TECHNOLOGY series (I-IV)

I.

10 FREE TECHNOLOGY TAKEAWAYS OF 2025

Danyl McLauchlan clarifies something that Edward Zitron misses: EV cancels burn. Calculation on expected value and Nate-Silver-inspired decoupling is exactly what tech founders want, to take the, as McLauchlan writes, near zero risk of destroying the world (or burning all the money in it) because it's worth taking. And it's worth taking because of a logic of value entirely internal and decoupled from all other (given) values.¹ In the face of the universal destruction of all values, they see it as a logic of value creation.

1. EV cancels burn

This is the first free technology takeaway. It answers the question Zitron raises about the level of resources, material, from the metals extracted from the ground to the megawatts pumped into the data centres it requires, financial, investment funds, sometimes public funds, which constitute the burn-rate of the tech punt on AI, which is less metaphorical than really an observation of money burning, and political, tech entrepreneurs, founders, leaders, so-called moguls and titans, presently prevailing on the political will, with the complicity of media to convince the public democratic will, despite all economic evidence of it being not only a bad but a wasteful bet, AI is good business, AI is in the national and international interest. Zitron, going against the current that says it is, is more or less the conscience of technology. He says in his blog, his soon to be published book no doubt, in his podcasts, AI is bad business;² peak AI passed in March 2024³—that is, Artificial Intelligence doesn't get any better: the Large Language Models have exhausted the data; Big Data cannot, whether stealing it or paying for it, provide any more:—AI (Zitron specifies Generative AI) has hit a material limit,⁴ a kind of Sophonic glass ceiling.⁵

The problem for him is in the question any tech startup is asked, How does it scale? It's actually the second question. The first is, What pain point does your idea answer?, or What pressing problem does it solve?, the more pressing, the more pain, the more demand there will be. But without scaling there's no return for investors. If there are difficulties inherent to the technology, to the idea, which mean that it does not scale, it cannot reach a critical mass of users; if it cannot, investors will think twice and will likely require those difficulties to be addressed and overcome before they put up the money—unless for other reasons than financial return they willfully throw money at the technology; which is the case, Zitron maintains, with AI. The problem he is addressing is large and AI might, rather than an outlier technology, be a limit case for all tech: whether at idea stage or in implementation scaling might not be the key performance indicator it is assumed to be. Zitron's theme is:

2. scale fails

As we might have gathered from TBTF,⁶ unless there are other reasons, extending beyond the purely financial level to the political (that is engaging political constraints of and on people) and technological (that is engaging physical constraints of and on materials), bigger is not better. It does not mean bigger returns—but may mean, Zitron's point, loss, a loss that scales exponentially in the case of pursuing bigger and better AI. A burn rate that is unconscionable in any other field may willfully be indulged in the field of technology. Zitron holds media accountable for not asking tech leaders to keep their technological promises, for not asking why, with all the resources thrown into it, no great leap forward has occurred in generative AI. He holds media accountable for not holding tech leaders, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whom he calls a "career liar," publicly accountable.⁷ In asking why, apart from being fairground hawkers, liars, over-promisers, sociopathic egomaniacs and narcissists,⁸ those leading tech are indulged, he doesn't ask why they indulge themselves.

This is the point, in parallel with Oppenheimer who bet a world on it, clarified by McLauchlan as takeaway #1: Expected Value cancels becoming Death, the destroyer of worlds. Oppenheimer's 'near zero' risk (global destruction) McLauchlan writes is worth taking "for the chance of defeating the Nazis and creating a weapon with a deterrent effect so powerful it will end all war."⁹ Did this tech too (the question whether it succeeded at the former is open) fail to do the latter because—the arms race—it all too readily scaled?

The point to be made that we will come back to is of a way of thinking that first countenances any risk however great on the basis of its EV of which technology is somehow indulgent. The second point to be made about this way of thinking is what it produces must scale¹⁰—scale and because of this, fail repeatedly and spectacularly, which it accepts, it leans in to risk. The role this thinking plays in financial institutions will be clear. Risk and loss are financialised, but that is not as we will see the end of it.

It cannot be summed up as the 'financialisation of everything' of neoliberalism;¹¹ neither can it be attributed to the rise of data-model capitalism:¹² it cannot, as we can see from takeaway #1, be called business as usual—no business, as Zitron points out, would go there; no business could. Even if media complicity is put down to media running on tech money and being run by tech bosses, there would not be the political will to stand by and watch all the money in the world burning or all the world.

It cannot be elided with weaponisation, with the for-profit weaponisation of technology, with which surveillance is also elided, as if being in one's own government's sights were the same as being in the enemy's, an enemy, for example, eyes-on, operating a military drone from the far side of the planet. If we ask where the political will was at with Los Alamos, we have part of the answer, as McLauchlan shows, in Oppenheimer, 2023, which suggests, he writes, that "Oppenheimer's pre-war world of genius was destroyed by the second subject of the film: the bureaucrat Lewis Strauss."¹³ It is not a way of thinking that's shared, like a shared belief in, for example, progress or a shared system of belief: rather than a matter of belief it is more one of self-belief. The common ground of those who have that self-belief is that progress can be secured at any cost, takeaway #1.

It's not simply a way of thinking; it's not simply what it produces: it's a way of thinking as what it produces, so that no more is it a 'thought collective,' a group who share an idea, as Philip Mirowski and others describe neoliberalism as being, than it is an ideology.¹⁴ All ten of these free takeaways are an attempt at an explanation of what can only be called—unless we call it

3. the American ideology

—technology. Insofar as we live in modernity, we are all more or less technologists.¹⁵

Technology comes first, before either America or ideology: it is in the production of high-tech weapons not for the sake of global dominance, except for technological dominance. Eisenhower's 'military-industrial complex' is at root technological. Technology defines the enemy as the other guy, while the idea is to win the world, through the biggest gamble ever, before the other guy gets it, gets there and builds it. This is the other against which technology defines itself, the gamble taken, a big one, made at scale, the biggest, leading to what can be called, on those conditions, an American political ideology:

4. Win the world before the other guy gets it!

The other guy is always out to outgun you. The Mutually Assured Destruction of the atomic age, aka Nuclear Deterrence are names for ratcheting up the risk to get the big gains. The game is not for profit until the profit-motive can be used to raise the stakes, and, constitutes the bigger gamble.¹⁶ On these conditions we can begin to see the role of a political technocracy and of a coming world government led by those who lead big tech, whose political aspirations are those of ideologues for the American ideology of takeaway #4. It's important to remind ourselves that the power of technology does not come from the wealth it creates, capital accumulation (and significant disaccumulation) is a side issue, a byproduct, a derivative product of technological power. Just as the ideology does not derive from politics, so the political power of the technocracy and the influence of tech founders derive from the political thought, idea and ideal, of technology as what it produces:¹⁷

5. a thought its product embodies, what it produces is power over nature and people

—how can it not be political?¹⁸

It is astonishing and a measure of the hold technology has on us that we live in a world where tech founders are household names: Jeff Bezos brings to mind a bald head, a lazy eye; Peter Thiel is a New Zealand citizen, reportedly saying, "I am happy to say categorically that I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future than New Zealand", he brings to my mind Simon Denny's artwork, The Founder's Paradox;¹⁹ Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, who seems to want to rule the Metaverse as a digital analogue, as it were, to the universe, at least the part of it we inhabit, changing his company's name to Meta—what comes to mind are his plastic-looking skin, his absence of eyebrows, no, he has eyebrows but like a baby's.

