Hito Steyerl & Simon Denny on Exocapitalism

This is the great to put forth. Hi there. This is the last piece of exo content to enter the pod for a little bit. If you're still hungry for more coverage of exo-capitalism, we hope you've had the chance to check out our interview on The Dangerous Maybe, our Berlin lecture gorgeously and generously produced by new models, our interview by Moe at the new center, all on YouTube. We'll have an upcoming event at Matadero Media Lab the day after Thanksgiving, an upcoming show on Novara Media with my beloved Richard Hames and interview by Pierre Loveink. A course at the new center in the spring, and then a brief East Coast tour targeting New York Providence, Boston, and DC, with some stops in Asia to follow. If you're a listener and you need live East Coast exo or exo anywhere, please hit us up. There's a lot more in the nascent planning stages, so you can imagine that both Roberto and I, old men at this point, are being ground to dust a bit, but still interested in spreading the news. This episode feels like a really nice culmination to exo discourse, which is an informal chat with two of the most influential and significant artists of the 21st century. The Hito Styral and Simon Denney. They both help us tease out some of the implications of our book. It's just such a stupidly big honor for us. As are all of these interviews, of course, but this is just one of those places where we've gotten some real perspectives on what this all means in practice, like in the art world, for example, from two of the people that have the most impact and insight within those spaces. If you somehow are unfamiliar with the work of Hito Styral, I really, really love her writing. In addition, of course, to her video work, but her writing, especially duty free art in the age of planetary civil war, published on Verso in 2017, was a huge impact on this particular book, Exo Capitalism, and her earlier work on Spam was also a huge influence on our work on Coriomatta, our first book together. It's also very much worth getting to know Hito Styral through her newest book, Medium Hot Images in the Age of Heat from this year, also on Verso. Simon Denney is also one of those artists who is absolutely everywhere, famous and no small part where he's cutting and occasionally quite brutal and even quite funny takes on the relationship between software and economic objects. His work on Kim.com, especially, was really, really influential to us, and his book, Products for Organizing, has assumed a kind of permanent position on my desk. So throughout this conversation, we go to a variety of different places, all kind of within the general Exo Capitalism orbit, but there's two kind of vectors here that are really, really interesting to me. Basically, Simon and Hito appeared here as two experts in a way, representing the art world, not necessarily looking for solutions through Exo Capitalism, but rather kind of using Exo Capitalism as a space of imagination and opportunity. So Hito brings in one of my favorite lines of thought. The idea that if Capitalism, as alleged in the book, is so interested in what we call surface area, so the opportunities for business to embed itself as a managerial object into other businesses, then it might be really worth thinking about what it would be like to be truly boring to Capitalism, to be completely surfaceless. This is related to a current obsession of mine, which is that if Capitalism is a budding invitation in representation or abstraction, another one of the allegations of the book that already with language we have Capitalism, that maybe we need to attack consciousness and mind, really, really taking the call to become egg-like, to become truly boring, very literally. Following from someone like Thomas Moynihan, or maybe from someone like Peter Watts, or many others, that maybe consciousness or mind are local mistakes, and not at all progressive structures when it comes to the advancement of thought. That's a brutal idea with a lot to unpack, but it's kind of a worm in my ear at the moment. The other vector here comes from Simon, which has a lot to do with writing volatility, with the idea that exoc Capitalism's volatility theory of labor and value is already a theory that scammers not only understand, but actually deploy with a lot of success, perhaps Trump being a kind of example par excellence. This is one of the books most insane ideas. The idea that labor's relationship to value isn't one of productive capacity. Not about building things or making things, but that it actually functions as a kind of randomizer within an arbitrage operation. The capitalist is converting their held capital into more capital by injecting it into volatile, moving markets, and both that active injection and the movement of those markets are and can be sustained by labor. And this is useful because it lets us think of industrial labor within the same graphs or schemas that we might think about other things that could and we think should be called labor, energy, TPU power, trading, venture capital, Bitcoin mining, things that modulate the price of anything between its acquisition and its sale. That's what it's all about for us. Anyways, that's a lot. You don't need to have read the book in order to appreciate this conversation, nor do you need to understand the crazy things that I've just been saying. These are just these are two of the most brilliant artists and cutting critics on the planet right now. And we just can't believe how generous they were with the two of us. Warm regards from colds, Minnesota, more mainline episodes coming soon. I promise. Enjoy. Sounds good. I just want to also say thank you guys for including me in this conversation and I've listened to a lot of your podcasts. Really? That's crazy. Yeah, that's really happy. I'm not entirely in and truly in very well from new models. And so I guess I'm aware of all of the people there. Talk to and I think I probably came across what you guys were up to because of that. And then when the book dropped, I just kind of instinctually reached for it because I like to keep up with what the discussion is. And then I really strongly responded to it. And this is when Hito and I were in discussion about a number of things, it sort of came up as just a part of the way that I was thinking about the present because I found it a