Hello! We’re back.
This fortnight we read “‘Fleeing, but while fleeling, pick up a weapon…'”, the fifth and final chapter of Sadie Plant’s 1992 book The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age.
A brilliant suggestion by Niall, there was a lot in here about negation and the crisis of negation, which we’ve talked about in recent weeks in orbit of Badiou and Brassier and Williams, but in that sweet spot right before the emergence of the Ccru.
No notes from me this week. The chapter is pretty self-explanatory, but we had a great chat about accelerationism and the intensification of the commodity form, which led us onto — you guessed it — NFTs, amongst a lot of other things.
Next time, we’ll be reading “Blog Settings”, the first chapter of Jodi Dean’s 2010 book Blog Theory. I haven’t read this before either but it seems to chime a lot with Plant’s book, albeit updated to consider the more recent developments in communicative capitalism.
Below, a few links to things discussed over the course of our conversation, or links otherwise shared in the group chat:
- Annoying Twitter reply guy
- Anti-Mystery Babylon VIII: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit w/ Edmund Berger & Recluse
- NFTs After Finitude
- TokenSpace: Introduction & Historical Review
- Designing TokenSpace: A Conceptual Framework for Cryptographic Asset Taxonomies
- The Indifference Engine: An Ecological Characterisation of Bitcoin
- Socialising Tokens
- The Downward Spiral: Popular Things
On an administrative note, apologies about the weird levels in the audio this week. I had some technical difficulties at the start and the eventual recording was inverted as to how I was hearing it… Live, everyone else was clipping whilst my levels were quiet. Out the other end, I’m dominating the mix whilst everyone else is lower down… I’ve tweaked the audio to fix as best I can with my complete absence of audio production and will bear this in mind in future weeks.
