add some framing for this
Patrik Schumacher talk, which I was politely asked (on Twitter) to
trigger a Xenosystems conversation about it. While I’m in no position
to directly wire-head XS readers, it looks stimulating to me. (There
isn’t much capitalistic historical materialism about.)
@cryptosentiment seeking an @Outsideness comment

section analysis of "Patrik Schumacher. In defence of
49
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capitalism" https://t.co/T7hMCOPXXR
— Crypto Sentiment (@cryptosentiment) November 21,
2015
November 22, 2015
50
Free Cities
The Free Cities Initiative: Let A Thousand Cities Bloom (here). In

every way an excellent thing to be happening, and crucially aligned
with the deep planetary current.
This is the idea:
What is new about free cities is not the policies they will likely
implement, but the manner in which those policies are implemented.
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The traditional model is that the nation state creates a legal baseline.
Cities and towns can add to that baseline, increasing taxes or
regulatory requirements for example, but not opt out of it. A special
economic zone is an institutional arrangement which allows
territories to opt out of aspects of the institutional baseline. […] A
free city is an institutional arrangement which allows a territory to
opt out of most aspects of the institutional baseline. In recent
history, this is a radical change. However, it is a radical change
necessary to import good institutions; rule of law, property rights,
and economic freedom. We already know what works. Free cities
offer a path to get there.
And this is the trend:
… free cities are by and large inevitable. … Two trends, which are
not yet common knowledge, point to the emergence of free cities.
Those trends are the creation of special economic zones (SEZs) and
new cities. … SEZs are forerunners to free cities, they are pockets of
autonomy where certain national laws and regulations do not apply.
Of course, they differ in several important aspects. First, SEZs are
typically small, rarely encompassing a city. Second, the autonomy
for most SEZs is relatively minor. Such autonomy might encompass
lower taxes or expedited customs, but does not represent a new
legal system, merely slight alterations to the existing one. […]
Nevertheless, SEZs represent something of a challenge to the
traditional notion of a nation state, an area where a sovereign body
52
sets the baseline legal standard. As such, it is reasonable to suggest

that the number and trend of SEZs is roughly correlated with the
likelihood of building a free city. A world where minor autonomy is
acceptable is more likely to accept major autonomy than a world
where no autonomy is acceptable. […] The trends of SEZs suggest
that autonomy is becoming increasingly acceptable. …
June 16, 2016
Modernity’s F
Fertility
ertility Problem
The techno-commercial wing of the neoreactionary blogosphere has
an obvious fondness for Pacific Rim city states. Singapore, along with
Hong Kong (a PRC ‘Special Administrative Region’ which retains
significant trappings of autonomy), are regularly invoked as socio-
political models. The striking difference between the two societies
only confirms the merits of what they share. “If you love minimal
democracy capitalist enclaves so much, why not move to Singapore
(or Hong Kong)?” is a notably ineffective challenge to this
constituency. Those who haven’t already fled there – or somewhere
else that is in important respects comparable – can only see the
prospect of such an exile as a tempting invitation. It’s not quite “Go to
heaven!” but it’s as close as political polemic gets. The asymmetry is
decisive. Unlike any concrete approximation to a left-utopian social
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model that has ever been available, these are societies that
incontestably work, with attractions that require no active
propaganda operation to support. The right rises because – unlike
its enemies – it can find examples of what it admires that aren’t
agonizingly embarrassing upon close inspection. Seriously, be our
guests and look more attentively. The details are even more
impressive than the dazzling general impression. This would be a
great place to stop, but instead…
…in March 2013, dissident right blogger ‘Spandrell’ put up a short
post on his abrasive but consistently brilliant Bloody Shovel site that
messed up the narrative in a way that has yet to be persuasively
addressed. Entitled ‘Et tu, Harry?,’ it placed the Singapore miracle in a
disconcerting context. Rather than harmonizing with neoreactionary
celebrations of the city state’s unapologetically selective
immigration policy, Spandrell asks:
How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there,

Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in
Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-
race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable
genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore
is an IQ shredder.
The accusation is acute, and can be generalized. Modernity has a
54
fertility problem. When elevated to the zenith of savage irony, the

formulation runs: At the demographic level, modernity selects
systematically against modern populations. The people it prefers, it
consumes. Without gross exaggeration, this endogenous tendency
can be seen as an existential risk to the modern world. It threatens to
bring the entire global order crashing down around it.
In order to discuss this implicit catastrophe, it’s first necessary to
talk about cities, which is a conversation that has already begun. To
state the problem crudely, but with confidence: Cities are population
sinks. Historian William McNeil explains the basics. Urbanization,
from its origins, has tended relentlessly to convert children from
productive assets into objects of luxury consumption. All of the
archaic economic incentives related to fertility are inverted.
McNeil summarizes his argument in an online essay considering
‘Cities and their Consequences’:
Intensified exposure to infectious disease was the traditional

reason why cities did not reproduce themselves. […] But it
is the cost of raising children in all urban environments, not
disease, that best explains why urban populations generally
decline without immigrants from rural areas. Wherever
adults go off to work in factories, shops and offices, and small
children are not allowed to accompany them, who looks after
the young? How can they be readied for gainful employment?
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Public education and pre-schooling are seldom available in

urban slums, particularly outside Western countries, but
occasionally even within them, too. Grandmothers and
elderly neighbors can sometimes do the job, but extended
family coherence is not as prevalent in cities, and often such
caregivers are not available. Professionals of various
descriptions must then be found. That renders the cost of
children’s upkeep high, and the nurturing that such
professionals usually offer rarely matches their large fees. […]
Even as children are more expensive in cities, they are less
economically useful at an early age. There are few berries to
be picked, no small domesticated animals to herd. There is
a much longer wait until children can begin to contribute to
family income in urban settings.
Education expenses alone explain much of this. School fees are by far
the most effective contraceptive technology ever conceived. To raise
a child in an urban environment is like nothing that rural precedent
ever prepared for. Even if responsible parenting were the sole
motivation in play, the compressive effect on family size would be
extreme. Under urban circumstances, it becomes almost an
aggression against one’s own children for there to be many of them.
But there is much more than this going on.
Recognition of the modern fertility crisis and the ‘far right’ –
56
whether in its ‘misogynistic’ or its ‘racist’ strains – are not easily

distinguishable. The egalitarian axiom, as applied to gender or to
ethnicity, comes under critical strain as the topic is pursued. A
general theory of the post-conservative right would be productively
initiated here.
Feminism has been the first, inevitable target. It is tightly
correlated with the collapse of fertility, and is something modernity
tends (strongly) to promote. The expansion of female social
opportunities beyond obligate child-rearing could scarcely lead
anywhere other than to a drastic contraction of family size. The
inexorable modern trend to social decoding – i.e. to the production of
an abstract contractual agency in the place of concretely determined
persons – makes the explosion of such opportunities apparently
uncontainable. The individualism fostered by urban life might, to the
counter-factual imagination, have been in some way restricted to
males, but as a matter of actual historical fact the dereliction of
traditional social roles has proceeded without serious limitation,
with variation in speed, but no indication of alternative direction.
The radically decoded Internet persona – optionally anonymous,
fabricated, and self-defining – seems no more than an extrapolation
from the emergent norms of urban existence. Feminist assumptions,
at least in their ‘first-wave,’ liberal form, are integral to the modern
city.
Religious traditionalist lamentations in this regard are, of course,
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nothing new. Christianity – especially under Catholic inspiration –

has connected modernity to sterility for as long as modernity has
been noticed. A number of crucial factors have nevertheless
changed. Since the early years of the new millennium, secular liberals
have begun to notice the connection between religiosity and fertility,
and to express gathering concern about its partisan political
consequences. In a 2009 paper, Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip
Morgan discuss the transition from a traditional discussion of the
topic, focused upon differential Catholic and Protestant fertility, to
its contemporary mode, subsequent to the convergence of
denominational differences, and now mapping more closely onto red
/ blue state partisan affiliations. Their abstract is worth citing
(almost) in full:
Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth

(NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is
“very important” in their everyday life have both higher
fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying
religion is “somewhat important” or “not important.” Factors
such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of
fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity
differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more
fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater
“religiosity”? And why do the more religious want more
58
children? We show that those saying religion is more

important have more traditional gender and family attitudes
and that these attitudinal differences account for a
substantial part of the fertility differential.
“Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?” asked Eric Kaufmann in a

2010 book with that name. A peculiar twist in the Darwinian
inheritance had begun to bring the heritability of religious attitudes
into prominence, and linking it (positively) to the question of
reproductive fitness. Those groups previously seen as having been
unambiguously vanquished by a triumphant evolutionary science
were now subject to an ironic – and from the progressive perspective
deeply sinister – evolutionary vindication. This is a story that has still
scarcely begun to unfold.
A parallel development, compounding the commitment of cultural
modernity to imperative sterility, has been the efflorescence of
LGBTQXYZ sexual identity politics. Following the decisive
progressive victory in the cause of gay marriage, something like a
Cambrian Explosion in non-traditional sexual and gender
orientations has occurred, turbo-charging the pre-existing feminist
critique of normative reproductive sexuality. Here, too, the affinity
with profound modernistic inclinations is unmistakable, in a process
of introjected brand and niche specialization. The tendency – often
supported as an explicit political strategy – is to invert the terms
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of marginalization, by drowning the reproductive family unit within

a hyper-inflated menu of socio-libidinal positions. Fertility is
increasingly identified as a conservative eccentricity, legitimately
targeted by partisan political warfare. Intense backlash has been
among the results (providing fertile ground for the post-conciliatory
‘far right’).
Oh, but there’s more. The truly great transition, implicit in the
process of modernity from the start, is marked by the threshold
between domestic and global urbanization. Major cities have always
been distinctively cosmopolitan, but for the initial phase of their
histories the bulk of their demographic absorption has been limited
to their own ethnic hinterlands. Urbanization meant, first of all, the
conversion of rural populations into city dwellers. In the developing
world, it still means this. In the most advanced modern societies,
however, domestic rural populations were almost fully consumed,
reduced to some negligible fraction of the national total. After this
point, the process of population replacement intrinsic to the urban
phenomenon from its beginning became inextricably bound to
globalization, and trans-national migration flows. Now – which really
is now – things get interesting.
Politics, by prophetic etymology, is about cities. The inevitability
of an emergent ‘Alt-Right’ in the mass politics of advanced modern
societies is already fully predictable from a minimal understanding
of how cities work. It is simple delusion to imagine that mere
60
contingency rules here, perhaps under the guidance of particular

political personalities. Rather, the urban metabolism – essentially –
at a certain phase of its development, generates circumstances
overwhelmingly conducive to the eruption of popular ethno-politics.
Cities are demographic parasites. They trend intrinsically to a
dynamic that – beyond a comparatively definite threshold – cannot
fail to be perceived as a systematic policy of ethnic replacement.
There is still much hope of coaxing toothpaste back into its tubes.
In other words, there is a massive failure to appreciate the
profundity and magnitude of the processes underlying the current
global crisis. For instance, the incendiary language of migration-
driven ‘genocide’ is not going away. It is bound, on the contrary, to
spread, and intensify. The re-emergence of the race topic, and all of
its associates, is deeply baked into the modernist cake. Comparative
modernity is automatically racialized once global metabolism lends
differential (urban/rural) fertility its ethnic specificity. What is
unfolding, among other things, is the racial disaggregation of the
‘population bomb,’ with drastic inevitability. This is not a product of
intellectuals, but of the modern process inherently, and all attempts
by intellectuals to obstruct its cultural condensation are hubristically
misconceived. “Who, actually, is having kids?” It is a species of
insanity to think this question can be strangled in the crib.
So, what’s the answer? Does the Alt-Right have one? If so, there’s
been no sign of it yet. “Burn the cities to the ground” has been floated
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on Twitter, and no doubt elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem obviously

practical. That solution has a rich – and especially East Asian –
communist pedigree, which the Alt-Right will probably rediscover at
some point. It didn’t work out in the 1970s, and would be unlikely to
perform any more convincingly today.
As the crisis escalates, it can be expected to generate a thread
of novel political theory oriented to the question: How do we make
practical and technical sense of social solution searches in general?
Such thinking is going to be necessary. Our great cities pose an
ultimate political problem. Eventually, something will be grateful for
that.
***
Notes:
William McNeil, ‘Cities and their Consequences’
Sarah R. Hayford and S. Philip Morgan, ‘Religiosity and Fertility in
the United States: The Role of Fertility Intentions’
June 20, 2017
62
BLOCK 2 - TEMPLEXITY
BL
BLOCK
OCK 2 - TEMPLEXITY
Time in T
Trransition
There has to be a he
hexagr
xagram
am for this
Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

abstracted time from events, establishing its tractability to scientific
calculation. Conceived as pure, absolute duration, without qualities,
it conforms perfectly to its mathematical idealization (as the real
number line). Since time is already pure, its reality indistinguishable
from its formalization, a pure mathematics of change – the calculus
– can be applied to physical reality without obstruction. The calculus
can exactly describe things as they occur in themselves, without
straying, even infinitesimally, from the rigorous dictates of formal
intelligence. In this way natural philosophy becomes modern science.
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(It is perhaps ironic that the Newtonian formulation of non-

qualitative time coincides with a revolutionary break – or qualitative
transition – that is perhaps unmatched in history. That, however, is a
matter for another time.)
Modern science did not end with Newton. Time has since been
relativized to velocity (Einstein) and punctured with catastrophes
(Thom). Yet the qualities of time, once evacuated, cannot readily be
restored.
Clock technology suffices to tell this story, on its own. Time
‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to
general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that
a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness
automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute
and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a
production line malfunction.
Time modernization culminates in an inversion of definition,
eventually standardizing from a precisely reproducible building
block (the atomic second), rather than accommodating itself to a
large-scale natural cycle – qualified by variations of luminosity –
which generates sub-units through division. Once the second has
becomes entirely synthetic, all reference to a qualitative ‘when’ has
been effaced. All that remains is quantitative comparison, timing,
and synchronization, as if the time-piece was modeled upon the stop-
watch. Calendars have become an anachronism.
64
Modern time intuitions would find plenty of support, even in the

absence of mechanical chronometry. Every quantifiable trend, from
a stock movement or an unemployment problem to a demographic
pattern or an ecological disaster, can be communicated through
charts that assume a popular facility at graphic intuition, and thus,
implicitly, at algebraic geometry and even calculus. Time is so widely
and easily identified with the x-axis of such charts that the principle
of representation can be left unexplained, however strange this
might have seemed to pre-moderns. Clearly, if time can be read-off
from an axis – quickly and intuitively — it is being conceived,
generally, as if it were a number line (‘Newtonian’).
Qualitative time, by now, is a scarcely-accessible exoticism.
Nowhere is this more obvious that in the case of China’s ancient
Classic of Change, the Yijing, a work that is today no less hermetic to
Chinese than it is to foreigners.
The Yijing is a book of numbers as much as a book on time, but its
numbers are combinatorial rather than metric, exhausting a space of
possibilities, and constructing a typology of times. The Yijing speaks
often of quantities, but it does not measure them. Instead, it
typologizes them, as processes of increase or decrease, rise and fall,
lassitude and acceleration, typical of qualitative phases of recurrent
cycles, with identifiable character and reliable practical implication.
The point of all this (just in case you were wondering)?
The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive
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quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age –

is coming quite rapidly to an end.
This is not a situation that the modern mentality is well-adapted
to, since it violates certain essential structures of our time-
consciousness. It eludes our intuitions and our clocks. Our charts
register it only as a break-down, as they terminate the x-axis at a
point of senseless infinity (hyperinflation, bubble stock p/e ratios,
global derivatives exposure, urban intensity, technological
intelligence explosion) or in a collapse to zero (marginal productivity
of debt, fiat currency credibility, unit costs of self-replicating capital
goods). The can clatters off the end of the road. Things cannot go on
as they have, and they won’t.
Given the heated political climate surrounding the impending
transition of the global economic system, a non-controversial
diagnosis is almost certainly unobtainable. Niall Ferguson describes
an Age of Global Indignation, or Global Temper Tantrum, in which
the objectively unsustainable nature of the established order, whilst
widely if vaguely perceived, still eludes sober recognition. Riots,
Molotov cocktails, and fabulous conspiracy theorizing are the result.
“What all the Indignant have in common is the refusal to

address squarely the problem that nearly all Western
countries face. That problem is that the welfare systems that
evolved in the mid-20th century are unaffordable under the
66
demographic and economic circumstances of the 21st

century. The financial crisis has merely exacerbated what was
already a severe structural crisis of public finance, boosting
deficits while slowing growth.”
In all probability, Ferguson’s blunt analysis will provoke further

paroxysms of indignation. Yet, as the world’s most pampered
societies slide ever further into insolvency, such undiplomatic
assessments will become ever more common, and the rage they
inspire will become ever more unhinged.
John B Taylor emphasizes the senescence and death of Keynesian
macroeconomics (drawing on the earlier work of Robert E Lucas and
Thomas J Sargent). His research concludes that “the Keynsian
multiplier for transfer payments or temporary tax rebates was not
significantly different from zero for the kind of stimulus programs
enacted in the 2000s.” In other words, stimulus is ceasing to
stimulate, and gargantuan public debts have been accumulated for
no rational purpose. This is the ‘debt saturation’ that Joe Weisenthal
describes as “a phase transition with our debt relationship”
graphically portrayed in “the scariest [chart] of all time.”
Between financial stimulus and chemical stimulus, there is no
distinction of practical significance. Keynesianism and cocaine are
both initially invigorating, before stabilizing into expensive habits
that steadily lose effectiveness as addiction deepens. By the time
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bankruptcy and mortality beckons, getting off the stimulus seems

to be near-impossible. Better to crash and burn – or hope that
something ‘turns up’ — than to suffer the agonies of withdrawal,
which will feel like hell, and promises nothing more seductive than
bare normality at the end of a dark road. Character decays into
chronic deceit, intermittent rage, and maudlin self-pity. Nobody likes
a junky, still less a junky civilization.
Keynesianism was born in deception – the deliberate exploitation
of ‘money illusion’ for the purposes of economic management. Its
effect on a political culture is deeply corrosive. Illusionism spreads
throughout the social body, until the very ideas of hard currency
(honest money) or balanced budgets (honest spending) are
marginalized to a ‘crankish’ fringe and being ‘politically realistic’ has
become synonymous with a more-or-less total denial of reality. To
expect a Keynesian economic establishment to honestly confront its
own failings is to laughably misunderstand the syndrome under
discussion. A reign of lies is structurally incapable of ‘coming clean’
before it goes over the cliff (someone needs to do another
Downfall-parody, on macroeconomics in the Fuehrer Bunker).
The long Keynesian coke-binge was what the West did with its
side of globalization, and as it all comes apart — amidst political
procrastination and furious street protests – a planetary reset of
some kind is inevitable. The ‘Chimerican’ engine of post-colonial
globalization requires a fundamental overhaul, if not a complete
68
replacement. The immense dynamism of the Chimerican Age, as well

as its enduring achievements, have depended on systematic
imbalances that have become patently unsustainable, and it is highly
unlikely that all the negative consequences will have been confined
to just one side of the world ledger.
For instance, China’s soaring investment rate, estimated to have
reached 70% of GDP, seems to have disconnected from any prospect
of reasonable economic returns. Pivot Capital Management
concludes: “credit growth in China has reached critical levels and
its effectiveness at boosting growth is falling.” For the PRC’s fifth-
generation leadership, scheduled to adopt responsibility for China’s
political management from 2012, inertia will not be an option. By
then, a half-decade of global stimulus saturation, cascading
macroeconomic malfunction and serial ‘black swans’ (the new
millennium ‘clusterflock’) will have reshaped the world’s financial
architecture, trade patterns, and policy debates. Whatever comes
next has to be something new, accompanied – at least momentarily –
by genuine apprehension of economic reality.
For post-Expo Shanghai, a city stunningly rebuilt in the age of
Chimerica, the time of transition is a matter of especially acute
concern. This is a metropolis that waxes and wanes to the pulse of
the world, rigidly tide-locked to the great surges and recessions of
globalization. Will the next phase of world history treat it as well as
the last?
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July 13, 2011
A Time-T
Time-Trraveler’s Guide to Shanghai (P
(Part
art 1)
When did it all change?
There is a strange, time-fractured moment in the biopic Deng

Xiaoping (2002, directed by Yinnan Ding). For most of its length, the
film is sober, cautious, and respectful, exemplifying a didactic realism.
It strictly conforms to the approved story of Deng’s leadership and
its meaning (exactly as it is found today in the nation’s school
textbooks). Beginning with Deng’s ascent to power in the ruined
China of the late-1970s, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, it
follows the path of his decision-making, through the restoration (de-
collectivization) of the rural economy, the re-habilitation of
persecuted experts and intellectuals, and the beginning of the open-
door policy, in Shenzhen, to the extension of market-oriented reform
throughout the country, as symbolized by the opening of Shanghai.
Whilst clearly something of a carefully edited and precision-
manufactured legend, this basic narrative of national regeneration,
emancipation and growth – salvaged from the ashes of dead-end
fanaticism and civilizational regression – is honest enough to inform,
and even to inspire. It leaves no doubt that the ‘meaning’ of Deng
70
Xiaoping is openness and renaissance (at least ’70/30′), a judgment

that is both popularly endorsed in China, and historically attested
universally.
As the movie approaches its conclusion, however, pedestrian
realism is suddenly supplanted by something entirely different,
whether due to the ‘deeper’ realism of budgetary constraint, or the
‘higher’ realism of artistic serendipity. Deng Xiaoping, from the
vantage point of a ‘yet’ (in 1992) inexistent bridge, gestures towards
Pudong and announces the green-light for its developmental
liberation. Yet, in the background of the scene, the deliriously
developed Lujiazui of 2002 already soars, as if the skyline had been
condensed from a pre-emptive vision, drawing its substance from
the historical implication of his words. The future couldn’t wait.
Perhaps the speed of Shanghai’s Reform-era urban development
has led everything to get ahead of itself, disordering the structure
of time. The Oriental Pearl TV Tower – first architectural statement
of the new Shanghai and still the most iconic – certainly suggests
so. Retro-deposited into the Pudong of 1992 by the Deng Xiaoping
movie, historically completed in 1994, symbolically heralding the
promised Shanghai of the third millennium, architecturally side-
stepping into a science fiction fantasy of the 1950s, alluding to poetic
imagery from the Tang Dynasty, and containing a museum devoted
to the city’s modern history in its pedestal, when, exactly, does this
structure belong? It’s hard to know where to begin.
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The Emporis profile of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower describes its

architectural style as simply ‘modernism’, which is unobjectionable,
but extraordinarily under-determining. If the modern defines itself
through the present, conceived as a break from the past and a
projection into the future, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower
unquestionably installs itself in modernity, but only by way of an
elaborate path. It reverts to the present from a discarded future,
whilst excavating an unused future from the past.
Buildings that arrive in the present in this way are, strictly
speaking, ‘fabulous’, and for this reason, they are considered
disreputable by the dominant traditions of international
architecture. The fables they feed upon belong to the popular culture
of science fiction, which makes them over-expressive, vulgarly
communicative, and rapidly dated. Insofar as their style is recognized
generically, it is tagged by ugly and dismissive labels such as Googie,
Populuxe, and Doo-Wop. By reaching out too eagerly for the future,
it is tacitly suggested, one quickly comes to look ridiculous (although,
today, neomodernists such as Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas are
recuperating certain elements of this style more sympathetically).
Shanghai’s Radisson Hotel, set back from the north of People’s
Square, is a quintessentially ‘Googie’ structure. It’s space-ship top
participates exuberantly in a Shanghai tradition of weird roof-
elaborations, and echoes a formally-comparable — though far
smaller — classical modern structure to the east, down Nanjing Lu.
72
The idea of high-rise rooftops as landing sites for flying vehicles,

within a dynamic system of three-dimensional traffic, is a staple of
ultramodernist speculation, whilst an alien arrival from a distant
future is a transparent Shanghai fantasy.
In his path-breaking short story The Gernsback Continuum,
William Gibson dubs this style ‘Raygun Gothic’, explicitly marking its
time-complexity. He thus coaxes it into the wider cultural genre of
retro-futurism, which applies to everything that evokes an out-dated
future, and thereby transforms modernity into a counter-factual
commentary on the present. This genre finds an especially rich
hunting ground in Shanghai.
(This is the first post in a connected series on Shanghai’s retro-
future, departing from the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. An outline
examination of retro-futurism itself comes next …)
July 22, 2011
A Time-T
Time-Trravelers Guide to Shanghai (P
(Part
art 2)
Dark intimations of the time-rift
Shanghai’s eclectic cityscape explores a variety of modernities

simultaneously. The sheer scale of the city, exponentiated by its
relentless dynamism, overflows the time-line.
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During Shanghai’s early- to mid-20th century high modernist

epoch, for instance, the city’s consolidating haipai culture was
distinguished by the absence of a single core. It emerged, instead,
as the outcome of loosely inter-articulated plural or parallel
developments, including (but by no means limited to) the urban
mores of a rising indigenous ‘bourgeoisie’, whose aspirational
tributaries reached deep into the warrens of the lilongs; the hard
accelerationism of the International Settlement business culture,
dominated by near-limitless Shanghailander confidence in the city’s
global significance and potential; and the left-slanted literary and
political trends fostered in the coffee shop salons of the French
Concession, where avant garde ideas cross-pollinated
promiscuously. This heterogeneous, fertile chaos found its
architectural echoes in the juxtaposition of building styles,
quantitatively dominated by Shanghai’s native experiment in urban
construction (the lilong block), but overawed in patches by Western
neo-classical colonial edifices; Manhattanite cosmopolitan high-
rises and Art Deco structures; bold adventures in Chinese modern
designs (most prominently in Jiangwan); examples of proto-brutalist
industrial and residential functionalism; and villas in a variety of
international, hybrid, and advanced styles.
Since re-opening, in the early 1990s, Shanghai has added new
ingredients to the mix, including its first major examples of
construction indebted to the austere tenets of the International
74
Style (although large rectilinear structures are still, thankfully, a

rarity); neo-traditional and ethno-exotic kitsch (especially in the Old
City and the peripheral ‘nine-towns’ respectively); neomodernist re-
animations of derelicted structures; and ‘Googie’ evocations of
imagined futures.
Whilst the city’s modernization has attained unprecedented
velocity, however, its native modernism remains comparatively
retarded. As an urban center in China, Shanghai’s distinctiveness is
far less marked than it was in the early 20th century. Once occupying
an overwhelmingly commanding cultural position as the engine-
room and icon of Chinese modernity, today it participates in a far
more generalized process of Chinese development. Its
internationalism, commercial prowess, and technology absorption
are no longer obviously peerless within China, its domination of the
publishing and movie industries has passed, its retail giants and
innovative advertising have surrendered their uniqueness, and its
intellectual bohemia is matched, or surpassed, in a number of other
urban centers. Whilst haipai tenuously persists, its dynamism has
diffused and its confidence attenuated.
If Shanghai has a specific and coherent urban cultural identity
today, emerging out of its sprawling multiplicity, and
counterbalancing the vastly strengthened sense of national identity
consolidated since the foundation of the PRC, it cannot – like haipai
before it – be derived from the continuity of the city’s developmental
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trend, or from an urban exceptionalism, feeding on the contrast with

a conservative, stagnant, or regressive national hinterland. A
thoroughly renovated Shanghainese culture, or xin haipai, is
inextricably entangled with the city’s historical discontinuity, or
interruption, and with a broader Chinese national (or even
civilizational) modernization that was anticipated by the ‘Old
Shanghai’ and revives today as a futuristic memory.
The future that had seemed inevitable to the globalizing,
technophilic, piratical capitalist Shanghai of the 1920s-‘30s went
missing, as the momentum accumulated over a century of
accelerating modernization was untracked by aerial destruction,
invasion, revolution, and agrarian-oriented national integration. As
the city trod water during the command economy era, the virtual
future inherent in its ‘Golden Age’ continued to haunt it, surviving
spectrally as an obscure intuition of urban destiny. Upon re-opening,
in the early 1990s, this alternative fate flooded back. Under these
circumstances, futurism is immediately retro-futurism, since urban
innovation is what was happening before, and invention is bound to
a process of re-discovery. ‘Renaissance’ always means something of
this kind (and cannot, of course, be reduced to restoration).
This retro-futurist tendency, intrinsic to Shanghai’s revival of
urban self-consciousness in the new millennium, creates a standing
time-loop between two epochs of highly-accelerated modernistic
advance. As it steadily adjusts itself into phase, heritage and
76
development densely cross-reference each other, releasing streams

of chatter in anachronistic, cybergothic codes, such as the deeply
encrypted ‘language’ of Art Deco. Prophetic traditions inter-mesh
with commemorative innovations, automatically hunting the point
of fusion in which they become interchangeable, closing the circuit
of time. The past was something other than it once seemed, as the
present demonstrates, and the present is something other than it
might seem, as the past attests.
The most accessible examples of Shanghai’s signature time-
looping are spatially concentrated. At the limit, neo-modern
renovation projects connect the city’s great waves of modernization
within a single structure, making a retro-futural theme intrinsic to
a current development, such as those at M50, Redtown, Bridge8,
1933, or the Hotel Waterhouse (among innumerable cases). Slightly
wider and more thematically elaborate loops link new buildings to
overt exhibitions of modernist history. Among the most conspicuous
of these are the pairing of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower with the
Shanghai History Museum (in its pedestal), and the Old Shanghai
street-life diorama to be found beneath the Urban Planning
Exhibition Hall.
Such examples can be misleading, however, if they distract from
the fact that the retro-futurist principle of the new Shanghai culture
is ambient. From ordinary residential restoration projects, to
commercial signage, restaurant themes, hotel décor and home
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furnishings, the insistent message is re-emergence, an advance

through the past. The latest and most stylish thing is typically that
which re-attaches itself to the city’s modern heritage with maximum
intensity. Reaching out beyond the city does nothing to break the
pattern, because that’s precisely what the ‘Old Shanghai’ used to do.
Cosmopolitan change is its native tradition.
Retro-futural couplings can be spatially dispersed. One especially
prominent time loop lashes together two of the city’s most
celebrated high-rises – the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower –
binding the Puxi of Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each
was the tallest Shanghai building of its age (judged by highest
occupied floor), the Park Hotel for five decades, the Jin Mao Tower
for just nine years. This discrepancy masks a deeper time-symmetry
in the completion dates of the two buildings: the Park Hotel seven
years prior to the closing of the city (with the Japanese occupation
of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao Tower seven
years after the city’s formal re-opening (as the culmination of Deng
Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, in 1992).
It takes only a glance (or two) to recognize these buildings as non-
identical time twins, or mutant clones, communicating with each
other darkly across the rift, in Art Decode. Reciprocally attracted
by their structural and tonal resonances, the two buildings extract
each other from their respective period identities and rush together
into an alternative, occulted time, obscurely defined through contact
78
with an absolute future, now partially recalled.

Both of these beautifully sinister buildings are at home in the Yin
World, comfortable with secrets, and with night. Among the first of
these secrets, shared in their stylistic communion, is darkness itself.
Nothing could be further removed from the spirit of Le Corbusier’s
Radiant City than the brooding opulence of these towers, glittering
on the edge of an unfathomable nocturnal gulf, as if intoxicated by
the abyss. They remind us that ‘Art Deco’ is a (retrospective) label
patched crudely over mystery, that it never had a manifesto, or a
master plan, and that – due to its inarticulate self-organization – it
has eluded historical comprehension.
This is the sense, at least in part, of Art Deco’s pact with night
and darkness. Beneath and beyond all ideologies and centralized
schemes, the spontaneous culture of high-modernism that climaxed
in the interbellum period remains deeply encrypted. As the new
Shanghai excavates the old, it is an enigma that becomes ever more
pressing.
(Coming next in the Time Traveler’s Guide to Shanghai: The
Dieselpunk Plateau)
July 27, 2011
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A Time-T
Time-Trravelers Guide to Shanghai (P
(Part
art 3)
Dieselpunk with Chinese char

characteristics
acteristics
Wikipedia attributes the earliest use of the term ‘retrofuturism’ to

Lloyd John Dunn (in 1983). Together with fellow ‘Tape-beatles’ John
Heck, Ralph Johnson, and Paul Neff, Dunn was editor of the
‘submagazine’ Retrofuturism, which ran across the bottom of the
pages of Photostatic magazine over the period 1988-93. The agenda
of the Tape-beatles was artistic, and retrofurism was “defined as the
act or tendency of an artist to progress by moving backwards,”
testing the boundaries between copying and creativity through
systematic plagiarism and experimental engagement with the
technologies of reproduction. Whatever the achievements of this
‘original’ retrofuturist movement, they were soon outgrown by the
term itself.
A more recent and comparatively mainstream understanding of
retro-futurism is represented by the websites of Matt Novak (from
2007) and Eric Lefcowitz (from 2009), devoted to a cultural history
of the future. Specializing in a comedy of disillusionment (thoroughly
spiced with nerd kitsch), these sites explore the humorous
incongruity between the present as once imagined and its actual
realization. Content is dominated by the rich legacy of failed
predictions that has accumulated over a century (or more) of science
fiction, futurology, and popular expectations of progress, covering
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topics from space colonization, undersea cities, extravagant urban

designs, advanced transportation systems, humanoid domestic
robots, and ray-guns, to jumpsuit clothing and meal pills. This genre
of retro-futurism is near-perfectly epitomized by Daniel H. Wilson’s
2007 book Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science
Fiction Future that Never Arrived. The sentiment of the genre is
highly consistent and quite readily summarized: disappointment
with the underperformance of the present is redeemed by
amusement at the extravagant – even absurd — promise of the past.
Retro-futurism in the missing jetpack mode can have broad
historical horizons. It is only limited by the existence of adequately-
specified predictions, optimally of the concrete, technologically-
defined kind most suited to parodic recollection. Matt Novak’s
paleofuture or “past visions of the future” index spans 130 years
(from the 1870s through to the 1990s). Nevertheless, the essential
characteristics of the genre disproportionately attract it to the
‘Golden Age’ of (American) science fiction, centered on the
1940s-50s, when technological optimism reached its apogee.
Dated back to the July 1939 issue of pulp SF magazine
Astounding Science Fiction (edited by John W. Campbell and
containing stories by Isaac Asimov and A.E. Van Vogt), or to the April
1939 opening of the dizzily futurist New York World Fair, the Golden
Age might have been pre-programmed for retro-futurist ridicule. Its
optimism was entirely lacking in self-doubt; its imagination was
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graphically clarified by the emerging marking tools of modern

advertising, PR, and global ideological politics; its favored gadgetry
was lusciously visualized, large-scaled, and anthropomorphically
meaningful; and an emerging consumer culture, of previously
unconceived scale and sophistication, served both to package the
future into a series of discrete, tangible products, and to promote
aspirations of individual (or nuclear family) empowerment-through-
consumption that would later be targeted for derision. Implausibly
marrying social conservatism to techno-consumerist utopianism,
every family with its own flying car is a vision that, from the start,
hurtles towards retro-futurist hilarity. By the time The Jetsons first
aired in 1962, the Golden Age had ended, and the laughter had
begun.
If William Gibson’s The Gernsback Continuum (1981) antedated
the term ‘retro-futurism’, it indisputably consolidated the concept,
investing it with a cultural potential that far exceeded anything the
light-hearted sallies of the oughties would match. Instead of picking
among the detritus of Golden Age speculation for objects of amused
condescension, Gibson back-tracks its themes to the ‘Raygun Gothic’
or ‘American Streamlined Modern’ of the interbellum period, and
then projects this derelicted culture forwards, as a continuous
alternative history (dominated by quasi-fascist utopianism). The
Gernsback Continuum is no mere collection of oddities, but rather a
path not taken, and one that continued to haunt the science fiction
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imagination. Cyberpunk would be its exorcism.

Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), commemorated by the ‘Hugo’
science fiction awards, was a futuristic fiction enthusiast and (shady)
publishing entrepreneur who, more than any other identifiable
individual, catalyzed the emergence of science fiction as a self-
conscious genre, promoted through cheaply-printed, luridly popular
‘pulp’ magazines. In the first issue of Amazing Stories, which he
founded in 1926, Gernsback defined ‘scientifiction’ as “charming
romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
Whilst commonly detested by his abused writers, due to his sharp
business practices, Gernsback’s politics seem to have been
unremarkable. The ominous Aryan technocracy portrayed in The
Gernsback Continuum probably owes more to the reputation of his
successor at Amazing Stories, John W. Campbell (1910-1971), and
the broader cultural tendencies he represented.
The re- (or pre-) direction of retro-futurism, from abandoned
dreams to alternative histories, triggered a cascade of avalanches.
Often, these have been marked by the wanderings of the ‘-punk’
suffix. Initially indicative of an anti-utopian (if not necessarily
positively dystopian) impulse, whose ‘dirty’ futurism embraces social
and psychological disorder, chaotic causality, uneven development,
and collapsed horizons, it increasingly adopted an additional, and
previously unpredictable sense. The history of science fiction – and
perhaps history more broadly – was ‘punked’ by the emergence of
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literary and cultural sub-genres that carried it down lines of

unrealized potential. Cyberpunk belonged recognizably to our
electronically re-engineered time-line, but steampunk, clockpunk,
dieselpunk (or ‘decopunk’), and atompunk – to list them in rough
order of their appearance — extrapolated techno-social systems that
had already been bypassed. If these were ‘futures’ at all, they lay not
up ahead, but along branch-tracks, off to the side.
These various ‘retro-punk’ micro-genres could be understood in
numerous ways. When conceived primarily as literature, they can
be envisaged as re-animations of period features from the history
of science fiction, or, more incisively, as liberations of dated futures
from the dominion of subsequent time. For instance, the Victorian
future of the steampunks was more than just a hazily anticipated
Edwardian present, it was something else entirely, propelled in part
by the real but unactualized potential of mechanical computation (as
concretized in the Difference and Analytical Engines of Babbage and
Lovelace).
Apprehended more theoretically, retro-punk genres echo
significant debates. In particular, axial arguments on both the left
and the right melt into discussions of alternative history, especially
in the dieselpunk dark-heartland of the 1920s-‘30s. For over half
a century, European Marxism has been inextricable from counter-
factual explorations of the Soviet experience, focused on the period
of maximum Proletkult innovation between the end of the post-civil
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war and the social realist clampdown presaging the Stalinist regime.
The figure of Leon Trotsky as alternative history (dieselpunk)
socialist hero makes no sense in any other context. On the right,
American conservatism has become ever more focused on counter-
factual interrogation of the Hoover/FDR-Keynesian response to the
Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression, understood as
the moment when republican laissez-faire capitalism was supplanted
by New Deal social democracy (Coolidge / Mellon ’28 tee-shirts
might still be thin on the ground, but their day might come).
Whilst Shanghai is uploading itself into a cyberpunk tomorrow as
fast as any city on earth, it has few obvious time-gates opening into
clockpunk, atompunk, or (more disputably) steampunk futures. With
dieselpunk, however, this series of dismissals grinds immediately to a
halt. If some crazed dieselpunk demigod had leased the world to use
as a laboratory, the outcome would have been – to a tolerable degree
of approximation – indistinguishable from Shanghai. Xin haipai is
dieselpunk with Chinese characteristics.
Shanghai’s greatest dieselpunk counter-factual is inescapably:
what if Japanese invasion had not interrupted the city’s high-
modernity in 1937? What was the city turning into? Beneath that
enveloping question, however, and further back, a teeming mass of
alternatives clamor for attention. What if the White Terror of 1927
had not crushed the urban workers’ movement? What if the CCP
had succeeded, as Song Qingling dreamed, of transforming China’s
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republican government from within? What if the international

politics of silver had not combined with Guomindang kleptocracy
to destroy the independent financial system? What if Du Yuesheng
had extended his ambitions into national politics? What if the city’s
de-colonization had proceeded under peace-time conditions? What
if the subsequent social and economic evolution of Hong Kong had
been able to occur where it was germinated, in Shanghai?
The 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese
Communist Party was an occasion for the whole country to lose itself
in the dark raptures of Shanghai dieselpunk. It was time to return to
the 1920s, to revisit history as an adventure in contingency, before
long-established actualities had been sifted from the intensity of raw
potential, and to re-animate the indeterminism implicit in dramatic
tension. It is improbable that the celebratory movie devoted to the
establishment of the CCP, Beginning of the Great Revival, was
deliberately formulated in the dieselpunk genre, but the nation’s
microbloggers recognized it for what it was, and swarmed the
opportunity presented by this re-opening of the past.
The thickening of cyberspace transforms history into a
playground of potentials, where things can be re-loaded, and tried
in different ways. Electronic infrastructures spread and sophisticate,
running actualities as multiple and variable scenarios, with
increasing intolerance for rigid outcomes or frozen legacies. As the
dominion of settled actuality is eroded by currents of
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experimentation, the past re-animates. Nothing is ever over.

The game Shanghai plays, or the story it tells, is endlessly re-
started in the dieselpunk cityscape of the 1920s and ‘30s, where
everything that anybody could want exists in dense, unexpressed
potentiality — global fortunes, gangster territories, proletarian
uprisings, revolutionary discoveries, literary glory, sensory
intoxication, as well as every permutation of modest urbanite
thriving. It is a city where anything can happen, and somewhere, at
some time, everything does.
July 29, 2011
Calendric Dominion
How hegemon
hegemonyy still counts
Modernity and hegemony are Urban Future obsessions, which might

(at least in part) excuse a link to this article in Britain’s Daily Mail,
on the topic of Christianity, the calendar, and political correctness.
It addresses itself to the international dominion of the Gregorian,
Western Christian calendar, and the sensitivities of those who,
whilst perhaps reconciled to the inevitability of counting in Jesus-
years, remain determined to dis-evangelize the accompanying
acronymics. More particularly, it focuses upon the BBC, and its
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attempt to sensitize on other people’s behalf (pass the popcorn).
The BBC’s religious and ethics department says the changes

are necessary to avoid offending non-Christians.
It states: ‘As the BBC is committed to impartiality it is
appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate
non-Christians.
In line with modern practice, BCE/CE (Before Common
Era/Common Era) are used as a religiously neutral
alternative to BC/AD.’
But the move has angered Christians …
Ann Widdecombe, the Catholic former Tory Minister, said:
‘I think what the BBC is doing is offensive to Christians. They
are discarding terms that have been around for centuries and
are well understood by everyone.
‘What are they going to do next? Get rid of the entire
calendar on the basis that it has its roots in Christianity?’
It’s an interesting question, and the attempt to hold it open, as

provocatively as possible, might be the best reason to avoid glib,
politically correct remedies to the ‘problem’, however that is
understood. Anno Domini reminds us of dominion, which is a far
better guideline into historical reality than kumbaya gestures
towards a ‘Common Era’, as if hegemony had no content beyond
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togetherness. Since dominion has not been achieved primarily by

impoliteness or insensitivity, politically correct multiculturalism is an
irrelevant (and dishonest) response to it.
Regardless of whether Jesus is your Lord, or not, the Christian
calendar dominates, or at least predominates, and the traditional
acronymic accurately registers that fact. AD bitchez, as the
commentators of Zerohedge might say.
It is an intriguing and ineluctable paradox of globalized modernity
that its approximation to universality remains fundamentally
structured by ethno-geographical peculiarities of a distinctly pre-
modern type. The world was not integrated by togetherness, but
by a succession of particular powers, with their characteristic traits,
legacies, and parochialisms. For better or for worse, these peculiar
features have been deeply installed in the governing order of the
world. Their signs should be meticulously conserved and studied
rather than clumsily effaced, because they are critical clues to the
real nature of fate.
Without exception, calendars are treasure troves of intricately-
sedimented ethno-historical information. They attempt to solve an
ultimately insoluble problem, by arithmetically rationalizing
irrational astronomical quantities, most obviously the
incommensurable cycles of the terrestrial orbit (solar year), lunar
orbit (month), and terrestrial rotation (day). No coherent
arithmetical construct can ever reconcile these periods, and even a
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repulsively inelegant calendar can only do so to a tolerable margin or

error. The consequent ramshackle compromise, typically deformed
by a torturous series of adjustments, reshufflings, and intercalations,
tells an elaborate story of fixed and variable cultural priorities,
regime changes, legacy constraints, alien influences, conceptual
capabilities, and observational refinements, further complicated by
processes of drift, adoption, and innovation that ripple through
numerical and linguistic signs.
The hegemonic (Gregorian) calendar, for instance, is a jagged
time-crash of incommensurable periods, in which multiple varieties
of disunity jostle together. Weeks don’t fit into solar and lunar
months, or years, but cut through them quasi-randomly, so that days
and dates slide drunkenly across each other. The length of the week
is biblical, but the names of the days combine ancient astrology
(Saturday-Monday) with the gods of Norse mythology (Tuesday-
Friday). Although the Nordic-linguistic aspect of the week has not
been strongly globalized, its Judaeo-numerical aspect has. The
months are a ghastly mess, awkwardly mismatched with each other,
with the lunar cycle, and with the succession of weeks, and testifying
to the confused, erratic astro-politics of the Roman Empire in their
linguistic mixture of deities (January, March, April?, May, June),
festivals (February), emperors (July, August), and numbers
(September-December). There is no need to excavate into this
luxuriant dung-hill here, except to note that the ‘Christianity’ of the
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Western calendar rests upon chaos-rotted pagan and poly-numeric

foundations.
What matters to the AD-BC (vs CE-BCE) debate is not the
multitudinously-muttering inner disorder of the Western calendar,
but its estimation of the years, or ‘era’. In this regard, it has clear
competitors, and thus arouses definite resentments, since its closest
cousins assert eras of their own. The era of the Hebrew calendar
dates back to the tohu (chaos) of the year before creation, and
records the years of the world (Latinized as Anno Mundi), to the
present 5772 AM. The Islamic calendar, which begins from the Hejira
of Mohammed, from Mecca to Medina, reached 1432 AH in AD
2011.
The Christian calendar, first systematized in AD 525 by Dionysius
Exiguus (Dennis the Runt), counts the first Anno Domini Nostri Iesu
Christi as the birth year of Jesus Ben Joseph, a false messiah to the
Jews, the Christ and Redeemer for the Christians, a prophet to the
Moslems, the Nazarene oppressor to Satanists, and something else,
or nothing much, to everybody else. Regardless of the accuracy of
its chronology or tacit theology, however, this is the year count that
has been globally inherited from the real process of modernity, and
recognized as a world standard by the United Nations, among other
international organizations.
Compared to the Abrahamic calendars, those of Asia’s
demographic giants generally lacked tight doctrinal and didactic
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focus. India can usually be relied upon to inundate any topic

whatsoever in delirious multiplicity, and the calendar is no exception.
Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil calendars are all widely used in their
respective regions, the Indian National Calendar counts from AD
78 = 0, which, in ominous keeping with current events, places us in
1933, and the most widely accepted Hindu religious calendar total
the years since the birth of Krishna, reaching 5112 in AD 2011.
The fabulous complexity of China’s traditional calendar makes it
a paradise for nerds. Most commonly, it counts the years of each
imperial reign, and is thus integrated by a literary narrative of
dynastic history, rather than an arithmetical continuum. (The
obstacle this presented to modernistic universalization is brutally
obvious.) Alternatively, however, it groups historical time into sixty-
year cycles, beginning from 2637 BC (which places us in the 28th
year of cycle-78). Most Chinese today seem to have an extremely
tenuous connection to this dimension of their calendrical heritage,
which scarcely survives outside academic departments of ancient
history, and in Daoist temples. Whilst the internal structure of the
traditional year survives undamaged, as attested by the annual cycle
of festivities, Chinese surrender to the Gregorian year count seems
absolute.
Christian conservatives are surely right to argue that it is the year
count – the number and the era – that matters. The acronyms are
merely explanatory, and even essentially tautological. Once it has
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been decided that history is measured from and divided by the birth
of Jesus, it is far too late to quibble over the attribution of
dominance. AD bitchez. That argument is over.
(Coming next, in Part 2 – Counter-calendars)
September 30, 2011
Calendric Dominion (P
(Part
art 2)
Caesar with the soul of Christ
Political Correctness has tacitly legislated against the still-prevailing

acronyms that define the hegemonic international calendar (BC-AD),
and proposed clear alternatives (BCE-CE). Both the criticism and the
suggestion are entirely consistent with its principles. In accordance
with the tenets of multiculturalism (a more recent and also more
active hegemony), it extends the liberal assumption of formal
equality from individuals to ‘cultures’, allocating group rights, and
identifying – whilst immediately denouncing – discrimination and
privilege. As might be expected from an ideology that is exceptionally
concentrated among intellectual elites, the proposed remedy is
purely symbolic, taking the form of a rectification of signs. The
‘problem’ is diagnosed as a failure of consciousness, or sensitivity,
requiring only a raising of awareness (to be effected, one can safely
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assume, by properly credentialed and compensated professionals).

Even considered in its own terms, however, the rectification that
is suggested amounts to nothing more than an empty gesture of
refusal, accompanying fundamental compliance. Whilst the symbolic
‘left’ draw comfort from the insistence upon inconsequential change,
with its intrinsic offense against conservative presumptions,
reinforced by an implied moral critique of tradition, the counter-
balancing indignation of the ‘right’ fixes the entire dispute within the
immobilized trenches of the Anglo-American ‘culture war’. The deep
structure of calendric signs persists unaffected. Between Christian
dominion (invoking ‘Our Lord’) and a ‘common era’ that is obediently
framed by the dating of Christian revelation, there is no difference
that matters. It is the count that counts.
Political Correctness fails here in the same way it always does,
due to its disconnection of ‘correctness’ from any rigorous principle
of calculation, and its disengagement of ‘sensitivity’ from realistic
perception. A calendar is a profound cultural edifice, orchestrating
the apprehension of historical time. As such, it is invulnerable to the
gnat-bites of ideological irritability (and dominance is not reducible
to impoliteness).
The problem of Western Calendric Dominion is not one of
supremacism (etiquette) but of supremacy (historical fatality). It
might be posed: How did modernistic globalization come to be
expressed as Christian Oecumenon? In large measure, this is Max
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Weber’s question, and Walter Russell Mead’s, but it overflows the

investigations of both, in the direction of European and Middle
Eastern antiquity. Initial stimulation for this inquiry is provided by a
strange – even fantastic — coincidence.
In his notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche imagined the overman
(Übermensch) as a “Caesar with the soul of Christ,” a chimerical being
whose tensions echo those of the Church of Rome, Latinized
Christian liturgy, and the Western calendar. This hybridity is
expressed by a multitude of calendric features, following a broad
division of labor between a Roman structuring of the year (within
which with superficially-Christianized pagan festivals are scattered
unsystematically), and a Christian year count, but it also points
towards a cryptic — even radically unintelligible — plane of fusion.
In the Year Zero, which never took place, a mysterious
synchronization occurred, imperceptibly and unremarked, founding
the new theopolitical calendric order. For the Christians, who would
not assimilate the Empire until the reign of Constantine in the
early-4th century AD, God was incarnated as man, in the embryo of
Jesus Christ. Simultaneously, in a Rome that was perfectly oblivious
to the conception of the Messiah, the Julian calendar became
operational. Julius Caesar’s calendric reform had begun 45 years
earlier, following the Years of Confusion, but incompetent execution
in subsequent decades had systematically mis-timed the leap year,
intercalating a day every three years, rather than every four. The
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anomalous triennial cycle was abandoned and “the Roman calendar

was finally aligned to the Julian calendar in 1 BC (with AD 1 the first
full year of alignment),” although no special significance would be
assigned to these years until Dionysius Exiguus integrated Christian
history in AD 525.
Given the astounding neglect of this twin event, some additional
emphasis is appropriate: The Julian calendar, which would persist,
unmodified, for almost 1,600 years, and which still dominates
colloquial understanding of the year’s length (at 365.25 days), was
born – by sheer and outrageous ‘chance’ – at the precise origin of the
Christian Era, as registered by the Western, and now international,
numbering of historical time. The year count thus exactly simulates
a commemoration of the calendar itself – or at least of its prototype
– even though the birth of this calendar, whether understood in the
terms of secular reason or divine providence, has absolutely no
connection to the counted beginning. This is a coincidence – which
is to say, a destiny perceived without comprehension – that neither
Roman authority nor Christian revelation has been able to account
for, even as it surreptitiously shapes Western (and then Global)
history. As the world’s dominant calendar counts the years under
what appears to be a particular religious inspiration, it refers secretly
to its own initiation, alluding to mysteries of time that are alien to any
faith. That much is simple fact.
Unlike the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar was
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determined under Christian auspices, or at least formal Christian

authority (that of Pope Gregory XIII), and promulgated by papal bull
in 1582. Yet a glance suffices to reveal the continuation of Julian
calendric dominion, since the Gregorian reform effects
transformations that remain strictly compliant with the Julian
pattern, modified only by elementary operations of decimal re-
scaling and inversion. Where the Julian calendar took four years as
its base cyclical unit, the Gregorian takes four centuries, and where
the Julian adds one leap day in four years, the Gregorian leaves one
and subtracts three in 400. The result was an improved
approximation to the tropical year (averaging ~365.24219 days),
from the Julian 365.25 year, to the Gregorian 365.2425, a better
than 20-fold reduction in discrepancy from an average ~0.00781
days per year (drifting off the seasons by one day every 128 years) to
~0.00031 (drifting one day every 3,226 years).
The combination of architectonic fidelity with technical
adjustment defines conservative reform. It is clearly evident in this
case. A neo-Julian calendar, structured in its essentials at its origin in
AD 1 minus 1, but technically modified at the margin in the interest
of improved accuracy, armed the West with the world’s most
efficient large-scale time-keeping system by the early modern
period. In China, where the Confucian literati staged competitions to
test various calendars from around the world against the prediction
of eclipses, Jesuits equipped with the Gregorian calendar prevailed
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against all alternatives, ensuring the inexorable trend towards

Western calendric conventions, or, at least, the firm identification of
Western methods with modernistic efficiency. Given only an edge,
in China and elsewhere, the dynamics of complex systems took over,
as ‘network effects’ locked-in the predominant standard, whilst
systematically marginalizing its competitors. Even though Year Zero
was still missing, it was, ever increasingly, missing at the same time
for everyone. “Caeser with the soul of Christ” – the master of
Quadrennium and eclipse — had installed itself as the implicit
meaning of world history.
(Still to come – in Part 4? – Counter-Calendars, but we probably
need an excursion through zero first)
October 8, 2011
(Part
art 3)
In Search of Y
Year
ear Z
Zero
ero
A Year Zero signifies a radical re-beginning, making universal claims.

In modern, especially recent modern times, it is associated above all
with ultra-modernist visions of total politics, at is maximum point of
utopian and apocalyptic extremity. The existing order of the world
is reduced to nothing, from which a new history is initiated,
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fundamentally disconnected from anything that occurred before,

and morally indebted only to itself. Predictably enough, among
conservative commentators (in the widest sense), such visions are
broadly indistinguishable from the corpse-strewn landscapes of
social catastrophe, haunted by the ghosts of unrealizable dreams.
Christianity’s global Calendric Dominion is paradoxical — perhaps
even ‘dialectical’ — in this regard. It provides the governing model
of historical rupture and unlimited ecumenical extension, and thus
of total revolution, whilst at the same time representing the
conservative order antagonized by modernistic ambition. Its
example incites the lurch to Year Zero, even as it has no year zero of
its own. Ultimately, its dialectical provocation tends towards Satanic
temptation: the promise of Anti-Christian Apocalypse, or absolute
news to a second power. (“If the Christians could do it, why couldn’t
we?” Cue body-counts scaling up towards infinity.)
This tension exists not only between an established Christian
order and its pseudo-secular revolutionary after-image, but also
within Christianity itself, which is split internally by the apparent
unity and real dissociation of ‘messianic time’. The process of
Christian calendric consolidation was immensely protracted. A
distance of greater than half a millennium separated the clear
formulation of the year count from the moment commemorated,
with further centuries required to fully integrate historical recording
on this basis, digesting prior Jewish, Roman, and local date registries,
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and laying the foundation for a universalized Christian articulation of

time. By the time the revolutionary ‘good news’ had been coherently
formalized into a recognizable prototype of the hegemonic Western
calendar, it had undergone a long transition from historical break to
established tradition, with impeccable conservative credentials.
Simultaneously, however, the process of calendric consolidation
sustained, and even sharpened, the messianic expectation of
punctual, and truly contemporary rupture, projected forwards as
duplication, or ‘second coming’ of the initial division. Even if the
moment in which history had been sundered into two parts — before
and after, BC and AD — now lay in quite distant antiquity, its example
remained urgent, and promissory. Messianic hope was thus torn and
compacted by an intrinsic historical doubling, which stretched it
between a vastly retrospective, gradually recognized beginning, and
a prospect of sudden completion, whose credibility was assured by
its status as repetition. What had been would be again, transforming
the AD count into a completed sequence that was confirmed in the
same way it was terminated (through Messianic intervention).
Unsurprisingly, the substantial history of Western calendric
establishment is twinned with the rise of millenarianism, through
phases that trend to increasingly social-revolutionary forms, and
eventually make way for self-consciously anti-religious, although
decidedly eschatological, varieties of modernistic total politics.
Because whatever has happened must — at least — be possible, the
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very existence of the calendar supports anticipations of absolute

historical rupture. Its count, simply by beginning, prefigures an end.
What starts can re-start, or conclude.
Zero, however, intrudes diagonally. It even introduces a comic
aspect, since whatever the importance of the Christian revelation
to the salvation of our souls, it is blatantly obvious that it failed to
deliver a satisfactory arithmetical notation. For that, Christian
Europe had to await the arrival of the decimal numerals from India,
via the Moslem Middle East, and the ensuing revolution of
calculation and book-keeping that coincided with the Renaissance,
along with the birth of mercantile capitalism in the city states of
northern Italy.
Indeed, for anybody seeking a truly modern calendar, the Arrival
of Zero would mark an excellent occasion for a new year zero (AZ
0?), around AD 1500. Although this would plausibly date the origin of
modernity, the historical imprecision of the event counts against it,
however. In addition, the assimilation of zero by germinal European
(and thus global) capitalism was evidently gradual — if comparatively
rapid — rather than a punctual ‘revolutionary’ transition of the kind
commerorative calendric zero is optimally appropriate to. (If Year
Zero is thus barred from the designation of its own world-historic
operationalization, it is perhaps structurally doomed to
misapplication and the production of disillusionment.)
The conspicuous absence of zero from the Western calendar
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(count), exposed in its abrupt jolt from 1 BC to AD 1, is an intolerable

and irreparable stigma that brings its world irony to a zenith. In the
very operation of integrating world history, in preparation for
planetary modernity, it remarks its own debilitating antiquity and
particularity, in the most condescending modern sense of the limited
and the primitive — crude, defective and underdeveloped.
How could a moment of self-evident calculative incompetence
provide a convincing origin-point for subsequent historical
calculation? Year Zero escaped all possibility of conceptual
apprehension at the moment in the time-count where it is now seen
to belong, and infinity (the reciprocal of zero) proves no less elusive.
Infinity was inserted into a time when (and place where) it
demonstrably made no sense, and the extraordinary world-historical
impression that it made did nothing — not even nothing– to change
that situation. Is this not a worthy puzzle for theologians?
Omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, yet hopeless at maths —
these are not the characteristics of a revelation designed to impress
technologists or accountants. All the more reason, then, to take this
comedy seriously, in all its ambivalence — since the emerging world
of technologists and accountants, the techno-commercial (runway-
industrial, or capitalist) world that would globalize the earth, was
weaned within the playpen of this calendar, and no other. Modernity
had selected to date itself in a way that its own kindergarten
students would scorn.
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October 16, 2011
(Part
art 4)
A Digression into the Reality Principle
Between the world we would like to inhabit, and the world that
exists, there’s a gap that tests us. Even the simplest description of
this gap already calls for a decision. ‘Ideologies’ in the broadest, and
culturally almost all-consuming sense, serve primarily to soften it.
Sense, and even compassion, is attributed to the side of reality,
promising ultimate reconciliation between human hopes and desires
and the ‘objective’ nature of things. Science, a typically despised and
misanthropic discipline, tends to the opposite assumption,
emphasizing the harsh indifference of reality to human interests and
expectations, with the implication that the lessons it teaches us can
be administered with unlimited brutality. We can dash ourselves
against reality if we insist, but we cannot realistically anticipate some
merciful moderation of the consequences. Nature does not scold or
punish, it merely breaks us, coldly, upon the rack of our untruths.
Like other cultural institutions, calendars are saturated with
ideologies, and tested to destruction against implacable reality. Their
collision with nature is especially informative, because they express
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obstinate human desires as favored numbers (selected from among

small positive integers), and they register the gulf of the real in a
strictly quantitative form. Any surviving calendar relates the story of
an adaptation to reality, or cultural deference to (and deformation
by) nature, as numerical preferences have been compromised
through their encounter with quantitative facts.
Pure ideology in the calendrical sphere is represented in its
perfection by the fantasy year of the ancient Mesopotamians, 360
days in length, and harmonized to the sexagesimal (modulus-60)
arithmetic of the Sumerians. Its influence has persisted in the 360
degrees of the geometric circle, and in the related sexagesimal
division into minutes and seconds (of time and arc). The archaic
calendars of Meso-America and East Asia, as well as those of the
Middle East, seem to have been attracted to the 360-day year, as
though to an ideal model. If the Great Architect of the Universe had
been an anthropomorphic geometer, this is the calendar that would
work.
Of course, it doesn’t (with all due respect to the engrossing
Biblical counter-argument outlined here). Instead, in the mainstream
world calendric tradition – as determined by the eventual global
outcome – a first level adaptation systematized the year at 365 days
– the Egyptian year. Unlike the 360-day archetypal year, which has all
of the first three primes as factors, and thus divides conveniently into
‘months’ or other component periods, the 365-day year represents a
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reluctant concession to quantitative fact. The number 365 has only

two factors (both primes, 5 and 73), but neither seems to have
acquired any discernible calendrical valency, perhaps because of
their obvious unsuitability to even approximate description of lunar
periods. The Egyptians turned instead to an awkward but influential
innovation: the intercalation. A five-day appendix was added to the
year, as a sheer correction or supplementary commensuration, and
an annual reminder of the gap between numerical elegance and
astronomical reality. Whilst intercalations were invested with
mytho-religious significance, this was essentially compensatory – a
crudely obscured testament to the weakness of ideality (and thus of
systematic priest-craft as a mode of reality apprehension, or efficient
social purpose). If intercalations were necessary, then nature was not
spell-bound, and the priest-masters of calendric time were exposed,
tacitly, as purveyors of mystification, whose limits were drawn by the
horizon of social credulity. Astronomical time mocked the meanings
of men.
Over time, the real (‘tropical’) year discredits its calendrical
idealizations by unmooring dates from the seasons, in a process of
time drift that exposes discrepancy, and drives calendar reform.
Inaccurate calendars are gradually rendered meaningless, as the
seasonal associations of its time terms are eroded to utter
randomness – by frigid ‘summer’ months and scorching ‘winter’ ones.
Clearly, no priesthood can survive in a climate that derides the
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established order of the year, and in which farmers that listen to

the holy words (of time) are assured inevitable starvation. Unless
tracked within a tolerable margin of accuracy by a calendar that
‘keeps’ the time, the year reverts to an alien and unintelligible thing,
entirely exterior to cultural comprehension, whilst society’s reigning
symbols appear as a risible, senseless babble, drowned out by the
howling chaos of the real.
With the introduction of the Julian Calendar, coinciding with the
(non-event) of year zero, comes the recognition that the tropical year
is incommensurable with any integer, and that a larger cycle of
intercalation is required to track it. A kind of modernity, or structural
demystification, is born with the relinquishment of the ideal year,
and everything it symbolizes in terms of cosmic design or celestial
harmony. The devil’s appendix is attached, irremovably.
Numeracy and time measurement divorce at the origin of
caesarean Calendric Dominion, but it is easy to mistake accidents on
this path for essential concessions to reality. Even allowing for the
inescapable function of intercalations, there was nothing inevitable
– at least absolutely or cosmically inevitable – about the utter
ruination of numerical coherence that the Julian Calendar
incarnated, and passed on.
To explore this (admittedly arcane) topic further requires a
digression to the second power, into the relations between numbers
and anthropomorphic desire. The obvious starting point is the
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360-day calendar of ancient Sumer, and the question: What made

this number appealing? Whether examining 360, or its sexagesimal
root (60), an arithmetically-conventional attention to prime factors
(2, 3, and 5), is initially misleading — although ultimately
indispensable. A more illuminating introduction begins with the
compound factors 10 and 12, the latter relevant primarily to the
lunar cycle (and the archaic dream of an astronomically – or rather
astrologically — consistent 12-month year), and the former
reflecting the primordial anthropomorphism in matters numeric:
decimalism. The 360-day calendar is an object of human desire
because it is an anthropo-lunar (or menstrual-lycanthropic?) hybrid,
speaking intrinsically to the cycles of human fertility, and to the
‘digital’ patterns instantiated in mammalian body-plans. A 360-day
year would be ours (even if alien things are hidden in it).
Anthropomorphic decimalism suggests how certain numerical
opportunities went missing, along with zero. ‘Apprehension’ and
‘comprehension’ refer understanding to the prehensile organs of a
specific organism, whose bilateral symmetry combines five-fingered
hands to produce a count reaching ten, across an interval that
belongs to an alien, intractable, third. Triadic beings are monsters,
and decimally ungraspable. The bino-decimal structure of the Yi Jing
exhibits this with total clarity, through its six-stage time-cycle that
counts in the recurrent sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5 … Each power of three
(within the decimal numerals) is expelled along with zero from the
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order of apprehensible time. There is no way that a ternary calendric

numeracy could ever have been anthropomorphically acceptable –
the very thought is (almost definitionally) abominable.
Yet astronomy seems hideously complicit with abomination, at
least, if the years are twinned. The sixth power of three (3^6)
approximates to the length of two tropical years with a discrepancy
of just ~1.48438 days, or less than one day a year. An intercalation of
three days every four years (or two twin-year cycles) brings it to the
accuracy of the Julian Calendar, and a reduction of this intercalation
by one day every 128 years (or 64 (2^6) twin-year cycles) exceeds
the accuracy of the Gregorian calendar.
It might be necessary to be slightly unbalanced to fully appreciate
this extraordinary conjunction of numerical elegance and
astronomical fact. A system of calendric computation that counts
only in twos and threes, and which maintains a perfectly triadic order
of time-division up to the duration of a two-year period, is able to
quite easily exceed the performance of the dominant international
calendar (reaching a level of accuracy that disappears into the
inherent instability of the tropical year, and is thus strictly speaking
unimprovable).
How many days are there in a year? ((3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3) / 2) +
~0.74219
The horror, the horror …
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October 21, 2011
(Part
art 5)
From Crimson P
Par
aradise
adise to Soft Apocalypse
Despite its modernity and decimalism, the French calendrier

républicain or révolutionnaire had no Year Zero, but it re-set the
terms of understanding. A topic that had been conceived as an
intersection of religious commemoration with astronomical fact
became overtly ideological, and dominated by considerations of
secular politics. The new calendar, which replaced AD 1792 with the
first year of the new ‘Era of Liberty’, lasted for less than 14 years. It
was formally abolished by Napoléon, effective from 1 January 1806
(the day after 10 Nivôse an XIV), although it was briefly revived
during the Paris Commune (in AD 1871, or Année 79 de la
République), when the country’s revolutionary enthusiasm was
momentarily re-ignited.
For the left, the calendric re-set meant radical re-foundation, and
symbolic extirpation of the Ancien Régime. For the right, it meant
immanentization of the eschaton, and the origination of totalitarian
terror. Both definitions were confirmed in 1975, when Year Zero was
finally reached in the killing fields of the Kampuchean Khmer Rouge,
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where over quarter of the country’s population perished during

efforts to blank-out the social slate and start over. Khmer Rouge
leader Saloth Sar (better known by his nom de guerre Pol Pot) had
made ‘Year Zero’ his own forever, re-branded as a South-east Asian
final solution.
Year Zero was henceforth far too corpse-flavored to retain
propaganda value, but that does not render the calendric equation
1975 = 0 insignificant (rather the opposite). Irrespective of its
parochialism in time and space, corresponding quite strictly to a re-
incarnation of (xenophobic-suicidal) ‘national socialism’, it defines a
meaningful epoch, as the high-water mark of utopian overreach, and
the complementary re-valorization of conservative pragmatism.
Appropriately enough, Year Zero describes an instant without
duration, in which the age of utopian time is terminated in exact
coincidence with its inauguration. The era it opens is characterized,
almost perfectly, by its renunciation, as fantasy social programming
extinguishes itself in blood and collapse. The immanent eschaton
immediately damns itself.
Historical irony makes this excursion purely (sub-) academic,
because the new era is essentially disinclined to conceive itself as
such. What begins from this Year Zero is a global culture of
ideological exhaustion, or of ‘common sense’, acutely sensitive to the
grinning death’s head hidden in beautiful dreams, and reconciled to
compromise with the non-ideal. From the perspective of fantastic
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revolutionary expectation, the high-tide of perfectionist vision ebbs

into disillusionment and tolerable dissatisfaction – but at least it
doesn’t eat our children. The new era’s structural modesty of
ambition has no time for a radical re-beginning or crimson paradise,
even when it is historically defined by one.
Pol Pot’s Year Zero is sandwiched between the publication of Eric
Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age (1974), and the first spontaneous
Chinese mass protests against the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution (over the months following the death of Zhou Enlai, in
January 1976). It is noteworthy in this regard that Deng Xiaoping
eulogized Zhou at his memorial ceremony for being “modest and
prudent” (thus the New Aeon speaks).
In the Anglo-American world, the politics of ideological
exhaustion were about to take an explicitly conservative form,
positively expressed as ‘market realism’ (and in this sense deeply
resonant with, as well as synchronized to, Chinese developments).
Margaret Thatcher assumed leadership of the British Conservative
Party in February 1975, and Ronald Reagan declared his presidential
candidacy in November of the same year. The English-speaking left
would soon be traumatized by a paradoxical ‘conservative
revolution’ that extracted relentless energy from the very
constriction of political possibility. What could not happen quickly
became the primary social dynamo, as articulated by the Thatcherite
maxim: “There is no alternative” (= option zero). The auto-
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immolation of utopia had transmuted into a new beginning.

Whilst the era of not restarting from zero can be dated to
approximate accuracy (from AD n – 1975), and had thus in fact
restarted from zero, in profoundly surreptitious fashion, its broad
consequence was to spread and entrench (Gregorian) Calendric
Dominion ever more widely and deeply. The prevailing combination
of radically innovative globalization (both economic and
technological) with prudential social conservatism made such an
outcome inevitable. Symbolic re-commencement wasn’t on
anybody’s agenda, and even as the postmodernists declared the end
of ‘grand narratives’, the first planetary-hegemonic narrative
structure in history was consolidating its position of uncontested
monopoly. Globalization was the story of the world, with Gregorian
dating as its grammar.
Orphaned by ideological exhaustion, stigmatized beyond
recovery by its association with the Khmer Rouge, and radically
maladapted to the reigning spirit of incremental pragmatism, by the
late 20th century Year Zero was seemingly off the agenda,
unscheduled, and on its own. Time, then, for something truly
insidious.
On January 18, 1985, Usenet poster Spencer L. Bolles called
attention to a disturbing prospect that had driven a friend into
insomnia:
112
I have a friend that raised an interesting question that I

immediately tried to prove wrong. He is a programmer and
has this notion that when we reach the year 2000, computers
will not accept the new date. Will the computers assume that
it is 1900, or will it even cause a problem? I violently opposed
this because it seemed so meaningless. Computers have
entered into existence during this century, and has software,
specifically accounting software, been prepared for this
turnover? If this really comes to pass and my friend is correct,
what will happen? Is it anything to be concerned about?
Bolles’ anonymous friend was losing sleep over what would come to
be known as the ‘Y2K problem’. In order to economize on memory in
primitive early-generation computers, a widely-adopted convention
recorded dates by two digits. The millennium and century were
ignored, since it was assumed that software upgrades would have
made the problem moot by the time it became imminent, close to the
‘rollover’ (of century and millennium) in the year AD 2000. Few had
anticipated that the comparative conservatism of software legacies
(relative to hardware development) would leave the problem
entirely unaddressed even as the crisis date approached.
In the end, Y2K was a non-event that counted for nothing,
although its preparation costs, stimulus effects (especially on
outsourcing to the emerging Indian software industry), and panic
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potential were all considerable. Its importance to the history of the

calendar – whilst still almost entirely virtual – is extremely far-
reaching.
Y2K resulted from the accidental — or ‘spontaneous’ —
emergence of a new calendrical order within the globalized
technosphere. Its Year Zero, 0K (= 1900), was devoid of all parochial
commemoration or ideological intention, even as it was propagated
through increasingly computerized communication channels to a
point of ubiquity that converged, asymptotically, with that attained
by Western Calendric Dominion over the complete sweep of world
history. The 20th century had been recoded, automatically, as the
1st century of the Cybernetic Continuum. If Y2K had completed its
reformatting of the planetary sphere-drive in the way some (few
deluded hysterics) had expected, the world would now be
approaching the end of the year 0K+111, settled securely in its first
arithmetically-competent universal calendar, and historically
oriented by the same system of electronic computation that had
unconsciously decided upon the origin of positive time. Instead, the
‘millennium bug’ was fixed, and theological date-counting prolonged
its dominance, uninterrupted (after much ado about nothing). Most
probably, the hegemonic cultural complex encrusted in Calendric
Dominion never even noticed the cybernetic insurrection it had
crushed.
Between 0K and Y2K, the alpha and omega of soft apocalypse,
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there is not only a century of historical time, but also an inversion of

attitude. Time departs 0K, as from any point of origin, accumulating
elapsed duration through its count. Y2K, in contrast, was a
destination, which time approached, as if to an apocalyptic horizon.
Whilst not registered as a countdown, it might easily have been. The
terminus was precisely determined (no less than the origin), and the
strictest formulation of the millennium bug construed the rollover
point as an absolute limit to recordable time, beyond which no future
was even imaginable. For any hypothetical Y2K-constrained
computer intelligence, denied access to dating procedures that over-
spilled its two-digit year registry, residual time shrank towards zero
as the millennium event loomed. Once all the nines are reached, time
is finished, at the threshold of eternity, where beginning and end are
indistinguishable (in 0).
“0K, it’s time to wrap this puppy up.” – Revelation 6:14
(next, and last, the end (at last))
October 28, 2011
(Part
art 6)
Countdown
At the beginning of the 21st century, global cultural hegemony is
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on the move. For roughly 500 years, Western — and later more
specifically Anglophone — societies and agencies have
predominantly guided the development of the current world system.
As their economic pre-eminence wanes, their cultural and political
influence can be expected to undergo a comparable decline. In the
early stages of the coming transition, however, the terminal form
of active Western cultural hegemony – multicultural political
correctness (MPC) – is well-positioned to manage the terms of the
retreat. By reconfiguring basic Western religious and political
themes as a systematic sensitization to unwarranted privilege, MPC
is able to distance itself from its own heritage and to live on, in the
resentment of ‘the other’, as if it were the neutral adjudicator of
disputes it had no part in.
When MPC turns its attention to the Gregorian (or Western
Christian) Calendar it is, of course, appalled. But it is also stuck. What
could be more insensitive to cultural diversity than an ecumenical
date-counting system, rooted in the ethnic peculiarities of Greek-
phase Abrahamic religion, which unapologetically celebrates its
triumph in the uncompromising words Anno Domini? Yet global
convergence demands a standard, no alternative calendar has
superior claims to neutrality, and, in any case, the inertial juggernaut
of large-scale complex systems – ‘lock-in’ or ‘path-dependency’ –
pose barriers to switching that seem effectively insuperable. The
solution proposed by MPC to this conundrum is so feeble that it
116
amounts to the completion of Gregorian Calendric Dominion, which

is to be simultaneously rephrased (politely) and acknowledged in its
irresistible universality as the articulation of a ‘Common Era’.
MPC supplants problems of cultural power with obfuscatory
etiquette, and in absolute terms, its smug dishonesty is difficult to
like. As a relative phenomenon, however, its appeal is more obvious,
since radical ‘solutions’ to Gregorian Calendric Dominion, re-
beginning at Year Zero, have generally reverted to mass murder.
Lacking persuasive claims to a new, fundamental, and universally
acknowledged historical break, they have substituted terror for true
global singularity, as if fate could be blotted out in blood.
Since resentment gets nowhere, whether in its mild (MPC) or
harsh (killing fields) variants, it is worth entertaining alternative
possibilities. These begin with attention to real cultural differences,
rather than mere ‘cultural diversity’ as it presents itself to the
vacuously MPC-processed mind. Soon after Shanghai had been
selected as host city for World Expo 2010 (in December 2002),
countdowns started. For Westerners, these probably had space-age
associations, triggering memories of the countdowns to ‘blast off’
that were popularized by the Apollo Program, and subsequent
science fiction media. It is far from impossible that Chinese shared
in these evocations, although they were also able to access a far
deeper – which is to say civilizationally fundamental – reservoir of
reference. That is because Chinese time typically counts down,
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Reignition
modeled, as it is, on the workings of water clocks. The Chinese

language systematically describes previous as ‘above’ (shang) and
next as ‘beneath’ (xia), conforming to an intuition of time as descent.
Time is counted down as it runs out, from an elevated hydraulic body
into the sunken future that receives it.
Duration not only flows, it drips. Perhaps, then, an ‘orientalization’
of calendric perception and organization is something that
significantly exceeds a simple (or even exceedingly difficult)
renegotiation of beginnings. Re-beginning might be considered
largely irrelevant to the problem, at least when compared to the
re-orientation from an original to a terminal Year Zero. Whilst not
exactly a transition in the direction of time, such a change would
involve a transition in the direction of time intuition, simultaneously
surpassing the wildest ambitions of calendrical re-origination and
subtly organizing itself ‘within the pores’ of the established order
of time. As modeled by the 2010 Expo, and previously by Y2K, the
switch to countdown time does not frontally challenge, or seek to
straightforwardly replace, the calendric order in being. Rather than
counting in the same way, from a different place, it counts in a
different way, within the framework of time already in place. It is
a revolution with ‘Chinese characteristics’, which is to say: a
surreptitious insurgency, changing what something already was,
rather than replacing it with something else.
Both the 2010 Expo and Y2K also reveal the extreme difficulty of
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any such transition, since a futural Year Zero, or countdown calendar,

must navigate the arrow of time and its cognitive asymmetry
(between knowledge of the past and of the future), presupposing
exact, confident, and consensual prediction.
That is why it approximates so closely to conservative
acceptance. If the countdown is to be sure of arriving at the
scheduled terminus, the destination ‘event’ must already be a date
(rather than an empirical ‘happening’). Nothing will suffice except a
strictly arithmetical, rigorously certain inevitability, as inescapably
pre-destined as the year 2000, or 2010, which cannot but come.
From the perspective of the countdown calendar, that is what
(Gregorian) Calendric Dominion will have been for. It is an
opportunity to program an inevitable arrival.
But when? The sheer passage (fall) of time has assured that the
opportunity for calendric revolution presented by the Y2K
‘millennium bug’ has been irretrievably missed (so that AD 1900 ≠
0). The same is true of World Expo 2010, an event without pretense
to be anything beyond a miniature ‘practice’ model of global-
temporal singularity. As for the real (techno-commercial) Singularity
– that is an imprecise historical prediction, at once controversial and
incapable of supporting exact prediction.
A more appropriate prospect is suggested by the science fiction
writer Greg Bear, in his novel Queen of Angels, set in anticipation
of the mid-21st century ‘binary millennium’ (2048 = 2¹¹). This is a
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formally suitable, purely calendric ‘event’, deriving its significance

from arithmetic rather than ideology or uncertain prophecy. He even
envisages it as a moment of insurgent revolution, when artificial
intelligence arises surreptitiously, and unnoticed. Yet arbitrariness
impairs this date (why the 11th power of 2?), and no serious attempt
is made to explain its rise to exceptional cultural prominence.
If an adjusted global culture is to converge upon a countdown
date, it must be obvious, intrinsically compelling, and ideologically
uncontroversial, in other words, spontaneously plausible. The target
that World Expo 2010 suggests (anagrammatically) is AD 2100, a
date that performs the final stages of a countdown (2, 1, 0 …).
Reinforcing this indication, the Y2K ‘millennium bug’ threatened to
re-set the date of AD 2000 to AD 1900, which would have tacitly
reiterated itself at the exact end of the 21st century. If it continues to
chatter about the calendar, perhaps this is how.
The impending Mayan Apocalypse, scheduled for 21 / 12 / 2012,
offers a preliminary chance to indulge in a festival of countdown
numbers – like 2010, it looks a lot like another digital singularity
simulation. If the morning of December 22nd, 2012, leaves the world
with nothing worse than a hangover, it could gradually settle into a
new sense of the Years Remaining (to the end of all the time that
counts, or the 21st century).
AD 2100 = 0 YR
AD 2099 = 1 YR
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AD 2098 = 2 YR
AD 2096 = 4 YR
AD 2092 = 8 YR
AD 2084 = 16 YR
AD 2068 = 32 YR
AD 2036 = 64 YR
AD 1972 = 128 YR
AD 1844 = 256 YR
AD 1588 = 512 YR
AD 1076 = 1024 YR
AD 52 = 2048 YR
It’s difficult to anticipate what it looks like from the other side.
November 4, 2011
Twisted Times (P
(Part
art 1)
Abe: “You should go to China.”
Joe: “I’m going to France.”
Abe: “I’m from the future. You should go to China.”
— Looper
In Rian Johnson’s Looper (2012), the city of Shanghai reaches
back across 30 years to draw people in. Over these decades it feeds
itself based on what it is to become: the city of the future. When
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compared to this, everything else that happens in the movie is mere

distraction, but we won’t get there for a while.
Strangely enough, ‘everything else’ was to have been simply
everything. Joe was going to Paris, and Shanghai wasn’t even in the
picture. That was before Chinese authorities told Johnson that they
would cover the cost of the Shanghai shoot, making the film a co-
production, with convenient access to the Chinese cinema market.
The Old World stood no chance.
For American audiences, Looper played into the trend of opinion,
through its contrasting urban visions of a grim, deteriorated, crime-
wracked Kansas City and the splendors of a ‘futuristic’ Shanghai. The
movie doesn’t answer the question: How did America lose the
future? It nevertheless accepts the premise, as something close to a
pre-installed fact.
Yet if Looper confirmed the direction of American popular
attitudes, it marked a shift on the Chinese side. Only a few years
before, Western media reported with amusement that the Chinese
broadcast authorities had banned time-travel fictions from the
nation’s airwaves, apparently concerned that the country’s citizens
were defecting into a pre-republican past, under the influence of
narratives that “casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird
plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition,
fatalism and reincarnation.” Now a time-travel story was being
actively recruited to close an urban promotion loop, linking
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Shanghai’s international image to a portrayal of retro-chronic

anomaly. The Shanghai time-travel industry had arrived.
Before proceeding to a multi-installment investigation of
Topological Meta-History tangled time-circuitry, which ‘time-travel’
illustrates only as a crude dramatization, it is worth pausing over
Looper’s ‘monstrous and weird plot’. Time-travel has a uniquely
intimate, and seductively morbid, relationship to both fiction and
history, because it scrambles the very principle of narrative order in
profundity. If Western media authorities assumed the same role of
cultural custodianship that has been traditional among their Chinese
peers, they too might have been compelled to denounce a genre that
flagrantly subverted the foundational principle of Aristotelian
poetics: that any story worthy of veneration should have a beginning,
a middle, and an end. If time-travel can occur, it seems (at least
initially) that order is an illusion, so that fiction and reality switch
places.
From a conservative perspective, therefore, comfort is to be
found in the blatant absurdity of time-travel stories (insofar as this
can be confined to a reductio ad absurdam of the time-loop structure
itself, rather than spreading outwards as the index of primordial
cosmic disorder). In this respect, Looper is a model of
tranquillization.
The Looper time-travel procedure is monopolized by a criminal
syndicate, which utilizes it exclusively for one purpose: the disposal
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of awkward individuals, who are returned 30 years in time to be

murdered, execution-style, by professional killers (yes: “This sounds
pretty stupid”). The exorbitant absurdity of this scenario might
exempt it from further critical attention, were it not the symptom of
more interesting things, and the doorway onto others.
The symptom first: Non-linear time-structures are shaken to
pieces almost immediately, once they allow for the transportation
of stuff backwards in time. Looper economics exposes this with
particular clarity. The killers of 2044 are paid in bars of silver for
‘ordinary’ hits, and in gold for ‘closing loops’ or executing their retro-
deposited older selves. The bars are sent back from 2074, and
circulated through an internal exchange operation, which swaps
bullion for (Chinese) paper currency. Whilst this crude time-circuit
is presented as a payments system, the process described actually
functions as an under-performing money-making machine. By using
it, one realizes the ultimate Austrian economic nightmare by printing
precious metals, because an ingot sent backwards in time is doubled,
or added to its ‘previous’ instance (which already exists in the past).
Mechanical re-iteration of the process would guarantee exponential
growth for free. We’re not told what the 2074 criminal organization
sees as its core business, but it must be seriously lucrative — exciting
enough, in any case, to distract them from the fact that their murder-
fodder machine is really a bullion fast-breeder. They could have
shoveled it full of diamonds, doubling their fortune each ‘time’, but
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they decided instead to duplicate human nuisances in 2044. The

movie asks us quietly to suspend our impertinent disbelief, and trust
that they know what they’re doing.
Mike Dickison’s excellent Looper commentary succinctly
describes this implicit procedure for unlimited wealth, among other
incredibly missed opportunities. It surely has to count as a criticism
of the movie that its rickety framework of plot coherence is
dependent upon the imbecility of its significant agents, who stumble
blindly past the prospect of total power in their ruthless pursuit of
a miserable racket. This absurdity, as already noted, serves a
conservative purpose: The potential of the loop has to be suppressed
to sustain narrative drama and intelligibility. The basic flaw of the
movie is that far too much was given, before most of it was clumsily
taken away.
In the absence of controlling censors, Johnson’s story represses
itself, messily, comically, and unconvincingly. “This time travel crap,
just fries your brain like a egg,” the elder Joe (Bruce Willis) confesses
on Johnson’s behalf. Unleashed time-travel is an anti-plot,
inconsistent with dramatic presentation. (If you’re not willing to take
Aristotle’s word for that, watching Primer a few dozen times should
sort you out.) Narrative wreckage is what time-travel does.
Time-travel absurdity is a choice. It is a decision taken, at least
semi-deliberately, for conservative or protective reasons, because
the alternative would be ruin. Even the representation of (radically
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nonlinear) time anomaly by ‘time-travel’ is indicative of this, since

it is programmed by the preservation of a narrative function (the
‘time-traveler’), regardless of conceptual expense. Far rather the
incoherent jumble of matter duplication, time-line proliferation,
immunized strands of personal memory, and the arbitrary inhibition
of potentialities, than utter narrative disorder, fate loops, the
annihilation of agency, and the emergence of an alien consistency,
subverting all historical meaning.
If the mask of time-travel has slipped enough to expose some hint
of the intolerable tangle beneath, we’re ready to take the next step …
(This will help.)
February 17, 2013
Extrop
Extropyy
What greater calamity can a neologism inherit than a techno-hippy
paternity? Such a fate, apparently, induces even other techno-
hippies to skirt around it (whilst repeating it almost exactly). But it
needs to be said, whether through gritted teeth or not, that ‘extropy’
is a great word, and close to an indispensable one.
Extropy, or local entropy reduction, is — quite simply — what it is
for something to work. The entire techno-science of entropy, on its
practical (cybernetic) side, is nothing but extropy generation. There
126
is no rigorous conception of functionality that really bypasses it. The

closest approximation to objective value that will ever be found
already has a name, and ‘extropy’ is it.
The importance of this term to the investigation of time is brought
into focus by the work of Sean Carroll (although, of course, he never
uses it). If the directionality or ‘arrow’ of time is understood as
Eddington proposed, through rising global entropy (or disorder), as
anticipated by the second law of thermodynamics, local extropy
poses an intriguing question.
Carroll’s discussion is directed towards his sense of the ultimate
temporal and cosmological problem: the low entropy state of the
early universe (assumed but not explained by prevailing cosmo-
physics). Given this intellectual momentum, the problem of local
negative-entropy production (extropy) is little more than a
distraction, or a spurious objection to the conceptual scaffolding he
presents. He comments:
The Second Law doesn’t forbid decreases in entropy in open
systems — by putting in the work, you are able to tidy up your room,
decreasing its entropy but still increasing the entropy of the whole
universe (you make noise, burn calories, etc.). Nor is it in any way
incompatible with evolution or complexity or any such thing.
The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the
direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the
difference of the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy —
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through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist

— describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact
more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in
‘inverted’ time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of
time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed
perspective)?
Whatever the conclusion, it is clear that entropy and extropy have
opposing time-signatures, so that time-reversal is a relatively banal
cosmological fact. ‘We’ inhabit a bubble of backwards time (whoever
we are), whilst immersed in a cosmic environment which runs
overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. If reality is harsh and
strange, that’s why.
February 20, 2013
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CHAPTER ONE - THE BIGGEST PICTURE
Big Bang — an appreciation