Google and Alphabet's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are not household names, although the word google has entered common language, neither are Sundar Pichai or Apple's CEO Tim Cook, but Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs has now the status of a household saint—a religious avatar. Bill Gates, among these names is a forgettable redundancy, principally because he's quiet about his political influence, conservative, in the old humanist mold, and doesn't have political, pseudo-political or anti-political—wanting to pull the whole edifice down—ambitions. And Elon Musk, founder of . . . his own mythology that he is the founder of anything except that mythology, which of course includes SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company (tunnel-digging), OpenAI (in transition from not-for-profit to profit, being sued by Musk for it²⁰) and, the better known, Tesla and, SpaceX subsidiary, Starlink, which has forever, with its frog-spawn-like chain of satellites, changed our view of the stars, bringing their eternity into question: he follows his programme into the White House of deleting until the system crashes and restoring only the minimum for it to run, repeat, accelerate, automate, the system is the US government.²¹

Then there are the other founders, and those leveraged on tech and AI, politically (anti- and pseudo- included) and financially, like Marc Andreessen, who belong, with exclusions noted above, to the same set. The political role played by these figures is mistaken if it and the expansion of that role are attributed to the circle of money and power, that spirals when PR is thrown in, media celebrity leading to increased influence or media ownership linked to increased coverage. Zitron's lament is that the media actually listen to Sam Altman.²² The fact that China is producing more billionaires than anywhere else in the world throws the background for these observations into relief: there are more new billionaires in China than anywhere else because of the growth in its technology industries, which is politically directed, including in e-commerce. Despite the looming of US sanctions, Deloitte reports a "a cautiously optimistic long-term outlook. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and emerging technology sectors are set to become core focus areas, which are critical to strengthening China’s industrial supply chains."²³

We can link, and tend to take it for granted, economic, market power with political power (influence of lobbying and direct pressure applied in national economies through the market), the link is neoliberalism itself. To neoliberalism is due the financialisation (quantification, measurement and quantization modulating control) without limits of contemporary life, from neural through social to political levels. This is the case not for all but for those societies that participate in the global wish-fulfillment mechanism, the circle of media, power and buying power, that spirals for technology, since, as the way of thinking that is that thought's, or wish's, embodiment, where mechanism meets market defines its process.²⁴

The mechanism of global wish-fulfillment is institutionalised and represented by institutions with a global reach, principal among which are the IMF and WTO. Pressure from these, conducted largely as financial pressure from the austerity that is the product of indebtedness, privatisation of debt and high loan repayments, is asserted to change societies from the political level down. Greece comes to mind as an example; but even for countries in which neoliberal reforms have been accepted, like New Zealand in 1984, following Chile's example, the pressure from global financial institutions continues.

As if without it the global institutions comprising the neoliberal mechanism of wish-fulfillment ('thought collective,' Mirowski has it) could no longer work for it, that there is a single interconnected global market has to be accepted as an accomplished fact. Political pressure continuously applied by institutions the continuing existence of which is premised on a global market, pressure exercised financially, itself has become an element of control. But there is more to it.

6. tech is outside the purview of control

Without the aspect of technology there could not be the wish and the spectre of its fulfillment could not arise: technology is in effect placed outside the purview of control, but it is only through incorporating financial economics and politics. Through internalising both and by making their connection internal to technology (and its pursuit at any cost) commerce becomes e-commerce and the political framework becomes a net, a network.²⁵

Danyl McLauchlan, calling it a favourite of Musk and his set, cites the passage in de Tocqueville where this happens: ²⁶

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate . . . It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannise, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Note, the political network is subsumed under its technological instance. Only in its technological instance can it be positively acknowledged. Only as a technology can the network transcend the political framework de Tocqueville describes. Only as technology does it offer transcendence and escape from the political network.

It offers escape from a power that does not tyrannise, but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, so constitutes the neoliberal network. Note also that its wish has to be accounted as already fulfilled; the promise has to be real: and so it is as a matter of freeing a people, of freeing each nation, from superstition and inculcated false belief that its scientific reality is asserted. Thiel calls it the internet, the network in which the wish of science is fulfilled by technology.²⁷

For there to be reconciliation between politics and its apocalypse, which is its abolition and its unveiling, there has, says Thiel to be truth. The internet exists as the medium for unveiling or revelation and the revelation, the truth itself. The truth precedes itself, is the avant-garde or new guard replacing the old. Thiel writes, "The apokálypsis is the most peaceful means of resolving the old guard’s war on the internet, a war the internet won."²⁸

He goes on in a style recalling de Tocqueville: "My friend and colleague Eric Weinstein calls the pre-internet custodians of secrets the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC)—the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation. In hindsight," he continues, "the internet had already begun our liberation from the DISC prison," when suddenly there is a twist, "upon the prison death of financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019."

It is like the breaking in of the unconscious or is simply in connection with it. The truth the internet reveals, "Almost half of Americans polled that year mistrusted the official story that he [Jeffrey Epstein] died by suicide," is closely followed by revelation, "suggesting that DISC had lost total control of the narrative."

Escape is possible on the horizon of technology: the public conversation, which is what politics is and was for, although it limited it, has a new venue, the internet. Limited, suppressed, its powers restricted by the old guard and the old politics, when the internet stands for the public conversation, for politics, without limitation, free, its truth can be revealed. Its truth can be revealed before it reveals its truth, this is the meaning of the internet being both revelation and what is revealed.

7. The internet has won, on behalf of technology, the moment is here.

The unconscious breaking in, the meme Epstein didn't kill himself, belongs as much to the medium as to Thiel (or, inasmuch as it belongs to Thiel or anyone it is the internet's). However, a greater truth lies behind this and all the other references to conspiracy theories with which Thiel's opinion piece for the Financial Times is populated.

Called "A time for truth and reconciliation," the time is when the internet has won and the old guard, who tried to limit its influence (and that of its politics, for Thiel the "public conversation") are resentful. Now it is up to us, who know better, Thiel implies, who know better because of the public conversation of the internet, to make our reconciliation with the reactionary powers and for them, by implication, to accept their error. They have been stood down, their time has passed and the signs were already present, the writing on the wall, when it was claimed by US Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide.²⁹

The counter-claim that he didn't became a meme through repeated use as a tag or sign-off, in some cases an advertising and brand slogan on merchandise, by those for and against the statement. It's not an empty signifier, but signifies through repetition the currency of the Epstein case, where there were victims, a lot of money and power, and a cover-up: now the cover-up also cuts both ways. Epstein's powerful friends covered up their own complicity in his crimes, whether this went as far as killing him and covering up the murder, as far, that is, as US Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, doesn't matter: we, who know better, know there was a cover-up. We also know who the true criminals are, the limiters of freedom of information.

Knowing better precedes itself: it is about the knowing better from which knowing better proceeds, ontological not epistemological, not knowing one way or another or taking sides, except the side of unrestricted information and uncurtailed freedom—

8. they would have you think there are two sides, pitting one political belief against another, but when it comes to truth and the freedom of information, when it comes to the internet and the public conversation, there is only one.

Knowing better, the Epstein meme in this regard is definitive, is to speak for what Thiel calls the internet. To repeat the meme is how those who do identify themselves to each other in the public conversation of the internet. It is also how, and why he puts it at the start of his opinion piece, Thiel, as if issuing a call, a command that is also a commandment, identifies us to ourselves. Epstein didn't kill himself represents or performs more than it means. It is, to take J.L. Austin's term, a political performative.³⁰

As a statement it could come across all wrong, and this too is how we differentiate the reactionaries from the revolutionary actors. Epstein only looks like one of them—or one of us—to the political enemy of technologically assured truth, in service of which, as financial manager for, among others, Les Wexner, major investor in AI, he made his money and to which he is a kind of martyr.³¹ From mention of his name no more may be inferred but that he is the enemy's enemy. He is the enemy's enemy, from mention of whose name we meet in recognition of our calling, as friends to the truth unveiled, freedom uncurtailed and conversation unconstrained.

We might note that Thiel calls the limiters, curtailers, constrainers, whose apocalypse has come, the ancien regime. Epstein became their enemy, it did away with him; to it also belongs McLauchlan's bureaucrat, who ended the era of the geniuses, Lewis Strauss. This lets us in to the technologists' alignment with the Right, both are enemies of bureaucracy; but it goes further than that, Thiel is talking about the Deep State, and those who worked for it, who covered up the truth, belong to the ancien regime. The term invokes post-revolutionary France and necessarily the Terror that is the alternative to what Thiel is proposing. He is suggesting it might not be so. Since we are the victims, we the people, we are on good grounds to call on the guillotine at this moment.

