[P]atchwork describes the breakdown and fragmentation of the nation-state (a majoritarian, subjugated group) into a complex global fabric of small city-states or other alliances — ‘patches’ — premised, following the disposition of those who compose or set them up, upon either intensive or extensive configurations of space-time (subject groups or subjugated groups respectively).
As an immanent, intelligent system, patchwork evolves through the cauterisation of deficient nodes, those which operate as obstacles to the intensification and strengthening of the system as a whole.
One might speculate that its minimal ethical norm is thus one that selects against top-down, ‘patriarchal’, homogenous, regulated and controlled individuations and for heterogeneous, integrally diverse, and perpetually drifting synthetic individuations: the subject groups of minoritarian political space-times.
Thus, it is not bereft of ethical assessment, but rather comprises what could be considered the first properly irresponsible post-human ethics. Such an ethics is not discursive, nor does it betray a sensitivity to discursive structures, rather it is hard-coded into the selection mechanism of patchwork as assemblage survival — a species of spatiotemporal darwinism.
The identity of each patch is dependent on the space-time it produces and each ‘city-state’ can be understood as a sub-component of a complex artificially intelligent organism engaged in a process of auto-immunisation against overly striated nodes.
A new essay / short talk is up online from Amy in which she argues that “AI NRx patchwork is the ultimate cyberfeminist realisation of the overhuman.”
Amy’s thoughts on patchwork have been percolating in the background of my brain for most of this year and so it’s brilliant to finally have such a strong distillation of her position as this in the public domain.
A must read.
“One might speculate that its minimal ethical norm is thus one that selects against top-down, ‘patriarchal’, homogenous, regulated and controlled individuations and for heterogeneous, integrally diverse, and perpetually drifting synthetic individuations”
one might speculate that but cashing it out in terms of practicable means is what would take this out of the merely academic/fictional.