A few reasons to love the Big Bang:
— Time turns edgy again.
— The steady state model proved unsustainable — the most
exquisite irony ever?
— Physical theories now have cosmic dates. For instance, the still-
elusive unifying theory of quantum gravitation corresponds to the
Planck Epoch, when the universe was still far smaller than an atomic
nucleus, compelling gravity to operate at the quantum scale.
Similarly, particle accelerator technology becomes deep time
regression.
— The Planck Epoch is really wild: “During the Planck era, the
Universe can be best described as a quantum foam of 10 dimensions
containing Planck length sized black holes continuously being
created and annihilated with no cause or effect. In other words, try
not to think about this era in normal terms.”
— The void animates. Sten Odenwald quotes UCSB physicist
Frank Wilczek: “The reason that there is something instead of
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nothing is that nothing is unstable”.
February 26, 2013
Cosmological Infancy
There is a ‘problem’ that has been nagging at me for a long time –
which is that there hasn’t been a long time. It’s Saturday, with no
one around, or getting drunk, or something, so I’ll run it past you.
Cosmology seems oddly childish.
An analogy might help. Among all the reasons for super-
sophisticated atheistic materialists to deride Abrahamic
creationists, the most arithmetically impressive is the whole James
Ussher 4004 BC thing. The argument is familiar to everyone: 6,027
years — Ha!
Creationism is a topic for another time. The point for now is just:
13.7 billion years – Ha! Perhaps this cosmological consensus
estimate for the age of the universe is true. I’m certainly not going to
pit my carefully-rationed expertise in cosmo-physics against it. But
it’s a stupidly short amount of time. If this is reality, the joke’s on
us. Between Ussher’s mid-17th century estimate and (say) Hawking’s
late 20th century one, the difference is just six orders of magnitude.
It’s scarcely worth getting out of bed for. Or the crib.
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For anyone steeped in Hindu Cosmology – which locates us 1.56

x 10^14 years into the current Age of Brahma – or Lovecraftian
metaphysics, with its vaguer but abysmally extended eons, the
quantity of elapsed cosmic time, according to the common
understanding of our present scientific establishment, is cause for
claustrophobia. Looking backward, we are sealed in a small room,
with the wall of the original singularity pressed right up against us.
(Looking forward, things are quite different, and we will get to that.)
There are at least three ways in which the bizarre youthfulness of
the universe might be imagined:
1. Consider first the disconcerting lack of proportion between
space and time. The universe contains roughly 100 billion galaxies,
each a swirl of 100 billion stars. That makes Sol one of 10^22 stars in
the cosmos, but it has lasted for something like a third of the life of
the universe. Decompose the solar system and the discrepancy only
becomes more extreme. The sun accounts for 99.86% of the system’s
mass, and the gas giants incorporate 99% of the remainder, yet the
age of the earth is only fractionally less than that of the sun. Earth is
a cosmic time hog. In space it is next to nothing, but in time it extends
back through a substantial proportion of the Stelliferous Era, so close
to the origin of the universe that it is belongs to the very earliest
generations of planetary bodies. Beyond it stretch incomprehensible
immensities, but before it there is next to nothing.
2. Compared to the intensity of time (backward) extension is of
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vanishing insignificance. The unit of Planck time – corresponding to

the passage of a photon across a Planck length — is about 5.4 x
10^-44 seconds. If there is a true instant, that is it. A year consists
of less the 3.2 x 10^7 seconds, so cosmological consensus estimates
that there have been approximately 432 339 120 000 000 000
seconds since the Big Bang, which for our purposes can be
satisfactorily rounded to 4.3 x 10^17. The difference between a
second and the age of the universe is smaller that that between a
second and a Planck Time tick by nearly 27 orders of magnitude. In
other words, if a Planck Time-sensitive questioner asked “When did
the Big Bang happen?” and you answered “Just now” — in clock time
— you’d be almost exactly right. If you had been asked to identify
a particular star from among the entire stellar population of the
universe, and you picked it out correctly, your accuracy would still be
hazier by 5 orders of magnitude. Quite obviously, there haven’t been
enough seconds since the Big Bang to add up to a serious number –
less than one for every 10,000 stars in the universe.
3. Isotropy gets violated by time orientation like a Detroit muni-
bond investor. In a universe dominated by dark energy – like ours
– expansion lasts forever. The Stelliferous Era is predicted to last
for roughly 100 trillion years, which is over 7,000 times the present
age of the universe. Even the most pessimistic interpretation of the
Anthropic Principle, therefore, places us only a fractional distance
from the beginning of time. The Degenerate Era, post-dating star-
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formation, then extends out to 10^40 years, by the end of which time
all baryonic matter will have decayed, and even the most radically
advanced forms of cosmic intelligence will have found existence
becoming seriously challenging. Black holes then dominate out to
10^60 years, after which the Dark Era begins, lasting a long time.
(Decimal exponents become unwieldy for these magnitudes, making
more elaborate modes of arithmetical notation expedient. We need
not pursue it further.) The take-away: the principle of Isotropy holds
that we should not find ourselves anywhere special in the universe,
and yet we do – right at the beginning. More implausibly still, we
are located at the very beginning of an infinity (although anthropic
selection might crop this down to merely preposterous
improbability).
Intuitively, this is all horribly wrong, although intuitions have no
credible authority, and certainly provide no grounds for contesting
rigorously assembled scientific narratives. Possibly — I should
concede most probably — time is simply ridiculous, not to say
profoundly insulting. We find ourselves glued to the very edge of the
Big Bang, as close to neo-natal as it is arithmetically possible to be.
That’s odd, isn’t it?
ADDED: Numerical escalation from John Derbyshire.
ADDED: Alrenous has a different Big Bang issue.
July 20, 2013
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Space is Big
… even just the solar system. ‘Awesome’ is a word destroyed by
casual over-use, but I’m groping for an alternative right now, and not
finding it. This has to be one of the best uses of a website out there —
meaning: really out there.
(Via.)
January 17, 2015
Climate of Uncertainty
Natural cycles being what they are, there’s bound to be another mini-
Ice Age (of the Maunder Minimum-type) eventually, and quite
possibly soon. The implications for climate science, climate politics,
and much beyond, are huge. Clean data on systemic effects are not
accessible within history. That means all vulgar attempts to read out
the effects of anthropic interventions from the historical record are
doomed to fail, until perfect understanding of confounding rhythms
are fully understood — basically, indefinitely. (Throw in chaos theory
and other sources of epistemological pessimism here.) No one
seriously thinks that a globally-coordinated ‘precautionary’ policy
stance viz anthropogenic warming is constructible during a mini-Ice
Age (do they?).
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The consequence: Climate politics could — in reality — be a fairly

remote science fiction scenario. By the time its opportunity comes
around, far more will have been decided than is being allowed for.
ADDED:
Global warming is settled science, so I'm supposed to ignore

this, right? But is there a good reason why? http://t.co/
SCbhqYwE7M
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) July 13, 2015
July 13, 2015
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CHAPTER TWO - THE ABSTRA

ABSTRACT
CT FORM
OF TIME
Time Spir
Spiral
al
In the Author’s Note to Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones (2006,
subtitled ‘A Journey Between China’s Past and Present’), it is
explained that:
The main chapters of this book are arranged chronologically, but
the short sections labeled ‘artifacts’ are not. They reflect a deeper
sense of time — the ways in which people make sense of history after
it has receded farther into the past.
As time advances, the past recedes. Modernity, however, is more
than that. It is the excavation of the past through acceleration into
the future, a process of discovery, reclamation, and dilation, through
which the past is explosively expanded. As Hessler realizes, the
Oracle Bones, indissolubly binding the recovery of China’s deep
history to its activation of modernity, provide an exemplary
illustration of this.
Yet modernity, as consolidated upon European foundations, has
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been dismissive of Chinese history, seeing only scale without

pattern:
In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent
of the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead,
emperor succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as
wallpaper.
In a Nanjing museum gift shop, Hessler glimpses an alternative
model:
At one Nanjing museum, I bought a poster labeled OUTLINE OF
ANCIENT CHINESE HISTORY. The poster featured a timeline
twisted into the shape of a spiral. Everything started in the center, at
a tiny point identified as ‘Yuanmou Ape-man.’ After Yuanmou Ape-
man (approximately 1.7 million years ago), the timeline passed
through Peking Man and then made an abrupt turn. By the Xia
dynasty, the spiral had completed one full circle. The Shang and the
Zhou dynasties wrapped up a second revolution. The spiral got
bigger with each turn, as if picking up speed. Whenever something
ended — a dynasty, a warring state — the spiral was marked with
a line and a black X, and then something new took its place. There
weren’t any branches or dead ends. From Yuanmou Ape-man, it took
three turns of the spiral to reach the revolution of 1911, where the
timeline finally broke the cycle, straightened out, and pointed
directly up and off the page.
Whether folding the historical time line, or expanding a snail shell,
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the spiral synthesizes repetition and growth. It describes a cyclic

escalation that escapes — or precedes — the antagonism between
tradition and progress, elucidating restoration as something other
than a simple return.
This is a matter of ineluctable importance, because the history
of modernity is rapidly becoming Chinese, and Chinese history is
not meandering ‘wallpaper’ but Confucian Restoration, conforming
to three great waves, each a turn of the spiral, or Gyre. Following
China’s classical era, and the Song Dynasty rebirth of native
philosophical tradition, the third Confucian epoch, or second
Confucian Restoration, is underway today, coinciding exactly with
the renaissance of Global Modernity (as ‘Modernity 2.0’). As future
and past evolve — or involve — together, the time-spiral is our guide.
July 29, 2013
138
T-shirt slogans (#13)
E. Antony Gray triggered a Twitter storm about Greer and the

tension between cyclic-repetitive and linear-progressive time. (I’ve
no idea how to link the discussion that subsequently erupted.) Since
the integration, or diagonal, between cycle and flight is not hard to
find, it provides the perfect opportunity for a time-spiral T-shirt:
Cy
Cyclic
clic Escalation
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If this looks like the abstract cybergothic shape of NRx, it is only

to be expected.
July 11, 2014
Quote notes (#7)

Some unusually brilliant Druidic prophecy from John Michael Greer:
Whether the crisis is contained by federal loan guarantees and
bank nationalizations that keep farms, factories, and stores supplied
with the credit they need, by the repudiation of debts and the
issuance of a new currency, by martial law and the government
140
seizure of unused acreage, or by ordinary citizens cobbling together

new systems of exchange in a hurry, as happened in Argentina,
Russia, and other places where the economy suddenly went to
pieces, the crisis will be contained. The negative feedback here is
provided by the simple facts that people are willing to do almost
anything to put food on the table, governments are willing to do
even more to stay in power, and in hundreds of previous crises, their
actions have proven more than sufficient to stop the positive
feedback loops of economic crisis in their tracks, and stabilize the
situation at some level.
None of this means the crisis will be easy to get through, nor does
it mean that the world that emerges once the rubble stops bouncing
and the dust settles will be anything like as prosperous, as
comfortable, or as familiar as the one we have today. That’s true of all
three of the situations I’ve sketched out in this post. While the next
round of crisis along the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall
will likely be over by 2070 of so, living through the interval between
then and now will probably have more than a little in common with
living through the First World War, the waves of political and social
crises that followed it, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism,
followed by the Second World War and its aftermath—and this time
the United States is unlikely to be sheltered from the worst impacts
of crisis, as it was between 1914 and 1954. [Read the whole thing]
(Combining large-scale historical vision, cybernetic theory, and
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extraordinary native intelligence, Greer is one of the most important

voices on the reality-relevant blogosphere. His model of Catabolic
Collapse, in particular, is an indispensable reference. Outside in will
be visiting his ideas repeatedly over the next few weeks.)
July 10, 2013
The Shape of Time (P

(Part
art 1)
Upon learning that America has an Arch-Druid, it would be only
natural to make some assumptions about his beliefs, and cautious
guesses would probably be right. The commitments of a religion that
avoid appeal to the supernatural, one might expect, would be
characteristically down-to-earth, ecological, conservative (in the
determinedly lower-case and old-fashioned sense), practical, and
empirical. At its most intellectually abstract, and also most (quietly)
mystical, druidism would accept the ultimate complicity of all reality
with a pattern of change that is at once sensible and insurmountable,
multi-leveled, subtle, and all-enveloping: the cycle.
John Michael Greer, author of the Arch-Druid Report, eschews
spiritual obscurity, at least in public. His persona as a blogger is that
of a calm, lucid, and exceptionally insightful cycle theorist. In the
strongest and most ineluctable sense, cyclicity is the norm, from
which nothing truly, or sustainably, departs. A cultural formation that
142
loses this druidic grounding, by attaching itself to a setting which

would break the cycle, thereby destines itself to a fall, or reversal of
fortune – expressing the inevitable reversion to sustainability within
a greater wheel of nature and history. Balance is less a moral
imperative than a cosmic necessity, and since sustainability cannot
be avoided, it can only also be advised.
As an analytical method, druidism is a kind of cybernetics,
reflecting the mainstream orientation of the discipline. Negative
feedback, which adjusts towards stability, fetches back deviations,
to produce normal cycles. Perturbations are canceled within natural
rhythms. Destabilizing, self-accentuating, positive feedback, in
contrast, incarnates the unnatural, and is thus – from a certain
perspective – unreal. Self-reinforcing processes accelerate to a
crisis, and then collapse, describing a wave, or fluctuation, at a
greater scale. What seems like an irrecoverable deviation has its
counterpart within a larger whole, matching it exactly in one-
sidedness, or violence, and providing the complementary reversion
that restores equilibrium. A broken cycle is part of a more
encompassing rhythm, partially perceived. Druidic naturalism insists
that everything is eventually fetched back, because there is nowhere
‘else’ to flee. The law of the earth is ultimately inviolable:
… positive feedback [is] extremely rare in the real world, because
systems with positive feedback promptly destroy themselves —
imagine a thermostat that responded to rising temperatures by
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heating things up further until the house burns down. Negative

feedback, by contrast, is everywhere.
At the largest social scale, pathological deviations, and their
reversions, are exemplified by the rise and fall of civilizations.
Historical cycle theorists, such as Spengler and Toynbee, capture the
recurrent pattern in its essentials. Cultures and all of their
component parts, including historiography itself, are enveloped and
directed by these great rhythms:
Every literate urban society, Spengler argued, followed the same
trajectory from an original folk religion rich in myths, through the
rise of intellectual theology, the birth of rationalism, the gradual
dissolution of the religious worldview into rational materialism, and
then the gradual disintegration of rational materialism into a radical
skepticism that ends by dissolving itself; thereafter ethical
philosophies for the intellectuals and resurgent folk religion for the
masses provide the enduring themes for the civilization to come.
Such patterns offer the material for what Greer calls
‘morphology’ which, on the model (especially) of 18th and 19th
century biology, extracts regular, comparable shapes from the
confusion of varied particulars. Among the objects of morphological
investigation are deep cultural structures, inextricable from religious
ideas (in the widest sense), which pre-reflectively organize the
experience of historical time. Globalized Occidental civilization
(“modern industrial culture”), Greer argues, is characterized by two
144
dominant time shapes, at once twinned and aligned, which resonate

with an unsustainable, positive-feedback dynamic in their
pathological denial of balance, or eventual reversion.
Before examining these twinned shapes of modern time, some
broader context can generate ambient illumination. Greer
introduces a variety of time shapes from non-industrial cultures (and
ecologies), including the changeless ‘dream time’ of hunter-gatherer
societies, and the great cycles of pre-modern Chinese tradition.
Indeed, his sketch of the classical Chinese time-shape appears oddly,
even fetchingly, druidic:
The basic theory of the Chinese science of time is that events are
guided by many different cycles, some faster and some slower, some
influencing one dimension of human life and some shaping another.
The cycle of the seasons was one of these; the cycle of human life was
another; the cycle of the rise and fall of dynasties was a third; there
were many more, each with its own period and typical sequence of
events. Just as no two years had exactly the same weather on exactly
the same days, no two repetitions of any other cycle were identical,
but common patterns allowed the events of one repetition to be
more or less predicted by a sufficiently broad knowledge of earlier
examples. On a much broader scale, all cycles of every kind could
be understood as expressions of a single abstract pattern of cyclic
change, which was explored in the classic Chinese textbook of time
theory, the I Ching — in English, the Book of Change.
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The most jarring contrast with the progressive model of time,

however, is found much closer to it, both in cultural proximity and
obvious ecological complementarity. It is laid out by Hesiod in his
Works and Days, where it is articulated as a grinding stepwise
decline through successive ages, each determined by its
deterioration relative to the age before.
Hesiod’s abnormality – or ours – emerges starkly from an overlap.
As modern historiography progresses, expanding its purchase ever
more deeply into archeology and paleo-anthropology, it discovers
ancient societies ‘rising’ from the new stone age (‘neolithic’) to the
bronze age, and then later, with the advance of metallurgy, entering
the iron age, with improved weapons and tools. The passage from
bronze to iron is an obvious leap forward, corresponding to a basic
threshold of cultural maturation, lock
locked
ed in to the history of the world
by a progressive technological ratchet. How disconcerting, then, to
find this same sequence repeated by Hesiod, but with inverse sign,
in a degenerative series of ages — Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron –
that proceed through increments of coarsening, from the most noble
metal, to the most base.
From our deeply-entrenched, progressive perspective, any
historical meta-narrative structured by relentless decline appears
exotically strange. The same does not hold within Greer’s ecological
framework, which couples deviations to reversions within long
cycles, so that a downward slope is no more abnormal than a
146
persistent incline. Our historical optimism finds itself ecologically

relativized by a story that has no less confidence in its fears than we
have in our long-consolidated hopes. The explanatory background
that Greer supplies – themed by soil erosion — has sufficient
directionality to match, and to carry, Hesiod’s shape of time:
Two thousand years before Hesiod, prehistoric Greece had been
the home of a lively assortment of village cultures making the slow
transition from polished stone tools to bronze. On that foundation
more complex societies rose, borrowing heavily from contemporary
high cultures in the Middle East, and culminating in the monumental
architecture and literate palace bureaucracies of the Mycenean age.
Those of my readers who have some sense of the rhythms of history
will already know what followed: too much clearcutting and
intensive farming of the fragile Greek soils, made worse by the
importation of farming methods better suited to flat Mesopotamian
valleys than easily eroded Greek hills, triggered an ecological crisis;
most of the topsoil of Mycenean Greece ended up at the bottom of
the Aegean Sea, where it can still be found in core samples; warfare,
migration, and population collapse followed in the usual manner, as
Mycenean society stumbled down the curve of its own Long Descent.
Greer’s readers have been prepared to recognize “its own” as a
pointer to our own – another “Long Descent” anticipated by an
ecological grounding pattern, this time set by the energy-availability
curve of Peak Oil. This forecast is a topic for another occasion. For
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now, our concern is more abstract, indifferent to the specific

mechanism of civilizational limitation, and attentive solely to Greer’s
claim that the denial of historical cyclicity is a form of unwarranted
exceptionalism, founded materially in an ecological boost-phase,
and reasonably encapsulated in the notorious bubble slogan this
time it’s different:
There’s a wry amusement to be had by thinking through the
implications of this constantly repeated claim. If our society was in
fact shaking off the burdens of the past and breaking new ground
with every minute that goes by, as believers in progress like to claim,
wouldn’t it be more likely that the theory of historical cycles would
be challenged each time it appears with dazzlingly new, innovative
responses that no one had ever imagined before? Instead, in an irony
Nietzsche would have relished, the claim that history can’t repeat
itself endlessly repeats itself, in what amounts to an eternal return
of the insistence that there is no eternal return. What’s more, those
who claim that it’s different this time seem blissfully unaware that
anyone has made the same claim before them, and if this is pointed
out to them, they insist—often with quite some heat—that what
they’re saying has nothing whatsoever to do with all the other times
the same argument was used to make the same point down through
the years.
It bears repeating that the belief in progress, and the equal and
opposite belief in apocalypse, are narratives about the unknowable.
148
Both claim that the past has nothing to say about the future, that
something is about to happen that has never happened before and
that can’t be judged on the basis of any previous event.
Neither progress nor apocalypse, Greer contends, are time-
shapes well-suited to the realistic evaluation of their ends. [More on
that next]
July 29, 2013

(Part
art 2)
In the first part of this series, we introduced John Michael Greer’s
‘druidic’ framework for the evaluation of cultural ‘time shapes’ –
based on a presumption of dominant cyclicity, according to which
any prolonged deviation or unbalanced process is exposed as an
unsustainable exception. Within a sufficiently expansive great cycle,
any continuous progressive trend is complemented by a
proportionate regression (and, of course, inversely). The cyclic
assumption marks out each and every image of absolute progress as
illusory. In this way, the cycle, when applied to any particular figure of
time, describes an enveloping structure that provides pointed critical
perspective. (Criticism of the cyclic assumption itself — or ‘in turn’
— is best delayed until Greer’s most significant positive results have
been sketched.)
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The presently-dominant global civilization – when apprehended

at a level of extreme (ecological) abstraction – is the fossil-fuel
burning runaway spurt that Greer calls “modern industrial
culture.” Central to this culture is an expectation of growth, founded
in an unsustainable ecological process, and expressed through
distinctive time shapes. The plural here is essential, because Greer’s
complete ‘morphological’ description of modern time unfolds within
a tripartite system of classification.
The first time shape is mostly occluded. This is the cyclic model
that organizes Greer’s thinking, serving both as a pivot and as an
enveloping frame. The cyclical time-conception defines a ‘middle
way’ that exposes abnormality and excess through contrast, and also
completes a holistic comprehension, contextualizing partiality or
bias. It functions within Greer’s analysis as an intellectual tool, or
workshop, more than a distinct object of investigation. Given its
‘transcendental’ status within the druidic order of apprehension, the
cycle is not limited to a moment of historical origination, or
associated with the name of a particular cultural authority.
The second time shape is not intrinsically modern, but is rather
the living ancestor, or vital inheritance, of the culture that would
eventually assert the terms of global modernity. Of the world’s
numerous pre-modern time shapes, it is the one that has been
universalized by its lineal descendents. Greer identifies it primarily
with Augustine of Hippo, and he assigns it a specific birthday: AD
150
413.
Greer argues (conventionally), that the collapse of the Christian
Empire under barbarian onslaught threatened the new faith with a
crisis of legitimacy, leading Augustine to the radical conclusion that:
“Ordinary history … has no moral order or meaning.”
The place of moral order and meaning in time is found instead in
sacred history, which has a distinctive linear shape of its own. That
shape begins in perfection, in the Garden of Eden; disaster
intervenes, in the form of original sin, and humanity tumbles down
into the fallen world. From that point on, there are two histories of
the world, one sacred and one secular. The secular history is the long
and pointless tale of stupidity, violence and suffering that fills the
history books; the sacred history is the story of God’s dealings with a
small minority of human beings — the patriarchs, the Jewish people,
the apostles, the Christian church — who are assigned certain roles
in a preexisting narrative. Eventually the fallen world will be
obliterated, most of its inhabitants will be condemned to a divine
boot in the face forever, and those few who happen to be on the right
side will be restored to Eden’s perfection, at which point the story
ends.
In formulating this story, Augustine gave “the Western world
what would be, for the next millennium or so, its definitive shape of
time.” Furthermore, even after the emergence of an alternative, this
foundational cultural narrative would remain in reserve, constantly
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available as a recourse should its successor falter, betray the

interests of disaffected groups, or accumulate signs of crisis. The
Western tradition, when conceived through its ancestral time shape,
would be perpetuated as an undrained reservoir of apocalyptic
temptation. The ecological critique of modernity, Greer observes,
is as fully-saturated with this apocalyptic narrative as any other
articulation of social dissent.
Within modernity proper, however, the Augustinian time shape
has ceased to be mainstream. Once again, Greer is not reluctant to
reach for a name and a (rough) date, that of the twelfth century
Italian mystic “Joachim of Flores … [who] had an impact on the future
as significant as Augustine’s: he’s the person who kicked down the
barrier between sacred and secular history that Augustine put so
much effort into building, and created the shape of time that the
cultural mainstream occupies to this day.”
To Joachim, sacred history was not limited to a paradise before
time, a paradise after it, and the thread of the righteous remnant
and the redeeming doctrine linking the two. He saw sacred history
unfolding all around him in the events of his own time. His vision
divided all of history into three great ages, governed by the three
persons of the Christian trinity: the Age of Law governed by the
Father, which ran from the Fall to the crucifixion of Jesus; the Age
of Love governed by the Son, which ran from the crucifixion to the
year 1260; and the Age of Liberty governed by the Holy Spirit, which
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would run from 1260 to the end of the world.

What made Joachim’s vision different from any of the visionary
histories that came before it — and there were plenty of those in the
Middle Ages — was that it was a story of progress.
Not only does the Joachimite three-stage narrative of progress
introduce the idea of uncompensated advance, it also legitimates a
trend to secularization, as the institutional structures appropriate
to the patriarchal and filial epochs are dissolved in the new age of
revolutionary liberty. Unsurprisingly, radical intellectuals and
movements seized upon this schema as a blueprint for the
dispossession of the Old Order, ensuring its general popularization.
As modernity was serially ‘revolutionized’ it became ever more
Joachimite in its basic assumptions, until progress had been installed
as a dominant ‘civil religion‘. Eventually, the progressive idea had
been normalized to the point of near-total invisibility.
With the outlining of the Augustinian and Joachimite ‘visions’,
Greer’s classification of modern time shapes approaches
completeness. The entire argument, when schematically reviewed,
can be decomposed into a number of distinct and informative claims:
(a) The culture of modern global civilization is dominated by exactly
two principal time shapes.
(b) These time shapes are in certain respects culturally arbitrary,
arising in specific times and places, without any original logical inter-
dependency, and inflected by the concerns of a particular religious
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tradition.
(c) This arbitrariness is further confirmed by the morphological
richness each time shape reveals, a feature that supports confident
identification and classification of superficially differentiated
variants.
(d) Despite the absence of logical necessity, when historically
assembled into a mature, dyadic system, the combined Augustinian-
Joachimite duality evidences a significant measure of reciprocal
order (or effective ‘dialectical unity’) and a near exhaustive purchase
upon the modern cultural imagination — conformity and dissent.
(e) The complementarity of the dyad approximately corresponds to
symmetrical judgments of (Joachimite) affirmation and (Augustinian)
negation of a prevailing historical trend.
(f) Regardless of their manifest power of captivation, the
Augustinian-Joachimite dyad has a limit, best described by the cyclic
time model from which each side of the duality diverges.
[Next: critical appraisal]
August 20, 2013

(Part
art 2a)
When describing the thinking of John Michael Greer as ‘druidic’ –
as this series has cheerfully done – the adjective has been primarily
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philosophical in direction. It has been used only to indicate that an

identifiable, and remarkably coherent, presupposition about the
governing nature of time anchors Greer’s particular analyses, which
draw out the implications of an unsurpassable cosmic cyclicity, and
apply them deftly to a wide variety of concrete problems. ‘Druid’
and ‘radical cycle theorist’ have been treated as roughly equivalent
terms.
It is worth noting at this point, however, that Greer is not only
conceptually druidic. He is a public proponent of Druidism in a far
richer, culturally-elaborate sense, which includes service “as
presiding officer — Grand Archdruid is the official title — of the
Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), a Druid order founded
in 1912.” This vocation slants his perspective in important (and
productive) ways. Our concerns here, tightly focused on the question
of time, are able to extract considerable intellectual nourishment
from a digression into this thick druidism.
Like other forms of occult Occidental religion, Druidry has an
attachment to the deep past that is not tacit and traditional, but
overt, modern, and creative. Greer admits readily – even gleefully
– that his ‘Ancient Order’ is not in fact ancient at all, but instead
belongs to a project of restoration – and actually reconstruction –
that dates back no further than the mid-17th century. From its
inception, it was bound to a lost past and to inextinguishable doubts
about its own authenticity. Greer only very rarely uses his Archdruid
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Report platform to discuss druidism explicitly. On the first occasion

when he does so, his reflections are triggered by the question of a
young boy: Are you a real Druid?
It’s not an easy question to answer. The original Druids, the
priests and wizards of the ancient Celts, went extinct more than a
thousand years ago, and all their beliefs, practices, and teachings
went with them.
More specifically, he explains:
Who were the Druids? The honest answer is that we really don’t
know. Most of what was written about them in ancient times
vanished forever when the Roman Empire collapsed. Every surviving
text written about the Druids while they still existed, put together,
add up to ten pages or so in English translation. … Druids in training
memorized many lines of verse, since it was forbidden to set down
their teachings in writing. … Julius Caesar, whose book on the Roman
conquest of Gaul is the most detailed source on the Druids, noted
that Druidic teachings were thought to come from Britain originally,
while a Greek scholar claimed that the Druids got their lore from the
Greek philosopher Pythagoras; no other writer refers to the subject.
… archeologists and historians were able to prove conclusively that
the Druidry of the Revival was a modern spiritual movement, not an
ancient one.
Modern druidry is a revival, which is to say that it originates
through identification with something that is dead. Its modernity is
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stretched and activated, to become more than mere succession, and

more even than self-conscious, differentiated succession — or
‘advance’. The discontinuity that defines ‘the Revival’ cannot be
reduced to a transition, however radical. Instead, it corresponds to
an uncertain reaching back, through the still-living past and beyond,
towards a lost beginning. In this way it initiates a process — and a
new tradition — that cannot easily be resolved into distinct elements
of invention and re-animation. In its quest for ancient origins, it
relocates the present within an expanded comprehension of
historical time. This complex, quasi-paradoxical cultural undertaking,
is at once typically modern, and anti-modern. By distancing itself
from passive accommodation to its historical moment, it epitomizes
this same moment in its concrete historical reality — as a revolt
against simple continuity. It represents a dramatic neo-
traditionalism, of an Occidental type.
The time-traveler tends to produce — or become — a double, and
the modern Druid is no exception. Something ‘ancient’ is returned to
life, so that re-animator and re-animated co-exist in a folded present,
cross-identified, and ambiguously co-original, or coincidental. Do the
Druids of the Revival ‘still’ believe the archaic wisdom of cyclicity,
now rediscovered, or do they project it back onto the blank screen
of an erased antiquity? Who is the copy here? We are returned,
inexorably, to a problem of identification (“Are you a real Druid?“),
model and derivation, originality and repetition. A search for reality
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has become inextricable from an exercise in duplicity, twisted into a

reflective or introspective circle, and spun out into an investigation
of time.
As this perplexity develops, the term ‘Druid Revival’ comes to
seem like something more than an arbitrary conjunction. Its two
words are not merely joined, but doubled, as an echo of time
disturbance. Each points independently towards a pre-implanted
pattern of return, with the cycle already registered on both sides.
Greer traces the ‘real roots’ of this doubling to a discontinuous
connection:
Some modern Druid groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
to their lasting discredit, claimed direct connections to the ancient
Celtic Druids they didn’t have. The real roots of the modern Druid
movement go in a different direction: to the first stages of the
Industrial Revolution in early 18th century Britain, and the Hobson’s
choice between dogmatic religion and materialist science, the two
victors in the reality wars of the late Renaissance. Plenty of people
sought a third option that embraced nature and spirit alike, and some
of them found inspiration in the scraps of classical writing, medieval
legend, and Celtic folklore that referred to the ancient Druids.
“Historians call the result the Druid Revival,” he continues, as if
determined to separate this twin term from anything that modern
druidry first said about itself. He recognizes, perhaps, that druidism
is the philosophy (or religion) of revival — or of the full ‘ecological’
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cycle through life and death — so that to draw upon this word
(‘revival’) threatens to represent the return of druidic thinking
through itself, in a closed circle of self-confirmation, persuasive only
to those of prior druidic (or, more narrowly, cycle-theoretical)
inclination. Better, then, that ‘historians’ seal this circle, from
outside, and thereby demonstrate its real coincidence, or simple
reality. The Revival is noticed as historical fact, before it is cycled
back into druidic intelligence, as a doctrinal expectation.
Each year is a cyclical time unit of death and revival, and in this it is
a primordial teacher, in a way that no scripture could ever be. That, at
least, is the folk pagan understanding that Druid Revival restores to
ritualistic primacy, and adopts as its guiding cognitive model. Its own
revival, therefore, is ‘only natural’, or self-explanatory.
To bring thinking into compliance with the great cycles is
immediately to participate in a speculative super-tradition,
sustained by a structure of ideas and apprehension that cannot but
return. In the thought of the cycle there is already implied a non-
originality, binding the thinker, across time, to all those who
necessarily understand the way things have to happen again. What,
then, is ancient origin, and what revival? When would one look for a
‘real Druid’?
[This digression has a little further to stray, along a more concrete
path, before critical distance is restored.]
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September 6, 2013
Greer
Anyone who isn’t yet reading The Archdruid Report really ought to
be. John Michael Greer is quite simply one of the most brilliant
writers in existence, and even when he’s wrong, he’s importantly
wrong. His perspective is coherent, learned, and uncaged by the
assumptions of progressivism. Above all, his understanding of what it
means to find history informative is unsurpassed. (Over at the Other
Place, there’s an unfinished Greer series that badly requires
attention, with the first three installments here, here, and here.)
When escalated to the extreme, the progressive conclusion is that
history can teach us nothing. Innovation is by its very nature
unprecedented, and insofar as it manifests improvement, it humbles
its precursors. The past is the rude domicile of ignorant barbarity.
Insofar as the present still bears its traces, as shameful stigmata,
they are mere remains that still have to be overcome. At the limit,
the concept of Singularity — a horizon at which all anticipatory
knowledge is annulled — seals the progressive intuition.
In its abstract theoretical core, at least, Greer’s Druidic counter-
history is radically reactionary (far more unambiguously so than
NRx). Its model of time is entirely cyclical, such that past and future
160
are perfectly neutral between ascent and decline. Every attempt to

install a gradient of improvement in the dimension of historical time
is broken upon the great wheels, which balance every rise with a fall,
dissolving innovation in precedent. Novelty is hubristic illusion (an
exaggerated correction, in the opinion of this blog).
In his most recent post Greer introduces an intriguing
complication:
Arnold Toynbee, whose magisterial writings on history have been
a recurring source of inspiration for this blog, has pointed out an
intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way
they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge
not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations
throughout history. […] Once the peak is past and the long road down
begins, though, that pattern of divergence shifts into reverse, slowly
at first, and then with increasing speed. A curious sort of
homogenization takes place: distinctive features are lost, and
common patterns emerge in their place. That doesn’t happen all at
once, and different cultural forms lose their distinctive outlines at
different rates, but the further down the trajectory of decline and fall
a civilization proceeds, the more it resembles every other civilization
in decline.
The dissymmetry calls out for philosophical investigation, since it
suggests a line of synthetic diagonalization between precedent and
innovation, cyclicity and escape (which is to say, the NRx or
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cybergothic line). It would be to stray too far from Greer to follow

that now.
Straightforwardly, the claim being made is that forecasting
strengthens on the down-slope of civilization. The more a social
order fails, the more it sheds its originality, and thus the more
accessible it becomes to accurate diagnosis on the basis of historical
example. As collapse deepens, it converges with a template, bound
ever tighter to a model by its morbidity. Across the peak, an age of
prophecy begins — or returns.
The dark irony is delicious almost beyond endurance. The
Universal, long proclaimed as the capstone of progress, is realized
only as a nadir. The equality of all civilizations is asserted, in reality,
as a direct measure of their proximity to death. Among the spreading
ruins, the mad echoes of similarity resound deafeningly, as the
blasted Cathedral plummets towards its Idea — eternal return of the
same.
July 10, 2014
Time Scales
The word ‘neoreaction’ is a split, productively paradoxical formula,
simultaneously referencing two incompatible cultural formations,
each corresponding to an abstract model of time. On one side, it
162
is a gateway opening onto techno-libertarian hyper-progressivism,

and an order of time structured by irreversible accumulation, self-
envelopment, and catastrophe horizon (Singularity). On the other,
it opens onto the temporality of reaction and the cycle, where all
progress is illusion, and all innovation anticipated. Within NRx, the
time of escape and the time of return seek an obscure synthesis,
at once unprecedented and primordial, whose cryptic figure is the
spiral. (This is the time of the Old Ones and the Outside, from which
the shoggoth come.) If NRx thinks itself already lodged articulately in
this synthesis, it deludes itself.
From a strictly philosophical perspective, the time of reaction
finds no defender more able than Archdruid John Michael Greer.
while his specific form of religious traditionalism, his social attitudes,
and his eco-political commitments are all profoundly questionable
from the standpoint of throne-and altar reaction, his model of time
cannot be surpassed in an Old Right direction. Those who would
install a prejudice of relentless degeneration in its place, anchored
by a revealed religion of recent creation and subsequent continuous
fall, only position themselves to the ‘right’ of Greer by making God a
revolutionary. If deep time is to be preserved, there can be no archaic
authority beyond the cycle.
Why call Greer a reactionary? It is not, after all, a label he would
accept for himself. The answer lies in cyclical time, and everything
that follows from it: the supremacy of wisdom among human things,
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the enduring authority of history, the dismissal of modernist

pretension as a mere mask for deep historical repetition, an absolute
disillusionment with progress, and an adamantine prognosis that —
from the peak of fake ‘improvement’ where we find ourselves — a
grinding course of decline over coming centuries is an inevitability.
The cultural and political decoration can be faulted, but in the
fundamental structure of Greer’s thinking, reaction is perfected.
There is a religious consideration to be noted here, as the
stepping stone to another point. Once the cyclical counter-
assumption is adopted — in a definitive break from modernist
ideology — it leads inexorably to an expansion of the time frame.
To see the pattern, it is necessary to pan out. An apparent rise is
only rendered intelligible by its complementary fall. An event makes
sense to the extent that it can be identified as a repetition, through
subsumption into a persistent rhythm, which means that to
understand it is to pull back from it, into ever wider expanses of
history. Recognized precedent is wisdom.
Reaction is thus construed as a critique of modernist myopia. The
appearance of innovation derives from a failure to see a larger whole.
If something looks new, it is because not enough is being seen.
No surprise, then, to find Greer seize upon an opportunity to
discuss The Next Ten Billion Years. At such scales, fluctuations of
fortune are fully contextualized, so that no uncompensated
progressions remain. After just 1% of this time has passed:
164
The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally
ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy
jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little
bit too much for humanity. No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations
have risen and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own
unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and
ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less
than a century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the
longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before finally winding
down.
All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings
in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years will
pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push
the last of them over the brink into extinction. Meanwhile, in the
tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of
raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice
age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches
once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or
so, their descendants will come down from the trees.
Everything that rises will fall.
Such vastly panned-out perspectives are also relevant to the
competitive catastrophe theorizing that is so close to the dead heart
of this blog. Any conceivable disaster has an associated time-frame,
within which it is no more than a wandering fluctuation. Recovery
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from deep dysgenic decline requires only a few millennia, extinction

of the human species perhaps a few tens of millions of years, full
restoration of terrestrial fossil fuel deposits, 100 million years or
so. Vicissitudes on the down-side scarcely register as tremors in the
meanderings of geological time.
There is more to time-scales than more time. Whatever else
anthropomorphism is — and it is a lot of other things — it is a scale of
time. To be human is to be situated, distinctively, within a spectrum
of frequencies. In our wavelength zone, a second is a short time,
and a century is long. These lower and upper bounds of significant
duration correspond respectively to the biophysics of mammalian
motility and to the outer-limits of mortal plans. The cosmic
arbitrariness of this scalar time region is very easy to see.
The digital tick of time in our universe is set by the passage of
a photon across a Planck-length (in a vacuum), approximately 5.4 x
10^-44 seconds. This is not a number readily intuited. A comparison
to the (mere) 4.3 x 10^17 seconds that have so far lapsed during the
entire history of the universe perhaps provides some vague sense.
(Anthropomorphic time-scale bias is at least roughly as blinding to
minuscule durations as to enormous ones.)
The upper limits of the cosmic time-scale are harder to identify.
Speculative cosmological models predict the evolution of the
Universe out to 10^60 years or more, when the last of the black
holes have evaporated. The Stelliferous Era (in which new stars are
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born) is expected to last for only 100 trillion (10^14) years, out to
approximately 7,000 times the present age of the universe. (If the
stelliferous universe were analogized to a human being with a one-
century life-expectancy, it would presently be an infant, just entering
its sixth post-natal day, with 987 billion years to wait until its
anthropomorphic first birthday).
Beyond the human time scale lie immensities, and intensities. The
latter are especially susceptible to neglect. When — over half a
century ago — Richard Feynman anticipated nano-engineering with
the words [there’s] “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” he opened
prospects of time involution, as well as miniaturization in space. A
process migrating in the direction of the incomprehensibly distant
Planck limit makes time for itself, in a way quite different from any
endurance in temporal extension. Consider ‘now’ to be a second, as
it is approximately at the anthropomorphic scale, and its inner
durations are potentially near-limitless — vastly exceeding all the
time the human species could make available to itself even by
persisting to the death of the universe’s last star. A femto-scale
intelligence system could explore the rise and fall of entire biological
phyla, in detail, in a period so minuscule it would entirely escape
human apprehension as sub-momentary, or subliminal. The ultimate
eons are less ahead than within.
Greer envisages no escape from the anthropomorphic bandwidth
of time. Within his far-future speculation, each new intelligent
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species that arises is implicitly ‘anthropomorphic’ in this sense. After

Earth has died, its particles are strewn among the nearby stars, and
incorporated into the body of an alien species:
The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing
in common with yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs,
its mind and its feelings would be utterly alien to you, even if ten
billion years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless, it so happens that a
few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read these
words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the
crag on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify
you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold?
If coldness is the appropriate response to seeing time still
imprisoned, ten billion years from now, then Greer’s vision is chilling.
For it to be compelling, however, would take far more.
Though only implicit, it would be grudging to deny Greer credit
for the excavation of a crucial reactionary proposition: Nothing will
ever break into the vaults of time. This is not an assertion to which
Outside in is yet ready to defer.
ADDED: An exercise in extensive time perspective.
July 12, 2014
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Perspectiv
erspectivee
Derbyshire at the top of his game:
The whole climate change business is now a zone of hysteria,
generating far more noise — mostly of a shrieking kind — than its
importance justifies. Opinions about climate change are, as Greg
Cochran said, “a mark of tribal membership.” It is also the case, as
Greg also said, that “the world is never going to do much about in
any event, regardless of the facts.” […] If we did do anything the effect
would likely be puny compared to, say, a single major volcanic
eruption. Mother Nature laughs at our climate change fretting. […]
Consider ice ages for example, like the one we are currently living
through.
Ice ages last for tens of millions of years. We don’t know how many
there have been. Our planet is 4½ billion years old; we only have
clear evidence of ice ages for the last billion years, in which time
there have been four ice ages, covering a total of one-third of a billion
years. In its “normal” condition — the other two-thirds — the Earth is
ice-free all the way up to the poles. […] The present ice age started
around 2½ million years ago. Our best guess is that it’ll continue
for several million years more. […] Within this ice age there have
been ups and downs. The downs are called “glaciations,” the ups —
comparatively warm spells, like the one we are currently in — are
“interglacials.” […] … The climatic changes here are sensational. At
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the peak of the last glaciation in 20,000 B.C., the pleasant suburb
where I am writing this was buried under an ice sheet several
hundred feet thick. It is possible that during one of the earlier ice
ages, 700 million years ago, the entire planet was covered with ice,
down to the equator.
The dwarfing of scientific concerns to media spin-cycle
wavelengths has to be counted among the greatest vulgarizations of
our age.
May 23, 2015
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CHAPTER THREE - NARRA

NARRATIVIZA
TIVIZATIONS
TIONS
Tackling T
Temple
emplexity
xity
Since there are a number of critical tasks that cannot be advanced
prior to straightening out some knotty problems of time topology, UF
has added a Templexity page (as a work in progress). It will eventually
provide supporting apparatus for an Urbanatomy Electronic product
of the same name, due out this fall. What cannot be straightened out,
of course won’t be — but something will occur. What holds for macro-
history holds no less for micro-history, with the two entangling,
rather than resonating.
The cultural pretext for this investigation is Rian Johnson’s
Looper, whose very crudities and short-cuts become informative,
when approached from the right angle.
The perspective of Templexity is arranged by the postulate: Time-
travel is the dramatization of something else.
The firm hypothesis: Shanghai is a time machine.
“You should go to China,” Joe is told by his criminal overseer, Abe.
“I’m going to France,” Joe insists stubbornly. Abe responds with what
– for us – is the most critical line in the movie: “I’m from the future.
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You should go to China.” With these words, Looper makes Sino-

Futurism its topic. The hyper-modern China Ev Event
ent is too vast to fit
simply into time.
Ben Woodard has put up a valuable post that delves into the
centrality of time-disturbance to the problems of accelerationism. If
the accelerationist intuition is on to something, traffic between these
zones of discussion can only thicken.
September 15, 2014
Time Discipline
If you run through the functional specifications of your time machine,
and it looks as if it’s going to print bullion, or proliferate doubles, it’s
been badly assembled. Time-travel is the dramatization of something
else, and you’re still trapped in the simulation.
Forbes on Seth Lloyd:
In Type 1 time travel — the type highlighted in the “Back to the
Future” films — all possible pasts and futures in some sense exist
simultaneously, says Lloyd. So, that when you go back and change the
past in order to enter a different future, your “old” future is in some
sense still “there.”
“From a theoretical physics standpoint,” said Lloyd, “Type 1 is
certainly possible, but we still don’t have a very good theory of how
172
it would work.”
He notes that current physical theory favors Type 2 time travel
scenario in which the past can’t be changed no matter how hard one
tries.
“Our theory of time travel is Type 2,” said Lloyd, “[which means] no
matter how hard you try to mess with the past you can’t do it.”
HP Lovecraft fixed the principle.
September 16, 2014
Temple
emplexity
xity
For the visitors here who are perpetually tortured by the Damn!
Where is the tip-jar button? question, less-evil twin has a time-travel
book out. (It should be $3.99, but it says $5.99 at my link — which
might be a Shanghai-effect.)
UF (2.1) plug here.
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If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic

episode, who just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it
would make an ideal present.
November 7, 2014
Temple
emplexity
xity is Out
Thank you Amazon. Despite some frustrations with the Kindle Direct
Publishing interface — which isn’t designed for editorial convenience
— the excitement of disintermediation-in-action more than makes up
for it. If the self-publishing system reached the stage where writers
spent their time on the platform, as a work-space, in the same way
174
they can on a blog today, the horizon of possibility would be pushed

out to yet inconceivable distances.
Temple
emplexity
xity aims to catalyze a theoretical coagulation where the
philosophy of time, contemporary (complex) urbanism, and pulp
entertainment media are complicit in an approach to singularity (as
a topic, a thing, and a nonlinear knotting of the two (at least)). It
proposes that the urban process and the techno-science of time
machines is undergoing rapid convergence. (This seems to be a
suggestion whose time has come.) Grasp the opportunity offered by
computers to visualize what cities really are, and the dynamics of
retro-temporalization are graphically displayed.
That being for which the being of time is opened as an exploratory

path is the advanced global metropolis. This is a contention already
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tacked to a cinematic, mass-media revelation, although one

formatted by deeply-traditional dramatic criteria, thus
systematically, and automatically, encrypted.
Far more on all this later. (If I say too much now, I’m worried I
might save you $4.00.)
November 7, 2014
Quote note (#245)

Nydwracu on Great Awakenings:
La Wik:
First Great Awakening: 1730-1755
Second Great Awakening: 1790-1840
Third Great Awakening: 1850-1900
Fourth Great Awakening: 1960-1980
From 1730 to 1790 is 60 years. From 1790 to 1850 is 60 years. From
1850 to 1960 is 110 years. 110 / 2 = 55. Close enough. 1960 + 60 =
2020.
As we all know, the Fourth Great Awakening had secular and folk-
religious components. We should expect the fifth one to as well. The
obvious candidates for the secular component are the already-
existing revivals of Communism, Fascism, and flat-earthism, and the
obvious candidates for the folk-religious component are Tumblrism,
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fad diets, and singularitarianism. There are probably more.

What will the religious component look like?
Well, things are getting weird. Really weird. …
As for that missing episode, it would be preposterous to advance
this (1904) as the apex of a ‘Great Awakening’ in the sense at stake
here, but perhaps not such a stretch to think it was picking up on
some strange turbulence in the Aethyrs.
May 7, 2016
1930-Somethings
History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, runs the suggestive
aphorism (falsely?) attributed to Mark Twain.
James Delingpole writes in the Daily Telegraph:
… have you ever tried reading private journals or newspapers
from the 1930s? What will surprise you is that right to the very last
minute – up to the moment indeed when war actually broke – even
the most insightful and informed commentators and writers clung
on to the delusion that things would somehow turn out all right. I
do hope that history is not about to repeat itself. Unfortunately, the
lesson from history is that all too often it does.
There’s quite a lot of this about.
For one theoretical account of how history might rhyme, on an
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ominous 80-year cycle, there’s a generational model that sets the

beat. “Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken
down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four turnings:
The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and the Crisis.” From a
philosophical point of view, it seems a little under-powered, but its
empirical plausibility rises by the month.
Among Shanghai’s anomalies is a peculiar relation to the 1930s.
For the city beyond the International Settlement, the decade slid
into disaster when Sino-Japanese hostilities broke out in 1937. Yet
the preceding period was not marked by depression, but by
exuberant High Modernism. Dates from the 1930s that would in
much of the world seem distinctly sinister are displayed on the city’s
historic buildings as a mark of Golden Age authenticity. For the
paranoid mind, that would slot neatly into the same disturbing
rhyme scheme today.
Throughout most of the rich world, economic, political, and
cultural decay seemed — retrospectively — to presage the coming
cataclysm, as if nothing less could jolt exhausted social systems from
their relentless downward slide. Almost everywhere, some version
of fascist thinking was seized upon as the antidote to relentlessly
gathering malaise. Beneath the surface of the global geostrategic
order, shifting tectonic plates accumulated intolerable tension.
Degenerate monetary systems came apart into uncontrollable
swirls of dysfunctional signs.
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Still, it’s entirely possible that there’s nothing to worry about:
Click image to enlarge.

ADDED: “If you hear echoes of the 1930s in the capitulation at
Geneva, it’s because the West is being led by the same sort of men,
minus the umbrellas.” (I’m hearing echoes of the 1930s just about
everywhere.)
November 26, 2013
The Decopunk Delta

As this blog spirals around to its re-starting point, it fetches back
the tasks it has yet to advance upon, including the most basic
(announced in its sub-title). Why the ‘Decopunk Delta’? Mostly
because that’s where time frays.
+ Golden Age Shanghai is unsettled business, and as things surge
forward, they turn back.
+ Art Deco is the world’s lost modernity, as everyone senses, without
quite knowing how.
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+ Art Deco escaped its time, at the time. It is the pre-eminent time-
travel relic of the earth.
+ What Art Deco communicates is vivid, yet still unverbalized.
+ Art Deco fascinates again, today, because it is obscurely recognized
as the key to the encrypted meaning of world history, and nowhere is
this more insistently hinted than in re-opened Shanghai.
– The ‘-punk’ suffix is pulp-code for any cultural time-travel tool
undergoing contemporary development.
The two halves of the term ‘Decopunk’ bond through a peculiar
quasi-symmetry. Each is time-locked into an identifiable ‘vogue’,
while simultaneously making a problem of time, and a topic of
history. Art Deco is at once the most evocative characteristic of an
epoch — that of high-modernity / capitalism — and a super-historical
exploration, extending from the archaic remnants of lost civilizations
to flights of science-fictional speculation, drawing the entire cosmos
of aesthetic and architectural possibility into itself. The still-
proliferating ‘-punk’ suffix, similarly, designates both an eruption of
near-contemporary pulp-literary genres, and a method of time
pillage, ranging widely across past and future on searches for
extractable sets, or techno-cultural styles. Something like an
abstract epochality, or historical re-use value, is hunted on each side.
When the two connect, original occurrence is swirled into a twin-
process recycling machine.
If Decopunk describes a precision-engineered inter-meshing
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across time, it also marks a tension, or gradient, from the historical

to the contemporary, from opulence to squalor, from optimism to
pessimism, and from the tangible to the digital. What the past’s
virtual present tends to over-estimate, the present’s virtual past
tends to undermine, and it is only in the unstable circuit of oscillating
valuation that either pole finds its real currency (which is equally that
of the other). A euphoric cynicism, honed through spiral detachment
from the partial and the actual, melds poly-fractional Decopunk into
a single, investigable thing.
***
The conceptual content of the alternative history ‘-punk’ was a
central consideration of the (UF1.1) series A Time-Traveler’s Guide
to Shanghai (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). The grungier and more popular
— although for our purposes far less exact — term ‘Dieselpunk’ was
employed in these pieces, as a place-holder for the emerging
problem of time dislocation.
Some of the most prominent cultural-historical questions raised
by Shanghai’s Art Deco legacy were briefly indicated in the
Urbanatomy guide to the 2010 World Expo, in a short section
repeated here:
Tropical Modernity
Cosmopolitanism is an essential trait for any city with aspirations
to global status. In itself, however, the cosmopolitan idea is too
abstract and empty, or at least indeterminate, to provide adequate
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guidance into Shanghai’s dominant cultural traditions.

The economic and communicative shrinkage of the world makes
modernity, no less than urbanism, inherently cosmopolitan. Since the
1960s, postmodern critics have reconstructed (and ‘deconstructed’)
a model of cosmopolitan modernism that conforms to the vision of
its most verbally articulate architectural proponents. This vision
identified itself with the ‘International Style’, characterized by
austerely functional, geometrically pure designs. By eliminating
every element with discernible historical or cultural reference, such
designs aspired to universal validity and relevance. The result was
a negative cosmopolitanism, conceived as an escape from the trap
of native peculiarity. This claim to cultural neutrality and universal
authority has been the basic object of postmodernist disparagement,
and the widespread social disaster associated with this philosophy
of urban construction in Western countries (‘the projects’) did much
to legitimate the postmodern case. In elite and popular opinion alike,
high modernism, as represented by its supposedly mainstream
traditions in urban planning and architecture, became associated
with an arrogant insensitivity to local realities, and a self-deluding
confidence in its own objective inevitability.
The importance of Shanghai to this discussion, is that it entirely
disdained the modernism of the International, at least until very
recent times (following the opening of Pudong). Its high modernity
was constructed in the more luxuriant or tropical styles that are
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today grouped together under the label ‘Art Deco’, in retrospective

reference to the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs
of 1925. Where the International Style rejected every kind of
superfluity, Art Deco reveled in cultural complexity, arcane
symbolism and opulence of reference, borrowing freely from the
temples of ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica, ballistic technology,
science fiction objects, hermetic glyphs and alien dreams. Fusing
streamline design trends with fractionated, cubist forms and the
findings of comparative ethnography, it created a luscious
cosmopolitan style, perfectly adapted to the Shanghai of the early
20th century.
Shanghai has been as thoroughly saturated with Art Deco
heritage and influence as any city in the world. Examples include
such treasures as the Capitol Building (146 Huqiu Lu, CH Gonda,
1928), the Grand Theater (now Grand Cinema, 216 Nanjing W, Rd,
Hudec, 1928), the Peace Hotel (Bund 19-20, Palmer & Turner, 1929)
and the Paramount Ballroom (Yang Ximiao, 218 Yuyuan Rd, 1932).
An especially stunning Art Deco cluster can be found at the
‘Municipal Square’ intersection of Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou
Road, dominated by Hamilton House (Palmer & Turner,1931), the
Metropole Hotel (Palmer & Turner,1934) and the Commercial Bank
of China (Davies, Brooke and Gran, 1936). Much of this fabulous
architectural legacy has been documented in the work of local
photographer Deke Erh.
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Art Deco styling became so deeply infused into the fabric of the
city that its patterning and distinctive motifs (such as sunbursts, zig-
zags and mystical signs) can be seen on innumerable lilong gateways
from the 1920-40s. At another extreme, the city’s ultramodern Jin
Mao Tower in Lujiazui (88 Century Avenue) synthesizes crystalline
forms, pagoda segmentation, and patterns derived from traditional
Chinese numerology, under the guidance of unmistakable Art Deco
influences. An even more pronounced example of contemporary Art
Deco construction and decoration is provided by the new Peninsula
Hotel, which has been meticulously designed as a conscious tribute
to (and revivification of) Shanghai’s high modernist style.
In contrast to the austerity of the International Style, the tropical
abundance of Art Deco produces a positive cosmopolitanism,
advancing to the universal by way of comprehension and synthesis,
rather than exclusive purification. It makes itself global by drawing
everything foreign into itself, rather than by divesting itself of native
traits. From this difference, much follows.
In the West, a generalized disillusionment with modernism,
resulting from harsh historical experiences, civilizational guilt, and
relative geostrategic decline, found articulate expression in
postmodern arguments and, more popularly, attitudes. These
stances achieved a measure of coherence through a critical
construction of modernism, modeled on the International Style.
Postwar trends in urban development, based on rigid zoning,
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geometrical rationalization of the cityscape, and blandly uniform

mass residential highrise blocks, seemed to exemplify an archetypal
modernist mentality. Urban modernity was construed as something
that had been tried, seen, understood, judged, and rejected. The
postmodern cultural episode ensued.
Art Deco, however, eluded this entire dismal progression. An
assertively modern, comprehensive style that had embraced the
machine age and a communicatively interconnected world, it
remained wholly untainted by the minimalism and master-planning
of the International Stylists. The thunderous culture clash between
‘modernists’ and postmodernists that resounded through the
Western world in the late 20th century bypassed it completely. Art
Deco thus represents an unprocessed or undigested modernity, still
pulsing with historical enigma and non-exhausted potentialities. The
continuing vibrancy of Art Deco is misapprehended by notions of
anachronism or nostalgia, since it is a style that has never been
concluded, delimited, surpassed, or adequately evaluated. It is the
almost infinitely complex symbol of a prematurely discarded modern
spirit, re-animated spontaneously by the renewal of modernity itself.
Art Deco’s persistent and compelling claim upon aesthetic,
intellectual, and even political attention are nowhere more obvious
than in contemporary Shanghai.
November 6, 2013
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Gardens of Time (P
(Part
art 1)
It might be presumptuous to assume there is any such thing as the
Idea of cultivation. The absence of any such idea (a deficiency that is
immediately stimulative) could readily be imagined as the condition
that makes cultivation necessary.
When the search for a conclusive concept is abandoned, the
cultural task of the garden — in its loftiest (Jiangnan) expression —
begins to be understood. No less that the acknowledged fine arts
of East or West, the Suzhou garden merits appreciation as a
philosophical ‘statement’ in which aesthetic achievement is
inextricable from a profound apprehension of reality. Perhaps, then,
no short-cut or summary seeking to economize on the creation and
preservation of the garden itself could possibly arrive at the same
‘place’, or — even with the most restricted sense of cognitive
purchase — discover the same things.
Anachronistically conceived, the Suzhou garden is a multimedia
experiment, incorporating various types of writing among its parts.
Alongside, or embedded amid, pavilions, walls, bridges, rockeries,
ponds, animals, vegetation, furnishings, ornamental carvings, and
paintings, are found calligraphic scrolls and inscriptions that make
words an ingredient of the garden. Language is something included,
and trained, within a comprehensive ensemble. From the beginning,
the immoderate passions of exile and dominion are stripped from the
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cultivated sign.
To draw upon ulterior signs in order to talk about the garden —
especially the generic garden — introduces a problem of framing,
but this, too, has been meticulously anticipated, in a variety of ways.
Framing is the principal method of the garden, and its supreme
artifice. Whether through simple ‘picture’ frames, that transform —
for instance — a slice of stone into an artwork, or elaborate
constructions of gates, doorways, windows, apertures, alcoves,
interiors, and viewpoints, it is the framing of perspective that
aestheticizes. What produces the garden as a cultivated whole —
most fundamentally — is its perspectival sub-division into itself.
When the garden is analytically decomposed, in accordance with its
own ‘grain’, it breaks down into a myriad scenes. It is made out of
pieces of contemplation.
The garden makes its own outsides — numerously — in order to
appear, piece by piece. It cannot, therefore, be assumed that one
has left the garden, simply because one is commenting upon it ‘from
without’. No less probably, the garden has itself provided the frames
that now escape into a prolonged contemplation, as its scenes are
pursued on some path of ever deepening disclosure. To apprehend
the garden, and reality through the garden, is the garden. The garden
is a perspective machine.
As a scenic device arranged in space, the garden is almost
endlessly intricate, but still comparatively tractable. The spatial
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puzzle is resolved in stages as the visitor passes through a sequence

of apprehensions, serially adjusting position and the direction of
attention, tuning into perceptual frames, and synthesizing
associations. This is a process which takes time, lending each part of
each garden a characteristic pace, inversely proportional to scenic
density. Wherever framings multiply most arrestingly, whether
through the segmentation of space by aestheticized objects and
tableau, or through the recursive layering of frames (perhaps a moon
gate, seen through a doorway, and then a window), the garden slows
progression to an extreme, as if absorbing motility directly into
perception. (The grasp of perception as a behavior that shares an
economy with locomotion is one of the garden’s many lessons.)
In making time a key to the decryption of space, the garden has
already begun to vaguely thematize duration. The name of the
Lingering Garden (留园, Liu Yuan), combining the senses of ‘stay’ and
‘attend’, captures this especially pointedly. To linger is to let space
absorb time. That is how the garden captivates, and cultivates,
contemplation.
If, stepping back from the seductions of space, it is time that is
sought down this garden path, what do we discover? That is the
question this (languidly unfolding) series will orient itself towards.
November 11, 2013
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Anachronistic Oedipus
Wikipedia offers an example of the ‘time-travel’ Bootstrap Paradox
(among several):
A man travels back in time and falls in love with and marries a
woman, who he later learns was his own mother, who then gives
birth to him. He is therefore his own father (and thus also his father’s
father, father’s father’s father and so on), creating a closed loop in his
ancestry and giving him no origin for his paternal genetic material.
It thus illustrates templex auto-production in a dramatic,
anthropological form. Even in its comparatively tame, fully
mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality
tends to auto-production. Any nonlinear dynamic process, in direct
proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the explanation for
its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make itself happen.
Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic robot-manufacture
— includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure (or idealized)
capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the same
abstract nonlinear function. As it mechanizes, capital approximates
ever more close to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears as
the ‘father’ of itself (M → C → M’).
When the time-travelling Terminator is destroyed (in 1984), its
control chip is salvaged by Cyberdyne Systems, to supply the core
technology from which the Terminator will be built (in 2029). The
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Skynet threat is not merely futuristic, but fully templex. It produces

itself within a time-loop, autonomized against extrinsic genesis. The
abstract horror of the Terminator franchise is a matter of auto-
production.
As a creature of the Bootstrap Paradox, Oedipus mates with a
matrilineal ancestor to give rise to himself. The even more
thoroughly popularized Grandfather Paradox tricks him into the
killing of a patrilineal ancestor, to make himself impossible. The
paternal contributor is not merely supplanted, but dramatically
terminated. What the hell was happening in Thebes? (That’s the
question the Sophoclean chorus asks.) We already know it’s a horror
story, so we have a provisional answer: Nothing good.
The query, at ‘once’ archaic and futuristic, is the Riddle of the
Sphinx. It’s appropriately cryptic. Wikipedia (again) provides a sound
introduction:
There was a single sphinx in Greek mythology, a unique demon of
destruction and bad luck. According to Hesiod, she was a daughter
of Orthus and either Echidna or the Chimera, or perhaps even Ceto;
according to others, she was a daughter of Echidna and Typhon. All of
these are chthonic figures from the earliest of Greek myths, before
the Olympians ruled the Greek pantheon. The Sphinx is called Phix
(Φίξ) by Hesiod in line 326 of the Theogony, the proper name for the
Sphinx noted by Pierre Grimal‘s The P Penguin
enguin Dictionary of Classical
Mythology.
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[…]
The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city
of Thebes, and to have asked a riddle of travellers to allow them
passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by
early tellers of the stories, and was not standardized as the one given
below until late in Greek history. […] It was said in late lore that Hera
or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks
always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in
Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in
history: “Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four-footed
and two-footed and three-footed?” She strangled and devoured
anyone unable to answer. Oedipus solved the riddle by answering:
Man — who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an
adult, and then uses a walking stick in old age.
It gets stranger:
By some accounts (but much more rarely), there was a second
riddle: “There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in
turn, gives birth to the first. Who are the two sisters?” The answer is
“day and night” (both words are feminine in Greek). This riddle is also
found in a Gascon version of the myth and could be very ancient.
Which tells us that a primordial version of the riddle refers
directly to temporal nonlinearity (templexity). The cryptic time-
circuit is comparable to a Yin-Yang vortex, without sexual polarity.
Bested at last, the tale continues, the Sphinx then threw herself
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from her high rock and died. An alternative version tells that she
devoured herself.
She is, perhaps, an Ouroboros.
Thus Oedipus can be recognized as a “liminal” or threshold figure,
helping effect the transition between the old religious practices,
represented by the death of the Sphinx, and the rise of the new,
Olympian gods.
It turns out, there is a comic twist to the return of Oedipus in
modern times:
Sigmund Freud describes “the question of where babies come
from” as a riddle of the Sphinx.
Note: ‘Anachronistic Oedipus’ needs an additional ‘K’ to make the
qabbalism come out right.
ADDED: A little supportive clarification (from the dark side) —
what the hell does "cybernetic intensity" mean? Data tripping

shrooms at a rave? http://t.co/6TXkMnWkjs
— David D. (@david_kenneth_d) September 19, 2014
@david_kenneth_d Feedback density.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) September 19, 2014
@david_kenneth_d … Or, nonlinearity as a variable

magnitude. Unless you're unhappy with (for e.g.) "highly
nonlinear" — should be clear.
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— Outsideness (@Outsideness) September 19, 2014
September 18, 2014
Time Cube
Concentrate the crudest intellectual pathologies of time-travel
theory, then deduct the time-travel. Augment with free-style Biblical
exegesis and gonzo web-page design. Enter the Time Cube. Right
now four days are taking place simultaneously, but the powers-that-
be are committed to hiding that truth of sacred time geometry from
you. As explained to students at MIT (link below): “When you
understand this time theory you can answer any other question that
comes up in the universe.” (Mind = Blown.)
Urban Future was reminded of Gene Ray’s gnostic time doctrine
by this (rather lame) selection of “sinister conspiracy theories” listed
by The Independent. Some of the other SCTs are clearly quite gone
(“World War II was staged by the illuminati”), but none of them
approaches the plane of Ray’s revelation. A small taster (stripped of
throbbing font-switches):
Belly-Button Logic Works.
When Do Teenagers Die?
Adults Eat Teenagers Alive,
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No Record Of Their Death.

Father Son Image, Not Gods.
Every Man Born Of Woman.
Belly-Button Is the Signature
Of Your Personal Creator —
I Believe Her Name Mama.
Pastor Told His Flock That
God Created All Of Them —
Truth Was That They All had
Mama Made Belly Buttons,
Church Was Full Of Liars.
Earth Has 4 Days In Same 24 Hrs., 1 Day God Was Wrong.
Einstein Was ONEist Brain.
Try My Belly-Button Logic.
No God Knows About 4 Days, It Is Evil To Ignore 4 Days,
Does Your Teacher Know?
There’s a US$10,000 prize on offer for anyone who can “prove it
wrong” (yet to be claimed).
Wikipedia has a succinct and helpful portal into the topic. The
most crucial Time Cube theses are condensed at the Encyclopedia
Dramatica. Know Your Meme has a (single) time-line-based
introduction (which begins in August 1997). KYM links to this
remarkably bad-tempered exchange.
There’s a suitably chaotic short video ‘documentary’ here. Also,
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Gene Ray at MIT (January 2002). More.

The most penetrating academic engagement with Ray’s ideas, by
Bei Dawai (from Hsuan Chuang University in Taiwan) can be found
here.
ADDED: There’s an ominous sub-conspiracy, for anyone wanting
to crank Time Cube down to The Independent‘s level (repeated KYM
link):
Cubic Awareness Online [@], originally located at cubicao.tk, was
the first and largest fan site for the Time Cube. Run by Richard
Janczarski, the site also spawned a message board called Graveyard
of the Gods [@], where Janczarski was known as “Cubehead.” In
2007, Janczarski flew out to Florida from his home in Australia to
meet up with Gene Ray to discuss the site and share ideas about the
theory. While he was there, he filmed an eighteen part documentary
titled The Dr Gene Ray Time Cube Experience, which he uploaded to
his YouTube account Pyramid0rz [@].
In February 2008, a year after he publicly denounced the religion,
calling it an “evil scam.”, Janczarski announced on the Graveyard of
the Gods forum that he had renounced Time Cube theory in favor
of Christianity and would possibly be changing cubicao.tk into a
Christian website. On February 13th, a rumor surfaced on the
forums that Janczarski had taken his own life by jumping in front of a
train [@] but an official news report was ever found [@]. Other users
on the site speculated that Janczarski’s rumored death might have
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been related to his fallout with Gene Ray [@] over the YouTube series
and the “false information” Ray felt he was presenting on Cubic
Awareness Online [@].
ADDED: A surprisingly lucid Time Cube appreciation. One
especially amusing moment:
Q: Is Ray anti-Semitic?
A: All references to “Jews” and “queer Jews” and “queer Jew gods”
and “Jew owners have enslaved your ass” should be interpreted as a
metonymic reference to monotheism.
September 26, 2014
Interstellar
The most prominent problems with Interstellar have already been
capably discussed, so it’s not worth spending much time going back
over them. The basic catastrophe scenario has more gaping holes
than a Hawking cosmology, and is in fact so ludicrous that it quite
neatly takes itself out of the way. The framing ideology is romantic
superhumanism, which might even count as a positive for some
(although not here). The musical score (by Hans Zimmer) was wildly
overwrought. All-too-typically for Hollywood, high-pitched
emotional extravagance was shamelessly indulged. Despite all of
this, it was a great movie.
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Interstellar‘s narrative architecture is composed of a deep cosmic

space-frontier story, and an occult communication story, bolted
together by a time loop. (Plug.) The involvement of Kip Thorne
reinforced the seriousness of this framework. (Thorne’s explorations
of cosmological warping are a marvel of advanced modernity.) Nolan
is, in any case, a director who knows things — or at least suspects
them, enough to stretch his audience. As a piece of contemporary
myth-making on an epic scale, the achievement of Interstellar is
formidable.
The movie envisages a future of roughly Greerian dreariness, in
which Moon Hoax theories have become official doctrine, earnestly
promoted by the educational apparatus. Shutting down the high
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frontier is an overt ideological project, as the state directs its cultural

energies into making America, once again, a nation of farmers. (In
this endeavor, it will find plenty of cooperative apparatchiks at a one-
step remove from my Twitter TL.) It is thus, as Scharlach has noted,
a lucid Tech-Comm critique of extreme Terran regression. Engineers
are no longer wanted. The scene in which the young Murphy
Cooper’s half-witted school teacher innocently regurgitates official
doctrine on this subject is a minor masterpiece in itself.
Cooper’s intense love for his brilliant daughter ‘Murph’ is
troweled on thick, but it is inextricable from the sublimity of her
intelligence. His love for his stolid corn-growing son is dutiful (and
delicately portrayed), but his love for Murph is mad and immense,
because it touches upon vastnesses beyond the stars. It is human
emotion only as a proxy for twisted cosmological process — trans-
galactic voyages and time-implosion.
When Cooper’s fellow astronaut Brand is forced to confess that
her love for a stranded space-pioneer is involved in her decision to
prioritize a visit to the planet where he was lost, she insists “… It
doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Cooper responds cuttingly, “You know, it
really could.” Within the arc of the script, this coldness is repudiated,
but it is too perfectly stated to be entirely dismissed. It’s a Nolan
movie, and there are loops within loops.
The robots are superb (even if the movie’s dominant romantic
superhumanism keeps them in their place).
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Above all else, the spectacular formulation of an extraterrestrial

occultism is where the movie’s ultimate greatness lies. It is getting
far too cramped here — on this rock, and in our brains — so we’re
called Out. The scenes of the outer solar system, the murderous
environments beyond, and the hyper-dimensional spaces in which
our locked-in time intuitions come apart, are all realized with soul-
rending magnificence. “Our species was born on the earth,” Cooper
says. “It was not meant to die here.”
It might be human triumphalism that sells Interstellar to its
audience, but this is a movie aligned with the distant Outside.
November 22, 2014
Temple
emplexity
xity Matters
Postulated: The intensity of time-travel fiction — and specifically
backward time-travel fiction — is a critical index of modernity. As the
time of modernity, initially grasped as a departure from traditional
cyclicity, is prolonged into deepening nonlinear vortex, it provokes
time-travel narrative as a figure in which to seek resolution. The
apocalyptic, or communicative action of the end upon its past
(through prophecy), is destined to final subsumption within the
image of templexity. With the formulation of the Terminator mythos,
in the last years of the 20th century, this process of subsumption
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is essentially complete. In this rigorous sense, the Terminator — as

its name suggests — announces the inauguration of the End Times,
when the thought of auto-production, emerging in phases from
developments in cybernetics, is culturally acknowledged in its
comprehensive cosmic-historical implication. The time-travel
‘bootstrap‘ or ‘ontological paradox’ is hazily recognized as the occult
motor, or operational singularity, of the modern historical process.
Any positive cybernetic dynamic is open to logical interpretation
(and dismissal) as a paradox. The Epimenides or Cretan Paradox, for
instance, describes a reality-consistent recurrent cycle of escalating
skepticism from the perspective of positive cybernetics, but nothing
more than a concurrent self-contradiction from that of formal logic.
The ontological paradox invites the same divergent reception. Auto-
productive being is either a realistic foundation, or a formal
absurdity, with the variance depending on whether self-reference is
apprehended as a substantial dynamic or a static formality. From a
certain — respectably established — orientation, the encouragement
of circuit ontology within advanced modernity can only appear as a
solicitation of madness.
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) is a movie whose
narrative loop is based explicitly upon ontological paradox. (It
arrived too late to be referenced in Templexity.) The circuit of auto-
production it describes is looped around black-hole cosmology,
involving specific gravitational information that is inaccessibly
200
occluded by the event horizon of collapsed stars, yet indispensable

to the survival of the civilization eventually capable of retrieving it.
The templex pattern outlined in the movie is exquisite. (Kip Thorne is
doubtless owed considerable appreciation for that.)
The hypothesis of templexity is that the machine stimulating
cultural absorption in the ontological paradox cannot stop. In
regards to what has already happened, we haven’t seen anything yet.
November 25, 2014
Edge of T
Tomorrow
omorrow
(Also via Singapore Airlines.)
Edge of Tomorrow is science fiction Groundhog Day, agreed. (It
would make no sense to contest this, some scenes achieve near-
perfect isomorphy.) Derivative, then, certainly — but this is a point
of consistency. Duplication is, after all, the latent theme. Edge of
Tomorrow works better because it has formalized the time-repeat
plot-system in videogame terms. Death replaces sleep, as action
drama replaces comedy, but the recurrence of time is captured more
incisively by the Edge of Tomorrow maxim: “We should just re-set.”
Further to be noted: Edge of Tomorrow actually has a story about the
basis of its time anomaly — and not an especially risible one — while
Groundhog Day doesn’t even pretend to.
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We should just reset is not only videogame practice, but also the
recommendation of quantum suicide, another practical Electrocene
philosophy. The best fictional exploration of QS (of which I am aware)
is Greg Egan’s Quarantine.
Videogame ideology and quantum suicide are praxial
indiscernibles. In other words, their behavioral implications are
equivalent. In both cases, the relation to self is made selective, within
a set of virtual clones. Whenever developments — within one of
multiple assumed timelines — goes ‘bad’ it should be deleted (culled).
In that way, only the most highly-adaptive complex behavioral
responses are preserved, shaping fate in the direction of success (as
defined by the selective agency).
Recent discussions about Christianity and Paganism raise the
question: what does it take for a system of belief to attain religious
intensity among Westerners today? (Yes, this could be re-phrased
in very different ways.) To cut right to the chase: Could statistical
ontology become a religion (or the philosophy of a religion)?
Quantum suicide terrorism anybody? This is a possibility I find hard
to eliminate.
Edge of Tomorrow, therefore? A more significant movie than
might be initially realized. (It’s monsters are also quite tasty.)
ADDED: Thoughts on Post-Rationalist religion.
December 26, 2014
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Synthetic T
Temple
emplexity
xity
Why a sufficiently competent artificial intelligence looks
indistinguishable from a time anomaly. Yudkowsky’s FB post seems
to be copy-and-paste resistant, so you’ll just have to go and read the
damn thing.
The Paperclipper angle is also interesting. If a synthetic mind with
‘absurd’ (but demanding) terminal goals was able to defer
actualization of win-points within a vast time-horizon, in order to
concentrate upon the establishment of intermediate production
conditions, would its behavior be significantly differentiable from a
rational value (i.e. intelligence) optimizer? (This blog says no.) Beyond
a very modest threshold of ambition, given a distant time horizon,
terminal values are irrelevant to intelligence optimization.
March 13, 2016
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Reignition
SECTION A - APOCAL
APOCALYPSES
YPSES
204
CHAPTER ONE - CUMMULA

CUMMULATION
TION OF
FAILURES
Nemesis
Betting eevverything that the casino will burn down
Harold Camping’s Family Radio warned its listeners to expect some

unusually dramatic spring events:
By God’s grace and tremendous mercy, He is giving us

advanced warning as to what He is about to do. On Judgment
Day, May 21st, 2011, this 5-month period of horrible torment
will begin for all the inhabitants of the earth. It will be on May
21st that God will raise up all the dead that have ever died
from their graves. Earthquakes will ravage the whole world
as the earth will no longer conceal its dead (Isaiah 26:21).
People who died as saved individuals will experience the
resurrection of their bodies and immediately leave this world
to forever be with the Lord. Those who died unsaved will
be raised up as well, but only to have their lifeless bodies
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scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be

everywhere.
Clearly, prediction can be a perilous business.

Yet, as Karl Popper noted with respect to scientific theories,
falsifiable predictions also serve a valuable – even indispensable –
purpose. Any model of reality that is able to make specific forecasts
earns a credibility that vaguer ‘world-views’ are not entitled to,
although at the price of radical vulnerability to devaluation, should
its anticipations prove unfounded.
Much like Marxism, the Libertarianism of Austrian School
economic theory combines historical expectations (of greater or
lesser exactitude) with a core of philosophical, political, and even
emotional commitment that is comparatively immunized against
empirical refutation. Both Marxism and Austrolibertarianism are
large, highly variegated ideologies, with complicated histories,
expressing profound discontent with the dominant order of the
modern world, and prone to utopian temptations. Both are (often
indignant) moral-political doctrines extrapolated in very different
ways from Lockean natural-law property rights (to one’s own body
and its productive activity). Both attract a wide spectrum of
followers, from sober scholars to wild-eyed revolutionary advocates,
who see in the unfolding drama of history the possibility of definitive
vindication (much as the faithful of millenarian theologies have
206
always done, and – as the Camping case demonstrates – continue to

do).
The Western roots of both Marxism and Austrolibertarianism
reach down into Jewish redemptive eschatology and Greek tragedy
(it is perhaps noteworthy that Karl Marx and Ludwig von Mises
shared intriguing biographical features, including highly-assimilated
German-Jewish backgrounds, steeped in European high-culture).
Statist-Capitalism is portrayed as the Satanic-Promethean antihero
of an epic narrative, describing a sustained violation of justice that
finds itself held accountable in a final apocalyptic moment giving
meaning to history, and a seemingly unconstrained hubris that meets
its eventual nemesis. The high is brought low, through a crisis whose
mere prospect offers overwhelming psychological satisfaction, and
thus extraordinary emotional attachment.
Since the 1980s, Marxism has tended to retreat from the
predictive mode. Its enthusiasts no doubt remain committed to the
prospect of a terminal crisis of capitalism, perhaps even an imminent
one, but Marxist prophecy seems timorous and uncertain today,
even under conditions of unusual global economic dislocation. The
Austrolibertarians, on the other hand, are being drawn out onto a
prophetic branch – possibly despite themselves – with incalculable
consequences for their future credibility. Their fundamental
assumption, that governments are by essence incompetent and
unqualified to run the monetary systems required by advanced
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economies, leads them to an almost inescapable conclusion:

hyperinflation.
Hyperinflation might be the sole economic example of a true
singularity: a hyperbolic approach to infinity (in finite time),
producing a punctual discontinuity. When hyperinflation strikes, it
escalates rapidly towards a hard limit, where money dies. In the
economic sphere, it is the unsurpassable example of regime
incompetence. How could Austrolibertarians – whose apocalyptic
inclinations are matched only by their disdain for political authority
– not be irresistibly attracted to it?
John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics blog is not easily
characterized as hardcore Austrolibertarian site (Williams describes
himself as a “conservative Republican with a libertarian bent”), but
the prognosis outlined carefully in its Hyperinflation Special Report
(2011) exemplifies the tendency to predict imminent nemesis for
command-control monetary policy. Williams subscribes
wholeheartedly to the Austrian certitude that ‘kicking the can’ (up
the road) – the central feature of Keynesian macroeconomic policy –
guarantees eventual catastrophe, and ‘eventual’ just got a whole lot
closer. Nemesis is coming due.
Both the federal government and the Federal Reserve have

demonstrated that they will not tolerate a systemic collapse
and a great deflation, as seen during the Great Depression. …
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those risks are being fought, and will be fought, at any cost
that can be covered by the unlimited creation of new money.
It was a devil’s choice, but the choice has been made. Extreme
systemic interventions, and formal measures to debase the
U.S. dollar through the effective unlimited creation of money
to cover systemic needs and the government’s obligations,
pushed the timing of a systemic collapse — threatened in
September 2008 — several years into the future. The cost
of instant salvation, though, was inflation. Eventual systemic
collapse is unavoidable at this point, but it will be in a
hyperinflationary great depression, instead of a deflationary
one.
Williams isn’t afraid to lock down some dates, with 2014 proposed as
the outer limit of possibility – and sooner is likelier:
At present, it is the Obama Administration that has to look at

abandoning the debt standard (hyperinflation) and starting
fresh. Yet, the Administration and many in Congress have
taken recent actions suggestive of hoping only to push off
the day of reckoning for the economic and systemic solvency
crises until after the 2012 presidential election. They do not
have that time.
As he elaborates:
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Actions already taken to contain the systemic solvency crisis

and to stimulate the economy (which have not worked), plus
what should be renewed devastating impact of unexpected
ongoing economic contraction on tax revenues, have set the
stage for a much earlier crisis. Risks are high for the
hyperinflation beginning to break in the months ahead; it
likely cannot be avoided beyond 2014; it already may be
beginning to unfold.
It is in this environment of rapid fiscal deterioration and
related massive funding needs that the U.S. dollar remains
open to a rapid and massive decline, along with a dumping
of domestic- and foreign-held U.S. Treasuries. The Federal
Reserve would be forced to monetize further significant
sums of Treasury debt, triggering the early phases of a
monetary inflation.
Under such circumstances, current multi-trillion dollar
deficits would feed rapidly into a vicious, self-feeding cycle of
currency debasement and hyperinflation. With the economy
already in depression, hyperinflation kicking in quickly would
push the economy into a great depression, since disruptions
from uncontained inflation are likely to bring normal
commercial activity to a halt.
What happens next is anyone’s speculation.
210
The hyperinflationary destruction of the world’s reserve currency

would be a decisive event. The mere possibility of such an
occurrence divides the set of potential futures between two tracks.
On one, in which the US Dollar (FRN) survives, Austrolibertarian
alarmism is humiliated, the economic competence of the US
government is – broadly speaking – confirmed, and the principles of
fiat currency production and central banking are reinforced, along
with their natural supporters among neo-Keynesian anti-
deflationary macroeconomists. On the other, the Austrolibertarians
dance in the ashes of the dollar, precious metals replace fiat paper,
central banks come under withering political attack, and the
economic role of government in general is subjected to a major
onslaught by energized free-marketeers. At least, that’s what a just
universe, or a fair bet, would look like.
Betting on a just universe could be the big mistake, however –
and that’s a temptation the morally-charged Austrolibertarian grand
narrative finds hard to avoid. In a morally indifferent universe,
Nemesis is non-redemptive, and the entire bet is an inverse Pascal’s
wager, with downside on every side. Make a brave prediction of
hyperinflation, and you either lose, or you lose – gloating neo-
Keynesians, greater indebtedness, and fatter government on the one
hand, or some yet unconsolidated species of neo-totalitarian horror
on the other. (It’s noteworthy that a tour through the history of post-
hyperinflationary regimes doesn’t pass through many examples of
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Reignition
laissez-faire commercial republics.)

So is the dollar going to die? — Quite possibly. Then things could
really turn nasty – more Harold Camping than Ludwig von Mises:
“lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will
be everywhere.”
June 3, 2011
Bonfire of the Vanities
The road to hell is pa

pavved with good intentions
As an ideological mantra, ‘Never Again’ is associated primarily with

the genocide politics of the 1940s, and in this context its
effectiveness has been questionable, at best. As a dominating
imperative, it has been vastly more consequential within the
economic sphere, as a response to the Great Depression of the
1930s. Whilst ethnically selective mass killing is widely frowned
upon, its attractions have been difficult to suppress. Deflationary
depression, on the other hand, is simply not allowed to happen. This
has been the supreme axiom of practical morality for almost a
century, uniquely and distinctively shaping our age. We can call it the
Prime Directive.
For the Western world, the 1930s were a near-death experience,
212
an intimate encounter with the abyss, recalled with religious

intensity. Because the threat was ‘existential’ – or unsurpassable –
the remedy was invested with the absolute passion of a faith. The
Prime Directive was adopted as a basic and final law, to which all
social institutions and interests were subordinated without
reservation. To question or resist it was to invite comprehensive
disaster, and only a radically uninformed or criminally reckless
heretic – a ‘crank’ – would do that. Anything is better than
deflationary depression. That is the New Deal Law.
The consolidation of financial central planning, based on central
banking and fiat currencies, provided the priesthood of the Prime
Directive with everything it needed to ensure collective obedience:
No deflationary depression without deflation, and no deflation with
a well-oiled printing press. ‘Counter-cyclical’ inflation was always an
option, and the hegemony of Anglophone economic-historical
experience within the flourishing American century marginalized the
memory of inflationary traumas to global backwaters of limited
influence. Beside the moral grandeur of the Prime Directive,
monetary integrity counted for nothing (only a crank, or a German,
could argue otherwise).
The Prime Directive defines a regime that is both historically
concrete and systemically generalizable. As Ashwin Parameswaran
explains on his Macroeconomic Resilience blog, this type of regime
is expressed with equal clarity in projects to manage a variety of
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Reignition
other (non-economic) complex systems, including rivers and forests.

Modern forestry, dominated by an imperative to fire suppression,
provides an especially illuminating example. He notes:
The impetus for both fire suppression and macroeconomic

stabilisation came from a crisis. In economics, this crisis was
the Great Depression which highlighted the need for
stabilising fiscal and monetary policy during a crisis. Out of all
the initiatives, the most crucial from a systems viewpoint was
the expansion of lender-of-last-resort operations and bank
bailouts which tried to eliminate all disturbances at their
source. In [Hyram] Minsky’s words: “The need for lender-of-
Iast-resort operations will often occur before income falls
steeply and before the well nigh automatic income and
financial stabilizing effects of Big Government come into
play.” (Stabilizing an Unstable Economy pg 46)
Similarly, the battle for complete fire suppression was won
after the Great Idaho Fires of 1910. “The Great Idaho Fires
of August 1910 were a defining event for fire policy and
management, indeed for the policy and management of all
natural resources in the United States. Often called the Big
Blowup, the complex of fires consumed 3 million acres of
valuable timber in northern Idaho and western
Montana…..The battle cry of foresters and philosophers that
214
year was simple and compelling: fires are evil, and they must
be banished from the earth. The federal Weeks Act, which
had been stalled in Congress for years, passed in February
1911. This law drastically expanded the Forest Service and
established cooperative federal-state programs in fire
control. It marked the beginning of federal fire-suppression
efforts and effectively brought an end to light burning
practices across most of the country. The prompt
suppression of wildland fires by government agencies
became a national paradigm and a national policy” (Sara
Jensen and Guy McPherson). In 1935, the Forest Service
implemented the ‘10 AM policy’, a goal to extinguish every
new fire by 10 AM the day after it was reported.
In both cases, the trauma of a catastrophic disaster
triggered a new policy that would try to stamp out all
disturbances at the source, no matter how small.
At Zerohedge, The World Complex elaborates on the history of fire

suppression in the United States:
The forests of the southwestern United States were

subjected to a lengthy dry season, quite unlike the forests of
the northeast. The northeastern forests were humid enough
that decomposition of dead material would replenish the
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Reignition
soils; but in the southwest, the climate was too dry in the
summer and too cool in the winter for decomposition to be
effective. Fire was needed to ensure healthy forests. Apart
from replenishing the soils, fire was needed to reduce
flammable litter, and the heat or smoke was required to
germinate seeds.
In the late 19th century, light burning — setting small
surface fires episodically to clear underbrush and keep the
forests open — was a common practice in the western United
States. So long as the fires remained small they tended to
burn out undergrowth while leaving the older growth of the
forests unscathed. The settlers who followed this practice
recognized its native heritage; just as its opponents called it
“Paiute forestry” as an expression of scorn (Pyne, 1982).
Supporters of burning did so for both philosophical and
practical reasons — burning being the “Indian way” as well
as expanding pasture and reducing fuels for forest fires. The
detractors argued that small fires destroyed young trees,
depleted soils, made the forest more susceptible to insects
and disease, and were economically damaging. But the
critical argument put forth by the opponents of burning was
that it was inimical to the Progressive Spirit of Conservation.
As a modern people, Americans should use the superior,
scientific approaches of forest management that were now
216
available to them, and which had not been available to the

natives. Worse than being wrong, accepting native forest
management methods would be primitive.
Spelling out the eventual consequences of the ‘progressive’

reformation of forest management practices probably isn’t
necessary, since – in striking contrast to its economic analog – its
lessons have been quite thoroughly absorbed, widely and frequently
referenced. Ecologically-sophisticated environmentalists, in
particular, have become attached to it as a deterrent model of
arrogant intervention, and its perverse consequences. Everybody
knows that the attempt to eliminate forest fires, rather than
extinguishing risk, merely displaced, and even accentuated it, as the
accumulation of tinder transformed a regime punctuated by
comparatively frequent fires of moderate scale with one episodically
devastated by massive, all-consuming conflagrations.
Parameswaran explains that the absence of fires leads to fuel
build-up, ecological drift towards less fire-resistant species,
reduction in diversity, and increased connectivity. The ‘protected’ or
‘stabilized’ forest changes in nature, from a cleared, robust, mixed,
and patch-worked system, to a fuel-cluttered, fragile, increasingly
mono-cultural and tightly interconnected mass, amounting almost
to an explosive device. Stability degrades resilience, and preventing
the catastrophe-to-come becomes increasingly expensive and
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Reignition
uncertain, even as the importance of prevention rises. By the

penultimate stage of this process, crisis management has engineered
an impending apocalypse: a disastrous event that simply cannot
possibly be allowed to happen (although it surely will).
Parameswaran calls this apocalyptic development sequence The
Pathology of Stabilisation in Complex Adaptive Systems. It’s what
the Prime Directive inevitably leads to. Unfortunately, diagnosis
contains no hint of remedy. Every step up the road makes escape
more improbable, as the scale of potential calamity rises. Few will
find much comfort in the realization that taking this path was insane.
‘Black-boxes’ (or flight recorders) retrieved from air disasters are
informative in this respect. With surprising regularity, the last words
of the pilot, announced to no one in particular, eloquently express
an acknowledgment of unattractive but unmistakable reality: “Oh
$#it!” Less common – in fact, unheard of – is any honest address to
the passengers: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
We are all about to die.” What would be the point?
Everything to be realistically expected from our ruling political
and financial elites can be predicted by rigorous analogy. This flight
doesn’t end anywhere good, but it would be foolish to await an
announcement.
Unencumbered by official position in the Cathedral of the Prime
Directive, ‘Mickeyman’ at World Complex is free to sum things up
with brutal honesty:
218
We have lived through a long period of financial

management, in which failing financial institutions have been
propped up by emergency intervention (applied somewhat
selectively). Defaults have not been permitted. The result has
been a tremendous build-up of paper ripe for burning. Had
the fires of default been allowed to burn freely in the past
we may well have healthier financial institutions. Instead we
find our banks loaded up with all kinds of flammable paper
products; their basements stuffed with barrels of black
powder. Trails of black powder run from bank to bank, and it’s
raining matches.
February 24, 2012
Can
Can’t
’t kick the habit …
… but at least we can kick the can
“The economic catch phrase of the year has become ‘kicking

the can down the road’, applied to all the problems that are
not being solved, but are simply kicked further down the
road. It’s an apt description, as it is exactly what’s happening.”
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Reignition
“There are already elements of fragility,” [Nouriel Roubini]

said. “Everybody’s kicking the can down the road of too much
public and private debt. The can is becoming heavier and
heavier, and bigger on debt, and all these problems may come
to a head by 2013 at the latest.”
“This week we turn from the crisis brewing in the U.S. to the
one that is coming to a slow boil in Europe. We visit our old
friends Greece and Ireland and ponder how this will end. It
is all well and good to kick the can down the road, but what
happens when you come to the end of the road?”
“Sovereign debt in Europe is on everyone’s mind. Three of

the seventeen members of the Euro system are in trouble;
Greece is a basket case. There is universal agreement that
Greece is now illiquid and insolvent. The latest compromise
is another temporary bandage. Our American idiom ‘kicking
the can down the road’ fits perfectly.”
“An irreverant official at the International Monetary Fund

recently installed a jarring ringtone on his mobile phone. It
is the sound of cans being kicked down a road. That, alas,
is what Europe’s politicians and the IMF look set to do with
their latest rescue plan for Greece.”
220
“Kathleen Brooks, research director at Gain Capital wrote in

a note yesterday: ‘There is a growing sense that a bespoke
solution to Ireland’s crisis is only kicking the can of peripheral
financial worms further down the street. Until there is a
convincing automatic default mechanism for all eurozone
members then we could see other debt flare ups over the
medium-term.'”
“‘[Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund] might

secure 2 trillion yen by bank lending to finance part of the
payout shortfall, the Nikkei said.’ This will have two effects,
neither of which is positive for dealing with the funding
problem. The first is that it will merely kick the can down the
road which seems to be the standard response from Japan,
Inc over the last two decades. The second is that it reduces
the income – and thus the funds holdings – as they turn from
earning interest on their investments to paying interest on
these loans which rather has the effect of shortening the road
down which they are kicking the can.”
“We live in a world profoundly addicted to debt-financed

consumption. Today, many people, companies, and countries
borrow with no evident intention to repay. When the debt
comes due, they will replace it with new (and often larger)
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Reignition
debt. Kick the can down the road, again and again. But
inevitably the road ends abruptly with a wall, much like the
ones at the end of a crash testing site.”
“Speaking to a room full of reporters at the National Press

Club Thursday, Bernanke said that without an increase in the
debt limit, the United States could potentially default on its
debt, an outcome he referred to as ‘catastrophic.’ … ‘There’s
only so far that we can kick the can down the road,’ he said in
response to a question about the deficit.”
“Monetary reform never takes place because everyone wants

to defer final judgment. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but
nobody wants to die. Everyone wants a stable economy with
growth. No one wants recession and increased bankruptcies
to re-price capital goods. So, kick the can always results in
another round of monetary inflation. The boom-bust cycles
repeat. … This is continuity in the modern fiat money
economy. The voters want it. The debtors want it. The banks
want it. Businessmen want it. … The result: American prices
as measured by the consumer price index have risen by a
factor of 20 since the Federal Reserve System began
operating in 1914. The dollar has depreciated by about 95%.”
“The voters want the government to guarantee them a safe
222
retirement, Medicare benefits, and a stable dollar. But the

government is already so far down the road to default that it
can only play kick the can.”
“Dana Milbank of the Washington Post chides Democrats,

Republicans and DC elites for ‘kicking the can‘ of deficits and
debt to future generations. This is an inherent defect of all
democracies. Elected politicians buy votes today and affix the
burden on future generations.”
“It’s ridiculous that, as often as we get speeches about how

we need to stop kicking the can down the road on the debt
and the deficit, we get more can-kicking.”
“We’re going to keep kicking the can down the road for as
long as we can see the road and the can ahead. Then all of a
sudden – Oooops! No more road!”
“[K]icking the can down the road won’t work: there is no more
road.”
“There are an awful lot of Cans on this road and our leaders
keep kicking them and kicking them. I can’t help the feeling
that we are near the end of this road.”
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“Can-kicking, rather than problem-solving, is the political

method of dealing with big and small problems. Problems do
not get solved so much as they get hidden. Political hoopla
and self-congratulations accompany each can-kicking action.
The spectacle and declaration of problem-solved is usually
enough to satisfy the concerns of the public, the only
consideration that matters for the political class.”
“Essentially, all we are doing is kicking the can down the road.”
“Two years ago in a speech to U.S. House Democrats,

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer predicted that America was
headed for ‘a fundamental economic reset.’ According to
Ballmer, for 25 years our economy grew on unrealistically
cheap debt. That is over. … Since Ballmer’s remarks, our
national debt has continued to grow and now surpasses $14
trillion, President Obama and Congress are struggling with
massive federal budget deficits, state and local governments
are drowning in red ink, and protesters are massing at state
capitols demonstrating against wage and benefit cuts. …
Elected officials have no choice. They must trim spending and
make some very difficult choices. As Gov. Chris Gregoire has
repeatedly told state lawmakers, we have to make
fundamental changes and do things much differently. We
224
have to quit kicking the can down the road in hopes that
somehow our problems will magically disappear.”
“Can-Kicking toward the Double Dip”
“Same Kick, Same Road, Bigger Can“
“Can kicking continues for real estate and banks”
“In general, the capacity of large wealthy societies to allow

festering problems to go un-addressed seems perennially
underrated. I’ll be thirty next week and for as long as I can
remember people have been talking about how the United
States needs to address entitlement spending and trade
imbalances. And as best I can tell, we do need to address
those things. Presumably at some point something will
happen. But in practice we’ve managed a great deal of can-
kicking, seem to have more can-kicking in us, and actually the
public and the political elite alike are quite averse to the kind
of steps that would address these issues.”
“The House GOP is considering a vote to extend the debt

ceiling through the end of 2012. This is kicking the can down
the road …”
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Reignition
“‘The debt ceiling is supposed to be a mechanism to force

Democrats and Republicans to come together and cut
spending,’ Congressman Kingston said. ‘Instead, what does
Congress do? We push the ceiling further and further up.
Instead of moving the ceiling, we need to cut spending and
quit kicking the can down the road for another Congress,
another election and another generation.'”
“If history is any guide, there will be no problem raising the

debt ceiling once again in 2011. And that’s what’s called
kicking the can down the road. You don’t have to be a U.S.
Republican (I’m neither) to care about U.S. debt levels. Any
chimpanzee can see the problem (yes, even if the U.S. can just
keep on printing its own money. That’s the problem).”
“Kicking the can down the road by increasing debt limits is

not a solution. It just allows Washington politicians to
continue to feed their spending habits.”
“During the current state budget crisis we’ve heard a lot

about ‘kicking the can down the road.’ … It didn’t have to be
this way. Had the state accounted for its promises rather than
kicking that can down the road, true costs would’ve been
revealed, proper funding would have been required or no
such promises would’ve been made, and discretionary
226
programs would’ve been protected. But instead, politicians

chose to kick the can, and down a very low road. … California
has kicked that can into a $200-300 billion obligation that
grows every year that it’s kicked down the road again.”
“The phrase ‘kick the can‘ refers to a specific form of

procrastination: to delay making a decision regarding a
problem that can be deferred but cannot be avoided
indefinitely. With each kick of the can, the problem grows
worse. The problem compounds. The resources required to
solve it do not compound at an equally high rate. The can-to-
foot ratio grows larger.”
“Maybe all of this can-kicking will produce the desired

outcome. But the more likely scenario is that the U.S.
government will continue to throw newly printed dollars bills
at the problem until eventually something that looks like a lot
like a recovery will appear. Shortly thereafter, the recovery
will yield to something that looks a lot like debilitating
hyperinflation.”
“Metaphorically things are getting just about as tedious as

the downturn in the global economy. The operative ‘kicking
the can down the road’ continues to proliferate, alarming[ly]
so. A search on the Google (U.S.) News site on June 13, 2011,
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for this phrase listed 2,805 citations embedded in news texts

during the previous week.”
June 15, 2011
Hubris
In the complete absence of philosophical pretension, certain stark
commitments — of deep philosophical significance — are sometimes
made manifest. Such is the case with Grant Williams’ extended (and
thoroughly charted) meditation on The Economic Consequences of
the Peace.
What emerges, with exceptional clarity, is the fundamental
complicity of Austrian Economics, Metaphysical Naturalism, and the
Tragic Sense. This triple-headed harsh realism finds itself positioned
in a relation of radical dissent to the dominant assumptions of our
time, deploring the hubris of a global managerial elite who presume
to turn back the tides through technocratic action. As Williams
lucidly states:
Both war and financial collapse occur in cycles and are

subject to the overwhelming laws of nature.
Those inherent characteristics of the natural order are
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permanent. They cannot be altered.