No, Thiel directs us to another course of action. As he and Musk are the products of Apartheid South Africa, he adjures 'truth and reconciliation' for the "struggling regime" now vanquished and "its struldbrugg ruler."³² The crimes to be admitted are first of all withholding information, to relieve the doubt surrounding the Kennedy assassination, an amuse-bouche before the main course: responsibility for COVID-19; but the questions, was it US-taxpayer-funded research? an adjacent Chinese military programme? the US-backed EcoHealth Alliance searching Chinese caves for new coronaviruses? lead back to the internet, Thiel asks, how did "our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?"³³ There the greatest grievances lie, those with global reach, situating us, not only among the pardoned insurrectionists but all of the aggrieved, from East Asia, Eurasia to the global South and Oceania, who not only suspect Epstein didn't kill himself we know: we are the aggrieved by the clandestine operations of the ancien regime to support itself through such acts as Australia's, where Thiel red-flags US complicity, in passing a law "requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity", he writes, adding, we "may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania."³⁴

Now the internet is here, Thiel writes, "There will be no reactionary restoration of the pre-internet past."³⁵ 2020's election in the US was the aberration; 2016 and 2024's elections represent incontestable evidence of victory for, keeping in mind its metaphorical function here, the internet, to which a formal commission of Truth and Reconciliation as the process was introduced in South Africa is unsuited. In fact, Thiel concedes, the 2016 administration approached the declassification of information that is called for now as if it still believed in the "rightwing deep state of an Oliver Stone movie." Thankfully this belief has faded. Now we can proceed "piecemeal" with the "short packages of information" that suit "Trump's chaotic style and our internet world," as what it "processes and propagates".³⁶ What is the takeaway from this? is it contained in Thiel's parting gesture, as some commentators believe and as the far right would like to,³⁷ that limits reconciliation to the recent and immediate past and will not address slavery, systemic racism and, by extension, genocide?

Thiel puts COVID-19 above 1619, his apokálypsis is given agency to adjudicate none but the sins of those who govern us today. The trade-off is, "The internet will not allow us to forget those sins [of the past]—but with the truth, it will not prevent us from forgiving", difficult to parse.³⁸ The difficulty resolves once we see there are no sides here.³⁹ As it was with the guillotine, we are left with a high-minded gesture as much against the lynch-mob as for it.

The takeaway is a reiteration of the political neutrality of the public conversation, the internet, stated in terms not anti-political or pseudo-political but preceded by the thought of technology takeaway #5, a thought its product embodies, what it produces is power over nature and people, that cannot be anything but political. However when we think about our new freedom, and considering more subscribe to the American Ideology who are Venture Capitalists than have ever built anything, we tend to put the flows of capital before those of information.

It's capitalism, not democracy, which has historically acted to free us from de Tocqueville's compressing, enervating, extinguishing, and stupefying network of power, and capitalism which has freed us from democracy in exactly the same sense, the sense of the many schools of economics and of the neoliberal thought collective. Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen agrees, the enemy we find in an over-regulated, bureaucratically-minded society is not one because it opposes data-flows or technological and scientific innovation but because it hampers and throttles the flows of financial capital. It prevents the natural workings of the market, which even John Ralston Saul who otherwise might be considered its critic believes is the best means we have of distributing wealth, goods and property.⁴⁰

9. The power of capitalism

—which raises spectres of the market, the internet, to which we are in thrall, is technology, in whatever direction it drags or pulls capital follows. And the money, as we put it in takeaway #1, burns; or the world. Andreessen says as much in "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto."⁴¹

The Venture Capitalist looks for where the highest returns are, which is the highest-priced technology on the market, saturates it with capital for it to scale, so bringing its price down to the minimum, and moves on;⁴² rather capital moves on, to where expected value cancels burn-rate. The gamble is, as Sam Altman has found, in staying put.

He appears ready to burn Stargate's US$500 billion on the value of a tech on its way to the Singularity not of Artificial General Intelligence but of a Black Hole, from which capital, except that engineered by the US President, in the aftermath of DeepSeek, has generally fled. That is, before being sucked in by the PR campaign politically directed to shore up the reputation of the project if not its worth, so re-inflating the EV with huff and puff.

DeepSeek out-performs OpenAI's ChatGPT, and other products in the AI market, in speed and in 'lower pretraining loss,' according to Samir Abnar, at Apple—meaning accuracy—despite the constraints of a 'fixed training compute budget.'⁴³ DeepSeek is, writes Zitron, 30 times cheaper to run,⁴⁴ and, the better product, it has captured the market share and now dominates that market. Still, its American competitors will not concede to the Chinese AI either overall superiority or the superiority of its technology as such, embodied in its engineering strategy, which is seen as underhanded. DeepSeek's trick, its, as Tiernan Ray writes, minimising, "special sauce"—it is not a sauce but that which constitutes the neural net and its effectiveness—is simply turning parts of the neural net on and off by calculating in the case of each request how much processing power is needed to fulfill it. In other words DeepSeek's developers, or to personalise it as is done with US companies, CEO Liang Wenfeng, meet both the material constraints set by the available chipset and the 'fixed training compute budget,' and turn these to its advantage—so, a better product. But to leave it at that and question the sanity or the brazenness of figures like Altman misses the point which McLauchlan makes in "Gamblers at the gate."⁴⁵

The gate in question is not Stargate but the Village gate that, by the end of McLauchlan's article, becomes a dam holding back the River in full flood, of, as Nate Silver, author of those terms says in interview, like himself, "degenerate gamblers."⁴⁶ The Village is the established order of the Superpower, the ancien regime, Thiel puts it—a plethora of metaphors. However, gamblers can be taken quite literally, degenerate less so, not because the table they are playing at is one of super wealth and power, for multi-billionaires and the powerful friends they have helped empower, but because of the superiority which is the horizon, since it is that of civilization, onto which technology opens. In terms of civilization it overshadows or exceeds all others for 'man the tool-maker,' homo faber.⁴⁷

The charge most commonly brought against Liang Wenfeng's AI is that it doesn't do anything new, it doesn't materialise any new thought, but in fact, as charged by Altman and maintained by media, uses ChatGPT's AI models.⁴⁸ It is not technology as it is meant to be—a tool by which civilizations are graded. Instead of the horizon offered by Altman, of better models (used to avoid 'products'), AGI, and beyond,⁴⁹ it opens onto the prospect of the nefarious and malicious use of AI, an horizon of immorality, theft, and de-civilization, like that Thiel accuses the Australian government of, "the beginning of the end of internet anonymity",⁵⁰ not the creation of new values, their destruction. Takeaway #10 takes us onto the horizon of civilizational superiority, and, if it's not yet the greatest good for the greatest number, it's because politics is the obstacle to technology's dream,⁵¹ to a place where—

10. all forms of superiority become commutable: being American, male, white, smart, rich and powerful.

. . .

footnotes

1. Benjamín Labatut in figures like him, members of the generation of geniuses so concentrated around Los Alamos and production of the bomb (mentioned by Danyl McLauchlan, see footnote 9), pays tribute to what Paul Ehrenfest calls “a strange new rationality”, “a spectre haunting the soul of science… both logic-driven and utterly irrational… preparing to thrust itself into our lives through technology by enrapturing the cleverest men and women with whispered promises of superhuman power and godlike control” (cited in The Guardian); Labatut describes it as a form of attention so extreme it is an encounter with madness (in his novels When We Cease to Understand the World, 2020, and The Maniac, 2023)↩

2. At his Ghost and Tuuli powered website, Where’s Your Ed At!↩

3. posted at ibid. March 18 2024, Have We Reached Peak AI?↩

4. while there are no limits to the money to be burnt or to the political will, with the media’s support, there are it seems material limits besides the geological and geopolitical limits on extraction, (Zitron invokes NVIDIA’s problems in delivering the latest generation Blackwell GPUs and, because they overheat, the need to throttle them back) as well as and concomitantly inherent limits to both the amount of data to be consumed by LLMs and that they can consume; at ibid.,Godot Isn’t Making It↩

5. Sophons appear in Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy to lock down human scientific development to weaken it for the benefit of the invading species, the Trisolarans; for the Sophon’s see A Physicist Responds to "The Three Body Problem" part 2 (for a parallel, see de Tocqueville below in the current article for a power which “compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies”)↩

