Shut up and show us the code.

And if the answer is “Justice!”, then our reply has to be this: The code is its own justice. No compiler or network stack or 3-D printer gives a crap about the shape of your genitals or the color of your skin, and hackers as a culture don’t either.

Close to the core of the tech-comm mind-set, no? (Via.)

It’s pulpy and narrative-driven, of course, but that surely has its place. Even within its limitations it helps to hold open the question — from which I’m far too easily distracted — what would an NRx aesthetic be? The thematic reflexivity is a part of that.

To be brutally frank, I’ve basically given up on the West as a source of continuing visual aesthetic achievement (symptom). Its global influence strikes me as radically toxic, promoting worthless pomo garbage wherever it gets its foot in the door, and whenever it tries to pull-out of its death spiral — to become neo-traditional — it sticks Roman columns everywhere and looks simply ridiculous. The last person who could get away with anything like that was de Chirico. Probably fascism wrecked it, as it did so many other things. Grumpiness aside, the importance of the discussion is undeniable. The consolidation which matters most takes place on the aesthetic plane.

ADDED: Huge twitter agitation about this, so I’m tacking it on, even though the connection is tenuous at best.

Jim’s ‘Death of Christianity’ post is the latest installment in a series defending Restoration England. It seems to me that people are being unusually cagey about arguing this out — perhaps a little scared? The religious topic, in particular, tends to draw a high level of interest, which is significant in itself. This might the place to stir the hornets nest with the latest from Pope Francis: The Koran is a prophetic book of peace. It’s not so much the appeasement, moral equivalence, or other red-rags to the right issues that intrigue me most about this — and not even the accommodation of ‘prophecy’ to an outcome that brings it close to sarcasm — but the sheer oddity of the theology behind the remark. To be trolled by the Pope is really something (but what?). (Patheos places the quote in context — which suggests the quality of the trolling is even higher than initially evident.)

Sensible strategic advice. Law and violence. Paleo-humanism. Don’t count on the robocops. 4GW lessons. Anissimov on Brin. Supplementing this link assortment, there’s a whole bunch more from ‘|||||’ here.

The ripples of Ferguson have turned all my bubbles into 24/7 carnivals of racial chaos — only fitfully interrupted by anything else. That’s even before noting the return of Unamused (plus). Black-on-Bosnian action (‘clarified‘), against the natives, and versus Hispanics. Sympathy is less than universal (last from September). Complication from The New Republic. In other animosities, Heartiste derides rice farmers (background from Peter Frost, 1, 2), and on the other side of the ledger, Slate does Watson, and the full communists do the New Atheists. This podcast discussion on Asia is recommended (directly accessible here).

Dysgenics update. The peculiar hereditarian fixation of animal breeders. Darwin’s notebooks go digital. Ridley on the (important) Dawkins-Wilson spat. HBD tweets of the week.

Cosmic and techno-apocalypse update. (More on Bostrom, 1, 2, 3, 4.) Perhaps tech-collapse will get us first.

This link (from Amerika) went is going completely berserk on my UF Facebook page.

Notable chant pieces: “We can’t do anything.” “Burn it to the ground.”

Bubble trouble. Bad plumbing.

Gaming heuristics.

My blog discovery of the week has masses of thoughtful commentary on NRx — critical in the best sense of the term.

This is a nonlinear point, from my perspective, since the rapid development of telepresence is of obvious internal consequence to the recent intensification of Exit-oriented and neo-secessionist discussion. (Balaji S. Srinivasan brought this out very clearly in his October 2013 talk on the subject, from which this event takes its title.) Exit in depth — i.e. into the crypto-thickened ‘Net — is at the very least an important complement to more traditional notions of territorial flight. It also sustains a better purchase on the commercial principle which provides Exit with its fundamentalal model, and which can easily get lost among secessionist excitement and visions of technologically re-sculpted geographical space.

Some background to the event (and hints of choppy waters). Argument is, of course, the other side of the nonlinearity (a micro-enactment of the inclusive Democratic ideal), so it will be interesting to see whether on this occasion the controversy can remain productive in its own terms, rather than ‘merely’ stacking up the incentives to get Out.

The most obvious reason to return so incessantly to Greer is the sheer consistency of his deep cycle theorizing, which achieves a conceptual elegance rarely seen elsewhere. At some point, the UF series on his historical thinking (1, 2, 2a) will reach some articulate conclusions about this. Still, there’s more to the engagement than that.

A recent Archdruid Report post on the limits of science (and, as always, many other things) added further indications of profound error, from the perspective of this blog. It hinges its overt arguments upon an impregnable fact-value distinction, which is a peculiarly weak and local principle, especially for a mind so disposed to a panoramic cosmic vision. Yet the post is also provocative, and clarifying. Responding to one of his commenters, who suggested that without the prospect of continued scientific and technological advance life loses all meaning, Greer repeats the lines from Dante that have just been hurled against him, and encapsulates them — by explicitly activating their own irony:

“Consider your lineage;
You were not born to live as animals,
But to seek virtue and knowledge.”

It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing about this passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put those words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so deeply in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these are the words with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all known seas — a voyage which took them straight to a miserable death, and sent Ulysses himself tumbling down to eternal damnation.

Within the immediate context of the post — which, naturally, I encourage everybody to read — somebody with paranoid inclinations might interpret this passage as a critique of NRx (at least among its subordinate functions), and perhaps even an atypically stinging one. This is not, however, what concerns us here.