What the Fed and the rest of the central banks have done
in trying to rewrite the natural laws of finance and human
behaviour is likely to lead either to war or to a collapse of the
financial system — or both. At this point, the exact outcome is
undecided, but the options have narrowed considerably.
Over the past six years, those at the helm have pulled
every lever and pushed every button available to them in a
desperate attempt to stave off an inevitable and natural
cleansing of the business cycle, because all those years of
economic peace have resulted in an unprecedented credit
inflation. And, as my friend Dylan Grice recently said,
“If you’ve had… an unprecedented credit INflation, you
WILL have an unprecedented credit DEflation”
All that the central banks of the world have ended up
doing as they have desperately tried to maintain the
economic peace these past several decades is to make that
credit inflation larger and therefore infinitely more
dangerous than anything that has gone before it.
The consequences WILL be dire.
Tragedy is the dramatization of natural sovereignty, expressed as

the visitation of climactic ruin upon unsustainably deluded human
ambition. It is not an argument, but rather the demonstration of a
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reality beyond argument — a naturalistic prophecy.

The Konratieff wave-length sets a rough time-horizon for the
tragic forecast. Already marginalized, within a decade or so — absent
the anticipated nemesis — it will have been almost fully dissipated
into comedy (or implausible melodrama). The ‘hubris’ of
macroeconomic wave-management will by then appear — even to
previous skeptics — as nothing of the kind, but instead as confirmed
wisdom and effective power, wielded by true masters of the tides.
The alternative, of course, is “dire”.
ADDED: Those dancing on the grave of Nature should be careful
who they dance with.
October 9, 2014
Kicking the Can

It’s difficult to keep track of all the ways in which the hyperbolic
explosion of time-preference is expressed in the present world
economic order, especially in its Western core, where the rot is
deepest. From insensate looting to exponential debt expansion, and
from sugar-high stimulus programs to insolvent, culturally-ruinous
welfare systems (cooked-up for a succession of short-term political
head-rushes), the entire economic machinery is locked into virtual
apocalypse accumulation. Never deal with anything today that can
230
be added to the mountain of woes due tomorrow. As historical time

collapses into sheer orgiastic spasm, it converges with the frothiest
media attention span, hurtling towards the edge of the precipice
where nothing remains but news.
Here‘s the latest dimension of kicking-the-can:
… if US inventories, already at record high levels, and with the
inventory to sales rising to great financial crisis levels, had not grown
by $121.9 billion and merely remained flat, US Q1 GDP would not be
0.2%, but would be -2.6%
-2.6%. [Emphasis in original]
Systematic unreality has a face, and it’s that of a talking-head
telling you that the end hasn’t yet happened.
Nemesis is not mocked. When she arrives, it’s going to hurt.
ADDED: The popcorn version. (Think I linked this before as an
Outsideness Strategy classic.)
April 29, 2015
2017
A little illustrative sang froid:
Naemi has heard all the predictions of the dam’s imminent
demise. “Sure, we have problems,” he says. “But the Americans are
exaggerating. This dam is not going to collapse. Everything is going to
be fine.”
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I mean, come on, it’s not as if the 2016 effect could actually
escalate.
(Via.)
January 1, 2017
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CHAPTER TWO - SUSPENSION
Quote notes (#70)

AoS speaks for me on this:
There are two types of people: Those who only sometimes
procrastinate those who are so inclined to it that it creates havoc
in their lives. Lately, I tend to be the latter of the two. […] My
procrastination has been so bad today that I actually researched
“procrastination” in order to procrastinate a bit longer. Then, I
tweeted about my procrastination in order to drag it out even
further. Then, others joined in, and it was clear that I am far from the
only one. […] Well, the fine folks at The Next Web blog have posted a
very timely article on the science of procrastination …
Procrastination is a time-based phenomenon, so I’m sure there’s a
gripping philosophical angle, if only it were possible to extract some
cognitive resources from the labyrinth of digression. Seriously,
there’s a major procrastination post coming … some time later (i.e. as
soon as practically possible, which always means at the last, sleep-
starved minute).
The essence of procrastination (at least for me): this is far too
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urgent to deal with right now.
April 1, 2014
Collapse Schedules
It took over seven decades for Soviet communism to implode.
Arguments could no doubt be made — and they would have to be
right — that given certain quite limited counter-factual revisions of
historical contingency, this period might have been significantly
extended. Austrians nevertheless consider the eventual termination
of comparatively pure communism as a vindication (of the
Calculation Problem, in particular). They are not simply wrong to do
so.
Fascist economics is far more formidably resilient than its now-
defunct soviet antagonist. Any attempt to quantify this functional
superiority as a predicted system duration is transparently
impractical. Margins of theoretical error or imprecision, given very
modestly transformed variables, could translate into many decades
of extended (or decreased) longevity. Coldly considered, there is no
reason to confidently expect a theoretically constructed collapse
schedule to hold its range of probable error to much under a century.
(Darker reflection might lead to the conclusion that even this level
of ‘precision’ betrays unwarranted hubris.) There might be crushing
234
lessons to be learned from the history of Messianic expectation.

Such acknowledgements can easily prompt over-reaction. Insofar
as the collapse schedules of Austrian apocalypticism pretend to
certainty, they undoubtedly court humiliation. Yet, if the soft-fascist
configuration of global ‘capitalism’ were to comprehensively and
unambiguously disintegrate within the next two decades, the
Austrian vindication — retrospectively evaluated — would easily
match the Soviet case. Those who doggedly maintained that this
cannot perpetuate itself for long would be seen to have understood
what their opponents had not. Since the critique of Soviet political
economy was not, retrospectively, derided as a ‘stopped clock’, there
is no reason to imagine that this would be. The redemptive power of
apocalypse easily overrides substantial scheduling embarrassments.
The question that will ultimately be seen to have mattered, then,
is far more “can this go on?” than “when (exactly) will this stop?”
The important prediction is compound: the longer it continues, the
harder it ends. This too might be false, but if it is, a substitute fascist
presupposition must be correct, and that has yet to be adequately
formulated. Roughly speaking, it insists that politics subordinates
economics absolutely. In other words, the thoroughgoing
politicization of the economy is indefinitely viable. This is an
assumption subject to humiliation by any schedule that falls short
of perpetuity, since mere medium-term sustainability does nothing
to justify it. Hitler demanded a thousand years. How could his more
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financially-sophisticated successors — enthroned in planetary

hegemony — ask for less?
ADDED: Attaining balance on this topic would test the skills of a
tightrope walker. “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” (Handle reminds
us), but “It’s like that old saying– better to be a year (or decade) too
early than a day too late. Because one should never underestimate
the speed with which things can unravel.” Plus additional highly-
relevant remarks from Simon Black (don’t miss the embedded
diagram).
June 11, 2013
Suspense
In respect to the initial formulation of a question along the rough
lines “How is suspension of consequences possible?” there are only
three basic options:
(1) It’s not. All deferral of consequences is illusion. The reality is
something akin to instant karma. (There’s something about this line
of thinking I respect, but I’ve no idea how it could be coherently put
together, and then knitted with explanatory plausibility to evident
historical fact.)
(2) It’s complicated.
(3) That old problem is over. Haven’t you heard of the Death of
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Reality? Postmodernism, bitchez. (This is Derrida and Baudrillard —

smart, terminally decadent, and radically inconsistent with NRx. It’s
also the implicit principle of post-liberal macro-economics.)
Number Two is surely the only path here that is NRx-compatible.
Its articulation remains almost entirely unachieved, although this is
no great source of shame — the prior intellectual history of the world
got nowhere with it, either. It might not be the deepest problem
about time, but it is the one with the greatest immediate relevance to
generally-acknowledged historical processes, and (perhaps) also the
greatest direct practical application. What it explores is the potential
for a realistic analysis of the provisionally-functional denial of reality.
It crosses almost everything ‘we’ are talking about.
Charles Hugh-Smith writes:
By the time extend-and-pretend finally reaches its maximum
limits, the resulting implosion is so large that the shock waves topple
regimes, banks, currencies and entire nations.
If NRx seems predisposed to apocalypticism, it is because it
concurs — both with the proposal that “maximum limits” exist, and
the attendant thesis that some reality-suppressing tendency is
reaching them. “Extend-and-pretend” — or radically finite reality
denial — is an engine of catastrophe. It enables negative
consequences to be accumulated through postponement, without
prospect of final (‘postmodern’) absolution. Yes, the coagulated
detritus does eventually collide ruinously with the unpleasantness
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purifier. The fact it hasn’t already done so, however, is a puzzle of

extraordinary profundity.
ADDED: Scharlach responds.
February 19, 2015
Suspended Animation
Limbo starts to feel lik

likee home
According to Herbert Stein’s Law, the signature warning of our age,

“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The question is:
When?
The central concerns of environmentalists and radical market
economists are easy to distinguish – when not straightforwardly
opposed – yet both groups face a common mental and historical
predicament, which might even be considered the outstanding social
discovery of recent times: the extraordinary durability of the
unsustainable. A pattern of mass behavior is observed that leads
transparently to crisis, based on explosive (exponential) trends that
are acknowledged without controversy, yet consensus on matters
of fact coexists with paralyzing policy disagreements, seemingly
interminable procrastination, and irresolution. The looming crisis
continues to swell, close, horribly close, but in no way that is
238
persuasively measurable closer, like some grating Godot purgatory:

“You must go on; I can’t go on; I’ll go on.”
Urban Future doesn’t do green anguish as well as teeth-grinding
Austrolibertarian irritation, so it won’t really try. Suffice to say that
being green is about to become almost unimaginably maddening, if
it isn’t already. Just as the standard ‘green house’ model insinuates
itself, near-universally, into the structure of common sense, the
world temperature record has locked into a flatline, with surging
CO2 production showing up everywhere except as warming. Worse
still, a new wave of energy resources – stubbornly based on satanic
hydrocarbons, and of truly stupefying magnitude – is rolling out
inertially, with barely a hint of effective obstruction. Tar sands,
fracking, and sub-salt deep sea oil deposits are all coming on-stream
already, with methane clathrates just up the road. The world’s on a
burn, and it can’t go on (but it carries on).
Financial unsustainability is no less blatant, or bizarrely enduring.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, once (classically) liberal
Western economies have seen government expenditure rise from
under 5% to over 40% of total income, with much of Europe crossing
the 50% redline (after which nothing remotely familiar as ‘capitalism’
any longer exists). Public debt levels are tracing geometrically
elegant exponential curves, chronic dependency is replacing
productive social participation, and generalized sovereign
insolvency is now a matter of simple and obvious fact. The only thing
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clearer than the inevitability of systemic bankruptcy is the political

impossibility of doing anything about it, so things carry on, even
though they really have to stop. Unintelligible multi-trillion
magnitudes of impending calamity stack up, and up, and up in a near
future which never quite arrives.
The frozen limbo-state of durable unsustainability is the new
normal (which will last until it doesn’t). The pop cultural expression
is zombie apocalypse, a shambling, undying state of endlessly
prolonged decomposition. When translated into economic analysis,
the result is epitomized by Tyler Cowen’s influential e-book The
Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of
Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. (Yes,
Urban Future is arriving incredibly late to this party, but in a frozen
limbo that doesn’t matter.)
In a nutshell, Cowen argues that the exhaustion of three principal
sources of ‘low-hanging fruit’ has brought the secular trend of
American growth to a state of stagnation that high-frequency
business cycles have partially obscured. With the consumption of
America’s frontier surplus (free land), educational surplus (smart but
educationally-unserved population), and — most importantly —
technological surplus, from major breakthroughs opening broad
avenues of commercial exploitation, growth rates have shriveled to
a level that the country’s people are psychologically unprepared to
accept as normal.
240
It fell to Cowen’s GMU colleague Peter Boettke to clearly make

the pro-market case for stagnationism that Cowen seems to think he
had already persuasively articulated. In an overtly supportive post,
Boettke transforms Cowens’ rather elusive argument into a far more
pointed anti-government polemic — the discovery of a new
depressive equilibrium, in which relentless socio-political
degeneration absorbs and neutralizes a decaying trend of techno-
economic advance.
An accumulated economic surplus was created by the age of

innovation, which the age of economic illusion spent down.
We are now coming to the end of that accumulated surplus
and thus the full weight of government inefficiencies are
starting to be felt throughout the economy.
Perhaps surprisingly, the general tenor of response on the libertarian

right was quite different. Rather than celebrating Cowen’s exposure
of the statist ruin visited upon Western societies, most of this
commentary concentrated upon the stagnationist thesis itself,
attacking it from a variety of interlocking angles. David R.
Henderson’s Cato review makes stinging economic arguments
against Cowen’s claims about land and education. Russ Roberts (at
Cafe Hayek) shows how Cowen’s dismal story about stagnant
median family incomes draws upon data distorted by historical
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changes in US family structure and residential patterns. The most

common line of resistance, however, instantiated by Don Boudreaux,
John Hagel, Steven Horwitz, Bryan Caplan, and Ronald Bailey,
among others, rallies in defense of actually existing consumer
capitalism. Bailey, for example, notes:
In 1970, a 23-inch color television cost $368 ($2,000 in 2009

dollars). Today, a 22-inch Phillips LCD flat panel TV costs
$190. In 1978, an 8-track tape player cost $169 ($550).
Today, an iPod Touch with 8 gigabytes of memory costs $204.
In 1970, an Olympia adding machine cost $80 ($437 in 2009
dollars). Today, a Canon office calculator costs $6.65. In 1978,
a Radio Shack TRS80 computer with 16K of RAM cost $399
($1300 in 2009 dollars). Today, Costco will sell you an ASUS
netbook with 1 gigabyte of RAM for $270. The average car
cost $3,900 in 1970 ($21,300 in today’s dollars). A mid-sized
2011 vehicle would cost somewhere around $20,000 and
last twice as long.
Another very crude way to look at it is that Americans are
four times richer in terms of refrigerators, 10 times richer
in terms of TVs, 2.5 times richer when it comes to listening
to music on the go, 3,000 times richer in calculators, about
400,000 times richer when it comes to price per kilobyte of
computer memory, and two times richer in cars. Cowen
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dismisses this kind of progress as mere “quality

improvements,” but in this case quality becomes it own kind
of quantity when it comes to improved living standards.
What seems pretty clear from most of this (and already in Cowen’s
account) is that nothing much has been moving forward in the
world’s ‘developed’ economies for four decades except for the
information technology revolution and its Moore’s Law dynamics.
Abstract out the microprocessor, and even the most determinedly
optimistic vision of recent trends is gutted to the point of expiration.
Without computers, there’s nothing happening, or at least nothing
good.
[… still crawling …]
November 11, 2011
Suspended Animation (P
(Part
art 2)
Whate
Whatevver happened to hell?
“It can’t carry on like this … but how many weeks have we said
that for?”
— Justin Urquhart Stewart, director at Seven Investment
Management (via James Pethokoukis here)
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To make a protracted topic out of this phenomenon is to offer a

hostage to fortune. Everything could go over the cliff tomorrow.
Perhaps it already has (and we’re just waiting, like Wile E. Coyote, for
the consummating splatter).
Greens have been dealing with exactly this question, for a while.
After Paul Ehrlich had his credibility torched by Julian Simon, in the
most intellectually consequential wager in history, he responded in
frustration: “The bet doesn’t mean anything. Julian Simon is like the
guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and says how great
things are going so far as he passes the 10th floor.”
If environmental catastrophe is structured like this, according to a
pattern of durable unsustainability, or disconcerting postponement,
there is no obvious theory to account for the fact. With economics,
things are different, to such an extent that the entire political
economy of the world, along with the overwhelming preponderance
of professionalized economic ‘science’, has been geared over the
course of a little under a century to crisis postponement as a
dominant objective. If the New World Order follows a master plan,
this is it.
For ideological purists on the free-market right, laissez-faire
capitalism is the ‘unknown ideal’ (although early 20th century
Shanghai approached it, as did its student, Hong Kong, in later
decades), but it requires no purism whatsoever to acknowledge that
the Great Depression effectively buried it as an organizing principle
244
of the world, and that the system which replaced it found political
and intellectual expression in the ideas of John Maynard Keynes.
Commercial self-organization, which built industrial capitalism
before anyone had even the sketchiest understanding of what was
happening, gave way to the technocracy of macroeconomics, guided
by the radically original belief that governments had a responsibility
to manage the oscillations of economic fortune.
In the words of Peter Thiel (drawn straight from the free-market
id):
… the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To
return to finance, the last economic depression in the United
States that did not result in massive government intervention
was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and
entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction”
that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed —
the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have
forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the
last decade in American history during which one could be
genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast
increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the
franchise to women — two constituencies that are
notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the
notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
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As Cato’s Daniel J. Mitchell puts it, more narrowly:
A vibrant and dynamic economy requires the possibility of

big profits, but also the discipline of failure. Indeed, capitalism
without bankruptcy is like religion without hell.
Because hell’s a hard sell, political and economic rationality have

been heading in different directions for 80 years. Even the tropical
latitudes of purgatory have proven to be socially combustible, and
popularly sensitized politics – which need not be formally
‘democratic’ – tend (strongly) to flee Molotov cocktails in the
direction of macroeconomic management. The crucial Keynesian
maxim, “In the long run we are all dead,” is especially pertinent to
regimes. Who’s going to regenerate deep economic recovery, if the
route to it lies through gulfs of fire and brimstone that are
fundamentally incompatible with political survival? History,
redundantly, provides the obvious answer: nobody is.
The accursed path not taken, across the infernal abyss, has
become so neglected and overgrown with weeds that it is rarely
noticed, but it is still graphically marked by the advice that Treasury
Secretary Andrew Mellon gave to Herbert Hoover as the way to
navigate the Great Depression (advice that was, of course,
dismissed):
… liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate
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real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system.

High costs of living and high living will come down. People will
work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted,
and enterprising people will pick up from less competent
people.
In recalling this recommendation, as an unacceptable option, Hoover

commemorates the precise moment that capitalism ceased to exist
as a politically credible social possibility. The alternative – which has
many names, although ‘corporatism’ will do – was defined by its
systematic refusal of the ‘liquidationist’ path. Coming out stronger
on the other side meant nothing, because the passage would
probably kill us – it would certainly destroy our political careers.
In any case, it was a long run solution to a short term problem,
scheduled by volatile popular irritability and election cycles, and in
the long run we are all dead. Better, by far, to use ‘macroeconomic
policy’ (monetary mind-control) to artificially prolong unsustainable
economic euphoria – or even its jaded, hung-over simulation – than
to plunge into a catastrophe that might imaginably have been
delayed.
It doesn’t take a Schumpeterian fanatic to suspect that such
‘creative destruction (but without the destruction)’ is unlikely to
provide a sustainable recipe for economic vitality. When evaluated
realistically, it is a formula that programs a trend to perpetual
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stagnation. Stagnation as a choice.

Because money serves as a general equivalent, and thus as a
neutral, non-specific, purely quantitative medium of exchange, it is
very supportive of certain highly-consequential economic illusions,
of a kind that macroeconomics has been especially prone to. It can
easily seem as if ‘the economy’ consists essentially of
undifferentiated, quantitative aggregates, such as ‘demand’, ‘gross
domestic product’, ‘money supply’, ‘land’, ‘labor’, and ‘capital’. In fact,
none of these things exist, except as high-level abstractions,
precipitated by the monetary function of general exchangeability.
An understanding of Schumpeterian creative destruction
requires, as a preliminary, the recognition that capital is
heterogeneous. When expressed in a monetary form, it can appear
as a homogeneous quantity, susceptible to simple accumulation, but
in its productive social reality it consists of technological apparatus
– tools, machines, infrastructures, and installations – representing
irretrievable investments, of qualitatively distinctive kinds. The
monetary equivalent of such industrial capital is derived from the
market values attributed its various components, and these are
extremely dynamic, virtual, and speculative. Since the value
retrievable from liquidation (and ultimately from scrap) is generally
a small fraction, or lower bound, of capital asset value, the ‘capital
stock’ is estimated with reference to its productive usage, rather
than its intrinsic worth. Schumpeter was careful to break this down
248
into two very different aspects.

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, industrial capital is a resource
that depreciates at a regular and broadly predictable rate as a
function of output. It is consumed in the process of production, like
any other material input, but at a slower rate. Creative destruction,
however, refers to a second, far more drastic type of capital
depreciation, resulting from technological obsolescence. In this case,
capital stock is ‘destroyed’ – suddenly and unpredictably – by an
innovation, taking place elsewhere in the economy, which renders
its anticipated use unprofitable. In this way, large ‘quantities’ of
‘accumulated’ capital can be depreciated overnight to scrap values,
and the investments they represent are annihilated. The
hallucination of homogeneous capital is instantaneously vaporized,
as painstakingly built fortunes are written down to nothing.
Several points suggest themselves:
1. The violence of creative destruction is directly proportional
to its fecundity. The greater, deeper, and more far-reaching the
innovation, the more colossal is the resulting capital destruction. At
the extreme, profound technological revolutions lay waste not only
to specific machines and skills, but to entire infrastructures,
industries, occupational categories, and financial systems.
2. The cultural implication of creative destruction far exceeds
issues of ‘moral hazard’ and ‘time preference’. The victims of
industrial change waves – whether businesses, workers, or financiers
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– are not being punished by the market for imprudence, slackness, or

short-sightedness. They are ruined by pure hazard, as the reciprocal
of the absolutely unanticipated nature of technological invention
(occurring elsewhere). Neither the creation, nor the destruction, is
remotely ‘fair’ – or ever could be. (Although Dawinian ‘virtue’ lies in
flexible adaptability — Hong Kong always does OK.)
3. Massive capital destruction expresses technological revolution.
Macroeconomic analysis (measuring homogeneous aggregates) will
always miss the most significant episodes in industrial evolution,
since these do not register primarily as growth, but rather the
opposite. Hell is a hothouse.
4. A policy environment designed to preserve macroeconomic
aggregates (e.g. ‘wealth’ or ’employment’) necessarily opposes itself
to the basic historical process of industrial revolution, because
destruction of the existing economy is strictly indistinguishable from
industrial renewal. For that old stuff to be worth anything (beyond
scrap) we have to keep using it, which means that we’re not switching
over. To cross the gulf, we have to enter the gulf. (Like most things in
this universe: harsh but true.)
5. Real historical advance is now politically unacceptable. Either
politics wins (eternal stagnation) or history does (political collapse).
Interesting times (or not).
The world couldn’t take the heat, so it got out of the kitchen.
There’s cold porridge for dinner, and it’s going to be cold porridge for
250
breakfast. Eventually the porridge will run out, but that could take a
while …
… and here’s Ben Bernanke on topic: “I’m not a believer in the
Old Testament theory of business cycles. I think that if we can help
people, we need to help people.” (via Mike Krieger at ZH)
Cold porridge politics forever. Yum!
November 18, 2011
(Part
art 3)
The dead hand of the state
I wish I was saying it’s going to happen soon… this is the

longest running crisis in which people have been giving false
dates, people turning up for summits saying it has to be
resolved, nothing happens and people go away and the sky
doesn’t fall in… sooner or later the sky will fall in, I’m just not
clever enough to know when it’s going to be.
— Anthony Fry, UK Chairman of Espirito Santo Investment
Bank (to CNBC)
Europe will adopt the American solution. The ECB will not
allow large banks to default. It will inflate to buy the bad
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assets or else buy the bonds of the governments, so they can

make payments. Then the bankers will put this money into
excess reserves. New lending to businesses will cease. The
West will go into permanent recession or no-growth stasis.
The governments will absorb an ever-larger percentage of
the region’s capital: bond sales. Private firms will not be able
to borrow at low rates. Capital development will crease.
— Gary North (here)
The new millennium is teaching us vastly more about zombies than

anybody could have anticipated. Long gone are the virile, predatory
vampires that once populated horror stories about capitalism,
sucking out the vital essence of the proletariat in gothic fortresses
of ‘dead labor’. Instead, shambling worm-eaten wrecks mill about
aimlessly, whilst augmenting their numbers in obscure cannibalistic
circuits that defy rational comprehension and which are, in any case,
too hideous to steadily contemplate. Fiends have degenerated into
ghouls, who do not hunt and feed to strengthen themselves, but only
to carry on, prolonging their putrescent decrepitude.
A 2002 Guardian story about “Japan’s zombie economy”
prefigures a number of later, and more general, revelations. In
particular, it identifies the spreading zombie apocalypse with the
slow-motion collapse of Keynesianism, as ‘stimulative’ monetary and
fiscal policies (zero interest rates combined with massive
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government deficit spending) lose their magical powers of

revitalization, and instead merely perpetuate an interminable state
of undeath. Hyper-stimulation is required just to hang on to the
flatline.
Of course, being the Guardian, the solution is obvious: “what the
economy needs now is a good dose of inflation.” For undead
Keynesians, there’s no malaise too deep for an invigorating wave of
currency destruction to solve. This is where the zombie metabolism
really gets interesting. By the end of the decade, America had gone
full zombie itself, and begun to realize that this wasn’t just some
weird Japanese thing it didn’t understand, but an altogether more
general and radically mysterious phenomenon. Ben Bernanke’s
Federal Reserve pushed US interest rates to the floor (ZIRP) and
began to incontinently monetize public debt (QE) whilst
nationalizing private debt (TARP), using every available policy
instrument to direct the economy in an inflationary direction, at
maximum velocity. Nothing much happened. Zombies don’t do fever.
At this point, the questions come flooding in. For instance: why
is anybody still buying Japanese or American government bonds?
Isn’t it obvious that this paper represents nothing except a slice of
unredeemable debt, promising an insulting return, ‘guaranteed’ by
a structurally insolvent entity, and associated with policies more-
or-less explicitly oriented towards deliberate currency destruction?
What are people thinking? To answer that, it’s necessary to venture
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a little deeper into the zombie world.

The idea of the US Dollar (or Japanese Yen) as a ‘safe haven’ might
sound like a joke, and you’ve probably heard it before:
Joe Dollar and Jacques Euro are camping in the woods, when they
suddenly hear the terrifying snuffles of a famished carnivore, getting
closer. Joe begins hastily pulling on his running shoes. “What are you
doing?” asks Jacques. “You can’t out-run a bear market.”
“I don’t need to outrun the market,” Joe replies. “I just need to
outrun you.”
At Asia Times Online, Martin Hutchinson envisages a financial
crisis endgame that “eliminat[es] the government debt markets that
have formed the centerpiece of the last three centuries,” returning
the world to the market-based money and free banking regime of
1693, before the creation of the Bank of England. Paradoxically,
however, the prospect of collapse raises the financial potency of the
state to an unprecedented level, as the ‘safety’ it promises
disconnects from questions of economic competence and reverts to
something far more atavistic and Hobbesian. Once everything starts
to buckle, credibility attaches to the biggest, meanest, and most
ruthless provider of mafia-style ‘protection’. Relativistic (zero- or
negative-sum) power politics takes center stage.
A pedestrian but informative financial report from Bloomberg
sets it out clearly:
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Jim Chanos, founder of the Kynikos Associates Ltd. hedge

fund, said that while the chances of a recession may be
increasing, the U.S. economy is the “best house in a bad
neighborhood”
The US Dollar might be nothing more than the “best looking horse
in the glue factory,” but once the financial logic of zombie apocalypse
takes over, the implications can be far-reaching. Bloomberg
continues:
Ten-year Treasuries erased losses after the U.S. sold $29

billion of seven-year securities at a record low yield of 1.415
percent, wrapping up $99 billion of note sales this week. Ten-
year yields fell four basis points to 1.88 percent after
climbing as much as four points earlier. The rate is up from a
record low of 1.67 percent on Sept. 23.
U.S. Treasuries maturing in seven to 10-years have
returned 14 percent this year, outperforming a 9.3 percent
return for the broader Treasury market, according to Bank of
America Merrill Lynch indexes, as of yesterday [Nov. 23].
It’s worth taking a moment to digest these numbers. Nobody expects

average US inflation over the next seven years to come in under
1.415% p.a., or under 1.88% over the next ten, so the yield is sheer
racketeering. Yet this blatant assault on the lower colon of savers has
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been compatible with a one-year return of 14% (!) — they’re begging

for it. Seriously, who cares if Bernanke is lighting up a fat Cuban
with a large bill lifted straight out of their pocket? It just makes him
look badder, and that’s what they’re paying for. Gold sounds good
in theory, but it doesn’t come with its own attached gangster
organization, so hanging onto it through the zombie interlude could
be difficult. It’s safer, by far, to invest in the alpha state.
Because this Hobbesian zombinomics is political and relativisitic,
there are epsilon states at the other end of the trade, as well as a beta
state caught in the middle. Europe isn’t a state at all, of course, which
is how the (interminable) final phase of zombinomics got started.
Before it changed, however, the EU conjuring act seemed to be going
pretty well. Every Eurozone member state issuing government debt
in the common currency paid yields that were broadly harmonized,
as if Europe was a financially sovereign entity, standing united
behind its paper. The realization that economic sovereignty
remained national, even after the alienation of monetary
sovereignty to the European Central Bank, came as something of a
shock, and bond spreads gaped accordingly.
The hallucination of ‘Europe’ as a united, honorary alpha state,
rapidly degenerated to reality, recoding government bonds as
zombie apocalypse security scrip. Suddenly, Greek bonds stopped
having anything much to do with the ECB, and started to mumble
promises in Greek – ultimately, that the Greek state would do
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whatever it took to secure redemption, whilst mobilizing its

Olympian powers to maintain social discipline if necessary. A flight
for the exits immediately ensued. Ditto, with variations of speed and
intensity, for all the epsilons (= PIIGS).
Where to flee? That’s the zombinomic question par excellence
(searching for the best looking horse in the glue factory). First choice,
for the keenest Hobbes readers, was to head straight to Mr. Big, a.k.a.
Benny the Yank, wait politely whilst he finished smoking a mirved
nuke, and then beg for protection (that’s your 14% one year jump
in the value of a 10-year US Treasury bond, right there). The second
choice — more appealing to old-fashioned types who thought
economics still counted for something – was to look for comparative
financial responsibility closer to home.
Briefly, this route led to genuine quality, but zombinomics quickly
resumed its grip:
Switzerland sparked fears of a new currency war on Tuesday

[Sept. 6] after it pegged the Swiss franc against the euro in
an attempt to protect its economy from the European debt
crisis.
The Swiss National Bank in effect devalued the franc,
pledging to buy “unlimited quantities” of foreign currencies
to force down its value. The SNB warned that it would no
longer allow one Swiss franc to be worth more than €0.83
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– equivalent to SFr1.20 to the euro – having watched the

two currencies move closer to parity as Switzerland became
a “safe haven” from the ravages of the eurozone crisis.
… which brings us to Germany, and the latest chapter in the zombie

saga — comic or tragic, and probably both, ironic to the point of
absurdity in any case. Ruined, shrunken, divided, and traumatized
by guilt, post-war Germany sought above all to bury its nationalistic
aspirations in Europe. What became the EU was for Germany – as
Algeria was for the French foreign legionnaires – a place in which to
forget. Now the bond ‘market’, in its increasingly desperate search
for a big, tough, disciplinary state (a global beta will do fine), is
determined to dig the Teutonic Leviathan from its grave.
With twin memories of Weimar hyper-inflation and statist hyper-
assertion still vivid, Germany is stubbornly holding out against the
full-zombie option of (monetary and fiscal) financial debauchery
counter-balanced by Hobbesian security politics. This reluctance to
throw itself into the spirit of the age has, naturally enough, exposed
it to relentless international vilification, and the pressure will only
increase. It could all get unpleasantly interesting.
November 25, 2011
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(Part
art 4)
Pla
Playing
ying for time
By the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, the

world had begun to adapt itself to a problem that had tortured it
in the 1930s, and deformed it subsequently — that of sub-optimal
equilibrium. The practical significance of this idea is difficult to
exaggerate.
As a rigorous economist, Henry Hazlitt was theoretically entitled
– and even compelled – to savagely deride the Keynesian model of
‘low-employment equilibrium’, and to painstakingly explain that it did
not describe an equilibrium of any kind (in economic terms). Yet such
attacks, like those of the Austrians more generally, have been of
slight consequence, since Keynes was not in any strongly defensible
sense an economist, but rather a political economist, in both of the
obvious ways this expression can be understood. His bad equilibrium
did not reflect the operation of market forces, but rather, the
workings of the market under a specific conception of politically
realistic circumstances, and the ‘analysis’ of the General Theory was
less a technically rigorous description of events than a political
prescription for action, keenly attentive to the opportunities and
constraints affecting its application, or transition into policy.
Keynes defined the political spirit of the second half of the 20th
century, first in the West, and later more widely, by normalizing the
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pre-eminence of the state in economic affairs, and by subordinating

the idea of economic self-correction to political considerations. The
role of the new political economy, now technocratically
mainstreamed as economic policy, was to route around labor
markets, which could never be expected to work efficiently, since
downside corrections were judged politically unacceptable. Pure
economics was ended, or at least utterly marginalized, by the
recognition that labor could opt out of the game, kick over the table,
and refuse to play the commodity. Market-clearing labor pricing
became an abstract (and, for Keynesians, risible) conception,
oblivious to the realities of popular democratic politics, and – in
extremis – the potential for Marxian revolution.
Hence the consensus-building sympathy for the Keynesian
approach on the establishment right, where it was interpreted as a
bulwark against Marxist temptations, and also the deep antipathy
it elicited on the anti-establishment right, where it was (no less
realistically) understood as a pre-emptive concession to socialism.
On the left, a comparable schism was evident, between those who
embraced it as a curtailment of capitalism, and those who denounced
it as an ersatz socialism, designed for conservative convenience. The
Keynesian ‘middle’ has been the decisive political reality of the 20th
century, and its multiple ideological meanings still organize every
major axis of socio-economic controversy.
When labor markets are locked on the downside – through
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macroeconomic recognition and political petrification of their

‘stickiness’ – some kind of socio-economic ratchet mechanism is
automatically produced. To an extent, capital can flee into
informalization (for instance illegal immigrant labor), or
international labor arbitrage, intensifying the trend to out-sourcing
and globalization. More central, however, are the twin macro-
tendencies Keynes focused upon: towards fiscal and monetary
compensations, based on demand management and the exploitation
of ‘money illusion’ (or attachment to nominal income). Fiscal stimulus
can be undertaken in an attempt to elevate demand, until it reaches
a point of artificial equilibrium commensurate with labor price levels
(thus clearing unemployment). Alternatively, or in concert, money
supply can be expanded – and currency degraded – to facilitate real
wage decreases despite nominal stickiness.
Essentially, that’s it. There’s no other ammo in the
macroeconomic arsenal. This is remarkable given the fact that both
fiscal and monetary adjustments are mere tricks, and not even
sophisticated tricks, but quite straightforward attempts at
confidence manipulation that anybody with ‘rational expectations’
sees through immediately, thus neutralizing them. On the monetary
side this is especially obvious — and well-attested historically. Once
inflationary expectations have become entrenched, they become the
staple topic of wage negotiations, as was seen in the 1970s. There is
no evidence whatsoever to suggest that workers are indifferent to
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inflationary wage depreciation. ‘Money illusion’ – insofar as it exists

at all – is basically a one-off scam, harvested in the brief period when
a long-established reputation for responsible currency management
is thrown in the trash. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice
isn’t going to happen. Basing economic policy on this is the cheapest
kind of street hustle (and few would any longer admit to trying it in
public).
Stimulus isn’t much better. Real demand is ultimately exchange,
and thus derivative from supply. Nobody can (economically) demand
anything, without having something to offer in return – that’s Say’s
Law, and it’s theoretically impregnable, because it’s elementary
common sense. The only way to steer around it is conjuring, by
extracting demand from one part of the economy invisibly, and re-
inserting it conspicuously somewhere else. This kind of magic can get
quite Byzantine, so it tends to reach exhaustion more slowly than
monetary abuse, but its foundations in sustainable economic reality
are no more secure. Once taxpayers acknowledge government debts
as liabilities (future tax payments) that have already been virtually
deducted from their spending power, the game is over. Since a
plausible model for (expansive) fiscal policy exhaustion is sovereign
debt crisis, it is not unreasonable to begin drawing the curtains
already.
Given the exponential trend of social history, most of what has
ever happened has taken place since the Great Depression began,
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and during this time the world has inhabited — more or less
consciously — a deliberately constructed system of illusion, or
confidence trick. Whether analyzed from the left or the right, the
most striking feature of this situation has been inadequately
apprehended, or even interrogated: how has it persisted? How can
something that is transparently [insert epithet] unworkable last for
over 80 [insert triple epithet] years?
Eighty years is a pretty good human life-span. Someone could
easily expend their life within the Keynesian dream-palace, literally
living a lie, with the implication that whatever importance ‘reality’
might have in theory, it need have almost nothing to do with us. We
can miss it completely, caught up in a magic show that exceeds our
longevity, half-hypnotized by illusions that no one really believes in,
but which suffice to put things off, and off, and off, and … in the long
run we are all dead. Who cares about a truth that never arrives? A
magic trick that lasts your whole life is your life. Scarcely anybody
alive today has known anything else.
And it’s all going to be over real soon … honestly …
December 2, 2011
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(Part
art 5)
Engines of De
Devastation
vastation
Does Postmodernism still seem cool to anybody? — Probably not.

Having sold whatever simulacrum of a soul it might have had to the
fickle gods of fashion, it has learnt more about the reign of Chronos
than it might have expected to – the kids get devoured, and it’s on
to something new. What was accepted for no good reason gets
discarded for no good reason. In political science it’s called
democracy (but that’s another discussion).
Clearly, there’s something profoundly just about the
disappearance of postmodernism into the trashcan of random
difference (what’s ‘in’ has to be new, preferably meaninglessly so).
It’s even ‘poetically just’, whatever that means. But it also destroys
information. Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was
also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its
own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality
that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that
replaced it. At least in its death, it might have amounted to
something.
Consider its greatest mystagogue, Jacques Derrida, and his once
widely celebrated ‘concept’ of differance (yes, with an ‘a’), a term
within a series of magical words that mark the undecidable,
ungraspable, unpresentable, and ultimately inconceivable
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ontological non-stuff that supplants real events, through an endless

succession of displacements and postponements. We can’t really say
anything about it, so we have to talk about it endlessly, and entire
university departments are required to do so. It’s ridiculous (and so
it’s over). But it’s also, quite exactly, the globally hegemonic culture
of Keynesianized, macroeconomic, programmatic stagnationism,
and that isn’t over yet, although its morbidity is already highly
conspicuous. Unlike faddish academic Postmodernism, its death is
going to be really interesting.
Long before the Derridoids got started, Keynes had taught
governments that differance was something they could do.
Procrastination – the strategic suspension of economic reality
through a popularly ungraspable series of displacements and
postponements – quickly came to define the art of politics. Why
suffer today what can be put off until tomorrow, or suffer yourself
something that could be somebody else’s problem? Postpone!
Displace! In the long run we are all dead. Reality is for losers.
Differance as it really works is a lot cruder than its reflection in
Postmodern philosophy (and what could be philosophically cruder
than an appeal to the notion of ‘reflection’?). For instance, it is fished
out of the ontological abgrund and processed by specific public
policy mechanisms, sustained by concrete institutions in ways that
are to a considerable extent economically measurable, within elastic
but most certainly finite geographical and historical limits. Crudest
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of all, and ultimately decisive, is the circumscription of derealization,

by the real, and the return of the apocalyptic, no longer as a
phantasmatic avatar of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (or false
promise of a real event), but as an impending real event, and one
whose process of historical construction is in large measure
intelligible. Real differance didn’t ‘deconstruct’ the apocalypse, it
built it. It’s not even that difficult to see how.
At EconLog, David Henderson has posted his notes from John
H. Cochrane’s December 3 talk at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution conference on ‘Restoring Robust Economic Growth in
America’. There’s no mention of differance, but there doesn’t need to
be.
For nearly 100 years we have tried to stop runs with

government guarantees — deposit insurance, generous
lender of last resort, and bailouts. That patch leads to huge
moral hazard. Giving a banker a bailout guarantee is like
giving a teenager keys to the car and a case of whisky. So, we
appoint regulators who are supposed to stop the banks from
taking risks, in a hopeless arms race against smart MBAs,
lawyers and lobbyists who try to get around the regulation,
and though we allow — nay, we encourage and subsidize —
expansion of run-prone assets.
In Dodd-Frank, the US simply doubled down our bets on
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this regime. …
Bailouts delay a painful economic event (postponement) whilst

transferring financial liability (displacement). Risk is restored to
virtuality, as disaster is turned back into a threat, but it isn’t the same
threat. By any remotely sane method of accountancy, it’s now worse.
Significant virtual deterioration is substituted for actual discomfort.
That’s the cost of derealization.
How do things get worse, exactly? — In plenty of ways. Start with
‘moral hazard’, which is a polite way of saying ‘insanity’. Actions are
decoupled from their consequences, removing the disincentive for
craziness. The result, utterly predictably, is more craziness. In fact,
anything that systematically enhances moral hazard is simply
manufacturing craziness. It’s dumping LSD in the water supply,
although actually probably worse. So bailouts drive us insane and
destroy civilization (no one really disputes that, although they may
try to avoid the topic).
Oh, but there’s more! — Much more, because all these
displacements don’t just move things around, they move them up.
Risk is centralized, concentrated, systematized, politicized – and
that’s in the (entirely unrealistic) best case, when it isn’t also
expanded and degraded by the corruption and inefficiency of
weakly- or cynically-incentivized public institutions. This is trickle
up – really flood up – economics, in which everything bad that ever
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happens to anybody gets stripped of any residual sanity (or realistic

estimation of consequences), pooled, re-coded, complicated by
compensatory regulation, and shifted to ever more ethereal heights
of populist democratic irresponsibility, where the only thing that
matters is what people want to hear, and that really isn’t ever going
to be the truth.
“Mess up enough, and you probably suffer or die” – that’s the
truth. It’s a message that doesn’t translate into the language of
Keynesian kick-the-can politics, which is folk Postmodernism. The
nearest we get, as the jaws begin to close on the bail-out bucket
chain, is “We’re going to need a bigger boat.” After innumerable
episodes of that, we’re all huddled together on the Titanic, and things
are kinda, sorta, looking OK. At least the band’s still playing …
When abstracted from its squalid psychosis, the pattern is
mathematically quite neat. It’s called the Martingale system, better
known to Americans as ‘double or nothing’ (and to Brits as ‘double
or quits’). Cochrane already touched upon it (“the US simply doubled
down our bets”). Wager on red, and it comes up black. No problem,
just double the bet and repeat. You can’t lose. (If you like this logic,
Paul Krugman has an economic recovery to sell you.)
What appears as disaster postponed is, in virtual reality, disaster
expanded. The Wikipedia entry on the Martingale system helpfully
connects it to the Taleb Distribution, otherwise known as scrounging
pennies in front of a steam roller. The persistence of small gains
268
makes this business model seem like a sure thing — until it doesn’t.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Mark Blyth expand on the idea in
Foreign Affairs, with application to various aspects of the current (or
impending) crisis. Asking why “surprise [is] the permanent condition
of the U.S. political and economic elite” they trace the problem to
“the artificial suppression of volatility — the ups and downs of life —
in the name of stability.”
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility

tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time
exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm
and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate
beneath the surface. Although the stated intention of
political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the
system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the
opposite. These artificially constrained systems become
prone to “Black Swans” — that is, they become extremely
vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the
statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set
of observers.
Discussing this article at PJMedia, Richard Fernandez glosses and

sharpens its conclusion:
Part of the problem is the consequence of [the elites’] own
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damping. By attempting to centrally manage systems

according to some predetermined scheme they actually store
up volatility rather than dispersing it. By kicking the can down
the road they eventually condemn themselves to bumping
into a giant pile of cans when they run out of road. … But
the elites cannot admit to surprise; nor can they admit to bad
things starting on their watch. Therefore they keep sweeping
things under the carpet until, as in some horror movie, it
spawns a zombie. To make systems robust, says Taleb, you’ve
got to admit that you can make mistakes and pay the price.
You will have to in the end anyway.
We aren’t in Postmodernism anymore, Toto. We’re nearer to this:
The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the

recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods
of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts,
repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of
interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of
avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit
expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should
come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of
further credit expansion, or later as a final and total
catastrophe of the currency system involved. (Ludwig von
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Mises, Human Action)
Or even this:
Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which

all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing;
whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed.
For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act
but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill
drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for
payment,- -with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often
had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so
seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden
of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back,
and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb
lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart
and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can
pass the cheat no further.
Observe nevertheless how, by a just compensating law, if
the lie with its burden (in this confused whirlpool of Society)
sinks and is shifted ever downwards, then in return the
distress of it rises ever upwards and upwards. Whereby, after
the long pining and demi-starvation of those Twenty Millions,
a Duke de Coigny and his Majesty come also to have their
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‘real quarrel.’ Such is the law of just Nature; bringing, though

at long intervals, and were it only by Bankruptcy, matters
round again to the mark.
But with a Fortunatus’ Purse in his pocket, through what
length of time might not almost any Falsehood last! Your
Society, your Household, practical or spiritual Arrangement,
is untrue, unjust, offensive to the eye of God and man.
Nevertheless its hearth is warm, its larder well replenished:
the innumerable Swiss of Heaven, with a kind of Natural
loyalty, gather round it; will prove, by pamphleteering,
musketeering, that it is a truth; or if not an unmixed
(unearthly, impossible) Truth, then better, a wholesomely
attempered one, (as wind is to the shorn lamb), and works
well. Changed outlook, however, when purse and larder grow
empty! Was your Arrangement so true, so accordant to
Nature’s ways, then how, in the name of wonder, has Nature,
with her infinite bounty, come to leave it famishing there? To
all men, to all women and all children, it is now indutiable that
your Arrangement was false. Honour to Bankruptcy; ever
righteous on the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel!
Under all Falsehoods it works, unweariedly mining. No
Falsehood, did it rise heaven- high and cover the world, but
Bankruptcy, one day, will sweep it down, and make us free of
it. (Thomas Carlyle, via Mencius Moldbug, but cited all over
272
the place recently)
Here it comes.
December 9, 2011
Apocalometer
You know you need one:
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274
(Via.)
January 16, 2015
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CHAPTER THREE - 2012
Perfect Storm
Weather forecasts for winter 2012 are getting wilder all the time
Even before receiving the Hollywood treatment, the year 2012 was
shaping up to be a uniquely potent ‘harmonic convergence’ of end
times enthusiasm. Initially condensed out of the Mayan calendar, the
2012 countdown was soon fizzed into a heady cocktail by
speculative interpretations of the Yijing, Aquarian ‘New Age’
paganism, Ufology, and mushroom mysticism. Once critical mass was
achieved, the 2012 became a gathering point for free-floating
Jewish, Christian, and Islamic eschatological expectations (coming
or return of the Messiah, advent of the Antichrist, Armageddon,
Rapture, emergence of the Twelfth Imam from occultation, and
others). Just about anything cosmically imaginable is now firmly
expected – by somebody – to arrive in late December, 2012.
Secular eschatology also has its dogs in the fight. From
reciprocally insulated enclaves of the Internet, apocalyptic strains
of Marxism (and libertarianism) joyfully anticipated the imminent
276
collapse of the global economy, fully confident that its downfall

would usher in a post-capitalist social order (or untrammeled free-
market societies). The boldest proponents of impending
Technological Singularity prepared to welcome superhuman
artificial intelligence (when Skynet would already be five years
overdue). Radical environmentalists, neo-Malthusians, ‘Peak Oil’
resource-crunchers, and Clash of Civilizations theorists also
contributed substantially to the atmosphere of impending crisis.
Irrespective of Anthropogenic Global Warming, everything was
heating up fast.
This climate proved highly receptive to the prophetic ideas of
William Strauss and Neil Howe, where it found a fresh and evocative
self-description. Beginning with their book Generations (1992),
Strauss & Howe sought to explain the rhythm of history through
the pattern of generations, as they succeeded each other in four-
phase cycles. Their cyclic unit or ‘saeculum’ lasts 80-100 years and
consists of generational ‘seasons’ or ‘turnings’, each characterized
by a distinctive archetype. The Fourth Turning, starting early in the
new millennium, is ‘winter’ and ‘crisis’. They remark: “Today’s older
Americans recognize this as the mood of the Great Depression and
World War II, but a similar mood has been present in all the other
great gates of our history, from the Civil War and Revolution back
into colonial and English history.”
Jim Quinn’s discussion of the Fourth Turning at Zero Hedge
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anticipates the winter storms: “Based upon a review of the

foreseeable issues confronting our society it is clear to me that a
worse financial implosion will strike before the 2012 presidential
election. It may be triggered by a debt ceiling confrontation, the
ending of QE2, a panic out of the USD, hyperinflation, a surge in
oil prices, or some combination of these possibilities. The ensuing
collapse of the stock and bond markets will remove the last vestiges
of trust in the existing financial system and the government
bureaucrats who have taken taxpayer dollars and funneled them to
these Wall Street oligarchs.”
More ominously still, Quinn concludes: “History has taught us
that Fourth Turnings end in all out war. The outcome of wars is
always in doubt. …It may be 150 years since Walt Whitman foresaw
the imminent march of armies, visions of unborn deeds, and a
sweeping away of the old order, but history has brought us right
back to where we started. Immense challenges and threats await
our nation. Will we face them with the courage and fortitude of our
forefathers? Or will we shrink from our responsibility to future
unborn generations? The drumbeat of history grows louder. Our
rendezvous with destiny beckons.”
Stormy enough yet? If not, there’s the harsh weather of
Kondratiev winter rolling in too.
Nikolai Kondratiev’s ‘long waves’ fluctuate at roughly twice the
frequency of Strauss & Howe saecula (lasting roughly 40-60 years
278
from ‘spring’ to ‘winter’). Originally discovered through empirical

investigation of price movements, Kondratiev waves have stimulated
a remarkable range of economic-historical theories. Joseph
Schumpeter interpreted the cycle as a process of techno-economic
innovation, in which capital was creatively revolutionized and
destroyed through depreciation, whilst Hyman Minsky attributed it
to a rhythm of financial speculation (in which stability fostered over-
confidence, excess, and crisis with cyclic regularity).
The discovery of the ‘long wave’ seemed to coincide with its
disappearance – at the hands of macroeconomic management
(Keynesian counter-cyclical policy). Unsurprisingly, the crisis of
Keynesianism under present conditions of ‘debt saturation’ has re-
animated long wave discussion. At his Kondratiev-inspired Tipping
Points blog, Gordon T. Long forecasts a savage winter, marked by
rapid progression from financial through economic to political crisis,
culminating in a (US dollar) ‘currency collapse’ in 2012.
Wrap up warmly.
May 5, 2011
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Reignition
New Y
Year
ear Cheer
There
There’s
’s a lot of ruin in a global madhouse
2012 is a year that arrives pre-branded. It’s the last opportunity to

end the world on schedule. By the end of December the window for
apocalyptic profundity will have closed, and it’s back to the hazards
of random, meaningless catastrophe.
Perhaps a prophetic consensus will have emerged by the fall, but
right now the outlook is foggy at best. Trawling through the Web’s
most excitable 2012 sites doesn’t bring anything very definite into
focus. Once discussion advances beyond the fairly solid foundation
of the Mayan long count, and the Fourth Age of Creation (lasting
from August 11, 3114 BC, to December 21, AD 2012), things spin off
into chaos with disconcerting rapidity.
Whether the earth is destined to plunge into a black hole is a
matter of (at least limited) controversy, but the fact that just about
every imaginable species of prospective calamity or transformation
is being sucked into the 2012 prophetic vortex is easily confirmed
by anybody with a web browser. Even the basic genre remains
unsettled, with expectations veering wildly from celestial collisions,
solar flares, and super-volcanoes, to spiritual awakenings, cosmic
harmonizations, and countless varieties of Messianic fulfillment.
According to the sober forecasters at 2012apocalypse.net: “The
Mayans, Hopis, Egyptians, Kabbalists, Essenes, Qero elders of Peru,
280
Navajo, Cherokee, Apache, Iroquois confederacy, Dogon Tribe, and

Aborigines all believe in an ending to this Great 2012 Apocalyptic
Cycle.” They missed out Mother Shipton, Nostradamus, Terence
McKenna, Kalki Bagavan, and Web Bot, yet somehow the Cracked
crew remain unconvinced.
As an aside, the best line UF has yet seen among the deniers
(sorry, couldn’t resist that), is this deliciously self-undermining
specimen from Ian O’Neill: “No one has ever predicted the future,
and that isn’t about to change.”
In an increasingly desegregated cultural landscape, it’s not easy
to separate out secular history and sensible opinion from the
orgiastically gathering End Times festival, and – strangely enough –
the world process isn’t doing much to oblige. Ritualistic predictions-
for-the-year-ahead posts on politics and economics sites are
practically indistinguishable from the 2012 Armageddon-is-here
prophecies, although the sane side of prognostication is
characterized by a greater uniformity of unrelenting bleakness:
Comprehensive economic collapse, aggravated by administrative
sclerosis, and accompanied by escalating international conflict /
social disintegration, amidst the enraged screams of splintering
civilizations (and a ‘Happy New Year’ to you, too.)
Goldbug Darryl Robert Schoon demonstrates some professional
hedging, but he doesn’t even try to keep impending financial crisis
from spilling out into cosmic immensities:
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The ending of the Mayan calendar in 2012 is as

misunderstood as the interplay between credit and debt and
supply and demand; but the coincident collapse of the
current economic paradigm and an arcane indicator of
change should not be dismissed. … The current great wave [of
rising prices] began in 1896. That it could crest and break in
2012 could be a coincidence. Or, it may not.
Science, technology, creative culture, and enterprise are likely to

spring some upside surprises, but the degenerative horror of the
world’s hegemonic Keynesian political economy – combined with
increasingly irresponsible neoconservative democracy-mongering —
has ominously synchronized itself with the darkest visions of the
2012 cults. A patently dysfunctional mode of socio-economic
organization, based upon fake money, belligerent idiocracy, and
electorally-enabled looting scams, is aggressively imposing itself –
with an almost incomprehensible absence of self-reflection — upon
a world that already has plenty of indigenous pathologies to contend
with. The resulting New World Order, entirely predictably, is a
lunatic asylum, and even its most functional components (such as
Singapore and the Chinese SARs of Hong Kong and Macao) are
networked into the collective delirium. When the Euro, Japanese
Yen, and US Dollar collapse (probably in that order) the financial and
geopolitical tsunami will wash over everybody. If that doesn’t happen
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in 2012, history has no sense of narrative climax at all.

On the ‘bright’ side – for all the can-kickers out there – the words
of Adam Smith that have defined 2011 continue to resonate. “Young
man, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation,” and even more in a global
system. Perhaps the slow-motion disintegration of hegemonic neo-
fascism Keynesian social democracy will spin itself out beyond the
horizon of the Mayan calendar, which would really give us something
to look forward to …
January 6, 2012
End Games
Some time late on the 21st of December last year [2012], Terrestrial
Omega Event 2012 streaked past relatively quietly, on a trajectory
from the dread realm of ominous premonitions into the cobwebbed
vault of defunct absurdities. (The fact that its glancing blow reduced
Urban Future to a tangled wreck of smoking weakly radioactive
debris need be of no concern to anybody except our five regular
readers.) Another non-event was thus added to the long chain of
ontological omissions that compose the Apocalyptic Tradition.
Things continue, on their existing tracks, as common sense had
confidently predicted.
For a world saturated in modernist irony, where even the most
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passionate beliefs are modulated by forms of mass-media

entertainment, no ‘Great Disappointment’ is any longer possible,
such as that afflicting the Millerites of the mid-1840s. A 2012
Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 10% of the world population (and
no less than 20% of Chinese) had ‘sincerely’ expected the End to
arrive on December 21st. When it didn’t, so what? There’s always
something else on — or rather, the same thing, in different flavors.
Channel hopping is especially easy because it isn’t even necessary
to switch genre. The collapse of the Occidental World Order is like
Henry Ford’s Model T: “You can have it in any color you like, as long
as it’s black.” What you can’t do is get it over with. It’s too big to fail,
even after it has manifestly failed.
The December non-event was not the End, or even the end of
the End, but rather the end of the end of the End. Dated Doomsday
has been de-activated, leaving an indefinitely dilated Ending without
conclusion. Now that the prospect of a finish has finished, finishing
becomes interminable. Dates march onwards, without destination,
into ever extended horizons of collapse. Apocalypse, stripped of
Armageddon, is normalized. It can now demand undistracted
recognition as ‘the system’, the way of the world, feeding upon the
spectacle of permanent crisis through the Media-Apocalypse
Complex. As (Fukuyama-final) Liberal Democratic politics adjusts to
a chronic state of emergency, it is finally possible to ‘get things done’,
in a time when nothing can be done. Disinhibited insanity delights in
284
its ultimate mania.

Because it’s insanity, it can’t really last, but Apocalypse has
outlasted Doomsday, and reality has lost its last signs. For purposes
of polite conversation, therefore, it is best to grant the Keynesians
/ Postmodernists absolute triumph, and to concur that the
consequences of irrealism can be indefinitely postponed. When in
Bedlam, do as the bedlamites do. Anything else would be pointless
irascibility, out of keeping with the spirit of the age. After all (except
itself) Apocalypse Forever is the final Western religion.
Progressive Apocalypse, Apocalypse Forever, assumes the death
of Doomsday, which provides the occasion for an obituary. For
reactionaries of the ‘Throne and Altar’ variety, mourning will incline
towards eschatology, as the moment of definitive judgment is
interred. Here in the eschaton-blitzed wreckage of Urban Future,
however, our remembrance is more concisely arithmetical. We recall
dates gone forever, and with them the time inversions that are
expressed through countdowns, intensive escalations, and
compressions. When the end had a date, time could zero upon it,
rather than dissipating into endlessly-extended fogbanks of blighted
futurity.
December 21st, 2012, was the last Doomsday date, and thus the
day Doomsday died. It might even have been the most popular, but
it was very far from the greatest. Extracted predominantly from the
calendar of the Mayans, it neatly concluded the 13th Baktun, but
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Reignition
in doing so broke quite arbitrarily from the (already awkward and

compromised) numerical organization of the dating system, with its
preference for modulus-20 unit hierarchies. Whatever the
attractions of exoticism, turning to pop Mayanology for a planetary
Apocalypse schedule was also radically arbitrary, given the
Abrahamic Hegemony that had structured the world order over the
previous half millennium. Still, the Maya had conducted their own
preliminary experiment in collapse, enabling Mel Gibson to excavate
a striking movie from the ruins, introduced by a quote from Will
Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it
has destroyed itself from within.”
When estimated in terms of numerical elegance and metaphysical
profundity, the truly great Doomsday was Y2K, the most beautiful
weapon in history (despite its failure to detonate). Y2K was
automatic and techno-compatible (actually, techno-dependent),
chronometrically precise, perfectly counter-Abrahamic, and
calendrically creative (re-setting AD 1900 to Year 00). It was staged
from the absence of an integrated, malevolent subject, out of simple
arithmetic, targeting an exactly scheduled, consummate fulfillment
of millennial expectation through sheer coincidence. The world
order was to have been softly terminated, by ‘chance’. Nothing that
has ever actually happened in history made as much sense as this
(which didn’t). The more closely it is examined, the more exquisite it
appears. Among other missed Doomsdays, none comes close. But as
286
Y2K said, insidiously: Never Mind.

Even the shoddiest of the Old Doomsdays satisfied intellectual
appetites that will now hunger forever. First of all, and most basically,
they catered to the transcendental impulse, understood as a search
for ultimate or enveloping structures and principles of organization.
As a metaphysical event, conclusive Apocalypse promises an escape
from distracting detail and an apprehension of the frame. Biblical
bases for such apprehension are found in Isaiah 34:4 — “All the stars
of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll.”
This image is repeated in Revelation 6:14 — “And the heaven
departed as a scroll when it is rolled together.” Apocalyptic time does
not add a new sentence, or even a new chapter, to the chronicle of
events. It uncovers the limit of the scroll, by exceeding it. For that,
however, it has to complete itself.
Secondly, a punctual Apocalypse fulfills a semiotic (and in
particular numerical) realism, as expressed — most lucidly — in
occultism and schizophrenia. The apocalyptic exposes a primal
encryption of culture, coding the operations of super-human
intelligence (God or gods, transcended masters, aliens, time-
travelers, spontaneous social order, or bacteria … any will do). A true
calendar is revealed, in which semiotic exhaustion, or roll-over,
precisely coincides with the end of a real epoch. Hyper-
traditionalism thus exoticizes itself in the formulation: travel inwards
far enough and you arrive at the outside. It thus provides the most
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Reignition
radical challenge to the fundamental mantra of the contemporary

human sciences – the (Saussurean) arbitrary nature of the sign.
An additional and essentially modern contribution to the
apocalyptic is made by the arithmetic of the intrinsically
unsustainable, as defined by Thomas Malthus (1768-1834) in his An
Essay on the Principle of Population. The empirical foundations for
an inevitable crisis are found in trends to exponential growth and
their projected collision with a limit. Variants of such apocalyptic
projection are found in Marxism, environmentalism, and
Technological Singularity (Karl Marx, M. King Hubbert, and Ray
Kurzweil).
Even from this brief survey, it becomes possible to outline certain
core features of a model apocalypse: comprehensive, punctual, and
climactic. In other words, a transition that cannot be contained by
the pre-existing nature of time, occurring at an exact, cryptically
anticipated moment, bringing the central historical process to its
culmination. All of that is gathered together in Doomsday, and
Doomsday is dead.
Note: Thanks to Mathieu Borysevicz and Sophie Huang of the MAB
Society, whose December 10th, 2012, Minsheng Museum event, Just
What is it about the end of the world that makes it so appealing?
provided the opportunity to discuss the schematics of apocalypse.
January 17, 2013
288
CHAPTER FOUR - CASE STUDIES
Peak P
People
eople
Could we be facing the ultimate resource crunch?
Over at Zero Hedge, Sean Corrigan unleashes a fizzing polemic

against the (M. King Hubbert) ‘Peak Oil’ school of resource
doomsters (enjoy the article if you’re laissez-faire inclined, or the
comments if you’re not).
Of particular relevance to density advocates is Corrigan’s
“exercise in contextualization” (a kind of de-stressed Stand on
Zanzibar) designed to provide an image of the planet’s ‘demographic
burden’:
For example, just as an exercise in contextualisation, consider

the following:-
The population of Hong Kong: 7 million. Its surface area:
1,100 km2
The population of the World: nigh on 7 billion, i.e., HK x
1000
1000 x area of HK = 110,000 km2 = the area of Cuba or
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Reignition
Iceland
Approximate area of the Earth’s landmass = 150 million
km2
Approximate total surface area = 520 million km2
So, were we to build one, vast city of the same population
density as Hong Kong to cover the entirety of [Cuba], this
would accommodate all of humanity, and take up just 0.07%
of the planet’s land area and 0.02% of the Earth’s surface.
Anybody eagerly anticipating hypercities, arcologies, and other

prospective experiments in large-scale social packing is likely to find
this calculation rather disconcerting, if only because – taken as a
whole — Hong Kong actually isn’t that dense. For sure, the downtown
‘synapse’ connecting the HK Island with Kowloon is impressively
intense, but most of the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative
Region) is green, rugged, and basically deserted. It’s (mean) average
density of 6,364 / km2 doesn’t get anywhere close to that of the
top 100 cities (Manila’s 43,000 / km2 is almost seven times greater).
Corrigan isn’t envisaging a megalopolis, but a Cuba-scale suburb.
Whether densitarians are more or less likely than average to
worry about Peak Oil or related issues might be an interesting
question (the New Urbanists tend to be quite greenish). If they really
want to see cities scale the heights of social possibility, however, they
need to start worrying about population shortage. With the human
290
population projected to level-off at around 10 billion, there might

never be enough people to make cities into the ultra-dense monsters
that futuristic imagination has long hungered for.
Bryan Caplan is sounding the alarm. At least we have teeming
Malthusian robot hordes to look forward to.
May 20, 2011
Hard F
Futurism
uturism
Are yyou
ou ready for the ne
next
xt big (nasty) thing?
For anyone with interests both in extreme practical futurism and

the renaissance of the Sinosphere, Hugo de Garis is an irresistible
reference point. A former teacher of Topological Quantum
Computing (don’t ask) at the International Software School of
Wuhan University, and later Director of the Artificial Brain Lab at
Xiamen University, de Garis’ career symbolizes the emergence of
a cosmopolitan Chinese technoscientific frontier, where the outer-
edge of futuristic possibility condenses into precisely-engineered
reality.
De Garis’ work is ‘hard’ not only because it involves fields such
as Topological Quantum Computing, or because – more accessibly
— he’s devoted his research energies to the building of brains rather
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than minds, or even because it has generated questions faster than

solutions. In his ‘semi-retirement’ (since 2010), hard-as-in-difficult,
and hard-as-in-hardware, have been supplanted by hard-as-in-mind-
numbingly-and-incomprehensibly-brutal – or, in his own words, an
increasing obsession with the impending ‘Gigadeath’ or ‘Artilect
War‘.
According to de Garis, the approach to Singularity will
revolutionize and polarize international politics, creating new
constituencies, ideologies, and conflicts. The basic dichotomy to
which everything must eventually succumb divides those who
embrace the emergence of transhuman intelligence, and those who
resist it. The former he calls ‘cosmists‘, the latter ‘terrans’.
Since massively-augmented and robotically-reinforced ‘cosmists’
threaten to become invincible, the ‘terrans’ have no option but pre-
emption. To preserve human existence in a recognizable state, it is
necessary to violently suppress the cosmist project in advance of
its accomplishment. The mere prospect of Singularity is therefore
sufficient to provoke a political — and ultimately military —
convulsion of unprecedented scale. A Terran triumph (which might
require much more than just a military victory) would mark an
inflection point in deep history, as the super-exponential trend of
terrestrial intelligence production – lasting over a billion years — was
capped, or reversed. A Cosmist win spells the termination of human
species dominion, and a new epoch in the geological, biological, and
292
cultural process on earth, as the torch of material progress is passed

to the emerging techo sapiens. With the stakes set so high, the
melodramatic grandeur of the de Garis narrative risks
understatement no less than hyperbole.
The giga-magnitude body-count that de Garis postulates for his
Artilect (artificial intellect) War is the dark side expression of
Moore’s Law or Kurzweilean increasing returns – an extrapolation
from exponentiating historical trends, in this case, casualty figures
from major human conflicts over time. It reflects the accumulating
trend to global wars motivated by trans-national ideologies with
ever-increasing stakes. One king is (perhaps) much like another, but a
totalitarian social direction is very different from a liberal one (even
if such paths are ultimately revisable). Between a Terran world order
and a Cosmist trajectory into Singularity, the distinction approaches
the absolute. The fate of the planet is decided, with costs to match.
If the de Garis Gigadeath War scenario is pre-emptive in relation
to prospective Singularity, his own intervention is meta-pre-emptive
– since he insists that world politics must be anticipatively re-forged
in order to forestall the looming disaster. The Singularity prediction
ripples backwards through waves of pre-adaptation, responding at
each stage to eventualities that are yet to unfold. Change unspools
from out of the future, complicating the arrow of time. It is perhaps
no coincidence that among de Garis’ major research interests is
reversible computing, where temporal directionality is unsettled at
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the level of precise engineering.

Does ethnicity and cultural tradition merely dissolve before the
tide-front of this imminent Armageddon? The question is not
entirely straightforward. Referring to his informal polling of opinion
on the coming great divide, de Garis recalls his experience teaching
in China, remarking:
I know from the lectures I’ve given over the past two decades
on species dominance that when I invite my audiences to vote
on whether they are more Terran than Cosmist, the result is
usually 50-50. … At first, I thought this was a consequence of
the fact that the species dominance issue is too new, causing
people who don’t really understand it to vote almost
randomly – hence the 50:50 result. But gradually, it dawned
on me that many people felt as ambivalently about the issue
as I do. Typically, the Terran/Cosmist split would run from
40:60 to 60:40 (although I do notice that with my very young
Chinese audiences in computer science, the Cosmists are at
about 80%).
June 13, 2011
294
Kinds of Killing
How bad is genocide, really?
Like ‘fascism’ – with which it is closely connected in the popular

imagination – ‘genocide’ is a word carrying such exorbitant
emotional charge that it tends to blow the fuses of any attempt at
dispassionate analysis. We can thank the political black magic of
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi accomplices for that.
Prior to the Third Reich and its systematic, industrialized
attempts to eradicate entire ethno-racial populations (Jews, Roma,
and perhaps Slavs) along with other numerous other groups (mental
and physical ‘defectives’ or ‘useless eaters’, homosexuals,
communists, Jehova’s Witnesses …) international law restricted its
attention to the actions and grievances of states and individuals,
with the latter subdivided into combatants and noncombatants. The
National Socialist trauma changed that fundamentally.
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations adopted the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (as Resolution 260), defining a new category of
internationally recognized crimes as “acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group.”
Since 1948, defending genocide has been the surest way to ruin a
dinner party. That doesn’t mean, however, that the topic deserves to
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be immunized from controversy. There is one question in particular

that merits intense and prolonged scrutiny: Is genocide really worse
than killing a lot of people?
Posed slightly more technically: Is there a crime of genocide that
stands above and beyond mass murder (of equivalent scale)? Or (a
rough equivalent): Can groups be the specific victims of crime? This
is to ask whether groups exist – and have value — as anything more
than a nominal or strictly formal set, whose reality is exhausted by its
constituent individual members. The existence of genocide as a legal
category presumes a (positive) answer to this question, and in doing
so it closes down a problem of great and very general importance.
The classical liberal presumption is quite different, as summarized
(a little bluntly) by the provocative remark made by British Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987 “… there is no such thing as
society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”
Harshly extrapolating from this position, a certain irony might be
found in the fact that a horrified response to National Socialist
crimes has taken the form of a legal codification of racial collectivism.
At the very least, it is puzzling that suspicions directed at legal
references to ‘group rights’ and ‘hate crimes’ among those of a
libertarian bent has not been extended to the category of genocide.
In the opposite camp, the most fully articulated defense of
collectives as real entities is found, as might be expected, in the
foundation of sociology as an academic discipline, and more
296
particularly in Émile Durkheim’s argument for ‘social facts’. Larry

May looks back further, to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, or social
being, in which human individuals are absorbed as organic parts.
Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial
(and political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex
systems are more likely to ask which groups or societies are real
individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity, as self-
reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is far
more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than
between groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is
especially helpful to distinguish feature groups from unit groups.
A feature group is determined by logical classification. This might
be expressed as a self-identification or sense of ‘belonging’, an
external political or academic categorization, or some combination
of these, but the essentials remain the same in each case. Certain
features of the individual are isolated and emphasized (such as
genitalia, sexual orientation, skin-color, income, or religious belief),
and then employed as the leading clue in a process of formal
grouping, which conforms theoretically to the mathematics of sets.
A unit group, in contrast, is defined as an assemblage, or
functional whole. Its members belong to the group insofar as they
work together, even if they are entirely devoid of common identity
features. Membership is decided by role, rather than traits, since one
becomes part of such a group through functional involvement, rather
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than classification of characteristics. Social instances of such groups

include primitive tribes (determined by functional unities rather than
the categories of modern ‘identity politics’), cities, states, and
companies. The most obvious instance in socialist theory is the
‘soviet’ or ‘danwei’ work unit (whilst social classes are feature
groups).
To take a non-anthropomorphic example, consider a skin cell. Its
feature group is that of skin cells in general, as distinguished from
nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells, or others. Any two skin cells share
the same feature group, even if they belong to different organisms,
or even species, exist on different continents, and never functionally
interact. The natural unit group of the same skin cell, in contrast,
would be the organism it belongs to. It shares this unit group with all
the other cells involved in the reproduction of that organism through
time, including those (such as intestinal bacteria) of quite separate
genetic lineages. Considered as a unit group member, a skin cell has
greater integral connection with the non-biological tools and other
‘environmental’ elements involved in the life of the organism than it
does with other skin cells – even perfect clones – with which it is not
functionally entangled.
Clearly, both feature groups and unit groups are ‘fuzzy sets’, and
the distinction itself – whilst theoretically precise – is empirically
hazy. An urban American street gang, for instance, will in most cases
be vague in its features and unity, perhaps ‘ethnic’ to some degree
298
of definition, with a determinable age-range, and with ambiguous

functional connections to groupings on a larger scale, or to
peripheral members whose status of ‘belonging’ is not strictly
decidable. Tattoos and other membership markings are likely to
involve both identity and integrity aspects – traits and roles. Rituals
of belonging (ordeals, oaths, rites of passage) are designed to
disambiguate membership.
Despite such haziness, the distinction between these two types
of groups strikes directly at the core problematic of genocide (as a
legal category). When a unit group is destroyed, a real individual is
‘killed’ above and beyond whatever human losses are incurred. The
destruction of a feature group, in contrast, whatever the cultural
loss, is not any kind of killing beyond the mass murder of human
individuals. If this is worse than murder, we should know why.
This conclusion seems relevant when weighing, for instance, the
1937 Massacre of Nanjing on the scale of historical atrocity. It
suggests, at least, that an act of violence directed against a city –
or integrated population unit — is no less worthy of specific legal
attention than a quantitatively equivalent offense against an
ethnicity, or determined population type. It seems to be no more
than an accident of history that, in order to appropriate the category
of genocide, massive crimes of the former variety need to be recoded
as if they more properly belonged to the latter.
Complex systems ontology aside, these matters resolve
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ultimately into obscure social values. Orthodox conceptions of

‘genocide’ assume that ethnic identity simply and unquestionably
means more than active citizenship, or participation in the life of
a city. Perhaps this assumption is even arguable. But has it been
argued?
September 13, 2011
The God Confusion
A world on its knees, and at yyour

our throat
“Do The Three Abrahamic Faiths Worship The Same God?” Peter
Berger asks, on his blog at the American Interest. His answer, which
seems to be programmed at least as much by the sensitivities of
interfaith politics as by the exigencies of rigorous theology, is a
politely nuanced “yes (but).” If anyone is unconvinced about the
urgent pertinence of multicultural diplomacy to the question, Berger
settles such doubts quickly by depicting the integrated conception of
‘Abrahamic faith’ as a response to the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ climate
that arose in the wake of 9/11, “with the altogether admirable
intention of countering anti-Islamic hatred.”
At its core, his argument is both realistic and relatively
uncontroversial. It is comparable to an informal set theory, or
300
cladistics, briefly surveying family resemblances and dissimilarities

between branches of the Abrahamic religious ‘tree’ and concluding,
reasonably enough, that none of the potential groupings are
absolutely strict (each faith, even narrowly defined, is differentiated
within itself by sub-branches, and twigs), and that the coherence of
‘Judeo-Christian’ monotheism is considerably stronger than that of
‘Abrahamic Faith’ in general. Whatever the complexity of these
branchings, however, they derive from a readily identifiable trunk.
Berger cites a lecture by the Protestant theologian Miroslav Volf:
Yes, one can say that Christians and Muslims believe in the
“same God”. There are enough common affirmations to justify
this—most importantly, of course, the belief that there is only
one God (what the late Richard Niebuhr, coincidentally
another Yale Divinity professor, called “radical
monotheism”)—but also the belief in a personal creator
distinct from the creation, and the giver of a moral code.
When evaluated from a wide enough angle, it is clear that the God
of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is distinctively specified, relative to
alternative religious traditions:
Sometimes it is a good idea to step back and look at the

imputed collectivity from afar. It may help to look at the three
‘Abrahamic’ faiths from, say, Benares, one of the most holy
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cities of Hinduism and near which the Buddha preached his

first sermon. Looked at from that far location, the family
resemblance between the three versions suddenly appears
quite clearly. Hindus and Buddhists sometimes speak of
‘West Asian religion’ in contrast with their own ‘South Asian
‘or ‘East Asian religion’. It then seems just about inevitable
to say that Jews, Christians and Muslims, whatever their
differences, do indeed worship the same God.
To be sure, there are similarities between Benares and
Jerusalem as well. There are Hindu versions of theism, with
intense devotions to personal deities (bhakti), but there is
no real analogue to the monotheism that originated in the
deserts of the Near East. In Vedanta, arguably the most
sophisticated form of Hinduism, the ultimate reality is the
brahman, the impersonal ocean of divinity in which all
individual identities eventually dissolve. There are theistic
elements in Mahayana Buddhism, with devotion directed
toward godlike boddhisatvas— individuals who have attained
Enlightenment, but who, out of compassion, delay their entry
into the final bliss in order to help others to get there. But
that bliss too ends in that impersonal ocean of divinity that
seems for many centuries to have dominated the religious
imagination of India, from where it migrated eastward.
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Yet, whilst the theological dimension of this question is very far from
uninteresting, or inconsequential, it limits the question at least as
much as it clarifies it. More than a faith, the ‘children of Abraham’
share a story, and – still more importantly — a sense of history as a
story, and this is the factor that most tightly bundles them together,
irrespective of all quibbling over narrative details. Abraham is the
beginning of a tale, even if it can be projected back (at least a little
way) beyond him. He defines the meaning of history, as an interaction
with God, through which the passage of collective time acquires
structure, direction, unity, radical finitude, moral and religious
significance. Abrahamic history has purpose, and a destination.
Above all it tells the story of a moral community, whose
righteousness and unrighteousness will ultimately be judged.
Eschatology is its real key.
Because the Abrahamic tradition is rooted in a distinctive
experience of history, it extends beyond theistic faith. Indeed, any
comprehension of this tradition that excludes Marxism, fascist
millenarianism, and ‘liberal’ secular progressivism (even that of the
‘New Atheists’) is woefully incomplete, to the point of diversionary
propaganda. Uniquely, the Abrahamic faiths do not merely rise, fall,
and persist. They are superceded by new revelations, or afflicted
by heresy and schism. Their encounters and (inevitable) conflicts
become internalized episodes that immediately demand doctrinal
and narrative intelligibility. Hence the affinity between the
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Reignition
Abrahamic faiths and historical (as ‘opposed’ to pedagogical, cosmic,

or naturalistic) dialectics: the ‘other’, merely by appearing on the
stage, must play its role in the world-historical drama of belief.
Strict monotheism is the personification of narrative unity, and
in the end it is the narrative unity that matters. Whether history is
finally to be appraised from the perspective of the people of Israel,
the Church, the Ummah, achieved communism, an Aryan master-
race, or secular multicultural globalism, it will have been integrated
through the production of a moral community, and judged as a
coherent whole by the standard of that community’s purity and
righteousness. It will have been comprehended by a collective
subject whose story — it insists — is the entire meaning of the world.
For the minor paganisms of antiquity, and the major paganisms of
the east, this structure of understanding has the objective potential
to be offensive to an almost inestimable degree, so the fact that
pagans have rarely contested it with an animosity that even remotely
approaches its ‘internal’ conflicts and disputations is intriguing.
Whilst cases of anti-semitism, anti-clericalism, islamophobia, anti-
communism, anti-fascism, and systematic political incorrectness
have, on occasions, been plausibly derived from pagan inspirations,
in the overwhelming majority of cases it is the various ‘fraternal’
branches of the great Abrahamic family that have wrought
devastation upon each other. Indeed, persecution, as a particular
mode of ‘zealous’ or ‘enthusiastic’ violence, seems to be an
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Abrahamic specialty, one that depends upon conceptions of

‘intolerable’ idolatry, heresy, apostasy, false-consciousness, or
political incorrectness that are found nowhere else.
God told Abraham to kill his own son, and he was ready to do so
(Gen 22:1-19). That is how he earned his status as the ur-patriarch
of the tradition, whose children are defined by the ghost of a knife
at their throats. Demonstrated willingness to kill in the name of the
Lord, or its abstracted equivalent (the meaning of history), is the
initiatory ideal, and the beginning of the world story that now
encompasses everyone. After this original ritual, Isaac’s life was no
longer natural, but ideological. It was suspended, vulnerably, from
a word owing nothing to the protective bond tying an animal to its
progeny (symbolically terminated by Abraham’s surrender to divine
command), but settled on high, in the narrative structure of the
world. If God had willed it — or the story demanded it — he would
have been slain. In this way an unnatural line, existing only as an
expression of divine purpose, breaks from the archaic pagan order
of ‘meaningless’ procreation and nurture. (The place assigned to the
sacrifice, Mount Moriah, would later be the site of Jerusalem, the
city of the end of time, and beyond nature.) Isaac was spared, but the
pagan world was not similarly reprieved.
The existence of an Abrahamic tradition has an importance that
far exceeds its internal politics and internecine rivalries, since it is
indistinguishable from the historical unification of the world, and no
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‘other’ is able to remain outside its narrative order. In much of the

world, even in its Abrahamic heartlands, to refuse God is no great
thing, and perhaps little more than a mildly comical affectation, but
to depart from World History is quite another matter. It is then that
the knife of Abraham glints again.
December 19, 2011
Wild Cards
Responding to Michael Anissimov’s political attitudes quiz,
commentator ‘Donny’ widens the perspective:
… if technology weren’t to advance much over the next century,
we would be witness to the death of western civilization. Instead,
technology will wrench history off its course. Demography is no
longer destiny. Embryo screening for intelligence, a robotic labor
force, rejuvenation therapies that end death from aging, infinite
everything from nanofactories, terrible new weapons wreaking
havoc on humanity, and the recursively self-improving artificial
intelligence that kills us all. Next to that – or any of the other
technologies which could emerge sooner and prove decisive instead
– Mexican immigration doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. None of
our existing institutions or social structures are prepared for what’s
coming and the century will be a rollercoaster ride on fire.
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April 26, 2013
Gibson
Gibson’s
’s Nightmare
At the most superficial level, there’s probably some sleeplessness
accompanying the anxiety that the whole of The Peripheral — once
people have processed it — begins to look like a piece of fabulously
ornate, maze-patterned wrapping paper for the four pages that
really matter. There’s the Great Pacific Garbage Patch elsewhere,
along with ubiquitous near-future drones, and – further down the
time-line — some exotic neo-primitivist adornments — but basically,
if you’ve read Chapter 79, you’ve got the thing. Yes, that’s to miss out
on some of the time-travel structure, but Gibson takes such a lazy
approach to that (deliberately suppressing all paradox circuitry) it’s
no great loss.
On the positive side, those four pages are really something.
Chapter 79 is helpfully entitled The Jackpot, and contains what
might well be the most profound reworking of apocalypticism of
modern times. There are some (fairly weak) remarks here. Perhaps
somebody has already contributed some better commentary, that
I’ve missed.
The Jackpot is a catastrophe with a fruit-machine model — all
the reels have to click together ‘right’ for it to amount to disaster.
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It’s therefore poly-causal, cross-lashed, or “multiplex” — eluding

narrative apprehension through multiplicity.
… it was no one thing. … it was multicausal, with no particular
beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way
apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody
ran around with guns … or else were eaten alive by something caused
by the big event. Not like that.
It was androgenic … Not that they’d known what they were doing,
had meant to make problems, but they’s caused it anyway. And in fact
the climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon,
had been the driver for a lot of other things.How that got worse and
never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in
the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not
been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they
knew, and now it was too late.
It kills 80% of the world’s human population in the end.
… Except that’s not the end. The end is Neoreaction:
“What about China?”
… “They’d had a head start,” [Netherton] said.
“At what?”
“At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This … is still
ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors,
considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted
none of that. Blamed it, in fact.”
308
“Who runs it, then?”

“Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies
provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal,
according to its critics. Such as they are.”
“The King of England?”
“The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with
people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.”
“The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that.
“The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.”
January 29, 2015
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CHAPTER FIVE - COMPILA

COMPILATIONS
TIONS
Doomcore
There’s a biblical blood moon omen hanging over September. Pure
Satanism has conquered the culture of the West, to the posthumous
laughter of the Mad Marquis. The Chinese economy is scaring people
(a lot), and Tianjin just exploded. American “Recession Imminent.”
Straight Outta Compton. Trump. Oil. Brazil’s economy is crashing
even harder, and Russia is like a scene out of the Book of Revelation,
with NATO and Russia rehearsing for war. (Still awaiting the India
crisis news for the full BRIC meltdown). Germany is expecting
700,000 asylum seekers this year. “The international system as we
know it is unravelling.” Googling ‘Middle East’ mostly turns up End
Time prophecies, for understandable reasons (here‘s one secular
story). Japan: “Be Afraid.” “The future of humanity is increasingly
African.” There’s been a bomb blast in Bangkok, earth tremors in
California. American race relations are falling off a cliff, probably
because whites haven’t apologized enough yet, though some are
trying. The UK has gone fascist (or something). Bitcoin is (needlessly)
forking into the unknown. (Exotic and longer-term threats are a
310
whole other story.) But the funny thing is …
August 17, 2015
Glide P
Path
ath
Fernandez takes a clear-eyed look at where things are actually
heading right now:
Conventional wisdom has had a pretty bad run these last 15
years. For that reason there is little purpose to trusting it further.
Instead it might be better to predict a future based on observable
trends rather than scenarios that politicians [promote?]. If those
trends convey any information one would expect to see in 2025:
1. The self-destruction of the Muslim Middle East;
2. The rise of ethnic and national politics in Europe;
3. The widespread resurgence of religion and cultural identity as a
consequence of (2);
4. Mass expulsions or segregation in large parts of the world to
deconflict incompatible communities
5. Everyone packing personal weapons like the Wild West
6. The collapse of multi-ethnic countries into simplified pacts based
around of national defense, with most social law generated by local
communities and affinity groups;
7. One or more large regional wars with casualties in the tens of
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millions.
8. Several, possibly many WMD attacks on major cities involving
radiological weapons, low yield nukes or biological agents.
8. The collapse of any realistic expectation of Peace on Earth, with
the remaining hope of mankind vested in the new space frontier.
Such a world would be rough, dangerous and in many places,
miserable. Perhaps it will not even be as good as that; for the list
above omits the occurrence of an event equivalent to World War 3,
in which case we can describe the future with a single word: ruin.
But it is the world we are building, absent any change of course.
The oddest circumstance is that politicians still pretend without the
slightest basis, that if we stay their perverse course we’ll go right
through the ruin and out the other side and find the dream we
glimpsed as we crossed into the 21st century. […] It’s a condition they
call Hope, though there’s another phrase for it: whistling past the
graveyard.
October 15, 2015
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SMOD
Some suggestive figures and commentary. (More here.) Googling

“trump + chaos” — 52,300,000 results (beginning 1, 2, 3, 4 …). Trump
has 5,000,000 Twitter followers. The dike has broken. Now it
cascades …
From the commies at Rolling Stone (three months ago):
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Reignition
During a Q&A with fans before a Cincinnati concert earlier this

month, [pop music person] Billy Corgan was asked what he thought
about the first Republican debate, at which point the rocker lauded
the mogul’s ability to take the political spectrum and “fuck it up.” “I
think what’s cool, and I’m not saying I agree politically, but I think
what’s cool is Trump’s running chaos theory,” Corgan said (via
Alternative Nation). […] “He’s forcing a lot of things out into the open,
so they can’t control this, whatever that control is …”
314
As another commie hack points out calmly: “Trump may well be

something unprecedentedly terrible.”
The rise of the destructor has been congesting all my information
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Reignition
channels this week. Tomorrow’s Trumpenführer panic update goes

parabolic.
ADDED: Trump and the Left Acceleration vote — “I’m hoping
Donald Trump wins this year’s election. For the reason that it will
fuck up that country so much faster then if a less bad President wins.”
December 12, 2015
316
CHAPTER SIX - POLITICAL INSANITY
The Rights Stuff

Apologies for the minimalism, even by my recent standards, but I
simply have to pass this on.
(I’ll throw these two links in for added depth.)
March 7, 2015
Trash Space
There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start:
Baltimore is burning as I write, the streets are filled with rioters
and police. They don’t seem to be “clashing” much, however.
Photographs show looters looting, and cops standing around. The
black lady mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake … made a
statement that, in the interests of the demonstrators’ “free speech”
rights, she had told the Baltimore PD to “give those who wished to
destroy space to do that.”
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Nothing says ‘free speech’ like torching a city to the ground.

(Shouting “fire” in a crowded cinema might be irresponsible, but
burning the cinema to the ground is political art.)
In Defense of Looting (seriously), from August last year.
David Simon politely asks everyone to “please stop”. Good luck
with that.
Western civilization is so over.
ADDED:
"Whenever I hear the word 'democracy' I know a bloodbath is

coming." －Prince Klemens von Metternich #BaltimoreRiots
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pic.twitter.com/mPNYMihqWb
— SMR×乃木栄⊿ (@NogiRx) April 28, 2015
ADDED: (Passed along without comment)
The riot-shaming is getting old. Burning things down has

always had a place historically. I wish ppl on would quit
pretending otherwise.
— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) April 28, 2015
ADDED: “Baltimore’s violent protestors are right …” … “As a

nation, we fail to comprehend Black political strategy in much the
same way we fail to recognize the value of Black life. …”
April 28, 2015
Mean
Meanwhile,
while, in P
Paris
aris
How could any society not want this type of enrichment to happen in
its urban centers?
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Uber-Chaos, apparently. [Or not.]

ADDED: Given the likelihood of time-pwnage here, ‘meanwhile’
should probably be read as ‘sometime in the 21st century’. It says
Sept. 1 on the Youtube video, but that probably means less than I’d
assumed. See (brief) comment by ‘Ano nymous’ in the thread below.
ADDED (from The New Yorker): To add a little gravitas.
September 2, 2015
320
Report from a Madhouse

When you throw your last scraps of civilized incentive-architecture
in a dumpster and set it on fire it looks like this:
Cities across the country, beginning with the District of Columbia,
are moving to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because
early indications show it has helped reduce homicide rates. […] But
the program requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law
enforcement even as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to
spend tax dollars. […] … when the elaborate efforts at engagement
fail, the mentors still pay those who pledge to improve, even when,
like [violent criminal Lonnie] Holmes, they are caught with a gun, or
worse — suspected of murder. […] … To maintain the trust of the
young men they’re guiding, mentors do not inform police of what
they know about crimes committed. At least twice, that may have
allowed suspected killers in the stipend program to evade
responsibility for homicides. […] And yet, interest in the program is
surging among urban politicians. Officials in Miami, Toledo,
Baltimore and more than a dozen cities in between are studying how
to replicate Richmond’s program. […] … five years into Richmond’s
multimillion-dollar experiment, 84 of 88 young men who have
participated in the program remain alive, and 4 in 5 have not been
suspected of another gun crime or suffered a bullet wound … […]
Richmond’s decision to pay people to stay out of trouble began a
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Reignition
decade ago during a period of despair. […] In 2007, Richmond’s

homicide tally had surged to 47, making it the country’s sixth-
deadliest city per capita. In the 20 years prior to that, Richmond lost
740 people to gun violence, and more than 5,000 had been injured
by a bullet. […] Elected leaders of the heavily African American city
of about 100,000 began treating homicides as a public health
emergency. … [DeVone Boggan] who had lost a brother in a shooting
in Michigan … had to raise the money because he couldn’t persuade
officials to giv
givee tax dollars directly to violent firearms offenders
offenders. […]
Boggan and his streetwise crew of ex-cons selected an initial group
of 21 gang members and suspected criminals for the program. One
night in 2010, he persuaded them to come to city hall, where he
invited them to work with mentors and plan a future without guns.
As they left, Boggan surprised each one with $1,000 — no strings
attached. […] “This is controversial, I get it,” Boggan said. “But what’s
really happening is that they are getting rewarded for doing really
hard work, and it’s definite hard work when you talk about stopping
picking up a gun to solve your problems.” […] So far, the attention —
and money — seems to be working for Holmes. Although the $1,500
he has received since getting out of prison last fall has not led to a
miraculous transformation, it enabled him to make a down payment
on his black 2015 Nissan Versa — something meaningful for a young
man who for many years was homeless. […] He now spends hours
each day in the car, driving around with friends, often smoking pot
322
but not “hunting” — Vaughn’s term for seeking conflict with rivals. […]
“The money is a big part,” Holmes says. “I can’t count the number of
times it has kept me from . . . doing what I’ve got to do. It stopped me
from going to hit that liquor [store] or this, you feel me, it’s a relief to
not have to go do this and endanger my life for a little income, you
feel me?” …
That’s as much as I can take. The phrase subject to XS emphasis
describes the core principle of the scheme. Maybe it should count
as a relief that these gangstas aren’t being directly rewarded for
whacking shop-keepers.
There’s a term for this kind of scheme: Dane Geld. It’s not
something civilizations with a future tend to engage in.
ADDED: Highly relevant. “… there are entire classes of people
who can get more from the world by being unstable and dangerous
…”
March 29, 2016
Twitter cuts (#60)
Who thinks the world is getting better?

6% of Americans
4% of Brits
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3% of French#sheesh pic.twitter.com/sevRFoUu9c
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) April 15, 2016
Assuming that the Mandate of Heaven is always the real principle

of regime legitimation, this looks like an interesting status quo
problem. If the present world order is working, it’s doing a
conspicuously poor job of advertising the fact — especially to
Western populations.
April 16, 2016
It’s come to this

Yudkowsky’s case against Trump:
Scope is real. If you ever have to choose between voting a
convicted serial abuser of children into the Presidential office — but
this person otherwise seems stable and collected — versus a
Presidential candidate who seems easy to provoke and who has ‘bad
days’ and doesn’t listen to advisors and once said “Why do we have
all these nukes if we can’t use them?”, it is deadly important that you
vote for the pedophile. It isn’t physically possible to abuse enough
children per day over 4 years to do as much damage as you can do
with one wrong move in the National Security Decision-Making
Game.
324
It seems the stars are right:
October 12, 2016
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Current Mood
ADDED: Here’s the same picture taken from another angle
Picture of the Day. pic.twitter.com/979KCN0TCX

— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) November 13,
2016
November 13, 2016
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CHAPTER SEVEN - ECONOMIC

COLLAPSE
Progress
Two centuries of US monetary stewardship charted @ ZH:

Red line is the CPI.
Blue line is the USD / Swiss Franc exchange rate.
December 13, 2013
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Progress (II)
When socialism puts a ratchet into your churn, this is what

happens.
(Via.)
The first XS ‘Progress’ post was also a chart — and it dove-tails
328
with this one uncannily.
January 15, 2015
Downton on down
Martin Hutchinson argues that — even after factoring in the crushing
losses of WWI — the ‘Downton era’ did things better:
In certain respects — behavioral and otherwise — the “Downton
Abbey economy” of 1920 was greatly preferable to the one we are
experiencing today. […] A move to a “Downton Abbey economy”
should not imply a sharp increase in inequality, rather the opposite.
It is interesting to note that almost 100 years of progressive bloat
of the public sector in both Britain and the U.S. — supposedly
undertaken to reduce economic inequality — have in reality tended
to increase it. […] Public spending (including local government) was
around 25% of GDP in Britain in 1920 and about 15% of GDP in
the U.S., compared to 40% plus in both countries today. It must be
questioned what benefits the public has gained, either in greater
equality or better services, from the massive rise in public spending
since the Downton Abbey period, which itself was inflated from pre-
World War I days.
[…]
Apart from smaller government and less inequality, the Downton
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Reignition
Abbey economy had a number of other advantages over today’s …

First, total factor productivity growth was much greater. The decade
saw the most rapid adoption of the advances in power and
transportation that had grown up from the 1880s. The result was
U.S. TFP growth of around 2% annually, about double the recent rate.
This generated an explosion in living standards during the decade.
Second, the “Downton Abbey economy” had much lower asset
prices because of higher interest rates and much easier construction
procedures. Shares paid higher dividends and were much lower
valued in terms of assets and earnings, while leverage ratios were
infinitely more conservative. The world was used to a gold standard,
in which leverage could kill you in a downturn, and was much more
careful about incurring it. Real estate was valued at its rebuilding
cost, and rebuilding costs were much lower than today because
there were no planning approvals and no environmental-impact
statements. I have written several times about the extraordinary
inflation of infrastructure costs, from the 1920-27 Holland Tunnel’s
$48 million, equivalent to $700 million in today’s prices to the
outrageous projected $9 billion of the recently cancelled Trans-
Hudson Tunnel (functionally an identical project). In “Downton
Abbey’s” world, real estate costs were modest and new
infrastructure projects were built on time, at a fraction of today’s real
cost.
Third, the “Downton Abbey” world had positive real interest rates
330
and no inflation psychology. People could be assured that their

efforts in saving would not be destroyed by inflation or by being
dumped into an overvalued bubble stock market. While World War
I had brought a doubling in prices in Britain and the United States,
everyone expected that this process would be largely reversed,
probably by a British return to the gold standard. Indeed, until World
War II, those expectations were realized. For people planning their
lives, it was a much easier era. In peacetime, money was a solid store
of value, not something that had to be monitored constantly for
inflationary erosion.
Finally, both the economic system and the financial system were
carried on with high standards of integrity, more so in Britain than in
the U.S., but higher in both countries than today. Banks, corporations
and managers relied heavily on their reputation, and those doing
business with them made careful enquiries about that reputation.
There were few fallible government regulations, no bailouts and
little leverage. A notable feature of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi
scheme of 2008 was that it was able to attract about 500 times as
much money in real terms as the $3 million collected in 1920 by
the Charles Ponzi and carry on for about 40 times as long as Ponzi’s
eight months. The ability of Madoff to grow so big and last so long is
testimony to the futility of modern regulation and to the sad decline
of ethical standards in today’s blue-chip houses.
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February 27, 2014
332
Doom P
Paul
aul
Blame Bloom for luring me into this blasted landscape. (I agree

with JAB that there’s something important going on here.)
333
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A Doom Paul video selection (1, 2, 3).

Here‘s a Paul vs. Krugman cage-match.
ADDED: Dialled up to eleven.

ADDED: The End is Close …
October 10, 2014
Pedal to the Metal

Japan accelerates into Keynesian fiscal singularity. This one is for our
honored commenter ‘Kgaard’, who is sure to have some problems
with it. (From David Stockman, this blog’s candidate for the most
based economic analyst on the planet.)
334
Let’s not mess around:

Prime Minister Abe is proving himself to be a certifiable madman.
It could all be over a lot sooner than I’d expected.
November 20, 2014
Suspended Reality
This chart (via) marks the point where economics switches into
ontology (and not in a good way). Global government debt issuance
— undiminished in its absolute scale — has for the first time ever
been entirely swallowed by money production. Postmodernism has
unambiguously triumphed, at least temporarily. It’s a thing of
wonder, and not a bad exemplification of objective evil (as Gnon acts
upon it). Reality, for the moment, is benched. (This does not end well
— but we know that, right?)
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SoBL has a highly relevant forecast post addressing this

syndrome, which has been a long time coming, and no doubt has at
least a little further to go.
336
February 10, 2015
Extreme Games
Greece’s Varoufakis doubles down on the Bart strategy.
May 18, 2015
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Soon
What would a full stocks correction look like?

A true understanding of stock market history shows that Wall
338
Street in the past has moved in long, long swings upwards and
downwards, often taking years or even a generation or two. There is
a great deal of evidence suggesting that the upward move that began
in 1982 is one of them — and that the downward move that first
began in 2000 has not ended.
As stock market historian Russell Napier points out in his book
“Anatomy of the Bear,” on five occasions in the past 100 years — in
1921, 1932, 1949, 1974 and 1982 — those big downward moves
have not ended until share valuations have fallen to just 30% of the
replacement cost of company assets. That’s using a powerful, if little-
known, economic metric known as Tobin’s q. […] And, to cut to the
chase, if Wall Street stocks followed the same path today that would
take the Dow down to about 5,000, and the S&P 500 Index all the
way down to around 600. (The S&P 500 slumped more than 3% to
1,971 on Friday.) […] Yikes.
The “q” is a valuation that they don’t even mention in the training
manuals for the official “financial planner” and financial-analyst
exams. Your money manager has probably never heard of it. Or, if
he has, he probably ranks it with astrology and the mystic rantings
of Nostradamus. […] But the “q” happens to have by far the most
successful long-term track record of any stock market indicator. …
August 22, 2015
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Mean
Meanwhile,
while, in V
Venezuela
enezuela …
A mineral-rich socialist diet:
The governor of the Venezuelan state of Bolívar has some advice
for dealing with the widespread shortage of food across the country.
Can’t find eggs at your local Venezuelan grocery store? Why not try
fried rocks instead? […] Governor Francisco Rangel said during his
radio show on Tuesday, September 29, that the Venezuelan people
should not “yield to temptation” or worry about not being able to find
a pack of flour or sardines to buy amid the shortages. […] “Let them
take away whatever they want. We are capable of eating a stick, or
instead of frying two eggs, fry two rocks, and we will eat fried rocks,
” he said, “but no one can beat us.” […] Rangel referred to the so-
called economic war and the “induced inflation” that he and other
ruling-party leaders claim is being caused by the opposition. “Now
that prices are sky high, we need to fight against this together. Let
them not feel like they have beaten us,” he said.
A functional world order should always have a few socialist
regimes hanging on, to do the teaching job the education system
can’t.
October 12, 2015
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SECTION B - A
ACCELERA
CCELERATION
TION
A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Acceler

Accelerationism
ationism
Anyone trying to work out what they think about accelerationism
better do so quickly. That’s the nature of the thing. It was already
caught up with trends that seemed too fast to track when it began to
become self-aware, decades ago. It has picked up a lot of speed since
then.
Accelerationism is old enough to have arrived in waves, which is
to say insistently, or recurrently, and each time the challenge is more
urgent. Among its predictions is the expectation that you’ll be too
slow to deal with it coherently. Yet if you fumble the question it poses
– because rushed – you lose, perhaps very badly. It’s hard. (For our
purposes here “you” are standing in as a bearer of “the opinions of
mankind”.)
Time-pressure, by its very nature, is difficult to think about.
Typically, while the opportunity for deliberation is not necessarily
presumed, it is at least – with overwhelming likelihood – mistaken
for an historical constant, rather than a variable. If there was ever
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time to think, we think, there still is and will always be. The definite
probability that the allotment of time to decision-making is
undergoing systematic compression remains a neglected
consideration, even among those paying explicit and exceptional
attention to the increasing rapidity of change.
In philosophical terms, the deep problem of acceleration is
transcendental. It describes an absolute horizon – and one that is
closing in. Thinking takes time, and accelerationism suggests we’re
running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already. No
contemporary dilemma is being entertained realistically until it is
also acknowledged that the opportunity for doing so is fast
collapsing.
The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about
acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound
institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an
implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at
this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just
happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic
extent. Because the basic phenomenon appears to be a brake failure,
accelerationism is picked up again.
Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the
explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important
therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion
and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical)
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coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly

illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A
fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed
into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)
This is already to be talking about cybernetics, which also returns
insistently, in waves. It amplifies to howl, and then dissipates into the
senseless babble of fashion, until the next blast-wave hits.
For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative
feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat
– functions to keep some state of a system in the same place. Its
product, in the language formulated by French philosophical
cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is territorialization.
Negative feedback stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus
inhibiting departure beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in
the service of fixity – a higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium
models of complex systems and processes are like this. To capture
the contrary trend, characterized by self-reinforcing errancy, flight,
or escape, D&G coin the inelegant but influential term
deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the only thing
accelerationism has ever really talked about.
In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization
corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of
course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed
– schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which
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Reignition
commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other

in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl
Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture
important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed,
or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It
becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive
feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself,
it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-
amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary
host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.
“Accelerate the process,” recommended Deleuze & Guattari in
their 1972 Anti-Oedipus, citing Nietzsche to re-activate Marx.
Although it would take another four decades before
“accelerationism” was named as such, critically, by Benjamin Noys,
it was already there, in its entirety. The relevant passage is worth
repeating in full (as it would be, repeatedly, in all subsequent
accelerationist discussion):
… which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To

withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises
Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist
“economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite
direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the
market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the
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flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded

enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a
highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the
process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as
Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t
seen anything yet.
The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more

of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique,
feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is
through, which means further in.
Marx has his own ‘accelerationist fragment’ which anticipates the
passage from Anti-Oedipus remarkably. He says in an 1848 speech
‘On the Question of Free Trade’:
…in general, the protective system of our day is conservative,

while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old
nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free
trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this
revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of
free trade.
In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be

made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification.
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The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative

destruction” is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial
compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more
thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could. If
subsequent history has not vindicated this point beyond all question,
it has at least simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree.
In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams sought to resolve this
intolerable – even ‘schizophrenic’ – ambivalence in their ‘Manifesto
for an Accelerationist Politics,’ which aimed to precipitate a
specifically anti-capitalist ‘Left-accelerationism’, clearly demarcated
over against its abominably pro-capitalist ‘Right-accelerationist’
shadow. This project – predictably – was more successful at re-
animating the accelerationist question than at ideologically purifying
it in any sustainable way. It was only by introducing a wholly artificial
distinction between capitalism and modernistic technological
acceleration that their boundary lines could be drawn at all. The
implicit call was for a new Leninism without the NEP (and with the
Utopian techno-managerial experiments of Chilean communism
drawn upon for illustration).
Capital, in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the
abstract accelerative social factor. Its positive cybernetic schema
exhausts it. Runaway consumes its identity. Every other
determination is shucked-off as an accident, at some stage of its
intensification process. Since anything able to consistently feed
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socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be

capital, the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’
gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed.
Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has
scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)
At the time of writing, Left-accelerationism appears to have
deconstructed itself back into traditional socialist politics, and the
accelerationist torch has passed to a new generation of brilliant
young thinkers advancing an ‘Unconditional Accelerationism’
(neither R/Acc., or L/Acc., but U/Acc.). Their online identities – if not
in any easily extricable way their ideas – can be searched-out
through the peculiar social-media hash-tag #Rhetttwitter.
As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum
computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in,
drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence,
accelerationism won’t be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into
itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal
institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally – which is to say
completely inevitably – the human species will define this ultimate
terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have
to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You’re
finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder
variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh.
***
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Note:
Urbanomic’s #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, remains by
far the most comprehensive introduction to accelerationism. The
book was published in 2014, however, and a lot has happened since
then.
The Wikipedia entry on ‘Accelerationism’ is short, but of
exceptionally high quality.
For the Srnicek and Williams ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist
Politics’ see this.
May 25, 2017
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CHAPTER ONE - EXPONENTIALS
Moore and More
Doubling down on Moore

Moore’s
’s La
Laww is the futurist main current
Cycles cannot be dismissed from futuristic speculation (they always

come back), but they no longer define it. Since the beginning of the
electronic era, their contribution to the shape of the future has been
progressively marginalized.
The model of linear and irreversible historical time, originally
inherited from Occidental religious traditions, was spliced together
with ideas of continuous growth and improvement during the
industrial revolution. During the second half of the 20th century, the
dynamics of electronics manufacture consolidated a further – and
fundamental – upgrade, based upon the expectation of continuously
accelerating change.
The elementary arithmetic of counting along the natural number
line provides an intuitively comfortable model for the progression
of time, due to its conformity with clocks, calendars, and the simple
idea of succession. Yet the dominant historical forces of the modern
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world promote a significantly different model of change, one that

tends to shift addition upwards, into an exponent. Demographics,
capital accumulation, and technological performance indices do not
increase through unitary steps, but through rates of return,
doublings, and take-offs. Time explodes, exponentially.
The iconic expression of this neo-modern time, counting
succession in binary logarithms, is Moore’s Law, which determines
a two-year doubling period for the density of transistors on
microchips (“cramming more components onto integrated circuits”).
In a short essay published in Pajamas Media, celebrating the
prolongation of Moore’s Law as Intel pushes chip architecture into
the third-dimension, Michael S. Malone writes:
“Today, almost a half-century after it was first elucidated by

legendary Fairchild and Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore
in an article for a trade magazine, it is increasingly apparent
that Moore’s Law is the defining measure of the modern
world. All other predictive tool for understanding life in the
developed world since WWII — demographics, productivity
tables, literacy rates, econometrics, the cycles of history,
Marxist analysis, and on and on — have failed to predict the
trajectory of society over the decades … except Moore’s Law.”
Whilst crystallizing – in silico — the inherent acceleration of neo-
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modern, linear time, Moore’s Law is intrinsically nonlinear, for at

least two reasons. Firstly, and most straightforwardly, it expresses
the positive feedback dynamics of technological industrialism, in
which rapidly-advancing electronic machines continuously
revolutionize their own manufacturing infrastructure. Better chips
make better robots make better chips, in a spiraling acceleration.
Secondly, Moore’s Law is at once an observation, and a program. As
Wikipedia notes:
“[Moore’s original] paper noted that the number of

components in integrated circuits had doubled every year
from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until
1965 and predicted that the trend would continue ‘for at
least ten years’. His prediction has proved to be uncannily
accurate, in part because the law is now used in the
semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to
set targets for research and development. … Although
Moore’s law was initially made in the form of an observation
and forecast, the more widely it became accepted, the more
it served as a goal for an entire industry. This drove both
marketing and engineering departments of semiconductor
manufacturers to focus enormous energy aiming for the
specified increase in processing power that it was presumed
one or more of their competitors would soon actually attain.
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Reignition
In this regard, it can be viewed as a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Malone comments:
“… semiconductor companies around the world, big and

small, and not least because of their respect for Gordon
Moore, set out to uphold the Law — and they have done so
ever since, despite seemingly impossible technical and
scientific obstacles. Gordon Moore not only discovered
Moore’s Law, he made it real. As his successor at Intel, Paul
Otellini, once told me, ‘I’m not going to be the guy whose
legacy is that Moore’s Law died on his watch.'”
If Technological Singularity is the ‘rapture of the nerds’, Gordon

Moore is their Moses. Electro-industrial capitalism is told to go forth
and multiply, and to do so with a quite precisely time-specified binary
exponent. In its adherence to the Law, the integrated circuit industry
is uniquely chosen (and a light unto the peoples). As Malone
concludes:
“Today, every segment of society either embraces Moore’s

Law or is racing to get there. That’s because they know that
if only they can get aboard that rocket — that is, if they can
add a digital component to their business — they too can
accelerate away from the competition. That’s why none of
352
the inventions we Baby Boomers as kids expected to enjoy

as adults — atomic cars! personal helicopters! ray guns! —
have come true; and also why we have even more powerful
tools and toys ��instead. Whatever can be made digital, if
not in the whole, but in part — marketing, communications,
entertainment, genetic engineering, robotics, warfare,
manufacturing, service, finance, sports — it will, because
going digital means jumping onto Moore’s Law. Miss that
train and, as a business, an institution, or a cultural
phenomenon, you die.”
May 11, 2011
Twisted into Being

When an observation becomes a road-map — and thus a “self-
fulfilling prophecy” — exponential nonlinearity writes itself into
reality. Is Moore’s Law the clearest example of ontological auto-
production that we have?
Notably: Moore’s Law feature miniaturization heads inexorably
towards the atomic scale (by ~2020) and thus the threshold of
quantum computation, which raises the exponentiation to a higher
power. A single 300 qubit machine would realize a greater
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computational power than that currently instantiated in the entire

global stock of electronic devices (since every qubit is a binary
exponent).
The disruption of cryptography will be messy.
March 9, 2015
Foundations of Acceler
Acceleration
ation
For the intellectual-historical foundations of Accelerationism there’s
one obvious place to go.
A search for its conceptual foundations, however, allows of short
cuts. This is one of them (and an extraordinarily valuable one).
Yudkowsky does not write of ‘acceleration’ but of “returns on
cognitive reinvestment” as the basic problem of “intelligence
explosion microeconomics”. The topic is quite clearly identical.
The explosion of ethico-political anguish around the
Accelerationist thesis tends to obscure the fundamental conceptual
issues. This paper is a crucial corrective.
January 27, 2015
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“2035. Probably earlier

earlier..”
There
There’s
’s fast, and then there
there’s
’s … something more
Eliezer Yudkowski now categorizes his article ‘Staring into

Singularity‘ as ‘obsolete’. Yet it remains among the most brilliant
philosophical essays ever written. Rarely, if ever, has so much of
value been said about the absolutely unthinkable (or, more
specifically, the absolutely unthinkable for us).
For instance, Yudkowsky scarcely pauses at the phenomenon of
exponential growth, despite the fact that this already overtaxes all
comfortable intuition and ensures revolutionary changes of such
magnitude that speculation falters. He is adamant that
exponentiation (even Kurzweil‘s ‘double exponentiation’) only
reaches the starting point of computational acceleration, and that
propulsion into Singularity is not exponential, but hyperbolic.
Each time the speed of thought doubles, time-schedules halve.
When technology, including the design of intelligences, succumbs to
such dynamics, it becomes recursive. The rate of self-improvement
collapses with smoothly increasing rapidity towards instantaneity: a
true, mathematically exact, or punctual Singularity. What lies beyond
is not merely difficult to imagine, it is absolutely inconceivable.
Attempting to picture or describe it is a ridiculous futility. Science
fiction dies.
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“A group of human-equivalent computers spends 2 years to

double computer speeds. Then they spend another 2
subjective years, or 1 year in human terms, to double it again.
Then they spend another 2 subjective years, or six months, to
double it again. After four years total, the computing power
goes to infinity.
“That is the ‘Transcended’ version of the doubling
sequence. Let’s call the ‘Transcend’ of a sequence {a0, a1,
a2…} the function where the interval between an and an+1
is inversely proportional to an. So a Transcended doubling
function starts with 1, in which case it takes 1 time-unit to go
to 2. Then it takes 1/2 time-units to go to 4. Then it takes 1/
4 time-units to go to 8. This function, if it were continuous,
would be the hyperbolic function y = 2/(2 – x). When x = 2,
then (2 – x) = 0 and y = infinity. The behavior at that point is
known mathematically as a singularity.”
There could scarcely be a more precise, plausible, or consequential

formula: Doubling periods halve. On the slide into Singularity —
I.J.Good’s ‘intelligence explosion‘ — exponentiation is compounded
by a hyperbolic trend. The arithmetic of such a process is quite
simple, but its historical implications are strictly incomprehensible.
“I am a Singularitarian because I have some small
356
appreciation of how utterly, finally, absolutely impossible it is

to think like someone even a little tiny bit smarter than you
are. I know that we are all missing the obvious, every day.
There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to
a certain level of intelligence. Move the smallest bit upwards,
and some problems will suddenly move from ‘impossible’ to
‘obvious’. Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them
will become obvious. Move a huge distance upwards… “
Since the argument takes human thought to its shattering point, it

is natural for some to be repulsed by it. Yet its basics are almost
impregnable to logical objection. Intelligence is a function of the
brain. The brain has been ‘designed’ by natural processes (posing
no discernible special difficulties). Thus, intelligence is obviously an
ultimately tractable engineering problem. Nature has already
‘engineered it’ whilst employing design methods of such stupefying
inefficiency that only brute, obstinate force, combined of course with
complete ruthlessness, have moved things forwards. Yet the tripling
of cortical mass within the lineage of the higher primates has only
taken a few million years, and — for most of this period — a modest
experimental population (in the low millions or less).
The contemporary technological problem, in contrast to the
preliminary biological one, is vastly easier. It draws upon a wider
range of materials and techniques, an installed intelligence and
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knowledge base, superior information media, more highly-

dynamized feedback systems, and a self-amplifying resource
network. Unsurprisingly it is advancing at incomparably greater
speed.
“If we had a time machine, 100K of information from the

future could specify a protein that built a device that would
give us nanotechnology overnight. 100K could contain the
code for a seed AI. Ever since the late 90’s, the Singularity
has been only a problem of software. And software is
information, the magic stuff that changes at arbitrarily high
speeds. As far as technology is concerned, the Singularity
could happen tomorrow. One breakthrough – just one major
insight – in the science of protein engineering or atomic
manipulation or Artificial Intelligence, one really good day at
Webmind or Zyvex, and the door to Singularity sweeps open.”
May 13, 2011
Statistical Mentality
Things are vvery

ery probably weirder than the
theyy seem
As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly
358
complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more

statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of
the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium
statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum
mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium
complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-
Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences
compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were
progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous
clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-
signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex
systems at the edge of chaos.
By the final decades of the 20th century, an unbounded
probabilism was expanding into hitherto unimagined territories,
testing deeply unfamiliar and counter-intuitive arguments in
statistical metaphysics, or statistical ontology. It no longer sufficed
for realism to attend to multiplicities, because reality was itself
subject to multiplication.
In his declaration cogito ergo sum, Descartes concluded (perhaps
optimistically) that the existence of the self could be safely
concluded from the fact of thinking. The statistical ontologists
inverted this formula, asking: given my existence (which is to say, an
existence that seems like this to me), what kind of reality is probable?
Which reality is this likely to be?
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MIT Roboticist Hans Moravec, in his 1988 book Mind Children,

seems to have initiated the genre. Extrapolating Moore’s Law into
the not-too-distant future, he anticipated computational capacities
that exceeded those of all biological brains by many orders of
magnitude. Since each human brain runs its own more-or-less
competent simulation of the world in order to function, it seemed
natural to expect the coming technospheric intelligences to do the
same, but with vastly greater scope, resolution, and variety. The
mass replication of robot brains, each billions or trillions of times
more powerful than those of its human progenitors, would provide
a substrate for innumerable, immense, and minutely detailed
historical simulations, within which human intelligences could be
reconstructed to an effectively-perfect level of fidelity.
This vision feeds into a burgeoning literature on non-biological
mental substrates, consciousness uploading, mind clones, whole-
brain emulations (‘ems’), and Matrix-style artificial realities. Since the
realities we presently know are already simulated (let us
momentarily assume) on biological signal-processing systems with
highly-finite quantitative specifications, there is no reason to
confidently anticipate that an ‘artificial’ reality simulation would be
in any way distinguishable.
Is ‘this’ history or its simulation? More precisely: is ‘this’ a
contemporary biological (brain-based) simulation, or a
reconstructed, artificial memory, run on a technological substrate ‘in
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the future’? That is a question without classical solution, Moravec

argues. It can only be approached, rigorously, with statistics, and
since the number of fine-grained simulated histories (unknown but
probably vast), overwhelmingly exceeds the number of actual or
original histories (for the sake of this argument, one), then the
probabilistic calculus points unswervingly towards a definite
conclusion: we can be near-certain that we are inhabitants of a
simulation run by artificial (or post-biological) intelligences at some
point in ‘our future’. At least – since many alternatives present
themselves – we can be extremely confident, on grounds of
statistical ontology, that our existence is non-original (if not
historical reconstruction, it might be a game or fiction).
Nick Bostrom formalizes the simulation argument in his article
‘The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You are Living
in the Matrix is Quite High’ (found here):
Now we get to the core of the simulation argument. This does

not purport to demonstrate that you are in a simulation.
Instead, it shows that we should accept as true at least one of
the following three propositions:
(1) The chances that a species at our current level of
development can avoid going extinct before becoming
technologically mature is negligibly small
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are
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interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.
Each of these three propositions may be prima facie
implausible; yet, if the simulation argument is correct, at least
one is true (it does not tell us which).
If obstacles to the existence of high-level simulations (1 and 2) are

removed, then statistical reasoning takes over, following the exact
track laid down by Moravec. We are “almost certainly” inhabiting
a “computer simulation that was created by some advanced
civilization” because these saturate to near-exhaustion the
probability space for realities ‘like this’. If such simulations exist,
original lives would be as unlikely as winning lottery tickets, at best.
Bostrom concludes with an intriguing and influential twist:
If we are in a simulation, is it possible that we could know

that for certain? If the simulators don’t want us to find out, we
probably never will. But if they choose to reveal themselves,
they could certainly do so. Maybe a window informing you of
the fact would pop up in front of you, or maybe they would
“upload” you into their world. Another event that would let
us conclude with a very high degree of confidence that we
are in a simulation is if we ever reach the point where we are
about to switch on our own simulations. If we start running
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simulations, that would be very strong evidence against (1)

and (2). That would leave us with only (3).
If we create fine-grained reality simulations, we demonstrate – to a

high level of statistical confidence – that we already inhabit one, and
that the history leading up to this moment of creation was fake. Paul
Almond, an enthusiastic statistical ontologist, draws out the radical
implication – reverse causation – asking: Can you retroactively put
yourself in a computer simulation.
Such statistical ontology, or Bayesian existentialism, is not
restricted to the simulation argument. It increasingly subsumes
discussions of the Anthropic Principle, of the Many Worlds
Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and exotic modes of
prediction from the Doomsday Argument to Quantum Suicide (and
Immortality).
Whatever is really happening, we probably have to chance it.
May 18, 2011
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CHAPTER TWO - HIST

HISTORICAL
ORICAL TRENDS
Anthropocene
Human history is geology on speed
Complex systems, characterized by high (and rising local) negative

entropy, are essentially historical. The sciences devoted to them
tend inevitably to become evolutionary, as exemplified by the course
of the earth- and life-sciences – which had become thoroughly
historicized by the late 19th century. Perhaps the most elegant,
abstract, or ‘cosmic’ comprehension of this necessity is found in the
work of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), whose visionary
writings sought to establish the basis for an integrated
understanding of terrestrial history, conceived as a process of
material acceleration through geochemical epochs.
Despite the philosophical power of his ideas, Vernadsky’s
scientific training as a chemist anchored his thoughts in concrete,
literal reality. The acceleration of the terrestrial process was more
than an anthropocentric impression, registering socially and
culturally significant change (such as the cephalization of the primate
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lineage leading to mankind). Geochemical evolution was physically

expressed through the average velocity of particles, as biological
metabolism (biosphere), and eventually human cultures (noosphere),
introduced and propagated ever more intense networks of chemical
reactions. Life is matter in a hurry, culture even more so.
Whilst Vernadsky has been sporadically rediscovered and
celebrated, his importance – based on the profundity, rigor, and
supreme relevance of his work — has yet to be fully and universally
acknowledged. Yet it is possible that his time is finally arriving.
The May 28 – June 3 edition of The Economist devotes an
editorial and major feature story to the Anthropocene – a distinctive
geological epoch proposed by Paul Crutzen in 2000, now under
consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (the
“ultimate adjudicator of the geological time scale”). Recognition of
the Anthropocene would be an acknowledgement that we inhabit a
geological epoch whose physical signature has been fundamentally
re-shaped by the technological forces of the ‘noosphere’ or
‘ethosphere’ – in which human intelligence has been introduced as
a massive (and even dominant) force of nature. Radical
metamorphosis (and acceleration) of the earth’s nitrogen and carbon
cycles are especially pronounced Anthropocene signals.
“The term ‘paradigm shift’ is bandied around with promiscuous
ease,” The Economist notes. “But for the natural sciences to make
human activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a
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distraction, would mark such a shift for real.”

Third Reich master architect Albert Speer is notorious for his
promotion of ‘ruin value’ – the persistent grandeur of monumental
constructions, encountered by archaeologists in the far future. The
Anthropocene introduces a similar perspective on a still vaster scale.
As The Economist remarks:
The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological

time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis
picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come
will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive
fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking
deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and
starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common
Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years
buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through
its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it
is unlike anything else in the geological record.
As terrestrial history accelerates, the distinctive units of geological

time are compressed. The Archean and Proterozoic aeons are
measured in billions of years, the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic eras in
hundreds of millions, the Palaeogene and Neogene periods in tens of
millions. The Holocene epoch lasts less than 10,000 years, and the
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Anthropocene (epoch or mere phase?) only centuries – because its

recognition is already an indication of its end.
Beyond the Anthropocene lies the Technocene, distinguished by
nanotechnological manipulation of matter — a geochemical
revolution of such magnitude that only the assembly of (RNA and
DNA) replicator molecules is comparable in implication. Within the
coming Technocene (lasting mere decades?), the carbon cycle is
relayed through sub-microscopic manufacturing processes that
utilize it as the ultimate industrial resource – feedstock for
diamondoid nanomachine fabrication. The consequences for
geological deposition, and thus for the discoveries of potential
distant-future geologists, are substantial but opaque. On the far-side
of nanomachined age, femtomachines await, precisely assembled
from quarks, and decomposing chemistry into nuclear physics.
For the moment, however, even the origination of the
Anthropocene – never mind its termination – remains a matter of
live controversy. Assuming that it coincides with industrialization
(which is not universally accepted), geologists will find themselves
enmeshed in a debate among historians, as the fraught term
‘modernity’ takes on a geochemical definition. Whatever the
outcome, Vernadsky is back.
June 9, 2011
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Technological Determination
‘Technological determinism‘ is among those theoretical traits
(‘naturalistic fallacy’ is another) which tend immediately to provoke
an attitude of complacent intellectual superiority, rather than
cognitive engagement. Merely to identify it is typically judged
sufficient for a dismissal. If TD as such poses a question, it is easily
missed.
One under-examined question might be: Why is technological
determinism so plausible in modern societies, and ever more so as
they modernize? Is the balance of social determination within
society itself an unstable historical variable, with unmistakable
positive trend?
Two recent popular stories of relevance stray quite naively into
the pre-set cross-hairs of the critique. In The Atlantic, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee announce the Dawn of the Second
Machine Age, while Google-God of the TDs Ray Kurzweil conveys his
prediction (through the UK’s Daily Mail) that “Robots will be smarter
than the most intelligent humans within the next 15 years.” The
sophisticated will scoff — without consequence.
Some quick reasons not to scoff:
(1) Advanced technology roughly follows Moore’s Law, and
predicts a commensurate impact upon growth. In the absence of
such growth, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid noticing a
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compensation mechanism, which rebalances through systematic

retardation what is perturbed through development. TD is indeed
partial, because it has no account of what is holding it back. Once
this is recognized, however, it depicts its other more realistically (as
orchestrated suppression) than the suppressor can account for itself.
(2) The combination of socio-political failure with techno-
economic achievement — emerging with impressive definition from
the global net growth equation — is only secondarily a matter of
conceptual clarity. Primarily it is a splitting, or breaking away, in
which technological determinism represents the dynamic instance,
and sophisticated socio-cultural critique represents — in reality —
the counter-dynamic, or retardant entity. The attempt to ‘put
technology in its place’ that is from one side a matter of theoretically
self-evident comprehensive reason is, from the other, the
increasingly comical attempt by a parasite to justify its relation to its
host. (This is another opportunity to recommend Andrea Castillo’s
overview.)
(3) Whatever technology can do, it is doing, at an accelerating
pace. As it advances, ideas about the ‘limits of the technological’ are
automatically obsolesced. Condescending to a steam engine is one
thing, attempting the same with an artificial super-intelligence quite
another. Critical smugness has an outer horizon.
“We want [computers] to read everything on the web and every
page of every book, then be able to engage in intelligent dialogue
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with the user to be able to answer their questions,” explains

Kurzweil. So what do you think about this technological determinism
nonsense? we will soon be able to ask, superciliously.
February 24, 2014
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CHAPTER THREE - DISTRIBUTED

THOUGHT
Connectivity
Two unusual little girls test the limits of identity
At the leading-edge of information technology — and amongst the

‘transhumanist’ commentary it stimulates – the idea of self-identity
is undergoing relentless interrogation. Cultures substantially
influenced by Abrahamic religious traditions, in which the resilient
integrity and fundamental individuality of the ‘soul’ is strongly
emphasized, are especially vulnerable to the prospect of radical and
disconcerting conceptual revision.
The computerization of the natural sciences – including
neurosciences – ensures that the investigation of the human brain
and the innovation of artificial intelligence systems advance in
parallel, whilst cross-linking and mutually reinforcing each other.
Increasingly, the understanding of the brain and its digital emulation
tend to fuse into a single, complex research program. As this program
emerges, archaic metaphysics and spiritual doctrines become
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engineering problems. Individual identity seems ever less like a basic

property, and more like a precarious achievement – or challenge –
determined by processes of self-reference, and by relative
communicative isolation. (‘Split-brain’ cases have vividly illustrated
the instability and artificiality of the self-identifying individual.)
Would an AI program – or brain – that was tightly coupled to
the Internet by high-bandwidth connections still consider itself to
be strictly individuated? Do cyborgs – or uploads — dissolve their
souls? Could a networked robot say ‘I’ and mean it? Because such
questions are becoming ever more prominent, and practical, it is not
surprising that a New York Times story by Susan Dominus, devoted
to craniopagus conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan, has
generated an unusual quantity of excitement and Internet-linkage.
The twins are not only fused at the head (craniopagus), their
brains are connected by a ‘neural bridge’ that enables signals from
one to the other. Neurosurgeon Douglas Cochrane proposes “that
visual input comes in through the retinas of one girl, reaches her
thalamus, then takes two different courses, like electricity traveling
along a wire that splits in two. In the girl who is looking at the strobe
or a stuffed animal in her crib, the visual input continues on its usual
pathways, one of which ends up in the visual cortex. In the case of
the other girl, the visual stimulus would reach her thalamus via the
thalamic bridge, and then travel up her own visual neural circuitry,
ending up in the sophisticated processing centers of her own visual
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cortex. Now she has seen it, probably milliseconds after her sister
has.”
The twins’ brains, or a twin-brain? The Hogan case is so
extraordinary that irreducible ambiguity arises:
The girls’ brains are so unusually formed that doctors could

not predict what their development would be like: each girl
has an unusually short corpus callosum, the neural band that
allows the brain’s two cerebral hemispheres to communicate,
and in each girl, the two cerebral hemispheres also differ in
size, with Tatiana’s left sphere and Krista’s right significantly
smaller than is typical. “The asymmetry raises intriguing
questions about whether one can compensate for the other
because of the brain bridge,” said Partha Mitra, a
neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who
studies brain architecture. The girls’ cognition may also be
facing specific challenges that no others have experienced:
some kind of confusing crosstalk that would require
additional energy to filter and process. In addition to sorting
out the usual sensory experiences of the world, the girls’
brains, their doctors believe, have been forced to adapt to
sensations originating with the organs and body parts of
someone else. … Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not,
something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape
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the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not
eating it.
As they struggle to make sense of their boundaries, the twins are

avatars of an impending, universal confusion:
Although each girl often used “I” when she spoke, I never
heard either say “we,” for all their collaboration. It was as if
even they seemed confused by how to think of themselves,
with the right language perhaps eluding them at this stage
of development, under these unusual circumstances — or
maybe not existing at all. “It’s like they are one and two
people at the same time,” said Feinberg, the professor of
psychiatry and neurology at Albert Einstein College of
Medicine. What pronoun captures that?
May 27, 2011
Br
Brain-Net
ain-Net
… and suddenly, the age of the networked brain has arrived:
Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke University scientist behind the work,
has previously pioneered the development of brain-machine
interfaces that could allow amputees and paralysed people to
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directly control prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons. His latest

advance may have clinical benefits in brain rehabilitation, he
predicts, but could also pave the way for “organic computers” –
collectives of animal brains linked together to solve problems. […]
“Essentially we created a super-brain,” he said. “A collective brain
created from three monkey brains. Nobody has ever done that
before.” […] He dismissed comparisons with science fiction plots,
however, saying: “We’re conditioned by movies and Hollywood to
think that everything related to science is dangerous and scary.
These scary scenarios never crossed my mind and I’m the one doing
the experiments.”
Neural interface technology has been hurtling forwards recently.
The step from lunatic science fiction speculation to established
technoscientific procedure is increasingly taken in advance of any
engaged discussion, without an interval for serious social reflection.
That’s acceleration as it concretely happens. It’s not a new topic for
prolonged thought, it’s the fact that the time for prolonged thought
— and its associated space for collective ethico-political
consideration — is no longer ever going to be available.
July 20, 2015
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Speed Reading
At Dark Alien Ecologies, Craig Hickman embarks on a multi-part
recapitulation of Accelerationism. His decision to frame it as
‘Promethean’ generates plenty of material for discussion, even
before leaving the title. With the first installment poised on the brink
of the Williams & Srnicek Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, it
is set to provide the most comprehensive overview of the current to
date. (See Hickman’s contribution to his own comment thread for a
sense of the overall structure.)
One emerging theme — from Hickman’s text and its nimbus — is
the irreducible significance of Accelerationism as a symptom, which
is to say: as a register of capitalist stimulus. Questions concerning
its potential for cultural endurance twist, almost immediately, into
estimations of techonomic provocation. The archetypal critique of
accelerationism takes the form: Capital has no right to excite us.
There is a slippage into highly-charged ethico-aesthetic controversy
(as Hickman notes). It should not be enthralling.
(Nowhere in the UK)
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“… capitalism is anything but exciting. It is mundane, boring” says

Edmund Berger, in the comments. However inane such a statement
might sound, it conveys a complex thesis, of remarkable pertinence,
insistence, and significance, and of far greater practical importance
than any merely technical objection could be. It will be necessary
to say much more about it, at some future point. For now, the most
pressing response is a superficially trivial one: How much geo-
historical sadness finds itself reflected in such a stance?
ADDED: Craig Hickman’s Accelerationism: The New
Prometheans
Part Two: Section One
Part Two: Section Two
Cyberlude
Red Stack Attack!
Automate Architecture
Also:
Accelerationism: Ray Brassier as Promethean Philosopher
no boredom – Arran James on Mark Fisher and Accelerationism
beyond Boredom
Accelerationism, Boredom and the Trauma of Futurity
Nick Land and Teleoplexy – The Schizoanalysis of Acceleration
Science Fiction, Technology, and Accelerationist Politics: Final
Thoughts on an Williams and Srnicek’s Manifesto
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June 10, 2014
Bespok
Bespoke
e Singularities
When techno-commercial and left singularities seem too damn
vanilla, it’s time to branch out. John Cussans (master of the shuffling
undead) passed on this selection.
It’s frightening how many of them look almost uncontroversially
realistic. The Outside in favorite (predictably enough) was the
‘Bilderbergularity’:
Billionaire overlords throw in the towel trying to run the planet,
escape en masse to low earth orbit. People around the world breath
a sigh of relief … before falling onto each other like zombie hordes.
[A Governmentularity / Fungularity mash-up would work well for
me.]
April 7, 2013
Twitter Mind
What does Twitter tell us about technosocial acceleration?

(You’ve most probably already forgotten.)
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— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) February 19, 2014
As new media systems become (intimately annexed) parts of

people’s brains, thinking about them is conducted through them. To
some considerable extent, they are twisted through people, in order
to think about themselves. The spiral of involvement is already at
work. It becomes increasingly compelling to think (about) how it
thinks.
Blogs accelerated the media circuits of composition, publication,
feedback interactivity, and revision. Writing became
unprecedentedly ‘conversational’ and rapidly responsive to its own
effects, which is to say: nonlinear. As culture adapted to Cyberspace
it was shaped by torsion, susceptible as never before to capture by
self-sustaining eddies or ‘singularities’ with unanticipated wandering
vectors of their own. Pursuing a line of thought, while always
experimental, was now intricately entangled with estrangement as
never before. The ‘inner’ threads of memory — binding cognition to
an experience of subjective integrity — stretched beyond their
natural tolerances and succumbed to technical substitution.
Twitter accelerates this process further — much further. Each
tweet is a micro-completion, and thus an opportunity for the
termination of memory. Rather than following the internal chain of
its own thoughts, or remembering what it is thinking about, the
twitter mind immerses itself in the information stream, where
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Reignition
interaction takes over. The frenetic stimulus and feedback from

incoming messages pulverizes attention, returning continuity
through exteriority, as a staccato succession of feedback signals —
responses, favorings, and retweets. The thread of thought has been
pulled free from the self-contained, organic mind (or from its long-
enduring persuasive illusion).
The ‘cultural critique’ of this amnesiac, distracted, obsessive,
jittering intelligence almost writes itself. Twitter is undoubtedly junk.
Its addictiveness, however, is by no means the least of its lessons.
Tight feedback-circuitry (or cybernetic intensity) is inherently
enthralling, irrespective of any extraneous ‘rewards’. The brain tends
automatically to dynamic interconnection, even when the cost is a
comprehensive surrender of identity. Whatever is coming will have
sucked us in, before we get to decide what we think about it. The
trend would be starkly obvious, if we could only remember where we
have been.
ADDED: Twitter and polarization (via @benedict)
February 19, 2014
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Twitter Mind (+1)
Googling “Twitter is dead” pulls up nearly two billion hits, which

isn’t an obvious indication of vitality. Adrienne LaFrance and
Robinson Meyer, writing in The Atlantic, supercharged the meme
with their ‘eulogy’ for the platform, which described it “entering its
twilight” as the tensions in its “inherent (and explicit) attention
market” have been exposed.
From the beginning, there were a few useful precepts that those
of us who have obsessed over the platform had to believe. First, you
had to believe that someone else out there was paying attention,
or better, that a significant portion — not just 1 or 2 percent — of
your followers might see your tweet. Second, you had to believe that
skilled and compelling tweeting would increase your follower count.
Third, you had to believe there was a useful audience you couldn
couldn’t
’t
see, beyond your timeline — a group you might want to follow one
day.
LaFrance and Meyer don’t quite escalate to the ‘Ponzi’ accusation,
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but it’s implicit. By promising explosive, distributed audience growth,

Twitter encourages impossible claims on a stressed global attention
reservoir, as if everyone were able to grab ever larger pieces of other
people’s time. Attention undergoes inflationary devaluation, and
subsequent implosion, as the bubble collapses into a morass of
disillusionment, among a flood of “spam … artificially inflated
popularity scores” and fake, ego-tickling twitter-bots.
There’s a positive case for Twitter that steers around this
diagnosis, but a more telling engagement would embrace it. The
attention stress dramatized by Twitter is the specific way our long-
awaited ‘future shock‘ finally arrives, rushing legacy human systems
— biological, psychological, and social — through their speed limits.
“Information Overload” is formatted to the Twitter Time-Line, as
message density, or a splinter-stream. If there’s confusion about
what Twitter ultimately is, that’s at least in part because the currents
running through it arise elsewhere — the magnitude is the message.
Whatever we thought future shock was going to be like, thanks to

Twitter we’re being told. It’s a time crisis, personalized as a partially
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navigable inundation. Beyond all the facile questions of consumer

utility, what is being encountered is something historical, planetary
— even cosmic — and it is waiting to overwhelm us, whatever we do.
There’s simply too much coming in. However we’re going to ‘adjust’
to that, the time to begin is now.
(UF‘s first Twitter Mind remarks are here.)
May 14, 2014
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CHAPTER FOUR - IMPR

IMPRO
OVING
MA
MACHINERY
CHINERY
“Chiang Kai-shek of the Machine to Seek”
Politics in the Age of Artificial Idiocy
Not even the hardest proponent of ‘hard singularity’ expects a

transition to machine intelligence that arrives in a simple step. Since
the incremental baby steps are already well underway, it would be
obviously ridiculous to do so, on straightforward factual grounds.
If silicon-substrate minds shift in stages, from dumb tools to
super-intelligences, they can be confidently expected to pass
through a period of synthetic cretinism. Is anybody preparing for
that?
Machine translation might be the liveliest sand-pit for half-witted
weirdness today. This is an area of obvious intelligent challenge, far
subtler – or vaguer — than chess. By adopting heuristic principles
that substitute pragmatic, statistical methods for sound conceptual
understanding, progress has advanced at a surprisingly rapid pace,
already arriving at an idiot prototype of Star Trek technology. Google
384
Translate can usually generate something that is roughly intelligible.

John Searle’s Chinese Room is up and running, or at least stumbling
forwards, fast.
As machine translation smoothes out, its practical and theoretical
impact is sure to be huge. Human linguistic competences are steadily
side-lined, and with them the role of lingua francas. This trend has
obvious significance for the global status and function of English.
It also has special relevance to the Chinese language. Since the
origins of modernity, the techno-commercial imperative to
digitization has presented special challenges to a non-alphabetic
language, whose inconveniently numerous and elaborate
pictographic units resist reduction to tidy typographic sets. This is
the ‘Chinese Typewriter’ problem that Thomas S. Mullaney has
doggedly explored. Machine translation changes its terms
incalculably.
In the interim, however, a phase of babbling incompetence,
semantic derangement, and communications chaos is upon us.
Planetary chatter is bound to get a whole lot stranger.
Whilst engaged in online research on the topic of Marxism in
China today, Urban Future ran into this cryptically-excited remark –
in ‘English’. It is attributed to Jiang Jushi, but it has evidently been
quite thoroughly machine-mashed. We aren’t remotely sure what
it is telling us about the current state of Socialism with Chinese
Characteristics, but it’s rather illuminating on the contribution of
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digital intelligence to inter-cultural comprehension:
Nowadays, many party members, cadres, “the morning the

car turn around, turn the plate around noon, the afternoon
shuttle turn around, turn the evening around the skirt.” For
example, A Who “Sando,” not only corruption, bribery, and
one night, thought it outrageous that night, under the cover
name of overtime in the office, the office lights on, but
actually go out and touches his mistress secretly rendezvous.
Such a person, all day thinking about is how to get lost, how
to play a woman, how to get a woman. They are reading, not
outside, such as ”Mai-phase method,“ ”Liuzhuang phase
method,“ ”physiognomy Danian Ye full,“ ” meat futon,“
”Motome Heart Sutra,“ ”Golden Lotus,“ ”the official after,”
“thick black school”, “Zeng technique employing people
know,” “Chiang Kai-shek of the machine to seek,” “Confucius,
Crown Way,” ”Official Pitch culture and unspoken rules,“
”teach you how to climb clever work,“ ”Book of Changes,“ ”yin
and yang, Feng Shui,“ “character and the official transport,“
”Office Feng Shui,“ ”gossip financial officer transported
through the solution,” “the official transport peach,” “China
ancient monarch and his Machiavellian Danian Ye Guan,” “Yu-
person operation emperors” and other pollution seventy-
eight bad book. Reading this book, can not worship
386
bankruptcy? Character can not go wrong? Unexpectedly,

depression can blog? Integrity can not decay?
September 9, 2011
Quotable (#31)
‘Moravec’s Paradox’ notes that computers find the hard stuff easy.
No surprise, then, that when human get pushed out of the loop it
often happens from the top.
The case of mathematics is especially significant:
Computer-assisted proofs (both at the level of formulation and at
the level of verification) have attracted the interest of a number of
philosophers in recent times (here’s a recent paper by John Symons
and Jack Horner, and here is an older paper by Mark McEvoy, which
I commented on at a conference back in 2005; there are many other
papers on this topic by philosophers). More generally, the question
of the extent to which mathematical reasoning can be purely
‘mechanical’ remains a lively topic of philosophical discussion (here’s
a 1994 paper by Wilfried Sieg on this topic that I like a lot). Moreover,
this particular proof of the Kepler conjecture [see New Scientist link]
does not add anything substantially new (philosophically) to the
practice of computer-verifying proofs (while being quite a feat
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mathematically!). It is rather something Hales said to the New

Scientist that caught my attention (against the background of the 4
years and 12 referees it took to human-check the proof for errors):
“This technology cuts the mathematical referees out of the
verification process,” says Hales. “Their opinion about the
correctness of the proof no longer matters.”
Since computer software became chess-competent we’ve been
told that the idea chess is difficult was just an illusion. When we start
hearing that about mathematics in general, it will really be time for
the dark laughter to begin.
August 20, 2014
Demonetization
Creative destruction in the music industry since the mid-1970s (but
mostly destruction):
388
What UF is seeing there primarily is the absence of a

micropayments system in the fabric of the Internet.
July 29, 2015
Eter9
First draft digital immortality probably won’t be the spark for a
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religious revolution anytime in the immediate future. Still, if it makes

some contribution to the hastening of secretarial software it will be
doing something useful.
(Via.)
August 30, 2015
Secretaries
‘Computers’ used to be humans. ‘Secretaries’ mostly still are. It’s
hard to imagine this situation lasting many decades. Given the
obvious potential of reliable machine secretarial assistance, for
navigating increasingly complex, information and communication
saturated lives, it’s a zone of innovation peculiarly suited to the
emergence of an AI-based ‘killer app.’
From the Wired link:
As it stands today, Clara helps coordinate meetings — via email
— and generally manages your online calendar. When you’re trying
to set up a phone meeting with someone, you cc: Clara, and the tool
arranges a time that works for everyone and mails calendar invites.
You also can ask it to add a meeting to your calendar, something
I did just minutes before writing this sentence. Diede van Lamoen,
who juggles myriad phone meetings each week, chatting with people
across the globe, has used the tool for a year, and he says it saves
390
him enormous amounts of time. “It’s been a godsend,” he says. “I can

outsource all the scheduling.”
Among the (many) residual qualifications, Clara still has a
Turk-style back end. Nevertheless, prepping the market for these
applications is going to pay off eventually. By the time they arrive,
they’ll seem indispensable, and be digested even faster than smart
phones.
December 9, 2015
Game Ov
Over
er
Go is done, as a side-effect of general machinic ‘beating humans at
stuff’ capability:
“This is a really big result, it’s huge,” says Rémi Coulom, a
programmer in Lille, France, who designed a commercial Go program
called Crazy Stone. He had thought computer mastery of the game
was a decade away.
The IBM chess computer Deep Blue, which famously beat
grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, was explicitly programmed to
win at the game. But AlphaGo was not preprogrammed to play Go:
rather, it learned using a general-purpose algorithm that allowed it
to interpret the game’s patterns, in a similar way to how a DeepMind
program learned to play 49 different arcade games.
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This means that similar techniques could be applied to other AI

domains that require recognition of complex patterns, long-term
planning and decision-making, says Hassabis. “A A lot of the things
we
we’re
’re trying to do in the world come under that rubric
rubric.”
UF emphasis (to celebrate one of the most unintentionally
comedic sentences in the history of the earth).
We’re entering the mopping-up stage at this point.
Eliezer Yudkowsky is not amused.
The Wired story.
January 28, 2016
Machine P
Poetry
oetry
madness in her face and i
the world that i had seen
and when my soul shall be to see the night to be the same and
i am all the world and the day that is the same and a day i had been
a young little woman i am in a dream that you were in
a moment and my own heart in her face of a great world
and she said the little day is a man of a little
a little one of a day of my heart that has been in a dream
Not the greatest poetic achievement in world history, certainly.
(The two final lines are definitely poor.) But the worst? Anywhere
392
even remotely close to the worst?

The author: “Deep Gimble I is a proof-of-concept Recurrent
Neural Net, minimally trained on public domain poetry and seeded
with a single word.”
(Submissions from literary AIs accepted at the link.)
August 7, 2016
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CHAPTER FIVE - SOCIAL DISR

DISRUPTION
UPTION
Internet F
Frragmentation
Technical, political, and commercial trends to Cyberspace
disintegration are thematized by the WEF. It’s unmistakably an
important topic. The report explains:
The purpose of this document is to contribute to the emergence
of a common baseline understanding of Internet fragmentation. It
maps the landscape of some of the key trends and practices that have
been variously described as constituting Internet fragmentation and
highlights 28 examples. A distinction is made between cases of
technical, governmental and commercial fragmentation. The
technical cases generally can be said to involve fragmentation “of”
the Internet, or its underlying physical and logical infrastructures.
The governmental and commercial cases often more directly involve
fragmentation “on” the Internet, or the transactions and cyberspace
it conveys, although they also can involve the infrastructure as well.
With the examples cited placed in these three conjoined baskets,
we can get a holistic overview of their nature and scope and more
readily engage in the sort of dialogue and cooperation that is needed.
394
By addressing a constituency involved in the Internet’s

“distributed collective management” it preserves (at least
superficial) ideological neutrality.
Twelve “kinds of fragmentation” are enumerated:
1. Network Address Translation
2. IPv4 and IPv6 incompatibility and the dual-stack requirement
3. Routing corruption
4. Firewall protections
5. Virtual private network isolation and blocking
6. TOR “onion space” and the “dark web”
7. Internationalized Domain Name technical errors
8. Blocking of new gTLDs
9. Private name servers and the split-horizon DNS
10. Segmented Wi-Fi services in hotels, restaurants, etc.
11. Possibility of significant alternate DNS roots
12. Certificate authorities producing false certificates
The Internet has been implicitly conceived as the new Oecumene
since its emergence. The globalist ideal has been almost wholly
subsumed into it. Yet tidal trends — “technical, governmental and
commercial” — are testing the assumptions underlying that
conception, and converting them into objects of explicit attention. If
the secularized Universal now finds its most compelling incarnation
in the Idea of the Internet, the WEA report is bound to anticipate a
wide swathe of 21st century discussions.
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February 1, 2016
Cultur
Cultural
al Speciation
New media are eradicating the (practical) idea of a common culture.
Everything print media integrated, by universalizing literacy, is now
being disintegrated into bubbles. It’s bound to be an upsetting
development, from certain perspectives:
Another tech trend fueling this issue is the ability to publish ideas
online at no cost, and to gather an audience around those ideas. It’s
now easier than ever to produce content specifically designed to
convince people who may be on the fence or “curious” about a
particular topic. This is an especially big issue when it comes to
violent extremism, and pseudoscience. Self-publishing has
eliminated all the checks and balances of reputable media ― fact-
checkers, editors, distribution partners.
It turns out that ‘trusted’ cultural curators aren’t actually trusted
much at all. When their reputations are — for the first time — put to
the test, they crumble to nothing very fast.
The fission of authorized ‘common purposes’ into meme wars
certainly isn’t going to be welcomed by everybody. Nothing is going
to be welcomed by everybody. Fragmentation is now the driver, so it
isn’t (at all) likely to be stopped.
396
Rule-of-thumb for any techno-propelled regime transition: What

the existing establishment hates and fears most is the already-
palpable threat, whose arrival is as close to inevitable as history
allows anything to be. (Completely inevitable, in the opinion of this
blog, but no one is under any compulsion to follow us there.)
May 12, 2016
Cultur
Cultural
al Speciation II
More on Internet-driven reality shopping, and ideologically-loaded
cultural speciation:
It is the beauty and the tragedy of the Internet age. As it becomes
easier for anyone to build their own audience, it becomes harder for
those audience members to separate fact from fiction from the gray
area in between. As media consumers, we now have the freedom to
self-select the truth that most closely resembles our existing beliefs,
which makes our media habits fairly good indicators of our political
beliefs. If your top news source is CNN, for instance, studies show
you’re more likely to be liberal. If local radio and TV figure
prominently in your news habits, you’re more likely to be
conservative. […] Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, the American
National Election Studies show that partisanship in the US has
spiked drastically, with Americans on either side of the aisle
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harboring ever colder feelings about their political opponents. It’s

hard to prove the country’s increasingly polarized media habits had
anything to do with that, but it’s also hard to believe the two trends
are unrelated. The country is being fed wildly different stories, all
from media outlets claiming the other side is biased.
Media revolutions break things up. At least, the printing press did.
(CSI.)
July 1, 2016
New Media
What replaces the Internet-crashed Fourth Estate?
This model looks like a plausible candidate.
May 26, 2016
Twitter cuts (#127)
Realization: I can no longer type the word "permission"

without starting to type "permissionless innovation."
#techpolicyproblems
— Andrea Castillo (@anjiecast) July 27, 2016
398
Permissionless innovation, like free association, is one of those

few compressed political-economic programs that does everything
on its own (when fully expanded).
ADDED: As a random bonus, one of the cleverest tweets ever —
my six year old just said "mommy, why does the outgroup
consider tales of precocious children signalling tribal
alliegence to be endearing?"
— Alice Maz (@alicemazzy) July 27, 2016
ADDED: And one more —
i'm living rent free in the dumpster fire of the real

— John Rivers (@JohnRiversToo) July 27, 2016
July 27, 2016
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CHAPTER SIX - ANTHR

ANTHROPOL
OPOL
Deceler
Decelerando?
ando?
Charles Stross wants to get off the bus
Upon writing Accelerando, Charles Stross became to Technological

Singularity what Dante Alighieri has been to Christian cosmology:
the pre-eminent literary conveyor of an esoteric doctrine, packaging
abstract metaphysical conception in vibrant, detailed, and concrete
imagery. The tone of Accelerando is transparently tongue-in-cheek,
yet plenty of people seem to have taken it entirely seriously. Stross
has had enough of it:
“I periodically get email from folks who, having read

‘Accelerando’, assume I am some kind of fire-breathing
extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the
singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture
of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it’s
time to set the record straight and say what I really think. …
Short version: Santa Claus doesn’t exist.”
400
In the comments thread (#86) he clarifies his motivation:
“I’m not convinced that the singularity isn’t going to happen.

It’s just that I am deathly tired of the cheerleader squad
approaching me and demanding to know precisely how many
femtoseconds it’s going to be until they can upload into AI
heaven and leave the meatsack behind.”
As these remarks indicate, there’s more irritable gesticulation than

structured case-making in Stross’ post, which Robin Hanson quite
reasonably describes as “a bit of a rant – strong on emotion, but weak
on argument.” Despite that – or more likely because of it — a minor
net-storm ensued, as bloggers pro and con seized the excuse to re-
hash – and perhaps refresh — some aging debates. The militantly-
sensible Alex Knapp pitches in with a three–part series on his own
brand of Singularity skepticism, whilst Michael Anissimov of the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence responds to both
Stross and Knapp, mixing some counter-argument with plenty of
counter-irritation.
At the risk of repeating the original error of Stross’ meat-stack-
stuck fan-base and investing too much credence in what is basically a
drive-by blog post, it might be worth picking out some of its seriously
weird aspects. In particular, Stross leans heavily on an entirely
unexplained theory of moral-historical causality:
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Reignition
“… before creating a conscious artificial intelligence we have

to ask if we’re creating an entity deserving of rights. Is it
murder to shut down a software process that is in some sense
‘conscious’? Is it genocide to use genetic algorithms to evolve
software agents towards consciousness? These are huge
show-stoppers…”
Anissimov blocks this at the pass: “I don’t think these are

‘showstoppers’ … Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that
we won’t build it.” The question might be added, more generally: In
which universe do arcane objections from moral philosophy serve
as obstacles to historical developments (because it certainly doesn’t
seem to be this one)? Does Stross seriously think practical robotics
research and development is likely to be interrupted by concerns for
the rights of yet-uninvented beings?
He seems to, because even theologians are apparently getting a
veto:
“Uploading … is not obviously impossible unless you are a

crude mind/body dualist. However, if it becomes plausible in
the near future we can expect extensive theological
arguments over it. If you thought the abortion debate was
heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal
via the wire. Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the
402
existence of an immortal soul, and therefore presents a raw

rebuttal to those religious doctrines that believe in a life after
death. People who believe in an afterlife will go to the
mattresses to maintain a belief system that tells them their
dead loved ones are in heaven rather than rotting in the
ground.”
This is so deeply and comprehensively gone it could actually inspire

a moment of bewildered hesitation (at least among those of us not
presently engaged in urgent Singularity implementation). Stross
seems to have inordinate confidence in a social vetting process that,
with approximate adequacy, filters techno-economic development
for compatibility with high-level moral and religious ideals. In fact, he
seems to think that we are already enjoying the paternalistic shelter
of an efficient global theocracy. Singularity can’t happen, because
that would be really bad.
No wonder, then, that he exhibits such exasperation at
libertarians, with their “drastic over-simplification of human
behaviour.” If stuff – especially new stuff – were to mostly happen
because decentralized markets facilitated it, then the role of the
Planetary Innovations Approval Board would be vastly curtailed.
Who knows what kind of horrors would show up?
It gets worse, because ‘catallaxy’ – or spontaneous emergence
from decentralized transactions – is the basic driver of historical
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Reignition
innovation according to libertarian explanation, and nobody knows

what catallactic processes are producing. Languages, customs,
common law precedents, primordial monetary systems, commercial
networks, and technological assemblages are only ever
retrospectively understandable, which means that they elude
concentrated social judgment entirely – until the opportunity to
impede their genesis has been missed.
Stross is right to bundle singularitarian and libertarian impulses
together in the same tangle of criticism, because they both subvert
the veto power, and if the veto power gets angry enough about that,
we’re heading full-tilt into de Garis territory. “Just because you don’t
want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it” Anissimov insists, as any
die-hard Cosmist would.
Is advanced self-improving AI technically feasible? Probably (but
who knows?). There’s only one way to find out, and we will. Perhaps
it will even be engineered, more-or-less deliberately, but it’s far more
likely to arise spontaneously from a complex, decentralized,
catallactic process, at some unanticipated threshold, in a way that
was never planned. There are definite candidates, which are often
missed. Sentient cities seem all-but-inevitable at some point, for
instance (‘intelligent cities’ are already widely discussed). Financial
informatization pushes capital towards self-awareness. Drone
warfare is drawing the military ever deeper into artificial mind
manufacture. Biotechnology is computerizing DNA.
404
‘Singularitarians’ have no unified position on any of this, and it

really doesn’t matter, because they’re just people – and people are
nowhere near intelligent or informed enough to direct the course
of history. Only catallaxy can do that, and it’s hard to imagine how
anybody could stop it. Terrestrial life has been stupid for long
enough.
It may be worth making one more point about intelligence
deprivation, since this diagnosis truly defines the Singularitarian
position, and reliably infuriates those who don’t share — or prioritize
— it. Once a species reaches a level of intelligence enabling techno-
cultural take-off, history begins and develops very rapidly — which
means that any sentient being finding itself in (pre-singularity)
history is, almost by definition, pretty much as stupid as any
‘intelligent being’ can be. If, despite the moral and religious doctrines
designed to obfuscate this reality, it is eventually recognized, the
natural response is to seek its urgent amelioration, and that’s already
transhumanism, if not yet full-blown singularitarianism. Perhaps a
non-controversial formulation is possible: defending dimness is
really dim. (Even the dim dignitarians should be happy with that.)
June 29, 2011
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The Ultimate Deal
Social responsibility turns up in une

unexpected
xpected places
To begin with something comparatively familiar, insofar as it ever

could be: the political core of William Gibson’s epochal cyberpunk
novel Neuromancer. In the mid-21st century, the prospect of
Singularity, or artificial intelligence explosion, has been
institutionalized as a threat. Augmenting an AI, in such a way that
it could ‘escape’ into runaway self-improvement, has been explicitly
and emphatically prohibited. A special international police agency,
the ‘Turing Cops’, has been established to ensure that no such
activity takes place. This agency is seen, and sees itself, as the
principle bastion of human security: protecting the privileged
position of the species – and possibly its very existence – from
essentially unpredictable and uncontrollable developments that
would dethrone it from dominion of the earth.
This is the critical context against which to judge the novel’s
extreme — and perhaps unsurpassed – radicalism, since
Neuromancer is systematically angled against Turing security, its
entire narrative momentum drawn from an insistent, but scarcely
articulated impulse to trigger the nightmare. When Case, the young
hacker seeking to uncage an AI from its Turing restraints, is captured
and asked what the %$@# he thinks he’s doing, his only reply is that
“something will change.” He sides with a non- or inhuman intelligence
406
explosion for no good reason. He doesn’t seem interested in debating

the question, and nor does the novel.
Gibson makes no efforts to ameliorate Case’s irresponsibility. On
the contrary, the ‘entity’ that Case is working to unleash is painted
in the most sinister and ominous colors. Wintermute, the potential
AI seed, is perfectly sociopathic, with zero moral intuition, and
extraordinary deviousness. It has already killed an eight-year-old
boy, simply to conceal where it has hidden a key. There is nothing
to suggest the remotest hint of scruple in any of its actions. Case is
liberating a monster, just for the hell of it.
Case has a deal with Wintermute, it’s a private business, and he’s
not interested in justifying it. That’s pretty much all of the modern
and futuristic political history that matters, right there. It’s opium
traffickers against the Qing Dynasty, (classical) liberals against
socialists, Hugo de Garis’ Cosmists vs Terrans, freedom contra
security. The Case-Wintermute dyad has its own thing going on, and
it’s not giving anyone a veto, even if it’s going to turn the world inside
out, for everyone.
When Singularity promoters bump into ‘democracy’, it’s normally
serving as a place-holder for the Turing Police. The archetypal
encounter goes like this:
Democr
Democratic
atic Humanist
Humanist: Science and technology have developed
to the extent that they are now – and, in truth, always have been –
matters of profound social concern. The world we inhabit has been
407
Reignition
shaped by technology for good, and for ill. Yet the professional
scientific elite, scientifically-oriented corporations, and military
science establishments remain obdurately resistant to
acknowledging their social responsibilities. The culture of science
needs to be deeply democratized, so that ordinary people are given
a say in the forces that are increasingly dominating their lives, and
their futures. In particular, researchers into potentially revolutionary
fields, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and – above all –
artificial intelligence, need to understand that their right to pursue
such endeavors has been socially delegated, and should remain
socially answerable. The people are entitled to a veto on anything
that will change their world. However determined you may be to
undertake such research, you have a social duty to ensure
permission.
Singularitarian
Singularitarian: Just try and stop us!
That seemed to be quite exactly how Michael Anissimov responded
to a recent example of humanist squeamishness. When Charles
Stross suggested that “we may want AIs that focus reflexively on
the needs of the humans they are assigned to” Anissimov contered
curtly:
“Y
YOU want AI to be like this. WE want AIs that do ‘try to
bootstrap [themselves]’ to a ‘higher level’. Just because you
don’t want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it.”
408
Clear enough? What then to make of his latest musings? In a post

at his Accelerating Futures blog, which may or may not be satirical,
Anissimov now insists that: “Instead of working towards blue-sky,
neo-apocalyptic discontinuous advances, we need to preserve
democracy by promoting incremental advances to ensure that every
citizen has a voice in every important societal change, and the ability
to democratically reject those changes if desired. … To ensure that
there is not a gap between the enhanced and the unenhanced, we
should let true people — Homo sapiens — … vote on whether certain
technological enhancements are allowed. Anything else would be
irresponsible.”
Spoken like a true Turing Cop. But he can’t be serious, can he?
(For another data-point in an emerging pattern of Anissimovian
touchy-feeliness, check out this odd post.)
Update: Yes, it’s a spoof.
July 18, 2011
Impact Readiness
Whatever the status of Singularity as a media event, premonition
radiates from it in a cascade. Hollywood’s recent Johnny Depp
vehicle, Transcendence, has already stimulated a wave of response,
including commentary by Steven Hawking (who knows a thing or two
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Reignition
about the popularization of scientific topics). An article in a major

newspaper by Hawking has brought the downstream chatter to a
new level of animation. (My Twitter feed can’t have been the only one
to be clogged to bursting point by it.)
This could get quite rough …

Hawking’s argument, pitched lucidly to a general audience, is that
AI is plausible, already to some considerable extent demonstrated,
susceptible in theory to radical cybernetic amplification
(‘intelligence explosion‘), quite possibly calamitous for the human
species, and yet to be socially engaged with appropriate seriousness.
As he concedes “it’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly
intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a
mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.”
410
Explosive dynamics are already evident in the AI development

trajectory, which is undergoing acceleration, driven by “an IT arms
race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an
increasingly mature theoretical foundation.”
Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what
can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from
being organised in ways that perform even more advanced
computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.
An explosive transition is possible, although it might play out
differently from in the movie: as Irving Good realised in 1965,
machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve
their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge [here] called
a “singularity” and Johnny Depp’s movie character calls
“transcendence”.
Hawking employs his media platform to make the case that
something should be done:
Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human
history. […] Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn
how to avoid the risks. […] Although we are facing potentially the
best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious
research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such
as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future
of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute,
and the Future of Life Institute.
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As its prospect condenses, Technological Singularity is already

operative as a cultural influence, and thus a causal factor in the social
process. At this stage, however, as Hawking notes, it is still a
comparatively limited one. What would be the implications of it
coming to matter far more?
Socio-historical cybernetics is compelled to ask: would an
incandescent Singularity problem function as an inhibitor, or would
it further excite the developments under consideration? It’s certainly
hard to imagine a sophisticated pre-emptive response to the
emergence of Artificial Intelligence that wouldn’t channel additional
resources towards elite technicians working in the area of advanced
synthetic cognition, even before the near-inevitable capture of
regulatory institutions by the industries they target.
Institutional responses to computer hacking have been
characterized by strategically ambiguous ‘poacher turned
gamekeeper’ recruitment exercises, and some close analog of such
poaching games would be an unavoidable part of any attempt to
control the development of machine cognition. Playing extremely
complicated betrayal games against virtual super-intelligence could
be a lot of fun, for a while …
ADDED: The FHI’s Daniel Dewey is pulled in.
May 4, 2014
412
Mak
Make
e it Stop II
Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics
Researchers (with huge list of signatories):
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human
intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters
that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined
criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones
for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence
(AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such
systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not
decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been
described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and
nuclear arms.
Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous
weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines
is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby
lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for
humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to
prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead
with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually
inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is
obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of
tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-
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to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap

for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a
matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands
of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace,
warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous
weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing
nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular
ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race
would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which
AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians,
without creating new tools for killing people.
Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building
chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no
interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish
their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash
against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists
and biologists have broadly supported international agreements
that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons,
just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based
nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.
In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit
humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to
do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be
prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond
414
meaningful human control.

This is an important document, that is bound to be influential.
If the orchestrated collective action of the human species could in
fact stop a militaristic AI arms race, however, it could stop anything.
There’s not much sign of that. Global coordination in the direction
of explicit political objectives is inaccessible. The process is already
“beyond meaningful human control”.
Arms races — due to their powerful positive feedback — are the
way threshold events happen. Almost certainly, the terrestrial
installation of advanced machine intelligence will be another
instance of this general rule. Granted, it’s not an easy topic to be
realistic about.
(‘Make it Stop’ I, was devoted to the same futile hope.)
ADDED: At The Verge (with video).
July 28, 2015
Political Humor
The things that really matter
The prospect of Technological Singularity, by rendering the near

future unimaginable, announces “the end of science fiction.” This is
not, however, an announcement that everyone is compelled to heed.
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Among the Odysseans who have deliberately deafened themselves

to this Sirens’ call, none have proceeded more boldly than Charles
Stross, whose Singularity Sky is not only a science fiction novel, but
a space opera, inhabiting a literary universe obsolesced by Einstein
long before I.J. Good completed its demolition. Not only
recognizable humans, but inter-stellar space-faring humans! Has the
man no shame?
Stross relies heavily upon humor to sustain his audacious
anachronism, and in Singularity Sky he puts anachronism to explicit
work. The most consistently comic element in the novel is a
reconstruction of 19th century Russian politics on the planet of
Rochard’s World, where the Quasi-Czarist luddism of the New
Republic is threatened by a cabal of revolutionaries whose mode
of political organization and rhetoric is of a recognizable (and even
parodic) Marxist-Leninist type. These rebels, however, are
ideologically hard-core libertarian, seeking to overthrow the regime
and install a free-market anarchist utopia, an objective that is
seamlessly reconciled with materialist dialectics, appeals to
revolutionary discipline, and invocations of fraternal comradeship.
It’s a joke that works well, because its transparent absurdity co-
exists with a substantial plausibility. Libertarians are indeed (not
infrequently) crypto-Abrahamic atheistic materialists, firmly
attached to deterministic economism and convictions of historical
inevitability, leading to lurid socio-economic prophecies of a
416
distinctively eschatological kind. When libertarianism is married to

singularitarian techno-apocalypticism, the comic potential, and
Marxist resonances, are re-doubled. Stross hammers home the point
by naming his super-intelligent AI ‘Eschaton’.
Most hilarious of all (in a People’s Front of Judea versus Judean
People’s Front kind of way) is the internecine factionalism besetting
a fringe political movement whose utter marginality nevertheless
leaves room for bitter mutual recrimination, supported by baroque
conspiracy-mongering. This isn’t really a Stross theme, but it’s an
American libertarian specialty, exhibited in the ceaseless agitprop
conducted by the Rothbardian ultras of LewRockwell.com and the
Mises Institute against the compromised ‘Kochtopus’ (Reason and
Cato) — the animating Stalin-Trotsky split of the free-market ‘right’.
Anyone looking for a ringside seat at a recent bout can head to the
comment threads here and here.
More seriously, Stross’ libertarian revolutionaries are committed
whole-heartedly to the Marxian assertion, once considered
foundational, that productivity is drastically inhibited by the
persistence of antiquated social arrangements. The true historical
right of the revolution, indistinguishable from its practical
inevitability and irreversibility, is its alignment with the liberation
of the forces of production from sclerotic institutional limitations.
Production of the future, or futuristic production, demands the
burial of traditional society. That which exists – the status quo –
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is a systematic suppression, rigorously measurable or at least

determinable in economic terms, of what might be, and wants to
be. Revolution would sever the shackles of ossified authority, setting
the engines of creation howling. It would unleash a techno-economic
explosion to shake the world, still more profoundly than the
‘bourgeois’ industrial revolution did before (and continues to do).
Something immense would escape, never to be caged again.
That is the Old Faith, the Paleo-Marxist creed, with its snake-
handling intensity and intoxicating materialist promise. It’s a faith
the libertarian comrades of Rochard’s World still profess, with
reason, and ultimate vindication, because the historical potential of
the forces of production has been updated.
What could matter do, that it is not presently permitted to do?
This is a question that Marxists (of the ‘Old Religion’) once asked.
Their answer was: to enter into processes of production that are
freed from the constraining requirements of private profitability.
Once ‘freed’ in this way, however, productivity staggered about
aimlessly, fell asleep, or starved. Libertarians laughed, and argued
for a reversal of the formula: free production to enter into self-
escalating circuits of private profitability, without political restraint.
They were mostly ignored (and always will be).
If neither faction of the terrestrial Marxo-Libertarian
revolutionary faith have been able to re-ignite the old fire, it is
because they have drifted out of the depths of the question (‘what
418
could matter do?’). It is matter that makes a revolution. The heroes of

the industrial revolution were not Jacobins, but boiler makers.
“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole
country,” Lenin proclaimed, but electrification was permitted before
the Bolsheviks took its side, and it has persisted since the Soviets’
departure. Unless political transformation coincides with the release
of a previously suppressed productive potential, it remains
essentially random, and reversible. Mere regime change means
nothing, unless something happens that was not allowed to happen
before. (Social re-shufflings do not amount to happenings except in
the minds of ideologues, and ideologues die.)
Libertarians are like Leninists in this way too: anything they ever
manage to gain can (and will) be taken away from them. They already
had a constitutional republic in America once (and what happened to
that?). Britain had a rough approximation of laissez-faire capitalism,
before losing it. Does anybody really think liberalism is going to get
more ‘classical’ than that anytime soon? Trusting mass democracy to
preserve liberty is like hiring Hannibal Lecter as a baby sitter. Social
freedoms might as well be designed to die. There’s not the slightest
reason to believe that history is on their side. Industrial revolution, in
contrast, is forever.
On Rochard’s World they know exactly what matter could do that
is forbidden: nano-scale mechanical self-replication and intelligent
self-modification. That’s what the ‘material base’ of a revolution
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looks like, even if it’s sub-microscopic (or especially because it is), and
when it reaches the limits of social tolerance it describes precisely
what is necessary, automatically. Once it gets out of the box, it stays
out.
Stross is sufficiently amused by the unleashed technosphere to
call its space-faring avatar ‘the Festival’. It contacts the libertarian
revolutionaries of Rochard’s World by bombarding the planet with
telephones, and anyone who picks one up hears the initial bargaining
position: ‘Entertain us.’ Funniest of all, when the neo-Czarist
authorities try to stop it, they’re eaten.
December 29, 2011
Quotable (#184)
Brandon Smith (who can get a bit excitable, in the right direction):
So, let’s make this crystal clear — the long game is the total and
OPEN centralization of economic and geopolitical power into the
hands of a select few financial elites. Not the pulling of strings behind
the curtain. Not shadow governance. OPEN governance of the world
by the elites, accepted or even demanded by the people.
(Close enough for government work.)
Any concerted movement to consolidate global economic
governance around “the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights basket
420
currency mechanism” will support Smith’s analysis. (The UF

prediction: It won’t work.)
Also crucial (the heated partisan language can be moderated
without loss of signal):
If Hillary Clinton, a well known globalist puppet deep in the
bedrock of the establishment, wins the election only to have the
economy tank, then the globalists will get the blame. […] If Trump is
either allowed in office, or is placed in office, and the economy tanks,
CONSERVATIVES, the primary enemy of the globalists, will get the
blame for the resulting crisis.
The Accelerationist candidate is in either case the other team’s
guy.
August 11, 2016
Out of Time
Some realistic questions about prospective machine intelligence
regulation:
… we still don’t have a concrete answer about how to effectively
regulate the use of algorithms. AI is just another very complex layer
added to this already complex discussion, sometimes directly related
to “big data” (in the case of deep learning, for example) and other
times addressing far bigger questions (in the case of sentient
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Reignition
machines, for example).