6. see, for example, the Congressional Research Service’s In Focus article for September 5 2024, “Too Big to Fail” Financial Institutions: Policy Issues↩

7. Zitron’s post Silicon Valley’s False Prophet on Where’s Your Ed At! to which the earlier cited Godot Isn’t Making It links↩

8. They are simply capitalists, it has been said. Zitron is at pains to show this is not so: business is not for him bad, but there is bad business. He castigates the bad tech businesses, and their leaders, and looks out for the good. In this respect he is technology’s conscience.↩

9. in his article for The New Zealand Listener, January 11-17 2025, “Gamblers at the Gate”↩

10. staying lean is for startups, their failure accepted for the rare outlier which succeeds. In other words, it is accepted on the same basis as takeaway #1, summed up in episode 10 season 4 of For All Mankind, when Margo tells Aleida that Werner von Braun believed progress is never free, there’s always a cost—his grossly inadequate response to Margo’s question as to his awareness of the Holocaust, writes Sophie Brookover at The Vulture. Margo adds, she has a little bit of Werner in her↩

11. Mariana Mazzucato confronts financialisation as value-making in The Value of Everything, 2018; this short article in The Guardian provides a summary: “Mariana Mazzucato: the best books about the financial market”↩

12. see Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2018↩

13. McLauchlan, loc. cit. footnote 9↩

14. see The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed.s Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, 2009; as for ideology, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state it plainly at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, although they say it for the reason that if it is ideology it cannot enter into agencement, into the assemblages of production which have agency, “There is no ideology and never has been.” (1980)↩

15. a question of degree and grading, since civilizations are graded on their attainment of technology, on their level of technological development; cultural advancements, unless seen as technological themselves, are generally put aside and civilizations are seen as primitive or advanced (the legitimacy of indigenous forms of knowledge in their claim to the title of science is where the debate rages). Capital is not the decider. Technology is.↩

16. which is what Altman is doing with OpenAI, creating a for-profit subsidiary, to raise equity, betting on the success of this gambit and raising the stakes with the statement that “it would convert its recent $6.6bn equity investment into high-interest debt, should it fail to successfully convert into a for-profit business within a two-year period.” [Zitron, loc.cit.]↩

17. another reason we cannot call ideology the thought to which the tech bros and thought leaders of Silicon Valley adhere↩

18. tech is first machine to master nature and then people, already political, and only secondarily ideology (which is like a return, for that which produces a power over nature and people that is directly political, to being a way of thinking). (On this machinic aspect, from the essay “Machine and Structure” (1969 published 1972) on, see the work of Félix Guattari)↩

19. Simon Denny puts the ‘game’ referred to above on display (here at Michael Lett Gallery): he himself rejects taking a position but endorses the exhibition’s engagement with technology and Peter Thiel as being politically and ideologically motivated (see this interview with Elena Filipovic)↩

20. in The Guardian, “Elon Musk sues OpenAI again, alleging ‘deceit of Shakespearean proportions’”↩

21. Austin Oberbillig’s post on (Microsoft-owned) LinkedIn gives a good breakdown of the ‘algorithm’: “The Complexity of the Human Condition, Takeaways from “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson.” see also the Forbes review of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson, 2023: “Book Review: Walter Isaacson’s Fascinating ‘Elon Musk’” ↩

22. “Silicon Valley’s False Prophet”↩

23. Deloitte, 2 January 2025: “China’s economic and industry outlook for 2025”↩

24. we might think of Musk’s ‘algorithm’ here, particularly in its final term, automate. Note that the article linked following equates process and returns, both matters of production for the way of thinking as what it produces, its product: “Use Elon Musk’s 5-step Algorithm to Improve Your Product Returns Process”↩

25. the network in particular is the verification of technology being way of thinking, system or process, as its embodiment, or brain↩

26. loc.cit., The New Zealand Listener, January 11-17 2025, “Gamblers at the Gate”↩

27. “A time for truth and reconciliation,” Peter Thiel, January 11 2025, in Financial Times↩

28. Ibid.↩

29. “DOJ OIG Releases Report on the BOP’s Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, New York”↩

30. these logics I have been calling on, of reflexivity, of a way of thinking that is what it produces and so precedes itself, as, because it is an ontological condition, our knowing better does, from which ‘knowing better’ proceeds, can also be aligned with performative speech acts, with the qualification that they are not speech acts but belong to a whole discourse of political performativity. Rather than utterances creating actions and so having agency, which is a feature of discourse in general, they create values: here (in the sense of takeaway #7) technology is master↩

31. For Epstein, Wexner and tech, see The Epstein-Tarnished Billionaire That Is Quietly Reshaping Ohio↩

32. struldbrugg is Swift’s word, in Gulliver’s Travels, for those who carry on living even though they are effectively dead. He means Biden. Thiel, loc.cit., “ A time for truth and reconciliation”↩

33. “ A time for truth and reconciliation”↩

34. Ibid.↩

35. Ibid.↩

36. memes in other words. Ibid.↩

37. those who would like to include those elected to public office in the US 2024 election; commentators who believe in the systemic entrenchment of far right views in the US point to measures directed against anti-white racism, like Thiel’s view the past white crimes is a closed book. On the connected issue of how many of the US administration are sex offenders, convicted felons and how many billionaires, who mostly made their money in tech, see Eliot Weinberger, “Incoming!”↩

38. “ A time for truth and reconciliation”↩

39. see takeaway #8↩

40. Saul represents corporatism, globalism and the political instrumentalisation of rationality, technocracy, as the enemies, and so partly supports the argument advanced here. See his website for comments and “The thoughts of John Ralston Saul: One individual’s democracy”↩

41. “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”↩

42. see Ed Zitron, “Everything Looks Like a Nail”↩

43. Tiernan Ray, ZDNET, “Apple researchers reveal the secret sauce behind DeepSeek AI”↩

44. Zitron, “Deep Impact”↩

45. Danyl McLauchlan, article for The New Zealand Listener, January 11-17 2025↩

46. Nate Silver, see transcript at Open to Debate↩

47. on the question of gender, see below↩

48. David Sacks is reported as saying Liang Wenfeng’s ‘distillation’ of ChatGPT’s models possibly amounts to theft of property, Mark Sweeney and Dan Milmo, “OpenAI ‘reviewing’ allegations that its AI models were used to make DeepSeek”↩

49. reddit, “Sam Altman comments on DeepSeek R1”↩

50. “A time of truth and reconciliation”↩

51. unless we are there already↩

II.

Postscript on the Societies of Automated Control

When Foucault placed power in relation to societies of sovereignty it was sovereign power, in disciplinary societies it was the power of capital, a power of rules and disciplines which became knowledge-power. In what Deleuze calls the societies of control taking over from disciplinary enclosures, factories, schools, prisons, hospitals and family homes in the suburbs is found the conjunction of technology with power. The implicit form of knowledge-power becomes explicit in technology, in the way technology, as I have already addressed it,^[1] is neither the product of thought, nor the thought producing it, but thought as product, in other words, as Foucault has it, a power productive of a political thought and of the political organisation, including governance of self, of governance in societies of control. From ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ we have ‘Postscript on the Societies of Automated Control,’ where the control is automated.

A detour through the translations has been useful because it deals with what we hallucinate in English to be part of the text. There are then three ideas I address in view of technology, control, and two not found in the text but connected by association, scoring as technique of self-management, dividualisation and the modulation of control, and the vacuoles of non-communication or breakers in the circuits of communication. The detour I think sheds light on all of them.

Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ appeared in print in May 1990, L’Autre journal no. 1 and was included in the volume Pourparlers, 1990; the edition I’m working with, from October, Vol. 59. (Winter, 1992), pp. 3-7, is online at the Anarchist Library,^[2] the PDF there also and at Cidade Inseguranca;^[3] a French edition is available at 1libertaire^[4] (also at aejcpp^[5]) and a PDF, although incomplete, at Infokiosques.^[6] The text owes its popularity both to its brevity and a love of leaping at the offer of a new periodisation, especially one with such negative distinction as this gives our own period, rare in Deleuze who is more apt to affirm or to find in the negative aspects native to it, as in A Thousand Plateaus, written with Félix Guattari, ‘lines of flight.’ In this it resembles the work of Critical Theorists from the Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research, explored in its hyperbolic (protests too much) dismissal of capitalist modernity by Stuart Jeffries in his group biography Grand Hotel Abyss: Lives of the Frankfurt School, 2016. The popularity of the ‘Postscript’ is then due, where many of Deleuze’s books and texts, including those written with Guattari, seem ambivalent and neither advocating for or against, its decisively critical angle: it offers us something solid to hold on to, albeit that this impression is largely hallucinated.

