[HN Gopher] Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
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Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
Author : doener
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-05-13 10:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| thom wrote:
| Mark Fisher went on to become one of the most significant voices
| on the Left in the UK before his suicide in 2017. His many online
| leavings are worth a significant investment of time.
| astrange wrote:
| They can't be that good if they produced the UK left, which is
| one of the world's worst and least successful left movements
| and is currently promoting "intentionally making the country
| poorer". Since the UK is already becoming poorer, of course,
| nobody even needs them for that.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Fisher did not "produce" the UK left, he was an outspoken
| critic of Labor. Actual politicians these days rarely take
| notice of philosophers.
|
| His main work, Capitalist Realism, was about the post-Cold
| war condition in which any alternative to Capitalism seems
| defeated before it gets off the ground--your comment is a
| splendid example of this phenomenon.
| astrange wrote:
| The UK can't escape capitalism because it hasn't escaped
| feudalism yet. Should try that first.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this looks relevant today
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiting_the_Vampire_Castle
| breckinloggins wrote:
| After trying my best to wade through the neopuritan works of the
| MIT Press' "Software Studies" series, this is a breath of fresh
| air.
| nico wrote:
| Tangential, but reminded me of Project Cybersyn
|
| An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early
| 70s for the Chilean government
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
| rektide wrote:
| Anyone have links to any of the good takedown articles on
| Cybersyn?
|
| There's plenty of pieces talking it up. And plenty demonizing
| American CIA actions around those time periods. But the effort
| itself was such a incredibly simple lo fi system, such a style
| over substance effort. The screen was literally manually
| painstakingly updated ahead of time.
|
| As an idea I see why Cybersyn was so successful & enrapturing.
| And CCRU is quite in that mold, was far and away first &
| foremost a vibe (albeit I think Chile & the people working on
| the project would have been mortally insulted to have that said
| at the time). I appreciate that CCRU was engaged in deliberate
| mythologization of technology, of cybernetics. Where-as a
| shallow "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" act
| like Cybersyn getting so outsizedly mythologized, being so
| popularized: that fires my cynicism up.
| urschrei wrote:
| The best thing to read is Eden Medina's "Cybernetic
| Revolutionaries"
| (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-
| revolution...). There's also a good Tech Won't Save Us
| episode featuring the author:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/tech-wont-save-
| us/id15...
| p_l wrote:
| The technical implementation aspects of Cybersyn are,
| honestly, the least interesting parts of it.
|
| The logistical, design underpinnings of how ultimately the
| men behind the curtains got the information to draw on the
| screen was the real improvement - effectively, it was the
| real "ugly scripts, notebooks and excel spreadsheets" of
| today even if the end result is sold to management through
| fancy looking visualizations that someone has to
| painstakingly manually edit.
|
| In many ways, some of the ideas behind Cybersyn combine quite
| well with Toyota production system, except done on much
| larger scale. And unlike failing nearly by design soviet
| GosPlan, it incorporated the idea of shortening feedback
| loops instead of trying to deal with combinatorical explosion
| of variables at the top.
| api wrote:
| ... or what happens when you give massive amounts of meth to
| academic pomo philosophy majors...
|
| There were some interesting ideas in there in the beginning,
| albeit not as original as some thought. A lot of that stuff just
| goes back to cybernetics, psychedelia, and occultism. But then
| the CCRU turned a bit culty and some of them including Land lost
| their minds.
|
| The Land went full fascist. There seems to be a connection
| between fascism and heavy stimulant abuse, like fascism is the
| politics of meth.
|
| That association goes way back too. There's a book called
| _Blitzed_ about how the Nazis were using meth. Seems to check out
| since starting a war on two huge fronts is a total meth move.
| breckinloggins wrote:
| I wonder if this is the result of becoming desensitized to
| ever-more-radical ideas until one arrives at either fascism or
| some other hardcore uncompromising -ism?
|
| Kind of like a porn addiction but for philosophy, politics, and
| ethics.
| api wrote:
| In Land's case I think it was meth plus the need to edgelord.
| If you simply must stay suitably edgy then you'll eventually
| end up somewhere insane.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| It's funny, then, that meth is a prescription drug given to
| children (and adults) to increase their tolerance for existence
| within academic/corporate hierarchies.