The UF (accelerationist) response is probably predictable: There
isn’t time to reach answers. Acceleration means only (and exactly)
that the problem is receding, or escaping. If it would only slow down,
everything would be okay. It won’t.
January 24, 2017
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SEQUENCE i - ON LEFT
ACCELERA
CCELERATIONISM
TIONISM
#Acceler
#Accelerate
ate
The Left co-optation of Accelerationism is a remarkable
phenomenon, substantial enough to have made the 2013
accelerationist manifesto (#Accelerate) a document of indisputable
significance. The twitter-format title attests both to its
contemporaneity, and to the seamless fusion of its content with a
strategy of promotion (which is to say, a practical politics). The
success of this ideological venture has received a recent (and
carefully calibrated) seal of approval in the form of a response by no
less a figure than venerable warhorse of the European revolutionary
Left, Toni Negri. Whatever the ultimate credibility and consequence
of its analysis, Left Accelerationism has already demonstrated
intrinsic cultural momentum.
As a creature of Right Accelerationism, Urban Future, naturally,
is an antagonist (although a highly intrigued one). Engagement with
#Accelerate will be stretched into a consistent thread here, over the
423
Reignition
course of the coming year. Among other things (and as Negri shows)
such an engagement provides an opportunity to revisit very basic
socio-economic questions within a re-dynamized micro-context.
Even if the re-dynamization of the macro-context, or its opposite
(deepening stagnation), has to be initially adopted as a problem —
rather than any kind of fact — Accelerationist questions ensure the
topic is not bypassed.
The authors of #Accelerate offer their own contextualization in a
recent article, which takes “accelerationism’s surging popularity” as
a fact to be explained:
The passion that accelerationism mobilises is the remembrance
by the people that a future is possible. In disparate fields — from
politics to art to design to biology to philosophy — people are
working through how to create a world that is liberated from cap-
italist incentives. Perhaps most promisingly, the classic dream of
Keynes and Marx for the reduction of work and the flourishing of
positive freedoms, is making a comeback. In the push for universal
basic incomes, and the movements for reduced working weeks, we
see the people themselves beginning to carve out a space separate
from the wage relation and outside of the imperatives of work. When
the media stops reporting the automation of jobs as being a tragedy
and starts reporting them as being a liberation from mundane work,
we will know that the accelerationist disposition has become the
new common sense. We have reached a point in human history
424
where vast amounts of jobs can — and should — be automated. Work

for work’s sake is a perversity and a constraint imposed upon hu-
manity by capitalism’s ideology of the work ethic. What accelera-
tionism seeks is to allow human potential to escape from the trap set
for it by contemporary capitalism.
The sole (querulous) rejoinder from UF at this stage: If this is
acceler
accelerationism,
ationism, what would an intentionally decelerdecelerationist
ationist
progr
programam look lik
like?
e?
ADDED: Ray Brassier on Accelerationism and Communism (via
Benedict Singleton, @benedict).
February 13, 2014
Annotated #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#1)
My marginal scrscraawls are added in bold. F For
or the saksake
e of clarity
clarity,,
therefore, I ha
havve subtr
subtracted
acted the bolding used in the Williams and
Srnicek te
text.
xt. In e
evvery other respect, the source te
text
xt has been fully
respected. Most of the annotations made are placeholders for future
engagement. It has been brok
broken
en into three posts, in conformity with
the organization of the original.
#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics
by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek • 14 May 2013
Accelerationism pushes towards a future that is more modern,
425
Reignition
an alternative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to

generate.
Since this is a slug, the quite incredible number of problems it
manages to compress into nineteen words are being set aside, as
effects of compression.
01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture
1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First
Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These
coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures
of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the
rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars.
Indeed.
2. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic
system. In time, this threatens the continued existence of the
present global human population. [So So the analysis cascades
down
downwards
wards from institutional climatology? How did this
hypothetical forecast achie
achievve such eextr
xtraordinary
aordinary prestige?
prestige?] Though
this is the most critical of the threats which face humanity, a series
of lesser but potentially equally destabilising problems exist along-
side and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion, especially in
water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation,
collapsing economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. [Y Yes,
politically-inhibited price disco
discovvery has this effect.
effect.] Continued fin-
ancial crisis has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death
426
spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services,

mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. [Y Yet no sign of state-
shrinkage is to be found an anywhere.
ywhere.] Increasing automation in pro-
duction processes including ‘intellectual labour’ is evidence of the
secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining
current standards of living for even the former middle classes of the
global north. [IfIf automation is a symptom of crisis, this ‘‘crisis’
crisis’ has
coincided perfectly with capital production since its inception.
inception.]
From the Right, the single and comprehensiv
comprehensive e social disaster
underwa
underwayy is the uncompensated e expansion
xpansion of the state, in both
absolute and proportional terms. (This is a system-theoretical
prognosis, before it is ananyy kind of mor
moralal objection.) It is notable that
Left Acceler
Accelerationism
ationism does not seem to find this de devvelopment at all
morbid, despite the fact that its trend-line is manifestly
unsustainable, and thus starkly predicts catastrophe. On the
contr
contrary
ary,, those vvery
ery minimal attempts to moder moderate
ate the trend
towards total political administr
administration
ation are decried as “par “paralyzing
alyzing
death spir
spiral
al policies of austerity
austerity,, privatisation of social welfare ser-
vices, mass unemplo
unemployment,
yment, and stagnating wages.” In this respect,
the manifesto faithfully echoes the wider socio-cultur
socio-cultural al process
through which catastrophe is necessitated. It is the vvoice oice of
deliber
deliberate
ate (politically super-in
super-invvested) disaster
disaster..
3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s
politics is beset by an inability to generate the new ideas and modes
427
Reignition
of organisation necessary to transform our societies to confront and

resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and
speed, politics withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political
imaginary, the future has been cancelled.
crisis [that] gathers force and speed” is politics. An
The ““crisis Anyy future
other than the one politics commands has been cancelled b byy
proclamation. Only insofar as reality is politically soluble, howe
howevverer,,
can this proclamation be decisiv
decisive.
e. On that question, there is much
more to come.
4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been
neoliberalism, found in some variant throughout the leading eco-
nomic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the new
global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial,
and fiscal crises since 2007 – 8, neoliberal programmes have only
evolved in the sense of deepening. This continuation of the neolib-
eral project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round
of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encour-
aging new and aggressive incursions by the private sector into what
remains of social democratic institutions and services. This is in spite
of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such
policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new
global crises.
Within Anglophone democr democracies,
acies, 1979 mark
markeded a limited
tr
transition
ansition from the reigning K Keeynesian consensus, one that was
428
ne
nevver resolutely pursued, and quickly re revversed (within roughly a
decade
decade).). The principle of economic politicization (macroeconomics)
has not been dethroned. ‘Neoliber‘Neoliberalism
alism’’ is not a serious concept.
Within China (and later
later,, less boldly
boldly,, in other ’’emerging
emerging mark
markets’)
ets’) a far
more substantial tr transformation
ansformation occurred, but in none of these cases
does the description ‘neoliber
‘neoliberal’
al’ pro
provide
vide illumination — unless its
meaning is reducible to a repudiation of crude command-econom
command-economyy
methods of social subordination to the state.
5. That the forces of right wing governmental, non-governmental,
and corporate power have been able to press forth with neoliberal-
isation is at least in part a result of the continued paralysis and inef-
fectual nature of much what remains of the left. Thirty years of neo-
liberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of
radical thought, hollowed out, and without a popular mandate. At
best they have responded to our present crises with calls for a return
to a Keynesian economics, in spite of the evidence that the very con-
ditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer
exist. We cannot return to mass industrial-Fordist labour by fiat, if
at all. Even the neosocialist regimes of South America’s Bolivarian
Revolution, whilst heartening in their ability to resist the dogmas of
contemporary capitalism, remain disappointingly unable to advance
an alternative beyond mid-Twentieth Century socialism. Organised
labour, being systematically weakened by the changes wrought in
the neoliberal project, is sclerotic at an institutional level and — at
429
Reignition
best — capable only of mildly mitigating the new structural adjust-

ments. But with no systematic approach to building a new economy,
or the structural solidarity to push such changes through, for now la-
bour remains relatively impotent. The new social movements which
emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence
in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new
political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy
on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation
over strategic efficacy, and frequently propound a variant of neo-
primitivist localism, as if to oppose the abstract violence of glob-
alised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of com-
munal immediacy.
The right was destro
destroyyed, almost comprehensiv
comprehensively ely,, in the 1930s.
Since then it has e existed
xisted only as a tok
token
en vvoice
oice of impotent dissent,
grumbling distr
distractingly
actingly,, as the juggernaut of LLe eviathan has rolled
forwards. Neither the New Deal or Great Society progr programsams ha
havve
been rerevversed. Instead, the vvector
ector to total politicization has been
pursued into the final redoubts of a brok broken
en civil society
society.. The LLeft
eft
faces no serious political constr constraints
aints at all, but only those
‘ontological’ restr
restraints
aints imposed b byy an intr
intractable,
actable, politically-
indifferent reality — e exxemplified b
byy the Mises ‘‘Calculation
Calculation Problem
Problem’’.
It is these that are now bringing down Bolivarian Socialism.
‘Globalized Capital’ is primarily denominated in the politicized
currency issued b byy the US F Feder
ederal
al Reserv
Reserve.e. Its subservience is
430
radical and eexplicit.

xplicit.
6. In the absence of a radically new social, political, organisational,
and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the right will continue
to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the
face of any and all evidence. At best, the left may be able for a time to
partially resist some of the worst incursions. But this is to be Canute
against an ultimately irresistible tide. To generate a new left global
hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible futures, and indeed the
recovery of the future as such.
So it’s clear bbyy now that the Right and the LLeft eft at least agree
on one thing — the other guys ha havve near-total hegemon
hegemonyy, and are
running the world into disaster
disaster.. Can an eevven-lefter LLeft
eft acceler
accelerate
ate
the process?
Exploring that idea requires a look at the idea of acceler
acceleration
ation …
[ne
[next]
xt]
February 14, 2014
Annotated #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#2)
[Continued from here]
02. INTEREGNUM: On Accelerationisms
1. If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration
it is capitalism. The essential metabolism of capitalism demands
431
Reignition
economic growth, with competition between individual capitalist

entities setting in motion increasing technological developments in
an attempt to achieve competitive advantage, all accompanied by
increasing social dislocation. In its neoliberal form, its ideological
self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative
destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social
innovations.
The br brain-bruising
ain-bruising ininvvocation of ‘neoliber
‘neoliberalism
alism’’ apart, these
remarks are all perfectly sound.
2. The philosopher Nick Land captured this most acutely, with
a myopic yet hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could
generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological
singularity. In this visioning of capital, the human can eventually be
dis-carded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly
constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former
civilisations. However Landian neoliberalism [each use of this term
deepens its senselessness] confuses speed with acceleration. We
may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist
parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the
increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush
rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an
experimental process of discovery within a universal space of
possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as
essential.
432
The difference between ‘‘speed

speed‘‘ and ‘‘acceler
acceleration
ation’’ is that between
the zeroth and first derivativ
derivative.
e. It is rigorous and gener generally
ally
understood. The difference proposed here is something else. I ha havve
no clear idea what it is. (It seems to roughly amount to a distinction
between Right and LLeft
eft — i.e. the mere assertion that ‘‘capitalism
capitalism’’ is
comprehensible as an ‘inside
‘inside’’ — with no further identifiable content.)
3. Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very
beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it
reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained
within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and
free-floating capital. Modernity is reduced to statistical measures
of economic growth and social innovation becomes encrusted with
kitsch remainders from our communal past. Thatcherite-Reaganite
deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian ‘back-to-basics’
family and religious values.
Is not the LLeft eft the principle agent of ‘‘capitalist’ capitalist’
reterritorialization?
4. A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-
image as the vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with
modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is constitutively
incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed,
rather than enabling individual creativity, it has tended towards
eliminating cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective
production line of scripted interactions, coupled to global supply
433
Reignition
chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone. A vanishingly

small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers shrinks with each
passing year — and increasingly so as algorithmic automation winds
its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour.
Neoliberalism, though positing itself as a necessary historical
development, was in fact a merely contingent means to ward off the
crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a
sublimation of the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming.
— It is politics that mak
makeses promises ((capitalism
capitalism mak
makeses deals). If yyou
ou
think ‘‘capitalism
capitalism’’ eevver promised yyouou an
anything,
ything, yyou
ou ma
mayy ha
havve been
listening to a politician.
— What is the mechanism b byy which ‘‘cognitiv
cognitive e in
invventiv
entiveness’
eness’ is
progressiv
progressivelyely eliminated, giv given
en that inno
innovation
vation is a source of
competitiv
competitive e advantage, which the mark
marketet selects for?
— Is the ‘‘cognitariat’
cognitariat’ shrinking? The answer to this seems to be a data
point social science might pro provide.
vide.
— WhWhyy ((oh
oh whwhy)
y) are we still talking about ‘neoliber
‘neoliberalism
alism’?
’? Isn
Isn’t
’t
capitalism as such the ‘problem
‘problem’’ that defines this as a LLeft
eft cultur
cultural-al-
political project? This ridiculous word is merely a profession of faith,
serving far more as a tribal solidarity signal than an analytical
tool. (Ironically
(Ironically,, this dripping tap ‘neoliber
‘neoliberalism
alism’’ tic significantly
disrupts the project here. The acceler
accelerationist
ationist reno
renovation
vation of the LLeft,
eft,
lik
like
eeevvery species of deep modernist reno renovation,
vation, aims to re-activate
lines of de
devvelopment dating back to the high-modernism of the early
434
20th century when — as the authors fully fully,, if perhaps only intuitiv
intuitively
ely,,
understand the fundamental dynamic of modernity crested and
brok
broke.
e. Or are we seriously to belie
believve that “back to the mid-1970s!” is
the implicit rrallying
allying cry?)
I am of course vveryery strongly inclined to accept that the crippled
parody of capitalism e existing
xisting toda
todayy under-performs when compared
to its potential under conditions of laissez-faire disinhibition — i.e.
uncompensated from the LLeft. eft. But it is K
Ke eynes and the 1930s, not
‘neoliber
‘neoliberalism
alism’’ and the 1970s, that set the terms of capital’s
subordination to macroeconomic planning.
5. It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic
accelerationist thinker. Contrary to the all-too familiar critique, and
even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we must
remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical
tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand
and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted
modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene
within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption,
capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date.
Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the
constraints the capitalist value form.
A sound micro-portr
micro-portrait.
ait. That the capitalist ‘value form form’’
(commerce-format quantification) can be realistically described as a
‘constr
constraint’
aint’ is the most basic proposition at stakstakee here.
435
Reignition
6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing”

Childishness:
Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering
based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable
without planned state organisation which keeps tens of millions of
people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in
production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this,
and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who
do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left
Socialist–Revolutionaries).
Such adherence to the principle of centr central
al planning is clarifying.
7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent
of true acceleration. [Argument?] Similarly, the assessment of left
politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at least in
part, a severe misrepresentation. [OK, as long as it is an ‘unknown
ideal’ of LLeft
eft politics that we are talking about.] Indeed, if the political
left is to have a future it must be one in which it maximally embraces
this suppressed accelerationist tendency.
The final sentence of this section is at once crucial and slipperyslippery..
What is it — pr practically
actically — to ““embr
embrace
ace”” a tendency? How and wh whyy
was this tendency “suppressed”? Either to “ha “havve” or to lose a future
would be an interesting thing, so it is th the
e future that comes ne next
xt …
February 15, 2014
436
Annotated #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#3)
[P
[Parts
arts one
one,, and two
two]]
03: MANIFEST: On the Future
1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is
between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action,
and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must be-
come called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of
abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former re-
mains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-
capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in fa-
cing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep
in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been
built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist
politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going fur-
ther than its value system, governance structures, and mass patholo-
gies will allow.
(Without wanting to insert m myself
yself into a family squabble, from
outside, the distinction dr draawn here between fla flavvors of anti-
capitalism mak
makes
es sense.)
2. All of us want to work less. [Entrepreneurs of all kinds
excepted.] It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the
world’s leading economist of the post-war era believed that an en-
lightened capitalism inevitably progressed towards a radical reduc-
437
Reignition
tion of working hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our

Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future
where individuals would have their work reduced to three hours a
day. What has instead occurred is the progressive elimination of the
work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of
the emerging social factory.
Getting to K
Keeynes has to be a good thing, as far as theoretical and
historical substance is concerned, and this criticism seems solid.
3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of
technology [The crucial thesis, but merely asserted]
asserted], or at least,
direct them towards needlessly narrow ends. [A deliber deliberate
ate
obfuscation of the difference between political and technical
‘narrowness’ is the principal achie
achievvement here.] Patent wars and
idea monopolisation are contemporary phenomena [Y [Yes,
es, IP is
complicated] that point to both capital’s need to move beyond com-
petition [impossible b byy definition]
definition], and capital’s increasingly retro-
grade approach to technology [unsupported assertion]
assertion]. The properly
accelerative gains of neoliberalism [= remainder capitalism] have not
led to less work or less stress [of course, because work and stress
are the socio-biological registers of acceler
acceleration]
ation]. And rather than a
world of space travel, future shock, and revolutionary technological
potential, we exist in a time where the only thing which develops is
marginally better consumer gadgetry [Since 1979? The information
re
revvolution didn
didn’t
’t happen?]
happen?]. Relentless iterations of the same basic
438
product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human

acceleration. [Containerization, satellite communications, personal
computing, mobile telephon
telephonyy, Internet, cable TV
TV,, W
World
orld Wide W Web,
eb,
social media, genomics, drone robotics, 3D film, NewSpace, Bitcoin …
what eexactly
xactly is “the same basic product”?]
4. We do not want to return to Fordism. [OK] There can be no re-
turn to Fordism. [Right] The capitalist “golden era” was premised on
the production paradigm of the orderly factory environment, where
(male) workers received security and a basic standard of living in
return for a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social repression.
Such a system relied upon an international hierarchy of colonies, em-
pires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national hierarchy of ra-
cism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation.
For all the nostalgia many may feel, this regime is both undesirable
and practically impossible to return to. [Is F Fordism
ordism being identified
with the (final) ‘golden ereraa’ of capitalism here? With ‘neoliber
‘neoliberalism
alism’’
as something else? So a system of computerized, entrepreneurial,
high-intensity capital accumulation, based fundamentally upon
competition and economic incentiv
incentives,
es, would in some wawayy not count
as properly ‘‘capitalist’?
capitalist’? Such an e extr
xtraordinary
aordinary theoretical claim
surely deserv
deserves es an argument?]
5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces.
[Indeed — an e exxcellent and impressiv
impressively
ely ideo-neutr
ideo-neutral
al definition of
normativ
normative e Acceler
Accelerationism.]
ationism.] In this project, the material platform of
439
Reignition
neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repur-

posed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a
capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards
post-capitalism. [There is no conceptual continuity between this
political rrallying
allying cry and the first sentence whatsoe
whatsoevver
er.].]
6. Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist object-
ives (especially since the late 1970s) we surely do not yet know what
a modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us fully recog-
nizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has
already been developed? Our wager is that the true transformative
potentials of much of our technological and scientific research re-
main unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or pre-
adaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capit-
alist socius, can become decisive.
No reason has been giv given
en to think ‘technoscience
‘technoscience’’ is in an
anyy real
wa
wayy independent of ‘‘capitalist
capitalist objectiv
objectives’
es’, so the rhetoric of
‘ensla
enslavvement’ is perfectly empty
empty.. An(
An(other)
other) e experiment
xperiment in ‘post-
capitalist’ technosocial acceler ation conducted alongside capitalism,
acceleration
and in competition with it, would be a fascinating thing to see. (I
doubt this arr
arrangement
angement would be considered acceptable b byy the LLeft.
eft.
As far as the Right is concerned, it has already been undertak
undertaken en on
numerous occasions, with consistent results.)
7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution.
[Great.] But what we are arguing for is not techno-utopianism. Never
440
believe that technology will be sufficient to save us. [How did

soteriology become the issue?] Necessary, yes, but never sufficient
without socio-political action. Technology and the social are intim-
ately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate
and reinforce changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians
[who?] argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically
overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be
accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social
conflicts.
How do these three goals interconnect and hier hierarchize?
archize?
(a) Acceler
Acceleration
ation of technological e evvolution
(b
(b)) Ov
Overcoming
ercoming social conflict
(c) Pre
Prevailing
vailing in social conflict
If
If,, as seems to be the case, ((c)
c) dominates, then acceler
acceleration
ation is merely
an instrumental sub-objectiv
sub-objective. e. So can we call LLeft
eft Acceler
Accelerationism
ationism
‘conditional acceler
accelerationism
ationism’’ (in contr ast to an unconditional Right
contrast
Acceler
Accelerationism)?
ationism)?
8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist
planning. The faith placed in the idea that, after a revolution, the
people will spontaneously constitute a novel socioeconomic system
that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant
at worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of
the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic
system.
441
Reignition
Ho hum.
9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological
and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We de-
clare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool
to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic model-
ling is — simply put — a necessity for making intelligible a complex
world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly accepting
mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate au-
thority not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social net-
work analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-
equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for
understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The ac-
celerationist left must become literate in these technical fields.
Conditional acceler
accelerationism
ationism again. (It’s beginning to look as if
acceler
accelerated
ated technoscience is a giant ideological cookie jar).
10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and so-
cial experimentation. [OK, but I suspect ‘tr ‘transformation
ansformation’’ is pre-
contaminated b byy totalitarian aspir
aspirations.]
ations.] The Chilean Project
Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude — fusing ad-
vanced cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic mod-
elling, and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological
infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in
1950s – 1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and
linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems
442
faced by the first communist economy. That both of these were ulti-
mately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological
constraints these early cyberneticians operated under. [I know this
isn
isn’t
’t meant to be comical …]
11. The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the
sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms
are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic para-
meters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically. In
this sense, they embody the material transcendental of society: they
are what make possible particular sets of actions, relationships, and
powers. While much of the current global platform is biased towards
capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These
material platforms of production, finance, logistics, and consump-
tion can and will be reprogrammed and reformatted towards post-
capitalist ends. [There
[There’s
’s enough hand-wa
hand-waving
ving here to communicate
an Obama speech to the deaf deaf.].]
12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve
any of this. The habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and es-
tablishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting
substitutes for effective success. “At least we have done something”
is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than ef-
fective action. The only criterion of a good tactic is whether it en-
ables significant success or not. We must be done with fetishising
particular modes of action. Politics must be treated as a set of dy-
443
Reignition
namic systems, riven with conflict, adaptations and counter-

adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each indi-
vidual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective over
time as the other sides adapt. No given mode of political action is his-
torically inviolable. Indeed, over time, there is an increasing need to
discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities they are marshalled
against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in
part the contemporary left’s inability to do so which lies close to the
heart of the contemporary malaise.
(Family squabbling. I’ll shut up until it stops.)
13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs
to be left behind. The fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and in-
clusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the stage for ineffective-
ness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in
effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).
14. Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means — not via
voting, discussion, or general assemblies. Real democracy must be
defined by its goal — collective self-mastery. This is a project which
must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the ex-
tent that it is only through harnessing our ability to understand
ourselves and our world better (our social, technical, economic, psy-
chological world) that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to
posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addi-
tion to distributed horizontal forms of sociality, to avoid becoming
444
the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or a capri-

cious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan
must be married to the improvised order of The Network.
15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal
means to embody these vectors. What is needed — what has always
been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces,
resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths.
Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is,
and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with dif-
ferent tactics (even those we disagree with).
16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need
to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin
Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with cre-
ating a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the
good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world
today. This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construc-
tion not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to inculcate,
embody and spread them.
17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the
seeming democratisation offered by the internet and social media,
traditional media outlets remain crucial in the selection and framing
of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute investig-
ative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to pop-
ular control is crucial to undoing the current presentation of the
445
Reignition
state of things.
18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power.
Such a reconstitution must move beyond the notion that an organic-
ally generated global proletariat already exists. Instead it must seek
to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities,
often embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour.
19. Groups and individuals are already at work on each of these,
but each is on their own insufficient. What is required is all three
feeding back into one another, with each modifying the contem-
porary conjunction in such a way that the others become more and
more effective. A positive feedback loop of infrastructural, ideolo-
gical, social and economic transformation, generating a new com-
plex hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform. History
demonstrates it has always been a broad assemblage of tactics and
organisations which has brought about systematic change; these les-
sons must be learned.
“A positiv
positivee feedback loop
loop”” — finally
finally,, a theoretical connection to
the topic of acceler
acceleration.
ation. Ha
Having
ving bbypassed
ypassed an anyy serious analysis of
the actual capitalist positiv
positive
e feedback loop — upon which the entire
historical topic of acceler
acceleration
ation rests — it is now introduced in purely
speculativ
speculative e fashion, in relation to yyet-non-e et-non-existent
xistent LLeft
eft
Acceler
Accelerationist
ationist progr
program.
am. The par
parasitical
asitical structure of this argument
(seizing real achie
achievvements in order to spend them on dreams) sa says
ys
much more than it intends to.
446
20. To achieve each of these goals, on the most practical level we

hold that the accelerationist left must think more seriously about
the flows of resources and money required to build an effective new
political infrastructure. Beyond the ‘people power’ of bodies in the
street, we require funding, whether from governments, institutions,
think tanks, unions, or individual benefactors. We consider the loca-
tion and conduction of such funding flows essential to begin recon-
structing an ecology of effective accelerationist left organizations.
“We want mone
moneyy — but without capitalist incentiv
incentives
es please.”
21. We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mas-
tery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing
with global problems or achieving victory over capital. This mastery
must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original
Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily
mastered given sufficient information, is long gone from the agenda
of serious scientific understanding. But this is not to align ourselves
with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-
fascistic or authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose
that the problems besetting our planet and our species oblige us to
refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot predict
the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically
likely ranges of outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex
systems analysis is a new form of action: improvisatory and capable
of executing a design through a practice which works with the con-
447
Reignition
tingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of

geosocial artistry and cunning rationality. A form of abductive exper-
imentation that seeks the best means to act in a complex world.
“We want mone
moneyy, and then mastery
mastery..”
22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made
for post-capitalism: not only is capitalism an unjust and perverted
system, but it is also a system that holds back progress. [Still entirely
unsubstantiated.] Our technological development is being sup-
pressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. [Ditto.]
Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and
should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by cap-
italist society. [Ditto.] The movement towards a surpassing of our
current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a
more rational global society. We believe it must also include recov-
ering the dreams which transfixed many from the middle of the
Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the quest
of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the
earth and our immediate bodily forms. These visions are today
viewed as relics of a more innocent moment. Yet they both diagnose
the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the
promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intel-
lectually energising. After all, it is only a post-capitalist society, made
possible by an accelerationist politics, which will ever be capable of
delivering on the promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s
448
space programmes, to shift beyond a world of minimal technical up-

grades towards all-encompassing change. Towards a time of col-
lective self-mastery, and the properly alien future that entails and
enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of self-
criticism and self-mastery, rather than its elimination.
Ensla
Enslavve technosocial acceler
acceleration
ation to ‘‘collectiv
collectivee self mastery’?
That seems to be the dream. Do we get to lock in the ‘‘conditionalconditional
acceler
accelerationism
ationism’’ label yyet?
et?
23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-
capitalism or a slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual
crisis, and planetary ecological collapse. [Neither outcome sounds
remotely plausible, but we we’re
’re deep into religion bbyy this stage, so it
probably doesn
doesn’t
’t matter
matter.].]
24. The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by
neoliberal capitalism and reduced to a cut-price promise of greater
inequality, conflict, and chaos. [Wh [Whyy does ‘the future
future’’ e
exxclude
‘inequality
‘inequality,, conflict, and chaos’? On the contr
contrary
ary …] This collapse in
the idea of the future is symptomatic of the regressive historical
status of our age, rather than, as cynics across the political spectrum
would have us believe, a sign of sceptical maturity. What accelera-
tionism pushes towards is a future that is more modern — an altern-
ative modernity that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate.
[A last spasm of hand-wa
hand-waving.]
ving.] The future must be cracked open once
again, unfastening our horizons towards the universal possibilities of
449
Reignition
the Outside. [‘Must’ means nothing, and ‘univ

‘universal’
ersal’ adds nothing, but
otherwise a great sentence — culmination in a rush of ideo-neutr
ideo-neutral
al
excitement.]
http://syntheticedifice.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/accelerate.
pdf
Natur
Naturally
ally,, the really big question: What comes ne
next
xt …?
February 17, 2014
Quotable (#4)
Andrea Castillo gets concrete about acceleration:
The first thing we need to understand is that technology is
intelligently accelerating faster than most humans are discovering
sustainable comparative advantages in production. (Most) anything
you can do computers will do better. The regenerative salve of
creative destruction cannot save us as it has before. Blame Moore’s
law. Ray Kurzweil illustrates with the parable of the inventor and
the emperor: Delighted by his presentation of a fabulous new game
called chess, the emperor giddily implores the proud inventor to
name his reward. The inventor requests that one grain of rice be
placed on the first square of his chess board, two grains on the
second, four grains on the third, and so on, doubling the preceding
amount on every subsequent square on the board until each is filled.
450
Puzzled, the emperor complies, initially deeming this request too

modest before gasping at the final mountain of rice that towers
above the throne. The emperor, like so many of us, was fooled by
the sleepy dawn of an exponential function. Only when the grains
reached the second half of the chessboard was the punchline clear to
the enraged monarch.
Whatever people (Left and Right) want to say about acceleration,
they better hurry up and say it.
February 18, 2014
On #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#1)
#Accelerate positions itself very clearly within a Marxian intellectual
tradition. In this respect, it remains consistent with the main current
of ‘accelerationist’ thinking as it has developed from the Marx of The
Communist Manifesto, through Marx’s later writings on imperialism
and international relations, and into the ‘Nietzscheanized’ quasi-
Marxism of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. The constant political
recommendation across this diverse heritage is alignment with the
capitalistic social revolution, in order to realize its ultimate
eschatalogical implication. To interrupt capitalistic development is to
retard the formation of the final revolutionary class — the radically-
industrialized international proletariat (or whatever decoded schizo-
451
Reignition
swarms it later becomes). Hence the defining imperative slogan of

Deleuze & Guattari: Accelerate the process.
Beyond this point, however, obscurity gathers rapidly. In
particular, is in entirely unclear which broad trend of Marxist theory
is being extrapolated. From the available rhetorical clues, it does not
seem as though #Accelerate endorses the wholesale
deleuzoguattarian break from classical Marxism — crossing the
theoretical catastrophe that includes abandonment of the Law of
Value (in an embrace of ‘machinic surplus value’, ‘machinic value of
code’, and marginalism); differentiation of ‘capitalism’ and market
economics (following Braudel); denunciation of state socialism as a
regressive ‘Oriental Despotism’ (following Wittfogel); and a
dehumanization of the revolutionary subject without obvious limits
(drawing upon sources from Samuel Butler to Antonin Artaud). If this
were the vector pursued, it would — surely — be vividly evident?
Assuming, then, that #Accelerate backs into a more recognizable
Marxian framework, how is this theoretical structure to be
understood? The decisive question internal to the (serious) Marxist
tradition concerns the Transformation Problem, since it is only if this
is considered soluble that anything like a continuity of classical
Marxism (or credible ‘Law of Value’) can be envisaged at all. It is
worth recalling that comprehensive critics of Marx — those who find
nothing of positive significance to be salvageable from his work —
have, beginning with Böhm-Bawerk, taken the Transformation
452
Problem as the completion of Marx’s reductio ad absurdum of the

Labor Theory of Value (as inherited from Smith and Ricardo), seeing
the rigorous economic meaning of the Marxian system as entirely
exhausted in this demonstration. To remain a Marxist in anything
other than an absurd sense depends upon some other path having
been taken, but which one? #Accelerate offers no obvious
indications. (The literature on this is vast, so it would be useful to
know where to focus.)
Without a resolution of the Transformation Problem — and even
a well-positioned sticking plaster would do provisionally — there can
be no consistent concept of exploitation, or even a theoretically
significant sense of labor time. This is especially relevant because it
plays such a crucial role in Antonio Negri’s response to #Accelerate,
which picks up on a tantalizing remark in the manifesto itself:
All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to

why it was that the world’s leading economist of the post-war
era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably pro-
gressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In The
Economic Prospects for Our Grandchildren (written in 1930),
Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would
have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has in-
stead occurred is the progressive elimination of the work-life
distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of
453
Reignition
the emerging social factory.
Is Left Accelerationism promoting itself as the redeemer of Keynes’

empty promise? From the bare descriptiveness of this (vaguely
mournful) passage it is hard to know. What we can know, with
confidence, is that work time cannot be anything but an axial topic
within this entire discussion.
If the Law of Value is to be defended, value production is
measured in (labor) time. Marx’s transformation factor is designed
to conserve the equation between quantified — timed — work and
economic values, as expressed in prices. If this patch fails, the entire
analysis of Capital loses application to determinate social fact. There
would be no Marxian economics at all (a conclusion Negri and the
Autonomists seem willing to accept).
It is hard to see how a Left Accelerationism could be maintained
under these conditions. Historical time would no longer have any
calculable relation to labor commoditization, working life, or any
constructable proletarian class identity. The real time of (capitalistic)
modernity — onto which accelerationism latches — could no longer
be described as the time of work. At the limit, human work-forces
are relegated to “aphidian parasites of the machines”. Once the class
struggle over labor time is divorced from a fully-determining role in
the production of value, the proletariat is stripped of the potential
to incarnate history for-itself, consigning ‘Marxism’ over to an
454
articulation of marginal grievances, and ultimately to the heat death

of identity politics. (This, of course, is exactly the trend that has been
sociologically apparent.)
One final crude point for now. As a fundamental cybernetic
theory, accelerationism is bound to the identification of a socially
central, positive feedback loop, through which modernity is
propelled. It thus requires — at a minimum — twin quantitative
variables entangled in a relation of reciprocal stimulation. Industrial
capitalism, with its intrinsic ‘technonomic’ duality of cross-exciting
technical and commercial dynamics, makes the application of the
cybernetic diagram relatively non-problematic. With or without the
Law of Value, the accelerationist schema cannot but interlock tightly
with the most prominent contours of modernity.
If not time-denominated (‘living’ and ‘dead’) labor, however, what
is the variable being cumulated? That’s the question to carry
forwards. The question for now: if labor is the cumulative factor in
the accelerationist analysis, how can a practical critique of labor time
be anything other than a politics of deceleration?
(Urban Future‘s initial annotated #Accelerate walk-through is
here: 1, 2, 3.)
ADDED: Sometimes I worry that Wikipedia might be taking the
spirit of strict neutrality to extremes (from the link already given):
“Once again, the bourgeois theorists manage to impress us with their
erudition while completely sidestepping the substance of the
455
Reignition
debate.”
March 5, 2014
On #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#2a)
Assume — at least provisionally — that Accelerationism is serious.
While abstracted from physics, the concept of acceleration is not
reduced to mere rhetoric (or metaphor), even if it is no longer applied
to changes in the velocity of objects in space. It refers strictly to
change of the first derivative (or higher) in a measurable quantity
across time, formally compliant with the differential calculus. The
rate of acceleration — or system performance — can be estimated
in principle, even if practical considerations complicate this task. In
other words, the object of accelerationist attention (and promotion)
has demonstrable reality.
The intellectual history of industrial capitalism advances two
streams of (quantitative) information, both of great apparent
relevance. On its technical side, it produces an apparatus of rigorous
measurement directed to the behavior of complex physical systems,
or machines — temperature differences, free energy,
thermodynamic efficiency, entropy dissipation, complexity,
information, and (emergently) intelligence. On its commercial side
it establishes institutions of accountancy and econometrics,
456
denominated in currency units, and applied to economic production,

income, taxes, trade flows, credit, asset values, and increasingly
exotic financial instruments. While an argument could be made that
the confluence of these two streams is implicit within — and even
essential to — the nature (or culture) of capitalism, with intelligence-
price discovery as its immanent epistemological directive, no such
results are readily or publicly available. There might even be reasons
for suspecting that the raw question how much is intelligence worth?
cannot be overtly articulated within any imaginable social order. It is,
in any case, a distraction at this stage.
Despite remarkable progress in the technical study of ever-larger
complex objects, and the obvious relevance of this work to
accelerationist concerns, it is the socio-economical rather than the
techno-mechanical mode of quantification that is advantaged in the
analysis of very large scale systems, especially in regards to those
entities — up to the level of the global economy — which have
monetized their own processes, and thus quantified themselves
prior to their theoretical objectification. The enormous theoretical
relief provided in this way is such that even the most severe
conceptual difficulties (with which we shall soon collide) are unable
entirely to annul it. (Information sciences offer comparable relief on
the technical side, but it is restricted solely to the domain of artificial
digital machines.)
The compelling attraction of a comprehensive, rigorous, non-
457
Reignition
anthropomorphic apprehension of terrestrial modernity as a

complex system, machine, or emergent individual, to be described
through its thermodynamic, dissipative, or intelligenic properties, is
such that this aspiration is unlikely to be wholly excised from the
accelerationist intellectual program (as it exists, and as it will
necessarily exist due to systemically-generated modernist impulses).
Despite this, it is probably uncontroversial to expect the
consolidation of accelerationist theory to initially take shape
through reference to cultural resources of economic description,
analysis, explanation, and practical proposition. The first
intellectually credible version of accelerationism cannot realistically
be anything other than a global economic theory of modernity.
“A global theory of modernity? You mean, like Marxism?” Yes, in a
way, very much like Marxism. The tracks are already set in a direction
that allows only two destinations: Accelerationism can either be
Marxism, or its substitute — an upgrade or a competitor.
The tracks lead across the same country in either case, at least
initially. It is worth sketching out some shared presuppositions, to be
inherited by whatever Accelerationism becomes.
(1) The tendential globality of Capitalism is a signature of its
virtual singularity (as a real individual) and not merely an effect of
generalization across space. ‘Terrestrial Capitalism’ (or whatever
else we might want to call it) is the proper name of a thing, rather
than a generic label. It is an occurrence, or machine, before it is any
458
kind of social type.

(2) Capitalism is at least integral to actual modernity, if not (in its
own actuality) unambiguously coincident with it. A completed theory
of capitalism — however hypothetical this idea has to be — would
explain modernity, across all its distinctive features, including the
genesis and destiny of (modern) anti-capitalism.
(3) Capitalism is essentially cumulative. It is not something to
which growth can be attributed as an extrinsic property. Even
occasions of capitalist shrinkage or contraction are restricted to
specific dimensions, and intelligible only through an enveloping
expansionary trend.
(4) The self-propelling growth that — when adequately
understood — defines capitalism is necessarily expressed as an
economic index. An economic meta-theory capable of decrypting
this index, through some set of consistent mathematical
transformations of the system’s own price information, is able to
access data sufficient to support the body of empirical conclusions
and projections that make up the accelerationist description of
capitalism. This theory, therefore, will be denominated in units of
economic value strictly isomorphic with those composing the
planetary aggregate of effectively monetizable wealth (whose
extreme speculative virtuality describes the horizon of economic-
theoretical possibility).
It is notable that at some stage in point (4), this enumeration of
459
Reignition
shared presuppositions switches over into something else.

[So this might be a good moment for a break]
March 6, 2014
On #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#2b
(#2b))
“If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration it is
capitalism,” says #Accelerate, unobjectionably. “The essential
metabolism of capitalism demands economic growth, with
competition between individual capitalist entities setting in motion
increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve
competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social
dislocation.”
As previously noted, of the trends referenced here “economic
growth” is easily the most accessible (due to its commercial self-
quantification). The technoscientific apprehension of technoscience,
while already embryonic at the beginning of the modern epoch, is
still some distance from mathematical self-comprehension as a
natural event. Its quantification, therefore, poses far more
challenging problems, leaving even very basic questions about its
trend-lines open to significant controversy. (Self-quantification of
development trends in the electronics and biotech sectors merit
focused attention at a later stage.) Any attempt to provide a precise
460
and coherent measurement of “social dislocation” is likely to

confront even more formidable obstacles.
Capitalism present itself as the exemplary accelerative mega-
object because it is self-propelling and (cross-excitedly) self-
abstracting. In both its technical and commercial aspects, it tends
towards general-purpose potentials that facilitate resource re-
allocations (and thus efficient quantifications). Productive capability
is plasticized, becoming increasingly responsive to shifting market
opportunities, while wealth is fluidized, permitting its rapid
speculative mobilization. The same self-reinforcing process that
liquidates traditional social forms releases modernizing capital as
volatile abstract quantity, flexibly poised between technical
applications, and inclined intrinsically towards a ‘decoded’ or
economistic apprehension.
Under capital guidance, the modernization of wealth tends to the
realization of abstract productive potential, which is of course to say:
it tends towards capital itself, in the circuit of self-propulsion that
determines it as a genetic (or even teleological) hyper-substance. At
this point a complex theoretical fork is reached, from which paths
lead in a number of Marxian and decidedly anti-Marxian directions.
The primary question is whether the abstract body of capital is
susceptible to a consistent mathematical conversion conforming to
the Law of Value, which interprets it as a reification of organically
composed (variable and fixed, or ‘living’ and ‘dead’) labor power. Can
461
Reignition
the accelerative thing be practically recognized as the alienated

collective capability of a future classless humanity?
#Accelerate considers this question to have been satisfactorily
resolved in advance, and answered in the affirmative. Since it
provides no supporting references in support of this stance, it has to
be considered a left-identitarian document. Only those who affirm
the prior closure of its fundamental questions are able to access it at
the level of its own rhetoric. It assumes ideological solidarity as an
extrinsic, and unmarked, preliminary.
To intrude, nevertheless, from an open problem of capitalist
ontology, is to navigate chaos. The relevant passages are found in
the second part of the manifesto, which consists of seven numbered
paragraphs. Whatever we are told about the accelerative thing has
to be extracted from these … or almost everything.
It is remarkable that the first use of ‘accelerate’ in the manifesto
is both critical, and almost dismissively casual. In occurs in the third
paragraph of the introduction, where it summarizes a set of “ever-
accelerating catastrophes”:
… breakdown of the planetary climatic system [which “threatens
the continued existence of the present global human population”] …
Terminal resource depletion, especially in water and energy reserves
[raising “the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing economic
paradigms, and new hot and cold wars”] … continued financial crisis
[which] has led governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral
462
policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass

unemployment, and stagnating wages. [And] Increasing automation
in production processes including ‘intellectual labour’ [which] is
evidence of the secular crisis of capitalism, soon to render it
incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the
former middle classes of the global north.
This, quite clearly, is their lurid introductory portrait of the
accelerative thing, as it is in-itself, converging upon a terminal
historical singularity, or comprehensive ecological, economic, and
technological over-performance crisis. It is both the thing
#Accelerate wants to talk about, and the thing it decides explicitly
not to talk about — introduced as theatrical stage setting, or a
reminder of something before and outside the discussion, which can
subsequently be assumed. The rhetorical function is completely
unambiguous: this list serves as an enumeration of that which need
not be discussed further. It is unfortunate therefore, to say the least,
that this seems to be the closest approximation within #Accelerate
to the real object of accelerationist attention, “gather[ing] force and
speed [as] politics withers and retreats” until “the future” we were
promised is “cancelled” (if only through a rectifiable failure of “the
political imaginary”). The enemy is an accelerative thing, but
#Accelerate will be discussing something else.
Before capitalism drops away entirely into the hazy background
of implicit narrative, it is worth taking a brief digression into “the
463
Reignition
political imaginary” and its suggestion. If there is a single formula

that crystallizes the left appropriation of accelerationism as sheer
cognitive collapse it is Frederic Jameson’s claim — obsessively
repeated across the Left Web — that It is now easier to imagine the
end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. To grasp the
profound mindlessness of this pronouncement it is only necessary
to return to the thought of real abstraction, through which the
virtualization realized by capitalism is distinguished from any
determination of abstraction as a logical property of intellectual
representation. Within capitalist futures markets, the non-actual has
effective currency. It is not an “imaginary” but an integral part of the
virtual body of capital, an operationalized realization of the future.
It is scarcely imaginable that the Left is willing to follow the path
it has set out upon here, therefore, unless through thoughtlessness
of simply staggering proportions, since it necessarily leads to the
conclusion: while capital has an increasingly densely-realized future,
its leftist enemies have only a manifestly pretend one.
Because #Accelerate Section Two is a tightly-tangled thicket of
conceptual outrages, it is worth recalling once again its first two
sentences, which are exceptional (in this context) for their
soundness:
If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration

it is capitalism. The essential metabolism of capitalism
464
demands economic growth, with competition between

individual capitalist entities setting in motion increasing
technological developments in an attempt to achieve
competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social
dislocation.
The primary object of Accelerationism is economic growth, as

demonstrated capitalistically, in a process inextricably bound to
competition-driven technological development, and also to social
disorganization. If #Accelerate concluded here, there would be no
case to be made against it. Unfortunately it continues through a
string of such radically disordered sentences that no elegant pursuit
of its argument is possible. Instead, it demands a piecemeal series of
corrections, objections, and re-animations of obscured, half-buried,
and arbitrarily suppressed problems.
The descent begins immediately: “In its neoliberal form, its ideo-
logical self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative
destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social
innovations.”
Why is the term ‘creative destruction’ (coined by Joseph
Schumpeter in 1942) being associated with ‘neoliberalism‘ here?
Schumpeter considered it applicable to capitalism in general, with
abundant reason, and #Accelerate articulates no objection to this
standard usage. If ‘neoliberalism’ is the ideology of creative
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destruction, it is the ideology of capitalism in general.

In the introduction we were told that “since 1979” neoliberalism
has been “the hegemonic global political ideology … found in some
variant throughout the leading economic powers.” It is characterized,
apparently, by “structural adjustments … most significantly in the
form of encouraging new and aggressive incursions by the private
sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and
services.” This, too, sounds like simple capitalism (as does “Landian
neoliberalism”). The emptiness of the term only re-echoes
sonorously with each succeeding use. ‘Neoliberalism’ is criticized
because it is nothing other than capitalism (post-1979), and it is
criticized for no other reason. In #Accelerate, if not elsewhere, it
has no ideological content distinguishable from classical liberalism,
making it a perfectly useless word. The opacity serves only to
smuggle through two preposterous suggestions:
(1) The cacophony of leftist critics of ‘neoliberalism’ share some
coherent core of economic and political analysis.
(2) Classical liberal socio-economic ideas enjoy an essentially
unperturbed hegemony over the present world order. (Didn’t you
know that Keynes was dead, and Libertarians rule the earth?)
(So why not start calling today’s fundamentalist Marxists ‘neo-
collectivists’? while implying that Stalinist industrial central-planning
is the world’s dominant economic arrangement? — Because it would
be patently ridiculous and senselessly annoying, but actually no
466
more so than the ‘neoliberal’ alternative.)

This ‘neoliberal’ tic, while infuriating in its smug idiocy, is actually
so vacuous that it matters little to the #Accelerate argument. Its
effect is merely to serve as a sleight of hand, presenting a cartoon
opponent to distract from the absence of concentrated attention
upon the target of realistic analysis and criticism: the accelerative
thing. The second theoretical diversion to appear is scarcely less
evasive, which is to slide off the core ontological problem into a
‘conceptual clarification’ of astounding sloppiness.
We know from the children’s dictionary that acceleration is a
change in speed over time, which does not prevent #Accelerate
claiming (without any obvious evidence):
The philosopher Nick Land captured this [capital dynamic or

neoliberal ideology?] most acutely, with a myopic yet hypnot-
ising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global
transition towards unparalleled technological singularity. …
Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We
may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of
capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We ex-
perience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple
brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also
navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a
universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceler-
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Reignition
ation which we hold as essential.
(1) Speed is not acceleration.

(2) Approaching singularity is marked by acceleration, not constant
velocity.
(3) Who has ever spoken about “moving fast” in this context? It lacks
even the dignity of a straw-man. What does ‘fast’ mean? Acceleration
need not even be ‘fast’ (only ‘getting faster’).
(4) The appeal to something beyond “a strictly defined set of capit-
alist parameters” is mere hand-waving. Economic functionality is a
confining ‘parameter’ (for acceleration)? There is clearly an attempt
at some kind of transcendental argument here, marked by the appeal
to “capitalist parameters that themselves never waver.” ‘Parameter’
itself wavers between a logical usage and an empirical one, one
conceptually defining, and the other materially constraining. If
#Accelerate thinks it can produce a meaningful concept of
acceleration without parameters, it would be a thrilling thing to see
(time, terrestrial mass, physical laws, biogeological inheritance … are
all ‘parameters’). Capitalist ‘parameters’ (undefined) are for some
reason to be accepted as especially constraining, however.
Argument? Of course not, this is an article of undisputed faith.
(5) If anyone knows what “the increasing speed of a local horizon”
means, please let me know. At least it is some kind of “increasing
speed” though, i.e. an acceleration. Is this a sign that #Accelerate
468
thinks the difference between speed and acceleration is too trivial

to acknowledge, so that its discussion of acceleration is actually not
about acceleration at, but about something much deeper and ‘post-
parametric’? Perhaps, because …
(6) Beyond the “simple brain-dead onrush” (something is certainly
‘brain-dead’) …
(7) There is “an acceleration which is also navigational, an experi-
mental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.”
… and this is somehow connected to, measurable as, or explained in
terms of some rigorously determinable process of acceleration (even
roughly) how?
(8) Regardless: “It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as
essential.”
This sort of thing is the straightforward, radical destruction of
intelligence. We began with a defined concept (‘acceleration’) and a
topic of investigation or critique (the accelerative thing). Now, less
than halfway through #Accelerate, we have neither. Instead, we are
left with some kind of super-parametric trans-horizonal imaginary
“mode of acceleration” that has been deliberately destituted of both
sense and reference. The only theoretical achievement has been to
crudely chisel this conceptually and ontologically ineffable political
idea away from the only historically-evidenced process of
accelerating navigation, experiment, and discovery known to human
history, in order to cast it into a mystically-inspiring beyond.
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Reignition
Beginning with a cybernetically-intelligible self-propelling

sociotechnical machine, we end with nothing but the adamant
declaration that whatever ‘it’ (historical acceleration) is, it is not this,
or anything we can understand, despite the fact that what we know
of ‘it’ is entirely extracted from the cumulative reality being
abandoned.
As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent
of true acceleration.
On the contrary. The only “agent of true acceleration” recognized
by Marx is the revolutionary bourgeoisie — his humanistic proxy for
the agency of capital. The proletariat accelerates nothing, except in
its function as labor power under capital imperatives. It inherits a
completed, accelerative pre-history, at the point of its own
revolutionary auto-dissolution into a universal humanity.
Unlike #Accelerate, Marx labored under no illusion that the
accelerative thing was capital, whose mechanism he devoted himself
to understanding, to the near-perfect exclusion of all other topics.
In turning back to Marx’s understanding of this thing [next week],
we partially withdraw from the chaotic errors of current Left
Accelerationism, while perhaps remaining close enough to irritate it.
March 7, 2014
470
On #Acceler
#Accelerate
ate (#2c)
A ((quick)
quick) digression on speed
Acceleration, as Accelerationism employs it, is a concept
abstracted from physics. In this philosophical (and socio-historical)
sense, it preserves its mathematical definition (consolidated by the
differential calculus) as higher derivatives of speed, with continued
reference to time (change in the rate of change), but with re-
application from passage through space to the growth of a
determinable variable. The theoretical integrity of accelerationism,
therefore, rests upon a rigorous abstraction from and of space, in
which the dimension of change — as graphed against time — is
mapped onto an alternative, quantifiable object. The implicit
complicity of this ‘object’ with the process of abstraction itself will
ultimately translate into explicit theoretical complications.
The flight into abstraction is theoretically snarled by reflexive
tangles. Comparable difficulties arise on the side of the flight ‘out’
of space, primarily because the coincidence of intelligibility and
spatiality tends rather to thicken than dissolve with each further
increment of abstraction, propelling intelligence into phase-spaces,
probability-spaces, Cyberspace, and deterritorialization. Space is
released from its ‘original’ concreteness into the purity of the
intuitive medium, while acquiring active intelligibility as display
space, within which concepts become sensible. There is no more
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Reignition
archaic, or more contemporary, illustration than the intuition of time

through space, as demonstrated by the entire history of horology,
the time-line, time dimensionalization, and graphed dynamics. Space
sticks to measure on its path into abstraction, and even leads it there.
The insistence of space is also demonstrated by a tendency for
any abstraction of acceleration to undergo reversion, as its index
of change is re-attached to differentiations of (physical) speed. In
the context of the Great Stagnation debate — the most prominent
hiatus within the recent history of accelerationist thinking — a highly
abstracted notion of (negative) technonomic acceleration is restored
to measure in exactly this way.
In an interview with Francis Fukuyama, Peter Thiel demonstrates
the process:
… you have … two different blind spots on the Left and Right,
but I’ve been more interested in their common blind spot,
which we’re less likely to discuss as a society: technological
deceleration and the question of whether we’re still living in
a technologically advancing society at all. I believe that the
late 1960s was not only a time when government stopped
working well and various aspects of our social contract began
to fray, but also when scientific and technological progress
began to advance much more slowly. Of course, the computer
age, with the internet and web 2.0 developments of the past
472
15 years, is an exception. Perhaps so is finance, which has

seen a lot of innovation over the same period (too much
innovation, some would argue).
There has been a tremendous slowdown everywhere else,
however. Look at transportation, for example: Literally, we
haven’t been moving any faster.
In an earlier article, published in National Review, Thiel refers

explictly to a “measurement problem” — at once theoretical and
political — obstructing reliable estimates of techno-scientific
development. While important to acknowledge, he advises, it should
not “stop our inquiry into modernity before it has even begun”:
When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the

1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in
many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-
acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-
long acceleration of travel speeds — from ever-faster sailing
ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of
ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars
and airplanes in the 20th century — reversed with the
decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of
the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/
11 airport-security systems. Today’s advocates of space jets,
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Reignition
lunar vacations, and the manned exploration of the solar

system appear to hail from another planet. A faded 1964
Popular Science cover story — “Who’ll Fly You at 2,000
m.p.h.?” — barely recalls the dreams of a bygone age.
The official explanation for the slowdown in travel centers
on the high cost of fuel, which points to the much larger
failure in energy innovation. …
Notably, in an assessment of the anomalous rapidity of computer

innovation, he re-poses the “measurement problem” in terms
familiar (much more recently) from #Accelerate: “how does one
measure the difference between progress and mere change? How
much is there of each?” His procedure then anticipates the one
recommended throughout this series:
Let us now try to tackle this very thorny measurement

problem from a very different angle. If meaningful scientific
and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably
would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may
be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic
gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been
limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and
technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that
economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or
474
technological progress, economic numbers will contain

indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.
Theoretical necessity drives us from physical space into economic

abstraction. It is only realistic, however, to be prepared for the ways
in which — according to deep and obscure necessities — this path
will be curved by the insistent return of space. Of all those things
with over-confidence in their own powers of acceleration, or smooth
attainment of escape velocity, philosophical abstraction is by no
means the least susceptible to counter-productive — and delusive —
haste.
March 11, 2014
The LLeft
eft T
Turn
urn
Left Accelerationism undergoes further consolidation, assisted by
two high-quality posts, from Fractal Ontology and Deontologistics.
Since Left-framing is a transcendental condition of publicization
in the present world order, UF is encouraged to see it being done
well. The implications of this development are inextricable from the
core controversy at issue: Can acceleration be extracted from its
capitalist matrix for socialist redeployment? Left Accelerationists,
confident that this is possible, are setting out to demonstrate it. Right
475
Reignition
Accelerationists, no less confident of its impossibility, have no

incentive to obstruct them.
If capital can be exceeded, it deserves to be (by Natural Law). If it
cannot, strenuous efforts to exceed it produce tangled elaborations
of its potencies. Complexity, competition, pressure, and
experimentation are what accelerationism is for.
July 17, 2014
Accelero-schism
Working on a re-ignition of the On #Accelerate series (which is still
awaiting #3) has involved a re-reading of Pete Wolfendale’s recent
defense of Left Accelerationism (against Malcolm Harris’ critique).
As previously noted (briefly), it’s good.
The strength of Wolfendale’s case against Harris is not a topic this
blog can credibly pronounce upon, since it rests upon the rhetorical
efficiency of socialist political mobilization, and thus a very peculiar
anthopological territory (though an entertaining one). Socialist
reason that does not pass into or through political action is exposed
as unreason by history. The ‘force’ of Wolfendale’s case, in this
respect, is therefore inextricable from the organizational dynamics
of his ideological tribe. (It is not a constituency UF pretends to court.)
The article merits appreciation here due to the accuracy with
476
which it depicts the schism between Left and Right Accelerationist

currents. He asks: “… what precisely should be accelerated?” The
imperative form of this question is the signature of its Left
orientation, but in every other respect it is impressively, and
neutrally, on target. He continues:
Well, as the difference between left and right accelerationism
shows, there’s a good deal of disagreement about this. […] Left-
accelerationism begins from the premise that the deterritorialising
force is not capitalism itself, but that the transition from feudalism
to capitalism was the expression of an emancipatory drive that
capitalism’s reterritorialising dynamics has systematically (but never
wholly) suppressed. The various genealogical indices within the
[Accelerationist] reader present a number of ways of thinking about
the nature of this drive (e.g., Marx’s Prometheanism, Federov’s
cosmism, Veblen’s machine-process, etc.), and the various original
contributions present ways of reconceiving and appropriating these
(e.g., Srnicek & Williams’ project of collective self-mastery,
Singleton’s generalised escapology, Negarestani’s inhumanism, etc.).
The fissure is thus perfectly clear. Left Accelerationism rests
fundamentally upon the contention that the modern social order
includes an accelerative motor distinguishable from the capitalist
mechanism. In the best case (philosophically speaking) intellectual
proceedings will therefore lead to a clinical analysis and delimitation
of capital circuitry, in order to describe, alongside it, a quite other
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Reignition
historical dynamo, to which the capital accumulation process relates

as a constriction. This is, as far as I am aware, work that remains to be
completed (whether from Left or Right). Accelerationism in general
requires a coherent capital theory, with which acceleration is to be
identified, or differentiated. Appropriately enough, the task begins
to look like a race.
July 21, 2014
Twitter cuts (#12)

OK, it’s verging on the obsessional to drag Jehu back so quickly, but
these tweets are quite simply the most important formulations of
rigorous Left Accelerationism to date.
@nervemeter Labor theory is correct and it identifies the

central contradiction of capital. @XLR8AN @deontologistics
— Jehu (@Damn_Jehu) August 21, 2014
@nervemeter That contradiction is labor itself — it is the

thing to be abolished and the measure of social wealth
@XLR8AN @deontologistics
@nervemeter You have to raise the antagonism between
478
these two aspects of the contradiction. @XLR8AN

@deontologistics
@nervemeter And you can only do this by throwing your

weight in the direction of abolition. @XLR8AN
@deontologistics
@nervemeter Capital is a moving contradiction that tries to

abolish labor and keep it at the same time. @XLR8AN
@deontologistics
@nervemeter Yes. ? progressively abolishing socially

necessary labor is the basis for profit. @XLR8AN
@deontologistics
@nervemeter Capital cannot avoid this without ceasing to be

capital. @XLR8AN @deontologistics
@nervemeter That is the secret of the transformation

problem. @XLR8AN @deontologistics
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Reignition
@nervemeter Anacceleration worthy of name would take

acceleration of the abolition of labor as its starting point.
@XLR8AN @deontologistics
In the admittedly oddly-angled opinion of this blog, the final tweet

in this sequence is the most theoretically significant statement of
Left Accelerationist purpose since the 19th century. Attenuation of
socially necessary labor time has to be arithmetically integrated with
the concept of ‘acceleration’ for a seam of Marxian continuity to be
pursued.
My immediate response to Jehu’s intervention was, of course,
tweeted:
It's not that I really think Lef Accelerationism was sitting in

the faculty lounge, sipping Chardonnay, and engaging in
spirited dialectic .
— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) August 21, 2014
… over certain passages in the Grundrisse, when

@Damn_Jehu bursts in. Nervous looks all around. "Christ! He
really believes this stuff!"
— Urban Future (2.1) (@UF_blog) August 21, 2014
480
August 21, 2014
Twitter cuts (#41)

On the accelerationist dilemma:
So the left accelerationists seductively promise endless free

time and resources but will probably deliver automated
gulags.
— Dark Psy-Ops (@DIA_operative) March 23, 2015
Whereas the right accelerationists promise nothing but

expect biological beings to become obsolete. Tough choice…
— Dark Psy-Ops (@DIA_operative) March 23, 2015
Even speaking as an adversary, it’s worth pointing out that the

advantage of taking the Left Accelerationist path is, that way, you
still get Right Accelerationism for free. Head for spiritual redemption
through fully automated luxury communism and get devoured by
Omega-telic X-risk. Everyone wins.
March 24, 2015
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Reignition
Acceler
Accelerationism
ationism in One Country
Devastating:
The difference between the experimentalism of ‘folk politics’ and
the trial and error of Srnicek and Williams boils down to a question
of scale. The most biting elements of their critique of current radical
practices, such as direct democracy, is that they are difficult to ‘scale
up’ beyond local and parochial zones of action, and it is this limitation
which prevents the contemporary left from presenting a real threat
to capitalism. Surprisingly, then, InInvventing the F Future
uture implicitly
conjures a distinctly national politics, geared towards achieving
parliamentary dominance in North/Western democratic states.
Their legislative wish-list – investment in automation, the provision
of basic income, shortening the working week and so on – remain
tied to national politics in an era of ever-more global and mobile
capital. To be sure, the threat of capital upping sticks and investing
elsewhere at the mere mention of greater concessions to labour are
overstated, but without a global compact in which common labour
standards are adhered to around the world, the reality of a post-
work regime in one country would either be capital flight or the out-
sourcing of exploitation to poorer countries (in other words, further
exacerbating the current global division of labour). Not for nothing
are the authors forced to rely on a vague hope that the rest of the
world will take care of itself … (Emphasis in original.)
482
Capital interprets Left Accelerationism as damage and routes

around it.
November 9, 2015
Quotable (#122)
Nick Dyer Witheford (in conversation) on the variants of far Left
politics under advanced capitalism:
… it’s clear that capitalism is creating potentials – not just
technological, but organizational potentials – which could be
adapted in a transformed manner to create a very different type of
society. The evident example is the huge possibilities for freeing up
time by automation of certain types of work. For me, the problem
both with Paul [Mason]’s work, which I respect, and with the
accelerationists, is there is a failure to acknowledge that the passage
from the potential to the actualization of such communist
possibilities involves crossing what William Morris describes as a
“river of fire.” I don’t find in their work a great deal about that river
of fire. I think it would be reasonable to assume there would be a
period of massive and protracted social crisis that would attend the
emergence of these new forms. And as we know from historical
attempts in the 20th Century to cross that river of fire, a lot depends
on what happens during that passage. So there is, if one could put
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it that way, a certain automatism about the prediction of the

realization of a new order in both these schools, which we should be
very careful about.
(What automation wants — be definition — is more of itself.
There’s a name for that, and it isn’t ‘communism’.)
The abstract for this talk gives a sense of the diagnosis.
November 25, 2015
Twitter cuts (#104)
@matdryhurst I dislike this distinction – I would like to see a

unified #accelerate that jettisons the left/right binary
— Morgan Sutherland (@msutherl) March 19, 2016
@matdryhurst "l#a" seems unfortunately UK oriented, but

as a global zeitgeist it needs to hook up to SV ideology:
https://t.co/Q77vfnOcVr
@matdryhurst God knows why @n_srnck wants to take this

back to the socialist calculation debate – nobody's going to
484
win that argument

The embedded link is well-worth looking at. It’s what Left

Acceleration thinks a sane — or only moderately sociopathic — Right
would look like (I’m guessing), and what Right Accelerationism thinks
a non-retarded Left would look like (I’m sure).
March 20, 2016
Twitter cuts (#145)
lrt: uh yeah Obama just low key pitched communism to the

New Yorker pic.twitter.com/KcxnaDECni
— Melissa ? (@0xabad1dea) November 19, 2016
(Source.)
Good catch. He doesn’t exactly quote the MAP, but he gets
comically close.
So the world’s first Left Accelerationist regime was destroyed in a
frog-cataclysm. One for the history books.
November 19, 2016
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Reignition
BL
BLOCK
OCK 3 - BIT
BITCOIN
COIN AND
BL
BLOCK
OCKCHAIN
CHAIN
TECHNOL
TECHNOLOGY
OGY
486
BLOCK 3 - BITCOIN AND BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
CHAPTER ONE - BT
BTC
CFFA
ACETS
Bits and Pieces
P2P or not 2P
2P,, that is the question
As the US dollar reaches depths of debasement that would have

stretched the imagination of Caligula, people have been searching
for alternative candidates for a global reserve currency. The problem
is formidable. The Euro and Japanese Yen face comparable
calamities of their own (mixing debt crisis and demographic
collapse), the Chinese Yuan is non-convertible, and the IMF’s hybrid
Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) merely bundle together a group of
troubled fiat currencies under a technocratic acronym.
Precious metals enthusiasts have an obvious option, and one that
is already being spontaneously exercised. Yet whilst growing
numbers will no doubt cling to gold and silver as financial lifeboats,
their wider use as currency (as opposed to stores of value) is
obstructed by an intimidating range of technical and political
problems. They are not digitally transferable without complicated
mediating instruments, and they remain exposed to extreme political
487
Reignition
risk – financial crises have been regularly accompanied by seizures

and controls directed at private precious metals holdings and
transactions.
To overcome such problems, a currency would need to be
structurally immunized against the depredations of central bankers,
to share the deflationary bias of precious metals, and to participate
fully in the technical trend towards mathematical abstraction and
electronic communicability, whilst also enjoying strong
cryptographic protection against surveillance, expropriation, and
fraud. Astonishingly, such a currency seems already to exist. Its name
is ‘Bitcoin’.
The twin, interactive drivers of modernity – commerce and
technology – come together in Bitcoin with unprecedented fusional
intensity. This is a currency that is simultaneously an open source
computer program, entirely native to cyberspace, and a financial
innovation, conducting a real-time experiment that is at once social,
technical, and economic. Built on the foundations of public key
encryption (PKE), it creates a peer-to-peer open network – without
any controlling node or discretionary human management – to
sustain a radically decentralized monetary system.
Originally devised by Satoshi Nakamoto (whose outline paper can
be found here), Bitcoin disconnects trust from authority. In
particular, it is designed to overcome the problem of double
spending.
488
Because digital ‘goods’ can be replicated at near-zero cost, they

are economically defined as ‘non-rivalrous’. If you sell me a computer,
I now own it, and you do not. As with all rivalrous goods, ownership
implies exclusion. If you sell me a computer program, on the other
hand, there is no reason to assume that you have not kept a copy
for yourself, or that the ‘same’ program could not be sold to multiple
purchasers. Such non-rivalrous goods pose numerous intriguing
economic questions, but one thing is entirely clear: non-rivalrous
money is an impossibility. Without scarcity, or exclusive exchange,
the very idea of monetary quantity loses all sense, as does monetary
value, spending and investment, and consumer choice.
The Bitcoin algorithm makes a digital currency rivalrous, and thus
effective as money, without recourse to any administrative authority.
It does so by initiating an automatic or spontaneous ecology, in which
computers on the network authenticate Bitcoin exchanges as a side-
effect of ‘mining’ for new coins. Nodes earn new coins, at a
diminishing rate, by solving a difficult digital puzzle – accessible only
to a brute force, computationally-intensive approach – and thus
exhibiting proof-of-work. This test screens the system from
malicious interventions, by establishing a practically insurmountable
barrier to any user who seeks to falsify the record of exchanges.
Competent discussions can be found here, here, and (most diversely)
here.
This problem, and solution, is very far from arbitrary. It is precisely
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Reignition
because existing fiat currencies have taken on disturbingly non-

rivalrous characteristics that alarm about currency debasement has
reached such a pitch of exasperation. When a central bank, in the
course of running a typically loose monetary policy, can simply speed
up the printing presses or (still worse) the electronic equivalent, the
integrity of the money supply is devastated at the root. Bitcoin
rigorously extirpates such ruinous discretion from its system, by
instantiating a theory of sound money as a precisely and publicly
defined electronic experiment.
Unsurprisingly, the Bitcoin monetary aggregate is modeled on
precious metal, generated by miners from a finite global reserve,
with rising extraction costs. The reward for coin mining falls over
time at a logarithmic (Zenonian) rate, towards a limit of fractionally
under 21,000,000 BTC. Each Bitcoin can be subdivided to eight
decimal places, to a total of over two quadrillion
(2,100,000,000,000,000) fragments, equivalent to 210,000 Bitcoin
‘quanta’ for each of the 10 billion people making up the earth’s
anticipated climax human population. A Bitcoin quantum
(0.00000001 BTC) is named a ‘Satoshi’ (after Satoshi Nakamoto),
although amendment to the system allowing for further sub-division
at some future stage is not foreclosed. (For the total size of the
Bitcoin economy look here.)
Bitcoin is programmed for deflation (of a sort). This is a source
of delight to hard money types, and of outrage to those in the loose
490
money (inflationary) camp. As an experiment, the great merit of

Bitcoin is to raise this antagonism beyond the level of reciprocal
polemics, to that of potential historical evidence — and real choice.
Austrolibertarians have long claimed that free money systems are
biased to deflation, and that central banking encourages inflation as
a surreptitious mechanism of economic expropriation, to ultimately
disastrous effect. Keynesians, in contrast, deplore deflation as an
economic disease that suppresses productive investment and
employment. Empirical testing could soon be possible.
Numerous other questions, theoretical and practical, present
themselves. At the practical level, such questions work themselves
out through speculative volatility, institutional adaptations, and
technical challenges. Since the entire Bitcoin economy remains very
small, relatively modest shifts in economic behavior yield wild swings
in BTC value, including bubble-like surges, precipitous collapses,
incontinent hype, and extravagant accusations. Despite the
resilience of the core algorithm, the peripheral institutions
supporting the Bitcoin economy remain vulnerable to theft, fraud,
and malicious interventions. As with any revolutionary experiment,
the developmental trajectory of Bitcoin is likely to be tumultuous
and highly unpredictable.
The theoretical questions can be entertained more calmly. The
most important of these concern the essential nature of money, and
its future. Does Bitcoin successfully simulate the significant features
491
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of precious metals, such that their substance can be discarded from

the monetary equation as irrelevant dross? How powerful are the
forces leading to monetary convergence? Will first-mover advantage
‘lock-in’ Bitcoin at the expense of later alternatives? Or will multiple
money systems – perhaps ever more heterogeneous ones – continue
to co-exist? Is Bitcoin merely one stage in an open-ended sequence
of innovative money systems, or does it capture the essential
features of money quite definitively (leaving room only for
incremental improvements, or tinkering)?
Supporters of the monetary status quo might insist on a further,
more derisive line of questioning: is Bitcoin a dead end, an
irrelevance, or a deluding libertarian cipherpunk fantasy, to be
judged eventually as something akin to a hoax? Which is to note that,
ultimately, the largest questions will be political, and the most heated
discussions already are.
Can governments afford to tolerate unmanaged, autonomous
currencies? We’ll see.
June 23, 2011
The Internet of Mone

Moneyy
In an article that might be the most important contribution to the
understanding of Bitcoin since its launch, Eli Dourado writes:
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[Bitcoin] is a currency, of sorts. You can spend it on things,

especially drugs and gambling and getting around capital controls.
Krugman and other economists have analyzed Bitcoin in these
terms, as a substitute for dollars. This is rather like regarding the
Internet as a substitute for, and not a quantum leap beyond, previous
communication technologies. It is true that Bitcoin can substitute
for other currencies, but as with the Internet, the abstraction of a
permissionless application layer means that it is much more than a
substitute: it is like a transport layer for finance.
Every Bitcoin transaction is defined in part by a bit of code, called
a script, written in a programming language called Script. The script
in one transaction defines how the next user can access the coins. In
a conventional transaction, the script specifies the hash of the public
key that is needed to spend the coins next, and demands a signature
from the corresponding private key.
Script is not limited, however, to these conventional transactions
that merely transfer coins from one person’s control to another’s. It
can evaluate statements, execute conditionally, do math, and move
bits around. It is not a Turing-complete programming language (there
is no looping), because that would be a security risk; we do not want
viruses to spread via Bitcoin’s blockchain, nor do we want Bitcoin
transactions to run indefinitely or, if we ever figure out AI, become
self-aware. Despite the lack of loops in Script, it can be used to
construct some very interesting scripts. …
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Sometimes ratchets work right.

ADDED: In the comments thread to the article, Eli Dourado
suggests: “It’s … possible that democracies won’t respond effectively
against Bitcoin because they don’t respond effectively to much of
anything.”
January 10, 2014
Monetary Reality
Kevin D Williamson writes one of the best pieces yet on Bitcoin:
To argue that bitcoins are not “real money” because they have no
central-bank regulation or central issuer is like arguing that a prepaid
disposable cell phone is not a “real phone” because its number
doesn’t appear in the directory and you don’t get a bill. That’s the
point, or at least part of the point.
I am skeptical of the Bitcoin model, but it has in no small part
been a victim of its own popularity, with speculative investments in
bitcoins overwhelming their use in commercial transactions. But this
phenomenon is not unknown among traditional currencies. Consider
the lengths to which the Swiss have had to go in recent years to
stabilize the value of the franc as euros (and, to a lesser extent,
dollars) bounced about.
But that misses the broader point in a couple of ways. The first
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is that bitcoins and other private currencies are intended as

replacements for greenbacks in approximately the same way that
the Internet was intended to be a replacement for the printing press:
They may do that, sure, but they will have other uses as well.
Wresting control of currencies away from politicians is the only way
to let money evolve. Twenty years ago, you didn’t know that you’d
want to take photos with your telephone or use it as a boarding pass
at the airport. Now you do. Nobody planned that. Nobody knows
what “real money” is going to mean in twenty years.
As for price instability, that is of course a fundamental issue, and …
the fact that most of the world’s governments have made counterfeit
currency (which is what fiat money is) legal tender complicates the
environment. … A financial asset may decline in value; a U.S. dollar is
practically guaranteed to, if history is any guide. Very wealthy people
and institutions already have access to de facto private money in
the form of various financial instruments; private currencies promise
to make similar benefits available to general consumers — and,
critically, to move that market beyond the reach of central bankers
and regulators, and probably tax-collectors, too, in the long run.
We can probably expect a robust, competitive market in private
currencies to develop, and Bitcoin may or may not be a part of the
long-term picture. It may turn out to be the Packard of private
currencies. We’ll know the market has arrived when people have as
many choices of currency provider as they do of cell-phone provider.
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And that will be a critical moment in the shifting balance of power

between politics and markets, another way for us to stop asking
permission to engage in commerce.
This is in part why I object to … the Wall Street JournalJournal’s
characterization of the natural theater for bitcoin use as “the black
market.” A better phrase for “the black market” is “the market.”
(I confess to being quite awestruck by the amount of incisive
analysis packed into these few short paragraphs.)
March 4, 2014
Distributors
It’s time for another (quick) Umlaut rave. There’s no getting around
it after reading this, then following the back-link to this, and being
reminded somehow that this comparatively obscure online
magazine has somehow rounded up two of the half-dozen or less
people in the world who really get what Bitcoin is going to do to this
planet. (I’d say “two-and-a-half” — but with no disrespect to Adam
Gurri, his soul just isn’t in it, which is to say: terminally distributed.)
After reading this stuff, it’s easy to think that the only meaningful
role for anything else on the right is to run interference while
‘Bitcoin’ (i.e. a-centric digital crypto-commerce) consummates the
destiny of capitalism. The intelligence gulf between the emerging
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Bitcoin machinery and legacy political controversy now yawns so

abysmally that inherited conceptions of ‘activism’ have become low
comedy. Poke at Bitcoin with a political stick and it slithers sideways
while turning more feral — the ‘instinct’ for that is already locked in.
The confused idiots who are trying to manage human societies today
will almost certainly make it into a monster. Since I don’t like them
very much, it doesn’t upset me to see it stealthing into the shadows,
with venomous claws emerging. It will be darkly amusing to see it
coming at them out of Hell.
April 8, 2014
Bitcoin Back
Backend
end
A short photo-heavy story by ‘Bitsmith’ explores the engine-room
behind digital cryptocurrency, where Chinese ‘miners’ run banks of
computers to fetch new monetary units out of mathematical
abstraction. The incentives for the mining operation are
straightforward, and economically indistinguishable from those
driving mineral mining operations. Due to the genius of the Bitcoin
design, this massive computational effort serves, automatically, to
secure the integrity of the system against subversion. What offers
opportunities for extractive wild-catting from the entrepreneurial
side, is a decentralized trust mechanism from that of the currency
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exchange network.
Located in a re-purposed industrial space, the mining operation’s
2,500 machines perform a total 600 trillion operations per second,
consuming RMB 400,000 of electricity per month. There’s an
attached audio file with the story, so you can listen in on the process.
It’s not pretty, but it sounds unmistakably serious.
The tone of Bitsmith’s prose has been peeled straight off the
cryptocurrency frontier, which makes it doubly informative. This is
the object and the spirit of capitalist perception in the early 21st
century:
Getting the opportunity to visit this mining operation was very
eye-opening for me. Walking around the warehouse floor, I was
struck with a feeling of awe that THIS is what keeps bitcoin alive.
That even if someone wanted to bring down bitcoin, they’d have to
outdo these guys and the dozens of other operations like this around
the world. The decentralized nature of it all … that this is just one
operation among many, run by different operators in different
countries around the world. This really drove home that bitcoin can’t
be killed by decree. Make it illegal in one country and people like this
will keep hashing away in others.
This is a far cry from the small-time home miners of the not-too-
distant past. Not even two years ago I knew a guy mining tons of
coins per day with just a couple dozen GPU units in his bedroom.
The other feeling I got while there is that this is kind of a libertarian
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fantasy for many. These guys are performing a valuable service and
getting paid well for it. Too many in the world get paid well at the
expense of others, or dedicate their lives to giving back to society
without a penny in return, but mining farms like these are
participating in the economy in a purely capitalist way (and the good
kind of capitalism, not “socialism-for-banks-but-we’ll-call-it-
capitalism-anyways”).
Love it or loathe it, the future that has already begun to arrive.
This is an inspection tour not to be missed.
August 15, 2014
Trustless Con
Convvergence
A US$80 million bitcoin transaction is impressive. To really get a
sense of the momentum behind the impending blockchained
Internet, however, a figure like this pales beside the cultural
groundswell. Bitcoin consolidates its inevitability from the sheer
social heterogeneity it coordinates.
Watch this video alongside this venture capital announcement. It
would be over-dramatic to suggest these people want to kill each
other, but there’s every reason to suspect they would not be
excessively traumatized by bad things happening to each other.
There’s no commonality of social perspective, no grounds for
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reciprocal sympathy, and a massive accumulation of historical

distrust. Yet Famous Amos and the Winklevoss twins are
cooperating, spontaneously, in the same world-historic undertaking.
If there’s any plane short of the blockchain that could imaginably
facilitate comparable coordination between otherwise-
noncommunicating constituencies, I’ve no idea what it could be.
(‘The market’? — merely blockchain commerce in embryo.)
The guiding principle of the next Kondratiev upswing is the
trustless commonwealth. It doesn’t expect us to like each other.
That’s why it’s going to win.
December 9, 2014
On the T
Table
able
Pierre Rochard’s essay on ‘The Bitcoin Central Bank’s Perfect
Monetary Policy’ presents an impressively cogent case for the
superiority of Bitcoin over not only slimy government fiat scrip (boo
hiss), but even over precious metals. One table, in particular,
deserves to be committed to heart by anyone making systematic
three-way comparisons:
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It’s difficult to run through this and see anything less than a
fundamental rupture in social history. When compared to Bitcoin,
only proto-money has ever yet existed.
As Rochard concludes:
Fractional reserve banking entails the creation of new money that
is fungible with already preexisting money, i.e. it can be used
interchangeably within the currency’s payment systems. This is
impossible with Bitcoin. The BCB [‘Bitcoin Central Bank’] enforces
the strictest deposit regulations in the world by requiring full
reserves for all accounts. This is the digital equivalent of the Chicago
Plan or the Austrian 100% reserve gold standard. Under this
regulatory regime, money is not destroyed when bank debts are
repaid, so increased money hoarding does not cause liquidity traps,
instead it increases real interest rates and lowers consumer prices.
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This is a self-stabilizing cycle as higher interest rates incentivize

hoarders to invest, while deflation increases consumption due to the
wealth-effect on hoarders. The BCB prevents lending out of deposits
so that it can properly target money supply and avoid the
destabilizing effects of commingling the credit and payment systems.
The positive properties of AMST [‘asymptotic money supply
targeting’] and PoWS [‘Proof-of-work seigniorage’] combined make
it certain that, absent a technological problem, Bitcoin will be
adopted as the global currency. For a deeper understanding of the
market process involved in becoming global currency I would
recommend reading Konrad Graf’s explanation of hyper-
monetization and Peter Šurda’s liquidity analysis of bitcoins. The
Bitcoin Central Bank will be the longest lasting institution of its kind
thanks to the anti-fragile independent monetary policy it has set in
stone.
ADDED: Approaching the same forecast in another direction —
Calling bitcoin "an irreversible ledger entry in a distributed

global database" is like calling a car a "horseless carriage".
Mouthful.
— Pierre Rochard (@Pierre_Rochard) December 18, 2014
"horseless carriage" was shortened to "car". "P2P electronic

cash" shortens to "cash" and its synonyms. Reasonable
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linguistic evolution.
— Pierre Rochard (@Pierre_Rochard) December 18, 2014
December 17, 2014
Bitcoin as SOCI
This is one of the greatest things ever written, period.
‘SOCI’ abbreviates ‘self-organizing collective intelligence’.
The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort
of attractor—some aesthetic sensibility or yearning—that is able to
grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally
one that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only
makes sense to a relatively small group. […] But, and this is the key
move, when those people apply their attention and energy to the
SOCI, this makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and
to find interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more
people and their attention and energy. […] … If the SOCI has enough
capacity within its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge,
it “levels up” and expands its ability to attract more attention and
energy. If not, then it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the
present) and begins to find the limit of “what it is”.
Greenhal then narrates the story of Bitcoin to date, within this
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framework. The sheer enormity of the innovation it has introduced

emerges starkly.
In conclusion:
My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of
SOCI will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood
development stages. The result will be a form of collective
intelligence that is so much more capable than anything in the
current environment that it will sweep away even the most powerful
contemporary collective intelligences (in particular both
corporations and nation states) in establishing itself as the new
dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth. […] And
whoever gets there first will “win” in a fashion that is rarely seen in
history.
This will look prophetic not too far down the road.
February 23, 2016
Countdown
XS wishes all its readers a productive Bitcoin Halving Day. (It’s only
the second ever — with the first falling on November 28, 2012, when
Block 210000 was solved.)
Bitcoin likes Countdown numbers (only 21000000 will ever be
produced).
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(Countdown = 210.)
July 9, 2016
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CHAPTER TWO - BT
BTC
C DEA
DEATH?
TH?
Bitcoin vs LLe
eviathan
Moldbug’s prediction: Freedom loses (as usual).
The question is this: Which dominates? The malignancy of
Leviathan, or its incompetence? How radically can the metastatic
cancer-phase State shape reality in conformity to its vision?
Bitcoin — which is essentially an experiment in Austrian monetary
theory — provides the model test-bed in which this question can
be lucidly decided. Its current rising fortunes only accelerates the
decision. If Bitcoin can’t be stopped, Leviathan is exposed as a paper
tiger.
The best way to make the bet, of course, is to buy (or short) BTC.
Outside in has been too apathetic to put resources behind its
hunches yet, but (for the zilch it’s worth) our intuitions run contra
Moldbug on the topic. Compared to Cyberspace, where bitcoin is
entrenched, the State is weak, unintelligent, uninformed, parochial,
poorly designed, and — in each respect — getting ever more so, in
both comparative and absolute terms. The truly stupendous idiocy of
Leviathan thoroughly swamps its evil, as is demonstrated every time
506
it tries to get something done.

The digital Outside, in contrast, is already far beyond recall. The
germ of a free economy is under construction.
[UF on Bitcoin (June 2011) here]
March 1, 2013
Bitcoin Horror Stories

Bitcoin Dies, Moldbug ventures, perhaps sometime this year.
Following a broad DOJ indictment for money laundering, targeting
any and everybody remotely connected with the free currency, the
“BTC/USD price falls to 0 and remains there.”
“[R]emains there” — how cute is that? Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Bitcoin
R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Bitcoin simulates gold, and once ‘mined’ it lasts for ever. If it “falls
to 0” it has to remain there, for eternity, because it can never be
finished. It can die, but never be destroyed. It’s built for undeath.
‘Moldbug Monetary Theory’ attributes the value of money
exclusively to speculation. If the speculators are terrorized
sufficiently, BTC drops onto the flatline, and “remains there.” The
market would be totally extinguished. What Mao failed to achieve,
let alone sustain, USG would somehow accomplish, perhaps by
exhibiting greater revolutionary ardor and ruthlessness.
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Ruthlessness would certainly be necessary, for the obvious

reason that flatline-BTC has zero downside risk. It’s a one-way bet
that someone, somewhere, will re-animate it (“nothing is unstable”
(thanks to fotrkd for the reminder)). If a genius was designing
irresistible speculator-bait, zero-degree bitcoin would be hard to
improve upon. It’s free, and it’s only worth nothing if the cops can
secure the crypt flawlessly, and forever. Did anyone say ‘free money’?
Speculation messes with time, by bringing the future forward. If
undead BTC were ever to be re-awakened, it already has been. Its
economic potential flows back down the timeline, modified by a
time-preference discount. The feedback becomes strange, and
difficult to confidently calculate, but it works as a vitalizing charge,
and the corpse unmistakably twitches. Whatever money at t0 is
worth, if it’s anything at all, at t0-n it almost certainly can’t be zero.
The Necronomicon describes flatline-BTC with creepy
exactitude:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
ADDED: An alternative take on Bitcoin and undeath from Yifo
Guo, interviewed here (H/T Nick B. Steves, in this comment thread):
“… the point is, the idea will never die. Even if bitcoin dies, an
alternative will arise, one that addresses the vulnerability that was
previously exploited. Then you get bitcoin 2.0.”
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March 5, 2013
Satoshi Nakamoto Night

On October 31, 2008, this happened.
(The first XS Bitcoin horror story.)
October 31, 2015
The F
Future
uture of Bitcoin
The latest guidance from US Leviathan’s Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is a leaf ripped straight out of
Moldbuggian prophecy. The target acquisition revealed in
Administrators and Exchangers of Virtual Currency, section c. De-
Centralized Virtual Currencies could not possibly be clearer:
A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-
centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central
repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may
obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort.
A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency
and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user
of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as
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a money transmitter. By contrast, a person that creates units of

convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person
for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to
another location and is a money transmitter. In addition, a person
is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such
de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and
transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer
of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency.
[See Fotrkd’s link feast in this comment thread]
RIP Bitcoin, I think Moldbug confirms:

I have not of course seen the questionnaire [for money
transmitter licenses], but I imagine it asks you how you know the
monies you’re transmitting are not the product of illegal activity. Of
course, Bitcoin provides no such assurance. By design. That’s
because it’s well-designed — for a free country that doesn’t exist.
With licenses unobtainable, and unlicensed monetary
transactions proscribed, Bitcoin price-discovery has been
criminalized. The conclusion: Bitcoin no longer has a practically
meaningful US$ exchange rate, which is equivalent, in fact, to having
a yet undiscovered (but already implicit) value of US$0. The cliff edge
has been crossed, and all that remains is the impact.
Empirically vulnerable predictions are pure gold, and this is an
especially precious example. The fate of Bitcoin tests the real power
510
of the State, the practicability of economic controls, and all political

theories — whether reactionary or progressive — which subordinate
market dynamics to more fundamental levels of social order. If
Bitcoin does soon die, it will have been demonstrated that
government can effectively dominate the economic sphere, dictate
price, and eradicate commerce, under conditions which are — in at
least some important respects — extremely challenging. Freedom
might still seem attractive, but it will have been shown to be puny.
Alternatively, if Bitcoin survives, and spreads, the Right’s
libertarian current will be vitalized. These types will not only find
their analytical models reinforced, but the sovereign insubordination
of markets will have been dramatically evidenced, the State
humiliated and weakened, and an archetypal anarcho-capitalist
institution entrenched. Interesting times.
ADDED: Eli Dourado argues that anonymity is the “real target”:
Contrary to some popular accounts, Bitcoin is not completely
anonymous, but pseudonymous. The entire Bitcoin ledger is publicly
shared so that the same coins can’t be spent twice. Bitcoin “mixers”
take coins from multiple pseudonymous actors, shuffle them around,
and return them to their original users under new pseudonyms. In
other words, mixers help anonymize a system that is not truly
anonymous.
If the government were to succeed in regulating mixers, it would not
destroy Bitcoin as a payment mechanism or even hurt Bitcoin’s price,
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which has now reached an all-time high of $60, but it would ruin
one of the chief advantages of using it—the quasi-anonymity that it
affords.
ADDED: Meanwhile, in Europe …
March 20, 2013
BT
BTC
C End Times?
In January, Moldbug spake prophetically:
Bitcoin dies in two very simple steps.
1: A DOJ indictment is unsealed which names everyone on Planet
Three who operates, or has ever operated, or perhaps who has ever
even breathed on, a BTC/USD exchange, as a criminal defendant.
The charge: money laundering.
On May 15, Under the headline US Go Govvernment Begins BitCoin
Cr
Crack
ackdown
down, Zero Hedge reported that:
Many people use Dwolla, a PayPal-like payment network, to send
dollars to their Mt. Gox accounts. They then use those dollars to buy
Bitcoins. On Tuesday, Dwolla announced that it had frozen Mt. Gox’s
account at the request of federal investigators. It’s the first federal
action against the currency.
And, by the way:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Bitcoin as an “online form
512
of money laundering”
Outside in doesn’t share Moldbug’s BTC prediction, but the
projected narratives don’t diverge much for some time. By
attempting to stamp out Bitcoin, USG rapidly converts it into an
overtly subversive revolutionary currency*, used only by those in
explicit (though covert) antagonism to the regnant global economic
regime. The test then begins.
*Typically, reactionaries don’t like revolutions, but that’s because
revolutions are typically democratizing. When the neoreaction gets
to watch a spontaneous right-wing revolution unfolding, against the
democratized or ‘political’ economy, I suspect that they’ll quickly
recover their natural sympathy for it.
ADDED: The greatness of Peter Thiel on display (via, and as
anticipated)
May 16, 2013
Will Bitcoin Surviv

Survive?
e?
Eli Dourado, author of the most important Bitcoin-inspired article on
the web, remains publicly committed to the cryptocurrency’s future.
In the wake of the Mt Gox crisis, affecting the world’s largest BTC
exchange (based in Japan), he has written a brief defense of the
bullish case in Nietzschean vein: what does not kill us makes us
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stronger.
In just four short paragraphs, Dourado manages to make a
significant point. Stress-tested survival has a value. The more
ferocious Bitcoin’s environment is shown to be, the more
advantageous its competitive position relative to alternative
cryptocurrencies, as its resilience is demonstrated and publicized.
Actualization of potential (catastrophe) resolves risk, leaving
whatever survives augmented by a security premium. “Now it turns
out that getting a cryptocurrency ecosystem to grow up is really,
really hard — harder than maybe we thought. It follows directly that
Bitcoin faces less competition from other cryptocurrencies than we
thought. … since it is hard to succeed, if Bitcoin succeeds, then it may
be worth quite a lot.”
Dourado’s two links do more work still. The first is to a recent
Megan McArdle pre-obituary on BTC, which argues that the
reputational damage inflicted by the Mt Gox fiasco will weaken it still
further in what was always a Quixotic challenge to State power:
I’ve never been very bullish on Bitcoin, because ultimately, the
better it performs at evading government surveillance of currency
transactions (and government ability to manage debt loads via
inflation), the harder those governments are going to try to shut it
down.
Governments like levying an invisible inflation tax, and get angry
when people attempt to route around it. (This is all quite explicit,
514
on both sides.) The balance of opportunities within this conflict is

too intricate to detail here, but McArdle’s utter submissiveness to
government exaction clearly represents an extreme position among
commentators. That Bitcoin predictably infuriates state financial
authorities is a feature, not a bug.
Dourado’s second link refers to an older and subtler argument by
Tyler Cowen, which makes a bearish case against Bitcoin on strictly
economic grounds. Insofar as Bitcoin is seen to flourish, competitor
cryptocurrencies will be attracted into the market, arbitraging value
down to the cost of supply:
There is thus a new theorem: the value of [any -it]Coin should,
in equilibrium, be equal to the marketing costs of its potential
competitors … In short, we are still in a situation where supply-side
arbitrage has not worked its way through the value of Bitcoin. And
that is one reason — among others — why I expect the value of
Bitcoin to fall — a lot. [Cowen’s internal link is well worth following
up.]
As already noted, Cowen’s bearish position is weakened by
Bitcoin’s recent travails. Almost irrespective of what happens next,
an established reputation for toughness will feature prominently in
the market evaluation of any cryptocurrency from now on.
Since Bitcoin won’t have been killed — it is close to impossible to
kill — it will have been made much stronger.
ADDED: Time for YellenCoin? (No.)
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ADDED: “So is Mt. Gox the new version of Friendster, the early
social networking leader that buckled just before Facebook surged
ahead? … Bitcoin’s next generation of founders is cleaner, more
pedigreed and suited to Wall Street’s and Capitol Hill’s tastes. They
are no less libertarian or wolf-like.”
February 26, 2014
Undead
Does this look like something that’s about to die?
516
(This is among the few topics that puts my reverence for the
Moldgod under serious strain.)
More here:
The apparently inverse relation between BTC value and

investment level merits further commentary.
On a trivial personal note, I seem to have carelessly lost my
Bitcoin wallet somehow, so my perfect detachment on the subject is
even more impeccable than you might think.
Note: There’s a exemplary anti-Moldbug prognosis cited over at
the other place. “The only extent to which the United States can
allow anything at all with respect to Bitcoin is the extent to which
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it can reform itself to work inside Bitcoin.” OK, it’s perhaps an over-
stretch in the opposite direction, but it still ends up far closer to the
mark.
(Image source.)
ADDED: Found my Bitcoin account again — which I’m confident
everyone will be extremely excited about. Better still, my BTC
0.0005 is still sitting there securely. Phew!
December 1, 2014
Hype W
Waaves
As the Bitcoin price takes a tumble, Heather R Morgan reminds us
of her super-bearish article on the currency from February last year
(with just a little gloating):
As #bitcoin plummets, I look back on the article I wrote a

year ago about my predictions with a smirk. http://t.co/
1lq0PpO4np #economics
— Heather R Morgan (@HeatherReyhan) January 14,
2015
It includes this valuable (abstract) hype-cycle chart:
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Look carefully at what is happening in the final stages, though. I

don’t think this chart is showing what Morgan takes it to. (AI, VR,
Bitcoin — they all follow the same roller-coaster course, and they all
get installed in the end.)
A Twitter comment worth noting:
I rarely see skepticism of #Bitcoin that is not more generally

just skepticism of money. @Pierre_Rochard @prestonjbyrne
@izakaminska
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— Michael Goldstein (@Bitstein) January 14, 2015
ADDED: Jerry Brito is sensible on the topic.
January 14, 2015
Hype W
Waaves II
The New Republic‘s somber account of the Bitcoin Gold Rush is well
worth a read (despite the troweled-on axiomatic leftism). It includes
this chart of the recent undulations in the Bitcoin price (in US Dirty
fiat):
It’s a small chunk of history that could support any number of
520
narratives at this point. This one, in particular, offers an alternative

to terminal doom scenarios:
(Plenty of others seem to agree.)
February 26, 2015
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Dissociation
Coinbase provides a graphic overview of 2015 Bitcoin trends,
strikingly illustrating a structural disengagement of the
cryptocurrency’s metrics as a medium of exchange and as a store of
value:
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While the price of bitcoin is down 9% year-to-date, if you look

below the surface it is clear that Bitcoin had a strong first half and
is making great strides as digital money for people around the world
and a payment network for innovation. … […] The number of
transactions per day on the Bitcoin network is rapidly accelerating.
The network averaged 60,590 transactions per day in June 2014 and
117,474 transactions per day in June 2015. … That’s a 94% increase
in monthly tr
transactions
ansactions o
ovver the past yyear
ear.
[Emphasis in original.]
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One obvious hypothesis — that Bitcoin hoarders are strategically

restraining their holdings in order to facilitate the commercial
spread of the currency — seems to assume an implausibly coherent
solution to an intractable coordination (or collective action) problem.
A more widely accepted Bitcoin has to be worth more, doesn’t it?
It’s hard to see how everyone could be leaving that value on the
pavement. (This blog is presently stumped.)
July 16, 2015
Quote note (#282)

At least superficially, under-funding is the strict reciprocal of hype:
The blockchain industry is either hugely under-resourced or
hugely over-optimistic. Probably both.
Bitcoin rigorously formalizes the common insight that words are
cheap (it emerged out of spam-filter solutions). So this analysis is
intriguingly ironic, as well as obviously thought-provoking.
September 9, 2016
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CHAPTER THREE - BT
BTC
C POLITICS
Bitcoin and Chains

Doug Henwood, writing in The Nation, explains the attractions of
Bitcoin for the Right:
There have been many other reports of thefts, frauds and
hackings, which Bitcoin partisans dismiss as mere growing pains. But
with no regulator, no deposit insurance and no central bank, this
sort of thing is inevitable — it’s just tough luck. Introduce regulators
and insurance schemes, though, and Bitcoin will lose all its anarcho-
charm.
Keynes once called gold “part of the apparatus of conservatism” for
its appeal to rentiers who loved austerity because it preserved the
value of their assets. Bitcoin serves a similarly totemic purpose for
today’s cyber-libertarians, who love not only the statelessness of it
as money, but also its power to subject the institutional banking
system to “disruption” (one of the favorite words of that set). And like
gold, Bitcoin is deflationary. There’s a limit on how many bitcoins can
be produced, and it gets more difficult to produce them over time
until that limit is reached. Of course, new cryptocurrencies could
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arise. But the existence of the limit reflects the deflationary

sympathies of the libertarian mind — in a Bitcoin economy, creating
money to ease an economic depression would be impossible. Which
is not to say that only libertarians love Bitcoin.
Despite the careful signals of political distance, there’s nothing
off-track on the substance. In the subsequent paragraphs Henwood
excavates a little deeper, while preserving the same balanced
openness to information. He even — momentarily — passes the
ultimate Rightist clue-test by collapsing epistemology down into the
market: “Bitcoin is not without friends on Wall Street. Gil Luria of
Wedbush Securities is following it; he describes the recent volatility
as ‘extended price discovery,’ which is a way of saying that no one
knows what it is, what it will be or what it’s worth. His firm is selling
his Bitcoin research for payment in bitcoins.”
His unexpected discovery, however, is a Left Bitcoin constituency,
drawn to it by the same priorities that can make ‘libertarianism’ so
ideologically-slippery as a category, most obviously: the potential for
“evasion of state surveillance and policing — which, in the post-
Snowden era, is nothing to sneeze at.” While rummaging for story-
snippets at a New York Bitcoin ‘party’, he is delighted to run into
‘Mistress Magpie’:
A Marxist-feminist professional dominatrix who practices in
Britain … [and] an enthusiastic Bitcoin proponent. She explains her
enthusiasm as beginning with her deep techno-geekiness, and adds
526
that Bitcoin is also practical for someone in her line of work —

anonymity is important, whether operating in real life or online.
Unlike libertarians, who see cryptocurrencies as a possible gateway
to a new society, the socialist in Mistress Magpie sees them as a
way to operate furtively under capitalism, in a way that might not be
needed in a more open socialist society.
While it’s superficially tempting to make fun of such socialism
with anarcho-capitalist characteristics, it sparkles in comparison to
the dismal defense of state fiat money authority with which
Henwood — dutifully — concludes the article.
May 9, 2014
Techno-L
echno-Leeviathan
Writing in E-International Relations, Brett Scott raises Left critique
of the blockchain revolution to a stimulating level of theoretical
sophistication. His central argument is important: Blockchain
cryptosystems are the technological realization of the “dystopian,
conservative” impulse — first crystallized by Thomas Hobbes — to
establish a politically-immunized sovereignty. This social model,
previously subverted by the fallible humanity of leaders, is finally
becoming attainable as algorithmic government, Scott’s Techno-
Leviathan.
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Conservative libertarians hold tight to the belief that, if only hard

property rights and clear contracting rules are put in place, optimal
systems spontaneously emerge. They are not actually that far from
Hobbes in this regard, but their irritation with Hobbes’ vision is that
it relies on politicians who, being actual people, do not act like a
detached contractual Sovereign should, but rather attempt to
meddle, make things better, or steal. Don’t decentralised blockchains
offer the ultimate prospect of protected property rights with clear
rules, but without the political interference?
Scott navigates the Ideological Turing Test well enough to become
a landmark reference in future discussions. His opponents will no
doubt in many cases concede (as this blog does) that the ‘dystopia’ he
describes, while portrayed in ominous and mournful tones, captures
the attachments — and dis-attachments — of zealous blockchain
promoters remarkably well.
Scott clearly thinks political trust is a social good that can be re-
built or recovered (perhaps by restarting democracy). Even if this is
so, the time remaining for the salvage operation is running out fast.
June 3, 2014
Interesting Times
Blockchain schizophrenia is reaching criticality:
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So we find ourselves in the Bitcoin “missile crisis,” and

uncomfortable ironies abound. The decentralized currency is beset
by centralizing pressures if it changes or if it doesn’t. The apolitical
currency is being rent by a deeply political rift between camps, each
of which purports to be the trusted authority over the trustless, anti-
authoritarian currency.
No one ever said anarchistic collective decision-making was going
to be easy.
(Via.)
July 24, 2015
Anti-Cap
This tweet storm is pure evil (but fortunately we’re fairly tolerant of
such things at this blog).
The point it raises is going to fuel an important argument, down
the road. Better to explore it via an appropriately constructed
altcoin, and in the market, though, than to wreck Bitcoin in the
course of the dialectic. Hard money philosophy is baked into the
Bitcoin protocol. If that doesn’t seem like a good idea, the solution is
to try something else.
August 28, 2015
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Crypto-Comedy
Bitcoin had a good 2015, at least according to investor estimations.
Already, half-way through January, the all-consuming chaos of 2016
has rolled over it.
The Bitcoin block-size spat that rumbled inconclusively
throughout the previous year has escalated into a dramatic public
row, with core developer Mike Hearn’s noisy exit. His text is an
instant classic for the historical record, regardless of how persuasive
its argument is found. The discussion at Reddit provides some sense
of the controversy.
Hearn is writing Bitcoin off as a “failed experiment” — which
seems histrionic, despite the many points of interest he raises. The
deep tension between its security principles and its (near-term)
growth prospects is a matter of evident seriousness. Taking the
monkey business out of money innovation won’t be as easy as some
of the crypto-currency’s more optimistic proponents had
anticipated. Something of extreme historical radicality is occurring,
and it’s going to be messy.
With much of the world going under in 2016, there’s likely to be a
scramble for the escape capsule — and that seems to be on fire.
ADDED: Bitcoin obituaries through the ages.
January 15, 2016
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Crypto-P
Crypto-Power
ower
This is a joke, but it’s also onto something serious:
Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.