Deleuze says we would be mistaken in regarding our own social formation, as a society of control, comparable to the disciplinary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or the societies of sovereignty of the preceding period, described by Michel Foucault, to be either better or worse than them. Whether they crystallise around the germ of a sovereign or an architecture of imprisonment, or in this case around the entreprise, as it is given in the French, as much business as corporation which is the usual translation, social organisations give rise to, and this is why their adequate description is important, distinct methods, tools and weapons of resistance. They are never negative.

The role of the ‘Postscript’ is diagnostic, less a programme for action than an isolation and definition in reference to its symptoms of a problem. This problem is often taken for granted as being negative, deleterious to the health and well-being of the societies concerned, and the translator from French has thought to do Deleuze a favour, as if offering a refinement of his perspective, by referring to his primary symptom in terms of the corporation. It has to do with capital because it goes straight to what workers are paid for their time, their salary. In a factory, writes Deleuze, the relation that drives it was held in a balance of the greatest production from the least pay; in the control society business replaces the factory and a new monetary rule takes over, according to which each salary is modulated by factors other than production: Deleuze specifies here that the factors modulating pay are not material. They are instead a soul, he says, a gas.

If however we call it a corporation we lose so much: the gaseous spirit of the corporation can easily be thought to coincide with its marketing and PR. What drives pay can be thought to reside in the new material relations of brand or image as a distinct output and in itself a material production. Pay can be thought to rest on performance.

Deleuze’s dematerialisation of the conditions of production is contra Marx. He breaks with the singular condition of production in bourgeois capitalism’s appropriation of material means: the capitalist’s ownership of the factory, the machines in it and of the property labour has of being consumed to increase value, which are the material conditions of the worker’s life. Capitalists’ confinement of populations, in schools, prisons, factories and, from time to time, hospitals exists to increase value. In control societies these are immaterial conditions – leading to services and stocks – and immaterial products or commodities; but wasn’t the life of the worker immaterial to start with? wasn’t it the true aim of capitalism, simply and no more than, to raise this immaterial value?

Deleuze’s, and Guattari’s, is a theory of immaterial production, of desire, which names his break with Foucault, not Marx. He considered himself and Guattari, each in their different ways, always to have been Marxists. The ‘Postscript’ (‘Post-scriptum’ in the original) is a postscript to what he writes about Foucault, both in the book Foucault and in the lecture which Deleuze gave, 17 March 1987, called ‘Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?’ (televised 1989, available under this title on Youtube,^[7] transcribed, translated and included in the volume Two Regimes of Madness, Semiotexte, 2001; also available here, in Charles Stivale’s revised translation and the original French, ‘What is the Creative Act?’^[8]). There, writes Marie Lecomte-Tilouine, whose comparative analysis of Martin Joughin’s two English translations of the ‘Postscript’ have been of great use, ‘Deleuze exposes in detail the ideas developed in the Post scriptum, and which were [sic] obviously inspired at the time by the new technologies in France in the 1980s, such as the minitel.’ A note informs us that the Minitel is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-world-wide-web online services.^[9]

Lecomte-Tilouine compares Joughin’s translation of the Postscript, as we will refer to it in the following, from 1992 with the one he made in 1995. (All further references to Lecomte-Tilouine are from the article cited above.) The earlier, she points out, statistically is more frequently referred to, it is the usual translation, where entreprise becomes corporation. As she says of a different instance, this is an interpretation rather than a translation.

Entreprise means, she writes, ‘a big and complex structure’. Still, in her own translation, she makes it company, whereas Joughin in his replaces corporation with businesses. Now, Lecomte-Tilouine points out that unless it is specified as ‘small,’ as in ‘petite entreprise,’ it's neither a business nor can it be, presumably without their organisation into a larger structure, like a corporation, businesses. The key passage runs, ‘dans une société de contrôle, l’entreprise a remplacé l’usine, et l’entreprise est une âme, un gaz.’

In 1992 it’s, ‘in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.’ Then in 1995, ‘in a control society, businesses take over from factories, and a business is a soul, a gas.’ The favour Joughin does Deleuze in 1992, of interpreting entreprise in light of the critique of corporations, of their governance in neoliberalism replacing governments, that David Mitchell, in 2004, in the novel Cloud Atlas calls ‘corpocracy,’ is undone in favour, says Lecomte-Tilouine, of representing Deleuze’s seemingly casual style, which is in fact highly technical and considered, as general and colloquial. This is the overall effect of the 1995 translation, a secondary effect probably being that it is more seldom cited than the translation of 1992; hence our familiarity with Joughin’s motivated misreading of corporation for entreprise. In other words, we might want to think Deleuze is referring to corporate solutions to governmental problems, just as we might want to think, from the perspective of neoliberalism, that the market offers the solution to those problems, can solve them and is the best, if not the only, if we want to stay one step ahead of communism and avoid totalitarianism, means of their solution. So we have the rule of control by market forces, a transactional rule that is not enforced but that we voluntarily enter into and that ensures our control.

We can then call Joughin’s businesses a mistake, and it is not a mistake fixed by Lecomte-Tilouine’s, adequately to translate entreprise, opting for company. Her own translation of the Postscript, given at the end of the comparison of the 1992 translation, which, going by the number of Lecomte-Tilouine’s corrections, tends to greater accuracy, and the 1995 translation, puts the passage like this: ‘in a society of control, the company has replaced the factory, and the company is a soul, a gas.’ Whereas corporation has to do with internal government, therefore governance, and the political nature of economic relations, with company a critical element is lost, which may broadly be called economic.

If corporation errs on the side of politics, businesses and a business, for entreprise, removes the focus from the organisation of economic forces and productive capacity altogether, and, as if harkening back to an earlier form, places it on those relations of the marketplace that for Curtis Yarvin are a ‘medley of hot, buzzing auctions for silk, opium, and broiled kid-goat.’ (from ‘The Cathedral or the Bizarre’^[10]) Capital seems to have gone missing; but why should we assume that Deleuze in the Postscript has Marx in mind at all? Lecomte-Tilouine’s translation may be insightful, considering she is a French speaker, but is inconsistent, her English does not read as if it is her first language; and company, since it designates a prepolitical grouping, a gathering of interests that may as well be economic and economically productive as theatrical and engaged in theatrical production, has neither the political push nor the economic pull of entreprise, a term, as Lecomte-Tilouine suggests he is doing, Deleuze may be using to ‘shake up the language.’

My own preferred translation is business, that is as abstract rather than Joughin’s concrete businesses which designates economic entities that do business. It is motivated by the prevalence of phrases like ‘business model,’ ‘business school’ and ‘business thinking’ in a society where these sorts of things provide the terms of reference for cultural and educational organisations and their governance, so, New Zealand government having business interests at its centre, concern as much an economic prescription as a political one. The question of highest political priority, in our current context, is what is and what is not the business of government, and so we have business leaders leading both government and the question of what it is.

In light of this, in contradistinction to the factory, where the economic rule obtained of the most work for the least pay, in a society of control, business has replaced the factory, and business is a spirit, a gas. The value of labour is set by challenges and contests and extremely comical team meetings, colloques, which Deleuze compares to idiotic TV game-shows, which we now know as reality TV. It is set at the level of the contestant or worker who is, owing to the reification of that part of them that plays along, no longer an individual but a ‘dividual,’ who over their lifetime plays many parts, each with its challenges, obstacles and comical set-tos, up to and including the role of the reproduction of these social conditions – over which the spirit of business hangs like a gas indistinguishable from the air – and their final role, burden on the community, the more quickly dispatched the better. Unlike those disciplinary societies, which succeeded Foucault writes societies of sovereignty, we are trapped in the air; but what is this gaseous substance that business, corporations, businesses, l’entreprise all give off?