| convolvatron wrote:
| why do you find that contradictory?
| api wrote:
| Not the same thing at all. The dosages for one are much
| lower, and people with ADD have a different reaction.
|
| ADD is real. It's not something people make up and it's not a
| social pathology. It's no different from people needing
| eyeglasses.
| asynchronous wrote:
| I've heard it described as "it's the same thing like bread
| is the same as beer."
| izzygonzalez wrote:
| In the spirit of CCRU, me and a few dozen other people have been
| having ongoing discussions on related topics under the banner of
| effective extropianism. I think it's important to figure out how
| the landscape of rapidly evolving tech fits into our lives and
| vice versa. We're working on a repository of adjacent texts.
|
| If you're interested, my Twitter handle is in my hn bio.
| phonescreen_man wrote:
| What did Nick Land say about Muslims and immigrants?
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| pizza wrote:
| it's crazy how much pre- and post-y2k Nick Lands would have
| reviled one another
| frostburg wrote:
| [flagged]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| it's kind of wild how many influential people and work either
| directly and indirectly came out of the CCRU. Someone else
| already mentioned Mark Fisher but also Nick Land during his time
| there when he was still producing academic work published some
| great pieces, _Meltdown_ is I think a very prescient one.
| Astonishing that he wrote this in 1994 I think.
|
| http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
| xk_id wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. What is striking is how the content
| created by CCRU is seeing a considerable resurgence in public
| consciousness, twenty years later.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| The main result of the CCRU's frantic, promiscuous research was a
| conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms,
| sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction. A typical
| piece from 1996, "Swarmachines", included a section on jungle,
| then the most intense strain of electronic dance music: "Jungle
| functions as a particle accelerator, seismic bass frequencies
| engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body ... rewinds
| and reloads conventional time into silicon blips of speed ...
| It's not just music. Jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary
| inhuman becoming."
|
| The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not
| traditional academic observers. They bought jungle records, went
| to clubs and organised DJs to play at eclectic public
| conferences, which they held at the university to publicise
| accelerationist ideas and attract like minds. Grant remembers
| these gatherings, staged in 1994, 1995 and 1996 under the name
| Virtual Futures, as attracting "every kind of nerd under the sun:
| science fiction fans, natural scientists, political scientists,
| philosophers from other universities", but also cultural trend-
| spotters: "Someone from [the fashion magazine] the Face came to
| the first one."
|
| Like CCRU prose, the conferences could be challenging for non-
| initiates. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as "an anti-
| disciplinary event" and "a conference in the post-humanities".
| One session involved Nick Land "lying on the ground, croaking
| into a mic", recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle
| records in the background. "Some people were really appalled by
| it. They wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood
| up, and said, 'Some of us are still Marxists, you know.' And
| walked out." [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationis...
| keiferski wrote:
| You can read many of their works directly here, on a site that
| (pleasantly) doesn't seem to have changed since the 90s:
| http://www.ccru.net/archive.htm
| rektide wrote:
| > _CCRU does not, has not, and will never exist._
|
| CCRU Writings 1997-2003 was/is a great book that blends reality
| with weird smart referential alternate realities. Short stories &
| blurbs that build on one another. Social commentary mixes with
| quirky cyber-quasi-occultism.
|
| I don't have a ton of other good CCRU materials that I got
| experience with, but buying CCRU was a good pick. Fun then, and a
| book I do in fact come back to now & again to be amused by.
|
| It was/is great having such literary/conceptual artifacts from
| before the onset of There Is No Alternative really set in like it
| has today, before we settled so deeply into this groove of
| capitalism molding tech so thoroughly to it's ends.
|
| Related ish, I'd put it off as not my style but I did finally
| pick up Charlie Stross's _Laundry Files_ saga a couple years
| back, after being shockingly delighted with his _Empire Games_
| which I 'd initially thought would be not my style. Laundry Files
| is a great spy thriller, cross computer geek, cross occult book,
| that reminded me of a more palatable & long form CCRU. If case
| anyone is interested in some other pretty solid fun very
| referential out there reads. That ability to get from here, from
| reality we have, to these fun nearby thought spaces is so
| delightful.
|
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780995455061/writings-19972003/
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