very useful frame. And then when I introduced it to her, I think I mean, Hito can tell the story, but you know, I think she also strongly responded in similar but also different ways. And that was really generous of our conversation. So it's a at least from my perspective, it's super, it's a real honor to be in dialogue with you guys directly about this so soon after you released it because I think it really popped for me. Yes, Simon introduced your book. He said it was the one book that he found super inspiring. So I immediately grabbed it, you know, one state of you was finished, I started reading and I was really fascinated. First of all, it's really well written, I have to say, but then also the ideas are really inspiring. I mean, generative, you know, I found myself drifting away constantly trying to in a way finish sentences or open new sentences or new questions and something like that. And I haven't been doing this with a lot of books recently. So I found it super refreshing, inspiring and also profound in a way because it opens up new paths to think about the present, about technology, not about art. It's in a way weird that I really immediately tried to respond in my head to questions of art which hadn't been raised at all. But I think this is also because of the language of the book. It really lends itself because the language is very descriptive, it has a lot of imagery. So I immediately responded to that. The mix between kind of informed in a way like literary theoretical language was like very conversational, like very casual language, you know, that's the way I talk. So when I kind of like read the material, it was so much easier for me to absorb than to quote and quote, "normal theory book" because it spoke my language, right? And then the kind of poetic evocative that I think he was also gesturing towards the eye of the book. Yeah, but on the other hand, it's much harder to write in that way, you know, argue and then to construct convoluted sentences. You know, to write a letter which is concise and evocative. It was a fever dream for us. Definitely. It was a very, very weird couple of weeks, especially to write a book like this in tandem. Yeah, very psychedelic experience and a lot of respects. Yeah, how did you work? I mean, how did you work on it? How did you co-write it? How do we do what? It really, I mean, it just came forth like a parasite, I'd say. We'd been talking about this. So Roberto and I gave a lecture that were, I think, both very, very proud of earlier that year, where we started to hash out these concepts in a really descriptive way. And then from there, they had just been kind of marinating in our conversations for quite a long period of time. Then it was just the world's largest Google Doc with just, you know, tens of thousands of comments. And Roberto is like an encyclopedia when it comes to references. So it was just this, the plop down a sentence and all of a sudden, you know, 30 different quotes or different positions where that idea had been established appear. So it's amazing. It's like, this is what chat Gbt should be. It's like to frame a thought and have it immediately crystallized. And you use Google Docs not clip. Just because, you know, I know you're such like Salesforce mega fans. I mean, I guess we could have used notion. Also, but, yeah, I know I do love Salesforce so much. So Simon, have you used Salesforce? Have either of you ever opened up Salesforce? Spider-chance? Oh wow. I just made some odd about Salesforce, with some Salesforce relics. So I got into the kind of Salesforce uniform. Also - I feel like if you go to San Francisco, it's kind of fierce that tower. It's the most kind of present, but un-present company ever, right? And the tower is somehow an amazing symbol of that, where it's the most visible company in the city, but the most invisible company in the world, or something like that. You know, it has this incredible duality to it. - And the tower itself, mostly empty, most of the time, right? I mean, that was there. (laughing) - It's just like, - And then there's this kind of ground, or semi-ground area to it, you know, I don't know if you've been to San Francisco, the Salesforce tower area, but they also have this kind of like platform that you can walk around on it, called the Salesforce, something other else. And so it's sort of quasi-sibic also, you know, the presence, it's-- - Yeah. - And then Benioff, of course, he's, I've focused a lot on the founders in the way that-- - Space. (laughing) - And yeah, Benioff has a very interesting figure, I think. - Yeah, definitely, definitely. - As you were pointing out, the book is not about the arts, but it is in a very weird way. I think there is something there that's most allymic kind of pointed out that because we have a background in the arts, there are things that are clear to artists, that are maybe not as clear to other people. And when you mix that into a more kind of deep analysis of the industry and on top of your finance and so on, it all mixes into a way of writing, if you want, that feels like almost like an inner voice. Like, that's what I was thinking about. I just couldn't find the words to put it that way. So I guess my question is, when you encounter the book, that relationship with the arts, how did that happen? I mean, where do you feel those connections and how? Because I think the arts in a way are hidden counterarguments to the book that needs to be revealed. There's something there that is not apparent maybe in a way, but it has a lot of potential if you want. So how did you establish that relationship with an artistic frame if you want? - I mean, we can answer that in a boring way or in a bit more wild way, I guess. (laughing) Of course, the boring way would be to talk about the realization, I think as artists, that there is zero relation to labor, in the value of your product, of your art work, just zero. There is a gap in between the value of your work and your labor that is in some sense, it's like a black hole, right? And things happen within that black hole, but you don't exactly know what that is. I mean, from your book, we know what that is. It's basically contingency or volatility, basically. Centrifug for volatility, this black hole. And that's where the price for your artwork happens. Usually it ends up by zero with zero or minus 20 or something. But there