It is also a soul or spirit, une âme. Deleuze uses the word three times, firstly in the passage through which we have conducted a detour across translations, Joughin’s two, Lecomte-Tilouine’s and mine; secondly, in the sentence, ‘Le service de vente est devenu le centre ou l’« âme » de l’entreprise’; thirdly, immediately following: ‘On nous apprend que les entreprises ont une âme, ce qui est bien la nouvelle la plus terrifiante du monde.’ (from 1libertaire^[11]) To give a rough literal translation: We are taught that businesses have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. Joughin in 1992 translates this as corporations, Lecomte-Tilouine as, that companies have souls, both plural, but the former’s use of businesses with a singular soul seems most appropriate here. Le service de vente, runs the preceding sentence, has become the centre or ‘soul’ of l’entreprise, singular, perhaps a business best translates it.

Note that the service of vente, sale, or better, sales, the sales department, is for both Lecomte-Tilouine and Joughin marketing. Why is it a gas? Why is it a soul or spirit? and if we are trapped in or by it how does it control us?

Does it direct us in our desires as consumers? That would seem to be it; but is that all there is to it? In other words, is this the most terrifying news in the world?

The point is that without sales a business has no identity, it is without brand-identity; a company, as a legal entity, can be an individual, but business without sales is not business. We’ve said that the gaseous spirit of a corporation may easily be thought to coincide with marketing and PR, however not with sales; although we’ve got to keep in mind it’s service de vente, where service, has close to the meaning it has in English; ‘service culture’ in French is culture de service. If we look to that in which capitalism consists according to Deleuze in societies of control, we read, ce qu’il veut vendre, c’est des services, et ce qu’il veut acheter, ce sont des actions, the qui here, ‘which,’ referring to a form of capitalism for surproduction, which Lecomte-Tilouine corrects from Joughin’s ‘higher-order production’ in 1992, and ‘metaproduction’ in 1995 (the sentence runs, ‘[Capitalism’s] directed towards metaproduction.’), to ‘overproduction.’ Overproduction is rather too much than to do with surplus; it is excessive production. What capitalism, for overproduction, says Deleuze, wants to sell is services, and what it wants to buy is ‘stocks,’ which seems a little blunt in English and might be rounded out by ‘and shares.’ In 1992 Joughin translates actions as stocks, in 1995 he writes, a clear mistranslation, what it, capitalism, seeks to buy is ‘activities.’ The soul of corporations is stocks and shares, the spirit moving corporatism is on the stock-market floor, its trade and traders, selling short, going long, the gas it gives off intoxicating, mergers, forced buy-outs, takeovers, cut-throat deals, where speed, in fact timing, is of the essence, and therefore the speed of the network connecting the centres of trade. Its drive comes from computers and people trying to be as fast as computers doing the deals – hence the need for both pharmaceutical and biological aids, biohacking, and AI. The soul of business is, even if those working in sales don’t recognise it, in sales, not the sales made in a day trading or their size, but this other aspect, service de vente, which Houellebecq might be talking about when he writes in Annihilation, 2022 in French, 2024 translated by Shaun Whiteside,

There was also something else, a dark and secret force which might be psychological, sociological or simply biological in nature, it was impossible to know what it was, but it was terribly important because everything else depended on it, both demographics and religious faith, and finally people’s desire to stay alive, and the future of their civilizations.

We are taught that businesses have a soul, this would be the most terrifying news, to find it in business too. Whatever it is it has a transcendent quality and as Houellebecq says is the source of what Kant calls transcendental illusions, three: soul, world and God; but what does this mean for a world that has no soul, a God that does not exist and a soul divided among its different, saleable, parts? What Deleuze calls the ‘greatness of Marx’ lies in that we have not passed from his ambit; he is writing of just such a world as ours.

For Kant, reason grasps them, experience cannot, the three transcendental illusions, grounded in it, have their source in reason. Since we are discussing Deleuze, we were better to call it an immanent and metaphysical origin or ungrounding. Deleuze gives us the horror of an ungrounding ground, meaning a movement that produces terror, belonging to repetition, the time difference is said, each time of what differs in itself; and if this is said of the world, the soul and God we are given, not a transcendent, an immanent and metaphysical source for them but one where what we grasp is like a phantasm: in this it recalls the aspect of Marx’s thinking Margaret Cohen calls Gothic in Profane Illumination, 1993. It also recalls Marx’s ‘Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,’ 1843-1844 (‘Towards a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right’), where Marx uses the formula for religious belief of it being the spirit or soul of our soulless conditions, ‘Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüt einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist.’ (‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the comfort, or heart, of a heartless world, as it is the spirit, or soul, of soulless conditions.’) (sources, German^[12] and English^[13]) After this he famously calls religion the opium of the people, namely the Chinese people, over which wars were fought, the settlement conditions were both mercantile and in this sense of Marx religious, inducing to narcotic-like illusions. Chinese ports were opened to trade by Britain and opium was made legal in China.

We are in both cases subject to phantasmagoria. Those of capitalism issue from the difference in value between exchange and use, commodities gaining in value, to the point of excess, through exchange, that which they lose in use, causing them to operate in capitalist societies like religious fetishes. The Marxism that is Gothic attends to the labour that went into them, which although dead still animates them: to the capitalist vampire sucking the blood of workers are added the zombies of the undead represented by fetishes. These because they are commodities are specifically capitalist, in them drug-hallucinations and the religious feeling of our spiritually bereft, soulless world commingle.

Being led to the empirical, although irrational, ground of transcendental illusions, we have in Deleuze a transcendental empiricism. He calls it this. We should however caution ourselves against seeing in it a ground for illusions, or for phenomena that are, for reasons they are unable to be grasped or represented rationally or irrationally, and, where we are limited that go beyond us, necessary illusions. We should caution ourselves against in empiricism seeing, this being the reason they induce fear in us, the proof that these illusions and other phantasmagoria are true: the labour of philosophy here is so far from ridding us of our illusions that neither truth nor reality, nor reason, arbitrates; reason goes beyond itself. That is, we are not heading towards illusions but the real conditions of their experience.

The next point is that in these cases, of difference animated by repetition, capital by commodity-exchange, ideology by the class system and struggle, illusions and phantasms by desire, the fact they move is terrifying rather than the principle of animation, than what moves them. The principle of animation is not that of automation; we would be mistaken to think that if we go far enough inside we will find it – yet this is exactly the thought, the image of thought Deleuze calls it, guiding us: it is this more than any illusion he would dispel.

The soul of business, sales, is also a gas: where it arises, just as we, although more likely to find it in business studies, are taught religion, we are taught is a soul. Should we, in regard to sales, think of terror we are more likely to attribute it to those entities that move across the world and across its borders extracting resources, rather than for the sake of production, for stocks and shares. This activity has been partly automated while sales are almost wholly. Over selling things and moving units, those who provide their service in sales are in fact selling a form of duty to the corporation, which is scoring intimate enough to be called self-scoring.

Now, from its familiarity and the familiarity of its themes there arises from the Postscript a gas from which we draw associations to the contexts where they are invoked. We sort of breathe control in and it converts us. If we prefer the translation sales over marketing it has to do with just such a conversion, the conversion alike of sales, souls and subjects: at this point a thing, a word, statement, promise, image or idea becomes animated. It has a life of its own. Marketing is the use of things, words, statements, promises, images and ideas up to the point where they convert to sales. A subscriber is booked, a politician bought, a widget sold, a suggestion that is acted on like a story which, even if only half-heartedly, is believed. It is simply believed enough to capture our attention for the briefest moment, that is enough, it is alive. When I think of the movement of control I think of how it leads to the self-capture of workers by scoring, by putting a numerical value, regardless of what those outcomes are, on outcomes, on performance, engagement, participation, and how that value supersedes, whether they are council-workers or university academics, as if its actual existence were not enough, what it is they actually do.