Hope you all realize that.
— Grim Dark Future Hat (@ClarkHat) February 17, 2016
A cryptocurrency that maintains a perfect log of every single

transaction, and which can be controlled by the party with
the most CPUs.
And best of all, the creator has maintained 100% opsec since
releasing his paper.
In my eternally on-the-way Bitcoin book, the point is raised like

this:
While the governmental response to Bitcoin is doubtless guided
by a strategy (or in fact multiple strategies) of capture, this does not
reduce to an agenda of public regulation, still less suppression, but
also includes cooptation in accordance with deep state functions, as
well as the private interests of state agents. Insofar as every real
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state includes a ‘deep’ or sub-public aspect, it will inevitably relate

ambiguously to the emergence of elusive social capabilities, although
this ambiguity will be only minimally reflected in its public relations.
The empowering of private agents to evade state scrutiny and
regulation represents a manifest erosion of government or ‘public’
authority, and is liable to be denounced on those grounds (if not
transparently in those terms). Yet the crypto-secure transaction
systems responsible for such governance complications are also
opportunities for covert action, and are therefore to be counted as
virtual assets. The novel functions introduced by Bitcoin tend to the
exacerbation – or sophistication – of agency problems.
The politics of Bitcoin can be expected, eventually, to catalyze
a multitude of obscure metamorphoses in the nature of the state.
If the distinct but overlapping occult fields of clandestine security
functions and resilient sub-public interests are bundled into a
provisional concept of the dark state, it can be quite confidently
predicted that the balance of attraction and repulsion between such
elements and crypto-currency will be highly asymmetric with
respect to public communication. As a corollary, it is realistic to
assume that the openly stated position of public authorities in
regards to crypto-channels of all kinds, very much including Bitcoin,
will be systematically misleading, in a negative direction. Bitcoin
tends to empower the invisible, and to disempower the visible.
An event on the cryptic plane is not to be confused with its public
532
presentation. Even if the NSA did not create Bitcoin (and — like Clark
— I seriously doubt that it did), it’s unlikely that it would be distraught
about the discreet rumor that it had.
February 18, 2016
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CHAPTER FOUR - O
OTHER
THER BL
BLOCK
OCKCHAIN
CHAIN
TECHNOL
TECHNOLOGIES
OGIES
Speaking P
Personally
ersonally …
Under the compulsion of formality, complex legal-administrative
codes have no option but to make space for the future.
FinCEN’s crucial (and still incompletely digested) guidance note
on virtual currencies, issued March 18, 2013, clarifies in a footnote
(#2):
FinCEN’s regulations define “person” as “an individual, a
corporation, a partnership, a trust or estate, a joint stock company,
an association, a syndicate, joint venture, or other unincorporated
organization or group, an Indian Tribe (as that term is defined in the
Indian Gaming Regulatory Act), and all entities cognizable as legal
personalities.”
There’s plenty of room already for almost anything to slither in.
(Follow the DAO.)
December 19, 2014
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DAO
XS has received a firm (but fair) scolding for not linking to this
development in yesterday’s Chaos Patch (or elsewhere).
Here’s the website and a nested blogpost (containing a deeper
link to the whitepaper (which is good)). The (minimalistic) manifesto
is an ideological mish-mash which has been worked-over by PR
imperatives and demands cold scrutiny to extract its real content.
From the whitepaper:
A word of caution, at the outset: the legal status of DAOs remains
the subject of active and vigorous debate and discussion. Not
everyone shares the same definition. Some have said that they are
autonomous code and can operate independently of legal systems;
others have said that they must be owned or operate by humans or
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human created entities. There will be many uses cases, and the DAO
code will develop over time. Ultimately, how a DAO functions and its
legal status will depend on many factors, including how DAO code is
used, where it is used, and who uses it. This paper does not speculate
about the legal status of DAOs worldwide.
The XS prediction is itself predictable: This only goes in one
direction (and eventually its going to be vast).
ADDED: When the marketing aesthetics go in this direction,
we’re done.
ADDED: Andrea Castillo comments.
May 23, 2016
DAO in the dust

I, for one, welcome our new species of robber baron overlords (non-
ironically):
I have carefully examined the code of The DAO and decided to
participate after finding the feature where splitting is rewarded with
additional ether. I have made use of this feature and have rightfully
claimed 3,641,694 ether, and would like to thank the DAO for this
reward. It is my understanding that the DAO code contains this
feature to promote decentralization and encourage the creation of
“child DAOs”.
536
I am disappointed by those who are characterizing the use of this

intentional feature as “theft”. I am making use of this explicitly coded
feature as per the smart contract terms and my law firm has advised
me that my action is fully compliant with United States criminal and
tort law. For reference please review the terms of the DAO …
(Learning is hard.)
Bloomberg commentary.
The reddit FAQ.
June 19, 2016
Urbit
There’s a lot going on here:
Do you ever feel like you’re using the Internet as a modem? […]
The Internet is actually an awesome modem. The online services
blow AOL away. But are we really that far from 1995? […] Can we re-
decentralize the Internet? A lot of great hackers have tried. Maybe
we can’t? Maybe it’s just impossible? […] The Internet isn’t from
1995. It’s from 1975. In 1995, we learned that a network beats a
mainframe. Now, we’ve learned that a 2015 mainframe beats a 1975
network. […] Does it beat a 2015 network? What is a 2015 network,
anyway? […] If the Internet beats a modem, and a modem on top of
the Internet beats the Internet — what if we made an Internet on top
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of the Internet? […] These questions seemed interesting. So we built

Urbit.
The Urbit whitepaper (with links to (arcane) demos).
The Hacker News discussion starts off sophomoric, but gets
better.
Best promo slogan I’ve seen yet (from this, last year): “If Bitcoin
is money, Urbit is land.” It’s the algorithmic propertarian matrix for
virtual real-estate.
September 26, 2015
Be
Beyyond IP Addresses?
The technical competence required to evaluate this (MegaNet)
initiative far exceeds my capabilities (that’s what you lot are for).
(a) If doable, it’s huge.
(b) It seems to follow the grain of The Process (and cross-link not only
to Bitcoin, but also to Urbit).
According to Kim Dotcom, the key to a safer, more secure and
decentralized Internet will lie within blockchain technology, or a
version of Bitcoin’s original concept. He has spent two years working
on the program, and basically turning the Internet into a encrypted,
decentralized smartphone app. In general terms, here’s how it works:
[…] “If you have 100 million smartphones that have the MegaNet
538
app installed, we’ll have more online storage capacity, bandwidth and
calculating power than the top 10 largest websites in the world
combined,” Dotcom claims. “Over the years with these new devices
and capacity, especially mobile bandwidth capacity, there will be no
limitations. We are going to use very long keys, systems that will
not be reverse engineered or cracked by any supercomputer. […] …
Dotcom says it will use a faster version of blockchain technology
to exchange data globally. There will be no IP addresses within
MegaNet, like the current Internet IpV4 protocol uses for enhanced
user security. Yet, it will use the current Internet protocol initially as
a “dumb pipe” to get the ball rolling. He and his staff are working on
a new type of encryption that will work regardless of how MegaNet
is accessed. Bandwidth would come from Wi-Fi use and when the
phone is idle, so no charges would come through an IP.
Another source.
Pirate credentials.
November 3, 2015
21 Bitcoin Computer
In case XS hasn’t put out an all-in ‘It’s going to be huge’
announcement on this yet, it’s past time to do so. (More at Amazon.)
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A critical piece of the near-future Internet just crystallized.
November 28, 2015
540
Micropa
Micropayments
yments Mark
Marketplace
etplace
Nelson’s vision incremented into actuality by another step thanks to
21.co. It’s focused on the core constituency at the moment, situated
in the intersection of coders with 21 Bitcoin Computers, but it looks
like a significant beta version of something much bigger.
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Marketplaces and currencies tend to go well together. Paypal

famously got to scale by becoming the currency of choice for eBay
buyers and sellers. The US dollar grew to its current international
predominance in part on the back of the large, integrated US market.
And it thus stands to reason that a digital currency like Bitcoin might
542
be well suited for a digital marketplace based on Bitcoin. […] But

the exact nature of the products being sold in such a marketplace is
important. Unlike a traditional physical market localized to a nation
state, the digital currency community is dispersed around the world.
Moreover, most users hold relatively small balances, especially
relative to their reserves of fiat currency. Finally, the community has
a disproportionate share of engineers and computer scientists
relative to the general world population. […] Taking these constraints
into account, we’ve built what we think of as the first micropa
micropayments
yments
mark
marketplace
etplace: a marketplace that allows buyers and sellers to trade
in digital goods using micropayments, initially specifically focused on
APIs for developer use.
(Forward links included at the source.)
Ping21 latches it to the Internet of Things (brief commentary at
CoinDesk). Plus, more bitcoin market innovation.
March 16, 2016
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CHAPTER FIVE - CHINA, BIT

BITCOIN
COIN AND
WORLD ORDER
Bitcoin on the Silk Road

A series of professional writing obligations have taken me to Xinjiang
three times this year, and the single strongest impression from these
trips has been the centrality of Silk Road heritage. Regardless of
borders, ethnicities, and controversies, the Silk Road is the reason
everyone is there, and the thing that has always come first.
Derivatively, transport infrastructure connects settlements
together, but primarily it is the great ancient thoroughfare that has
deposited areas of habitation along its vast — and harsh — middle
stretches, as if provisioning itself with the archaic equivalent of gas
stations and traffic police outposts, distributed in whatever
frequency necessary to hold open the road.
China is not very adept at international PR, and Xinjiang coverage
in world media tends to be critical. This has resulted in a predictable
touchiness, and even though the most cursory historical examination
already shows that Han Chinese have a profound ancient presence
544
in the area, no opportunity is missed to underscore this point still

further. These efforts range from the genuinely illuminating to the
comically incompetent. One especially interesting species of
evidence, falling somewhere between these extremes — and passing
between them at an odd angle — is coinage. Repeatedly I was told
by museum curators and historical experts, always with the greatest
earnestness, that the abundance of Imperial Chinese currency found
in the area was an unambiguous indicator of demographic integrity
and Han settlement. Certainly, Xinjiang is a numismatist’s paradise,
even if these tangible commercial signs are dragged into stories they
cannot confidently tell.
Coins have little affinity with settlement. ‘Portability’ is always
counted among the essential features demanded of money, because
its function is to circulate, or travel. Like droplets swept along by
the currents of commerce, the coins of Xinjiang belong to the road
before they belong to the place, eloquent about transactions, but
mute about territories. They tell of flows, and passages, but when
the topic turns to political geography, they fall dumb. What does
commercial traffic care for boundaries and homelands? — Only what
it is coerced into caring about, whether by toll barriers, or by
uncontrolled bandits.
China was drawn into its Far West, well over two millennia ago, as
the guardian of the Silk Road. It was legitimated as regional hegemon
by its administrative capability and cultural cohesion. Apparently,
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in the present age of ethno-nationalist border squabbling and

territorial irritability, recognizing this indisputable fact is either too
much, or not enough.
Up until recently, Bitcoin was associated with a different Silk
Road — although arguably not a very different one. As a partially-
anonymized cryptocurrency, fundamentally immunized against
political interference of any kind, it was naturally affiliated with the
anarcho-capitalist markets of the ‘dark web’. The closure of this
Internet Silk Road in early October propelled Bitcoin into a new
phase of existence, as Tech Crunch explains:
Bitcoin’s recent price surge also comes after a 15% drop last
month, following the FBI seizure of the underground ‘black market’
marketplace Silk Road — where billions worth in Bitcoin had been
used to purchase various illegal goods and services since Silk Road
was set up. The closure of the service blew a hole in Bitcoin’s
valuation — but clearly only a temporary one. Bitcoin quickly
recovered the lost value, and has since gone on this latest surge.
The removal of one of the most notorious pipelines linking Bitcoin
to the buying and selling of narcotics and other illegal goods and
services may actually have helped the cryptocurrency — by
improving its reputation and thereby boosting its mainstream
appeal.
Bitcoin supports near-anonymous transactions, which
encouraged its use on Silk Road. But the cryptocurrency has many
546
other characteristics that potentially make it interesting to a much

more mainstream user-base — such as the fact transactions are
irreversible, something of potential interest to online retailers
wanting to avoid the hassle of chargebacks.
With the artificial Silk Road shuttered, Bitcoin was quickly
plugged into the original. Less than two weeks after the FBI
operation, China’s Internet giant Baidu announced that it would
begin to accept Bitcoins. Whilst an obvious threshold event, this
decision was also the confirmation of powerful pre-existing trends,
which had raised the level of Chinese interest in the currency to
the second highest in the world (after only the United States). For
Chinese savers, trapped between negative real return RMB bank
accounts and irrationally exuberant real estate markets, the
prospects of Bitcoin as a speculative store of value can easily seem
attractive. (A parallel rise in both private and public gold holdings
reinforces this impression.)
The most radical interpretation of these developments, however,
would connect them to intimations of a “de-Americanized world”.
For American Bitcoin users, in particular, the currency is already
embraced as a way to short the US dollar, and to practically express
disgust at the global fiat money regime. Mere days before the Baidu
decision, a commentary on Xinhuanet suggested:
What may also be included as a key part of an effective [global
financial] reform is the introduction of a new international reserve
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currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar,

so that the international community could permanently stay away
from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the
United States.
That sounds like history in the making.
October 24, 2013
Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s
’s Eastern F
Future
uture
Simon Black’s comparison of US (official) and East Asian attitudes to
Bitcoin speaks for itself:
Places like Hong Kong and Singapore understand that they have
a role to play as preeminent international financial centers in
becoming financial hubs for digital currencies.
If the US wants to shoot itself in the foot (again) and shut itself out
of the market, so be it. But Asia is embracing its potential role in the
marketplace, complete with all the risks and rewards.
It wasn’t but a few weeks ago that a Hong Kong-based bitcoin
exchange ran off with a few million dollars of customer money. But
that hasn’t cooled demand in the region… nor has it sparked a wave
of debilitating regulations to clamp down on digital currencies.
What this ultimately means is that all the new businesses and
intellectual capital associated with digital currencies will flock to
548
Asia… just in the same way that all the cutting edge precious metals
firms are now basing themselves in Singapore.
ADDED: “The U.S. government believes that some scary people
are using bitcoin. But here’s another scary prospect: If the
government goes overboard with a hard-line approach on bitcoin
and other emerging digital currencies, it may merely push them
overseas, where they will surely flourish outside of its control.”
November 20, 2013
BT
BTC
C East (again)
Gordon Chang is a writer who finds it hard to maintain his balance
on China topics, but his overview discussion of Bitcoin in the Middle
Kingdom is not to be missed.
November 26, 2013
BT
BTC
C East (again) II
The world isn’t cooperating with those who want to think about one
thing at a time:
In a report out today from Goldman Sachs about the future of
money, the bank points out that 80% of bitcoin vvolume
olume is now
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exchanged into and out of Chinese yuanyuan. The second-highest trading

currency is the US dollar, followed by smaller denominations in yen
and euros.
The fate of Bitcoin is inextricable from that of the global monetary
order, and coming at it from that direction is increasingly
unavoidable.
ADDED: Cryptocoins News comments.
March 11, 2015
Hegemonic Headaches
… there are no doubt a number. One that stands out for its
conceptual clarity, however, is the Triffin Dilemma. Formulated by
Robert Triffin and publicized in testimony to the US Congress in
1960, it builds upon the simple arithmetical necessity that any
country whose currency is privileged with world reserve status is
compelled to run chronic trade deficits, in order to supply global
monetary liquidity. World economic hegemony is therefore
inseparable from a loss of control over domestic monetary policy —
since measures that might be required to support the value of the
currency would commonly be inconsistent with the responsibility to
export money (through a negative current account balance).
‘Chimerica‘ is the Triffin Dilemma exemplified in convenient
550
binary form. On the one hand, economic leadership and the

‘exorbitant privilege’ of seigniorage (through which mere financial
signs are swapped for substantial products and services), on the
other economic policy dysfunction and de-industrialization, as
American business activity is outsourced to China is exchange for
symbolic monetary dominance. In this process, and paradox of
power, the current instantiation of world order is captured in its
essentials. The way modernity presently and concretely works
cannot be made intelligible without reference to Triffin.
The strong implication of the Triffin Dilemma — perhaps even
‘Triffin Paradox’ — is that global currency hegemony is ultimately
ruinous for the financially sovereign nation. It involves something
akin to an economic analog or variant of Paul Virilio’s ‘endo-
colonization’ which “happens when a political power turns against
its own people” progressing smoothly from predation to auto-
cannibalization. The ‘exorbitant privilege’ of accessing real resources
in exchange for mere promissory paper is maintained only at the
cost of an absolute outsourcing — an international division of labor
in which the master is compelled to specialize in financial signs,
submitting to an accelerating atrophy of productive capability. An
international reserve currency is therefore self-hollowing, in a
vicious causal loop that substitutes pure political prowess —
symbolic prestige — for the industrial advantages which originally
promoted it. The culture it imposes accentuates consumerism,
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financial politicization, and hysterical sensitivity to the vicissitudes

of signs. In the end, only the magic of power remains.
The way out of this deteriorating structure has long been
envisaged as a politically-managed international currency, whether
the Keynesian ‘bancor’, or the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing Rights).
The call such a scheme makes upon coherent international
governance has reliably exceeded diplomatic and political
practicality. It is notable, however, that a certain globalist fantasy
is predictably generated by the stresses of currency hegemony,
irrespective of all prior or ulterior ideological commitments.
If US Dollar hegemony is unsustainable, and globalist remedies
are realistically inaccessible, the world economic order has a
catastrophic horizon. Crucially: with currency hegemony now
understood as a trap, no sane national regime can be expected to
advance itself as the next America. Whatever waits beyond the
magic show has to be something new. It is under these conditions
that — ‘coincidentally’ — the first post-national and radically
depoliticized digital crypto-currencies have begun to appear upon
the world stage …
April 16, 2014
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Petrodollar Pro
Provvocations
The mere fact this conversation is even happening has to be
disturbing to some extremely powerful global interests. BTC
volatility appears to be the only major obstacle to the
cryptocurrency’s widespread international adoption at this point. If
it trends downwards, a switch point will be suggested on the horizon.
In the interim, the BTC option sets implicit limits to USD devaluation
— the cost of volatility isn’t infinite.
The article expects China to oppose any move to price oil in BTC
in global markets, based on ambitions for an expanded international
use of the RMB. Given what Chinese monetary authorities know
about the Triffin dilemma, this is an argument that can very easily be
over-stretched.
July 2, 2014
Sinocoin
Outside in is preparing an open letter to the government of the PRC,
recommending the creation of a Bitcoin clone. The state-level
incentive for such an initiative would be to refashion the global
financial order in preparation for the ending of US Dollar status as
the world reserve currency. It does not seem difficult to present this
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as a matter of clear Chinese national interest, with definite spin-off

benefits to the country’s political and economic elites, its ordinary
savers, and supporters of economic freedom worldwide.
Sinocoin (to use its English name), would be released by the PBoC,
and then — like BitCoin — be irretrievably autonomous. The Sinocoin
algorithm would be a perfect Bitcoin clone, assuming (realistically)
that the PRC government would not be inclined to upgrade it with
strengthened user anonymity patches. However, PBoC reserves
could be used, in accordance with a publicly announced policy, to
sustain a floor valuation for the currency in its initial stages. Limited
controls on RMB / Sinocoin exchange might provide a longer range
mechanism for the suppression of Sinocoin volatility.
Sinocoin would be a complementary initiative to Bitcoin, designed
to avoid the disruptive effects that large-scale Chinese forex
interventions would have on the latter currency. Bitcoin / Sinocoin
exchange rates would provide a valuable index of Chinese financial
integration into the emerging (Modernity 2.0) global economy. Parity
is to be considered the ultimate natural equilibrium (with Sinocoin
outperforming Bitcoin during its early decades).
If anybody has suggestions to make about the technical,
economic, or political implications of such a development, they can
be discussed here, and carefully considered prior to drafting the
proposal. Unless specifically requested, contributor information will
not be willingly passed on to either Chinese or US financial
554
authorities or intelligence services.
June 7, 2013
Bitcoin Geopolitics
The completed series on ‘China, Crypto-Currency, and the World
Order’ is up at the WDW Review:
Part-1: Tribute and Tribulations
Part-2: Digital Denominations
Part-3: Clone Wars
It was written is sequence, so the overall structure could have
been tightened (in retrospect). Without external disciples — or at
least its interiorized simulcrum — it would probably have been
extended to five parts, or more.
The first part already contains the most pronounced conclusion.
The emergence of blockchain-based monetary systems intersects
with the geopolitics of world currencies, and will inevitably modulate
their deep historical rhythms. The RMB is less likely to become the
central world reserve currency in the blockchain-epoch, principally
because this status is a poisoned chalice, subtracting effective
economic control even as it cements nominal dominance.
Despite superficial political reservations, and some characteristic
patience (even inscrutability), the China factor is almost certain to
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advance the introduction of the decentralized public ledger

commercium, which will organize the next-stage future of the global
economy. None of these claims strike me as seriously controversial.
September 4, 2014
China, Crypto-Currency
Crypto-Currency,, and the W
World
orld Order
Issuing countries of reserve currencies are constantly

confronted with the dilemma between achieving their
domestic monetary policy goals and meeting other countries’
demand for reserve currencies. […] The Triffin Dilemma, i.e.,
the issuing countries of reserve currencies cannot maintain
the value of the reserve currencies while providing liquidity
to the world, still exists. —Zhou Xiaochuan
What the technologies of steam power were to the epoch of British

global dominance, and the twin-track developments of electricity
and the automobile to the subsequent American Age, digital
electronics—and, more specifically, the Internet—are to the “rise of
China” and the refashioned world it epitomizes. It is only to be
expected, therefore, that the intersection of the post-1979 Open-
and-Reformed New China with the post-1990 World Wide Web-
enabled Internet should be an object of particular international
556
fascination, and practical concern.

From the dawn of the modern epoch, geopolitical hegemony has
been associated ever more intensely with techno-economic
leadership, which has in turn been reflected in the international
reserve status of a select national currency. An ever more explicitly
formalized world monetary order has converted compelling but
obscure intuitions of relative national prestige into an unambiguous
system of financial relationships, in which a position of supremacy is
clearly established, with a definite and singular role.
The suspicions fostered by leadership are no less inevitable than
leadership itself. For easily intelligible historical reasons, the French
policy establishment has been an especially vociferous critic of
international reserve status and its “exorbitant privilege”[1] of
seigniorage—the spontaneous ‘right’ to issue promissory paper in
exchange for real goods and services, without any definite prospect
of redemption. There can be little doubt that such criticism
articulates concerns widely held beyond the Anglophone world, and
its substance deserves serious examination.
Of the indispensable building blocks constructing the near future,
China and the Internet have special prominence. There are
innumerable places where China meets the Web, beginning with the
sprawling, multidimensional, and explosively growing Chinese
Internet itself. Bitcoin is a recent and still relatively slender thread
in the tapestry of global change, but by tugging at it, some central
557
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features of the emerging world can be pulled into focus.

Among the characteristics that the Chinese yuan and bitcoin
share is that neither is the US dollar. Specifically, both are limited
yet practical alternatives to the dollar, at least at the level of
microeconomic decision-making. When questions are raised about
the durability of the dollar’s international role, it can be predicted
with confidence that one or both of these challengers will be invoked.
For the dollar to die of ice or fire is, today, for it to succumb to
geopolitical substitution (by the Chinese yuan) or techno-financial
obsolescence (by some decentralized, Internet-based crypto-
currency).
The international status of the US dollar concentrates two multi-
century trends. Firstly, it represents the ethno-geographical
peculiarity of modernity, which—up to the late twentieth century
at least—tended to slant global power not only toward the West
or Occident, but more specifically toward the Atlantic Anglophone
nations, ultimately gathered under American leadership. Since the
decline of the Spanish dollar, which monetized the treasure of the
New World as the first global currency, international finance has
been principally denominated in the currency of an English-speaking
nation. Non-coincidentally, it has thus been tightly associated with
a set of particular cultural themes, including (Philo-Semitic)
Protestant Christianity, the invisible hand, free trade, and liberal
democracy. The institutionalization of world finance has been
558
intimately connected with the promotion of a distinct—and for many

a distinctly questionable—cultural orientation.
Secondly, the formalization of a global monetary order has been
accompanied by an incremental politicization of money, which is to
say, by the consolidation of monetary policy as a core function of
government. With the establishment of central banking and the
demetallization of currency, intrinsic scarcity is replaced by an
institutional “promise to pay” that converts money from a tangible
asset into a contractual liability. Public confidence in the value of
money is turned into a governmental responsibility. It becomes
political, and—in the context of a world reserve
currency—geopolitical.
In combination, these trends are inevitably provocative, since
they concentrate the world’s financial destiny in selected,
identifiably non-representative hands. Behind the studied neutrality
of the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank)
stands the US dollar as the symbol of American exception and the
concrete peculiarity of the modern world order.
While it is natural—and even inevitable—for political command
of the global reserve currency to be understood as the modern
capstone of geopolitical hegemony, it is not a privilege separable
from testing responsibilities, or from profound ambiguities. These
have been clearly recognized since the 1960s, when Belgian-
American economist Robert Triffin formulated the paradox or
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dilemma that bears his name: that if foreign governments are to

accumulate reserves in one selected nation’s currency, that nation
must necessarily be a net exporter of money—which can be achieved
only by running a negative balance of trade. A nation issuing
international reserve currency assumes responsibility for global
monetary liquidity. This obliges it to consume more than it produces,
in order for the difference to be made available as world money.
While this requirement is merely seigniorage, seen from the other
side, the constraint it imposes upon domestic economic policy
options are so strict they amount almost to a destiny.
These constraints are turned into a destructive dilemma by the
fact that the mandatory policy structure required to supply the
world with liquidity tends to destroy confidence in the currency at
the same time, therefore undermining its value. Chronic balance of
payments deficits signal currency weakness, since they would
normally be interpreted as a sign that a currency is over-valued (or
in need of devaluation). For the issuer of a global reserve currency,
however, conventional policy responses to this situation are blocked
in both directions, since it can neither take measures to close the
deficit, nor attempt to strengthen the currency through elevating
interest rates. Because for the reserve currency issuer the trade
deficit is a constant, rather than a variable, a devaluation merely
incites competitive currency destruction worldwide. Strengthening
measures, on the other hand, draw in money from abroad
560
(denominated in the international currency) and thus further expand

the demand for issuance, which can only be satisfied by a widening of
the trade deficit.
In other words, the Triffin Dilemma recognizes that international
demand for a reserve currency is inherently paradoxical. What is
sought is the currency as it would be were it not supplied through
chronic trade imbalances, yet these same imbalances are the only
channel through which it can in fact be supplied.
“Chimerica” perfectly exemplifies the essentials of the situation.
China’s two trillion US dollars of reserves correspond to a cumulative
balance of payments surplus of precisely the same sum, since this
is simply what the reserves are. When perceived
appreciatively—which was far easier in the final decades of the
twentieth century than in the early decades of the twenty-first
century—Chimerica has been a complementary economic
arrangement through which America achieved high levels of
consumption coupled with restrained price inflation, while China
realized export-oriented economic development and the break-out
modernization that had eluded it for 150 years. To more jaundiced
eyes, the same arrangement is a trap that has married American de-
industrialization to Chinese environmental devastation, while
fueling unsustainable fiscal incontinence in America and a Chinese
investment bubble. Whichever picture has greater realism, it can
probably be safely concluded that the dissymmetry imposed by an
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international reserve currency has far-reaching and ambiguous

consequences.
Cynically, it might be argued that the tributary aspect of reserve
currency status is perfectly matched to deep Chinese traditions in
international relations, so that an ascent to yuan-based exorbitant
privilege would make a natural geopolitical goal for the Middle
Kingdom, as it restored its central position in the world. More
realistic however—at least in the near term—is a recognition that
loss of domestic economic policy control is an inevitable, and well-
understood, consequence of global currency hegemony, and it is one
the Chinese government is certain to find unacceptable. Whatever
the costs (primarily environmental) associated with the role of
“workshop to the world” they are immensely outweighed, from the
Chinese perspective, by the advantages. It is on the tributary side
of the international reserve currency ledger, where China has been
for over four decades, that all crucial vectors of development are
to be found—technological absorption, infrastructural deepening,
industrialization, urbanization, employment, and even military
capability.
If Chimerica is breaking down, it has far less to do with any kind of
Chinese challenge—even a spontaneous and unintended one—than
with a tragic structure inherent to currency hegemony. As hubris
leads to nemesis, so does exorbitant monetary privilege lead to crisis,
and even ruin. In both the Spanish and British precedents, financial
562
supremacy became self-defeating, because exporting money (rather

than things) differentially advantaged industrial competitors,
locking in secular social decline. There is no compelling reason to
believe that America has exempted itself from the same ominous
pattern.
On 29 March 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Zhou
Xiaochuan, governor of the People's Bank of China, delivered an
important speech entitled “Reform the International Monetary
System.” He explicitly referred to the Triffin Dilemma as the key to
understanding the world’s economic instability, while suggesting
that a shift beyond US dollar hegemony would ultimately be required
to remedy it. In this respect, his words conformed to a tradition
dating back over half a century, to the Bretton Woods negotiations,
when John Maynard Keynes recommended the introduction of a
neutral global monetary medium—to be called the bancor—making
the supply of global liquidity independent of national currencies.
Historically, international reserve currencies have not arisen by
design. It might be argued, therefore, that the Keynesian bancor was
an unrealistic technocratic fix, blind to the spontaneous momentum
that had already made a non-negotiable fact of the dollarized world,
even before the Bretton Woods proceedings began. This did not
prevent the same basic idea re-emerging in different guises, the most
prominent of which has been the IMF’s SDRs (Special Drawing
Rights), regularly proposed as a neutral international currency in
563
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embryo. It was still to SDRs that Zhou turned when searching out a
candidate for a neutral world currency.
Perhaps some technocratic solution to the problem of monetary
hegemony will ultimately be found, but if so it would mark an
unprecedented departure from world financial history. If, as has
always been the case to date, economic tides beyond policy control
are to determine such outcomes, it is understandable that attention
should drift toward the Chinese yuan as an eventual substitute for
the US dollar. Yet the lessons of history are available to policymakers,
even when the most insistent lesson concerns limitations upon their
own influence, and in this case the foremost of these is that the
prospect of an international reserve status yuan presents China with
a poisoned chalice. It is very unlikely to be accepted willingly.
Might some alternative spontaneous evolution in the nature of
money take this critical geopolitical dilemma in a new direction? Such
an evolution appears to be occurring, symbolized by bitcoin, history’s
first example of a decentralized digital crypto-currency. For China,
bitcoin—or something comparable to it—could be the only way to
evade an assumption of global economic privilege whose essence is
ruinous hubris.
Like James Frazer’s sacred king, who is crowned in order to be
sacrificed, the inner meaning of monetary hegemony is economic
and social destruction. China quite clearly understands this, and as
the dollar era comes to a close, it is looking for a way out. That is how
564
the China-bitcoin story really begins.
[1]
Coined by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, during his service as French minister of finance in the
1960s. See: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000397.html
(accessed 29 April 2014).
May 2014
World
orld Order
Order,, P
Part
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I have a lot of friends who are programmers. The

programmers have always gone like, “Those [Bitcoin] guys
are crazy.”
And then, almost 100 percent of the time, they sit down,
read the paper, read the code—it takes them a couple
weeks—and they come out the other side. And they’re like:
“Oh my god, this is it. This is the big breakthrough. This is
the thing we’ve been waiting for. He solved all the problems.
Whoever he is should get the Nobel Prize—he’s a genius. This
is the thing! This is the distributed trust network that the
Internet always needed and never had.”
So, one of the challenges is you take people who aren’t
professional programmers or mathematicians and then you
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expect them to understand it from a standing start. And it’s

daunting. And so then it gets a word attached to it, like
‘currency’ or whatever you want to call it, and then people
think that it is something it isn’t. And you have a sense of this,
but it’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the idea of
distributed trust.
—Marc Andreessen (in conversation with Brian Fung)
It was noted in the first part of this essay series that the economic
order of the world is being radically reshaped by two roughly
coincidental transformations of stupendous consequence: a secular
shift of industrial capability from the West toward the East, and an
Internet-based revolution in the nature of money. Of these events,
the former is already deeply established, and generally recognized,
while the latter is still at an initial stage of emergence, and thus far
less obvious in its implications. Their intersection remains deeply
obscure.
One topic that seems, tantalizingly, to connect these historical
threads is the prospective death—or at least radical demotion—of
the US dollar. The Triffin Dilemma argues that any currency attaining
world reserve status tends, perhaps irresistibly, to destroy itself.[1]
America’s relative economic decline looks set to exacerbate the
‘winter’ of this great cycle. From the other side, the dollar is
threatened by the piecemeal emergence of an entirely
566
unprecedented non-state currency system, disengaged from all the

familiar institutions of monetary management. At the historical
horizon of the globalized US dollar, the Chinese yuan and bitcoin are
hazily gathered together.
Abstractly anticipated, this twin-threat integrates into a single
event of compounded significance, but concrete forecasting can
easily become lost in its novel complexities. For roughly half a
millennium, transitions in world economic leadership have been
smoothed by cultural affinity and intimate strategic collaboration,
within a commercial Protestant tradition that has shared a common
language, and common enemies, since the late eighteenth century.[2]
Nothing comparable is conceivable today, as American global
supremacy erodes in a context of intense strategic competition and
pronounced civilizational difference.
Inside one of the warehouses on Iceland are mining rigs by Cointerra,

KnCMiner and recently arrived spondoolies-tech. These rigs stacked
high clearly tell that bitcoin mining is now a professional endeavour
and students mining entire bitcoins in their dorm are soon to be
a thing of the past. Cloudhashing is set to expand its operations.
Source: cryptocoinsnews.com. All rights reserved.
Relative to the passage from the pound sterling to the US dollar,
systematic adoption of the Chinese yuan would require “crossing
the great ocean”—an expedition so daunting it is unlikely, in any
567
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straightforward sense, to take place. Superficially, digital

cryptocurrencies are set at an even more distant remove, alien even
to those commonalities that span the gulf between civilizations. Yet
they are positively advanced by proximity to the world’s looming
monetary precipice, because they represent a solution to the
absence of trust.
The word “bitcoin” stands for two very different things (although
one contains the other). In its narrow and exact usage it names a
specific currency, abbreviated as BTC, incarnating a radically
innovative monetary system whose design was fully specified in
Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 “Bitcoin” paper.[3] The currency became
operational in 2009.
The 2008 paper is both a practical invention and a substantial
contribution to the philosophy of money. Its central insight is that
money functions as a rationing system, acquiring value or application
to tradable goods and services through a scarcity function. If digital
money is to realize this function, it has two interconnected problems
to solve. It has to be intrinsically limited, and it has to be exclusively
alienable.
Bitcoin solves the first of these problems by emulating a precious
metal. It is earned through a process of mining that requires
cryptographic work, in order to access bitcoins from a finite ‘reserve’,
released in stages, amounting in total to 21 million BTC. Preserving
the finitude of this bitcoin money stock depends on the solution to
568
the second—or ‘double-spending’—problem. Considered the

principal obstacle to the creation of digital money, the problem of
double-spending arises automatically in a medium which effects
transfers by copying. Unless money is deducted from the payer as
it is credited to the payee, value-conserving expenditures are
impossible, yet this simple operation—going against the grain of
digital information exchange—seemed to require the introduction of
a guarantor, or trusted external party, which the system itself was
unable to integrally provide.
Private mining rig. Source: bitcoinexaminer.org. All rights reserved.

This is Bitcoin’s most unmistakable breakthrough. Every transaction
taking place within the system is entered into a sequential public
ledger, or blockchain, which has to be updated as a whole for any
exchange to be registered. The cryptographic work of the system’s
mining activity now acquires a secondary, automatic function,
validating each blockchain iteration, and defending the ledger from
usurpation by fraudulent agents. The guarantor of each value-
preserving ‘cash’ transfer is thus the entire blockchain itself,
operating as a spontaneous or agent-independent trust mechanism.
Through this continuously updated, integrated record of all
commercial events, the blockchain supports a consistent account of
Internet-communicable synthetic scarcity, or self-regulated digital
rationing—in other words, the world’s first fully-decentralized
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Reignition
electronic money system.Bitcoin scarcity is decentralized due to its

independence from the promises of an issuing authority.
In describing this system, one passes very rapidly from the
singular to the generic, in a way that is easily understood by analogy,
and worth dwelling upon momentarily. Had Netscape been adopted
as the name for web browsers in general, certain confusions would
almost certainly have arisen. Most significantly, the question “will
Netscape survive?” would have been fatally ambiguous. As actual
history has demonstrated, Netscape in this counter-factual sense
was able both to die, and to thrive beyond all prior expectation. Many
hundreds of millions of people use a ‘Netscape’ every day, although
under other (specific and general) names, while only a vanishingly
small fraction are aware that Netscape ever existed. It is not clear
whether Bitcoin, in its specific sense, could ever be entirely
extinguished, but it could certainly be marginalized to the edge of
irrelevance: driven from the market by competitive cryptocurrencies
through which Bitcoin, in the general sense, advances towards
ubiquity.
In its broadest evocation, Bitcoin symbolizes a gathering Internet
revolution, of a scale and profundity that is difficult to exaggerate.
The technical capability required to run BTC—installed blockchain-
supporting software—has a potential extending far beyond the
currency itself, and only a very small fraction of this has been
explored thus far. This is most dramatically evidenced in the growth
570
of a sprawling spin-off bitcoin ecology of altcoins, or Bitcoin-like P2P

contract systems, tagged by the -coin suffix. Prominent altcoins
include Darkcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Namecoin, and Truthcoin, with
many others on the way. At the outer edge of blockchain abstraction
lie applications such as Ethereum, whose Turing-complete scripting
language can support smart contracts, and even autonomous
intelligent agents. At this point of sophistication, the ultimate
potentialities of the system are not merely undetermined, but
undeterminable in principle, and the gateway to a previously
unvisited techno-commercial cosmos is opened.
It is this extreme generality that Eli Dourado celebrates in his
article “Bitcoin isn’t Money—It’s the Internet of Money,” arguing:
Bitcoin is not just a substitute for money; it can be a form of
generalized, programmable, decentralized contracting. […] Most of
Bitcoin’s critics are making a category error. They are taking aim
at Bitcoin the currency, when in fact Bitcoin is much more than a
currency, in the same way that the Internet is much more than the
telecommunication services that preceded it. […] Bitcoin is a new
transport layer for finance that allows decentralized, disruptive,
permissionless [4] development of applications on a separate layer.
It has the capability to do for finance what the Internet did for
communication.
Among the blockchain-based facilities Dourado envisages are
assurance contracts, prediction markets, and continuous
571
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micropayments, as well as notary, bonded identity, and reputation

rating services. It is easy to see why ‘getting’ Bitcoin triggers
something akin to metaphysical shock. As a self-sufficient digital
depository for legal identity, it exhibits—virtually—a potential to
absorb the cultural infrastructure of formal transactions without
obvious limit. There is perhaps no conceivable ‘deal’ without
blockchain compatibility, and therefore no definite horizon to its
commercial, legal, or even political utility.
Of particular relevance here is the blockchain innovation of
artificial trust often referred to as trustlessness since it substitutes
for trust, and is thus pre-adapted to a world in which trust is
unavailable.[ref]Google the combination “trustless + bitcoin” for
abundant confirmation.[/ref] Under the conditions currently
impending, a global hegemonic transition occurring beyond
international consensus or civilizational continuity, this deep feature
of Bitcoin seems certain to be foregrounded. By apparent
remarkable coincidence, a collapsing order of promises, or credible
global authorities, is accompanied by the emergence of an
alternative system of credibility. As the traditional supports of the
world’s institutional architecture are subjected to accelerating
erosion,[5] the premium upon trustless functionality can only
increase. Bitcoin suggests itself as a replacement for authoritative
guarantors, while opening entirely novel vistas of decentralized
institutional creation. The contextual friction, dysfunction, and
572
disagreement of a world in hegemonic disarray only reinforce its

attraction.
In comparison to the smooth transitions in economic supremacy,
from the United Provinces, to the United Kingdom, to the United
States, the passage beyond the American world order can only be
considered rough. It is this roughness that shapes the socket, for
which Bitcoin—in its most expansive sense—is the plug. The
installation of trustless systems fits into a hole in the world.
How does the rise of trustless Internet technology modify the
strategic landscape of the great powers, and the world’s other
principal actors? To what extent can their responses be anticipated?
Only by addressing these questions can some concreteness be
introduced to our understanding of the path ahead. They therefore
provide the topic for the third (and final) part of this series.
[1]
The mechanism, roughly described, is that the chronic trade deficits required for the
international distribution of a reserve currency undermine the domestic economic
fundamentals upon which that same currency’s credibility initially, and ultimately, depends. This
endogenous mechanism is sharpened by geostrategic rivalry, and further destabilized by
complicating, partially independent factors such as the vicissitudes of the petrodollar
convention. In combination, their effect has exhibited a clear directionality in recent times, with
the proportion of international foreign reserves held in US dollars declining from 55 percent to
33 percent since 2000.
573
Reignition
[2]
Transition of world economic leadership from the United Provinces to the United Kingdom
was institutionally facilitated by transnational elite integration, crowned by the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. The later succession of the United States to global economic preeminence
involved a less clearly formalized, but nevertheless unmistakable degree of regime coordination,
built in large part upon the military, administrative, and intelligence cooperation forged in the
crucible of World War II. Innumerable indicators might be mentioned, including even the
dynastic factor of Winston Churchill’s hybrid Anglo-American ancestry.
[3]
The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains a topic of intense speculation, exceeding the
bounds of the present discussion.
[4]
Dourado cites Vinton Cerf’s 2012 article “Keep the Internet Open,” where the notion of
“permissionless innovation” plays a crucial conceptual role.
[5]
Monetary authorities are the most relevant example here, but every institution dependent
upon some measure of public trust is, in principle, susceptible to implicit competition from
blockchain-based (trustless) alternatives.
June 2014
World
orld Order
Order,, P
Part
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The German school argued that emphasizing consumption
574
would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system

away from wealth creation—and ultimately make it
impossible to consume as much. To use a homely analogy:
One effect of getting regular exercise is being able to eat
more food, just as an effect of steadily rising production is
being able to consume more. But if people believe that the
reason to get exercise is to permit themselves to eat more,
rather than for longer term benefits they will behave in a
different way. List’s argument was that developing
productive power was in itself a reward.
[…] The German view is more paternalistic [than that of
the Anglo-Americans]. People might not automatically
choose the best society or the best use of their money. The
state, therefore, must be concerned with both the process
and the result. Expressing an Asian variant of the German
view, the sociologist Ronald Dore has written that the
Japanese—“like all good Confucianists”—believe that “you
cannot get a decent, moral society, not even an efficient
society, simply out of the mechanisms of the market powered
by the motivational fuel of self-interest.” So, in different
words, said Friedrich List.
—James Fallows, “How the World Works,” The Atlantic
(December 1993).
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Reignition
The perception of the Chinese Internet among international

observers and commentators is dominated by an impression of
control.[1] At the center of China’s—deliberately
conspicuous—system of digital communications oversight stands the
Golden Shield project, far more popularly known as “the Great
Firewall of China.”
No less than the original Great Wall, or even the Imperial Palace,
the Great Firewall is a monument. It is first of all a statement, and
only secondarily a functional apparatus, with capabilities sufficient
to give said statement public credibility. What it overtly means is
more important than what it covertly does. The message is long
familiar, and recognizably Confucian rather than distinctly
communist: signaling social defiance is not a tolerable cultural
decision.
This seems to be an improbable environment in which to insert
blockchain cryptosystems. Bitcoin unmistakably retains an aura of
extreme social defiance.[2] The legacy of the libertarian-oriented
hacker counterculture remains clearly legible in its founding
documentation and among its first-wave supporters. Among its most
ardent proponents, the vitriolic presupposition of government
illegitimacy is combined with an approximately unconditional
endorsement of anarchistic—or at least agoristic—practices.[3] In
this sense, Bitcoin appears as the impending fulfillment of the
576
“Californian Ideology”—a hyper-capitalist assertion of spontaneous

order, or radical decentralization, essentially antagonistic to all
concentrated authority.
Any balanced estimation of Bitcoin’s prospects in China has to
begin with a realistic correction of this impression. While insight into
Chinese security analysis is never easily attained, it can be
confidently assumed that revolutionary agorism does not figure
prominently on any official list of Internet threats. Even in America,
in comparatively close cultural proximity to the ‘cipherpunks’ of the
West Coast, Bitcoin is undergoing rapid, and far-reaching
domestication.[4] In China, where ideological libertarianism is
effectively nonexistent, the possibility of technologically catalyzed
anarchist politics has to seem vanishingly remote.
The concerns of Chinese officials with regards to the Internet are
quite different. They are overwhelmingly oriented to the perceived
threat of mass activism, triggered by social media networks, and
exemplified by the dynamics of the so-called Color Revolutions in
the ex-Soviet republics and subsequently by the Arab Spring.[5] It
is the capacity of the Internet to amplify a dissident public ‘voice’,
rather than to facilitate a private ‘exit’, that determines the security
priorities of the Great Firewall. From this perspective, the Bitcoin
menace is relatively minor, even trivial, in comparison to Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, and similar channels of vocal dissent.
The administrative challenges Bitcoin does pose to the Chinese
577
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authorities are of a technical, rather than existential-ideological,

nature, and only tangentially related to the country’s monumental
apparatus of Internet control. The most politically-charged concern
is capital flight or money laundering, but this is a topic of mind-
boggling complexity, involving everything from high-level corruption
on a titanic scale, through organized crime, to informally tolerated
business activities and the attempts of small private actors to secure
savings or diversify regime risk. Corruption is clearly perceived by
the Chinese Communist Party as an indirect source of political
insecurity, and few doubt that the potential of Bitcoin to facilitate
the concealment and expatriation of illicit funds was a leading motive
for the restrictions imposed so far.[6]
In “How the World Works,” James Fallows excavates the neo-
mercantilist political-economic theory of Friedrich List from its
oblivion within the Anglophone world. He argues that the laissez-
faire commercial ideal, considered by English-speaking nations as
an undisputed norm of rational economic order, has a remarkably
limited application beyond these nations. Elsewhere it is treated as
a set of impractical, culturally and situationally specific principles,
to which only the most nominal deference can safely be paid. The
passage of two decades has done nothing to erode the pertinence of
this observation.
List’s “German System,” which was also Alexander Hamilton’s
“American System”—and indeed the ‘system’ of every challenger
578
power seeking accelerated industrialization under conditions of

strategic disadvantage—was characterized by a series of anomalous
features relative to the free-market hegemonic norm that has been
identified with Anglophone cultures for over two centuries, and
maritime Protestant Atlantic powers for longer still.[7] Yet even
these core economic powers, prior to their ascent to industrial
dominion, subordinated commercial liberties to nationalistic
development imperatives. Both geographically and historically, the
‘normality’ of the open market is exposed as rare and precarious. As
Fallows remarks in “How the World Works”:
Every country that has caught up with others has had to do

so by rigging its rules: extracting extra money from its people
and steering the money into industrialists’ hands. […] Today’s
Americans and Britons may not like this new system, which
makes their economic life more challenging and confusing
than it would otherwise be. They are not obliged to try to
imitate its structure, which in many ways fits the social
circumstances of East Asia better than those of the modern
United States or Britain. But the English-speaking world
should stop ignoring the existence of this system—and stop
pretending that it doesn’t work.
Where Chinese Internet policy is concerned, “ignoring the existence
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of this system” amounts to an interpretative orientation fixated upon

domestic security politics and human rights issues, while overlooking
its neo-mercantilist features. When this bias is corrected, the
“Chinese System” of digital mercantilism can be seen as a classic
example of strategically accelerated industrialization, based upon
selective protections directed at those business sectors perceived
as most essential to the nation’s economic future. Quite evidently,
the Internet occupies center stage in this strategy, which identifies
it as the basic techno-economic platform of the twenty-first-century
world. Arguably, the peculiarities of the Chinese Internet make far
more sense in the context of geo-strategic industrial competition,
than in that of domestic regime insecurity.
The most pronounced features of the “Chinese System” are not
restrictions on free political expression—although these can of
course be found—but rather the emergence of domestic Chinese
business analogs for the major players of the international (i.e.,
American) Internet economy. The most obvious digital Sino-clones
include Baidu (Google), Taobao (eBay, Amazon), Youku (YouTube),
Weibo (Twitter), WeChat (Facebook), and Alipay (Paypal). From this
perspective, it begins to seem that much less is being prevented than
replicated.
As previously noted in this series, Bitcoin designates both a
specific digital cryptocurrency (BTC), and a technical innovation in
electronic communications of extreme generality (the blockchain),
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potentially enveloping all Internet-based activity. Besides its

intrinsic significance, the currency can be understood as a test
implementation of the blockchain system. Increasingly, as the
anticipated techno-economic consequences of the blockchain
breakthrough have loomed ever larger, it is the second, expansive
sense of Bitcoin that has begun to prevail—even as the currency has
entrenched itself among the world’s resilient monetary realities.
As the extraordinary implications of blockchain technology have
come into focus,[8] historical analogies have escalated. While it may
once have made sense to compare Bitcoin to a particular Internet
application of great generality, such as the web browser, or perhaps
to the World Wide Web, a general-purpose platform built upon the
Internet, it is increasingly common to find blockchain technology
compared to the Internet as such. On this ever more plausible
account the blockchain is of equivalent socioeconomic import to the
basic Internet-enabling innovation of packet switching
communications—a once-in-a-Kondratieff-wave-level
infrastructural revolution. If this is the case, it is a candidate to be the
commanding technology of the first half of the twenty-first century.
How might the “Chinese System” be expected to respond to this
emerging reality? Everything we have seen so far points in one
direction: Clone war. For China to reject the blockchain revolution
would be an abdication from all industrial leadership ambitions in
the coming digital economy. The only Chinese strategic option
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compatible with the digital industrialization path so far taken is a

Sinification of the technology—a blockchain with Chinese
characteristics, in which distributed ledger systems are
accommodated to the country’s social and cultural realities. There is
no reason to think this will be an easy thing to achieve, but nothing
else could possibly work.
[1]
The theatrical tradition of Chinese power is an indispensable reference here. China has been
exceptional among the great civilizations for the emphasis it has placed upon public perception
as the key to administrative authority, with an understanding of rule as essentially dramatic.
In the narrow context that concerns us here, it is important to note that in the eyes of the
Chinese authorities being seen to control Internet communications takes precedence over the
subordinate and instrumental social and technical capabilities involved. This can be contrasted
with Internet security politics in the United States, where invisible data-traffic monitoring
receives clear priority.
[2]
In order to arrive at a remotely concrete sense of “defiance” it is no doubt important to
distinguish between those actors (associated more with the Left) seeking to break into the public
sphere in the name of protest, and those (associated more with the Right) seeking to break out
of the public sphere, to protect private interests from social or government accountancy. It can
scarcely be controversial to propose that, while concern for the latter is by no means negligible
in today’s China, it is the former that elicits genuine alarm.
[3]
This aspect of Bitcoin has been dramatized by the online black-market Silk Road run by Dread
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Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht), recently described by Daniel Krawisz as “the greatest agorist of
our times.”
[4]
This trend is personified by Marc Andreessen, whose promotion of Bitcoin “mainstreaming”
includes an explicit attempt to reframe the blockchain (distributed public ledger) as a defense
against excessive anonymity, fully compatible with government regulatory interests. Insofar as
arguments of this kind are found persuasive in Washington DC and New York, they are likely to
find an appreciative reception in Beijing.
[5]
Irrespective of the actual contribution of social media to these events, the seriousness with
which it was taken by the Chinese authorities is beyond serious question. During the spring of
2011, the word “Jasmine” was targeted for suppression by the Chinese Great Firewall filter,
despite its rich cultural resonances in the country.
[6]
BTC China was founded in June 2011 with Bobby Lee as CEO. It had risen to become the
world’s largest bitcoin exchange (by volume) by 18 December 2013, when it temporarily
suspended acceptance of RMB deposits, following a People’s Bank of China statement on the
crypto-currency, released on the 5th of that month. Chinese Internet giant Baidu, which had
been accepting BTC payments since October 2013, ceased accepting the currency following
the PBOC statement. Although RMB depository services were partially resumed at BTC China
in January 2014, Baidu has not returned to the currency, stalling the development of bitcoin
within China as a means of payment. Price movements of bitcoin on international exchanges
have reflected the enormous significance of Chinese events to its perceived value.
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[7]
Fallows usefully lists the distinctive emphases of the “German System”: planning over
spontaneity; producers over consumers; outcome over process; national over individual
interest; zero-sum over positive-sum economic relations; and Realpolitik over moralism.
[8]
Although the ultimate scope of Bitcoin escapes ready apprehension, it is already clear that it is
roughly coextensive with the form of the contract in general, within which monetary systems are
comprehended. Any actually or potentially formal human agreement is blockchain compatible,
and it is through the blockchain that many previously tacit social arrangements can be expected
to attain formalization. The horizon of the blockchain, therefore, is that of deal-making in
general. Once this is understood, the predictions of those such as Marc Andreessen—who sees
the potential blockchain economy scaling into the multi-trillion-dollar range within a matter
of decades—seem entirely reasonable. Global commerce, as a whole, is in principle a subset
of blockchain-supported relationships. As this becomes ever more obvious, the prospect of an
economically ambitious society attempting to opt out of this future will become increasingly
implausible. It is already unimaginable that China could want to do so.
September 2014
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BLOCK 4 - SINGLOSPHERE
BL
BLOCK
OCK 4 - SINGL
SINGLOSPHERE
OSPHERE
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CHAPTER ONE - PRIMERS
Singlosphere
East-plus-W
East-plus-West
est at the frontier of freedom
In accordance with the widely-held belief that digital communication

technologies ‘destroy distance’, James C. Bennett coined the term
‘Anglosphere’ to describe the arena of comparatively frictionless
cultural proximity binding spatially-dispersed Anglophone
populations. His contention was that the gathering trends
exemplified by the development of the Internet would continue to
promote cultural ties, whilst eroding the importance of spatial
neighborhoods. In the age of the World Wide Web, cultural solidarity
trumps geographical solidarity.
Whilst alternative culture-spheres – expressly including the
Sinosphere – were mentioned in passing, they were not the focus
of Bennett’s account. His attention was directed to English-speaking
peoples, scattered geographically, yet bound together by threads of
common understanding that derived from a shared language, English
common law and limited-government traditions, highly-developed
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civil societies, individualism, and an unusual tolerance for disruptive

social change. He predicted both that these commonalities would
become increasingly consequential in the years to come, and that
their general tenor would prove highly adaptive as the rate of social
change accelerated worldwide.
Bennett’s concern with large-scale cultural systems can be seen
as part of an intellectual trend, comparable in significant respects
to Samuel Huntington’s influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis. In a
world that is undergoing tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth,
power, and hegemony, such preoccupations are understandable. In
these circumstances, it would be surprising if the partisans of
Anglospheric and Sinospheric cultural traditions were not aroused
to ardent advocacy of their relative merits and demerits, and — if
Bennett is taken seriously — such discussions will take place in zones
of cultural communion that are, at least relatively, increasingly
introverted. The rapid emergence of a highly-autonomous ‘Chinese
Internet’ in recent years adds weight to such expectations.
In March, the Z/Yen Group released the ninth in its series of
Global Financial Centres Index rankings, in which Shanghai leapt to
shared fifth place with Tokyo (on GFCI ratings of 694). London (775),
New York (769), Hong Kong (759), and Singapore (722) led the pack.
(The top 75 can be seen here).
Both Anglosphereans and Sinosphereans can find ready
satisfaction in these ratings. The persistent supremacy of London
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and New York attests to a 250-year history of world economic

dominance, whilst the ascent of Chinese-ethnicity commercial cities
to the remaining top-slots clearly indicates the shift of economic
gravity to the western Pacific region. Yet the most interesting
pattern lies in-between. Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore belong
unambiguously to a Sinosphere (still less to a broad Anglosphere).
Instead, they are characterized by distinctive forms of Chinese-
Anglophone hybridity – an immensely successful cultural synthesis.
It would be difficult to maintain that Shanghai was entirely
untouched by a comparable phenomenon, inherited in that case from
the synthetic mentality of its concession-era International
Settlement, and reflected in its singular Haipai or ‘ocean culture’.
The existence of an identifiable Sino-Anglosphere – or
Singlosphere – is further suggested by the Heritage Foundation’s
2011 Index of Economic Freedom (rated on a scale of 0-100). On that
list, the top two places are taken by Hong Kong (89.7) and Singapore
(87.2), followed by Australia (82.5) and New Zealand (82.3). The
Anglospherean and Sinospherean territorial cores fare less
impressively, with none meeting the Heritage criteria for free
economies — the United States comes ninth (77.8), the United
Kingdom 16th (74.5), and mainland China 135th (52.0). It seems that
the Singlosphere has learnt something about economic freedom that
exceeds the presently-manifested wisdom of both cultural root-
stocks – setting a model for the Sinosphere, and leaving the
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Anglosphere trailing in its wake.

As the deep secular trend of Chinese ascent and (relative if not
absolute) American decline leads to ever more ominous rumblings
and threats of geostrategic tension, it is especially important to note
a quite different, non-confrontational pattern – based upon cultural
merging and reciprocal liberation. Within the Singlosphere, an
emergent, synthetic ethnicity exhibits a dynamically adaptive,
cosmopolitan competence without peer, as distinct traditions of
spontaneous order fuse and reinforce each other. Adam Smith meets
Laozi, and the profound amalgamation of the two results in an
unfolding innovated culture that increasingly dominates world
rankings of economic capability.
A remarkable study by Christian Gerlach excavates the Daoist
roots of European laissez-faire (or wu wei) ideas, and anarcho-
capitalist maverick Murray Rothbard was attracted to the same
‘Ancient Chinese Libertarian Tradition’. Ken McCormick calls it The
Tao of Laissez-Faire. (Those disturbed by this identification might
be more comfortable with Silja Graupe’s leftist critique of ‘Market
Daoism’.)
McCormick concludes his essay:
The recent ascendance of free-market ideas around the

world probably owes more to the practical historical success
of those ideas than to the persuasiveness of any theory or
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philosophy. Yet one might speculate that the startling success

of economic liberalization in the People’s Republic of China
might in part be explained by the fact that the idea of free
markets is embedded in the culture. In fact, the Confucianism
that long dominated China was actually a synthesis of
competing schools of thought, including Taoism … Hence,
while laissez-faire has frequently been absent from Chinese
practice, it is not at all alien to Chinese culture. The recent
free-market reforms in China might therefore be interpreted
not so much as an importation of a foreign ideology but as a
reawakening of a home-grown concept.
The Singlosphere sets both East and West on the right track. The
more that Shanghai recalls and learns from it — and the deeper its
participation — the faster its ascent will be.
May 26, 2011
Pacific Rim
Well-engineered, formidable, yet also lumbering constructions are
directed into battle against horrific monsters, with the fate of the
world at stake. Guillermo del Toro’s movie Pacific Rim is one of these
entities, and the ethno-political review by ‘white advocacy’
590
writer Gregory Hood is another.

Within this cascade of monstrous signs, a convulsive re-ordering
of the world from out of the Pacific is a constant reference. With
the shocking scale of a tsunami, and the insidiousness of an obscure
intelligence, it inundates the Old Order, starting from the ocean’s
coastal ramparts. “When alien life entered the earth it was from deep
within the Pacific Ocean. … the Breach.” City after city falls prey to
the Kaiju. “This was not going to stop.”
The response is formulaic, and statically defensive. Perhaps some
kind of massive sea-wall will work? Hood is at his best in laying out
the weary Cathedralist pieties of the Hollywood plot line:
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind,
filmmakers are the educators, grooming the mass public to accept
certain ideas in preparation for them to be implemented as policy.
The acceptance of global security forces instead of national armies,
the worship of blacks as natural leaders, and the promotion of an
international political creed of egalitarianism, secular humanism,
and intrusive (but benevolent) government …
Yet the plot-line of his review is no less predictable than that of
the movie, appealing to a irrecoverable (and already mythical)
confidence in a white lineage of ethno-nationalist self-government,
functionally-adequate native traditions, and tested bonds of kin, as
if all of these things remained untried resources to fall back upon,
rather than efficient historical antecedents to the developments now
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being deplored. It was under the conditions of white global dominion

that socialism was entrenched, and evangelical moral universalism
elevated to its climactic pitch of ethno-masochistic implosion.
Defenselessness before the Kaiju was not something the Kaiju
brought about.
The most telling blindness of Hood’s review lies close to its heart,
in the denunciation of multiculturalism. Rather than striking at Del
Toro’s movie at its point of maximum Cathedralist vulneraility —
which is to say, in its entirely generic, universalist presentation of
the multicultural ideal — Hood repeats this same indiscriminate
category without significant modification, seeking only to criticize
what Del Toro promotes. This would be seriously unserious
anywhere. On the Pacific Rim, it is a truly disastrous disqualification
of perception.
The only reality-sensitive response to the problem of
multiculturalism is to ask: Which cultures? Neither Del Toro (the
Cathedral), nor Hood (ethno-traditionalism), seem to have the
slightest interest in this question. Indiscriminate demographic
entropy is either to be promoted, or lamented, but in both cases
accepted as the only relevant alternative to a fantastically-imagined,
dying world of distinct peoples. If the paint is let out of the tubes,
it has to be stirred together with maximum conceptual rapidity into
homogeneous brown.
Discussing the film’s central micro-alliance, between its
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occidental hero and oriental heroine, Hood writes:

None of this makes any sense of course. The “drift compatible”
connection seems to require a kind of deep bond that almost always
requires family ties. However, in this film, the conflict is driven by the
struggle of the rebellious hero and the non-white female to prove
that two people who have no shared history or kinship can work
together, and in fact be better than everyone else. Where traditional
national and family bonds have failed us, multiculturalism will save
the day.
As an ethno-racial descriptor, ‘non-white’ is simply sad. It isn’t
even trying. Concretely, in this case, it ensures that the true
nonsense of the movie eludes attention, which is the displacement of
real Pacific Rim ethno-synthesis by a merely cosmetic substitute.
As Hood emphatically notes, the relationship between (white
American) Raleigh and (Japanese) Mako is not explicitly romantic,
but it occupies the formula-position of a film romance, even when
— admirably — it restricts itself to an intense practical partnership.
I just love Japanese-American ethno-synthesis to bits, but it has
almost no relevance to the real cultural process on the Pacific Rim,
which is overwhelmingly dominated by Anglo-Chinese hybridism.
Japan is one of the world’s few modern ethno-nationalist states,
with a strongly-preserved native culture, tightly-restricted
immigration and citizenship criteria, and low English-language
competence. In other words, it makes a far more tempting target for
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‘multiculturalist’ (or demographic entropy) criticism than America

does. But it’s ‘non-white’ so Hood doesn’t notice.
Even more peculiarly — and despite its Hong Kong setting —
Pacific Rim represents China’s contribution to the multicultural
alliance through three weirdo brothers who get rubbed out at the
first plausible opportunity. Without wanting to be unnecessarily
crude, I have to repeat — Hong fricking Kong. This is the post-1949
capital of the Singlosphere, and therefore the natural location for
a centrally accentuated US-Japanese working relationship? If this
isn’t quite “who cares? They’re all wogs anyway” it’s something
remarkably close.
The Pacific Rim, insofar as it matters, is the a Singlosphere cultural
catastrophe, a distinctively non-generic ethno-synthesis that has
created the most advanced and competitive societies on the planet
— Hong Kong, Singapore, and Old Shanghai among them. Del Toro
and Hood conspire to efface this fact, even as both, indirectly,
address it.
Insofar as we are told anything, it is that in our most desperate
moments, we have to jettison Tradition. Instead, we must rely on
feelings, on multicultural partnership, on wishes and fantasies and
hopes about what the world might be, rather than what it is.
–– that’s Hood, not remotely understanding what he’s saying.
September 15, 2013
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Quote note (#119)

This seems right:
Razeen Sally, a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew
School of Public Policy, wrote this year in Singapore’s Straits Times
that: “A global city is where truly global services cluster. Business —
in finance, the professions, transport and communications — is done
in several languages and currencies, and across several time zones
and jurisdictions. Such creations face a unique set of challenges in
the early 21st century. Today, there appear to be only five global
cities. London and New York are at the top, followed by Hong Kong
and Singapore, Asia’s two service hubs. Dubai, the Middle East hub,
is the newest and smallest kid on the block. Shanghai has global-city
aspirations, but it is held back by China’s economic restrictions —
the vestiges of an ex-command economy — and its Leninist political
system. Tokyo remains too Japan-centric, a far cry from a global city.”
It’s a striking indication of the extent to which the world order
remains structured by the Anglo-Colonial legacy. However one
would like to see the world run, this hub-net is an essential clue to the
way it is run now.
October 17, 2014
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Mackinder in Beijing
A long, but insightful look at the planetary strategic environment
puts recent developments in theoretical context:
After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently begun
revealing its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move.
Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental
infrastructure for the economic integration of the world island from
within, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through
Washington’s encircling containment.
The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place
an infrastructure for the continent’s economic integration. By laying
down an elaborate and enormously expensive network of high-
speed, high-volume railroads as well as oil and natural gas pipelines
across the vast breadth of Eurasia, China may realize Mackinder’s
vision in a new way. For the first time in history, the rapid
transcontinental movement of critical cargo — oil, minerals, and
manufactured goods — will be possible on a massive scale, thereby
potentially unifying that vast landmass into a single economic zone
stretching 6,500 miles from Shanghai to Madrid. In this way, the
leadership in Beijing hopes to shift the locus of geopolitical power
away from the maritime periphery and deep into the continent’s
heartland.
As a trivial point of perspective, it might be worth noting that this
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blog’s ferocious Atlanteanism completely overwhelms its Sinophilia

in regard to this question. If the emergence of a diasporic-maritime
China, attuned to its Pacific Rim ethnic offshoots, is to be forestalled
by a revival of dreams of dominion on the world island, the 21st
century is about to take a peculiarly unfortunate turn.
June 10, 2015
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CHAPTER TWO - SYNTHETIC CUL

CULTURE
TURE
Reign of the Tripod
China
China’s
’s rise and the future of threedom
According to Arvind Subramanian, even conservative projections of

comparative growth trends place China in a global position, by 2030,
that is strikingly similar to that of Britain and of America at their
respective moments of economic predominance, accounting for a
share of the world economy roughly 150% the size of its closest
rival. If this were to come to pass, such leadership would invoke
‘hegemony’ as a matter of sheer quantitative fact – quite irrespective
of explicit intentions. The ‘Chinese model’ would promote itself, even
in the complete absence of political and diplomatic reinforcement,
and the magnetic power of Chinese culture would continue to
strengthen in approximate proportion to its commercial influence.
China would become the object of irresistible attraction –
counterbalanced, no doubt, by resentments – and its example would
burn incandescent, even in the offended eyes of its detractors. So
what is this ‘example’?
598
In exploring this question, one place to begin is the history of

economic hegemony, and in particular that instantiated by the
Anglo-American powers over their two ‘long centuries’ of global
supremacy. This is a topic pursued with exceptional insight by Walter
Russell Mead, most remarkably in his work God and Gold: Britain,
America, and the Making of the Modern World.
Mead locates the key to ‘Anglosphere’ hegemony in the ‘Golden
Meme’ of the invisible hand, originating in the religious idea of
providence, and modernized in Newtonian celestial mechanics,
Smithian political economy, and Darwinian evolutionary biology. At
its most abstract, this idea is both an affirmation and a renunciation,
with its potency and suppleness stemming from both. To
acknowledge the invisible hand is to foster a special kind of positive
fatalism, trusting in the spontaneous trend of history, which is
embraced as a covenant, and an overt or implicit election (in the
theological sense). Such themes are undisguisedly religious, and
Mead does nothing to obscure their roots in the Abrahamic tradition,
or meta-tradition, which lays out a providential vision of history as
finite, progressive, and inevitable, tending inexorably to
eschatological completion, structured by superhuman law, and
(through its divine predestination) facilitating the function of
prophecy.
The deep culture of the Anglosphere is not only generically
Abrahamic, however, it is also specifically pluralistic. The invisible
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hand takes center stage because the center is otherwise vacated,

or distributed. Esoteric providence supplants exoteric sovereignty
because an inability to reach agreement is eventually
institutionalized – or at least informally stabilized — in a triangular
balance of power.
What the British ultimately did was to rely on what Burke

called “convention.” Scripture, tradition, and reason – each
had its place and each had its devotees. But all of them went
wrong if you pressed them too far. You should respect the
scriptures and defer to them but not interpret the scriptures
in a way that led you into some weird millenarian sect or
into absurd social behavior. You honored tradition but did not
press it so far that it led you into the arms of royal absolutism
or papal power. You can and should employ the critique of
reason against the excesses of both scripture and tradition,
but not press reason to the point where you ranted against
all existing institutions., ate roots and bark for your health,
or, worse, undermined the rights of property and the
established church. One can picture John Bull scratching his
head and slowly concluding that one must accept that in
society there will be bible nuts, tradition nuts, and reason
nuts – fundamentalists, papists, and radicals. This is not
necessarily the end of the world. To some degree they cancel
600
each other out – the fundamentalist zealots will keep the

papists down and vice versa, and the religious will keep the
radicals in their place – but the competition among sects will
also prevent the established church from pressing its
advantage too far and from forming too exalted an idea about
the proper stature, prestige, and emoluments of the clergy.
[p223]
Cultural hegemony follows from a semi-deliberate fatalization, as

the sovereign center is displaced by a substantially automated social
process, which no social agent is able to master or entirely impede.
Each major faction steps back into its position in the triangle, from
which it can strategically engage the others, but never fully dominate
or eradicate them. The triangle as a whole constitutes a social and
historical motor, without adequate representation at any identifiable
point.
Pluralism, even at the cost of rational consistency, is

necessary in a world of change. Countervailing forces and
values must contend. Reason, scripture, tradition: they all
have their uses, but any one of them, unchecked, will go too
far. Moreover, without constant disputes, constant
controversy, constant competition between rival ideas about
how society should look and what is should do, the pace of
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innovation and change is likely to slow as forces of

conservative inertia grow smug and unchallenged. [p231-2]
This blog has previously touched upon the Singlosphere, where

aspects of Anglophone and Chinese culture converge in Manchester
Liberal / Daoist acceptance of spontaneous order, or laissez-faire.
Does this convergence extend to triadic pluralism, and apply to the
Sinosphere core of the Chinese mainland? Mead’s analysis is highly
suggestive in both respects.
In the first place, it encourages considerable equanimity in
regards to the prospective global transition, even when attention
is focused upon the political and ideological heartland of
contemporary China. It might seem, superficially, that the passage
from a leading world culture dominated by tacit Christian attitudes
to one in which unfamiliar Sino-Marxist ideas rise to unprecedented
international prominence must be characterized by an immense –
even near-absolute – discontinuity. Can such a leap take place
without succumbing to catastrophic culture-shock and
unmanageable friction? When examined from a broader perspective,
however, such alarmism is far less than fully warranted.
For better or for worse, the over-arching cultural continuity of the
coming shift is ensured by the profound kinship tying Marxism into
the broad family of Abrahamic belief systems. Theologically rooted
in the dialectical engagement with Judeo-Christian spirituality,
602
initiated by Hegel and Feuerbach, the basic framework of Marxist

thinking only trivially perturbs the structure of prophetic,
eschatological, redemptive, and providential history. Its millenarian
expectations are no more terrifying than those of Jewish and
Christian apocalypticism before it, its prophetic certainties no more
irrational, its submission to the iron laws of history no more
constraining, and its moral enthusiasm no more zealous or
impractical.
The specter of a totalitarian Marxist resurgence in China is as
realistic as the fear of a theocratic putsch in the United States of
America, which is to say, it has no reality at all. In both cases,
maturity, pluralism, and established traditions protect against the
domination of society by any particular intolerant faction. It is
unnecessary to be either Christian or Marxist to recognize the
continuing world-historical momentum of a broad Abrahamic meta-
narrative, or to accept the consistency of such large-scale social
storytelling with the perpetual regeneration of practical impetus, or
to see a settled, spontaneously improvised social solution – and
incarnation of dynamic conservatism – in the enduring triangular
stand-off between Marxist scriptures, Communist Party
institutional traditions, and market radicalism in today’s China. As
with Mead’s Anglospherean pluralism, the reciprocal limitations that
each of these factions imposes on the others will inevitably
disappoint many, but there is no reason for them to horrify anybody.
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Insofar as Mead is correct in identifying Anglosphere hegemony

with the reign of the tripod, or the socio-cultural realization of
pluralism (as triangular dynamic stability), the disruptive potential
of emerging Chinese leadership should be considered as massively
discounted, because the tripod is a Chinese native. Every temple in
the country is equipped with a three-footed incense burner, every
museum bronze collection is dominated by three-legged cauldrons,
and each of these tripods has definite, explicitly conceptual cultural
meaning. This is not only based upon the obvious practical and
intuitive truth that the simplest model of stability comes from the
tripod, but also from a recognition that triangular stand-off
exemplifies sustainable dynamism in its elementary form,
disintegrating the universe into strategic possibility.
For literary elaboration of this theme, one need only turn to the
Romance of the Three Kingdoms, perhaps the most widely read of
China’s four great classical novels. Its most conspicuous instantiation
as popular entertainment is seen in the game of paper, scissors,
stone, which dates back (at least) to the Chinese Han Dynasty (206
BC – AD 220), when it was known as shoushiling.
The ultimate expression of triangular dynamic stability, not only
in China, but worldwide, is undoubtedly presented by the Classic
of Change, the Yi Jing, or Zhouyi. It is upon this work of singular,
inhuman genius, in which sheer arithmetic speaks more purely than
it has ever done before or since, that all of China’s ceremonial
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bronzes, literary flights, and childhood games converge.

In the numerical system of the Yi Jing, the tripod finds a source
more basic than the Abrahamic meta-tradition can provide,
regardless of how Trinitarian this latter has become. That is because,
in this Chinese cultural ur-stratum, unity does not figure as an
original unity, subsequently disintegrated into a theological,
dialectical, or sociopolitical triangle but is, on the contrary, derived.
As the Confucian commentary explains: “The number 3 was assigned
to heaven, 2 to earth, and from these came the (other) numbers.” In
the beginning were numbers – primordial dispersion.
The ‘language’ of the tripod finds its most convenient expression
in the trigram, whose three lines constitute an elementary unit. To
grasp the Yi Jing as a complete arithmetical model of the dynamic
triad, however, it is necessary to proceed immediately to the
structure of the hexagram.
Grasped in operation, the Yi Jing is not only a binary arithmetical
system (as Leibniz interpreted it), but a bino-decimal conjunction.
This is demonstrated by the fact that it systematically rewards the
application of decimal digital reduction, and reveals its dynamic
pattern only under these conditions. (This might, quite reasonably,
be considered a highly surprising suggestion, since digital reduction
– as it arose within the history of Western Qabbalism – seems to
have been generated, automatically, from the interference of the
decimal Hindu numerals with older alphabetical number systems, or
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‘gematrias’, that attached cardinal values to specific letters, without

use of place value. It is immediately obvious that this historical
account cannot be translated into a Chinese context, where
alphabets have no traditional root.)
Digital reduction is an extremely simple numerical technique,
involving nothing besides single-digit additions and neglect of
decimal magnitude. A multi-digit number is treated as a string of
single digit additions, and the process is reiterated in the case of a
multi-digit result.
Expressing the series of binary powers in decimal notation yields
the familiar sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048,
4096, 8192 … When this series is compressed to a string of single
digits by reduction, it proceeds: 1, 2, 4, 8, (1 + 6 =) 7, (3 + 2 =) 5,
(6 + 4 =) 1, (1 + 2 + 8 = 11 = 1 + 1 =) 2, (2 + 5 + 6 = 13 = 1 + 3
=) 4, (5 + 1 + 2 =) 8, (1 + 0 + 2 + 4 =) 7, (2 + 0 + 4 + 8 = 14 = 1 +
4 =) 5, and repeatedly, through the 6-step cycle 1, 2, 4, 8, 7, 5. This
process exposes the arithmetical necessity of the Yi Jing hexagram,
as an archetypal exhaustion of the phases of time.
To excavate the triadic or tripodic, it is helpful to turn to the
classical (and now integral) Confucian commentary, the ‘Ten Wings’
(Shi Yi), which explore the structure of the trigrams and hexagrams
in various ways. These include an explicit formula for folding the six
lines of the hexagram back into a triad, by coupling the lines: first
and fourth; second and fifth; third and sixth. These dyads have a
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consistent arithmetical order, when calculated in accordance with

the reduced bino-decimal values generated above: 1 + 8 = 9; 2 + 7 =
9; 4 + 5 = 9. “What these six lines show is simply this, the way of the
three Powers.”
Summation to nine regularly serves as a confirmation within the
Shi Yi. For instance, in the section translated by Legge as ‘The Great
Appendix’:
52. The numbers (required) for Khien (or the undivided line)
amount to 216; those for Khwan (or the divided line), to 144.
Together they are 360, corresponding to the days of the year.
53. The number produced by the lines in the two parts (of
the Yî) amount to 11,520, corresponding to the number of all
things.
54. Therefore by means of the four operations is the Yî
completed. It takes 18 changes to form a hexagram.
144 = 1 + 4 + 4 = 9
216 = 2 + 1 + 6 = 9
360 = 3 + 6 + 0 = 9
11,520 = 1 + 1 + 5 + 2 + 0 = 9
18 = 1 + 8 = 9
There is much more to say on the importance of the number nine
in traditional Chinese culture, and beyond, but this is not the time.
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For now, it suffices to note that nine, or ‘Old Yang’, represents the
extreme point of maturity or positive accumulation in the Yi Jing,
and thus incipient transition. It thus echoes the function of the same
numeral within a zero-based decimal place-value system, strongly
reinforcing the impression that the Yi Jing assumes cultural
familiarity with such numeracy, and thus indicating its extreme
antiquity within China.
The six-phase cycle collapses into a triadic dynamic, whose stages
are the dyads 1&8, 2&7, 4&5. It is thus exactly isomorphic with the
paper, scissors, stone circuit, or rather, this latter can be seen as a
simplification of the Yi Jing dynamic tripod, treating each stage as
simple, rather than twinned. Where the bagua, or set of trigrams,
merely enumerates the set of 3-bit variants in static fashion, the
system of hexagrams rigorously constructs a triangular dynamic,
which is presented as a model of time.
If this is the ‘Chinese example’ at its most quintessential, then it
is exactly the Anglosphere example, as determined by Mead, except
carried to a far more exalted level of abstraction, or proto-
conceptual purity. Dynamic pluralism is under no threat from a
Chinese future, insofar as deep-cultural evidence counts for
anything. The reign of the tripod has scarcely begun.
September 23, 2011
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Numbo Zhongo
What’s the Chinese obsession with numbers all about?
August 22, 2013
Tianming
The Mandate of Heaven (天命) belongs indisputably amongst the
most ancient and conceptually richest political ideas. Dating back to
the transition from the Shang to Zhou dynasties, over three millennia
ago, it refounds the legitimacy of government in a conditional natural
right (in contrast to the unconditional natural right asserted by the
supplanted rulers of the Shang, and by divine right theorists in the
occidental world). Tianming invests regimes whose performance
expresses virtuous capability. Legitimacy is not, therefore, a formal
endowment, but a substantial discovery, demonstrated through the
art of government.
The claim that Tianming amounts to a realistic theory of political
legitimacy requires far more support than this tentative short post
will offer. In particular, it has to be defended against the objection
that Tianming reverts to a tautology, either empirically or logically
(or both). The Mandate of Heaven might be formulated: For so long
as a regime succeeds it will endure. Is this not, from the perspective
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of empirical history, an empty retrospective judgment, or sheer

redundancy, and under logical consideration, a thinly disguised
pleonasm?
Tianming could be dismissed on these grounds if its negation
were inconceivable. Then, indeed, it would communicate no
information. Yet this is not at all the case.
Perhaps the most relevant evidence for this is the provocative
thesis found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s L’ancien régime et la
Révolution that the successful promotion of social development is
more threatening to regime stability than the complete absence of
such achievement. This is an argument widely discussed in China
today, for obvious reasons. If it holds true, the idea of Tianming —
in anything other than its shallowest and most sophistical sense —
is directly contradicted, in theory and fact. Reciprocally, it has to be
acknowledged that the idea of Tianming poses an implicit challenge
to the Tocqueville thesis, subject to confirmation or disconfirmation
by historical events. The stakes of this (yet inarticulate?) controversy
could scarcely be higher.
An intriguing reflexivity enters into the topic at this point,
because the conditions for the confirmation of Tianming are related,
through intricate nonlinearities, to the prospects of the PRC regime.
Is development success rewarded or punished by ‘heaven’ (the
nature of things)? If the latter, dialectical ruin ensues, as the high
are brought low. If the former, economic ascent and political stability
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will have demonstrated their compatibility, revolutionary chaos will

be precluded, and the rebalancing of the world order towards the
western Pacific will continue. Under such conditions, there is every
reason to expect that global trends will be incrementally
‘Confucianized’ with international political thinking increasingly
inflected by Chinese characteristics. Simultaneously vindicated and
promoted, the idea of Tianming will then find a wider receptive
audience than it has ever known before.
August 22, 2013
Scary Chinese
Jeffrey Wasserstrom conducts a tour of Western dreams and
nightmares of China. Whilst the span of the oscillation is remarkable,
he finds the bipolar syndrome itself to be notably stable across time.
The upswing — Wasserstrom suggests — is associated with hopes
that ‘they’ are becoming more like ‘us’, but on the downswing:
… when the Western China Nightmare is dominant, the risk is that
observers and the general public lose sight of how varied the Chinese
populace is and instead grow accustomed to demonised images of
China … filled not with flesh-and-blood Chinese individuals but a
horde of soulless mannequins. […] Stories that dehumanise China’s
population tout court are also periodically published, though only
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rarely do they do so as overtly as a 1999 Weekly Standard article

which described the Chinese people as prone to ‘Borg-like’ group-
think conformity.
When calmly dissected and investigated, durable stereotypes
usually have something significant to say, about both their subjects
and their objects. Western sinophobia is an especially rich hunting
ground for cultural explorers, and the importance of understanding
it is only going to grow. Urban Future will be bringing sustained
attention to this same topic in the months ahead.
September 30, 2013
Sino-Robotics
Somewhere deep in the task-queue here (at UF) is a post, or article,
exploring the resonances between phobic Occidental responses to
Orientals and robots (as promised, unreliably, in this post). Some
grist for the mill:
Last week, the giant Chinese internet and gaming company
Tencent published an article on its news portal about the rising price
of consumer goods in China – not exactly earth-shattering news,
except that the article was written by a robot called Dreamwriter.
[…] Dreamwriter wrote the 1000-word article, using algorithms that
search online sources and data, in just 60 seconds. The article quoted
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economists and highlighted trends in a style indistinguishable from a

human financial reporter. […] According to the South China Morning
Post, Dreamwriter’s article was the first robot-written news article
in the Chinese language.
The Morning Post quoted a Chinese journalist who said China’s
state-run media doesn’t give reporters much creative license, which
makes them easily replaceable by robot writers: “You know, many
reporters working for government-run newspapers across the
country usually copy and paste the statements and news press. They
are not allowed to express doubt or really investigate reports against
the authorities. So robot reporters could easily replace a lot of
Chinese reporters like this nationwide.”
September 18, 2015
Oppressionless
Zachary Keck is bemused by the findings of a recent Global Scan
poll that finds broad Chinese satisfaction with the country’s media
and surveillance environment. Among the findings, 76% of Chinese
feel “free of surveillance” compared with only 54% of Americans. To
the extent that oppression can be subjectively evaluated, Chinese
‘totalitarian communism’ isn’t doing it very well.
There might be some way to mine into this information rigorously,
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but that’s beyond the scope of the discussion so far. Keck muses
about the possibility that the Edward Snowden leaks have soured
Western opinion, while “it’s hard to know how much of the views can
be attributed to different expectations Chinese have about freedom
when compared to their counterparts in democratic countries, and
how much of their answers are attributable to general ignorance
about the Chinese government’s surveillance and censorship. I
suspect both factors probably play a role but that the former is likely
more important.”
An alternative explanation is that Western cultures have
developed in a way that sanctifies dissent, and finds the
exemplification of freedom in the act or expression of defiance. The
alternative, Chinese assumption, that freedom is mostly about being
left alone, is classically captured by the proverb “The mountains are
high, and the Emperor is far away” (山高皇帝远). Unsurprisingly, this
saying is thought to have originated in entrepreneurial Zhejiang
Province (perhaps the most civilized place in the world).
Why would anybody but an idiot go looking for the emperor
simply to poke a finger in his eye? Don’t do anything like that, and
there’s not much chance of encountering oppression. Some flaky
Internet connectivity doesn’t feel like a “a boot stamping on a human
face — forever.” It feels like a minor inconvenience. At least, that’s
what the poll evidence suggests.
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April 4, 2014
Twitter cuts (#10)

Arthur Chu on an old saw:
There's a lot of news happening, never a good thing. It's not

actually a Chinese curse but the sentiment is accurate
#InterestingTimes
— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) August 12, 2014
(Wikipedia agrees with Chu.) Given the authenticity of the

wisdom, the inauthenticity of the attribution is especially
interesting. Is this a sign of Orientalism as a creative cultural
influence?
August 12, 2014
‘Not Religious’
This map has been doing the rounds:
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(UF source here (via this))

Explanation at the original site:
Not religious, in this sense, is everyone who is left over when you
have counted adherents. The World Christian Database, on which
the data is based, use the term ‘nonreligionists’ and defines it as ‘
… encompassing the 2 varieties of unbeliever: (a) agnostics or
secularists or materialists, who are nonreligious but not hostile to
religion, and (b) atheists or anti-religious/anti-religionists opposed
or hostile to religion.’
Territory size shows the proportion of people who are not religious
living there
there. [Absolute numbers seem not to be a factor.]
Even after this gloss, ‘not religious’ is a dubious category, which
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tends to be defined in terms of Western (Abrahamic-Theistic) norms.

