Crackpots #1: We Make the Machine (Patreon)

Greeting. Zizek voice. Welcome to the desert of the real.

Just playing. It's Liz. Promise I won't do that again.

So, here's the deal: I explained in the last post what it is we are doing here. I don't want to repeat myself, so instead I'll another twist: I don't know exactly what it is I am doing here. I'm not going to pretend to be reinventing anything. It's all posts all the way down, you feel me? For our purposes, this probably means a mix of random thoughts, brainstorms, half finished diatribes, links, recommendations for reading, a scroll through my X (the everything app!) bookmarks — all highly classified info, if we are being frank with one another. I've opened an email inbox so you can send comments, questions, prompts, leads and what have you. Don't be weird and it might be fruitful. You can reach me at LizfromTrueAnon @ gmail dot com.

Alright, on with the show.

Julian Bigelow, Herman Goldstine, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Jon von Neumann in front of MANIAC 

READING NOW: The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut

I'm moving through Benjamin Labatut's novel The MANIAC which centers on John von Neumann, a contemporary of Hollywood's hero of last year, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Von Neumann worked under Oppie at Los Alamos, but is probably more well known for his work in game theory, quantum mechanics and digital computing. The foundation of modern computers comes from von Neumann's architecture, largely built off Alan Turing's, but it is von Neumann's work in modeling self-replicating machines that forms the basis of artificial intelligence. The title is taken from the name of his early computer, literally called MANIAC or Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. It takes a rare form of psychic demonic swagger to christen your project MANIAC when your bunk mate is building the atomic bomb.

The novel is laid out in three parts. Von Neumann is the subject of the second part, a delightfully titled "JOHN or The Mad Dreams of Reason." Collaged with testimony from various figures at the time—friends, family, colleagues, rivals—what forms is an unflattering portrait of an obsessional living genius afflicted with the still-defining symptom of the time: a passion for efficient management. If only the world could be sufficiently rationalized aka categorized, taxonomized, streamlined, smoothed, only then could it be contained: "all processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable, we shall control." If that sounds like a quote from a Sam Altman groyper, that's not a coincidence. Von Neumann is useful for locating the specific type of rational madness that organizes our society, and in Labatut's hands it achieves lift:

 What von Neumann had tried to do was find the purest and most basic truths of mathematics, and to express them as unquestionable axioms, statements that could not be denied, disproven or contradicted, certainties that would never fade or become distorted and so would remain—like a deity—timeless, unchangeable, and eternal....on this solid core, mathematicians could construct all their theories, unfolding the diverse beauty of quantity, structure, space and change without fear that they might encounter a monster, some awful chimera born of paradox and contradiction that, once awakened, could tear their tidy, ordered cosmos apart ....

The internal contradictions of certainty had already been expressed forty six years before von Neumann was born and maybe if he had heeded such practical advice he wouldn't have been as tormented as Labatut paints him when it comes to the ontological limit of mathematics, or as Kurt Gödel puts it in the book, von Neumann's obsession with "a formal system of axioms ... free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions ... [it] would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—would never be proven within the laws of that system." This limit of mathematical perfection seems to drive von Neumann insane:

The mathematical universe is built much like a pyramids of the ancient pharaohs. Each theorem rests on deeper and more elementary substrate. But what supports the bottom of the pyramid? Is there anything solid to be found there, or does it all float on the void like an abandoned spiderweb blowing in the morning wind, already unraveling at the edges, held together merely by frail and thinning strands of thought, custom and belief? .... But uncovering foundations is always dangerous, for who can tell what lies in wait among the fault lines in the logic of our universe, what creatures sleep and dream amid the tangle of roots from which human knowledge grows.

Anyways, this is not a book review. The novel is gorgeously written, sometimes arrestingly so. But I mention it less as a buy-it-now suggestion (though you should) and more as a prompt: I like to think about machines. Maniacal or otherwise, they express not just individual achievements of technical knowledge but capture and embody the contradictory social relations that produce them, what Marx termed the general intellect. That social knowledge is then continually absorbed and reflexively transformed through the expansion of the mass apparatus of fixed capital. In this way, von Neumann is less a mad scientist and more a psychotic doula, hastening the birth of new productive forces, long socially gestating.

We live in and with the machines already and how we talk about that matters. I mentioned this on our recent episode with Max Read, but often when we talk about artificial intelligence and the stuff "it" produces, we situate ourselves at a comfortable distance while the work of AI happens, as Max writes, at some "vast electronic beyond." But, he continues, that isn't right: "Slop requires human intervention or it wouldn't exist." The bullshit we consume on our feeds is produced by humans; it does not spontaneously generate. The market architecture of the platforms of course incentivizes this production which is about as insightful as telling you, "it's all capitalism, man." But it is still important to map out how we talk about this, the ways in which capital's myth of technological manifest destiny worms its way into our understanding, reshaping and reproducing what we imagine is our capacity to make or break this stuff.

The proliferation of AI generated media has other unintended consequences. We live under an aesthetic regime of continuous flow, from infinite scrolls of platform-optimized content to MMO video games to SFX tools and now into AI video. We create media that no longer needs to obey the laws of space and time, where archaic rules like gravity can be defied to showcase any conceivable angle. We stretch time, we loop, we modulate. We now do this without thinking. Our only mandate is coherence, which means any sequence can be seamlessly connected so long as there is no detectable narrative break.

I was thinking about this when JD Vance made his unintentionally thought-provoking comments on the nature of our shared reality: "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." He restated this in another interview saying, "if we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we're going to keep on doing it." Lots of people have noted JD's various millennial-coded tics, though the insistence on the political utility of meme magick might be his most explicit. I shouldn't say meme magick because the meme of meme magick has achieved escape velocity and the simple act of creating stories for media attention and doing so with and in coordination with others, particularly on Elon's X (the everything app!), is just what we all do now. That the realpolitik id of social media production allows for loose interpretation of the rules of reality is a feature built into the design of the machine. I'm not sure there is another way to post.

