#benedict singleton

[slopunk-blog]

QOA: Computers, Machines, & Cyberspace

Zeros and Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture — Sadie Plant (1997) nets The growth of the Net has been continuous with the way it works. No central hub or command structure has constructed it, and its emergence has been that of a parasite, rather than an organizing host. It has installed none of the hardware on which it works, simply hitching a largely free ride on existing computers,…

[ssedwedd]

A trap doesn’t have to damage anything, it can just…structure the environment…

Benedict Singleton, discussion in Speculative Aesthetics (2014)

The quote that lead me to start thinking about traps, ell

[bustakay]

It seems obvious that we are confined in space to the surface of the earth, and in time to the length of a life. Fedorov’s imaginative achievement revolves around refusing to mistake the ubiquity of these constraints—for all the great hold they exert—as inescapable necessities we have no choice but to accept. Those who point to the huge expanse of the earth and the whole terrestrial history of life—this is nothing but myopia, squalid provincialism. In isolated form, this is the characteristic gesture of cosmism, what we might call the “cosmist impulse”: to consider the earth a trap, and to understand the common project of philosophy, economics, and design as being the formulation of means to escape from it: to conceive a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which we steal ourselves from the vault.

Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’.

[rosswolfe]

Cosmism accelerates design until its project of insubordination becomes more clearly visible. What is revealed is the irreducibility of design to stated motivations of capital interest, social progress or scientific advance, in place of a programme of incursions across any and all borders, violations of every truce, an insurrection not only against gravity but also human beings, a process by which sociotechnical structures are taken hostage by precisely what they make possible, a process of ungrounding in more ways than the most obvious. This is the genuine injection of the offworld into terrestrial affairs, in which through progressive alienation freedom stacks up in the longest of cons.