Will the University of Austin Succeed?
It depends on your theory of technology.
Exit
A collection of 36 issues
Technology, Class, and Ideological Realignment
I appreciate Michael Lind's model of the contemporary American class structure. He asks us to visualize two horseshoe structures: a lower horseshoe whose two prongs point up, and an upper horseshoe whose two prongs point down. The lower horseshoe has the underclass at the bottom/midpoint and the hub city
The Meaning of Clubhouse vs. Taylor Lorenz
This is not just another Twitter beef, but a bellwether for the changing structure of intellectual influence. Clubhouse is a “drop-in audio” chat app especially popular in tech circles. People come in and out of ephemeral chat rooms; the rooms split users into speakers and listeners, with users moving between
Intelligence as a political cleavage
Intelligence is increasingly a political cleavage, thanks to the phenomenon of skill-biased technological change. If your income is earned through competition on an open market, intelligence is an unambiguous good. You need it, you want it, possessing it makes you succeed and lacking it makes you fail. The continued development
Calling all indie thinkers (literally)
Over the past week, I’ve conducted more than ten private Skype interviews with a diverse group of internet intellectuals, “content creators” of the higher-brow variety, cancellation-vulnerable professionals, and lesser-known upstarts aspiring to be one of these… The reason I organized these Skype calls is that I spent the past
Introducing Deleuze vs. Heidegger on Technology, Enslavement, and Escape
That’s the title of an online course I’m developing with Johannes Niederhauser. You may remember Johannes from his widely admired appearance on Other Life: “Heidegger, Ecstatic Time, and the Community of Mortals” (livestream, podcast). Our plan is to produce about 8 hours of content, mostly traditional lectures and
Advancing to Level 2
I’ve now been on Patreon for one year. It's been good, but I think I need to level up. Would you like to help? If so, I have a new flashy object with your name on it. Read on. Review and Projections First, a little review of my Level
Progress report for first book project
I launched a pre-order form for Based Deleuze a little more than a month ago (June 20, 2019). I committed to publishing a short book of about 20k words by September 20 at the latest. I currently have 15.9k words, so the writing itself has been proceeding smoothly. That’
An automated system for delivering high volumes of exclusive content to patrons
This took a lot of tinkering, but I think I've finally figured out the best currently available way to manage and deliver a wide variety of exclusive items to patrons. Optimizing and automating the links between research, production, and dissemination will probably be one of the main edges that internet
How I'm Successfully Digitizing Another Professorial Function: Consulting
[Update: Much of this turned out to be prescient, in fact so prescient that a lot below has been transcended by the creation of IndieThinkers.org. So I'm not really helping many people personally and directly anymore, but rather building scalable systems for doing so.] As loyal readers will know,
Technocommunist Vectors: Radar Edition
When I first laid out my idea for a neo-feudal technocommunist patch, I only waved my hand at the coming technological pathways to my proposed polity. In that first talk, I just hypothesized that Rousseau's concept of the General Will could be engineered by Internet of Things + Smart Contracts. But
Unfair Competition (How Academia Got Pwned 13)
This is the thirteenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. It's going to become a book, so for updates be sure to subscribe. You are probably reading the first and only blog that a university has
Evaluating Exit Modes: Resign or Be Fired? (How Academia Got Pwned 11)
This is the eleventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. I am considering the benefits and drawbacks of simply resigning, compared to being fired in my hearing tomorrow. One of the reasons I’m finding it
Early Days of Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 10)
This is the tenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. For such an extraordinary idea, with
Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 9)
This is the ninth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. "Interesting points," you might be thinking,
Remodeling the Units and Flows of Intellectual Production (How Academia Got Pwned 8)
This is the eighth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. [This post dives deeper into some
Rethinking intellectual production models (How Academia Got Pwned 7)
This is the seventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear about that when it happens, be sure to subscribe. You’ll recall from my last
I Have a Dream (How Academia Got Pwned 6)
This is the sixth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this story into a nice little book. My hearing for “gross misconduct” was supposed to take
Reputation (How Academia Got Pwned 5)
This is the fifth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this story into a nice little book. To hear about that, make sure you've subscribed. If
The Highest Ranking Non-Player Characters (How Academia Got Pwned 4)
This is the fourth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. I'm curious: Would you like to read the whole story, edited, in a beautiful paperback? I may have an announcement soon, so be sure to subscribe.