could also be different outcomes. So that's basically the boring way, I think, to answer the question. As an artist, you're immediately aware from the get-go that there is zero relationship between the amount of labor power you dedicate to anything and its value. Maybe some, you also wanna add something. - Yeah, I agree with that, Labour thing. It's very hard to know what's productive in terms of being an artist. I would add to that the boring answer, this kind of gradual awareness, I think, every artist kind of comes to about what an asset is and what it means, right? Because you kind of put these things out into the world, their artworks, but they also assets. And the fact that they behave as this kind of dual, cultural object plus asset container, is something that I didn't understand at first being an artist, but then became viscerally clear as life went on. And indeed, the kind of gap between the value of what you think you're doing, whether that be Labour or other kinds of value add, can have such a massive gap between that and its speculative value. But then you also, I think, recognise as an actor in that system how important the speculative value is. So while there's no direct relationship to say Labour, you also understand that this index is very important of the financial value of what you're producing because it's the engine and the container for so many other things that are important to kind of keep cultural objects out there in the world. There could be something like speculative Labour, right? On the other side of the equation, I don't know, attention, Labour, scandal, Labour, all sorts of volatility, augmentation, Labour. And that's quite interesting because this is also a way to rethink art history from a different perspective or maybe from its outcome. If you think back to something like the scandal, politics, or futures, so I'm pressurised, it doesn't really matter. Maybe these were already investments in that kind of economy, which at that point didn't even exist really yet. And now we see, okay, we basically develop the economy in which these speculative investments come to fruition. And I think that's completely underestimated. This kind of new artistic, oh, it's not new this artistic Labour has been existed forever, but let's say the economic framework also in terms of the financial industry, in which it now embeds itself beautifully. So we have a new way of defining and understanding this kind of artistic Labour. It's not art, it's a speculative operation. - That's what I wanted to ask you. So it's not art. So drama, drama Labour, even though the Labour of Dramatic, so the Labour of Scandal, or the Labour of Conducting, let's say the marketing work around a piece of art, which is actually, as we understand it, something that is much more directly correlated to Labour power as someone like Marks can see it. But you want to make this stance that that has not art, that has to do with the market dynamics, that has to do with the injection of value into art, but it is separate from the actual art object or art object construction, or the art Labour, art Labour as a word. - Maybe not, maybe it would be too conservative to say that. Maybe this is performance art. This is a new type of performance Labour, right? Performance Labour, which can of course be art, why not? Almost anything can be art. But it's important to just situate it in the context of this economy. Just as you know, the performance art of the '70s made sense in a world saturated with advertisement, let's put it like that. So the new performance art or performance speculative scandal Labour, if you will, makes sense in the context of this contemporary software-based economy. - Yeah, I agree. And I also think that one of the key things that I really appreciated in our conversation about your book when I spoke about it was your observation that this new language is also describing now, which is maybe like a kind of economic language to describe what's going on with activity around art, whether it's art or sell for marketing, but maybe that's unclear. Maybe it's unimportant because the value production is in the package anyway. But I think the really amazing reflection that I have responded to strongly taken from the book was that whether something is producing a kind of nihilistic right wing transgression outrage or a moralistic shaming outrage from maybe the political opposite, both a producing volatility value, which is producing value as such. And this mechanism should be spoke about, or can be spoke about, without actually responding to either outrage, right? Either the outrage of saying, oh my God, that's very close to being fascist, or the outrage of, oh my God, this person should be ostracized because of their unethical behavior, both are kind of like producing this value. And so if that's the case, how do we then speak about it once it's labeled as such? - Yeah, we need to speak about the form of this art, not the content, right? How what is a formalist analysis? How can we analyze it as a form of producing volatility value? And there can be more art than this and less art, as with any form. So really taking a formalist perspective, trajectories that have happened in the broader art world, especially for the past few years, let's talk about maybe the return to art at the level of infrastructures, the return of the kind of infrastructural turn, the idea of protocol art, which is something that we see a lot, the instrumentation of things like web three and Dow, not only as tools through which to financialize art operations, but are things that are actually considered artworks in and of themselves. I'm wondering what you think about this, what you think about this resurgence, what you think about the idea of protocol art, and maybe as a provocation, we think it's a kind of lift. For us, like this is very much like a total invocation of what the book calls lift, which is very much about movement away from BTC dynamics towards B2B dynamics, in this case, a movement from, let's call it A to A. So artists producing kind of infrastructure for other artists, as opposed to delivering, let's say, goods to consumers. That's a provocation, but I'm really curious what you think about the return to the bureaucratic, the return to the protocol, the return to the infrastructural. And part, due to necessity, right, because of things