Bowlich's Land of Links
In the third seminar of New Centre’s ‘Outer Edges’ course, Nick Land outlines two commonly held models of geopolitical organisation: high integration, high connectivity (globalisation, multiculturalism, unions) and low integration, low connectivity (tribalism, xenophobia, separation); and then suggests “the positive critical diagonal” — linked to Patri Friedman’s Dynamic Geography — a low integration, high connectivity option. This terminology is simple, neutral, and outstandingly vivid, lurching right into core issues of sprawling diversity, complex networks, strategies, etc.
So: within the format of emergent artificial intelligence described by cyberfeminism, this highly-connected, minimally-integrated network of patches — assemblages that 'do not see themselves as the expression of the people but as the creation of new people, a “people to come”’[8] — can be understood as a description of sub-components in a massively distributed, emergent, global, patchwork AI that evokes, with utterly satisfying provocation, the ultimate neoreactionary vision of the future and the fulfilment of the prophecy of the people — or the numbers — to come.
Philosophers love to hate Ayn Rand. It’s trendy to scoff at any mention of her. One philosopher told me that: ‘No one needs to be exposed to that monster.’ Many propose that she’s not a philosopher at all and should not be taken seriously. The problem is that people are taking her seriously. In some cases, very seriously.
Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results
I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me. Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, where the literary flourishes and wilful paradoxes of continental existentialists are viewed with anything from suspicion to outright disdain. In Paris, Roland Barthes might have proclaimed the death of the author, but in London the philosopher had been lifeless for years, as anonymous as possible so that the arguments could speak for themselves.
There’s been a lot of debate about free speech lately, and I’ve noticed that people on both sides often misunderstand why it’s a good idea. It’s commonly assumed that freedom of speech is about the right of the speaker to express their ideas, but if you read early formulations of the concept, you’ll find a totally different justification: Free speech is good because it benefits the audience, including those who disagree with the speaker. Freedom of speech isn’t about speech. It’s about hearing.
Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity.
In Beauty in the Word, Stratford Caldecott argues that there are two main branches of ethics, the natural law tradition and the voluntarist tradition. The natural law tradition, which one could also call virtue ethics, was promoted by realists like Aristotle and Aquinas. The voluntarist tradition comes out ot the nomialists, such as Ockham, and involves an emphasis on commandments...
...However, none of these branches of ethics are even remotely useful for education. If the point of education is to learn, and the point of learning is to achieve excellence, then it seems that virtue ethics rather than voluntarist ethics are in order.