People—especially, but not only, media people—love to insist that this type of toxic storytelling is contained to those who are terminally online. As if that wasn't everyone. The sludge of the social media machine invariably leaks to the outside. You can trace the origins of Vance's commentary to the infamous Karl Rove quotable, but you can equally trace it back to reality television which was, not coincidentally, coming into its own right when Rove chastised the "reality-based community." Millennials, like Vance, were forged in the fire of reality TV which exploited the blurring of public and private that the broadcast medium afforded. What followed in the social media reality-making machine exacerbated the dissolving of this distinction while insisting on the urgency (or commercial viability) of personal narrative. Out of this emerged influencers, celebrities, performers, newsmakers and even politicians all primed to broadcast the moment they decide to stop being polite and start getting real.

That flexible politics is produced for mass consumption isn't particularly insightful but the scale and scope and speed at which this happens continues to impress. I say politics but that is incorrect because what passes as politics produced by social media is, of course, extremely depoliticized. I would go further to say that it scans almost therapeutic. My blue-check dominated For You page reads as a stream of private fantasies set within wholly constructed paranoid delusions, grounded in some vague personal anxiety or another, all projected out onto the world, draped in political rhetoric designed for consumption, affirmation, defense and recognition. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus described similar behavior as microfascism:

Instead of the great paranoid fear, we are trapped in a thousand little monomanias, self-evident truths and clarities that rush from every black hole and no longer form a system, but are only rumble and buzz, blinding lights giving any and everybody the mission of self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man.

How do we understand the ways in which people come to experience the world? Deregulated mass media and the internet have cut out the middleman and spread a machine of mass direct-to-consumer politics on the cheap. Rather than edifying, I think most people have come to find this development nauseating, deeply unmooring. My sense is this overwhelming market of depoliticized consumer politics smothering everything is pushing segments of the middle class deeper into reactionary nostalgia. Remember what it was like before? If only someone could come along and take care of everything. Funny enough, this is where you find technocratic liberalism with its promise of efficient management solutions and depoliticized organized harmony. The world of the machines.

'This much evidence, still no charges' James Butler on the Grenfell inquiry, London Review of Books

At its inception, many families feared that the inquiry would be a drawn-out establishment whitewash, or that it would spread the blame so wide that nobody would be held accountable. Neither has proved the case. A third anxiety, that time would dull the public’s appetite for justice, is harder to allay. It takes an effort to recall the anger so widely felt the morning after the fire, when the burning tower seemed to represent so much that was wrong with Britain’s social and political order, its private affluence and public squalor, the avarice and arrogance of its ruling elite. Left-wing MPs were castigated for saying what happened was ‘social murder’ or calling on Britain to ‘burn neoliberalism, not people,’ but the final report confirms the soundness of those early intuitions. In 2017, only the most optimistic would have believed that the catastrophe would lead directly to substantive political change; but even the most pessimistic would not have predicted that, seven years on, almost nothing would have changed.

Warren Hern, America's Abortion Doctor, Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

Not to Lib out, but I'm sick to death of right-wing memes about babies getting chopped up on the operating table post-birth presumably after sex-crazed, deadbeat would-be moms change their mind carelessly at the last minute, as if these slutty whores thought precious life itself was as cheap as their Shein dress! Educate 👏 Yourself 👏

Brace Belden: LARP and Destroying the US Government, Doomscroll 

It's refreshing to listen to someone speak so plainly about their love of the world and for those who struggle to produce it and though I am loathe to stroke his ego, I think it is something he is particularly good at. Brace has the highly sought after ability to speak with clarity and care, especially when it comes to how obvious certain truths about our world are. He doesn't need me to give him his flowers but you should watch it if you haven't, it's great background for chopping onions and smashing garlic and all that.

Larger Than Life, Slavoj Žižek, Substack

Žižek on Jameson

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as fake, simplified solutions. We all know the cliché that conspiracy theories are the poor man’s ideology: when individuals lack the elementary cognitive mapping capabilities and resources that would enable them to locate their place within a social totality, they invent conspiracy theories that provide an ersatz mapping, explaining all the complexities of social life as the result of a hidden conspiracy. However, years ago, Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen that cannot be explained merely by referring to some anonymous logic of the capital … the true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such conspiratorial interventions.

How I Lost (and Found) My Style, Cathy Horyn, New York Magazine

I am not a big personal essay connoisseur, but I loved this from Cathy Horyn on how it feels to finally settle into yourself, a process that we are unwittingly committed to repeating endlessly for the whole of our lives.

I remember receiving some advice from Bill Blass soon after I’d moved to New York and joined the Times in 1998. We were at his house in Connecticut because I was planning to wear one of his evening dresses to receive a journalism award. ‘For God’s sakes,’ he growled, ‘don’t look like no one ever gave you an award before.’

Before we go:

I just saw the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant perform the Book of Ayres, a 16th century (!) series of songs by John Dowland, complete with lute (!!). She wore a fantastic Jacobean-esque frilly collar that I can't really get out of my head. She also played new music and it was simply one of the best vocal performances I've heard and also featured an incredible percussionist, among other musicians. If you have the chance to see her, I'd take advantage. And if you aren't familiar with her range, she does a great Kate Bush cover.

And ICYMI, I went on Ordinary Unhappiness a bit ago to talk about the movie CONSPIRACY THEORY and conspiracies in general, including my passionate defense of the fake moon landing theory and some thoughts on our collective fear of the Big They/Them.

See you next month.

Yours,

Liz