like generative AI. - It's not so new. It's really interesting because now I come to think that art as service or relational art, for example, could also be described as a form of lift, which I think would be a very interesting perspective on it, right? But I see this in a very similar way, art as a process, art as an operation, et cetera, et cetera. So in that sense, the new forms of protocol art are very similar to forms that were developed in the '60s and '70s already, or maybe even productiveist artists, you know, artists in the Soviet Union. So in that sense, it's not new, but it's new in the convergence with tech, with the current economic moment, so to speak. So there is a different angle there is not necessarily a DIY angle to it. - Yeah, I mean, for me, I think the experience of UNIS is also moot, but what I would describe as my maybe transition or my entry into a different art world that I experienced when, for example, I became a kind of a NFT artist for a period. NFTs as a phenomenon, I found very interesting, and the NFT art world did have slightly different mechanisms than I had experienced in the kind of museum, whatever gallery art that I was raised and educated with in. And I think some of that was from the more explicit collapse between the cultural object and the speculative aspect of object. Like in some ways, a painting is like that too. It's both a cultural object and a speculative object, but when it's a sort of a protocol format, it feels more explicit. And it's also literally more liquid, right? The difference between selling an NFT overborders and shipping an object overborders does change the way those objects can circulate, and therefore the speed of selling those markets also changed the way artists produced. And certainly, they became a different optimal form to produce in an NFT context. And while I sort of thought it might be a way to port over conceptual art, thinking from the idea of selling video art as files in the 1990s and '80s, even, it then actually turned out that a unique artwork just expressed as a protocol or a file format on a protocol wasn't really exploiting what was possible in these new network structures. And what was more apt for exploiting that were collections of collectible-like things that were kind of at once artworks, other times a kind of an avatar for your online presence for yourself, so the so-called profile picture projects or PFP projects became the kind of exemplar of NFTs. And these were $10,000, they were liquid. The price, as a group, went up and down, you could map them and you could perform things like arbitrage with them as you would other speculative digital assets in other fields. And people who were used to trading in one market then found a new home in this kind of cultural space, I think, that this is what you saw people that came through DeFi, then enjoying NFTs as a kind of another financial asset. So I think that all-- that for me was a kind of a new experience. Certainly, producing for that context was a new experience as an artist. And yeah, on the one hand, it reduced kind of content and noise. It was more efficient as an object, because it took a lot of content out of the artwork. But on the other hand, it also meant that there was a way, like the SAS example you give in the book, where you kind of need the social network to complete the meaning of the work, like a drawing of a monkey is not so meaningful, unless it's traded in this network. So the artwork itself has not finished until it's performed. Or maybe that's dissonpient, but maybe something else. Yeah, but I thought the emphasis moved on the price as the artwork, right? Oh, do you have the aspects for that? In relation to that. There was the key metric for supposed equality, also the price for the only metric for value. Whereas in our world, there's other economies, right? Exactly. Then diagram of different things. And then the NFT world price was almost on the indicator, right? So artists were working on price. They treated it as the medium, not 100%, but let's say 95%. Also on borderline tea, that was really the shame. I think in the whole NFT crash that the artists were thinking they were working on volatility. And they had some kind of measure of control over it. But they hadn't, of course, absolutely zero. The volatility was somehow performed outside of the artist's sphere with, I don't know, royal machinations. Or God knows what. Anyway, the volatility was completely out of their reach. And they were like little droplets of plastic bobbing on a huge ocean of volatility. And the whole thing was lifted away. To use your lift metaphor, right? Then kind of agentless artist was sort of left behind by the agency of the market, which that's the imaginary that we're talking to, I guess. Exactly. I mean, we're talking about lift, the kind of concept that we pair with that is out of the drug, as the human attempt in a performative fashion to embed itself into that lifting process. Usually by increasing the surface that is being exposed with the hope that since volatility only needs movement as a kind of a basis, ascending the sending of or any sort, it could be some sort of random number generation, we might be able to exercise from a level of agency by mimicking it as far as possible. And so there's a position in of arts as a possibility to project that altogether, a kind of letting go, going back into a motionless flood approach to what art may or may not be as a way to engage with an end, in a way we articulate as inevitable, like it's going to happen. So instead of trying to mimic it, should we just do the opposite? So articulate that on the interview, and that's part of your work as well of the past few years. Like, how do you think about that relationship between the arts, the idea of drag, if you want, in a way, and the idea of lift and the possibility of articulating an alternative approach to our relationship with these different elements? Well, first of all, I found that description super fascinating, increasing surface phase, making things more fragmented, more jagged, more rocked, just increasing the surface on which this algorithm or operation of capitalism can perform, because it has to encroach somewhere. Any sort of little cut and little difference is basically a docking point for it. So in drag, of course, when people try to increase the surface in