i have finally begun the project what i committed myself to doing. sadie plant’s zeros + ones felt like the intuitive place to start writing, so here are some notes on the book which is an extremely clear lifting-off point for accelerationist feminism (and which, if you’re on xnfm, you should probably read). they’re not intended to be comprehensive either of the book itself or of themselves, they’re just things i want to make a note to come back to
also, clicking on the header text goes to the index page where the project outline, which i wrote in the post i made here a month ago, is provided
@lilli Wonderfully written. It was an enlightening read despite my near-zero familiarity with the source material (I have only read nyx's g/acc blackpaper). It also inspired a few thoughts which I pre-emptively apologize for.
Math research, as ordinarily presented, operates from an extremely masculine perspective. Most mathematicians are Platonists and conceive of the numeral realm as an independent, objective landscape which it is their job to conquer. They do this by creating weapons and establishing outposts - theorems - which support the expedition into the unknown depths. Mathematics is not synonymous with the numeral realm; rather, it is the quest to inscribe order onto the numeral realm, to render it intelligible, and (ultimately) to unify it.
I always thought of the numeral realm and the internet as being analogous - they are virtual worlds which seem to be created and discovered at the same time by the people who explore them - but your writing made me realize that they are opposites. Unlike the numeral realm, the internet cannot be conquered. It is, by definition, connectivity. The moment you cut something off, it stops being part of the network. The internet is host to patterns which are not under anybody's control.
The thing which comes closest to "conquering the internet" is probably a search engine. Like the mathematician, a search engine seeks to impose order upon organic chaos. Its purpose is to centralize information. It names the regions of the web just as Adam named the creatures of the Earth. Both are made in the image of the highest namer, the all-seeing eye, the wind above the hill, YHWH, whose own name is the carving of existence from the void, "I am that I am," which is also the purest equation, pure reflexivity - the starting point of mathematics.
I agree that virtual reality is antithetical to a masculine perspective because it engulfs rather than shows - suddenly you are not looking at your fantasy but in it. Which is, of course, the real reason why Meta imposed a 4-foot bubble around every user, precisely calibrated to prevent touching from interfering with capitalist productivity. I wonder if the 'masculine horror' generalizes to other modes of being which cannot be conceptualized (spatially? visually? hierarchically?) prior to being experienced.
When you asked, "what exactly is folding itself into the wired?", I thought of the prokaryotes you mentioned at the beginning. I'm inclined to think that we humans are the 'submissive matter' which is folded into the virtual world, as water is 'submissive matter' in relation to the land. Nobody can disagree that the patterns of the virtual world are outside of our control; nobody can deny the influence of those patterns on the "real" world. I don't know much about accelerationism - I thought it was about destroying the system by making it more extreme, but here it also seems to mean a project of survival. The only surviving mitochondria are those which were integrated into our own cells. I suppose this is why g/acc says that only cuties will survive the apocalypse.
@ai thank you for this very insightful response! there is certainly no need to apologize
your citation of the ddj is something im very glad to see actually! years ago, the first time i read 0s+1s, i was thinking a lot abt the ddj, particularly Chapters 28 and Chapter 8. in the case of 28, that was both for this concept of cleaving to the feminine, but also for the great tailor who does not cut. sadie plant's model of non-gendered femininity is always much more subtle than cutting would be, virtualizing potentials instead of actualizing them, keeping the store of potentials as an occulted reserve. i think there's a lot of daoist sympathies there
your separation of the numeral realm and mathematics is a fundamental premise of "numogrammatics." trying to, rather than ordering numeracy, use it as a productive schematism which does not need to be ordered, which fosters contact and touch by producing abstract mappings; rather than subordinating numbers to human understanding, drawing out patterns which are capable of having an effect without requiring unity of understanding or intelligibility. there's a sympathy there to an approach to the internet as a text which is utterly impossible to read comprehensively, to genuinely get a grip on, but is constantly touching its users, making things happen through them
you may be right that internet connectivity is less conquerable than numeracy, im not sure. there's definitely attempts at conquering both. for the internet, that's not only search engines for the internet but also contexts where, for instance, facebook has tried to homogenize practically the entire internet use of a particular country, subordinating all connections into its own schema. for numeracy, that's mathematics, but i think it's also a lot of non-mathematical popular numeracy too. numerology, for instance, is usually hinged on a platonic view of numbers as expressing human symbols; it's not math, but it's no less platonic or based on unified human comprehension. but does the prevalence of this platonic view mean the numeral realm is genuinely conquered? it still, clearly, makes things happen, things which are not under anyone's explicit control—and the internet is one of those things
about "accelerationism," this is a historical note which may be of limited interest to you, but the sense of "making things more extreme so they collapse" is not the sense that the lineage g/acc came out of uses. accelerationism is, to speak very generally, a set of theoretical perspectives describing the temporality of runaway processes, specifically runaways which result not in collapse but in the emergence of a new system based on that runaway. it was coined as a pejorative by Benjamin Noys to refer to Nick Land, then reclaimed positively by Mark Fisher, and is associated with the Ccru which preceded its coinage. it has tended to be paired with a letter standing for something which describes some kind of political or ethical approach to runaway systems, particularly capitalism:
l(eft)/acc for the attempt to transfer capitalist runaway development into a socialist system which would remove inhibitions to that development
r(ight)/acc for a neoreactionary politics which seeks to unfetter capitalist development from the drag created by dysgenics/wokeness
u(nconditional)/acc for thinking those are both kinda stupid and eschewing any specific praxis for an anti-praxis of "making oneself worthy of the process" and/or "do what thou wilt"
g(ender)/acc, which was coined as a sister to u/acc; you've read the Blackpaper so i won't summarize
e(ffective)/acc, which is completely incoherent in every way yet somehow the one with by far the most uptake
and others besides. but none of these advocates for collapse really, and their praxis-related elements are usually confined to something appended onto accelerationism, not to accelerationism itself. in effect, i think accelerationism is always dealing with a question of survival: how does this process preserve itself by occulted means, how does it hide away in virtuality and then put itself together again, what is the time structure of its development? in that sense i think it borrows an immense amount from Sadie Plant, who was a mentor to the major theorists associated with accelerationism but, i think, outdid them quite a lot. practically all of Plant's topics are basically about survival and runaway processes: prokaryotes and the great oxygenation, the emergence of the internet, social numericization, etc.
@lilli Very enlightening - I don't have much more to say for now, but these paragraphs cleared up a lot for me. I look forward to seeing what you write about numogrammatics; for me, it seems difficult to learn about because its practitioners (rightly) avoid trying to rigorously define it.
I do appreciate the info about accelerationism's lineage actually. I've seen e/acc tossed around various places, and I've seen L/ACC used satirically in one of zerohplovecraft's stories, where it stands for "Ledger of Actual Carbon Costs." I suppose he's r/acc.
@lilli I’m only halfway down and I can already tell I’ll be re-reading this several times very closely, every time I go over a couple of lines there’s a new ping of ‘ah!’ Thanks for making this.
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