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@schulzb589 I accept that I haven't given a proof of this impossibility, but I believe the concerns I've laid out could probably be formalised in a way that would lead to one, though it'd involve something like a combinatoric diagonalisation similar to Russell's paradox.

 @paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 To state my issue in a more philosophical way, I think the desire to combinatorially totalise mathematical syntax is an effect of something like a transcendental illusion, what I sometimes call the Mythos of Logos.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 It's the Leibnizian desire to obviate creative dialogical interaction (dialectical reason) by providing a deductive system (monological reason) that would allow us to simply 'shut up and calculate'; the desire to obviate the pragmatic autonomy of discovery by automating it.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 It doesn't matter how many times this desire is betrayed by its own formal tools: Russell, Godel, Turing, Chaitin, etc.; it doesn't matter that these betrayals are what drive the externalisation of thought by producing new tools to automate computation. It always comes back.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 The desire to brute force reality, be it mathematical or empirical, is always lying in wait, whispering seemingly 'reasonable' lies about what is and isn't rationally possible. This is as close as I come to endorsing Heidegger and Adorno's worries about technoscience.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 But for me, technoscience is not generating an external force that saps our critical awareness ('instrumental reason') or disguises the hidden mysteries of human life (Gestell). Its *legitimate* will to power is being betrayed by the very pragmatic instincts that it cultivates.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 This is a broader cultural issue that extends well beyond the bounds of philosophy of computer science, but the latter is the Archimedean point from which maximal rational leverage can be achieved in the forever war on such rational betrayal. That's the gambit of neorationalism.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 But that's merely the most *abstract* line of attack, and there are also a more *concrete* tactics to be deployed in the war against the self-betrayal of freedom. This is where contemporary rationalism bleeds into contemporary Prometheanism: https://t.co/6UcpWWJX8y
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 To take one strand of such Prometheanism, the project of left-accelerationism (l/acc) is to cultivate and reinforce freedom's tendency to expand itself through any means necessary, insofar as this is an ultimate end (categorical imperative) implicit in rational agency itself.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 I'm a Kantian, which means I believe that normative autonomy (qua self-legislation) is an *end in itself*, but I'm also a Spinozist/Foucauldian, which means I believe that the causal underpinnings of such autonomy are something like *means in themselves*.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 This notion of a means-in-itself as opposed to a means to a given range of ends is what @benedict calls a 'platform', and the integrated platform architecture that enables autonomous agency as such is what @bratton calls 'The Stack'. These are the concrete foundations of freedom.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Freedom's self-betrayal is the tendency of these platforms toward decadence: to retard, disarticulate, and generate points of leverage that some 'users' (putative 'owners') can use to exert and accumulate power over others ('capital') all at the expense of growing agency.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton l/acc has always understood itself as the project of untying the knots that freedom has tied itself in: egalitarian emancipation as an unsnarling of the forces that drive freedom's tendency to ratchet itself, and thereby escape any seemingly 'natural' trap it's been caught up in.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton This is why my own (limited) contribution to the #ACCELERATE reader (https://t.co/bg0QgFT7jK) was to insist on the incorporation of Veblen alongside Marx and Federov as a precursor of contemporary accelerationism.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton As I noted when I shared this article (https://t.co/ST58FHFdZc), it's a tragedy that The Theory of the Leisure Class overshadows The Theory of the Business Enterprise, which presents the most concise and convincing alternative to the normative framework of Marxism that I've seen.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton It's not a complete alternative, or even an entirely incompatible one. I mean to say that it's perhaps the most significant theoretical critique of political economy after Capital. It tells a different story about the internal struggles of capitalism and their inevitable destiny.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Veblen posits two tendencies that are intertwined within capitalism: the machine process, which is the autocatalytic tendency of *industry* to ratchet human capacity, and the pecuniary drive, which is the autocatalytic tendency of *commerce* to maximise profit/accumulate capital.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton He claims that these competing forms of autocatalysis are in some sense symbiotic: industry provides commerce with its products and services ('the real economy'), while commerce ('the market') modulates the process of industrial refactoring, revision, and expansion.