Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations

K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Press, 1986), 172.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., “The Grey Goo Problem,” excerpted version of article “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations” (originally 2000), published on KurzweilAI.net, March 20, 2001. See →.

Ibid.

Projects were collected in Infanet Lab/Lateral Office, Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011).

Ibid., 33.

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 11.

Nick Land, “Machinic Desire,” Textual Practice, Vol. 7 No. 3 (1993): 479.

Alex Williams, “Xenoeconomics and Capital Unbound,” Splintering Bone Ashes, 2008. See →.

Franco Berardi Bifo, “Time, Acceleration, and Violence,“ e-flux journal no. 27 (September 2011). See →.

Ibid.

Or: are these questions mere manifestations of our naivete, ways of duping ourselves into participating in a fantasy or a symptom generated by a dissipative compulsion that advances regardless of how we position ourselves in relation to it? Are we surrendering more than we mean to when we take this treacherous path? Are these questions blindly groping for a kind of fetish aesthetics that allow us to have our transnational capitalism while claiming to be able to challenge it—to recover critical distance—from the inside? In other words, are they part of the general logic of our “post-ideologic” moment: a way to be radical at the level of the proposal, while acting in ways that help entrench and naturalize the structural necessities of the system at every other level? One should tread cautiously here.