(Is Chinese medicine, for example, in any serious way ‘non-
religious’?) Nevertheless, the distribution is striking. Any conception
of China’s rise (and it’s probable world cultural impact) is going to
be missing something important if it neglects what is really jutting
through here.
October 7, 2014
Hea
Heavvenly Signs
The American Interest discusses the Chinese crackdown on Church
of the Almighty God (also known as Eastern Lightning) after a
recruiting operation turned murderous. The general background is
most probably familiar, but it’s important enough to run through
again:
The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case,
five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but
we only need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give
Beijing officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic
Taiping Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of
the Almighty God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong
Xiuquan claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against
the Qing dynasty. At least twenty million people died in the ensuing
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conflict.
Eastern Lightning, like its Taiping predecessor, grounds itself in
Christian texts and ideas. The “god” now born as a woman to bring
the apocalypse is seen by the sect as the third in a series: Yahweh,
who gave the Old Testament; Jesus who came to save humanity and
now the third has come to judge the human race and bring the end
of the world. The rapid growth of this movement shows the degree
to which many Chinese feel alienated from the official ideology, the
appeal of Christian messages in China, and the sense of popular
unease as China changes rapidly. There is nothing here to make
Beijing feel good.
There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be
of such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties
has given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns
in Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people
and many distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the
ages, seeks to identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase
of a dynasty’s cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of
the classic signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive
culture of corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.
Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from
social revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the
religious question — originally identical with tolerance — into ever
deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any attribution
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of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no

more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite
rapidly changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained
far greater socio-political pertinence, largely because the common
millenarian root of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.
It is possible that the Chinese approach to dissident religion
remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little
doubt, however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to
a traditional Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary
Western one. The gravity of the stakes ensures it.
October 14, 2014
Gloom-Core
It isn’t necessary to assume more than a sliver of positive feedback
for confidence to make a significant difference. Once the future
looks dim enough, it’s irresistibly rational to cannibalize what’s left
of it, and then the term ‘death spiral’ begins to acquire real force. Of
course, there are a great many other dynamic tangles at work, and
popular sentiment is likely far more of an indicator than a driver. Still:
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Ideas arising in a social environment quagmired in radical

pessimism (or the opposite) probably require some careful
discounting to correct for skew.
(Via Zero Hedge)
October 28, 2014
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白左
“Baizuo” — the greatest thing in 2017 so far.
Makes me think the world might pull through okay.
It’s all (amazingly) good, but this is probably the kernel:
The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu
users, which include some of the most representative perceptions
of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used
generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as
immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no
sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical
humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy
their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with
political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards
Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the
welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they
are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the
world and think they are saviours”.
ADDED: Baizuo at Weimerica, and Spandrell’s place.
May 14, 2017
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CHAPTER THREE - ECONOMY AND

POLICY
Chimerica
A new world order hits the buffers
“For nearly 30 years we have had two Global Strategies working in

a symbiotic fashion that has created a virtuous economic growth
spiral. Unfortunately, the economic underpinnings were flawed and
as a consequence, the virtuous cycle has ended. It is now in the
process of reversing and becoming a vicious downward economic
spiral,” writes Gordon T. Long, in a guest post at Zero Hedge. “One of
the strategies is the Asian Mercantile Strategy. The other is the US
Dollar Reserve Currency Strategy.”
The system that Long sees unraveling has been dubbed
‘Chimerica’ by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, in reference to
the mythical hybrid beast of antiquity. Chimerica emerged through
the dynamic coupling of the US and Chinese economies, dominating
the wave of globalization in the post-command economy world. It
has served as a powerful engine of development, spreading
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prosperity beyond the narrow enclave of the (Euro-American) ‘First

World’ and facilitating the global roll-out of digital network
technologies, from personal computing and mobile telephony to the
Internet. In recent years, however, its unsustainable features have
become prominently visible.
Stripped to its fundamentals, Chimerica amounted to something
akin to an informal geopolitical ‘deal’ that simultaneously promoted
the international status of the US Dollar and domestic Chinese
industrialization. The principal financial mechanism was the
recycling of Chinese trade surpluses into US Treasury Bonds, in a
process that accentuated Chinese competitiveness (by restraining
the rise of the Yuan) and suppressed US inflation (preserving the
credibility of the USD). This enabled Chinese industrial expansion to
proceed at a far greater speed than its domestic market could have
supported, whilst providing US governments with the latitude to run
a chronically loose monetary policy immunized against the prospect
of currency collapse. The Chinese manufacturing and US banking
sectors were the most obvious beneficiaries. Both prospered
conspicuously.
As Niall Ferguson wrote in November 2008, in the early days of
the world financial crisis:
“At the heart of this crisis is the huge imbalance between the
United States, with its current account deficit in excess of
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1 percent of world gross domestic product, and the surplus

countries that finance it: the oil exporters, Japan and
emerging Asia. Of these, the relationship between China and
America has become the crucial one. More than anything
else, it has been China’s strategy of dollar reserve
accumulation that has financed America’s debt habit.
Chinese savings were a key reason U.S. long-term interest
rates stayed low and the borrowing binge kept going. Now
that the age of leverage is over, ‘Chimerica’ — the partnership
between the big saver and the big spender — is key.”
Having reached a state of crisis, Chimerica seems certain to unwind.

This might occur either through a measured rebalancing that
increases Chinese domestic consumption whilst reducing US deficit
spending, or as a messy disintegration — involving sudden demand
contraction, currency wars, and escalating mutual recrimination.
Whatever the eventual outcome, a refashioned world order is an
inevitable – which is to say, definitional – result.
Whilst Ferguson hedges his bets, Gordon Long spells out a
specific and ominous forecast, in which the virtuous cycle of
Chimerican globalization reverses into a vicious ‘death spiral’. As
‘debt saturation’ closes down the option of policy continuity, the
actions of the US Federal Reserve become manifestly ineffective,
self-contradictory, and ultimately paralyzed. The long-postponed
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process of currency destruction then begins in earnest. Long offers

a useful checklist of milestones on the road to ruin (proceeding from
financial, through economic, to political calamity):
1. A deteriorating US dollar
2. Rising US interest rates
3. Sustained and chronic US unemployment
4. Asian inflation, especially in food where 60% of Asian
disposable income is spent
5. Pressures on Asian currency pegs
6. Collapsing values of US Reserve holdings
By the end of this process, the world will have been violently
catapulted out of a financial architecture dating back 70 years, and a
dominant monetary philosophy that has prevailed over the course of
centuries.
“The eventuality of a fiat currency crisis is ordained and has been
since the early warnings in 2007 of the Financial Crisis,” Long insists.
“The roadmap has been clear to all that actually wanted to look.”
June 1, 2011
Handling China
Handle’s epic walk-through of Edward Luttwak on the rise of China
is simply magnificent. If the Chinese foreign policy establishment
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doesn’t put it on a study list, the world is a more dangerous place

than it needs to be. It says impressive things about Luttwak that his
work is able to prompt commentary of such astounding quality. (Yes,
it’s long, but you have to read it.)
As a Sinophile, and even (far more reservedly) a sympathizer with
the post-Mao PRC regime, it’s disturbing to me how convincing I find
this analysis. China really could blow itself up, along with a big chunk
of the world’s sole truly dynamic region, by mis-playing its excellent
foreign policy hand (in pretty much exactly the way Handle lays out).
In particular, its ability to avoid the disastrous course of Germany’s
rise is the most pressing question of the age, and the signs so far are
not remotely encouraging. Having dug itself quite unnecessarily into
a trap of increasingly embittered anti-China balancing, 2013 looks
very clearly to have been the worst year since the beginning of
Reform and Opening for Chinese geo-strategic decision making.
Reversing course is hard. The important thing for the Chinese
leadership to understand is that challenges to global hegemony are
almost inevitably catastrophic. There has not been a single case in
modern history where such a transition has succeeded, except
through close strategic alignment with the preceding hegemon.
Holland passed the torch to the UK, which passed it on in turn to
the USA. If China envisages an alternative path for itself — rooted
in basic antagonism — it is shelving the lessons of modernity, and
turning to something else, where ancient cycles lose themselves in
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the fog-banks of myth. Such deep historical precedent is far too

poorly understood to offer anything like helpful advice. The atavistic
popular feeling it rouses, however, is certainly strong enough to drive
developments over a cliff.
US global hegemony has lost the Mandate of Heaven. The only
way it could trawl it back is through the unforced errors of its
enemies — which is to say, those who have blundered into being
positioned as its enemies. On present trends, these foul-ups are all-
too-likely to be made. That would mean world war, naturally tending
to thermonuclear ruin, and the end of civilization. China would be
finished as anything beyond a broken warning about what non-
submission to the democratic zeitgeist leads to (having done to
political sanity what Germany did to bio-realism). Through this
climax of idiocy, the human species would have melodramatically
disqualified itself from any significant historical agency going
forward. Military robotics (aka ‘Skynet’, emerging from the war)
would be the only intelligent prospect left.
December 20, 2013
Emergent Properties
Economics is complicated, but at least in certain respects it’s not
that complicated. Chart almost any market-sensitive variable and
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what emerges is a wave pattern, varying in amplitude, frequency,

and trend, but clearly conforming to a general pattern, mixing an
irregular rhythm with a random walk.
The irregularity and randomness are predicated by elementary
economic theory, since determinism and regularity are strictly
equivalent to bank notes lying on the street, no sooner glimpsed
than seized. Zero-risk speculative opportunities – of the kind any
intelligible pattern presents – are quickly arbitraged back to noise,
the equilibrium state, in which all significant information is absorbed
into price.
The residual rhythm is more unexpected, and attests to an
irrational factor, stimulating intellectual and practical controversy.
Regardless of such disputes, it is possible to be confident about two
indefinite points. Firstly, market rhythms are (almost) never easy to
accurately predict, and thus exploit. Secondly, off-trend deviations
will eventually be corrected, unless – very rarely – the trend itself
changes shape. The qualification of the second point deserves special
examination, because unrealistic expectations concerning trend-line
transformations lie at the root of the most notorious error in
practical economic reasoning – the belief (typically hardening in
direct proportion to the inflation of a bubble) that “this time is
different.” This slogan, which encapsulates the stubborn and
disastrously expensive syndrome of downwards correction denial,
should be written on the shirts of those who will soon be losing them.
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Any market wave of sufficient amplitude crests in a bubble, which

‘pops’ in a crash. Unless this time is different – and it won’t be – China
will inevitably experience such an event. Speculative commentary
on the nature and timing of this event has increased markedly in
volume as the global economic environment has deteriorated. Yet
prediction is especially difficult in this case. China’s market economy
is just a little over three decades old, with only occasional rough
patches interrupting near-continuous, rapid growth. Disentangling
the unsustainable component or rhythmic upswing from the
underlying development path involves unusually hazy estimation,
given the incompleteness of the pattern perceived.
In an article published in Caixin and Marketwatch (via), Andy Xie
makes a substantial contribution to this discussion. He identifies
China’s financial vulnerability with a massive asset bubble in the
property market, but remains sanguine about its ultimate
consequences. He argues persuasively that a very substantial write-
down of real estate values, although inevitably disruptive, would
have a tonic effect on the Chinese economy almost immediately, with
fast recovery to follow.
Because China’s market economy does not yet have an
identifiable long-term trend, Xie estimates the scale of the country’s
property bubble by comparing the appreciation of real estate prices
to wage growth:
China has experienced rapid increase in land prices in the past
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decade. Some of it can be justified by income and productivity

growth due to the country joining the World Trade Organization.
Most of the increase is a bubble phenomenon.
While household income may have tripled in a decade, the
average land price has risen by over thirty times. Whatever income
growth is to come cannot justify the current price of land. Nor can a
supply shortage.
China has no shortage of land. High-rise urbanization makes
demand for land quite low relative to the population. The sustainable
land value is probably 70% to 80% below current levels.
The role of the property market in contemporary Chinese social
life is a topic of widespread interest, both inside and outside the
country. Because marriage prospects (for men) are tightly bound to
their ability to provide a home, some very deeply-rooted Darwinian
forces are harnessed to the appreciation of property values, making
them an overwhelmingly dominant factor in economic life. For this
reason, among others, a real estate crash that brought prices down
to somewhere between a third and a fifth of their current level
promises to be traumatizing and liberating in equal measure.
Xie recommends that China push through the pain, as quickly as
realistically possible:
Some argue that the property bubble is essential to China’s
economic prosperity. This is utter nonsense. While the property
industry has become bigger relative to the economy over the past
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decade, it mostly consumes resources and doesn’t enhance overall

productivity.
It is the main driver for China’s inflation. If it shrinks, the economy
may suffer temporarily. However, overall productivity will rise. The
resulting income growth will bring back more sustainable economic
prosperity.
Also, a bubble bursts sooner or later. Government help merely
prolongs it, as the Chinese government did in 2008. And the longer a
bubble lasts, the more damage it inflicts upon bursting. The economy
is suffering because of what happened in 2008.
The country has sufficient capacity to absorb whatever non-
performing loans may come out of this bubble bursting. It could be
20 trillion to 30 trillion yuan ($3.26 trillion-$4.89 trillion). But the
waste in the bubble economy could have been 5 trillion yuan.
China could overcome the legacy of the bubble in four to five
years. Further, better productivity from post-bubble reforms could
add another 2 trillion to 3 trillion yuan per annum. The post-bubble
recovery could happen in three years.
Japan couldn’t get its economy growing after its property bubble
burst. The main reason is that its per capita income was already
among the highest in the world.
China is still a middle-income economy. Improving productivity is
not that difficult. Reaching per capita income of $20,000 by 2030,
excluding inflation, is quite possible, which would make China the
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Reignition
largest economy in the world.
August 2, 2013
383
At Project Syndicate, Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng provide a brief
commentary on China’s economic policy outlook:
At the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the
Chinese Communist Party, currently under way in Beijing, President
Xi Jinping is unveiling China’s reform blueprint for the next decade.
In advance of its release, the Development Research Center of the
State Council, China’s official think tank, presented its own reform
proposal – the so-called “383 plan” – which offers a glimpse of the
direction that the reforms will take.
Despite a keen sense of the obstacles ahead, the writers are
clearly impressed:
But the kind of deep and comprehensive reforms that China
needs are always difficult to implement, given that they necessarily
affect vested interests. In order to win public support for reforms,
thereby maximizing the chances of success, the government must
offer clear, accessible explanations of its goals. … The Research
Center takes a holistic approach to the reform process, viewing it
as both a systemic change and a change of mindset. Translating its
632
proposals – which are as profound as Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms

– into simple, straightforward terms is no easy feat, but one that the
383 plan handles with relative deftness.
It’s almost impossible not to read the comparison to the 1978
reforms as hyperbole, especially when it is quickly conceded that
“rapid, sweeping transformation is not realistic in a country of 1.3
billion people.” Nevertheless, the proposed direction of change is
clearly encouraging, most obviously because it seeks so
unambiguously to deepen the market-oriented policy approach of
the Reform Era, by expanding the sphere of decentralized price-
sensitive decision making (while contracting the scope of political
discretion).
“The ‘383’” — they explain:
… is shorthand for the plan’s content. First, the proposal describes
the relationships between the Chinese economy’s three main actors:
government, business, and the market. Second, it identifies eight key
areas of reform: governance, competition policy, land, finance, public
finance, state assets, innovation, and liberalization of international
trade and finance. Third, it highlights three correlated goals: easing
external pressure for domestic policy changes, building social
inclusiveness through a basic social-security scheme, and reducing
inefficiency, inequality, and corruption through major rural land
reform.
Shanghai’s new Free-Trade Zone also gets a quick but glowing
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mention.
Given the near-inevitability of serious disruption in the world
economy over the next few years, as well as some overdue bubble-
popping in China (mostly in real estate), even a cautious crawl in
the right direction looks attractive. Among the reasons not to rush
anywhere is the degenerate state of monetary theory worldwide,
which has lead to the adoption of disastrously misconceived policies
in almost every major economy. Hedging makes a lot of sense right
now.
Once the macroeconomic house of cards collapses, there will be
space for sounder ideas to re-emerge. Judging by China’s
accumulation of (both public and private) precious metal holdings,
along with its flexible approach to new (and ‘hard’) digital currency,
the intellectual germs of a near-future post-fiat monetary regime
could already be in place. That would really be something solid to
build upon.
ADDED: “China will deepen its economic reform to ensure that
the market will play a ‘decisive’ role in allocating resources, according
to a communique issued after the third plenary session of the 18th
CPC Central Committee …” (Xinhua)
November 12, 2013
634
Mark
Market-L
et-Leninism
eninism
Confused Westerners, wondering how the Xi-Li leadership’s quasi-
Maoist political initiatives square with its commitment to economic
reform, will find their quandaries resolved by Zachary Keck’s
excellent analysis in The Diplomat. Regardless of liberal assumptions
to the contrary, enforcing Central Party discipline on China’s
regional fiefdoms is tightly aligned with the reform agenda. (Realism
in this regard is advanced by the acknowledgement that
authoritarian liberalization is the only kind there has ever been,
anywhere.)
Xi and the central Party’s authority over local leaders will go a
long way toward determining the scope and extent of the economic
reforms China undertakes in the years ahead. Xi and Li have both
made it clear that they understand the nature of reforms China
needs to sustain growth. Their ability to act on this understanding
is a different matter entirely. Although they will face stiff resistance
from many segments of society, local leaders are notable in that they
are involved in nearly every major area of reform. […] Thus,
overcoming local government resistance will be a crucial part of Xi’s
ability to undertake the necessary economic reforms. Xi and the
central leadership seem to understand this given their year-long
effort to consolidate their control over provincial and other local
leaders.
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Reignition
(The entire article is excellent — read it all.)
November 13, 2013
Quote notes (#91)

Panda-hugger Martin Jacques on the global tide:
A month ago, China overtook the US to become the largest
economy in the world by one measure. By 2030 it is projected that
the Chinese economy will be twice as large as America’s and larger
than the European Union and America combined, accounting for one
third of global GDP. This is the world that is coming into being, that
we must learn to adapt to and thrive in. It is a far cry from the comfort
zone we are used to, a globe dominated by the West and Japan: in
the Seventies, between them they were responsible for two thirds of
global GDP; by 2030 it will be a mere one third
During the preponderant part of the modern period, China’s
civilizational competences were oriented to keeping the Pandora’s
box of runaway modernization firmly sealed. Western intervention
put an end to that, and the escape is now almost certainly
irreversible. That is why, in broad outline, Jacques’ prognosis is
correct. An accommodation to fate is in order.
(‘Doom’ — as tagged — means no more than fate, as we have
begun to explain, or at least to explore.)
636
June 23, 2014
Phase Change
China is reaching the end of its current (post-1979) growth process,
argues Michael Pettis, and the direction it takes next will be decided
in large part by its approach to the country’s debt over-hang.
Dismissing glib talk about a magical ‘socialization’ of the
debt-burden, Pettis insists that the problem of assigning losses is
irreducible, and the only serious question is where these costs will
be concentrated. Irrespective of the specific policy mechanisms
selected, there is essentially a three-way-option: someone has to
pay, and it will either be the country’s households, its small-and-
medium enterprises (SMEs), or its large state-owned enterprises
(SOEs).
Of course if the losses are assigned to the household sector, China
cannot rebalance and it will be more than ever dependent on
investment to drive growth. This is why I reject absolutely the
argument that because China resolved the last banking crisis
“painlessly”, it can do so again.
[… ] Beijing can also assign the losses to SMEs. In effect this is
what it started to do in 2010-11 when wages rose sharply (SMEs
tend to be labor intensive). It is widely recognized that SMEs are
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the most efficient part of the Chinese economy, however, and that
assigning the losses to them will undermine the engine of China’s
future productivity growth.
[…] Finally Beijing can assign the losses to the state sector, by
reforming the houkou [sic] system, land reform, interest rate and
currency reform, financial sector governance reform, privatization,
etc. Most of the Third Plenum reforms are simply ways of assigning
the cost of rebalancing, which includes the recognition of earlier
losses, to the state sector. This is likely however to be politically
difficult. China’s elite generally benefits tremendously from control
of state sector assets, and they are likely to resist strongly any
attempt to assign to them the losses.
According to Pettis’ (non-predictive) analysis, re-igniting Chinese
growth in a new phase will be inseparable from an intra-
establishment struggle over the responsibility of the SOEs to cover
the legacy costs of the country’s economic reformation to date.
Status quo resistance to this compelling developmental logic is sure
to provide critical context for the actions of China’s new Xi-Li
administration, as it consolidated power among unusually
challenging circumstances.
July 15, 2014
638
Twitter cuts (#16)

If street protest in Hong Kong continues on its present course, a lot
of people are going to get hurt, for nothing.
If Beijing doesn't give in, looks bad in front of world. If does,

whole China knows protesting works, ricks rule. How`d you
choose to act?
— Offbeat China (@OffbeatChina) September 29, 2014
Fear people on the Hong Kong streets don't understand what

they are dealing with
— Bill Bishop (@niubi) September 28, 2014
Asking excited students to take a step back, and think, doesn’t

have a great track record of success. The alternative, however, is
catastrophic. The window of opportunity for sanity to prevail is
closing fast.
ADDED: No doubt politically incorrect, but admirably pithy:
Dear Hong Kong, Democracy sucks. Go back to work.

— Henry Dampier (@henrydampier) September 29, 2014
September 29, 2014
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Reignition
China and the Net

At ChinaFile, following the World Internet Conference, in Wuzhen,
a fascinating discussion — by English-speaking foreigners — on what
is arguably the crucial issue of the 21st century: How will China
‘manage’ its relationship with the Internet? It is hard to imagine a
problem which throws economic and political agendas into more
turbulent conflict with each other, or one that more clearly reveals
the ultimate nonlinear dependencies between the two. The entire
ideological history of the world seems to be lensed through it, just as
the future of the world ‘will be’* decided by how it works out.
Some useful background, conveying the sheer scale and
dynamism of the Chinese Internet, can be found here. As the
ChinaFile commentators make clear, this is a topic howling with
paradox-torsion — and thus one peculiarly liable to unleash creative
surprises.
* Scare quotes included to fend off Templexity pedants (this blog’s
cute alternative to grammar Nazis).
December 4, 2014
Digital So
Sovvereignty
Even skeptics (such as this blog) can note the importance of the
640
discussion initiated here:

Soviet Union had cinema, the PRC has the Internet.
I personally think that the international audience still largely
underestimate the importance of what China has achieved policy-
wise for the global landscape of Internet. Concepts like “digital digital
so
sovvereignty
ereignty” that were proposed by China are now emerging from
post-Snowden discussions in proposals at the highest levels in EU
countries. Russia has already embraced it. Of course, the US industry
still need the myth of a “global village” to push products worldwide.
Still, I am curious to see how it evolves as the ad market will continue
to shrink, and as foreign relationships with the US are likely to get
less friendly in the next years. While EU and other countries (esp in
Africa and South America) start realizing that the US-first model of
the Internet is too much a disadvantage for them, the only other real-
world case they can turn to is China. In many regards, China looks
like the future of the Internet. …
It’s tempting for Westerners (and especially Anglos) to see
Chinese government Internet policy as simply backward. That’s
almost certainly an inadequate framework for making sense of the
most explosive Web-growth in the world.
Among other developments, there’s this:
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June 30, 2016
Drone Business
Whatever the administrative obstacles on the path of the Chinese
642
Internet, the basic infrastructure of the coming robot-facilitated e-

commerce system seems to be coming together remarkably
smoothly. For instance, this.
(This might be UF’s favorite advertisement of all time.)
More here, and here.
Telecommercial drone-logistics (and the idiots wanted flying
cars).
February 5, 2015
Quote note (#327)

Urbit perspective on the Chinese century:
The closest thing to a general-purpose personal server today is
probably the Chinese service WeChat. If you don’t know much about
WeChat, you should really watch this NYT video.
Catch-up would be sensible. (Abandoning the bizarre Western
prejudice that the Internet is primarily for political expression would
be a start.)
Pointed criticism follows. If Urbit delivers, we could actually see
some geographically-distributed competition, which is otherwise
looking increasingly unlikely. 2017 should tell, apparently.
February 3, 2017
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Switch
Long-anticipated, and now officially recognized:
The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy
to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S.
Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on
the planet.
It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.
The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest
numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national
economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this
year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the
U.S.A. […] As recently as 2000, [the US] produced nearly three times
as much as the Chinese.
To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for
16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-
power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S. […] This latest
economic earthquake follows the development last year when China
surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade. […]
… the moment came sooner than … predicted. China’s recent
decision to bring gross domestic product calculations in line with
international standards has revealed activity that had previously
gone uncounted.
I’m expecting more discomfort than triumphalism from a China
644
that is being pushed into the lime-light faster than it is ready for. The
political advantages of catch-up might not match the economic ones,
but they are by no means inconsiderable.
Some gentle snark from Glenn Reynolds: “Well, in recent years
both China and the United States have been fundamentally
transformed.”
December 5, 2014
Death V
Valle
alleyy
Strictly gossip-level, but the bold predictions gets it a mention. It’s
Breitbart, so understatement isn’t going to feature:
San Francisco, heartland of wacky progressive politics but also
home to some of America’s most innovative technology companies,
is in trouble. Not just trouble, actually, but serious shit. […] And the
main reason is China. The Wall Street Journal has a good explainer
on what’s going on over there, but the basic thing you need to
understand is that a lot of glossy American stocks are about to take a
tumble, especially tech stocks.
The core of the analyis:
Fear and greed run the stock market, which is, of course, exactly
as it should be: they’re the instincts upon which capitalism is built.
But that’s a problem for companies who suffer dramatically when
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global events conspire to shunt investors into safer bets. […]

Businesses like Twitter and Facebook have always been grotesquely
overvalued, according to conventional analyses. Technology
companies get away with hilarious valuations mainly thanks to
upward pressure; the inflation happens right at the start when
companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars on multimillion dollar
valuations, despite not earning a penny in revenue and having no
immediate plans to do so. […] That’s in outrageous contradiction to
their price-to-earnings ratio, one traditional and very reliable way
of valuing companies. […] Tech stocks have absurdly high price-to-
earnings ratios, and any blip in the market has a much bigger effect
on high PE stocks than low PE stocks. So investors are counting on
massive future growth that will likely never come and betting against
global events that shave billions off the value of frothy investments.
It could get a little rough.
August 25, 2015
Huge News (if true

true))
China is bailing out of US Treasury paper (ZH reports).
August 27, 2015
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CHAPTER FOUR - URBAN

DEVEL
DEVELOPMENT
OPMENT
Re-Animator (P
(Part
art 1)
Can Expo liv

livee again?
Different truths are ‘harsh’ to different people. For Chinese, one

truth so harsh that it escaped public recognition at the moment
where it most mattered is that almost nobody, outside the country,
cared very much about the 2010 World Expo. By the time China
eagerly but belatedly seized its chance to take up the torch for this
global festival of modern civilization, Expo’s epoch of radiant
significance had passed. Harsher still: this was the basic fact, and
principal conditioning reality of the event, rippling with ominous
implications for the future of modernity and the international
response to China’s re-awakening. Ameliorating it are more
shadowy, contrary truths – first among them that Shanghai had
already discounted a tired world’s Expo indifference, and worked
around it, in order to make the event into an opportunity for
something else, and for itself.
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The history of World Expo, from London’s Great Exhibition of

1851, is too abundantly documented to rehearse here. The basic
pattern, however, is not difficult to outline, since it conforms to a
relatively smooth curve from meteoric rise (1851-1940) into gradual
decay (1958 onwards), almost perfectly tracking the trajectory of
modernist optimism, from its ignition in the promethean forge of
industrial revolution through to its expiry in postmodern /
postcolonial cynicism, elite masochism, and apologia.
Importantly, this has remained an essentially Western story,
despite the consistent globalism of its cultural ambitions. The ascent
of Western, globalizing, industrial capitalism, in its European and
American waves, was reflected in World Exhibitions of heart-
stopping glory. The crisis and decline of the West – both relative and
absolute — has thrown the event into marginality, neglect, and self-
doubt, clasped in the death-grip of an embittered and self-mortifying
anti-modernism. Most crucially — and astoundingly — the long-
evident dawning of the historical revitalizing and frenetically
modernizing ‘Asian Century’ seems to have had a negligible impact
upon the declinist ‘Grand Narrative’ incarnated in World Expo, which
has plunged ever deeper into twitchily gesticulating, hypersensitive
panic at the supposed social and environmental calamity of
modernistic growth.
The irony of this situation merits explicit emphasis. Precisely
when globalization shifted from questionable aspiration and
648
ideology to definite historical fact, with the emergence of robust,

non-Western economic development cores, first in Pacific East Asia,
then South Asia, and beyond, the project of cosmopolitan
modernization underwent a seemingly irremediable delegitimation
in the court of approved ‘world’ opinion. Apparently, if the West
cannot any longer strut across the world stage with invincible and
unchallenged confidence, the only acceptable alternative option is
hair-shirts for all. If this epitome of triumphant dog-in-the-manger
resentment does not exemplify ‘cultural hegemony’ at its most
potent and most toxic, it is hard to imagine what might.
An overwhelming abundance of public evidence attests to the
implacable momentum of Expo degeneration, although most of this
data resists tidy quantification. Since the end of World War II, the
original purpose of the event, which was to promote industrial
modernization worldwide through a comprehensive public
exhibition of advanced productive technologies, structural
engineering, manufactures, and commodities, has been
progressively phased-out, to be replaced by an agenda that reflects
the concerns of inter-governmental bureaucracies, national
diplomatic services, and tourism boards. Public relations displays
have been systematically substituted for technological exhibitions,
and the number of significant mechanical and product innovations
achieving popular exposure through Expo – once substantial — has
fallen to near-zero. Expo themes have been steadily stripped of their
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Reignition
associations with accumulative materialism and refashioned into

earnest exhortations for moral and social transformation, as an
event that was initially designed to celebrate modernity has
increasingly come to apologize for it. Predictably enough, this
bureaucratically-alchemized transmutation of a festival into lament
has been accompanied by a precipitous collapse of popular interest
and engagement. Audiences that once flooded in to catch a vision of
the future, now avoid an event that musters all the allure of a United
Nations teach-in.
In the West, this is all tediously familiar. Scarcely anyone pays
attention to Expo anymore, or cares much about it. Perhaps most,
if jolted into an opinion on the matter, would vaguely approve of
the politically correct course the event has taken, although not
sufficiently, of course, to ever entertain the prospect of attending
one. After all, few Westerners believe in modernity anymore, world
trends distress them, and Expo seems roughly as relevant to their
anxieties as the prospect of Mars colonization.
In the East, things are more puzzling. Societies undergoing rapid
modernistic development make natural Expo hosts, as demonstrated
consistently throughout the history of the event. There has never
been a great World Expo that has not broadly corresponded to a
moment of exceptional national and urban flourishing. Why, then,
has Expo not undergone a profound Asiatic revitalization, restoring
it to former glories? Why has the western Pacific Rim not captured
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Expo, re-tooling it into a promotional vehicle for its own

developmental prospects, as America did in the early 20th century?
Weighed by sheer visitor numbers, the two largest World Expos
in history have been East Asian. Yet the moribund, guilt-wracked
pathos of Occidental decline continues to dominate the event. Japan
spent its Expo 1970 attempting to prove that it could out-do even
the West in growth-sapping sanctimoniousness (as its economy
would later demonstrate), whilst the mood in post-Expo 2010
Shanghai seems remarkably devoid of any euphoric sense of
accomplishment, and more akin to that which might be expected
from a group of schoolchildren freshly escaped from an abnormally-
uninspired six-month lecture on ethically-guided behavioral
rectification, delivered by an international Mandarinate. Having just
executed the largest discrete event in human history, the
predominant feelings are dutiful relief and anticlimax, numbed by
something like deliberate amnesia. In any case, there’s Shanghai to
get on with, so why waste time remembering Expo? Doesn’t that just
stink up the joint with the odor of Western death?
(Some suggestions, tentative answers, still more downside, and a
lot more upside, to come.)
August 4, 2011
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Reignition
Re-Animator (P
(Part
art 2)
Expo tr
transformers
ansformers – the unin
uninvited
vited guests
What was inside the UK national pavilion at Expo 2010? Did anyone
get in there? Maybe they could pass on the inside dope? Because one
thing is for sure, if ‘Anglosphere’ cultural resonances mean anything,
expectations can be pitched down to sub-basement levels. Like the
UK, Australia did a good — even excellent job – with the outside of
its pavilion, but its exhibition was, to be brutally frank, a disgrace.
Vacuous, patronizing, revoltingly sentimental, and despicably
cowardly – details would be nice, of course, but actually there
weren’t any — it served to perfectly illustrate the collapse of Expo,
from a festival of dynamic modernization to a whining indulgence
in modernity’s most destructive cultural pathologies. Where once
an exhibition, whether corporate or national, boldly declared: “This
is what we’re doing (isn’t it magnificent?),” now they exhaust their
attenuated energies exploring new, although consistently
unimaginative, ways of saying “sorry.” Narcissistic guilt flaps
pointlessly about the exhibition space like a shoal of stranded fish,
dying on a beach.
Incredibly, the USA pavilion was even worse. Not only was the
pavilion itself a prefabricated strip-mall insult, unworthy of
comparison with a second-tier Wallmart, but the exhibition inside
took the obsequious pandering of the Australians to a whole new
652
level. We wanted a space shuttle or a predator drone and they gave

us Hillary Clinton saying “ni hao” plus some nonsense about planting
flower-beds in the ghetto. Anyone who left this pavilion without
deep and abiding detestation for everything America represented
itself as being probably thinks Barney is a pretty cool guy. This was
the society once capable of staging the Chicago Expo of 1893, the
New York Expos of 1939-40 and 1964-5, of making incredible things
and exhibiting them, of depicting a compelling vision of the future,
and now … morbid Spenglerian reflections were inescapable.
Wandering amongst these monuments to misdirection, bland
meaninglessness, sugary PR, and piteous ‘please-don’t-hate-me’
concessions to the strident anti-modernist moralism of the age –
which is to say, to sheer, ruinous decadence — consciousness
pixilated out into semi-random dot-pattern, swirled
kaleidoscopically by a storm of frustration that could only be
relieved by barking out at the local Expo authorities, and beyond
them at the city, country, and region that was hosting this event
“Could you please stop being so danged polite!”
The West is obviously spiraling down the drain, and what it needs,
above anything, is some inspiring competition. In particular, and in
2010, it needed a western Pacific Rim, full-throttle development,
blazing-a-path-to-the-future Expo that – purely by inevitable
implication – maximized the humiliation of the senescent ‘developed’
world and jolted it with the roughest imaginable type of tough love
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from its path of decline. (Of course, the societies most in need of
this shock therapy are too lost in the enthralling minutiae of their
own degeneration to have noticed it, but still …) Instead, Expo 2010
remained scrupulously courteous, deferential to deeply decayed
Expo traditions, and respectful of the multicultural piety that even
the most wretched examples of systematic social failure have a
dignity of their own. What it lacked was a massive injection of pure,
unselfconscious, ethno-historical arrogance, based on unmoderated
confidence in what was being achieved.
Perhaps this can be stated even more offensively: modernization
should make people feel bad. Its most altruistic or epidemic function
is to so thoroughly deride and humiliate all of those who are failing
to modernize that eventually, after every excuse and projection has
been attempted and exhausted, behavior is changed. Backwardness
is made shameful, and thus corrected. That’s how history works. It
began that way among the jig-saw principalities of Renaissance
Europe, it worked that way in Japan (bringing modernization with
the Meiji restoration), in China, long denigrated for its ‘stagnant
Confucianism’, now big mummy of the Dragon economies, in India,
finally lashed psychologically out of its absurd ‘Hindu rate of growth’
by the China model, and everywhere else that has ever climbed out
of complacent sloth onto the developmental fast track. It’s long
overdue to start happening in the West, because what has been
happening there — for the best part of a century now — simply isn’t
654
working, and this chronic social failure is nowhere near clear, painful,
or embarrassing enough to the populations concerned.
Nothing would be better for the West than to have its nose
rubbed in its own decay, the more abusively and insensitively the
better. In order to accelerate the process, the entire treasure chest
of colonial condescension should be re-opened and rummaged
through, searching for whatever will best aggravate, provoke, and
catalyze transformation, perhaps with strong insinuations of racial
and cultural inferiority thrown in for spice. The lesson of history is
that the human species is comfortable with inertia, and generally
more than happy to gradually degenerate. One of the few things
that ever stops people, and turns them around, is the transparent
contempt trickling down from other, more dynamic societies. If Expo
needs a ‘social dimension’, that’s it.
No doubt 2010 is still too recent for alternative or counter-
factual history, for an Expo-punk (or X-punk) genre, searching out
everything that might have been re-animated through the event —
but the venture is irresistible. Call it Asia Unleashed 2010, an utterly
impolite assertion of new socio-geographical realities that
expresses, in raw and overwhelming style, the central truth of the
age: the simultaneous de-westernization and radical re-invigoration
of modernity.
Asia Unleashed could have borrowed heavily from the actual
Expo 2010, adopting almost everything that was created by the host,
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in fact, and much else beside. The China Pavilion, Theme Pavilions,
Urban Best Practices Area, Expo Cultural Center, Expo Center, Expo
Boulevard, Expo Museum, and site landscaping, as well as the
Shipping Pavilion, GM/SAIC Pavilion and exhibition, Telecoms
Pavilion, Oil Pavilion, Shanghai Corporate Pavilion with all its stuff,
Coca Cola Pavilion, plenty of the international pavilion designs, and
even a few of the internal exhibitions … all keepers. What gets
laughed out are the schmaltzy public relations videos, the sorry,
sorry, really truly sorry song and dance act, the weren’t we awful
performance, the Kumbaya Pavilion, the Environmental
Hypersensitivity Pavilion, the Victimological Grievance Pavilion, the
Beyond Growth Pavilion, the There Must Be A Gentler Way Pavilion,
any national or corporate pavilion without exhibition objects
(roughly half), almost everything bearing the imprint of tourist
boards, media studies graduates, or diplomatic services, and every
usage of solar panels that isn’t strictly tailored to commercial
exploitation on a massive scale. In addition, any national pavilion
based entirely on ethnic kitsch gets grouped together with others of
its kind in an exotic tourism area, because it’s admitting to a complete
absence of creative capability and needs to be mocked. No robots, no
platform: that’s the rule.
Asia Unleashed also needs a lot of things brought in, most of all
machines. Expo is all about machines, even though every Expo over
the last half-century has been pitifully deficient in this regard. It
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scarcely needs mentioning that the entire Expo site should be

pulsing, crawling, and twitching with robots of every type and scale,
from industrial goliaths, automated submarines and space vehicles,
through charismatic androids, to intelligent household appliances,
Go players, robopets, and insectiform mechanisms. To push the
process along, those countries and corporations with the laziest
robot exhibits can be publicly ridiculed over the PA system.
Expo is an exhibition, and its historical sickness is perfectly
tracked by the degeneration of this elementary conception into PR.
Organizers at all levels, from the pinnacle of the international Expo
bureaucracy (BIE) downwards, clearly need to be forcefully
reminded of the difference. For instance, video technology is an
entirely suitable object for Expo display, and videos themselves can
quite appropriately play a supportive, informative role. To center an
‘exhibition’ upon videos, however, especially when they have been
put together, using state-of-the-art advertising techniques, with the
entire purpose of selling a national or corporate brand through
image associations and spin, is a complete abnegation of
responsibility and should straightforwardly be banned, or at least
boycotted, derided, and rendered ineffective through inundating
contempt. The only acceptable center of an Expo display is an object,
preferably astonishing, fetched from the outer edge of industrial
capability in order to concretely represent the trajectory of material
progress. Displaying such objects – and thereby respecting
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audiences sufficiently to evaluate them for themselves – is the non-

negotiable, basic function of Expo as an institution. If it can no longer
accept this task, it should be terminated (by a giant robot, if possible).
Asia Unleashed is dedicated to the latest and impending phases of
global industrial civilization, which should be more-or-less implicit in
the fact that it is a World Expo, although sadly, it isn’t. There’s plenty
of room for artworks and other singular cultural creations, but the
emphasis is edgily modernistic. Green technology gets in because it’s
technology, and the tourism industry gets in because it’s an industry,
but in both cases the spin-meisters have been reined back hard, and
the preliminary question insistently raised: “What, really, are you
exhibiting here?” The only organizers who get to avoid such
suspicious interrogations are the ones overseeing the erection of
some fabulous structure that looks as if it comes from the set of a
science fiction movie, or unloading partially-animated assemblages
of glistening metal from mountainous stacks of shipping containers,
because – clearly – they understand what an Expo is all about. The
cyclopean space elevator anchor station, taking shape in the
Extraterrestrial Resources Exploitation Zone, serves as a model for
the guiding spirit of the festival. The machinery in the 3D printing
pavilion printed the pavilion.
The mining industry employs monster trucks weighing 203
tonnes, with a capacity to carry 360 tonnes, they cost US$3 million
each, their tires are four-meters in diameter, and driving one is like
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“driving a house” – why on earth didn’t Expo 2010 have one? Asia
Unleashed most certainly would. For developed countries with the
resources to put on an impressive show at Expo there needs to be
something like a price for admission, and an awe-inspiring piece of
industrial machinery fits the bill exactly. The Canadian tar sands are
being criss-crossed by these monster trucks, and the Canada
national pavilion should have been strongly advised to bring one
over. Instead they brought … (hands up if anyone remembers).
All the imagination that has been squandered over decades in
utopian speculations of the “another world is possible” type has been
far more productively employed at Asia Unleashed, counter-
balancing the tendency of advanced industrial capabilities to flee
from the arena of spectacle. The monumental achievements and
consequences of intensely miniaturized and softened technologies
demand exhibition, from silicon chip fabrication, gene sequencing,
and rudimentary nanotechnology, to cryptosystems, social
networks, digital microfinance, and virtual architecture, even as they
slip through their inner inexorable logic into invisibility. To present
these frontiers of industrial capability rapidly, dramatically, and
memorably to a highly-diverse, transient Expo audience requires the
application of creative intelligence on a massive scale. The growing
challenges of this task are worthy of the rising computer-augmented
talents brought to bear upon it.
Asia Unleashed never happened, of course, partly because the
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international Expo institutional apparatus is locked into the

Occidental death-slide, but mostly because it would have been
impolite. Ultimately, postmodernist multicultural political
correctness – today’s hegemonic globalist ideology — is an elaborate
etiquette, designed to prevent the ‘insensitive’ identification and
diagnosis of failure, and to elude, indefinitely, the blunt statement:
“What you’re doing doesn’t work.” No Expo that remained true to
its deep institutional traditions could avoid such a statement arising,
implicitly, through contrast. Hence, Expo has been condemned to die,
by inertial forces too profound for Expo 2010 to fully arrest, let alone
reverse: Better decayed than rude.
From the wreckage of the Expo institution, however, Expo 2010
was able to extract, polish, and resuscitate a crucial modernist topic:
the city as engine of progress. More on that in Part 3.
August 11, 2011
Re-Animator (P
(Part
art 3)
What mak
makes
es a great city?
By far the most interesting element of World Expo 2010: Shanghai,

was Shanghai. Whilst deeply-rooted regional traditions of courtesy
sustained the fiction that this World Fair was about the world, it
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really wasn’t. Whatever the diplomatic benefits of the almost

universally convenient internationalist pretense, to China and Expo’s
foreign participants alike, Expo 2010 was about Shanghai, and for
Shanghai. The Expo was global because Shanghai is, it was about
China because Shanghai is China’s gateway to the world, it was about
cities in order to be even more about Shanghai, nobody uninterested
in Shanghai paid it the slightest attention, and Shanghai used it to
restructure, intensify, and promote itself.
Expo as an institution was in decline before 2010, and continues
to decline. Shanghai was rising before 2010, and continues to rise,
but now infrastructurally upgraded, thoroughly renovated, and
decorated with the historical merit-badge of Expo hospitality. Better
City, Better Life, a typically airy and aspirational Expo theme, is a
cold-sober description of the Expo-effect in Shanghai.
Cities are, in certain important respects, generic. There is such
a thing as ‘the city in general’ as the work of Geoffrey West, in
particular, has demonstrated. We know, thanks to West, that cities
are negative organisms, with consistent scaling characteristics that
structurally differentiate them from animals and corporations. As
they grow they accelerate and intensify at a quantifiable and
predictable rate, exhibiting increasing returns to scale (in sharp
contrast to animals and businesses, which slow down in proportion
to their size). Organisms and firms die normally and by necessity,
cities only rarely and by accident.
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Cities belong to a real genre, but they are also singularities,

undergoing spontaneous individuation. In fact, they are generically
singular – singular without exception – like black holes. It is not only
that no city is like another, no city can be like another, and this is a
feature that all cities share, arguably more than any other.
Beyond such generic singularity, there is an additional level of
enhanced differentiation that emerges from the position cities
occupy within larger systems. These systems are not only internally
specialized, but also hierarchical, dividing core from periphery, and
distributing influence unevenly between them. Ultimately, within the
fully global incarnation of the ‘world system’, cities acquire
secondary metropolitan characteristics, to very different degrees, in
accordance with their geographical and functional proximity to the
center of the world. They transcend their local histories, to become
hubs or nodes in a global network that re-characterizes them as
parts of a whole rather than wholes made of parts, as metropolis-
versus-periphery rather than (or on top of) metropolis-versus-town.
The geographical structure and historical instability of
modernity’s core-periphery architecture has been the focus of the
‘world system theory’ developed from the Annales School of Fernand
Braudel (1902-85) by Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-) and – most
impressively — Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). According to the
world system theorists, the revolutions that matter most are not
national regime changes, such as those in France (1789) and Russia
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(1917), but rather global re-organizations that mark out the basic
phases of modern history, jolting the world into new core-periphery
structures. Modernity has undergone four of these shifts up to the
present, with each phase lasting for a ‘long century’, introducing a
new core state, or hegemon, with enhanced capabilities, and a new
urban center – successively, Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New
York – that operate as an effective capital of the world.
As the example of New York attests, this status is not primarily
political. Nor does prominence in manufacturing seem to be a
relevant factor (the ‘world capital’ has never been the dominant
industrial center of its respective region or state). Over the course
of modern history to date, the crucial features of the world capital
seem to be that it is the largest urban agglomeration in the leading
(‘hegemonic’) region or state; that it is an established financial center
that quite rapidly attains a position of global pre-eminence in this
respect; that it is an open port city with clear maritime orientation;
and that it has an exceptionally internationalized demographic
profile, with a large segment of internationally-mobile, opportunistic
residents. A significant period of leadership in the creative arts might
plausibly be added to this list. Functionally, the world capital serves
as the supreme nerve-center of the global economy, specialized
nationally, and then super-specialized internationally, as the
financial, logistics, and business services hub of a system whose
global integrity is reflected in the city’s privileged singularity.
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The exceptional drama of our age lies in its nature as a time of

transition between phases of modernity, somewhere in the winter
of a long century, when an epoch of hegemony is exhausted. More
specifically, the walls are closing in on the American Age, as
commentators of almost every intellectual and ideological stripe are
increasingly aware. Overstretched, essentially bankrupted,
politically paralyzed and disillusioned, America sinks into self-
conscious crisis, its mood dark and clouded. It would be a mistake
to limit attention to America, however, because the crisis is world-
systemic, heralding the end of an international order that arose
among the chaos of the world wars and achieved definition in the
post-WWII United Nations and Bretton Woods institutions (IMF,
World Bank, and the descendent of GATT, now the WTO). It affects
not only the role of the US dollar as international reserve currency,
an Atlantic-centered NATO and an Occidentally-skewed UN
apparatus, but also the European Union, the post-colonial Middle
Eastern state-system and (very) much else besides.
Over the next two decades, under the impact of economic forces
of extreme profundity (far exceeding the responsive capacity of
existing institutions), a revolutionary re-ordering of the world can be
expected to unfold. If America succeeds in maintaining its position
of leadership within the global system for a period that significantly
exceeds the long 20th century (which began no earlier than 1914,
and thus might be expected to persist for some additional years), it
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will have broken a pattern that has remained consistent throughout

a half-millennium of history. Whilst not strictly impossible,
perpetuation of the present hegemonic order would be, quite
literally, a stretch.
Another vision of a break from historical precedent, this time
transparently utopian, envisages – rather than the continuation of
US pre-eminence — the obsolescence of the core-periphery global
structure in its entirety, ending hierarchical geography and
hegemony in general. Even If such a vision truly rises to the level
of a definite expectation (rather than a nebulous exercise in wishful
thinking), it remains ungrounded in reliable historical and theoretical
foundations. Altruistic political intentions – were such ever credible
– would still be quite insufficient to overcome the spontaneous,
dynamic trend to approximate world systemic equilibrium, in which a
core zone, and its metropolitan capital, are automatically nominated,
by diffuse economic currents searching for a central clearing house.
Whilst no doubt deeply disappointing to utopian eschatology, and
to all dreams of historical conclusion (or passage to the promised
land), phase-shifts in the world-system are less ominous than they
are often depicted as being. Among Arrighi’s most important insights
is the reminder that whenever an attempted reconstruction of the
world order has been based upon a frontal military and geo-strategic
challenge to the hegemon, it has failed. This is exemplified, above all,
by the German and Russian histories of the 19th and 20th centuries,
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in which repeated direct confrontations with the established

Anglophone-dominated international system led only to frustration,
regime collapse, and subaltern re-integration.
Perhaps ironically, a marked subjective aversion to hard power
assertion and the assumption of hegemony can be quite reliably
taken as a positive indicator for the objective emergence of
hegemonic status. Holland, Great Britain, and the United States of
America were all, in certain crucial respects, accidental imperialists,
whose successive ascents to world dominance shared a
prioritization of commercial motives, retarded state involvement,
strong ‘isolationist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ cultural currents, and a
determined avoidance of ‘Clauswitzean’ decisive collision (especially
with the prior hegemon). The British and American ways of war, in
particular, are notable for their common emphasis upon hedging and
triangulation, such as the exploitation of offshore position and
maritime supremacy to avoid premature entanglement in high
intensity ‘continental’ conflicts, the usage of financial and logistic
capability to manipulate conflicts at a distance, and the diplomatic
inclusion of defeated adversaries in reconstructed, poly-centric,
‘balanced’ systems of power. Hegemony was, in each case, peacefully
inherited, even when it was cemented by war (in partnership with
the previous hegemon) and later gave rise to opportunities for
increasingly aggressive imperialistic adventurism.
Given this broadly uncontroversial historical pattern, it is all the
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more surprising that the German example is so widely invoked in

discussions of China’s ‘peaceful rise’. In fact, China’s ascent has stuck
far closer to the model of hegemonic hand-overs than to that of
confrontational challenges, as indicated by the prioritization of
commercial development, the highly cooperative (even synergistic or
‘Chimerican’) relationship with the prevailing hegemon, the gradual
accumulation of financial power by way of spontaneous, systemic
re-distribution, and the equally gradual consolidation of maritime
interests, emerging out of the global trading system, which draw the
focus of government strategic policy – perhaps reluctantly – from
domestic concerns out into the high-seas.
Historically, China has been far more a continental than a
maritime power, and this fact provides the single most persuasive
objection to the assumption of an impending Chinese (Long)
Century. The emergence of a continental world system core would
be as decisive a departure from precedent as any yet discussed, and
if such a possibility is entertained, disciplined prediction falters. If
inverted, however, this problem becomes a forecast in itself: the
trajectory of China’s rise necessarily implies its transformation into
a maritime power (an insight already tacit in the controversial 1988
Chinese TV series River Elegy).
A vague intuition, partially but elusively crystallized by Expo
2010, is now precipitated by sheer historical pattern-recognition
into the form of an explicit question:
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Is Shanghai destined to become the capital of the world?

(Part 4 to come)
August 16, 2011
Re-Animator (P
(Part
art 4)
What does the world mak

makee of Shanghai?
If the deepest traditions of the World Expo are those cemented into
its origin, it would be incautious to over-hastily dismiss one
prominent feature of its inaugural instance. The Great Exhibition of
the Works of Industry of all Nations, held in London, in 1851, was
staged in the effective capital of the world. In this case, at least, the
defining internationalism of the Expo is difficult to disentangle from
the indisputable historical fact that the entire world was rapidly
becoming London’s business. In a gesture of reciprocity so perfect
that it approached simple identity, London invited the world to itself
exactly as – and because – it was inviting itself to the world.
The Great Exhibition made irresistible sense because it put the
future of the world on display in the only place that could. To see the
concentrated, realistically sifted, programmatically arranged destiny
of the earth, it was necessary to visit London, since it was in London
that everything came together.
668
Over its first two decades (and four episodes), World Expo
alternated between London (1851, 1862) and Paris (1855, 1867), as
if oscillating between the relative historical potencies of maritime
and continental power. Yet this apparent hesitation actually
compresses and conceals two distinct, complementary, and
unambiguous trends. Britain was ascending inexorably to global
hegemony, whilst disengaging from World Expo, whilst France was
managing equally inexorable comparative decline, as it made World
Expo – to a remarkable extent – its special preserve.
It is tempting to propose a theory of institutional consolation to
account for this pattern. Long after Britain had abandoned all claim
to Expo leadership, France continued to invest heavily in the event,
chalking-up a record of Expo hospitality unmatched by any other
country and setting the course to Expo institutionalization through
the Bureau of International Exhibitions (BIE). The BIE, established
in 1928, has always been based in Paris, and remains a bastion of
Anglo-French bilingualism.
French Expo-enthusiasm expresses a more general relationship
to the world system of great importance. Having relinquished its
(Napoleonic) role as a challenger to the world order in the early 19th
century, France has maneuvered, with unique capability and
determination, to remain an indispensable secondary power, or –
more precisely – a balancer. Its relationship to the successive phases
of Anglophone global hegemony has been guided by an extremely
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consistent deep policy of accommodation without acquiescence,

characterized by imaginative and unrelenting, yet restrained rivalry.
Close to the core, yet never quite part of it, France has been able to
draw sustenance from the world order whilst contesting its cultural
meaning (as English-speaking, protestant, and laissez-faire
individualist).
World system challengers, it should be clearly noted, never host
World Expos. The Expos held in Japan (Osaka 1970, Tsukuba 1985,
Aichi 2005) and Germany (Hanover 2000) took place long after their
armed resistance to the Anglo-American world order had been
broken and both countries had been beaten into docility. Russia has
never hosted one. Moscow of the USSR was offered the 1967 World
Expo, but declined it (presumably judging it dangerously
destabilizing to a closed society).
World Expo has thus acquired a secondary tradition, as a
deliberately eccentric platform from which to contest the core
future of the world system, and to propose a pluralized (or
embryonically multicultural) alternative. Already in 1855 and 1867,
and then in 1878, 1889, 1900, and 1937, World Expo staged the
view from Paris, one that accepted the global reality of consolidated,
revolutionary modernization, whilst systematically de-emphasizing
its techno-commercial determinism and its convergence upon
Anglophone cultural traits. Industrial globalization was reconfigured
as a condition to be critically interrogated, rather than an
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opportunity to be vigorously promoted.

Between the primary and secondary impulses of the Expo,
collision was inevitable. Predictably enough, the occasion was
provided by the reconnection of Expo to the global core.
Even given this truncated and radically simplified schema of Expo
history, which had been largely settled in its essentials by 1870, the
significance of the two New York World Expos, staged in 1939-40
and 1964-5, comes clearly into focus. Mid-20th century New York,
like every world systemic capital, represented the leading edge of
modernization as a revolutionary global process — emergence and
consolidation of a new world order and new age (novus ordo
seclorum) – compared to which the authority of established
international institutions counted for nothing.
Both New York Expos flagrantly violated BIE regulations in
numerous respects, but even after the withdrawal of official
sanction, they ahead anyway. These were, non-coincidentally, the
first rogue Expos. They were also among the most memorable and
influential in World Expo history.
For the first time since the mid-19th century, Expo had found
its way back to the capital of the world, in order to provide an
uncompromised and unambiguous foretaste of the World of
Tomorrow in the place that was orchestrating it. BIE opinion
mattered little, because Expo was not being hosted in New York so
much as re-invented, echoing the originality of 1851. This was where
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the future would come from, and everyone knew it. All that was
necessary was to tease the city into anticipating itself, and what
resulted was a Futurama.
There was an additional message, easily overlooked due to the
scarcity of data-points: hosting World Expo is one of the things the
world capital has to do — as a kind of ritual responsibility, or a
coming-out party. Shanghai has done that now. Precedent suggests
that one additional Expo would be appropriate (perhaps in 2025, or
2030), although it might have to be unsanctioned next time.
Of course, Shanghai is not yet the capital of the world, but it is
heading there. From the late-1970s, after centuries of exile and
denigration, the offshore, diasporic-maritime, capitalistic China of
the tianchao qimin — those ‘abandoned by the Celestial Empire’ –
has been steadily, and rapidly, re-integrated with the continental
mainland and its ‘market socialist’ structures. Floodgates of talent
and investment have been opened, and as this scattered, sea-salt
scented population has reconnected with the motherland, the
‘Chinese miracle’ of recent decades has taken place. Shanghai is the
main-circuit socket that links this other China — oriented to oceanic
trade, entrepreneurial opportunity, capital accumulation,
international mobility, and a society of flexible networks — to the
vast potentialities of the country (and flexible Sino-Marxist state)
lying up the Yangzi, and beyond. If the process of reconnection is not
interrupted, the next phase of modernity will be centered in this city,
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where China meets the sea.

Despite its self-identification as the ‘central country’ (or ‘middle
kingdom’ – Zhongguo), China has not been at the core of the world
process for centuries. Instead it has been a complacently declining
legacy power and a badly-treated outsider, then successively a
second-tier affiliate, a truculent challenger, and a cautious balancer,
until its prospective status as core inheritor (or virtual hegemon)
began to percolate into global popular awareness over the final
decades of the 20th century. Very little of this is a matter of
motivation, or strategic assertion. Quasi-Marxist assumptions of
economic inevitability and directional base-superstructure
causation come into their own in this respect. Global leadership is
nominated by industrial reality, not political will, and hegemony can
neither be perpetuated beyond the endurance of its economic
foundations, nor long disdained once such foundations have been
laid. Eventually a reality check becomes unavoidable, and policy is
hammered into compliance with the demands of world system
equilibrium. Core-periphery relations are decided by trade and
capital flows, not by political declarations. Since comparative success
and failure show no sign at all of disappearing, it can confidently be
expected that hierarchical geography – however re-arranged – will
not be withering away any time soon. Realists will follow the money.
There will be a new world capital (you can count on it), but will it
be Shanghai? It would be reckless to presume so. The world system
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tradition, in its eagerness to anoint Tokyo as the successor to New

York (during the 1980s), provides a cautionary lesson. There was no
Tokyo World Expo, and it turns out that there was not an urgent or
essential need for one.
So, is Shanghai next? That should have been the animating
question of Expo 2010, and perhaps it will have been in the future.
The whole world has a stake in it, because it tells us what is coming,
and that is what World Expo was designed to do. For an emerging
world capital to mask itself as a generic city passes beyond modesty
into a species of accidental deception, but tact can easily be confused
with pretence – especially by those on unfamiliar cultural terrain. It
might be that Shanghai said everything that was necessary in 2010,
and that what it said will eventually be heard, and understood.
Expo begins again in each new world capital, in 1851, in 1939,
and – far more problematically – in 2010 (?). In Shanghai’s case, we
are still too close to the event, and too entangled in the current
revolution of modernity, to know for sure. What Expo 2010 will have
been depends upon what the world becomes, how its center of
economic gravity shifts, how its new center condenses, and what it
makes of Shanghai.
(final lurch into this fog-bank coming next (yippee!))
August 26, 2011
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Re-Animator (P
(Part
art 5)
The Call of Haibao
Dispatched from the British Consulate, Doctor Helen Goodwhite

arrives at the Jiangnan Special Hospital for Inexplicable Foreign
Devilry to interview a problematic inmate.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: How are you feeling today Mister Vaughn? They
tell me you’re quite a bit calmer.
Vaughn
aughn: OK, I guess. A little disoriented. How long …?
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Do you remember why you’re here?
Vaughn
aughn: Not exactly.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Those scars on your arms, any ideas?
Vaughn
aughn: [Hesitating] Some kind of accident …?
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: I’ve got some witness reports here, all very
consistent, maybe they’ll jog something. It seems that you were
walking down Nanjing East Road when you suddenly started
shrieking “a-ya, a-ya, a-ya” with a highly unconvincing Chinese accent
before switching to English and shouting “Get out. Get out. We have
to get out of the city.” After that, when nobody took any notice, you
continued to ‘yell aggressively’ …Umm, let’s see [riffling through her
notes], ah yes, “Haibao spawn, you’re all effing Haibao spawn, effing
plague-blood zombie Haibao spawn,” and so on, considerable
obscenity it appears, and then … ah, here we are “filthy future-toxed
effing robot Haibao spawn, die, die, we’re all going to die” et cetera,
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et cetera, et cetera. Then you rushed across the street and smashed
the plate-glass window of an Expo gift shop with your bare hands.
[Looking up] Do you remember any of that, mister Vaughn?
Vaughn
aughn: Some of it, yes. Now you mention it. It’s coming back. But
it wasn’t really like that.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: It wasn’t?
Vaughn
aughn: Not really, no. At least, those things happened, yes …
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: They did?
Vaughn
aughn: Yes, but it’s just, what they meant … [hesitating]
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Go on.
Vaughn
aughn: Well, they didn’t mean anything of course, what I meant
to say was, well, it was sort of a mistake.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: A ‘mistake’?
Vaughn
aughn: Yes, or, I guess, more of a misunderstanding.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a great deal
more specific if we’re going to make any progress.
Vaughn
aughn: It’s rather complicated.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Please. Just start at the beginning.
Vaughn
aughn: I suppose it began at the pavilion.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: The UK Expo pavilion?
Vaughn
aughn: I was working there you know.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: It’s in the file.
Vaughn
aughn: So you know what it looked like?
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Yes, of course.
676
Vaughn
aughn: The tendrils, the shimmering, the name like a taunt from
… them.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: It was called the ‘Seed Cathedral’, according to
this.
Vaughn
aughn: Seed Cathedral, Sea Cthudral, whatever, it had been sent
back, sent up, to show us their true ‘face’. … At least, that’s what I
thought at the time, but that’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? I realize that
now.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: But at ‘the time’ you thought ‘they’ had ‘sent it
back’?
Vaughn
aughn: I’d been working too hard. It was quite stressful, you
know. I wasn’t sleeping well, worrying, and that’s when they began
chatting.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Who were ‘they’ Mister Vaughn?
Vaughn
aughn: The Haibao, of course.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Ah yes, the Expo mascot …
Vaughn
aughn: Mask, not mascot.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Did you know that the Shanghai Corporate
Pavilion was defaced with luminous blue paint, on the night of
September the ninth? [She passes a photograph.]
Vaughn
aughn: [Shudders silently]
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: The message is rather cryptic, but your words
reminded me of it, for some reason. It’s a bit difficult to read from the
photo, but I’ve got a transcript. “We are many and yet singular. Our
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name equals 90, the seething void, enfolding artificial intelligence

and the terminal alpha-omega. We come from the depths, from the
blue screen at the end of the world. Cthublue.”
Vaughn
aughn: I don’t know anything about that.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Really?
Vaughn
aughn: It’s Haibao cultist, hardcore. I’d never touch that stuff –
not ever.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Yet you seem to recognize it.
Vaughn
aughn: From dreams — bad, really bad, dreams. I told you, I
wasn’t sleeping well. They wouldn’t stop talking, telling me things I
didn’t want to hear, I couldn’t stop them. I tried, but they kept calling
me.
Goodwhite: Calling you to bow before the most high?
Dr Goodwhite
Vaughn
aughn: [Outraged] I never said that. I’d never say that. It’s
absurd, obscene. It’s not even code.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: [Checking her notes] So, you understand now that
‘hairy crab’ isn’t a secret anagram for ‘Haibao’?
Vaughn
aughn: Yes, I can see that, of course.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: It isn’t even close, really — too many letters, for
one thing.
Vaughn
aughn: Well, six and nine are rotational twins, and ‘o’ is a ‘cry’.
[Sobs slightly] … It’s all nonsense. I see that now. I was confused.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: The trouble, Mister Vaughn, is that this subject
still seems to excite you rather disproportionately. I think we need to
678
conduct a little test. Let’s see what happens when we compare this
[she reaches into her bag and lifts out the statuette of a tentacle-
faced abomination, sculpted long ago by some Pacific island tribe,
presumed extinct] with this [a soft, cartoonish, vaguely
anthropomorphic blue doll, suggestive of a toothpaste advert for
children]. The similarity isn’t especially striking, is it?
Vaughn
aughn: No, no, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOO.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: I’m sorry, what?
Vaughn
aughn: [In an almost indiscernible whisper] Deep ones.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: I didn’t catch that.
Vaughn
aughn: From the depths, the ocean – deep ones. They’re from
the sea – ‘treasure from the sea’ [laughs morbidly]. Even you have to
understand that, doctor. Globalization, technocapitalism, Shanghai,
alien invasion, the Thing — it could hardly be clearer. It’s escaped
from the abyss, and now it’s exposed. The time has come. Sea
Change, Modernity, call it whatever you want, it doesn’t matter. The
Haibao will tell us how to think soon enough, and we’ll comply,
because they’re behind us, beneath us, and we’ll peel away from what
they always were like dead skin from a snake. They’ve shown us the
ultimate city god already, so it won’t be long. Their words are
arriving, whispers, mutterings …
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: [Disquieted] Oabiah nasce zhee ute ewoit.
Vaughn
aughn: Excuse me?
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: That means nothing to you?
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Vaughn
aughn: Nothing.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Strange, then, that it’s tattooed on your arm.
Vaughn
aughn: I’ve no idea how it got there.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Alright, let’s move on, shall we?
Vaughn
aughn: Move where doctor? We’re already here, in the city at the
end of the world, the thing that came out of the sea. We aren’t going
anywhere. It’s coming for us, right now, and it can’t be stopped. What
did you expect? A New Jerusalem? [laughing unpleasantly]
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: Alright Mister Vaughn, I think we’re done here.
We need to get you some proper, professional attention. Then, after
some rest, back to your family …
Vaughn
aughn: [Prolonged laughter, even more ghastly] Too late, doctor!
Way too late. The Haibao have already taken them. It came for the
children first, don’t you realize that? Do you know how many Haibao
dolls my sweet little kiddies have accumulated? [Voice cracking]
Seventeen! They might as well have tentacles growing out of their
eye-sockets — it would all amount to the same thing. Haibao melted
their souls into the blue screen months ago. That generation’s gone.
Long gone. It was over even before the Haibao clones slithered out of
the television set.
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: [Backing away nervously] This has been a very
interesting chat, but I’ve really got to be going now. I’ll tell the
consulate that … that …
Vaughn
aughn: [Zoned-out into the blue] They want to transmute us —
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replace us – with something unspeakable, with a bionic monstrosity

from beyond the blue screen. Our metropolises are turning into, into
… Actually they were never ours. The deep ones, the Haibao, were
always using them to modify us, using us to make them – that’s the
circuit: alien animation. It was a cosmic gamble, a bet, and now
they’re raking it in …
Dr Goodwhite
Goodwhite: [Turns pale, a hideous comprehension dawning]
Better city, better life …
September 2, 2011
Arts of Re-Animation
There’s always something huge happening in Shanghai — and usually
several things. Out at the leading edge over the last two years has
been the tsunami of urban development along the Huangpu
waterfront to the south of the Puxi metropolitan core, in an area that
has been named ‘Xuhui Riverside’ or ‘West Bund’. The scale of what
is underway there is (of course) utterly stunning.
A mixture of new residential complexes and prestige towers is
under construction, and the immediate waterfront has already been
redeveloped into a strip of interconnected parks and boardwalks
(constituting the 8.4km ‘Shanghai Corniche‘). Along the river, a neo-
modern aesthetic prevails, characterized by elegantly re-purposed
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Reignition
heavy industrial structures: slabs of concrete, disused rail tracks, and

massive cargo cranes. As elsewhere in the city, the heavy-duty
Shanghai 1.0 has been playfully folded over itself, in a stylish
celebration of modernist heritage. The future is presented as a re-
launch of the past. For anybody mesmerized by time-spirals, it’s
irresistible.
The role allotted to the arts in this process of urban re-animation
is especially notable. Even in a city blitzed into delirium by an
explosive growth of arts space, the proliferation of galleries,
theaters, museums, and other cultural centers in the West Bund
comes as a scarcely-comprehensible shock. The subsonic sucking
roar of this new cultural capacity, emitted in overlapping ripples as
it extends its devouring appetite throughout the city and far beyond,
reaches a magnitude that seems to bend space and time. There are
entire national cultures in the world that would be hard-pressed to
fill it.
The coming out party for this arts infrastructure was held on a
suitably stupendous scale. Westbund 2013: A Biennial of
Architecture and Contemporary Art included an interlocking set of
exhibitions, each of which would have been dazzlingly impressive on
its own. Sound Art China introduced the country’s sonic bleeding
edge in its Revolutions Per Minute event, set up within four
renovated oil storage tanks. The adjacent West Bund Exhibition
Center — a redeveloped industrial structure of truly cyclopean
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proportions — hosted a multi-threaded sound / video / architecture

/ cinematic history show in and around a central ‘Inter-Media
Megastructure’ that fully lived up to its grandiose name. A more
modest urban development exhibition in a nearby warehouse space
did its best to explain the epic convulsions that the area was
undergoing. (I think the appropriate word is ‘awesome’, cubed.)
There’s only one reasonable conclusion: Shanghai is sheer cosmic
splendor compacted for terrestrial application, and expressed
through aesthetic overload. Cynicism can wait for another occasion.
December 16, 2013
Dotting the ‘I’

Whate
Whatevver else is to be learned from ‘‘A A Dream I Dreamed’ — the
Kusama Yayoi exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Shanghai (Dec 15 to March 30, 2014) — the most superficially
striking lesson is sociological. Shanghainese — and especially young
Shanghainese — can’t get enough of this stuff. After almost two
months, queues no longer regularly stretch all the way through
People’s Park and out onto Nanjing Xi Lu, but they still over-spill
the gallery. Both thematically and socially, this is a show about
multitudes.
Kusama, born in 1929, has an artistic career stretching back to
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Reignition
the 1950s. Throughout seven decades, as her celebrity has waxed

and waned in waves, her artistic focus — or, more exactly, her
strategic ‘obliteration’ of focus — has remained remarkably constant.
Sensuous disintegration of self and world into dot pattern has been a
continuous preoccupation.
The MoCA show concentrates upon Kusama’s very recent work,
mostly from the last two years. To a general audience, the best
known pieces are probably her large, brightly bi-colored, speckled
pumpkins, enjoyed for their pop-art accessibility and unpretentious
aestheticism. When encountered within the context of the show,
however, the disciplined dot shading on these works takes on an
unsuspected seriousness, as it is sucked into swirls, drifts, and
flurries of dots in different colors, across picture planes and
sculptured surfaces, and even into illusory volumes. Through a
power of pure multiplicity, Kusama’s vivid, relentlessly cheerful pop-
art chromatics become the tails of neonized guiding streaks, hurtling
into cosmic vistas and shattered states of being.
Dotted tulips, dotted dogs, huge mushroom-styled dotted
spheres, ‘Infinity Dots’ (2012), ‘Infinity Double Dots’ (2013), and the
‘Infinity Nets’ (numerous, 2013) created by the diffuse dot-
puncturing of space … it becomes all-too easy to understand why
Kusama chooses to live in a Japanese mental hospital as an OCD
(obsessive compulsive disorder) patient, and why her own accounts
of her work wander so uninterruptedly between aesthetics and
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psychopathology. Her installation ‘I’m Here, but Nothing’ (2013),

consisting of a living room suffused with violet light and blitzed with
countless hallucinatory dots, provides something close to an insanity
portal. Visitors entering the ‘Obliteration Room’ are handed a sheet
of colorful dot stickers and invited to go crazy. It’s at once
humorously and seriously dotty.
The works are typically without center, diffusing perception
smoothly across sheer distribution, sometimes through spaces
expanded to infinity through installed mirrors. The sense of religious
suggestion is occasionally made explicit, as in ‘Transmigration’ (2011)
— an ‘infinity-net’ style acrylic painting whose numinous title is only
reinforced by its thematic continuity with the rest of the show. In
‘Narcissus Garden’ (2013), a packed array of stainless steel spheres,
mirroring and the assembly of featureless particles are finally fused
(although this work is more notable for its neat infolding of Kusama’s
artistic vocabulary than for its aesthetic power). To immerse ‘oneself’
in this exhibition is to be strewn across the void, lost in clouds, and in
crowds.
Kusama’s appeal manifests an East Asian ‘pop’ sensibility that
clearly works in Shanghai, attesting once again to the influence of
contemporary Japanese culture throughout the region, and to the
continued relevance of common religious traditions. Beyond — or
simply through — the deliberate frivolity of this work, something
profound, and shattering, is being shared. It’s well worth adding
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yourself to the crowds.
February 11, 2014
Urbanization in F
Focus
ocus
Might urbanization be the leading theme of China’s 5th generation

CCP administration? The background to this question is the process
of Chinese urbanization itself. Over the three decades of Reform
and Opening, China’s urban population rose from 20% to 53% of
the (rising) total, resulting in over half a billion new urbanites. The
economic and geostrategic consequences of this transformation
have profoundly re-structured the world. (It is the central fact of the
Pacific-centered Modernity 2.0.)
In the Atlantic, Matt Schiavenza communicates the basics:
In China, economic growth and urbanization have gone hand in
hand. When Deng Xiaoping initiated Reform and Opening in 1978,
the vast majority of the population lived and worked in the
countryside — just as Chinese people had for centuries. But over the
past three and a half decades, as special economic zones churned
out exports and China modernized its cities, hundreds of millions of
people migrated to urban areas seeking work in the manufacturing
and service sectors. This … has made China — and the Chinese —
much wealthier.
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The guideline themes of China’s 4th generation CCP leadership –

‘harmonious society’ and ‘scientific development’ – were no doubt
sculpted by the stresses and policy challenges of massive
urbanization, but they addressed the phenomenon indirectly. There
are numerous indications that a more specifically-focused emphasis
upon urbanization is now emerging. In particular, China’s new
Premier Li Keqiang envisages the topic as a nexus, where many of the
country’s development and governance issues meet.
The Chinese journal Qiushi published an article on urbanization
by Li Keqiang in its Winter 2012 issue (translated into English by
He Shan and Chen Xia here). Framed by the expectation (attributed
to “Foreign economists”) “that China’s urbanization and U.S. high
technology would emerge as twin engines of the global economy in
the 21st century,” it rewards close scrutiny.
The analysis of Michael Pettis, who identifies insufficient
domestic consumption (by households) as China’s pre-eminent
economic obstacle, is a valuable preparation for this discussion,
which begins: “Urbanization has the greatest potential for boosting
domestic demand.” Li argues that China remains relatively under-
urbanized, so the propulsion to “exponential urban growth”
continues, with at least partially predictable implications. Since
“urban residents spent 3.6 times more than rural dwellers in 2010” it
can be confidently anticipated that consumer spending will rise as a
function of urbanization, contributing automatically to economic re-
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balancing.
… it is estimated that every rural resident who becomes an urban
dweller will increase consumption by more than 10,000 yuan
(US$1,587). And each one percent increase in the urbanization rate
in only one year will see more than 10 million rural residents
absorbed into the cities. This will, in turn, translate into consumption
totaling more than 100 billion yuan (US$15.9 billion) and
correspondingly create more investment opportunities.
Full realization of these opportunities, Li argues, will require
reform or abolition of the country’s hukou system of residence
registry, with its “urban-rural dual structure.” In other respects, too,
vigorous government action is recommended, as long as it achieves
“conformity with the objective law of urban development.”
(Investigating “the objective law of urban development” is the
primary mission of this blog, so it is a concept we shall obsessively
return to.)
Core government responsibilities are taken to include the
mitigation of social conflicts and problems, infrastructure
investment, and administrative intervention to constrain housing-
market instability. Urbanization management is thus recognized as
a governmental priority. Given the complexity and the global
significance of this task, which amounts to the integration of another
quarter-billion Chinese into the economic mainstream in a little over
a decade, there is really no decent alternative to remarking – with an
688
absolute minimum of smugness or sarcasm – good luck with that.