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Nevertheless, he believes that they are in conflict: the machine process articulates and expands the industrial means (platforms) that constitute the economic base of freedom, while the pecuniary drive will happily sabotage them to seek sources of *rent* and accumulate *capital*.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton The separation of these tendencies is precisely what Nick Land denies in the opening of the 'Teleoplexy' piece that closes the reader (https://t.co/kLgs7WTG0d). This is the crucial explanatory (as opposed to normative) disagreement in the debate between between l/acc and r/acc.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Land is thus constitutively unable to even comprehend the conflict that Veblen sees here, which is a deep irony, given that he is the consummate thinker of cosmic conflict (https://t.co/CTjHHm50Ei).
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Rather than inevitable technocapital singularity (or a diverse eschatology), in which artificial intelligence bootstraps itself into existence like a nightmare god (or pantheon) travelling back from the future, Veblen foresees futures dominated either by industry or commerce.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton The choice is between a return to some neofeudal arrangement in which the old hierarchies of power are emulated on a monetary virtual machine (commerce wins), and a technocratic system in which expertise is cultivated and cultivates freedom in turn (industry wins).
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton For anyone who has been paying attention to the evolution of neoliberal capitalism over the last 40 years, the idea that commerce will reimplement feudal structures within a putatively market based system will sound not just plausible, but all too familiar (cf. privatisation).
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton The real difference between Marx and Veblen is that Marx sees the industrial proletariat as the revolutionary class destined to fight (and win) the war against capitalists, whereas Veblen believes this is the destiny of engineers, who may well lose without *class consciousness*.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton There are plenty of problems with Veblen's position, not least an obsession with *optimising efficiency* that is itself a facet of the Mythos of Logos (https://t.co/wzlEQ54zwJ). Bataille's celebration of *energetic excess* is a useful corrective to this (https://t.co/ZaSBrgcWPw).
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton But the idea that engineers need to develop class consciousness, that they must understand the normative parameters of the role that they play within the industrial system, is itself a powerful corrective to persistent Marxist nostalgia for earlier forms of industrial labour.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton In the age of automation (https://t.co/HTqzcrm5i8), as work becomes increasingly detached from technics (https://t.co/NssAJX05IZ) while the core and periphery of the workforce are divided into those with *jobs* and those with *gigs*, the revolutionary parameters have shifted.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton To bring us full circle, and return to computation as both a locus of labour and a means of automation, nowhere is the conflict between the machine process and the pecuniary drive more obvious than in software development and the wider tech industry that encompasses it.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Is there a better way to describe the conflict between the coalitions of the willing that expand and maintain the open source software on which the Stack is run, and the bloated over-managed edifice of commercial software development that parasitises it? It's the exemplary case.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton As Richard Stalman might put it, software should be free not in the commercial sense, but in the political sense: free as in freedom. This has long been the rallying cry of industrial hackers fighting an endless war against commercial sabotage. There's your class consciousness.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Of course, there's more to the economy than software, and there are always more proletarians than engineers, but the accelerationist unsnarling of productive forces required to defeat the autocatalysis of commerce and its neofeudal destiny demands solidarity between the two.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton I reject every purported opposition between the technoscientific expansion of freedom and the 'authentic' realities of human social life (https://t.co/Sp2C7pVLHG). Resist that nostalgia for a more simple time that hides in your fantasies of the future. Kill the Mythos inside you.
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton Even if you want to retain the term 'communism' for the Promethean project of collective emancipation that brings about the end of capitalism and opens the door to something else (post-capitalism), you must destroy the perfect commune inside your head (https://t.co/aa2rcbOc40)
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton And that's how you get from the critique of computational reason to the techno-political opportunism of left-accelerationism: https://t.co/KM0mXTntJ6
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 @benedict @bratton @threadreaderapp unroll

More from pete wolfendale

pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.


I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.

Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.

I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.

We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).
ECONOMY
pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).


This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.

And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.

We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.

This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

The characteristic Pete thought is: wait a minute, this whole area is dominated by an assumption that no one seems to be questioning, and I've got two options to express that: i) outline the logic of the issue in a quick and compressed way, ii) write a small book with references.

The discipline seems to want something in between these poles every single time, and this makes me extremely anxious because I feel (with good reason) like any partially referential engagement with the issue will get instantly torpedoed by anyone outside its referential remit.

To repeat something I've said before: I'm actually quite good at being *concise*, I just find it very hard to be *brief*, because most of the thoughts I have don't permit brevity. Consider what your (referential) reactions are to this brief piece:

One of the main genres of publication I've actually excelled in over the years is dictionary articles, which I take a lot of joy in writing, and include some of the pieces of which I'm most proud. Consider this one on the crux of Meillassoux's project:
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Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi
@shreyas
Why does Your Manager’s Manager (YMM) request a deck/doc during a meeting, says it’s urgent, and then doesn’t respond for days after you create & send it?

Or, why does YMM often respond with trivial feedback (e.g. formatting) & not substantive feedback?

Answers in this thread👇🏾

Have you set an entirely new password on a site & said to yourself: “surely, I’ll remember it becos this site is so important for me”. Have you then gone on to forget that password the very next week?

Me too.

The reason for YMM’s odd behavior & my password optimism is the same.

That reason is the Focusing Illusion, first described by Daniel Kahneman.

The Focusing Illusion:
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

When YMM asked you to create that doc as one of the follow up actions during the Product Review, YMM fell prey to the Focusing Illusion.

Trust me, YMM had no intention of making you do busywork.

YMM truly believed that it was very impt & urgent to create that doc & review it.

This was YMM’s conception of how much of their future time was appropriate to spend on the item for which they requested that doc (Item A):
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TXgrlWatching💻⚔🛡...
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Thread Pt 3 Who is Prometheus?

1. In Greek mythology, Prometheus, is a Titan of fire. Prometheus is a culture hero & trickster figure who is credited with the creation of humanity from clay, and who defies the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity as civilization.
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John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Time once again to emphasize the differences between totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism. They're often used as synonyms but they are different, although they do tend to lead to each other. Order one, and the other two are usually delivered soon enough.

Totalitarianism is best understood as the politicization of everything. Every facet of life is infused with political meaning... and subjected to political control. There is little room for privacy or individualism. Every word and deed is seen as a political action.

Totalitarianism does *not* require authoritarian government, although it usually leads to such. You can be totalitarian without having any real government power at all, enforcing your political will through mob actions and corporate power. Examples from recent history abound.

Totalitarianism is the easiest of the three deadly "isms" to slide into, because it can easily be disguised with claims of its good intentions. Totalitarians usually claim to be motivated by the Greater Good. They claim to represent the interests of sympathetic victims.

Totalitarians claim that society is unjust and must be corrected by force. Before they gain the power to become authoritarians, they often assert the right to use force outside of the law because the government is corrupt or serves the interests of their ideological enemies.
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GAVNet
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Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/13/2021

Claudia Sahm on Twitter and ThreadReader

https://t.co/UNH4NEks6h

https://t.co/kFdktm5eeu

#UnemploymentBenefits #EconomicRecovery #StimulusChecks #PandemicResponse
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Lauren Thoman
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@LaurenThoman
I should mention, this is why I keep talking about this. Because I know so many people who legally CAN'T.

How do I know they have NDAs, if they can't talk legally about them? Because they trusted me with their secrets... after I said something. That's how they knew I was safe.


Some of the people who have reached out to me privately have been sitting with the pain of what happened to them and the regret that they signed for YEARS. But at the time, it didn't seem like they had any other option BUT to sign.

I do not blame *anyone* for signing an NDA, especially when it's attached to a financial lifeline. When you feel like your family's wellbeing is at stake, you'll do anything -- even sign away your own voice -- to provide for them. That's not a "choice"; that's survival.