order to humanize, or I don't know, narrativeize, or whatever, the operation of capitalism to keep it down somewhat, or keep it closer to the ground. Let's call it like that. Then, of course, you need to increase the surface area, too, thereby multiplying the docking points of the algorithm. That's the paradox. You think that you're countering the algorithm, but you're just increasing the chances for it to operate. So in that sense, of course, reducing surface phase and minimizing the docking points, where there's a receptor for the algorithms, so to speak, that would be a very clear answer, and how to do that formally. I mean, there is lots of possibilities, but it has to become indifferent toward that kind of operation, not to offer a receptor point, basically, for it to operate. And of course, the first thing that I imagined was a sphere, like the opposite of this kind of fractor, mandal-barotian surface. Not a broccoli, soccer ball, or egg, something like that. Anti-Romanical art, so to speak. - Death Coons' balloon surface. - I have no idea. Maybe. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. I mean, I liked his Venus of Will and Dorf. That worked, you know, as a job. That really worked. - He, don't-- I think, talked about this idea of at this intentional desurfacing, this becoming boring. That's how I reflected it. How do you reduce your engagements in the system? You've become the noise and static signal. That's a way to disentangle yourself from this. And it reminded me of the history of the autonomy movement that a lot of philosophy came out of as well, right? Where workers in Italy in the 1970s, as far as I remember, intentionally, for example, worked less productively, right? They would continue to work. They wouldn't strike, but they would then rather work slower. And then if this was the case, you're still a user in the system, but the gap that you create is less because you're more of a surface. Right? I found that compelling. But then, on the other hand, just to flip it around, of course, if you disengage from this, if you find yourself a boring surface, do you then relinquish some kind of agency in power as well? This flips me over and to think about what happens in politics, right? The accumulator of power in politics is, in fact, the most jagged node. And this is why, for example, you see this excessive project like the Trump project. And the boring ones, the Kamalas, which is much less volatile as a surface, it gets left behind and can't join the power force. So I don't know what that means in terms of formulating this. If we opt out, do we also become invisible and then become not possible to participate in anything? Is the surface smoothness, then, therefore, disadvantaging us to the point of that we don't exist? The alternative that we've heard framed is the psychotic. I mean, really, just complete volatility mapped out in the highest possible dimensions because precisely to your point, that's the ultimate attractor. It's a kind of lightning rod. And Trump is exactly the perfect example of this is a kind of lightning rod for activity. I think that that's something that I'm really interested in. Thing about the egg or the B-wo or the sphere, which I'm very attracted to, I agree that there exists in there a certain foreclosure of upstream agency. Though at the same time, I think a foreclosure upstream agency is a useful and productive thing to intentionalize at a certain point, or at least understand is very much the case. That feels like a very good starting point for any kind of relationship to politics. But I do kind of wonder, contemporary art feels in a way quite good at doing this. No, I mean, like the kind of majority of contemporary art that's out there is quite good at being a little boring about being insufficiently invested in market dynamics. It's very good at being kind of invisible in a way and just idly floating like pure content through pre-existing institutions. So I guess that would be it. my question is not contemporary art already quite good at being boring. You're right to say you have a good point. I'm able to place to sit right for us. I can continue to be boring or over, you know, over the over complex to the point of boring. I have to credit Ava Yeager for the allegation there. I don't know if she wants that. She made it on the phone, but yeah, I think it is quite good at being boring. Yeah, I wonder how you reacted that. Yeah, but of course it wants not to be boring. It's trying so hard not to be boring that becomes really, really boring. So you don't want to be interesting at all. Like, if you really intentionalize that you might be able to make something that is really boring. Like I mean, really boring on some kind of other domain or dimension. Yeah. I think this also connects to this D-differentiation idea that comes up in the book too, right? Of the blandness of something, but maybe Hida you had something before the events. No, no, I was just going to say that you need to basically imagine this as the opposite of mining. Mining as an operation that creates rackets surfaces and the opposite is boring, not mining, but boring. But as an activity, right? Using the same kind of use as his company, right? Exactly. Yeah, boring. Yeah. So you can do boring also. It's not just not doing, but it's an activity. Yeah, boring is a verb. But as I say, like the boringness is there, right? I think one of the other things that challenged me about trying to fit contemporary art, whatever things into this way of describing things that is in the book was, okay, I was thinking, okay, is there D-differentiation? Like, let's leave the NFT outworld aside for the moment. Is there D-differentiation like you describe and SAS involved in normal, quote-unquote, art world dynamics? And I would say that there's also this tendency now for kind of fresh speculative assets to be entered at a very blue chip level that then don't have a negative past behind them that might be able to kind of a crew value very quickly. And this is like young artists showing with blue chip galleries, for example. People in their 20s making painting that probably Tahedo and I might look familiar, unclear whether the artist feels the familiarity that we might or other people that have been in the system for longer might see. But then it's this kind of fresh D-differentiated asset that the market actor