The sole comment to be made about it right now, is that it demonstrates the architectonics of irony. To ironize, with such supple capability, is to explore a structure, differentiating an inside from an outside. This is no mere rhetorical device, but a fully philosophical — and metaphysical — operation. Crude antagonism is bypassed, through envelopment. Ironically, therefore, irony itself becomes a mark of seriousness. It is introduced at exactly the point that a cognitive process exceeds a constricting frame, in a doubling, which repeats and exceeds simultaneously. In the complete absence of vulgar polemic, it demonstrates an incontestable superiority. There is an accomplishment, a lesson, and an elevation of the game.

For Outside in, signed up with Ulysses by solemn contract, this example is especially piercing. It cannot dissuade us from putting to sea again, because nothing could. That does not — at all — mean nothing has been learnt.

Within TempleOS he built an oracle called AfterEgypt, which lets users climb Mt. Horeb along with a stick-figure Moses. At the summit, a round scrawl of rapidly changing color comes into sight — the burning bush. Before it you should praise God. You can praise Him for anything, Davis says, including sand castles, snowmen, popcorn, bubbles, isotopes, and sand crabs.

(Link.)

Let’s start with some basic assumptions. Let the grain of sand be a 1 mm cube (i.e. 10^-3 m on a side). Assume the molecules in the sand have a cubic dimension of 1 nm on a side (i.e. 10^-9 m). Let each molecule consist of 10 atoms (for the purposes of an “order of magnitude” calculation). Assume the grain of sand has been nanoteched such that each atom can switch its state usefully in a femto-second (i.e. 10^-15 of a second). Assume the computational capacity of the human brain is 10^16 bits per second (i.e. 100 billion neurons in the human brain, times 10,000, the average number of connections between neurons, times 10, the maximum number of bits per second firing rate at each interneuronal (synaptic) connection = 10^11*10^4 *10^1 = 10^16. I will now show that the nanoteched grain of sand has a total bit switching (computational) rate that is a factor of a quintillion (a million trillion) times larger than the brain’s 10^16 bits per second. How many sand molecules in the cubic mm? Answer:– a million cubed, i.e. 10^18, with each of the 10 atoms per molecule switching 10^15 times per second, so a total switching (bits per second) rate of 10^18 times 10^15 times 10^1 = 10^34. This is 10^34/10^16 = 10^18 times greater, i.e. a million trillion, or a quintillion.

OK, but that’s coarse sand …

Ben Goertzel chips in:

According to the Bekenstein bound the number of bits possibly storable in the matter comprising a human brain is around 10^42. Factoring in the smaller diameter and mass of a grain of sand, one decreases this number by a few powers of ten, arriving at an estimate around 10^35 or so for the sand grain. Compare this to estimates in the range 10^13 – 10^20 for the human brain, based on our current understanding of psychology and neuroscience [http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html]. Of course, a human brain cannot approach the Bekenstein bound without being restructured so as to constitute some very non-human-brain-like strange matter. A cyborg combining a human brain with a grain of “sand” composed of strange matter that approaches the Bekenstein bound, would potentially contain 10^35 bits in the femtotech sand grain component, and 10^21 bits or so bits in the legacy-human-brain component.

Much follows …

It can be fixed, provisionally, by an hypothesis that requires understanding, if not consent. Capital is highly incentivized to detach itself from the political eventualities of any specific ethno-geographical locality, and — by its very nature — it increasingly commands impressive resources with which to ‘liberate’ itself, or ‘deterritorialize’. It is certainly not, at least initially, a matter of approving such a tendency — even if the moralistic inclinations of gregarious apes would prefer the question to be immediately transformed in this direction. Integral Leftist animosity to capital is actually valuable in this respect, since it makes room for a comprehensive apprehension of ‘globalization’ as a strategy, oriented to the flight of alienated productive capability from political answerability. The Left sees capital elude its clutches — and it sees something real when it does so. By far the most significant agent of Exit is capital itself (a fact which, once again, politically-excitable apes find hard to see straight).

“It’s escaping! Let’s punish it!” Yes, yes, there’s always plenty of time for that, but shelving such idiocies for just a few moments is a cognitive prerequisite. The primary question is a much colder one: is this actually happening?

The implications are enormous. If capital cannot escape — if its apparent migration into global circuits beyond national government control (for non-exhaustive example) is mere illusion — then the sphere of political possibility is vastly expanded. Policies that hurt, limit, shrink, or destroy capital can be pursued with great latitude. They will only be constrained by political factors, making the political fight the only one that matters.

If capital cannot in reality flee, then progress and regress are simple alternatives. Either nations advance as wholes, in a way that compromises — on an awkward diagonal — between the very different optimisms of Whigs and Socialists (Andreessen), or they regress as wholes, destroying techno-economic capability on the down-slope of social degeneration (Greer). Only if capital escapes, or practically decouples, does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about socio-political trends, alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of techno-economic innovation. The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem (Cyberpunk, Elysium). Try not to ask — if only for a moment — whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual integrity you can summon: What is the real process?

It is the contention of this blog that without a conception of economic autonomization (which means escape) modernity makes no sense. The basic vector of capital cannot be drawn in any other way. Furthermore, the distribution of ideological positions through their relation to this vector — as resistances to, or promotions of, the escape of capital — constructs the most historically-meaningful version of the Left-Right ‘political’ spectrum (since it then conforms to the social conflicts of greatest real consequence).

If capital is escaping, the emergence of the blockchain is an inevitable escalation of modernity, with consequences too profound for easy summary. If it isn’t, then macroeconomics might work.

(Links and video here)

ADDED: The sonic dimension. Harpoon failure.

ADDED: Slingshot targeting.