Paid Vacation Begins (How Academia Got Pwned 3)
This is the third post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. My first day of teaching in Fall 2018 would have been October 3rd, so of course — normally — I would have spent the day and night of
Mushrooms, Modafinil, and Mass Shooters (How Academia Got Pwned 2)
This is the second post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. Tell me: Would you like to read the whole story, edited, in a beautiful paperback? I may have an announcement soon, so be sure to subscribe.
How Academia Got Pwned (1)
This is the first post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This blog will now commence a strange and winding tale. If it requires many installments, and many detours, it is because I am still living this
Introducing monthly seminars
For the past two months, I've been hosting private online seminars for patrons supporting me at $25/month or more. The first one was good, but the second session really took off. Participants became comfortable sharing their projects, raising questions and constructive criticisms with each other, and the whole thing
The non-linear effect of ability on earnings in the computer age
A reader/watcher/listener has brought to my attention another paper, which shows that, for college-educated individuals, earnings are a non-linear function of cognitive ability or g — at least in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1979-1994. The paper is a 2003 article by Justin Tobias in
Against the Epistemic Status
I've been considering the idea of assigning an "epistemic status" to each of my blog posts, in the fashion of Scott Alexander. Basically: adding an addendum at the top of each blog post indicating the degree to which I really believe what is said in the blog post. Perhaps I
The rich are more communist than they're allowed to be
When I talk about aristocratic communism — the idea that a functional communism might be achieved by organizing and enforcing respect for the rich, on condition they distribute wealth — many people scoff and say "that's already the hell of neoliberal capitalism!" But in fact, today, it's increasingly difficult for the wealthy
What am I doing?
Many different people are asking me what's going on with me. In different languages, sometimes gleefully and sometimes worriedly, I have been asked some variant of "what are you doing?" so many times in the past couple of weeks that I figure I should just write one thing that I
Reality Patchwork and Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism (Transcript)
[This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Diffractions/Sbds event, "Wyrd Patchwork," in Prague on September 22, 2018. The video can be found here. My talk begins at around the 2-hour and 6-minute mark. I've added some links and an image.] I want to talk about
Make Communism Elite Again (Corralling Desperate Hordes Is Not a Blueprint)
Any serious theory of communism needs to have not only an account of how and why communism has always failed, but also an account of how and why it could work differently now. Ideally, a parsimonious theory would solve both of these puzzles at once: the specification of some key
Why Write One Book When You Can Speak 18 Volumes?
Have you ever wondered how and why The Life of Samuel Johnson is so damn long (and influential), even though he's just rambling like a livestreamer on adderall? Some thoughts on the current frontiers of idea production. Organic conversation is one of the most effective ways to generate thoughts; and
Fully Automated Luxury Communism as Rousseauean Techno-Commercial Cyber-Manorialism
My take on Fully Automated Luxury Communism is that — if it is anything — it should probably look something like a Rousseauean techno-commercial cyber-manorialism. In short, think The Four Hour Work Week with ~150 people enjoying guaranteed material comfort and deep belonging supported by a cryptographically formalized nobless
Sell Outs and Sell Ins
It's interesting to note that, since I've shifted a lot of my intellectual energy to autonomous work on the internet, I've received a fair number of accusations about "selling out" or "pandering." It's very strange because academia pays me to constrain my intellectual ability into a highly ideological and politically
Aristocracy and Communism
Communism remains the best conceivable form of human organization, and it can work, but the major catch is that it requires something that smells intolerably fishy to those who are most likely to want communism (left-wing activists). I will try to show that a workable and highly desirable communism is
The net-negative utility of Utilitarianism in the long term
Utilitarianism, taken as a world-historical arrival at the level of civilization itself, might very well have a net-negative utility. It is perfectly plausible that an overly refined awareness of, and sensitivity to, utility would have unintended consequences tending toward catastrophically negative outcomes. Deontological ethical systems have often issued from this
Left Singularity
…modern political history has a characteristic shape, which combines a duration of escalating ‘progress’ with a terminal, quasi-punctual interruption, or catastrophe – a restoration or ‘reboot’. Like mould in a Petri dish, progressive polities ‘develop’ explosively until all available resources have been consumed, but unlike slime colonies they exhibit a