Scoring and how it connects to the Postscript probably comes from a paper presented by Ian Buchanan, a keynote speaker, at 2019’s Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference in Tokyo.^[14] Called ‘Society of Control (Revisited),’ Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics and Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, both published 2018, were cited alongside the Postscript and its ‘control in the open air’, ‘contrôle à l’air libre’ that has replaced the ‘enclosures’ of disciplinary societies. The enclosure of subjects has been displaced onto digital networks, in particular for Buchanan social networks, where we are not only trapped in the data we produce but also are its products. Buchanan ended saying ‘We have lost the aesthetic capacity to respond to our times.’ We have lost, as it were, the feeling. That is, if the conversion is total.

For Deleuze it never is and cannot be, but the question we are asking is what if the soul, or the gas, is automated? The people working to convert others, pitching courses of study to students, hoping for conversions in attendance numbers, start-ups to Angel investors, for capital to develop and then automate the process of conversion of users, and those in service and sales offering subscriptions to services, pitching products and services without belief in their benefit, while scoring not the credulousness of target markets but their own credibility – as well as rubbish-collectors attending to steadfastness of purpose over and above the effects of their labour: all these shape themselves and gain the value of work and to a greater or lesser extent their self-worth according to an inner calculation of conversion. The task of rating our value occurs against a background of jobs that might as well be automated, often operating in the fear that they will be. More, this task serves computation, that is automated, for conversion into statistics and data, the goal of which is to increase the value of stocks and shares. Whether in the university or value in the eyes of stakeholder citizens, called customers, this further conversion by computation sees now the prospect of its automation by artificial intelligence. By our service to tasks that can be automated we have a code or what Deleuze calls a cipher, chiffre; the whole process of giving an essential value to human beings is familiar from the camps and, for Josef Škvorecký, communism, in his book, The Engineer of Human Souls, 1977.

From the example of the tech start-up we also derive the distinction of the automating technology: tech is, has always been, what moves the phantasmagoria, of which the movement of capital is only one movement. The restless coils of a fabulous boa constrictor, although headless those who control the tech control the constriction, moving in a ceaseless figure-eight. They are the gatekeepers of all animation.

The problem of how to break the circuits of control is badly posed if freedom is thought to lie outside them and resistance to have to do with lessening the degree of their constriction. For Bergson number is already spatial and assigning number determinant of social space. Deleuze in an interview connected by association to the Postscript invokes a spatial metaphor, a single cell and the part of it separated by a membrane called the vacuole.

The interview between Negri and Deleuze is from 1990 (the text here in French,^[15] here in English^[16]). In it Deleuze says ‘L’important, ce sera peut-être de créer des vacuoles de non-commmunication, des interrupteurs, pour échapper au contrôle.’ He has just said creating has always meant something other than communicating, and then: the important thing will be perhaps creating vacuoles of non-communication, switches or circuit-breakers, to escape control. Vacuoles and interrupteurs have equal weight, then there is créer, to create, but not to communicate. Note also that the break in the circuit caused by the switch is inside the cell, a part of it. Escape is not to outside except insofar as it constitutes escape. Rather it is from outside.

We make our escape, bring about our resistance, to the circuits of control, to their increasing constriction, from outside of communication. What are we then creating but a perception? The problem is the social space is filled with technologically enabled communication. Some have said the answer is just to shut up – in that sense the shut-ins, hikikimori would have the answer. Their intensification of the social controls which already exist are a way of controlling that control, or puts them in control to the extent they shut out the outside they cannot control, but what do they create?

If we compare a cell to a single room, which it seems to resemble, the role played by the vacuole would most resemble a line of communication from outside, a cellphone or computer screen; and we should be reminded of the Minitel as part of Deleuze’s inspiration for the Postscript. If we attend to the screen for long enough we can receive the impression of agency, what we see, the data, is moving because of us, we are after all both producing and inputting; but the labour put in divides us from ourselves and we feel agency only by identification with the part taking part. In fact, what is happening is that the moving images act to defer the cessation of labour, the effort put in to performing ourselves, for as long as possible. And this condition, the shaping of our desires, for identity as much as anything, is now automated.

At the scale of the social space engaged by mass communication where is the vacuole, the switch, if not in the machine which engages all of us? For the private individual, Benjamin writes, phantasmagorias of the interior, it is his word we have been using, represent the universe – our own interior and its self-identity as well. This is no less true for automated societies. In their interior are brought together remote places and memories of the past as in the bourgeois living-room, which is, Benjamin writes, ‘a box in the theatre of the world.’ Jeffries, quoting him in Hotel Grand Abyss, adds ‘Benjamin was presciently writing before the age of television or the internet, before the assembling of the distant in time and space in the domestic interior became technologically sophisticated,’ and, we would add, in both the individual, private and social, public realms, before the automation of its delivery, before the mechanism of its delivery became an indispensable tool and before we were taught to carry it on our persons at all times. (op.cit., 98)

Existing at a cellular level is what characterises the vacuole, however, we might simply say it is a way of thinking that scales. Except it is not so much a way of thinking as of perception into which we are suborned, by being told that in it lies our freedom, and to which we subscribe, where we learn, to our genuine terror, we are subscribed, like conscripts, to services and a kind of service we didn’t sign up for. The service is to hear, like Nietzsche’s giant ear; and to see, like a giant eye, not the one familiar from the panopticon or the netopticon but the eye that cannot see itself seeing, the eye that is an answer to the problem of light, Deleuze says. It is in this sense our vacuole is a from-outside. How it has grown to be the dominant mode of perception, except that it is a technological answer not a biological one, we can compare to the hypertrophy of a single neuron.

III.

FREE TECHNOLOGY TAKEAWAY OF 2025 #11

Here's a recap:

1. EV cancels burn
2. scale fails
3. the American ideology
4. Win the world before the other guy gets it!
5. a thought its product embodies, what it produces is power over nature and people
6. tech is outside the purview of control
7. The internet has won, on behalf of technology, the moment is here.
8. they would have you think there are two sides, pitting one political belief against another, but when it comes to truth and the freedom of information, when it comes to the internet and the public conversation, there is only one.
9. The power of capitalism
10. all forms of superiority become commutable: being American, male, white, smart, rich and powerful.

. . . for full explanations please go to part I. above, but, I will summarise:

1. EV cancels burn—where EV = expected value, a theme of Danyl McLauchlan's article for The New Zealand Listener, January 11-17 2025, “Gamblers at the Gate,” its title referring to tech bosses, the PayPal bros, and those cosying up to the current US administration. The burn is what they are gambling on. The stakes are capital, to do with burn-rate, the effects of an exorbitant system of extraction for capital accumulation, the burn is literal, it's oxygen, and, wherein the expected value lies, above all technological.
2. scale fails—this appears as a theme in Ed Zitron's commentary and critique of technology: tech companies are enjoined to scale, both organisationally and in terms of the technology they are selling, the app or product. (see Zitron's blog Where's Your Ed At) Scaling is built into the model, but scale, the TBTF phenomenon, fails.
3. the American ideology—is the political ideology technologically executed of #4.
4. Win the world before the other guy gets it!—speaks for itself: space, both outer and global, is won by technological dominance.
5. a thought its product embodies, what it produces is power over nature and people—defines technology, not as the product, not as the thought or discourse producing it, but as what it produces, where thought, discourse and product, from phone-apps to high-tech weaponry, are mutually inclusive. Power over nature and people = political purview and seeking political effects. Technology is then distinct from Stiegler's technics and from techno-science which assumes the base instrumentalisation of a superior knowledge.
6. tech is outside the purview of control—control is Burroughs's term taken up by Deleuze in his "Postscript on the Societies of Control." Between here and there, between writing the 10 Tech Takeaways and now adding an 11th, I returned to the Postscript (see part II.) in light of technological control, that is, in light of control being technologically empowered (see all of the points above, below) and automated. Technology is taking control of control.
7. The internet has won, on behalf of technology, the moment is here.—takes up Thiel's call to follow the cause of technologically assured truth and freedom which the internet embodies. Why should we pause in thinking so? see takeaway #10.
8. they would have you think there are two sides, pitting one political belief against another, but when it comes to truth and the freedom of information, when it comes to the internet and the public conversation, there is only one.—for Thiel and pals the most prominent idea is that we are all together in wanting technological progress (but see #10), where technology meets politics, since government regulation, in other words the law, limits progress, is a constraint on technology rather than its liberation.
9. The power of capitalism—is what technology drives, not the other way around.
10. all forms of superiority become commutable: being American, male, white, smart, rich and powerful.—we see what is affirmed by the associative model of a relational network with the network function forming a cognitive bubble. In this new enclosure we have a new conservatism. The promised liberation by technology is into the gated community of privilege, which leads us to tech takeaway #11

11. Capital is the throttle on technology and those capitalists who are only technologists by association are its gatekeepers.