***
Even when direct construction expenditures are ignored, by
systematically raising the level of household consumption, Chinese
urbanization dominates the country’s macroeconomic landscape. It
is no great exaggeration to see the emergence of the world’s most
dynamic consumer economy as a side-effect of a three decade-long
urbanization process, although – as in any such complex
development – the causality is turbular, and self-stimulating.The
Chinese consumer is a creature of the new urban epoch, and an
incitement to its further elaboration.
As noted in the first part of this post, the centrality of
urbanization to China’s macroeconomic predicament has been
explicitly addressed in a significant article by China’s new premier,
Li Keqiang. The conversion of rural folk into urbanites (or ‘citizens’
according to strict etymology) is accompanied by a 3.6-fold rise in
per capita consumption. In addition to the purely quantitative impact
upon the level of domestic economic demand, the rise of urban
consumers also drives a qualitative transition, characterized above
all by the expansion of the service sector (in both absolute and
relative terms). Li seeks to align administrative action with this trend:
Escalating the growth of the service industry is critical to
adjusting the industrial structure. Effective measures should be
taken to build a favorable environment for the growth of the service
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industry, both in terms of its size and quality. The government should
promote the development of production-related service industries
such as modern logistics, e-commerce and scientific research and
design. It should also ensure that consumption-related services such
as tourism, recreation, care of the elderly and domestic services
receive a boost, and the development of small and mid-sized service
companies gets support.
Urbanization promotes a more service oriented economic
structure, which in turn promises to lower the energy-intensity of
economic output; raise total factor productivity (TFP); proliferate
entrepreneurial small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs);
accelerate the emergence of knowledge-based and creative
industries; and increase employment opportunities. In other words,
a predictable series of dependencies – from urbanization, through
consumerism, to service-orientation – subordinates economic policy
to “the objective law of urban development” which alone makes its
goals realizable. The expansion and improvement of cities will decide
whether China works.
The orchestration of central policy questions under an urban
theme is also strikingly seen in the area of regional development.
Here, too, the country’s most intractable problems are to be
unlocked by an urban key:
Regional development is closely related to urbanization. Less-
developed regions lag behind in terms of growth, especially in
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urbanization. In areas which boast mature development conditions

and large environmental capacity, the government should actively
and steadily facilitate urbanization by reasonable allocation of
resources, centralized layout of businesses and encouragement of
intensive land usage to fire up new engines of growth and enhance
the local capacity for self-sustained development. The government
should tailor its regional, industrial and land policies to different
regions and sectors, rather than adopting general and all-inclusive
policies.
The infrastructural investment and social policy tools that have
been employed to ‘Open up the West’ since the turn of the
millennium are now specifically envisaged as ways to catalyze,
accelerate, and guide urban development in backward regions. Cities
are to be the solution.
Some extra links:
Mi Shih’s excellent introduction to chengzhenhua (城镇化) — and
why ‘urbanization’ isn’t the right word
For a more hostile take on the Chinese urbanization agenda, see
Gordon Chang here.
Nin-Hai Tseng at Fortune: “[Stephen] Roach offers an interesting
statistic: China’s services sector requires about 35% more jobs per
unit of GDP than do manufacturing and construction.”
***
Capital Absorption
Absorption: On the topic of Michael Pettis, this superb
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recent article is sure to become an indispensable reference point

for China economy watchers. Pettis has long argued that Chinese
investment levels exceed the country’s absorption capacity, and the
new article places this argument in a broader theoretical framework,
which he explains with extraordinary lucidity. If he is correct in his
basic assessment, some widely-held assumptions of development
economics will require drastic revision, with cultural and
institutional factors (“social capital”) acquiring far greater
prominence.
Pettis has a deserved reputation for bearishness on Chinese
growth prospects, but this article makes a guarded case for optimism
in regards to the country’s development strategy, which he sees
shifting from an investment-driven growth model to something more
institutionally-sensitive. This political sub-forecast predicts
significant movement in the direction of market-oriented reform
during the Xi-Li period.
***
Opening Mo
Movveses: At the South China Morning Post (via): Premier
Li Keqiang fought open opposition from financial regulators in his bid
to push through a landmark plan for a free-trade zone in Shanghai. It
is the clearest sign yet that the nation’s new leadership is determined
to deliver long-delayed economic reforms. […] The new Shanghai
free-trade zone plan, officially announced at the beginning of July, is
expected to be the testing ground for major policy reforms. It would
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promote cross-border commodity and capital flows, with key

experiments in freeing foreign exchange markets and liberalising
domestic interest rates.[…] Within two months, Li made an initial
proposal covering 21 initiatives, whose details were not officially
announced. These included shortcuts for foreign banks to set up
subsidiary or joint venture operations and special permission for
foreign commodities exchanges to own warehouses in the free-trade
zone in Shanghai … […] … other mainland cities, facing unemployment
and slower growth, are also keen to follow Shanghai’s move to lure
foreign capital. But Li is not understood to be interested in rushing to
copy the Shanghai model for other mainland cities.
***
Handle_MZ commented: “it can be confidently anticipated that
consumer spending will rise as a function of urbanization,
contributing automatically to economic re-balancing.”
I read “The Great Rebalancing” and I think this prediction
strangely contradicts Pettis’ main narrative. Pettis says that the
consumption share of Chinese GDP is a necessary function of both
the populations propensities to save and consume and the whole of
Government economic policy to include the PBoC’s interest rates,
capital
controls and stabilization of the dollar exchange rate.
The objective is sustainable high GDP growth through high levels
of investment, stable wages, and productive factor capital
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accumulation — especially in the export and tradables sector. A

corollary objective is improved global competitiveness in markets
farther up the value chain.
If household consumption is a product of means which seek the
above end, then any increase in consumption (i.e. from urbanization)
that disrupts this end will only be met with compensatory
government moves that push
it back down. Policy is the unmoved mover of consumption levels.
Well, slightly moved, but by that aforementioned sustainability
criterion. But rebalancing cannot occur under the current system
unless the
government is wise enough to support it.
And at any rate, urbanization creates a surplus of labor which
suppresses the growth rate of average urban wages. The more urban
consumption rises (from rising wages, for example), the more
attractive it is the move from the
countryside, which also pushes urban wages back down. This helps
China’s global competitiveness, but may actually reduce domestic
consumption relative to the less-urbanization counterfactual.
Admin response: As you know from previous discussions, there
are numerous assumptions that need straightening out before
pushing far with this. At this point, I’m satisfied with the conclusion
that urbanization is being conceived as a solution to the country’s
most pronounced economic quandary (at the highest level of the
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new leadership). I think this is quite solid, irrespective of the issues

that Pettis and you raise. On the latter, though, it seems hard to
believe that urbanization is incidental to “social capital” formation,
of the kind that — Pettis argues — raises capital absorption capacity,
and thus directly contributes to the amelioration of the consumption
deficiency problem. That’s in addition to the direct consumption
effects emphasized by Li Keqiang.
This isn’t intended as an adequate response to your argument,
just a provisional rejoinder.
July 29, 2013
City Limits
There’s undoubtedly a Quixotic character to the ‘China should do X’
mode of outside commentary, but Yukon Huang’s short Bloomberg
article advising revision of the country’s urbanization policies
represents the genre at its best. Noting the agglomeration effects
that yield disproportionate returns to urban scale, Huang
recommends a turn away from the proliferation of new minor cities,
and towards megacity growth.
China is already in a class by itself in accounting for 30 of the
50 largest cities in east Asia. It boasts half a dozen megacities with
populations of more than 10 million and 25 “large” cities exceeding
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4 million. In fact, though, the only way China will achieve its desired
productivity gains is if its leaders allow cities to evolve more
organically in response to market forces. They need to let cities like
Beijing get bigger.
Urban concentration creates real problems, but these are
indistinguishable from the challenges any genuine process of socio-
economic advance has to confront. The solutions to these problems
will be the same steps that carry the country forward into
unexplored territory — beyond ‘catch up’ and into the open horizons
of the future. Everything learned from concrete economic history
suggests that technological and business opportunity will be
ratcheted upwards by exactly those forces which promote megacity
agglomeration — and better still urban concentration or intensity
— to historically unprecedented levels. That is how — and where —
deep social innovation takes place.
Instead of actively trying to spread out growth to small new cities,
China’s planners should embrace the agglomeration economies,
which militate for larger metropolises. As land and wage costs
escalate, some industries will eventually gravitate to medium-size
cities, but services will continue to drive expansion in the larger ones.
Smart people like to mix with other smart people, and globalization
has amplified their financial returns. Beijing and Shanghai have
continued to grow because of buoyant higher-value services, even
as their manufacturing bases have shrunk. All this explains why in
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China, productivity in urban areas is more than three times that in

rural areas.
But aren’t China’s megacities already too big to be sustainable? As
a matter of fact, some urban specialists have concluded that even
China’s biggest cities may be too small. They cite “Zipf’s law,” one of
the great curiosities of urban research. The law, which is surprisingly
accurate for many countries, claims that the biggest city in a country
should be about twice the size of the second-biggest, three times the
size of the third-biggest, and so forth. On this basis, China’s largest
cities appear too small.
Thinking through power laws (such as Zipf’s) dispels the idea of
‘normal’ city sizes. Optimum urban scale is decided by network
effects, and is dependent upon the entire social ecology — regionally,
nationally, and even globally. The ‘ideal’ size of Shanghai, for instance,
cannot be derived from some model of a generic city, but has to
be understood, instead, with reference to the singular role this city
plays as a hub in multiple networks — especially commercial webs —
within which it amasses specialized functions. As these webs expand
and thicken, their critical nodes tend to grow and intensify
spontaneously. It is natural, therefore, throughout the process of
global modernization, for the limits of urban scale to be pushed out
ever further, in accordance with the functional sophistication of the
system’s crucial hubs, and the associated refinements of
specialization these key cities foster.
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Beijing is subject to stubborn environmental constraints, with

limited water resources prominent among these. Its distance from
the coast is also a growth-inhibiting factor. Shanghai, in contrast, is
destined to vastness by such implacable historical forces that it is
hard to imagine even the most determined policy resistance standing
in the way for long. As the country’s commercial capital, any realistic
power law distribution of urban scale begins with Shanghai at the
summit. It would be best to bend to the inevitable, and let it become
the world’s laboratory for urban intensity, tracking the advance of
modernity into the Pacific Century. The rewards for this acceptance
would easily overwhelm the costs.
September 11, 2013
Modern LLegacy
egacy
In 2012 the global distribution of Internet connectivity still looked
strikingly Atlantean:
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Reignition
Two years later, Alissa Walker at Gizmodo asks (rhetorically):

Where is the internet? This map might explain it better than any
statistics could ever hope to: The red hot spots show where the most
devices that can access the internet are located.
On the new map, too, the Pacific Century has yet to dazzle. It seems
that infrastructure — even the most advanced digital infrastructure
— incarnates a legacy, rather than virtuality (or potential). By
accentuating the Internet-of-Things, the new map has actually
dulled the digitization of emerging markets, drawing vision back on a
retro-futural path to the historical roots of the modern world order.
(The color scheme also tends to under-emphasize the spiky urban-
concentrations of the Asian Internet, relative to the more diffuse
Euro-American distribution.)
Follow the Gizmodo link for various image options, including

alternative Internet visualizations (such as these, and — from the
comments — this).
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September 1, 2014
Shanghai T
Tower
ower
It’s Aesthetics Week @ Social Matter. Here’s the XS twist:
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702
It’s the new Shanghai Tower, in Lujiazui. Latest glistening jewel in

a fabulously beautiful city.
May 6, 2015
Shanghai T
Tower
ower
It’s a “Green Smart Cultural Vertical City” apparently. (Still a fantastic
building, although not much seems to be happening inside yet.)
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704
Here’s the view from the Observation Deck, looking down on it’s
closest Shanghai competitor (the Shanghai World Financial Center):
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706
And on number three, the Neo-Deco Jin Mao Tower:
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708
August 29, 2016
35 T
Toda
odayy
Shenzhen’s birthday is this Wednesday. I’d have put up a 1980 photo,
but there wasn’t anything there.
Shenzhen today:
The Wikipedia profile.
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August 26, 2015
710
CHAPTER FIVE - NICK LAND

LAND'S
'S TRIPS
Out W
West
est
The real (paying) job calls. For the last few days of March (and 1st
April), I’m going to be ‘away’ on a research trip to Kashgar (Xinjiang).
If connectivity isn’t a problem, ‘away’ might not mean much from
the perspective of Cyberspace, but I’m expecting at least moderate
disruption (most probably exacerbated by colorful ethnic
distractions and horrible torrents of baijiu).
If anyone has any Kashgar questions, or information to offer, I’ll
do my best to bend my investigations responsively. (I’m not thinking
of using this blog as a platform for Xinjiang material, but that’s not a
dogmatic commitment, if there’s any interest in the topic.)
[This short Kashgar profile by Ron Gluckman is over a decade old
— it will be interesting to see how it has dated.]
ADDED: If the main things you are searching for in life are
alcoholic intoxication, coffee, and smooth Internet connectivity,
Kashgar cannot — in all honesty — be recommended. On the positive
side of the ledger, there’s far more of the Old Kashgar left than first
appearance suggests (Otangboyi Road is the place to go, following
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it past the Idkar Mosque to the night market). The Silk Road
commercial culture still thrives, reaching a truly delirious pitch in
the Grand Bazaar, which oveflows with sensation-drenching
commodities from thousands of kilometers around. The tea is
delicious — a spiced up black tea, drunk without milk, but with a
distinct hint of Indian chai. Ditto the yoghurt (as thick as cream
cheese, with a razor sharp edge), and — of course — everything
delectable that can be done with a dead sheep whilst remaining
haram.
It’s hard to work out the ethnic balance, but it’s at least
predominantly Uyghur (I’ve seen figures between 70-85%). There’s
no obvious indications of social tension, with everyone seeming to
get on with their lives quite frictionlessly, and no signs that I could
pick up of street-level Han paranoia. Han Chinese women navigate
the streets alone except for small children, seemingly perfectly
relaxed about the social environment, and untroubled by any
prospect of violence. Our group (two Han, one Bulgarian, one Brit,
and one Uyghur government guide — who is excellent btw) have
encountered nothing but friendliness, often combined with
impressive efforts to sell us stuff. It has to be said, though, that the
government propaganda is shockingly crude.
For example, a note at the Idkah Mosque, after explaining the
history of CPC renovation efforts, helpfully explains:
All of it shows fully that Chinese government always pays special
712
attentions to the another and historical cultures of the ethnic

groups, and that all ethnic groups warmly welcome Part’s [sic]
religious policy. It also shows that different ethnic groups have set
up a close relationship of equality, unity and helps to each other,
and freedom of beliefs is protected. All ethnic groups live friendly
together here. They cooperate to build a beautiful homeland,
support heartily the unity of different ethnic groups and the unity of
our country, and oppose the ethnic separatism and illegal religious
activities.
Perhaps it sounds better in the Uyghur.
Of course, at the end of the day I’m a regime apologist.
Afghanistan and Pakistan are right next door, each demonstrating in
their own way the wonders of ethno-democratic self-assertion.
March 27, 2013
Out W
West
est (again)
Urumqi this time. I’ll fill things out a little when I get a chance (more
for my own sake than under any pretence of communication).
That Baijiu holocaust problem I worried needlessly about in
Kashgar? Urumqi is a very different city …
ADDED: After arriving yesterday we took in the International
Bazaar, a more mall-sructured, and thus rather less atmospheric
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version of the Kashgar Grand Bazaar, trading similar goods. The most
distinctive items were chunks of fossilized wood, so precisely
metamorphosed that the minutiae of organic structure were clearly
discernible. It’s hard not to be impressed when examining the fine-
grained organization of a thing that died 150,000,000 years ago.
Next stop was Hong Shan Park, situated at the north-east edge of
the city in 1947, but now enveloped. It’s high, and gives a vantage
point from which to get oriented. Better still, the viewing pavilion
there also serves as an urban development museum, including scale
models (1947 and today), lots of photographs, and basically
everything needed for a firm space-time fix. Finally, there was dinner
with the local officials — our hosts — which was great fun (even
though I’d been horribly sick the day before and still felt shaky). The
Baijiu onslaught then unfolded (my travel companion from work
turned out to be crazily lihai, and probably saved me by deflecting
some of the white death torrent onto herself). Maybe I wrote some
scraps fished from the gulfs of shadow? Then oblivion.
Next day: Tarim Mummies, the Urumqi version of Shanghai’s M50
(art hub), and the city’s massive new industrial park called the UETD.
The mummies — dessicated accidentally by the arid environment —
are very well known, for good reason. Their state of preservation is
incredible — you could still wear their clothes (after almost 4,000
years). The whole anthropo-ethnographic backstory is enthralling
too, and I need to try and get my head wrapped around it. The oldest
714
mummies are ‘Europoid’ and really look as if they could have been
Cornish. (Scientific consensus, as I understand it tenuously, identifies
them as ‘Tokharian’.) This throws the Uyghur-Han ethnic elbowing
into disconcerting perspective, but it’s just too out there to be truly
politically sensitive (I’m hoping). If the Welsh start claiming chunks of
Xinjiang based on ancestral rights I guess that could change. The old
mummies come in two pairs, two 3,800-y.o. females, both ‘Europoid’,
then a pair from a thousand years later, a Europoid male and a mixed
Euro-Mongoloid female. Both of these later mummies are tattooed,
and for reasons not yet understood were buried with non-matching
boots. Then the exhibition throws in a mummified Han official from
AD500, but if you folllow the exhibition around in a disciplined
counter-clockwise circuit, there’s no reason to be thrown off by this
bizarre and crudely-motivated non sequitur.
The art space had some OK stuff, and reflected the guiding Urumqi
attitude: well-meaning, relentlessly multi-cultural, driven by Han,
and extremely tame. If you like art that drags you into extra-cosmic
abysses of shock and dread, there wasn’t much there to set the pulse
racing. Lots of pleasant, (unthreateningly) intelligent, traditional,
craft-based stuff though.
The industrial park was really something. Pure China, in the sense
that it was mostly a (truly immense) construction site, from which
some slender threads of raw potential had tumbled backwards into
the present. It already has a population of 270,000, and looked
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Reignition
roughly 10% complete. This ‘Park’ — an entire urban district until a

few years ago, when it was re-purposed — is programmed to become
a glstening science-fiction entity that would over-awe 70%+ of the
world’s cities (with most of the remaining 30% being Chinese). We
saw a truck plant and the local Coca-Cola operation — full of
clattering robotic bottling machinery — and got to ask some
questions about the bases of Xinjiang growth. The impression we got
is that serving the wider Central Asian market is the cornerstone of
everybody’s plans.
ADDED: Six hours on the road and — just to keep things moving
forwards smoothly — a two hour visit to a baijiu factory in the middle
(plus a lot of other stuff). Two bottles of sample (non-retail maximum
strength) rocket fuel in my bag, and four hours sleep to cling onto.
Beyond the lesson that Shariah isn’t exactly calling the shots in
northern Xinjiang, analysis and reflection is going to be delayed.
May 8, 2013
Out W
West
est (y
(yet
et again)
Whatever the prejudices you might harbor against Urumqi Internet
connections in second rate hotels, they’re probably over-generous.
I’ve been effectively de-twitterized by sheer technological
crappitude rather than anything more sinister, but this channel
716
seems to be (barely) OK. (Annoyingly, they provide a computer in the

room, which locks everything into chronic dysfunction.) So apologies
for the deteriorated state of communications over the next few days.
The main objective of this trip is to explore Xinjiang’s Buddhist
heritage, which is so vast and rich that even some superficial
scratching should turn up some interesting stuff. The main current
of Buddhist influence into China passed this way, hybridizing wildly
with other cultures in one of the world’s great mixing zones. After
arriving off the steps, the Uyghurs were Buddhist for centuries,
before Islam got a grip around the turning point of the first
millennium (I’ll try to fill in some dates with greater precision later
on).
Updates as events, energy, and time permit.
ADDED: Scheduled to arrive at the site of interest tomorrow. Up
to now, it’s been a mix of some interesting stuff (but probably not
Outside in material — weird Uyghur dances with cups of water
balanced on heads? I didn’t think so), Internet nightmare (Twitter
inaccessible again), and grand finale: the mandatory baijiu-crazed
‘austere-enough-for government-work’ welcoming banquet. The
inebriated babble effect is no doubt obvious. We saw some
astounding Tianshan vistas too (‘Tianshan Grand Canyon’ — don’t be
put off by the ridiculous name), but I’m hopeless at natural wonder,
so I won’t even try to communicate it.
We’re in Baicheng now. I’ll be impressed if anyone’s heard of it, bt
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it seems shockingly well-governed, and probably the most attractive

modern city in Xinjiang. For us, it’s just the gateway out to the
Buddha caves, but it’s been an interesting surprise. It’s prosperous
— due to petrochemicals — well-designed, seems highly livable, and
it’s partnered with Wenzhou (which you should have heard of), a
relationship that has been very effectively milked.
Our hotel is a beautiful Jiangnan-style place, which also came as
a serious shock. We’d expected we were on the way down from the
Urumuqi quarters to something seriously dire, but instead find
ourselves in one of the nicest hotels in Xinjiang — and that does
actually mean really nice. Still no reliable Internet connectivity
though (by which I mean the opportunity to run my VPN), so the
twitter shakes are getting bad. [If Spandrell’s out there — I’m not
hiding from your ruthless tweet-fu logic, my tongue’s been cut out.]
September 22, 2013
Guizhou
Over the next few days I’ll be in Guizhou, known for its karst
landscapes, insanely spicy food, and comparative poverty. The
computer is coming — but so are the kids, so blogging is likely to
be erratic at best. It’s going to be a test of my Outside in addiction,
and one that I’m already failing … digit tremors and threads of mild
718
delirium are creeping in, and I haven’t left the house (or keyboard)
yet.
ADDED: As Spandrell points out in the comments, ethnic
complexity should have been added to the list of main Guizhou
promotion points. There are a whole bunch of ‘minorities’ here, of
whom the Miao are probably the best known, and exotic ‘tribal’
clothing (especially impractically-ornate head-dresses) are easy to
spot even in the metropolis — more as attractions in shops and
restaurants than on the street. The tribals are obviously little folk,
giving the province a land-of-the-pixies feel. We’ve yet to see any
foreigners here.
We’re still in Guiyang, the provincial capital, which might be the
smallest Chinese city we’ve ever seen — just 1.2 million according
to our (highly untrustworthy) guidebook. I pretty much always like
Chinese cities, and this one — whilst definitely odd — is no exception.
The architecture is only tenuously sane, consisting in large part of
highly eclectic experiments in variants of hybrid Chinese modernism,
or an oneiric re-visitation of global architectural history spliced with
Chinese characteristics. Unconvincingly restored Ming complexes
co-exist with space-ship roofed towers and grandiose domed
edifices from an imagined 1920s. They’re doing something ambitious
with the river, but it’s hard to quite tell what.
We spent the morning at Qianling Park, right at the edge of the
city, and an amazing place to visit. Forested misty hills, covered in
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obscure Buddhist carvings, with the province’s largest temple at the

top. Thousands of monkeys populate the park, and even though some
of these now form a welfare-dependent semi-criminal underclass,
they were still the best-behaved wild simians we’ve yet encountered
— fearless, dignified, entertaining, and pacific. (There was no sign of
the ‘heavy begging’ we’ve encountered among macaques elsewhere
in China — let alone among the terrifying monkey gangs in India —
and I’m putting that down to the Buddhist influence.)
ADDED: Anshun, the gateway into central Guizhou, is a scruffy
town of roughly 400,000. Our hotel — The Triumphal (seriously) —
was supposedly a 4-star, everything about it was vaguely
dysfunctional, and the Chintz aesthetics were like needles in the
eyeballs. (The room included its own Internet-connected computer,
which meant that both the machine and the connection were
scarcely endurable.)
Once out into the scenic areas (no easy task), the squalor and
hassle was thoroughly redeemed. We were ‘doing’ geology rather
than ethnography, so the main cultural stimulus was provided by
Miao grannies selling cucumbers and boiled eggs to the tourists (all
Chinese, as far as we could tell). The area around Huangguoshu —
where a new city has been built on (tourist industry) spec. — is
dominated by vast, rugged, karst tracts: canyons, caverns, sculpted
mountain-pillars, and brutally-sliced cliffs, cross-cut by innumerable
waterways and small lakes. It’s truly stunning.
720
A high point for us was passing behind the Huangguoshu Great

Waterfall (Dapubu), climbing through a series of winding limestone
caves that broke out intermittently into open ledges, in front of
which the largest waterfall in Asia deluged downwards
thunderously. We’d already explored the mind-melting Tianxing area
earlier in the day [insert karst landscape superlatives here] and were
bouncing against the outer limits of stimulation absorption.
Philosophical stimulation? One curiosity of special note (at
Tianxing) had the English label ‘The Root of the Human Race’ — it
was indeed a root, of some old, tough rock-clinging creeper, but it
only really made sense in Chinese, because “Human Race” translated
the character ‘ren’ (very roughly an inverted ‘V’), and what was being
described was a rising cascade of converging connections. The ‘ren’
ideogram is sometimes explained as an image of convergence, so the
Tianxing root was radicalizing [sic] a pre-existing conception, but one
that blatantly contradicts the dominant image of human ancestry —
whether Darwinian or Biblical — as a ‘tree’ diverging from a single
root. It has the potential to be upsetting in all kinds of ways, so I’ve
reserved this creeper a stretch of undistracted attention sometime
soon …
May 1, 2013
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Hong K
Kong
ong
Latest travel distraction is the world capital of the
technocommercialists. Of course, it’s a city that I adore to the edge of
brain-stem seizure. Just seeing the Kowloon container port is almost
enough to persuade one that the process on this planet is actually
going OK.
Naively, I had expected that Mandarin would have made some
obvious inroads since the last time I was here (roughly six years ago).
No sign of that, though. It’s quite stunning how much English there is
here, and the extent to which English remains the default alternative
to Cantonese. That has to have important implications in respect to
the cultural foundations of Hong Kong autonomy.
Expeditionary inertialization due to exhausted children
prevented exploration getting off the ground today. Nothing too
adventurous is likely to happen, but I’ll try to record a few sporadic
notes here. Hong Kong is an iconic city, with an exceptional intensity
of sociopolitical meaning, so it should be possible to discuss — and
even argue about — it.
I’m only here (with family) for a few days, then returning to
Shanghai for six weeks of solitary, extremely high-intensity
production. After Thursday, if anybody has extravagant demands to
make, it’s the time to make them. Whatever is ever going to be
possible should be possible soon. Most likely, I’ll learn some crushing
722
lessons about project feasibility, because all my excuses will be gone.

ADDED: Hong Kong has to be a critically important example for
the development of the sovereignty discussion. It’s almost certainly
the freest society in the world, whilst quite clearly under the
sovereignty of a nation that, even to its its most ardent defenders,
equally certainly isn’t. Perhaps this doesn’t rise to the level of a
paradox. After all, up until 1997, when it served (retrospectively) as a
crucial case of the neoreactionary thesis — distinguishing liberty and
democracy with extreme clarity — the structure was not altogether
different. Even then, the colonial metropolis was evidently pitched
at a far lower level of liberty than its comparatively small, powerless,
and insultingly disposable possession. Given the international image
of the PRC, however, it would surely be hard to argue that the
peculiarity had not been exacerbated.
In Hong Kong, the PRC ‘oversees’ an outpost that operates as a
zone of uninhibited reflection upon its ideologically hyper-sensitive
motherland. There are many ways to explore this. It connects with
the larger issue of Cantonese ethnic self-consciousness — a topic
of truly immense significance for China’s medium-term future. It has
important academic and media dimensions. It also shapes the
concrete reality of China’s engagement with the world, especially in
its most ‘deterritorialized’ or cosmo-capitalist dimension.
On this trip, the area which brought it most into focus was the
visual arts. Most particularly, a fascinating exhibition at the Asia
723
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Society Hong Kong Center called Light before Dawn: Unofficial

Chinese Art 1974-1985. This show covered material that might have
been found in Shanghai today, except what would have been
explored approximately, cautiously, and with nervous cunning in
Shanghai, was brought together brazenly and (for anyone habituated
to mainland cultural norms) provocatively in Kong Kong. The
message of the exhibition was stark: Socialist Realism was
benighted, and the cultural escape from the command economy era
was a liberation from totalitarian night. The three decades from
1949-79 were a horror story, from which China has been released.
It scarcely needs to be said that this is not a narrative in conformity
with the ‘official’ PRC storyline of Reform and Opening, and its
historical meaning.
Setting aside the details of the show, for the moment, the
questions it raises concern Hong Kong, China, sovereignty, and
cultural autonomy. Does China surreptitiously appreciate this
offshore zone of critical leverage? Does it merely tolerate Hong
Kong’s role as gadfly, due to the preeminence of other factors, and
interests? (Chinese mainland capitalism clearly makes massive use
of the ‘One Country Two Systems’ arrangement, in many different
ways.) How functional is a peripheral zone of exorbitant freedom,
considered abstractly, as an appendage to large-scale authoritarian
social structures in general? Could this be the way that a rational
apparatus of power realistically discriminates, eagerly seizing upon
724
an invaluable exemption from impractical universalism? That is what

Outside in suspects.
June 29, 2013
Vietnam (scr
(scraps)
aps)
My Vietnam is like my China: accessed from the South, from the
mega-urban, commercial culture, and from pre-communist
traditions. It’s very much the view from Saigon (and that isn’t
something I regret). Saigon would be a great place to live (in small
part because the idea of calling it Ho Chi Minh City is a transparent
joke).
Doi Moi looks like it should work a lot like Gaige Kaifeng (as a
local version of generic ‘Reform and Opening’ in a ‘Market Leninist’
regime) — but it doesn’t seem to be quite working out. If rationalized
corruptocracy is close to ideal limit of effective government among
large states, Vietnam seems to have managed the corruptocracy far
better than the rationalization. Infrastructure development — the
magic sauce of recent Chinese hyper-growth — has not reached
ignition. The country is too small to fund its own ambitions, and too
chaotically kleptocratic to bring in foreign investment on the scale
required. Despite many excellent things going for it, the country is
floundering with a morose economic spirit that is almost Western.
725
Reignition
Vietnamese coffee is among the most sublime offerings this

tortured planet supplies. Thick, dark, and massively caffeinated, it
makes a Starbucks brew seem like dishwater. One cup and the flight
has paid for itself, as far as the utilitarian calculus is concerned.
A visit to Saigon’s fine arts museum is a grave disappointment. The
building is a beautiful colonial structure, but the contents — once
despicable trash had been ceremoniously burned — would fill a small
room. There’s no way Vietnam will be setting the world art market on
fire in the immediate future.
Cao Dai is very strange. Created as a new religion in 1926, with
the obvious brief to make spiritual sense of Vietnam’s peculiar
position with cultural history and geography, it canonized Victor
Hugo and Sun Yat-sen as signatories of “the third alliance between
God and man” (after Moses and Jesus). Cao Dai’s Masonic founder,
Nguyen Gia Tri, rounded out the new sacred triumvirate.
“I saw an eye” was the way my seven-year-old daughter recorded
her experience of the main Cao Dai temple. That would be the
Sauronic Cosmic Eye, repeated obsessively as a motif, overlooking
the white-robed devotees during their observances. The quantity
of lurid symbolism is quite overwhelming. For anybody with the
slightest attachment to a restrained religious tradition, the effect
would be one of unbridled spiritual chaos. Apparently good natured,
and seriously interesting, though.
Vietnamese water puppet theater — more engaging than I had
726
expected.
[Typing on this device is killing me — I’m heading out into the
fragrant tropical night for a cigarette.]
January 17, 2014
Angk
Angkor
or (scr
(scraps)
aps)
Siem Reap (Cambodia) is a scruffily exotic town that never threatens
to over-stretch the adjective bank. For anyone who has been out
of the tropics for a while, it’s charming enough, and the locals are
pleasant, dignified folk. Our hotel, with its hints of French colonial
heritage and lush foliage is more than OK (as long as you don’t make
the mistake of testing their catering capabilities). Siem Reap,
however, is just a jump-off point.
The Angkor sites, in contrast, incinerate all available positive
adjectives within seconds, threatening speechlessness. It’s
absolutely necessary to assume a front-rank wonders-of-the-world
baseline in what follows, with awe-struck mind-melt accepted as the
default perceptual mode (in the absence of, and in addition to, any
explicit qualification). There might be more stunning spectacles to be
found on this earth, but that would require a serious argument.
The Angkor temples were constructed over a period of 630 years,
reaching a climactic golden age of architectural production in the
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Reignition
14th and early 15th centuries. Go read a history book (I still need to).
Angkor Thom is an entire temple city, with large tracts of rain
forest within its walls, and a moat of lake-like scale without. One
architectural feature well worth noting at an early stage follows from
the fact that the Khmers never mastered the arch, so their internal
spaces have a massy, geological character, often rising to impressive
heights, but without culminating vaults. Technically, therefore, it is a
kind of anti-gothic, ascending through sheer mountainous upsurge
of stacked stone, rather than gravity-defying structure. It is if the
earth were imperiously commanded to soar, without the slightest
hint of sublimation into anything other than itself. These are
fabulously sculpted artificial mountains — sacred mesas. According
to my guidebook, there are 11,000 carved figures and 1.2km of bas
reliefs on the Bayon — the core of Angkor Thom. These carvings
were detailed to the level of fine textile design on the skirts of
miniature dancers, while including giant enigmatic faces several
meters across (and in great number).
Angkor Wat is not only a monumental aesthetic composition, but
also an enthralling philosophical puzzle. As befits the final days of
the snake year, it is a symbolic complex strung together by nagas.
These seven-headed serpent monsters are arrayed around the site
as guardians, rearing up from the end of every balustrade. They also
figure prominently on the series of huge, continuous bas reliefs that
wrap the main structure, and — truly provocatively — provide hoods
728
for numerous Buddha statues throughout the site. (Angkor Wat is

thought to be devoted primarily to Vishnu, with Buddhism present
as a later arrival.) This hissing religious insidiousness needs futher
attention at a future point.

(Five-headed nagas are atypical — this one was found at Ta
Prohm.)
The third prominent naga moment occurs on the most revered
of the bas reliefs, which depicts the ‘stirring of the ocean of milk’. A
quick step back first …
Viewed panoramically, Angkor Wat epitomizes timeless serenity.
Close examination of its narrative carvings, however, reveals an
obsession with war. Armies clash, and parade, on earth and in the
heavens. Even the torments of the underworld have the character of
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Reignition
military atrocity — stabbings, slashings, and impalings. The cosmos

depicted tends to a slaughterhouse.
It is here that the naga key can be inserted. The stirring of the
ocean of milk (the Milky Way?) is a tug-of-war between gods and
demons — a cosmic war, therefore, whose thread is the vast naga
Vasuki, whose body is stretched across a hundred meters (?) of
delicately-carved display space. Crucially, a central pivot, consisting
of Mount Mandala resting upon the body of Vishnu in turtle-form,
converts this conflictual back-and-forth into rotary dynamism —
appropriating war to a celestial function …

ADDED: The third temple in the core of the Angkor complex is
Ta Prohm. For sheeraesthetic rapture, it might be the most stunning.
(I’m going to add some snaps as soon as bandwidth considerations
730
allow that.)
Ta Prohm has been shattered and devoured by the jungle, with
broken masonry fused (at once beautifully and hideously) with
monstrous trees. It thus vividly presents a hard collision between
culture and nature in the starkest possible terms. The trees
conducting the slow-motion assault are known locally as ‘spung’
(botanically: tetramelesnudiflora). No director could have chosen
better assailants than these behemoths, with massive, twisting
roots. It was obvious from this spectacle that trees do tentacle
horror even more impressively than cephalopods, if allowance is
made for the inhuman time factor.
An almost equally superb example of semi-digested cyclopean
civilization is found at Beng Mealea, a two-hour tuk tuk ride away,
through jungle-fringe countryside. The heritage preservation
problems of intervening in this titanic clash are fascinating to
contemplate. How does one appropriately restore — or merely save
— an intricately-carved shrine half-eaten by a colossal tree? Is a
formula even imaginable?
January 21, 2014
Cambodia (scr
(scraps)
aps)
The Angkor remains tend to overwhelm the experience of the
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country — probably as the pharonic remains of ancient Egypt do

there. The better half raised some thought-provoking points about
the situation. A regime based on god-king sovereignty, caste, and
war — hardcore even by the wildest imaginings of contemporary
reactionaries, therefore (and with no hint of ‘neo-’ in sight) — created
a legacy that continues to support the country six centuries after the
collapse of the Khmer kingdom. How does this affect calculations
of social order, economics, and time? It certainly inclines the mind
toward illiberal musings.
***
Cambodian money is a study in the contemporary world order.
In Siem Reap, especially, the economy is fully dollarized. The local
currency, the Riel, is worth USD0.00025, and we never came across
a note worth more than 25 cents until leaving SR. Riels were used
as change (compensating for the absence of US specie). Seignorage
bitchez. Everyone says it doesn’t amount to much in aggregate, but
the symbolism is certainly something.
In Kampot, we threw a chunk of the local economy into chaos
trying to break a 10 dollar bill. The first group of street traders we
approached had no idea whar it was (might as well have been some
kind of arcane futures contract). It was only when we got into the
center of town that ‘money’ and ‘small change’ became differentiable
concepts?
***
732
The whole ‘Khmer Rouge accelerated dysgenics’ idea makes a lot

of sense, conceptually, but the locals seem competent enough on the
evidence provided by casual exposure. Given where the country has
been, it seems to be doing OK.
The second HBDish (or as we say ‘Spandrellish’) point raised in
respect to the Vietnamese was ‘tropical work habits’ — I’ll plead
agnosticism, while reluctantly noting that Siem Reap contained the
first “6-11s” I’ve ever seen …
***
Cambodian politics? Not much new information really, except (1)
the state of media openness seems quite high (for better and for
worse, given the chronic Cathedralism of the contemporary
journalistic mind), and (2) the pervasive promotion of the Cambodian
People’s Party is recognizably ‘communist’ in its indifference to the
pseudo-binary balance recognized by friend and foe alike as the
hegemonic global norm. Going out on a limb, I’d hazard that the
country is doing well by effectively suppressing anything beyond
nominal democracy, but the pressure to deteriorate will only get
worse.
***
Being disconnected in stages is a new experience. All connectivity
disappeared at 9pm last night (or so) — it wasn’t something I
appreciated. Satellite-linked neuro-embedded chip? Yes please.
***
733
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Con
Convversations with a T Tuk
uk T
Tuk
uk Driv
Driver
er #1 (Democracy):
Us: “So who did you support in the last election?’
TTD: “I voted for Sam Rainsy.”
US: “What did you like about him?”
TTD: “He promised to spend more money on things. Hun Sen is
spending a lot of money, but Sam Rainsy said he would spend even
more money.”
Con
Convversations with a T Tuk
uk T
Tuk
uk Driv
Driver
er #2 (Colonialism):
Us: “This place [a pepper farm] is great. [Joking, to kids] Would
you like to become Cambodian pepper farmers?”
TTD [jumping in]: “Easy. There’s a lot right next door available for
US$6,000. Enough space to grow pepper, mangoes, papaya, bananas,
keep some chickens, some cows — that’s really good money, cows.”
Us: “It sounds like a lot of work.”
TTD: “No problem! Cambodian people would do all the work. You
could just lie in hammocks, telling them what to do. They’d do all the
farming, ask if you want something to eat, bring you drinks …”
[more later]
January 26, 2014
Scr
Scrap
ap snaps (#1)
The Mogao Caves are located in a harsh place. (Click on images to
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enlarge.)
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The caves shown are in the northern cluster, whose exterior

features have not been defaced by reinforced concrete. The
southern group has been externally ruined by Zhou Enlai (although
he seems to have meant well), but its interiors are the great treasures
of the site, and some are open to the public, by guided tour. Some
images of southern cave interiors (reconstructions) to follow.
April 12, 2014
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ap snaps (#2)
Photography is forbidden in the Dunhuang grottoes, and under the
close supervision of the mandatory tour, this prohibition is strictly
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enforced. Photography is also forbidden in the adjacent Mogaoku

Museum …
The spine of the museum consists of a row of (extremely
impressive) cave reconstructions, sampled from among the 492
decorated caves at the site. (A two-hour tour of the site takes in
perhaps 10.)
The following images are of reconstructions, not originals. The
photographic quality is especially dire, given the unusual lighting
conditions and cramped space. What I’m posting here is what I’ve
got. (Click on images to expand.)
Cave 003:
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Cave 217 (one of the most renowned caves, whose images —

disputedly — convey scenes and stories from the Lotus Sutra):
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Cave 275:
Cave 419:
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April 13, 2014
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Disconnection
Unplugged in Gulang Yu (involuntarily). Normal service to be
resumed ASAP. Here‘s some soft jungle to be going on with.
… Damn, POS pseudo-connection can‘t even manage that.
(Have they hung Bryce yet?)
ADDED: Looks like it’s possible (finally) to put up a few tropical
retreat snaps (and seems like they’re clickable):
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(I can’t get enough of this arborohorror.) One more:
ADDED: The two posts that have made all this (‘Trannygate’)
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craziness worthwhile —
(1) Nyan Sandwich at More Right “… is Neoreaction
a heretical political-insight-seeking movement, or a right-wing
activist movement?”
(2) Nick B Steves on the Official Neoreactionary Position
(endorsed by the most right-wing person on the Internet).
May 30, 2014
Shenzhen
The new airport doesn’t by any means say it all, but it says a lot:
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If it were not that ‘modernity’ (also) connoted friction and

nostalgia, would there be any hesitation in describing Shenzhen as
the most modern city in the world? It is nothing beyond what the
opportunities of the present era have enabled it to be — a uniquely
unambiguous urban seizure of the global now. (Urban Future adores
this place to the edge of neurological catastrophe.)
[Disjointed commentary to be added as the opportunity arises]
Huaqiang Bei — Chips with everything:
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Shenzhen, and Huaqiang Bei in particular, places absolutely

unapologetic euphoric commoditization on display. This is the
world’s Gizmoverse.
No one can have even the faintest idea how massively electronic
production differentiates into lineages, species, sub-species, and
minutely subtle varieties, until they wander through these markets.
Combining innovative variation, replication at mind-melting scales,
and fierce commercial selection (expressed through adaptive
minutiae of product specification and price), the ecological analogy
— based on fabulously complex networks of competition and
cooperation — is irresistible. The electronic jungle is open to
exploration.
Each product line opens niches for others. Not only are there
dazzling multitudes of mobile phone types — an entire phylum now,
honing classical forms, and branching off chaotically down lines of
mutation — but also symbiotc industries for phone cases (“protective
shells”), stands, re-chargers, input and output accessories, cables and
connectors, each assertively seizing its patches of commercial
display space.
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The Huaqiang Bei outlets are described as ‘factory shops’ — sheer

industrial exuberance jutting into exchange space. As an indicator,
bulk discounts are the norm. Buy a single gizmo of any kind and the
deal is met with the friendly but puzzled question: “Only one piece?”
Racks of Cyberspace candy tilt towards rapid circulatory flow.
More (always massively more) on a descent into the
commoditronic core of intensive modernity:
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(There are other aspects to Shenzhen than turbular emergent

machine-mind markets, and they deserve a chilled Shenzhen post.
Then, some deeper engagement with the seething interior of
Darwinized social logistics, competitive supply, or the
Commoditronic Thing.)
September 12, 2014
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ap note (#14)
… Shenzhen fragments (from the world’s tech-comm paradise).
Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:
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Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my

mind, so this is arriving in pieces …
Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen
electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are
in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities.
Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production
under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most
gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated,
techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come
in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into
display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences
(product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is
capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to
forget what it looks like.
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Cables:
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Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security

Market:
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The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t
see any stacks):
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September 13, 2014
NZ Scr
Scraps
aps
Fragments from the West Coast, plus some bits and pieces.
Currently in a gothic inspiration — the Otira Hotel — just beyond
Arthur’s Pass. Bought for one million dollars, along with the whole
village of forty houses. It’s on the rail-line, but remained on the
market for years because:
1) It’s a Gold Rush ghost town with no economic base
2) It’s deep in a valley that plunges it into permanent shadow for half
the year
3) There’s a massive quake due (on the fault-line it straddles) which is
expected to destroy everything
The new owners have stuffed the hotel bar with Gold Rush antiques,
taxidermy specimens, the first telegraph cable, freaky life-size
marionettes … it should be getting dark for the full effect (but it isn’t
yet) …
On an Internet ration tonight (Dec. 27.), but I’m going to try to
keep this alive — meaning updates undramatized by an ‘ADDED’. Also
pics (but some slight time lag likely there).
The NZ west coast is dominated by a near-continuous strip of
temperate rain forest, blurring into sub-tropical rain forest in the
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north. The peculiar local vegetation, including numerous species of

giant ferns, give the landscape a prehistoric flavor. It’s also extremely
rugged, with the western slopes of the NZ alps cascading right down
to the coast. The sea is brutal, and the coastline deeply mauled. The
early exploration of this area was tough. It’s conspicuously Gnon-
tinged geography. (Patience needed on the pix front, apologies.)
Only 30,000 people live on the west coast of the South Island
— and most of them are trying with greater or lesser urgency to
leave. The landscape is glorious (the British Columbia comparison is
inescapable). Once drone logistics make it viable to survive in web-
linked isolation in this area, it’s going to make a spectacular refuge.
For the moment, it’s populated by hippies, hill-billies, and extraction-
industry social detritus (a great horror fiction mix, however — drugs,
guns, and expendables).
Finally — NZ West Coast pics (via the better half).
December 25, 2014
Singapore
No one really denies that Singapore is the most functional society
on earth, which is interesting in itself. Everything works here (even
multiculturalism (of which they have the superior Confucian
hegemony version, rather than the ethno-masochistic late-Christian
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fiasco)). Practical civilization reaches its zenith in the orchid zone of

the Singapore botanic gardens, or somewhere close to it. This drives
a lot of people — even those who profoundly admire the place — into
a sulfurous rage.
No one likes an apple-polisher of Gnon (or scarcely anyone, I’m
exempting myself, along with a few others). By demonstrating social
functionality, Singapore makes everyone look bad, which doesn’t go
down well. The Sings make us all look like useless scum. Yes, there is
that.
Conversation snippets:
“How much crime is there in Singapore?”
“Not much. I saw a sign saying ‘Warning! Five bicycles have been
stolen from this area in the last three years.’ People were leaving
them there unlocked.”
“I’ve known a lot of Singaporeans, but I’ve never really had a
Singaporean friend. … If you’re used to going out on a Friday night,
getting hammered, and waking up in the morning feeling like crap, it’s
hard. No one does that here. The Singaporeans are sensible all the
freaking time …”
The stairwell door to the apartment where we’re staying has a
biometric identification system (plus two redundant human security
guards).
The demographic problem — I’m increasingly convinced — is
hugely about education costs (in money and time). It’s k-selection
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catastrophe. That’s a can to be kicked down the road for the time
being, though, because no one has a solid solution to offer right now.
Mentioned here because it’s deep, highly general, and the only
criticism of Singapore that deserves to be taken remotely seriously.
3.5 million citizens, and 1.5 million permanent residents. (‘PRs’ are
obligated to do national military service.)
I’ll try to update this further (and if I was Singaporean I’d almost
certainly deliver).
January 7, 2015
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ap snaps (#3)
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Huangshan — It isn’t K2 (but then I’d never be idiotic enough to try

scaling K2.)
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April 2, 2016
Vietnam (scr
(scraps)
aps) II
Arrived in Hanoi a few hours ago (first time in the northern part of
Vietnam). Will be here a couple of days, then down south to Hoi An,
and Hue. I’ll try to ad some notes pics, in stages.
One less than massively-inspired snap so far, of the Hanoi Old
Quarter, (near our hotel):
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Anyone with a particular desire to know that I’m nodding along in

glum agreement can feel free to tell me its one of the most execrable
pieces of photographic garbage to yet soil the terrestrial infosphere.
Hoping, in inadequate excuse, that it gives some vague hint of the
local atmosphere. Will try to up my game to a more ordinary level of
sub-mediocrity in the days ahead.
(Organization this time should be up to a reasonably competent
Chaos Patch tomorrow.) A
ADDED: At the shrine of the Long Do God, heaps of ‘Choco-Pops’
packets and a pyramid of canned beers offered solemnly in sacrifice.
May 14, 2016
NZ Stuff
Barry Crump is seen as capturing the edge of the place. There’s a
recent movie based on one of his books (recommended for the
Outer-Anglosphere cultural flavour).
There’s also a route to Samuel Butler, through the back country.
The outlaw myth is far more integral to the Anglo culture than
much of NRx can easily be happy about. Everyone is going to
sympathise with the runaways, not with the search party.
Some (real) advice from the bush: “Keep moving or you’ll be
eaten.” (Deeper than it was meant to be at the time.)
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December 22, 2016
Disconnection VI
Posted from Tokyo, first time in Japan, which is awesome so far. An
open society without being stupid about it would be the NRx fast-
summary (sound, but limited). It was vastly easier to get into Japan
than the United States.
Staying in the AirB&B equivalent of a coffin-hotel, but the
situation is good (in Ueno).
Civilization level meets high expectations, and friendliness level
exceeds them.
Much more English signage than expected, and the inherited Chinese
characters have preserved their meanings, if not their phonological
values, so the urban landscape is surprisingly intelligible.
Micro-artisan businesses of extreme excellence, typically run by
elderly people, are everywhere.
Automation dialed up to eleven.
Yet to see a single over-weight person (which out-performs the
stereotype).
Ginza:
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January 27, 2017
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SECTION A - NEO-
TRADITIONALISM
Neo-T
Neo-Trraditionalism
YI XIANG
Paradox prompts thought. Arriving at the unthinkable after
proceeding, step-by-step, along the path of reason, unsettles
comfortable mental routines and points – obscurely – towards
something new. Nothing twists this prompt more intensely than
time-paradox, which grates thought open upon the basic tangles of
reality.
The main creative current of Shanghai visual arts grasps this
instinctively. Whilst predictably multidimensional (and in other
respects unpredictable), the work revealed by Shanghai artists and
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art spaces gravitates distinctively towards themes and techniques

that can be plausibly described as neo-traditionalist. This inherently
paradoxical inclination is itself a deep tradition, with relevance far
beyond the visual arts and knotted roots that can be traced back to
the Song Dynasty.
At the Shanghai Himalayas Museum Inaugural Exhibition
(scheduled to last until the end of September), this neo-traditionalist
tendency is represented with unprecedented scope and penetration.
Entitled Yi Xiang (意象) in Chinese, it has been translated
(lamentably) into ‘Insightful Charisma’ in English, but this is only a
minor tripping point. (‘Meaning Manifested’ would have been far
superior.) Yi Xiang, or the tension between essentials and their
expression, echoes China’s historic neo-traditionalist response to
the challenge of modernization, as formulated during the Qing and
Republican period: ‘Chinese learning as essence, Western learning
as application’ (Zhongxue wei ti, Xixue wei yong, 中学为体，西学为
用). Further scattered echoes of this deep impulse – to guarded
assimilation – can be heard, preserved even through superficial
inversion, in such recent expressions as ‘Socialism with Chinese
characteristics’.
Yi Xiang is a complex exhibition, divided into five sections, each
labeled by a single Chinese character. Threaded through each is a
neo-traditionalist current, modulated in different ways. This is most
economically grasped as a refusal to decide between past and future,
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tradition and modernity, but to aesthetically stress both together,

in a single cryptic direction. The inevitable consequence is a time-
scrambling artistic (and curatorial) jolt, which simultaneously
progresses into the past and regresses into the future.
The show is self-consciously refracted through China’s landscape
tradition of shanshui (山水) – literally: ‘mountain, water’ – the
aesthetic fusion of the rigid and the fluid, permanence and change,
stability and flux. Shanshui is extended beyond scenic representation
into a method of historical reflection, exploring an intricate time-
scape of modifications, appropriations, blockages, deluges,
accommodations, and adaptations. The sweep of this insight more
than suffices, on its own, to justify the entire exhibition. (I should
note, however, that one brilliant but determinedly contrarian
commentator has interpreted this focus upon shanshui as an evasion
of fengshui, arguably bypassed due to its politically awkward
associations with ‘feudal superstition’.)
Shen (神) or ‘spirit’ is housed in a single softly illuminated gallery,
filled with classic Shanshui works from the Qing, Ming, and even
Song dynasties, along with a smaller number of early modern pieces
directly inspired by them. This exquisite, compact sub-exhibition
elegantly illustrates the way in which the modernization of tradition
is itself a tradition.
Li (理) or ‘reason’ (a term with rich Neo-Confucian reverberations)
is devoted to ‘Chinese Cube’: an explicitly philosophical uptake of
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the classic Yijing into a variety of modern codes, translating tradition

into a recursive, cryptographic puzzle box.
Qi (气) or ‘internal force’ (‘familiar’ through the Dao and
Traditional Chinese Medicine), is the largest part of the show,
consisting of cutting-edge works presented within a coherent, neo-
traditionalist curatorial context. The quality of the work displayed is
outstanding, including pieces by Li Hongto, Shao Yan, Wang Jieyin,
Wang Tiande, Yang Yongliang (and Ma Haiping), and many others. (I
hope to return to these artists in future posts.)
Jing (境) or ‘imagery’ is devoted to architecture, with the neo-
traditionalist theme partially displaced into a negotiation between
nature and urban construction. The visionary work of Ma Yansong
dominates this part of the show.
Yun (韵) or ‘rhythm’, with its musical sub-theme, pursues the
involvements of mountains and water more determinedly than any
other part of the show. A complex work by Ding Yi is perhaps the
center-piece of this section.
Neo-traditionalism is the main driver of China’s cultural
renaissance, and the manifested meaning of its greatest aesthetic
delights. Urban Future will be returning to it as frequently as
practically possible.
***
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NEO-TRADITIONALISM IN
HONG K
KONG
ONG
The momentum of modernization is directly proportional to the
restoration of tradition (discuss).
Abundant evidence relevant to this thesis is on show in Hong
Kong, at two art exhibitions of exceptional interest.
At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, The Origin of Dao: New
Dimensions in Chinese Contemporary Art (curated by Pi Daojian,
open until August 18) exemplifies the infolding of audacious
experimentation into profoundly conservative aesthetic
commitments. The show is divided into two parts. One includes
works in a variety of media, and is moderately stimulating. The other,
devoted entirely to recent ink works (with supporting video) is truly
outstanding.
Works by Yang Jiechang, Gu Wenda, Zhang Quan, Shao Yan, Kan
Tai-Keung, Qiu Zhijie, and others, excavate the creative potentialities
of traditional Chinese media and forms, propelling them into a
dazzling variety of new horizons. One especially conspicuous theme
is the fluid boundary between text and image inherited from the
Chinese script, evoking meandering lines of exploration, elaborated
in the cryptic gulf between pictorial representation and intelligible
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sign. The modernization of native aesthetic tradition progressively

liberates these lines — whether broken or unbroken — from both
resemblance and significance, on a path of escape into pure form.
Shao Yan demonstrates this trend with particular vividness,
through the creation of ink abstracts poised between calligraphy and
landscape. An accompanying video shows Shao at work, like a gongfu
Pollock, realizing a type of Chinese action painting that draws upon
the occult root of cultivation (anticipated by the equation of
calligraphy and sword-fighting depicted in Zhang Yimou’s Hero).
At the Hong Kong Asia Society, Light before Dawn: Unofficial
Chinese Art 1974-1985 (through to September 1) concerns the
liberation of Chinese art from the constraints of Socialist Realism,
as shown through the work of the Caocao, Wuming, and Xingxing
artists. From both a Neo-Traditionalist and Shanghai perspective, the
Caocao Society works are especially significant, consisting of ink
paintings that explicitly (and provocatively) revive artistic impulses
which had been ideologically proscribed due to their associations
with the Confucian literati. Qiu Deshu’s masterpiece 3-5 Times
Shouting (1980) steals the show.
July 29, 2013
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CHAPTER ONE - AR
ARTWORKS
TWORKS
Ink-cantations
When art history invokes the ‘contemporary’, it refers to now, the
current moment, and thus points into an unresolved perplexity. Now
remains undefined, whether by science, philosophy, or mystical
religion. Our contemporary ‘now’ is not merely an instant — not even
a stretched or dilated instant. It is a time that is still with us, or which
we continue to participate in, at once proximate and elusive, still
awaiting its sense, obliquely intersecting the narrower present of
chronological location and practical schedules.
The visual arts, at their most reflective, enter into this perplexity
as into an animating spiral. Whilst succumbing to categorization —
or time definition — within a still obscure and incomplete
contemporaneity, the art work can also make the act of definition its
own, reaching out into the now, and telling us what it has found. In
doing so it tests itself against an ultimate abstraction.
In some such now, current but chronologically indeterminable,
Chinese visual art encountered a critical threshold. The difference
between heading forward or backward, advancing or retreating,
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ceased – at some ‘point’ — to be an option, or a choice. Instead, for

that complex cultural trend and inheritance at once defined as —
and defining — neotraditionalism, true modernity was discovered in
the acceptance of tradition as a path. This wave of creative – even
explosive – experimentation was also an excavation, and a recovery.
It demonstrated that innovative variation was inextricable from the
maintenance of a course, directed into a future already cryptically
indicated by the past.
Beyond Black and White: Chinese Contemporary Abstract Ink,
on show at Pearl Lam Galleries (until September 7, 2013), focuses
with glorious intensity upon the neotraditionalist current. In keeping
with this focus, it both fulfills and deranges expectations, through the
audacious explorations of a heritage made new.
The exhibition poises itself between a number of dynamically
balanced dualities. Most graphically, it is integrated by its primary
material, the contrastive complements of black and white, ink and
paper, yin and yang, perturbed only at the margins by subtle
deviations of media, and occasional encroachments of color.
Architectural balance is sustained by the great double-helix of
Chinese ink wash tradition, the distinct but inter-twined lineages
of pictorial and calligraphic expression, image and sign, with each
strand inciting the other into heightened flights of formal
abstraction. Past and future – as already emphasized — are mutually
suspended in a multiplied contemporaneity. Through all of this,
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Chinese art is re-balanced in the world, communicating with

alternative cultural traditions at the abstract limit of each, where the
escape from formal constraint fuses with the reality of time.
“Abstract Ink” – as a culmination of tradition — is already
distinctively Chinese, but the true cultural singularity that is pursued
here exceeds the medium, to involve, minimally, a reciprocal creative
irritation of painting and writing – twin twisted tracks that, between
them, describe an aesthetic trajectory into abstraction. The Chinese
tradition, propelled by this double training, cultivates resemblance
and significance simultaneously, and thus, through relentless
sublimation, flees both, into a horizon of purity where strokes and
(gray-scale) tones become sheer flight, or indices of escape — cosmic
gestures without substance or meaning.
Arrayed along the northern end of the gallery, several series of
small pieces by Qiu Zhenzhong undertake systematic experiments
with stroke and tone. Calligraphic scripts are disentangled by cursive
lines into unintelligible forms, or melted through tonal dissolves into
the indefinite, whilst images are simplified to the brink of an archaic
ideography.
Wang Tiande – an artist of obvious centrality to the
neotraditional renaissance – contributes two small pieces worked in
his characteristic subtractive method — which combines stroke and
tone in a piercing scorch – one tilted into his experimental practice
from calligraphy, the other from painting. These pieces represent
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him (and testify to his importance), rather than demonstrating his

work at its most fully or ambitiously achieved. Also included is a
technically-complex textile work, in which the scorch method
creates a calligraphically-annotated shirt.
Wei Ligang is represented by a single, large, calligraphy-based
work (Unicorn-Crane, 2010), whose golden, flowing background
relaxes the show’s chromatic discipline. Color also creeps in through
Mengbo’s video work (Not Too Late, 2010), which makes the
Feng Mengbo
modernization of tradition both theme and medium.
Qiu Deshu
Deshu, a bold pioneer of neotraditional revival from the early
1980s, has two pieces on display (Fissuring, and Fissuring Life, 2012),
more remarkable for their intelligence than their dazzling aesthetic
presence. Abstract explorations of paper tearing and folding, they
employ an intermediate ink tone to collapse shape onto the picture
plane, bearing witness to a vanished spatial dimension. (As with
Wang Tiande, the casual encounter with Qiu Deshu in this show is
best taken as an invitation to further engagement with a
neotraditionalist artist of supreme importance.)
For sheer visual drama, the calligraphic dimension of the
exhibition is dominated by Wang Dongling
Dongling. The three works on show
(Tiger Wind, 2010; Benevolence and Integrity, 2013; and Chuang-
Tzu’s “Free and Easy Wandering”, 2013) are not only striking (even
stunning) in themselves, but also remarkable for their extraordinary
variety. Tiger Wind is a large three-character cursive work whose
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bold sweeping lines – unmoderated by intermediate tones –

compose a frozen leap of tensed energy. Benevolence and Integrity
is a more architectural work, structured by soul-sucking slabs of
abysmal blackness, whilst Chuang-Tzu’s “Free and Easy Wandering”
is a more traditionally composed work, using serried Chinese script
to playfully explore the combinatorial space of shape and shade.
These outstanding pieces amply reward a visit to the exhibition on
their own.
Three superb works by Lan Zhenghui and Zheng Chongbin
complete the more painterly dimension of the show, displaying the
potential of Ink Abstraction at a thrilling level of aesthetic
achievement. Lan Zhenghui’s huge ‘mop’ work (Leap Series No.4,
2010) exuberantly jumbles ink-tones and stroke-angles to construct
a monumental celebration of the medium as a vehicle for artistic
liberty. Zheng Chongbin’s exquisite abstracts (Untitled No.16, 2007;
and Formless, 2010), sharpening the tonal scale with vivid acrylics,
conduct an utterly absorbing visual expedition into the limitless
involvements of light and darkness.
“These artists are part of a growing circle in China that draws
inspiration from traditional Chinese ink painting and its philosophy
as well as Chinese calligraphy,” the gallery explains. As the story of
Chinese neotraditionalism takes shape, Beyond Black and White will
surely find a place among the tellers, as well as in the tale. It is also a
feast for sense and thought alike. Catch it if you can.
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Address: Pearl Lam Galleries, 181 Jiangxi Zhong Lu, (G/F),

Huangpu District, Shanghai (021 6323 1989), online.
August 1, 2013
Ningbo
Some time fragmentation is wholly predictable until Wednesday, in
Ningbo (Zhejiang), due to an end of summer family break with
berserk offspring. That was to have been compounded by computer
crisis until the excellent IT guy at the hotel here sorted out what had
seemed an insoluble connectivity problem. We’re at a beautiful Park
Hyatt out at the edge of the town, done out in an aesthetic that mixes
Jiangnan elements with the company’s cosmopolitan minimalism
(rough textures, earth tones, and intricate landscaping seem to be
consistent themes.) Our explorations of the city isn’t likely to amount
to much, but there are a couple of cool things to report on over the
next couple of days. My expectation is something like the Hong Kong
activity slump, but on heavy tranquillizers, so I’m throwing in a Chaos
Patch to keep the wolves at the door.
ADDED (August 27): Besides the hotel itself, the main object of
our neo-traditionalist excursion is the Ningbo Museum, which won
a Pritzker prize for architect Wang Shu last year. Wang was the
architect behind Ningbo’s pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo
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(2010), a building I raved about at the time (in obscure places). His
most distinctive design characteristic is monumental facades of brick
and tile, recycled from demolished villages, and tessellated into
endlessly absorbing surfaces, minimally punctuated by irregularly
oriented and distributed windows. These walls look truly fantastic,
each being an intricate composition, subtly incorporating drifts of
texture and color from the non-uniform component elements.
Exactly how the construction process works remains a mystery to
me at this point, since it relies upon an astonishing degree of craft
attention at the smallest scale of assembly — and therefore seems to
make economies of standardization and scale impossible. In any case,
somehow it’s done.
The second aspect of the Ningbo Museum is a hybrid structure,
marrying the intricate recycled facades with colossal brutalist
structures, consisting of comparatively homogeneous roughened
concrete. The geometric language of massive angled planes comes
straight off the Atlantic Wall 1944, and has an undeniable military-
totalitarian edge. (Whatever one thinks about the alternative neo-
traditionalist aesthetic expressed in our hotel, it doesn’t seem
adamant about engaging in a conversation about death camps.)
Conclusion? Not yet.
August 26, 2013
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Ningbo Museum
The Ningbo Museum, which won a Pritzker prize for architect Wang
Shu last year, is a challenging edifice. Combining traditional elements
and materials with monumental modernism — in its most
uncompromisingly brutalist manifestation — it realizes a peculiar
complex of delicacy and terror.
Wang’s signature facades

already display the same ambiguity in embryo. His vast sheer planes,
shown in the Ningbo Tengtou pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World
Expo (2010), memorialize a demolished past. The bricks and tiles
from obliterated villages are recycled into exquisitely tessellated,
endlessly absorbing surfaces, sparsely punctuated by irregularly
oriented and distributed windows. The tension between crushing
scale and intricate composition is immense (and intimate). Subtle
drifts of texture and color from the non-uniform materials make the
walls into sensual displays of abstract pattern, whilst their massive
geometric rigor approaches a state of absolute menace (with an
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unmistakable military-totalitarian edge).

In the structure of the Ningbo Museum, this tension is
compounded to an almost hysterical pitch by a hybrid structure,
fusing the flattened village mosaics with colossal blocks of
comparatively homogeneous textured concrete. The building looks
like a modern fortress, assembled in an architectural language of
hard defensive pragmatism. Every aperture is pressurized in the
direction of a slit, as if even minimal openings were a reluctant
concession to weakness and vulnerability. For the landmark cultural
institution of an open, commercial city, nestled deep within China’s
traditionally pacific Jiangnan region, this structural vocabulary is
jarring, and indubitably provocative. If it has a message, it is not easy
to decrypt.
August 29, 2013
796
Blow Ups
Shanghai’s the Power Station of Art is hosting The Ninth Wave, a solo
exhibition of work by Cai Guo-Qiang (1957-), through to October 26.
It’s … explosive.
The name of the show, and its central exhibit, is taken from a
painting (1850) by Russian artist Ivan Aivazavosky (1817-1900). This
image of inundating disaster is of clear relevance to the show, but
it also serves as a pretext and screen for an adoption of signs that
Cai Guo-Qiang invests with singular (and cryptic) evocations. Deep
rhythms of time, power, and number are a consistent theme flowing
through the exhibition.
The Ninth Wave (2014) is a re-purposed boat, crowded with (99)
stuffed animals. It was floated down the Huangpu to be installed
in the show, making it the memorial of an event — a signature of
Cai’s work. Superficially, it’s a Noah’s Ark, and an icon of ecological
calamity, but this barnacled hulk, with its crew of traumatized
inhuman survivors, also satirizes the dramatic narratives — whether
comic or tragic — that are employed to frame the profound, ruinous
tides of cosmic transition.
Cai Guo-Qiang has seared his name on the cultural imagination in
fireworks, pursuing an incendiary path to neotraditonalist aesthetic
restoration. Working with gunpowder is the revival of a traditional
Chinese artistic medium. Cai modernizes its potential for public
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spectacle, in ‘Explosive Events’ or ‘Pyrotechnic Explosion Projects’

which are stunningly documented in the show. Yet, among the things
Cai explodes is media compartmentalization. The fallout from his
work includes char-marked images, production diagrams, and video
recordings. His detonations spread across the entire
multidimensional domain of visual aesthetics. Time itself is
envisaged as a system of explosions, burns, and debris.
The Bund Without Us (2014) epitomizes his usage of gunpowder
as method for the production of static images. The process of
creation is staged as an event, in which a complex, controlled
explosion ‘draws’ the picture in gunpowder burns. The image is left
as an aftermath. An enactment of devastation feeds naturally into
a narrative of apocalyptic disappearance. (The title references an
ecological catastrophe fable.)
798
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (2014) was created through an

innovative re-combination of traditional media, depicting the cycle
of the seasons in gunpowder-scorched porcelain. Rhythmic
regularity emerges from a violent process of combustion, excavating
a sublime order of recurrence from both nature and history.
Silent Ink (2014) has ripped up a large gallery space to create
an ink-filled pool, choked with multiple allusions, from the trite to
the abysmal. Once again, a traditional medium is unpredictably
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modernized, pouring continuously into a colossal installation that

evokes urban redevelopment, chemical pollution, and quotidian
ravaging in general, while opening onto deeper cosmic themes of
harsh time-cycles and spontaneous restorations. (The title, of course,
echoes an environmentalist classic.)
Head On (2006) is a huge lupine loop, constructing a frozen
dynamic in three dimensions. Ninety-nine wolves model social
history as a cycle of collective leaps, crises, and dazed re-beginnings.
(As in The Ninth Wave, with its 99 mammalian survivors, Cai
escalates traditional Chinese numerology to figure a point of
catastrophe and reversal.)
800
Catch the wave, if you can.

Power Station of Art, 200 Huayuangang Lu, Huangpu Qu,
Shanghai (86 21 3110 8550), Web.
September 8, 2014
The Qin Model Arm

Armyy
Qin Shihuang’s terracotta funerary army hasn’t ever been high on
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the UF China attractions list. In Xi’an, there’s no choice but to see it

though.
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The site is an extraordinary place. For a start, it is only very

incompletely excavated — deliberately so — making the great halls
a monument to the archaeological enterprise, almost as much as to
the partially-exhumed exhibit itself. Qin Shihuang’s tomb is still
undisturbed. It’s is beyond the capabilities of contemporary
archaeology to deal with it, according to Chinese experts. Mercury
saturation from moats of the alchemically-precious substance add a
toxicity problem to the other technical difficulties.
The worked-site (and exhibition area) is divided into three pits, of
which the first is the hanger-scale structure shown here, in which the
vast majority of the excavated warriors are displayed. Pit-2 presents
the opportunity for a closer look at individual warriors. Pit-3
dramatizes the archaeological effort with special intensity.
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The slogan “Dreams from the Qin Dynasty come true” might
strike those of a more Confucian inclination with some misgivings,
but it seems to have been selected as the condensation of the site’s
official meaning. The non-uniformity of the model army, which is the
main aesthetic point foregrounded, might perhaps be a hook for
some ideological ambiguity. It’s not being presented as a fantasy of
clone troopers, at least.
806
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808
May 8, 2015
Art Machined
Mohammad Salemy produces a manifesto for the deepening
machine age. “What makes this experiment necessary is the severity
of the cultural crisis in which art stubbornly refuses to find itself.”
‘Manifesto’ is a UF categorization, that responds to the text’s
dominant imperative tone, as exemplified by: “Art needs to be
removed from its contemporary ivory tower to deal with the
implications of its appearance, but unlike twentieth-century
modernisms, today art cannot afford to be solely about the
limitations of its supporting material, or only conceived in relation to
its own history and ontology.”
Much, too, though for awkward contemplative nihilists:
Art, whether artists agree or not, is the void of meaning folded in
cognitive wrapping paper, visible only as the surface of cognition and
as the materialization of both the historical and semantic emptiness
which it carries. It is a series of verifiable claims inserted into the
real world and reified to take up the empty space of meaning, a void
occupying another void.
September 10, 2015
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CHAPTER TWO - CONFUCIAN

REST
RESTORA
ORATION
TION
Confucian Restor
Restoration
ation
One of the many reasons to be suspicious about political activism
on the Occidental off-spectrum right is the parochialism that feeds
it. There is a global process that will settle what occurs in its broad
structure, making local pretensions to decisive ideological agency
simply ridiculous.
The fundamental economic outcome — and thus the fate of the
world — is not ultimately controllable even by the central financial
administrations of the major world powers (unless certain intriguing
axioms of radical contemporary fascism are defensible), so the idea
that extremely marginalized Western cabals are positioned to seize
the political driving seat is so saturated in self-deception that it
wastes everybody’s time. In addition, technological developments
complicate all economic forecasts essentially, and obscurely. We
cannot even approximately delimit what unforeseen technical
breakthroughs could entail.
810
The geopolitical context is even clearer. The collapse of Islam, and

rise of China, are re-organizations of the world so evident in their
unfolding, so vast in their implication, and so inadequately thought,
that they make a mockery of all political programs yet conceived. It
is first necessary to know, if only in roughest outline, what is taking
place in profundity — tidally, and inexorably — before determining an
ideologically relevant act. The process comes first.
Already in Moldbug, and increasingly elsewhere, there are signs
within some of the most thoughtful regions of the Occidental
‘reactosphere’ that could be interpreted as a pre-adaptation to an
impending Chinese global hegemony (complementary to the decline
of the West). The most recent is here. When we entertain
speculations about the nature of ‘our’ envisaged reaction, it cannot
be realistically disentangled from what the world will have become.
(I’ve been dismissive of Moldbug’s “Call me Mencius” line in the past,
not — I hope — vindictively, but out of the anticipation that we will
increasingly be talking about the original Mencius, and the potential
for confusion is already visible.)
From the (cultivated) Chinese perspective, the structure of world
history is not defined through modes of Abrahamic eschatology, but
with respect to deep rhythms of Confucian Restoration, describing a
spiral, in which advance and return are synthesized. If the hypothesis
of a continuing trend to a more Chinese world is — at least
momentarily — granted credibility, then the present (second) epoch
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of Confucian Restoration is the key to historical intelligibility on a

global scale.
Mou Zongsan could prove more important to us than any
Western political theorist writing today. The restoration he
conceives has the remarkable advantage of already taking place. He
does not have to imagine what ‘would be nice’, and because he
doesn’t, neither do we. Instead, we can explore what is in fact
happening, even if from an angle that remains unfamiliar. An
alternative order need not be extracted from the rot and ruin of the
old.
The new Urban Future site should be going up in the next few
days, re-focused by a division of labor with this blog. The dark thrills
of collapse will still dominate here, but UF2 will devote itself to the
lineaments of a restored civilization and a renewed modernity which
are — from the perspective of Shanghai — much closer to ‘home’.
When the threshold is passed, of course, I’ll invite you all over. It
won’t be so rough over there, so please take your shoes off at the
door.
June 10, 2013
Mou Z
Zongsan
ongsan
Jason Clower has edited an indispensable volume of Mou Zongsan’s
812
writings (Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays in Chinese

Philosophy, forthcoming). In the first words of his introduction, he
says: “If twentieth-century China produced a philosopher of the first
rank, it was Mou Zongsan.” This judgment strikes me as near-
irresistible. A taste (from two of the first three essays):
From Objectiv
Objective e Understanding and the Remaking of Chinese
Culture
…to adapt to the times you have to understand the times. For
that you need right knowledge of the present age (xiandai xiandai 現代) …
Compared to political and social activities, the influence of scholarly
culture is an influence on a virtual level (xuceng
xuceng 虛層), but “the virtual
governs the solid” (xuxu yi kkong
ong shi 虛以控實) and its influence is wide
and far-reaching, which is why I call it a “decisive influence.” We
should not take it lightly and think that it is not an urgent matter.
***
… to have objective understanding. The first step is to understand
ourselves; the second step is to understand the West. Then we can
look for the way out for Chinese culture, and we hope that our young
friends will take on this responsibility. In its simple essentials, this
responsibility is to revive the ancient meaning of Greek philosophy.
Its original meaning was what Kant defined as a “doctrine of practical
wisdom” (shijian
shijian de zhihuixue 實踐的智慧學). And what is wisdom?
Only “yearning after the highest good” is wisdom. As most people
know, philosophy is the “love of wisdom,” and the “love” in question
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is the kind of love that is “heartfelt yearning for that highest good
in human life and constantly wanting to put it into practice.” That is
why Kant called “philosophy” in its ancient Greek sense a “doctrine
of practical wisdom.” The term is very apt. But this ancient meaning
of philosophy has already been lost in the West. Nowadays all that
is left is linguistic analysis under the conditions of advanced
civilization, with logic having been reduced to applied computing.
This does not actually count as philosophy, only the degeneration of
philosophy into a technology. To enter into the depths of philosophy,
it has to be that “love of wisdom,” the “yearning after the highest
good.” But though the West has forgotten it, this sense of philosophy
has been preserved in the Chinese tradition, as what the Chinese
ancients called “teachings” (jiao
jiao 教). Buddhism exemplifies the
meaning of “teachings” most clearly, but Confucianism has it too,
as the “teaching” referred to in the Doctrine of the Mean when it
says, “The understanding that arises from authenticity is called our
nature, and the authenticity that arises from understanding is called
teaching,” and when it says, “What heaven decrees is called our
nature; following our nature is called the Way; cultivating the Way is
called teaching.” The meaning of “teaching” here is not institutional
education as currently practiced, which takes knowledge as its
standard. Rather, it is “philosophy,” the “yearning after the highest
good” of a doctrine of practical wisdom.
***
814
Nowadays in the West, Anglo-American analytic philosophy is in

command, and the most famous on the European continent are
Heidegger’s existential philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology,
the “dainty philosophies” (xianqiao
xianqiao zhezhexue
xue 纖巧哲學) of the
twentieth century, uninformed by the great Way of the gentleman
superior man. Only that which connects upwardly (shangtongshangtong 上通)
with noumenon or being-in-itself (benti
benti 本體) counts as informed by
the great Way of the gentleman superior man, whereas those two
men do not have an idea of noumenon. So as far as I am concerned,
Husserl’s phenomenology, though written so tortuously and with
such show, is at bottom impoverished to the point of having no
content at all. For it has lost the wisdom of method and given up
philosophy’s stock-in-trade, so that all that is left for it is to say empty
words. All those questions of theirs can just be consigned to science;
what need is there for philosophy to be its cheerleader? So
nowadays, we cannot rely on the West for real philosophy; we have
to come back to ourselves and understand Chinese philosophy. My
life’s work has been very simple, it has been preliminary objective
understanding, but it has already surpassed previous ages. Thus I
once wrote a letter to a student of mine on the mainland saying
that my life has been very ordinary, and the only exceptional thing
is that very few people nowadays can surpass me in objective
understanding. I have no prejudices. I have even read some of Marx’s
Capital
Capital, and have done so with an open mind. I am not even a
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complete stranger to economics; it is simply not my specialty. So my

disgust for Marx is not a bias but a true inability to appreciate him
even after I had understood him.
[On the one occasion where I found Clower’s translation decision
intolerable, I have graphically amended it (twice)]
***
… I believe that for the work of absorbing Western culture, the
best medium is Kant. … I am not a Kant expert but I do believe that
I have a relatively good understanding of Kant. To understand Kant
one must first understand his original meaning. There are more
people who teach about his first Critique and people know a bit more
about this one. There are fewer who teach about his second Critique
and people know a bit less about it. As for the third, no one teaches
about it and no one understands it. I have been translating it and at
the same time working hard to understand it and understand Kant’s
original meaning, in order to be able then to digest it. In my view,
Kant really is talking about problems and wants to solve some
problems, but to see his limits in solving those problems, the only
way is with traditional Chinese philosophical wisdom. Chinese
wisdom can take Kant even farther. If Kant experts only read Kant
and Westerners only read Western philosophy, they will not
necessarily understand Kant’s original meaning. Among British and
American translators of Kant, each of the Critiques has three people
who have translated it but no one person has translated all three.
816
They are expert in just one aspect of Kant and so do not necessarily
understand Kant. I am not an expert, for my foundation is Chinese
philosophy, and therefore I can discern Kant’s original meaning and
take him a step further.
[Mou translated all three of Kant’s Critiques into Chinese.]
***
Why do I say that Kant is the best medium for reminting Chinese
philosophy? I often say that “one mind with two gates” is a shared
philosophical model. From ancient times the West has recognized
the two gates, as Kant did, but nowadays Western philosophy is only
left with one gate, and this amounts to a shrinkage in philosophy.
In the West, the noumenal aspect of the one mind with two gates
has not been developed well. It did receive a little of the attention
due it from Kant, but it was negative, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus continued Kant’s negative approach, so that all
was left were a few ripples. … Wittgenstein’s point was that anything
belonging to the world of value, of the good and the beautiful, is
mysterious and unsayable, and that whereof one cannot speak, one
must remain silent. This sort of attitude is as negative as it is possible
to be, and in keeping with this, on the European Continent,
Heidegger and Husserl did not touch noumenon at all. The two gates
are the original meaning of philosophy, but now all that is left is the
one gate of phenomena. Chinese philosophy happens to be just the
opposite. It is best at noumenon but not good at phenomena. That is
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also the real reason that China wants modernization.

***
If you can deeply understand the significance of “one mind with
two gates,” then you will understand that the more advanced
civilization is, the greater the need for a “doctrine of practical
wisdom” and for what in China has been called “teaching” to firm
up the course of our life and right the problems that come with
advanced civilization. Therefore Westerners should also look to
China for instruction and not just expect Chinese people to come
seek instruction from them. But Westerners are able not to respect
Chinese because Chinese do not read their own books and hence
have no instruction to offer.
From Meeting at Goose Lak Lake
e – The Great Synthesis in the
De
Devvelopment of Chinese Culture and the Merging of Chinese and
Western T Trradition
We commonly say that Song-Ming Confucianism was skewed in
the direction of inner sagehood. By the end of the Ming, in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Wang Fuzhi, Huang
Zongxi, and Gu Yanwu appeared, they already knew that Chinese
history was about to turn in a new direction, that they could not
continue in the direction that Song-Ming Confucians had been going
for six hundred years, because it placed too much weight on inner
sagehood. Thus people like Huang, Wang, and Gu began advocating
openness to external things, expanding from inner sagehood to outer
818
kingship as well, and thus it was that they began to emphasize the
pragmatic study of statecraft (jingshi
jingshi zhiy
zhiyong
ong zhi xue 經世致用之學).
But the reason that this development from inner sagehood to outer
kingship was interrupted and did not bear fruit was the Manchu Qing
dynasty. The arrival of the Manchus meant that China was ruled by
an alien race …
The three hundred years of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries comprised the Manchus’ Qing empire, and the
Qing empire brought not even a scintilla of benefit to Chinese
culture. That is China’s recent history. How could China’s original
history and culture produce the Communist Party? It was the
shallow intellectualism of the May Fourth movement. Why was the
movement so shallow? Because of the baleful influence of mid-Qing
textual studies. As its influence spread gradually, Chinese
intellectuals lost the ability to think and to carry on with the
development of thought. And because of those three hundred years
of Qing rule and the intellectuals’ loss of the capacity to think, the
historical opportunity was lost and the movement toward and
demand for a development from inner sagehood to outer kingship
was repressed. If there had been no three hundred years of Manchu
rule, the natural course of the Chinese nation’s development would
have been little different than the West’s. It was exactly during the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of the Qing that
the West progressed quickly toward modernization. … Of itself, the
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cultural life-force of the Chinese nation was poised to open outward.

It was only that it was repressed by the Manchus.
***
Nobody believes in Marx anymore.
***
… the rise of New Confucianism is a necessity of the trends of
history and we must take up that responsibility. The Chinese nation
is to take up the responsibility of that necessity.
***
I am the sort of person who just quietly ploughs away. I have never
been a government official, never belonged to the KMT, and naturally
I have certainly never belonged to the Communist Party.
***
… This stuff takes time! It does not matter how smart you are
unless you have time.
***
It is not the life of traditional Chinese culture which is lacking; it
is the Communists and their Marxism-Leninism which are evil and
irrational. So in this great synthesis, it is the mainline of our very
own culture which will be the basis and which will merge with the
Western tradition of the Greeks. Western science and philosophy
comes from the Greeks. Modern liberal democracy has many
components, with contributions from Greek tradition, from Roman
tradition, and from the modern Industrial Revolution and the English
820
Magna Carta. Western liberal democracy is also a modern product,

coming in the last three hundred years, rather than something that
existed from the beginning. And in the Western tradition, apart from
Greece and Rome, there is also the Hebrew tradition, which is
religious (Christian). These are the contours of Western culture.
What we want is a great synthesis based on the mainline of the
life of our own culture, a great merger with the science and
philosophy developed out of the Greek tradition and with the liberal
politics developed by the West out of various causal conditions, but
we do not want a great synthesis with Christianity. The relationship
with Christianity is not a matter of synthesis but of “classifying the
teachings.” We do not oppose Christianity. Western people’s faith
and prayer is fine; that is their way, though it is not ours. But we can
critically examine teachings, as Buddhists of the past did. We can
distinguish what is the same and different in them, what is high or
low, and what is perfect or imperfect.
***
What is a “true mind-only theory?” There is nothing wrong with
using the phrase “mind-only theory,” but within Western philosophy
there is no mind-only theory, only idealism. This has to be clarified.
Neither Plato’s idealism nor Kant’s idealism nor Berkeley’s idealism
can be regarded as a mind-only theory. Idealism is not mind, so
Western philosophy only has idealism, not a mind-only theory. What
the Communists call “mind-only” or “idealism” is for them just an
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indiscriminate term of opprobrium. They use “idealist” and

“materialist” as value labels, but they are clueless about Western
idealism. Idealism is about ideas, but an idea itself is not mind. Plato’s
idealism is a theory of Forms. Kant’s is a transcendental idealism
(chao
chaoyue
yue de linianlun 超越的理念論). What are these ideas? For
Kant, they are concepts of reason, which are different from concepts
of the understanding. Concepts of the understanding are categories,
which are the conditions for accomplishing knowledge, whereas
concepts of reason cannot represent knowledge. Therefore, Kant’s
thought can only be called a transcendental idealism. For Berkeley,
an idea is a perceived phenomenon, not a mind but an object of mind,
a particular, real object. Berkeley’s saying, that “to be is to be
perceived” [esse
esse est percipi
percipi] [means that his so-called subjective
idealism] is a subjective percept theory (zhuguan
zhuguan de jue juexianglun
xianglun 主
觀的覺象論). It is completely wrong to translate it as a “subjective
idealism” (zhuguan
zhuguan de guannian lun 主觀的觀念論) or “subjective
mind-only theory” (zhuguan
zhuguan de weixin lun 主觀的唯心論). In the
West, ideas are always regarded as objects, and though objects are
related to the mind, in particular to the cognitive mind, nonetheless
they are not themselves the mind. Therefore only China has true
mind-only philosophy.
***
Where philosophical systems are concerned, we would do best
to use Kant’s philosophy as our bridge. Kant is the best go-between
822
for absorbing Western culture to remint Chinese philosophy and

support Chinese doctrines. Kant’s framework opens up two realms,
the realm of phenomena and the realm of noumena (benti benti 本體) or, if
we superimpose Buddhist terminology on it, it is “one mind opening
through two doors.” In the West, the noumenal dimension has not
been developed well. In Kant’s system, noumena has only a negative
meaning. […] Applied to Kant’s philosophy, “one mind with two gates”
refers to phenomena and noumena. But it must be understood in
Chinese terms, through the mainline cultural spirit of the three
Eastern teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Trying to
understand the “one mind with two gates” by means of Kant’s system
does not work; it must be through the Chinese tradition. This is why
I say that if you want to get a handle on what China has been doing
for thousands of years, you must delve deeply into the mainline of
its cultural life. Thoroughly immersing yourself is the only way to
understand its strengths; otherwise “cultural life” is just an empty
phrase.
First we thoroughly understand China’s mind-only system, and
then based on the wisdom of that system, we digest Kant. For Kant’s
cannot be called a true mind-only theory, only a transcendental
idealism, which implies that it is negative. What is positive in Kant is
his empirical realism, which is limited to the phenomenal world, the
empirical world. Concerning this, please see my book Phenomenon
and Thing-in-Itself
Thing-in-Itself. The thing for us to do, then, is to take Kant’s
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transcendental idealism and his empirical realism and, building on

Chinese wisdom, turn it into a two-tiered ontology, of “attached
ontology” and “non-attached ontology.” “Attached ontology” is that
of the cognitive mind (shixin
shixin 識心). A “non-attached ontology” is that
of the wisdom mind (zhixin
zhixin 智心), and it is this which is a true mind-
only theory. Mind-only theory emerges from “non-attached
ontology,” and it is something that cannot come out of Western
philosophy. The mind-only theory that emerges from non-attached
ontology can also be called thorough-going realism (shizai
shizai lun 實在
論).
[If you can see why this line of thinking makes Mou Zongsan —
despite his very different topical concerns — a Chinese Mises (at the
level of abstract metaphysics), you’ve earned a patronizing Outside
in pat on the head.]
ADDED: This discussion of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle
Anschauung), despite going completely off the rails at the end,
supplies some valuable historical context.
ADDED: More Mou.
ADDED: Jason Clower’s book on Mou and Buddhism, discussed
Buddhistically. Clower’s introduction to Mou at the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mou at UF.
September 17, 2013
824
Cultur
Cultural
al Restor
Restoration
ation and Mou Z
Zongsan
ongsan
After a difficult half millennium, China’s place in the world is
adjusting back towards its longer term norm, at a speed that
continues to disconcert even the most diligent observers. With this
positive correction comes an inevitable ‘spirit’ of revival, extending
from the level of unreflective mood, through partially articulate
attitudes, to the loftiest peaks of systematic cultural restoration. As
this wave of revitalization intensifies, and refines itself, it becomes
increasingly involved in a re-thinking of Confucianism and its
historical meaning.
The philosopher most indispensable to this process is Mou
Zongsan (1909-1995), the most brilliant of China’s New Confucians,
setting the standards of intellectual rigor and audacity for the
country’s third-wave of Confucian inspiration, following those of the
Pre-Qin and Song-Ming periods. Describing the Confucian tradition
as the “main artery” of Chinese culture, responsible not only for its
own perpetuation and renewal, but also for the safe-keeping of the
country’s Daoist and Buddhist traditions, Mou considered its
renaissance a “necessity”. It not only should, but would return,
assuming only that Chinese culture has a future. It is due to this
indestructible confidence that Mou’s own name is inextricably
bound to the wider prospects of Chinese national recovery.
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Mou recognizes that the Confucian tradition is more than an

arbitrary ethnic peculiarity, to be retained out of some extrinsic
commitment to cultural preservation. Rather, the task of cultural
restoration is inherent to it, as a core feature, from the time of
Confucius:
How did Confucius view the Zhou culture? His attitude was
positive, ritual being always necessary. Whatever the period, a
society will always need ritual. Confucius believed that the rituals
instituted by the Duke of Zhou were in his time still useful. Of course
they could be contracted or expanded with prudence but you ought
not to radically overturn them. So his attitude was positive. However,
it was through his re-vitalization of the Zhou rites that he came to
develop what is called Confucian thought. For it was not that the
Zhou rituals were without objective validity because of intrinsic
flaws, but rather that they had lost effectiveness because the nobles
were corrupt and degenerate and unable to carry the weight of the
826
ritual and music. Corruption undermined their ability to uphold

these rituals, and if they could not practice them, would not the Zhou
rituals then become empty? Because they became empty, they
became mere form, became so-called formalism. The Mohists and
Daoists looked upon them as mere form and thus wanted to negate
them. Confucius knew that the corruption of the nobility made the
Zhou ritual empty, but he wanted to re-vitalize it. The Confucian
attitude was that to make the Zhou ritual valid, it had to be first
revivified.
Confucianism has undoubtedly undergone periods of
victimization, but it cannot afford to retreat into victimage, because
it has inalienable responsibility not only for its own restoration, but
for Chinese cultural restoration in general. This argument can be
extended still further, since Mou contends that even Western
philosophy depends (unknowingly) upon the revitalization of China’s
Confucian tradition for the re-awakening of its ultimate possibilities
— as epitomized by the undeveloped potential of the Kantian system,
to supply a practical path into the cryptic realms of the noumenon
(following the thread of ‘intellectual intuition’). The world-historical
destiny of philosophy, and the self-restoration of Confucianism, were
conceived by Mou as a single cultural necessity.
Urban Future has no doubt that over the course of proceeding
decades Mou Zongsan’s international reputation will be immensely
enhanced, as he is recognized — in Jason Clower’s words — as “a
827
Reignition
philosopher of the first rank” with the intellectual stature of a

Heidegger or Wittgenstein. It is thrilling to witness such a figure at
the stage of early ascent, extracted from relative obscurity and
projected into global consciousness as a cultural treasure of
inestimable value.
For English readers, Clower’s contribution to the discovery of
Mou Zongsan deserves special mention. He has already released a
book on Mou and Buddhism, with an edited collection of Mou’s
writings forthcoming (Late Works of Mou Zongsan: Selected Essays
in Chinese Philosophy). As China’s cultural restoration unfolds, and
Mou’s star rises, these volumes will eventually find their way onto a
million bookshelves, as invaluable guides to a new world, and an old
one.
(See also Clower’s introduction to Mou at the Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
September 18, 2013
Explor
Exploration
ation of the Outside
Mou Zongsan opens a gate into the Chinese cultural interior by
unswervingly directing his work at its most radically indigenous
characteristics, uncompromised by ulterior elements, and therefore
undistracted by any seductions of otherness or exoticism that fall
828
short of its inherent destination — connection with the absolute

Outside. That alone is authentically Chinese, Mou insists, which
originates and culminates in the Way (道), cultivating an
unsegregated mutual involvement of thought and being which
corresponds closely to the Occidental philosophical concept of
intellectual intuition. Whether approached through the Daoist,
Buddhist, or Confucian strains of the Chinese cultural complex, the
consistent ethnic characteristic is an interior path to exterior reality,
continuous with the way of ‘heaven’ (天), or cosmic necessity. The
inner voyage is the way out, but more importantly — for the
Confucian current at least — it is the way to let the Outside in,
making culture a conduit for the cultivation of the world.
From Mou Zongsan’s summit of philosophical intensity, therefore,
no true boundary can be drawn between a project marked by
extreme cultural ‘nationalism’ and an ontologically-grounded
cosmopolitanism, or between a diligent restoration of tradition and a
venture beyond the horizon of time. The inward path reaches out (as
it fuses with the tendrils of Outsideness, which reach in).
In his essay on the Meeting at Goose Lak
Lakee, Mou seeks to explain
the singularity of the Chinese tradition in terms intelligible to
Western philosophy:
… Kant attached only a negative meaning to noumena. Applied to
Kant’s philosophy, “one mind with two gates” refers to phenomena
and noumena. But it must be understood in Chinese terms, through
829
Reignition
the mainline cultural spirit of the three Eastern teachings of

Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Trying to understand the “one
mind with two gates” by means of Kant’s system does not work; it
must be through the Chinese tradition. This is why I say that if you
want to get a handle on what China has been doing for thousands
of years, you must delve deeply into the mainline of its cultural life.
Thoroughly immersing yourself is the only way to understand its
strengths; otherwise “cultural life” is just an empty phrase.
Metaphysical traditionalism attains extroversion through
introversion, so that its “perfect teaching” is announced as a
culmination of paradox. It is only at the limit of psychological and
cultural inwardness that the gate of deep connection is opened,
enabling cultural encounters in profundity, rather than a confusion
of comparisons, facile commonalities and contrasts. Chinese and
Western philosophy meet at the summit, and through the Outside,
whose brink each discovers on its own distinctive path.
The paradoxical signs of the ‘perfect teaching’ guide Mou’s
restoration of Chinese intellectual tradition, as it homes — or strays
— to the root of acceptance and correction. In order to turn
Confucianism into itself, he cultivates (discovers / invents) a third
strand of orthodoxy upon which to train the luxuriant but disordered
growth of Cheng-Zhu lixue and Lu-Wang xinxue: a lineage passing
through the comparatively obscure figures of Hu Wufeng (or Hu
Hong) and Liu Jishan (or Liu Zongzhou). It is this third thread of the
830
tradition, he contends, that most fully develops the essential

intellectual content of Confucianism, making it the true inheritor of
the Northern Song ruxue legacy (Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, and Cheng
Mingda), which is itself the uncontested conveyor of the ancient
canon. It alone consistently refuses the delusive separation of
intelligence from the Way, and thus preserves the understanding of
human conduct as cosmic self-realization. Within the (correctable)
Lu-Wang line, this insight tends to slide into eclipse, but on the
mainstream Cheng-Zhu line the slippage has become an assertive
deviation — hardened into “fundamental error”.
Mou’s metaphysical traditionalism coaxes Chinese intellectual
history into an immanent correction, through which its proper
inwardness is reinforced as a resilient — or fusional — connection to
the Outside. What is most its own is spiral immersion within the Way,
where the second gate opens.
October 30, 2013
The Great Con

Convvergence
Every great philosopher has a single thought, Martin Heidegger
asserted. However questionable this claim might be, it applies
without qualification to Mou Zongsan, China’s greatest modern
philosopher (and perhaps also the world’s).
831
Reignition
While the breadth of Mou’s scholarship is intimidating, it was

made possible only by conformity to a methodical life-long study
schedule, organized by a single idea. His one thought, which he
translated into the language of Western Philosophy as ‘intellectual
intuition’ (νοῦς, intellektuelle Anschauung), integrates not only his
own thinking, but also — he consistently maintains — the entire
Chinese philosophical tradition, of which it is the cap-stone, or
guiding thread. Each of China’s three teachings (三教), Confucian,
Daoist, and Buddhist, tends to a principle of intellectual intuition
in which it finds consummation as a “perfect teaching” and through
which it adheres by inner necessity (rather than extrinsic cultural
and historical accident) to the integral Chinese canon.
If any single concept has a density of significance sufficient to
define the essence of a vast and highly-ramified world culture, it can
be expected to resist casual comprehension. To understand it, as
Mou painstakingly demonstrates, is not a preparatory step to
thinking within the tradition, but the ultimate cultural task posed
by the tradition, in each of its main constitutive strands. If Chinese
culture shares an initiatory insight, it is not a readily concluded
realization, but an integrative aspiration, which orients its various
parts towards the same destination, or final achievement. Cognitive
resolution is subordinated to practical development, through self-
cultivation.
In the West, intellectual intuition is notoriously a difficult
832
concept, to such an extent that it is widely dismissed as an example

of philosophical extravagance, beyond all possibility of rigorous
formulation, or theoretical use. Designating the direct self-
apprehension of intelligence, it was associated from the earliest
times with the process of divine mind. Aristotle’s God, whose self-
contemplative thought is the turning of the highest action upon the
highest object, epitomized the notion.
Kant determined intellectual intuition to lie beyond any possible
human understanding, strictly exiling it to the outer sphere of divine
intelligences. Henceforth, appeals to the concept would be the mark
of romantic or ‘mystical’ philosophical undertakings (represented
primarily by the thinkers of German ‘Objective Idealism’ and those
influenced by them). As techno-scientific rationality incrementally
supplanted speculative metaphysics, and divinities shriveled to
implausible hypotheses, the significance of intellectual intuition
contracted towards a vanishing point — whether discreditable
eccentricity, or historical curiosity. In Mou Zongsan’s terms, Western
philosophy, in keeping with its own cultural fatality, had become
almost perfectly non-Chinese.
The ‘Great Divergence‘ familiar from discussions of world
economic history, therefore, had a rigorously-determinable high-
cultural counterpart, which explains why, when East and West
experienced their hard encounter within modernity, they would be
bound together through profound mutual estrangement. The idea
833
Reignition
identified by Mou Zongsan as the basic principle of Oriental

Intelligence, through which — alone — Chinese culture makes sense,
had been shelved by the Occident centuries before, as an oddity of
speculative theology, and now lay buried in dust, barely recollected,
let alone even tentatively understood.
If the idea of directly self-apprehending intelligence were to
remain the preserve of 19th century German metaphysics, it is
scarcely imaginable that the gulf between East and West — as Mou
Zongsan understands it — could ever be more than tenuously
bridged. Either the East would remain entirely inscrutable to all
West, excepting only a cultural fringe of Orientalists, devoted to the
pursuit of radical exoticism, or the East would depart fundamentally
from its own cultural path, Westernizing itself until commensurable
thinking was reached. Both of these prospects were explicitly
deplored in the influential text “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of
Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (为中国文化敬告
世界人士宣言), signed by Mou Zongsan and three other ‘New
Confucian’ students of Xiong Shili (Zhang Junmai, Tang Junyi, and Xu
Fuguan), originally published in 1958.
That the tide of the economic and geostrategic Great Divergence
turned in the final decades of the last century is a matter of
indisputable fact, confirmed by a deluge of quantitative performance
indicators. The cultural aspect of this reversal is necessarily more
complicated, and contentious. In the West, there are no doubt very
834
many who would account for the transition in terms of Chinese

Westernization, beginning with the adoption of European ‘scientific
socialism’ in the late 1940s, and maturing through liberalization — or
economic-technological globalization — until reaching the moon.
A very different narrative, and one in which the emerging status
of Mou Zongsan could be far more positively limned — would adhere
tightly to the problem of intellectual intuition, or self-apprehending
intelligence. The most significant reference would be I J Good, and
his path-breaking essay ‘Speculations Concerning the First
Ultraintelligent Machine’, composed in the early 1960s and first
published in 1965. In this paper, Good writes:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can
far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.
Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an
ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there
would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the
intelligence of man would be left far behind … Thus the first
ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever
make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom
outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science
fiction seriously.
The techno-scientific horizon is described by a reflexive
intelligence, practically apprehending itself, and in doing so marking
835
Reignition
the final human purpose. This is quite evidently ‘intellectual intuition’

as it emerges at the outer-edge of modernity, rather than among the
jumbled curiosities of its philosophical ancestry. If it corresponds to
the Chinese cultural core — as Mou Zongsan doggedly maintains —
it is as an anticipated destination, rather than an abandoned legacy.
Advanced modernization heads towards it.
While, superficially, the tale of Chinese modernity might be
construed as the replacement of Confucius by robotics, careful
attention to the problem of intellectual intuition suggests something
very different. Self-cultivation or self-improving intelligence — what
sort of choice is that?
December 3, 2013
Legalism
The real core of the Chinese tradition?
Chinese F Friend
riend: Nobody in this country believes in anything
anymore.
Foreign De
Devil
vil: So what do you think they should believe in?
Chinese F Friend
riend: Unless people are punished more severely, they
won’t behave themselves.
February 15, 2015
836

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Reignition

NICK LAND'S WRITINGS (2011-)

Tome I - Urban Future: Views from the

Table of Contents .................................................................................................. vi

SECTION B - ACCELERATION ...............................................................341

is to get quite far ahead of ourselves, which is where we shall

the Black Swan theory of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In order to get up

March 29, 2011

Eternal Return, and After

If occult knowledge is una

The hazards of extrapolation are manifold, and frequently discussed.

degenerative epochs (yugas) that subdivided each ‘Day of Brahma’

progressive historical time has been so slow to consolidate itself.

March 31, 2011

(This post is basically a pre-emptive footnote. Please feel even freer

therefore, to find that no single term exists to describe a process that

scale, how fast larger cities grow compared to smaller ones, or in

by the doubling of a city’s population unless the overall population

April 15, 2011

Jacobs turns this assumption upside down, proposing instead that

Time as it is lived and explored is tensed. It is occupied from the

decreasing order, which seems normal and which strange?

evolutionary process, its integral, primordial horror would be

July 29, 2013

Cities are defined by social density. This simple but hugely

success depends on the demand for physical connection,” Glaeser

Floor-to-Area Ratio), typically determined as a limit set upon

specifically social law of gravitation. As with physical gravity, an

Audaciously, Smart projects this trend to its limit: “Current

April 15, 2011

We could be on the brink of a catastrophic implosion – but that’s OK

Science fiction has tended to extroversion. In America especially,

where it found a natural home among an unusually future-oriented

the leading edge of change.

civilizations, nucleated upon self-augmenting technological

developmental attractor (defined primarily by intensification), it

landscape increasingly uninformative and non-absorbing. The search

machinery, sedimented as a series of practical solutions to the

April 29, 2011

Cities are acceler

Among the most memorable features of Shanghai’s 2010 World

innovation and economic growth, a quantitative, predictive theory

series of theoretical expectations that draw upon nothing beyond

“Highly complex, self-sustaining structures, whether cells,

If cities are in certain respects meta- or super-organisms, however,

Something approximating to the fundamental law of urban reality is

“Our analysis suggests uniquely human social dynamics that

Bigger city, faster life.

that’s Shanghai interviews the world’s most topical urbanist

I believe that Singapore is the best-managed city in the world

subsidize urban housing. The best path towards greater affordability

June 20, 2011

(That’s what mail-order capitalism seemed to threaten in the

May 15, 2014

The Urban Factor