can kind of lock on to and then write. But I think overall, all that lift of the 2010s has come crashing down to Earth, like satellite that is crashing. Most of the assets have thanked. Yeah, but that means space for new assets, right? Like, I'm not sure that that means that the system is being rejected. I'm just talking about the art world, just about contemporary art. Only that. But same, like what I'm saying is like XYZ Painter from yesterday that, you know, maybe two years or three years ago had a spike and is now worthless. That just means that that particular container is not useful today. But a new container of a similar kind, perhaps very similar, could be as useful to do the same spike. I know that there's a lot of noise about the art world as itself, having no money in anymore and there are sales to prove that and quiet, art fairs, etc. On the other hand, people still do sell artworks. I know that. And I think that it's easier to sell an untested new asset for a high price quickly than it is to keep building on older assets that may have been spent. I always tend to come back to this question and feel like I repeat myself a lot. But to me, one of the key arguments in the book or one of the most interesting ones, maybe. Mixes the idea of scale with the idea of agency, with the idea of causality. In the sense that we're still living a very weak understanding of history, we look at chains of events that correlate, we look at action and reaction as humans, we expect things to react to our actions. And one of the claims that the book is raising in a way is that that chain of causality is not linear. There are aspects of it that eventually break and that we cannot fully explain. If in a way there's nothing we can do about that lifting process of exocapitalism, then the time has come to move on and stop framing things through how do we relate to that lifting process. So the question becomes how do we do something else? What happens after we stop talking about that? And is that a possibility? Does this mean a complete reconceptualization of the idea of politics, of human agency? How can we move into a new space where all of these discussions actually come to an end? I have a question that starts a little earlier because I thought that this idea of capitalism as an operation on algorithms totally fascinating. I mean you certainly have thought about it, it's really a question, right? How if one framed other operations also as algorithms like the state or religion or ideology and those algorithms or operations were encroaching on one another? There is a sort of, you know, process going on in between those different operations, which in a way have the same origin, I don't know if there is an origin to such processes, but at some point emerged or were created and now are in a sort of contestation with one another. Is anything like that possible? That's literally, I would say, our worldview and every possible respect. And algorithm is one way to think about it. I think like one thing that we're very animated by in a lot of respects is a return in philosophy. And again, I say return, of course, these things are constantly returning, but to transcendence as some kind of operator, meaning that there exists some structures, processes, or forms that are kind of anterior to the direct scales of anthropogenesis, right? That maybe they are prior to us or they're outside us or whatever. It's somehow very useful to think about them at very least in terms that are not strictly sociogenic. I think that that's just true. Like I'm very convinced by how useful, at very least it's meant for me to think about capitalism as something that's not sociogenic because it allows me to actually think about it as a formal exercise. Well, the whole thing that said the same thing and even though you have spirit, it starts with some chemical processes in salt or something like that, you know, and everything developed. So yes, extremely interested also in the concurrent return to Halo, definitely that's a part of what's animating this moment. But I think that there is also a tendency to do that type of operation on that I think you just insinuated, which is let's actually construct some kind of retroactive motion where all these algorithms emerge from the same potential. And I don't think that that's necessarily the best way to think about it because that immediately collapses some kind of transcendent object into some plane of eminence where everything is differentiated from the same. I think it's actually really, really nice to say, let's pretend maybe we all agree that there is some kind of universalizing plane from which everything emerges, but let's pretend that actual real structural difference can emerge at some level and that that difference is important and we're thinking about. And let's start with that first kind of fragmentation of difference as this primary kind of ontological move. And so doing that's where we would position things like capitalism, language, mathematics, computation as primary movers, empire, certainly something that we read principally through geotrometrics, something that's definitely powered by the engine of humanity, but not something that is anthropogenic in any sense. And the state is a kind of weaker iteration of those things, a kind of weaker algorithm or form or however you want to put it. But I think what we want to do, ContraHagel is decouple them from some kind of material beginnings. I think like it's really, it's a nice luxury to take from time to time to say that yes, the material substrate for these operations exists, but to your point about art, that's not strictly determinative of the forms themselves. That in fact, the forms are expressed, curated or actualized from a kind of contingent space into real space by material, but that's like understanding a casino through the touch and feel of the slot machine itself, which is insufficient. So we're turning Corobertus' question, how do we respond to the operation of capital? Do we just withdraw and become indifferent to it? I think this is how I understood the question. And I think it doesn't matter whether we become indifferent to it or not or do nothing because there is still all these other operations happening at the same time, right, which overlap, which interact with one another and which still impinge on our living conditions. And