Even before an algorithm recognises, reinforces, makes it property and commercialises it, the network function is present. The word cognitive should alert us to the form. It is a metaphor. In its pervasiveness it encapsulates social organisation, the internet, artificial neural networks and the natural one, the brain. The brain connects the metaphor of the network to nature, naturalises it and places it beyond question.

The connection is connectivity itself. To the Left it appears in the natural light of goodness, kindness, intersectionality, inclusivity and communication but it upholds the bubble where the bros commune. The Right feels the obligation to undo the Left's illusion.

The strange thing is that, considering the brain, a synapse is as much a cut, an interval, a gap as it is a link. This is proven by DeepSeek's R1 use of sparsity. Consciousness may be achieved when there is a cut, an interval, a gap between what is perceived and the action it elicits. The issue is providing time for the detour of non-communication. Automated speed goes in the other direction. So does the network function if it is assumed to go by way of making continuous links. Whereas, if we think of relating differences . . . There is something else in everything that is.

IV.

There is something else in everything that is

Il faut plutôt admettre que le pouvoir produit du savoir (et pas simplement en le favorisant parce qu'il le sert ou en l'appliquant parce qu'il est utile); que pouvoir et savoir s'impliquent directement l'un l'autre; qu'il n'y a pas de relation de pouvoir sans constitution corrélative d'un champ de savoir, ni de savoir qui ne suppose et ne constitue en même temps des relations de pouvoir. Ces rapports de «pouvoir-savoir» ne sont donc pas à analyser à partir d'un sujet de connaissance qui serait libre ou non par rapport au système du pouvoir; mais il faut considérer au contraire que le sujet qui connaît, les objets à connaître et les modalités de connaissance sont autant d'effets de ces implications fondamentales du pouvoir-savoir et de leurs transformations historiques. En bref, ce n'est pas l'activité du sujet de connaissance qui produirait un savoir, utile ou rétif au pouvoir, mais le pouvoir-savoir, les processus et les luttes qui le traversent et dont il est constitué, qui déterminent les formes et les domaines possibles de la connaissance.

– Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, Gallimard, Paris, 1975, 32 (pdf)

... this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. This means that these relations go right down into the depths of society, that they are not localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes and that they do not merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government; that, although there is continuity (they are indeed articulated on this form through a whole series of complex mechanisms),there is neither analogy nor homology, but a specificity of mechanism and modality. Lastly, they are not univocal; they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations. The overthrow of these 'micro-powers' does not, then, obey the law of all or nothing; it is not acquired once and for all by a new control of the apparatuses nor by a new functioning or a destruction of the institutions; on the other hand, none of its localized episodes may be inscribed in history except by the effects that it induces on the entire network in which it is caught up.

– Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, NY, 1977, 27 (pdf)

There follow in this edition a series of perhaps-es, perhaps we should abandon the idea that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge, leading to: "We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful)" ... which, from the French of the preceding block quote, is:

It is necessary to admit that power produces knowledge (and not simply in favouring it because it serves it or in applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly implicate one another; that there is not a relation of power without correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor of knowledge that does not entail and not constitute at the same time relations of power. These relationships of 'power-knowledge' are not then to be analysed going from a subject of awareness who would be free or not in relationship to a system of power; but it is necessary to consider instead that the subject who is aware, objects of awareness and modes of awareness are as much effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and of their historical transformations. In short, it is not the activity of the subject of awareness that produces knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but the power-knowledge, the procedures and struggles which traverse it and of which it is constituted, that determine the possible forms and domains of awareness.

Before considering the differences between this and Sheridan 's translation, it is to our point that Foucault continues, and, although I was going to return to the standard translation, I find the original so much more compelling, so, in my own rough and literal translation:

To analyse the political investment of the body and the microphysics of power entails then that we give up on – for what concerns power – the opposition of violence-ideology, on the metaphor of property on the model of contract or of conquest; for what concerns knowledge, that we give up on the opposition of that in which it is 'interested' and in which it is 'disinterested,' on the model of awareness and on the primacy of the subject. ...

The ellipsis concerns a 'political anatomy' which, Foucault again:

... would deal with a 'body politic' as an assemblage of material elements and of techniques that serve as weapons, channels, lines of communication and relay points for power and for knowledge which invest in human bodies and subject them by making them objects of knowledge.

Using invest here is a bit clunky but it means a commitment to, that in which knowledge and power have stakes or where, to foreshadow, there is an investment by technology. For what Foucault is talking about and what it would be an anachronism for him to say in place of political anatomy is technology, a political technology, moreover, a technology of communication.

Where Sheridan uses we should, we should admit rather, he writes, assuming Foucault's speculative perhaps-es are continuous with this statement, for Foucault's Il faut que, I have, it is necessary to admit, a direct statement: It is necessary to admit that power produces knowledge, a statement introducing power and knowledge in combined power-knowledge. Foucault is not tentative at all about it. The subject does not produce his or her awareness or the objects of that awareness or the modes in which he or she is aware. Power-knowledge does. Moreover, their mutual implications, the ways in which power and knowledge are implicated with one another, undergo historical transformations. It is these implications that change which Foucault's political anatomy, here and in History of Sexuality, covers.

Sheridan's translation makes power and knowledge subject to historical transformations but it is rather the ways, the techniques and modalities of their implication which change. A political anatomy, not, as it might be a political economy, concerns the body politic by examining the history not of power-knowledge directly, because their entwinement is presupposed and necessary, but of the ways, borrowing the image from Deleuze, they coil around each other. The implications of power-knowledge are embodied, as said, not only in subjects, the objects and modes of their awareness (note for Sheridan this awareness is already knowledge) but also materially, in the assemblage of material elements of the historical world, where they are transformed. Foucault's view exceeds that of historical materialism, because how power and knowledge mutually support one another changes according to changes in the ways in which knowledge is communicated and the points at which power is applied. As well as being techniques of assembling material elements those which serve as channels, lines of communication and relay points for power, invested in human bodies, subjecting them by making them objects of knowledge, serve, says Foucault, as weapons, armes.

From the technical implementation of power-knowledge, from the political anatomy which concerns the body politic, we get a political technology. In it power is used as much as a weapon as to elicit information. It is necessary to admit that power produces knowledge and that power-knowledge produces technology.

Technological progress is then the advance of this power-knowledge. Or, to put it in other words, power-knowledge as it arises in Foucault's analysis in the disciplinary societies which succeed the societies of sovereignty, when we can see the transformation begin, mediates between disciplinary societies of the 18th and 19th century and the societies of control Deleuze names in his "Postscript on the Societies of Control," in turn succeeded, a transformation we can see beginning in the 20th century, by the societies of automated control. Power-knowledge is then the mediator, the media, the information, behind the political conception of technology. The techniques of power-knowledge eclipse the power of the sovereign and political economy, where capital is king, is eclipsed by technology, where knowledge-power comes into full force, and the power of the king and of capital has no more than a supporting and technical role.

A final note, a motivated translation, such as I have given, might find reason to dispute the title in English being Discipline and Punish, while in French, more in keeping with the theme of technological rule, it is Surveiller et Punir. However Foucault himself endorsed the translation of surveiller, since surveillance does not have the implication it has in French of a commanding gaze, therefore discipline. And in the body of the text we read:

Ces méthodes qui permettent le contrôle minutieux des opérations du corps, qui assurent l'assujettissement constant de ses forces et leur imposent un rapport de docilité-utilité, c'est cela qu'on peut appeler les « disciplines ».

– Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, Gallimard, Paris, 1975, 139

These methods that permit the minute control of the body's activities, that ensure the constant subjection of its powers to act and impose a relationship of docility-utility, it's this that we can call 'disciplines.'