And yes, many of the people whose stories I now know were pressured into signing an NDA by my husband's ex-employer. Some of whom I *never* would have guessed. People I thought "left well." Turns out, they've just been *very* good at abiding by the terms of their NDA.

(And others who have reached out had similar experiences with other Christian orgs. Turns out abuse, and the use of NDAs to cover up that abuse, is rampant in a LOT of places.)
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Хајде да направимо мали осврт на случај Мика Алексић .

Алексић је жртва енглеске освете преко Оливере Иванчић .
Мика је одбио да снима филм о блаћењу Срба и мењању историје Срба , иза целокупног пројекта стоји дипломатски кор Британаца у Београду и Оливера Иванчић


Оливера Илинчић је иначе мајка једне од његових ученица .
Која је претила да ће се осветити .

Мика се налази у притвору због наводних оптужби глумице Милене Радуловић да ју је наводно силовао човек од 70 година , са три бајпаса и извађеном простатом пре пет година

Иста персона је и обезбедила финансије за филм преко Беча а филм је требао да се бави животом Десанке Максимовић .
А сетите се и ко је иницирао да се Десанка Максимовић избаци из уџбеника и школства у Србији .

И тако уместо романсиране верзије Десанке Максимовић утицај Британаца

У Србији стави на пиједестал и да се Британци у Србији позитивно афирмишу како би се на тај начин усмерила будућност али и мењао ток историје .
Зато Мика са гнушањем и поносно одбија да снима такав филм тада и почиње хајка и претње која потиче из британских дипломатских кругова

Најгоре од свега што је то Мика Алексић изговорио у присуству високих дипломатских представника , а одговор је био да се све неће на томе завршити и да ће га то скупо коштати .
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SRI MOOKAMBIKA DEVI, KOLLUR (KAR)

There was an Asura, Kaumasura, who was doing penance to please Shiva and get a boon. To prevent him from asking for a boon, Devi Saraswati made him dumb (hence called Mookasur)
Later, Adi Parashakti slayed him and came to be called Mookambika.


It is said that Adi Shankaracharya had a vision in which Devi agreed to follow him provided he did not look back. He kept walking and was assured of her presence due to the sound of anklets. When he reached here in Kollur, he turned back as the sound of anklets had stopped.


So Devi stayed here and merged with the lingam. The place came to be called Mookambika Kshetram.
The linga has integrated on it’s left side MahaKali, Maha Lakshmi and Maha Saraswathi and on the right side- Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.


A swarna rekha (gold line) divides this linga into left and right portion. Adi Shakthi in this Udhbhavlinga form appears only here.
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Adi Shankaracharya installed the Sri Chakra in front of Devi and also composed the Soundarya Lahiri here.
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Singing the Blues:
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"I had all of the advantages. I was already inside the network. No one suspected me. But they found my hack, kicked me off the network...

...and physically hunted me down."


Many pentests start from the outside, wanting to see how the perimeter might be breached.

This pentest started from the inside. My client wanted to assume they had already been breached, and, if breached, how far could an attacker go.

Could they stop me once I was inside?

So they snuck me in. Disguised me as a new employee. Gave me a work computer, an ID badge, an account in their system... hell, I even had a cubicle w/my assumed name on it.

The only person who knew who I really was was their CISO. Everyone else thought I was Jeremy in Marketing.

During most of the first morning, I completed onboarding, made introductions, and completed menial tasks.

But I had to act quick. I only had a week onsite. I had to hack their network while not raising suspicion.

So I set about it.

You have to understand... most "Internal Pentests" are straight forward. The hard part is breaching the network, but once you're inside, it's a target rich environment. End of Life computers, default passwords, everyone a Local Administrator...
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They’re shooting into the chamber.
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Dr Amanda Moehring
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In Academia, people aren’t always supported when they need it. I want to share what @WesternU did when my husband died right after the pandemic shutdown. It should be shared with other uni’s as a model for empathy and proactive care when someone is in crisis.
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