I really love this metaphor. You didn't write it, but this is the way I understood it of capitalism being this kind of spaceship, which sort of emerges from the sea and then simply lifts off into space and leaves everyone behind. Great, wonderful, but if that left, you know, there's still other operations around, which will not leave us alone, I'm afraid. That does make sense. My question, I guess, was framed to dress how an important part of critical thinking and life we think is trying to address our relationship to indifference, to something that is indifferent to us. And how that has become a sort of feedback loop where we talk about something that we actually maybe should not be talking about that much. And in possibility of finding alternative ways of communicating and engaging in parallel realities or finding new paths to relate to all of this, that I find striking. We've been sharing the book a few days ago in Venice and some of the questions had to do with that. So not that there is an answer, but what's next? Is there an next? I mean, what's alternative? that is not clearly articulated in the book, but that's kind of an open question out there to start thinking if there is a next or not or how that might look like. I guess to maybe add the sauce on that. The next that the book suggests is what already exists, which is very much slavery dynamics, right, that are kind of imposed idly along the kind of river banks of empire itself, which I think is what we're suggesting as the kind of focus of thought. How to navigate that particular problem, I suppose. I don't know if this is any use at all, but for me, think often in memes and visual films, and I'm reminded of the madman meme when there's Don Draper stuck in the lift with the illustrator guy, who I can't remember the name of appropriately, and the illustrator guy who's under him is saying something like, "I think about you, and I feel sorry for you in the way that you have to behave, and Don Draper says, 'I don't think about you at all.' This is the key agency inequality going on, where capitalism doesn't think about the subjects that we are at all, and we, the kind of lifters theorists, would be down there shaking our fists at something they can't even see us, right? That's the type of dynamic I think you're describing, Roboto. The situation where either the slave or the master just doesn't care anymore, you know, about the other, just the leaves. Maybe to kind of double down on the impulsive question here, in both of your practices and writing, how do you think about agency now? How is your thinking about agency changed? And I think we really mean political agency, but maybe even in a kind of more cosmic sense. Or are we at a point where the question of agency is becoming more or less irrelevant? Principally, due to the kind of circumstances that we're describing. Something that's maybe parallel to that that I think he do, and I also discussed when we met to have another conversation, was about how I find working in the idiom of pop, or the kind of shadow of pop, as an operating system useful for this, because it demands only a witness. I don't know if this is always the answer, but I feel that when you're going through these things, the act of describing is already a kind of a value add, even if it's not a formulation of a resistance. You know, and this is actually what I found satisfying also about the way that you work with the book. It's enough to describe purely. This gives the possibility for agency to somebody else because they can understand it better. And I think this is what Pop-Up did so well, right? It sort of described the feeling of mid-century, whatever it is, American life, globalized, a really powerful role of reflection. And that's plenty to do that. Yeah, it's probably even more than trying to force oneself to come up with some kind of solution, because there's so many force solutions which do not even take into account the moment, or the reality, or the time we live in. So in that sense, I agree, I think, a proper description is a kind of agency. And in terms of agency of art, I forget it, you know. As a filmmaker, I'm now being completely automated. I have other problems. Then thinking about my agency. That's a great answer. I think Wagner Kahnjör has this answer that I repeat endlessly, especially when we're kind of proposed, this precise question whenever we give a talk, which is that the least interesting question that I could be asked about XYZ that I wrote is, what do we do next? Right, what do we do as a result of this? What is to be done? Yeah. Well, it's also kind of total logical, right? Because we are doing the thing. I don't know if that's fair, but this is what I always feel like, because this is a challenge that I've often come up with, often want more from my work as well. And I've had responses where ambiguities are seen as a negative, where non-conclusions in and of themselves are rated as a political gesture that is supposedly complicit with the things that I might be describing. And I always find that hard to understand, actually. So. Becoming like an egg, right? Becoming a sphere. Becoming a star that's becoming disengaged. Right? I mean, that could be seen as a form of agency. Yeah, I think so. That's something I think that someone like Fred Moten even would, I think, really agree with. It's something like refusal, but it's even more passive than refusal, or it's even more refusal than refusal. It's like a complete non-performance, yeah. That could certainly be one answer. It's not the only possible answer, but I think at the moment, where so many of the coordinates of the political coordinate system are being completely warped and moved into different dimensions. It's a bit foolish for anyone to really have a clear plan about the next 50 years, or even five or five days even. It's just not realistic. It's basically learning by doing, learning by figuring it out. Ask all questions along the way. So we are clearly aligned at so many different levels. But I would also like to talk about moments of friction. I guess that the question is, when you were reading the book, did it ever feel maybe too much or too abstract? Were there moments of challenge, your assumptions, or arguments that maybe felt uneasy or hard to accept? I didn't want to think about it that way. No, because it was so much fun thinking along. So yeah, I just didn't pay attention to whether I felt any friction or not. A dissimilar thing, a sort of a proposition to think with, like something to run with and see where it could take you. I guess one of the things that when I try to talk about, I've actually proselytized the book a little bit. When I try to introduce it to other people, sometimes I've received pushback from the notion that it's extending a accelerationist idiom, which is not resonant to everybody. I think a lot of people saw the direction that Nick Land went and are kind of revolved. It's the point of not being able to engage in an accelerationist thought at any stage. So maybe to flip the question around to you, how do you deal with presenting to people who you respect and work with, who might have a revoltsion to revisiting things in an accelerationist shadow, at least, which I think part of this book is doing. How do you win people on side and find ways for them to enter? What's exciting about this, which I think Hito and I did by a kind of suspension of disbelief, just going with the polemic, right? Yeah, thank you for doing that. I think that's the most charitable way to read anything. I think is the best way to read anything is to try and interpret something on its own terms as a way of thinking through or with thinking with, as opposed to trying to see it as some kind of declarative statement that should be immediately kind of situated and understood as a kind of discrete position. I think like the one thing that we get all the time, especially in Europe, especially on the continent, is the labor actually really matters. Sorry guys, labor matters. It is so difficult for the, I'm going to say, the European mind, but maybe you can say the Western mind, more or less, to relinquish its centricity in its own understanding of its upstream relationships to capital. It's like so difficult for people. Always like the question that we get is, okay, even if you have a GPU server farm somewhere that's just free-wheelingly betting on the market, well, those are still people that made the GPUs and mine the neodymium and there's still people who are responsible for the underlying volatility mechanics and everything like that. So what about them? And it's like, we're not forgetting about them. We're certainly thinking about them. We would probably argue that most of the people involved in that chain are being ordered and organized in terms of their lives, their possibilities, less by capitalism and more by kind of conventional feudal tactics or even a lot of sense, enslaved tactics, but to understand those relationships as labor power is just so fundamentally incorrect and wrong. But it's really difficult to get that across. It's like, just, that's the thing that we really struggle with. It feels like there's a moment now that everyone is a little bit more or less okay with Nick Land, mostly because he was proven at very least capable of a tremendous amount of hyperstitial power in terms of bringing into play what has occurred. So regardless of how you feel about him politically, which I think we'd probably all feel the same way, but he was right in terms of the ability to bring into existence a particular political moment. But at the same moment, I don't think the book thinks of itself as accelerationist at all in that if you take the accelerationist position, you just get to slavery faster. And in a more kind of generally distributed way, which may be good, I don't know, but it also feels like a problem in a lot of respects. It feels like some thinking needs to occur before we wind ourselves up. So no, I think it's not an accelerationist text though it certainly takes a lot of its references from accelerationism, but more of the problem that we consistently encounter is the just the absolute incapacity of so many people for reasons that I totally sympathize with to let go of their labor power. Like they want to be laborers. That was something muddled to me at a bar late last night after the first exo reading is like, they actually really do, they really do want to be laborer. Like they really do want to be laborer in a kind of conventional Marxian framework. They want to be laborers because understanding themselves outside of that framework is catastrophic. - Well, I mean, it's probably not saying, yeah. I mean, it's understandable why people cling to it because there is no other framework, right? I certainly read it as such, but I also take your point, Marik. But maybe their resistance to that is also some kind of grievance, right? A grievance for knowing, for inhabiting, for having an identity, to sit alongside with it fit. Maybe people feel their visceral dislocation with the description of labor, but they don't know the language with which to feel aligned with something else to describe what their self is. I don't want to speak outside of that either. I also don't know how to describe my own agency position, right? This is what we're kind of grappling with. But when people want to. hold on to Labour, it feels like letting go of an agency to even feel like letting go of a label. No, but intuitively they seem to jump into the next mode of speculation, scandal, attention economy, labour, like from one position into the other without "wessive any time". We can find those responses exactly as speculative Labour or scandal Labour or you know, lift Labour in a way. Which is maybe a nice place to kind of surgically locate it, it may be a some kind of active call, I think. Disability to do a formalist read of these new Labour dynamics or these newly urgent or newly potent Labour dynamics leaves one in a very different position in terms of feeling agency because it is a description that one can find and really relate to it. We know the moral outrage, we know the transgression outrage, it unfortunately is too loud and everybody's day, right? So to have a formal descriptor where you can see that, I think was part of what connected me to the books so strongly. Yeah, this is why Simon and I did a performatively boring reading, not finding any scandal with it. At the moment, we were all outraged whatsoever, we were trying to be as boring as possible. And next, our new, you know, we feel like a lot of tactics. Subscribe to this podcast for more analysis at the intersection of algorithm, subjectivity and the odds. This is the Greater Podcast.