rifts, part two: a fracturing breach that forcibly rearranges, a racehorse of genius, and a bad feeling about AI, in Garbage Time
rifting between the moral, the actual, and the agentic – in surveillance capitalism, with a bad feeling about our undermining overtaking
An observation of a rift is an injured exclamation of diremption.
In a rift, something has been sundered from something, wrenched away.
A breach has been wrongfully yanked out of the cosmic weave: whether in time and nature, or between people.
Rifting is not the distinctness of calmly disparate entities. It is not the multiplying separation of differentiation inherent to processes of growth and becoming.
Rifting: a tearing sundering of entity from its growth and becoming, pulled from roots and relation, into the bad open of an untimely cold sky.
Macbeth:
Despair thy charm,
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee Macduff was from his mother’s womb
Untimely ripped.
Metabolic rift: Harm and disturbance in exchange relations; a fracturing reach that forcibly rearranges.
All rifts are metabolic in a world of process and interdependence. I take this as an ontological given, as a person who sees themselves as an agentic part of a set of implicating processes – beyond my control – in which I am invested, that involve me, about which I am deeply concerned.
Marx also talked about the metabolic rift. Andreas Malm has drawn recent critical attention back to this concept, developed in 1999 by John Bellamy Foster as his basis for environmental sociology. I want to give a full post on metabolic rifts, but I’m still reading and thinking through this set of points and sitting with the implications of our having punched through x of the 9 planetary boundaries. In the meantime, ‘if there is time’, I’ll let Malm sum it for us as he does, “in the following, highly condensed sequence”, and move on, with the sincere promise to return ‘after Christmas’.
“Nature consists of biophysical processes and cycles. So does society: human bodies must engage in metabolic exchanges with nonhuman nature. That need not be particularly harmful to any of the parties. Over the course of history, however, the relations through which humans have organized their Stoffwechsel (metabolism) might be fractured and forcibly rearranged, so that they not only harm the people disadvantaged by this change, but also, at the very same time, disturb the processes and cycles of nature. A metabolic rift has opened up (link)”
Harm and disturbance in exchange relations; a fracturing reach that forcibly rearranges. This is a metabolic rift.
Coda/refrain: rift in space, from the emergence of the machine, via clock time in the monastery
In the first rifting, I looked at the invention of clock time. Such a tragic irony: that a device for ‘freeing’ us toward one another – by creating the regulation of a punctuated common space of prayer – subjected us to a machinic interposition, from then on (to eternity).
Time (not only) waits for no man; it (also) gets between each and every one of us. None of us says ‘I’m sorry I can’t ‘meet’ you, time has been interposed between us, by us, forever after’, although, in a certain sense, co-inciding in encounter has not been possible since we came to be out of joint. We cannot live in the moment once ‘moments are the elements of profit’.
The tiring flow of the last millennium toward frazzled entropy: where once the tides sighed soothingly in and out and seasons undulated in timely rhythmicity (and no one had to ‘be on time’ or ‘commute at the end of the working day’), now we are all harried, running late, burnt out – time’s up, game over. In that post, I noticed Rosa noticing acceleration accelerating this, the ramping of the collective StairMaster, our endless cattle shute noticing/not noticing that we’re shooed up a down escalator getting faster year by year.
Time is a paradox insofar as the invention of time was (and is, and will be) the negation of time. The more time we measure, the less we have of it, the more it slips through our fingers, past our clock hands: the more precision, the less soul – as Musil notices.
In fact, these disjunctures I’m shorthanding (second handing?) are key to the involuting unfolding – infolding? – of spacetime in Musil’s Vienna, 1913. One year away from Ferdinand in Sarajevo, three from the Emperor’s Tomb, five from the loss of the World, even more than the loss of the War, Musil’s Ulrich subsists in a world in which (the newspapers announce) there exists of A Racehorse of Genius, while a man cannot add up to anything of qualities.
“The time had come when people were starting to speak of genius on the soccer field or in the boxing ring, although there would still be at most only one genius of a halfback or great tennis-court tactician for every ten or so explorers, tenors, or writers of genius who cropped up in the papers. The new spirit was not yet quite sure of itself. But just then Ulrich suddenly read somewhere, like a premonitory breath of ripening summer, the expression ‘the racehorse of genius.’ It stood in the report of a sensational racing success, and the author was probably unaware of the full magnitude of the inspiration his pen owed to the communal spirit. But Ulrich instantly grasped the fateful connection between his entire career and this genius among racehorses. For the horse has, of course, always been sacred to the cavalry, and as a youth Ulrich had hardly ever heard talk in barracks of anything but horses and women. He had fled from this to become a great man, only to find that when as the result of his varied exertions he perhaps could have felt within reach of his goal, the horse had beaten him to it” (41).
from Vienna 1913 forever to the distended 3S of Garbage Time
In the forevervanishing of Musil’s 1913 – Vienna 1913 forever – we can see that Ulrich was in fact living in Garbage Time, facing a world in which the ‘genius’ of horses and boxers can be measured, while the soul of genius is something invisible, elusive, annulled by faster athletes and more precise vehicles. The book’s superb tragic irony, in no small measure, is that the book’s characters don’t know to have the good sense to leave the stadium called Vienna: they are ‘too busy’ distracting themselves from the pointless comfort of their haute bourgeois lives by preparing to celebrate Franz Joseph’s seventeeth jubilee, in the same way that Kamala Harris’ supporters were busying themselves preparing to celebrate the inauguration of the US’ first black female president on November 5th, and Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley South were busying themsleves preparing, on July 13th and September 15th, to celebrate the death of presidential candidate and convicted felon Donald Trump, at their hand.
The tragicomic condensation of this rift to its point of imponderability: what if Gavrilo Princip had missed, and Crooks or South had not?
Instead, we are in Garbage Time for the forseeable, and unlike Ulrich and the Racehorse of Genius, we know it. Holy fuck, no: a four-year distention of 3S, a farcical sequel to the acknowledged-forgotten bin fire of 2016-20, but with even more Gorka, and all the 2016 B-Team rusted ons and one-eyed ideologues now elevated to key supporter roles, alongside an unhinged and exhilarated Elon.
In this ‘time’, I can feel my own longing to be as far away from this global stadium as possible. I am longing for the calm separation of being disparate to all that (they’re over there, I’m [safely] over here); I am longing for the enclaved differentiation of my children, safely beyond the faecal reach of the Binfire Clown Posse, so beautifully captured by Jack Nicholson in the first Batman film in these two – parade, gallery take over – amazing scenes.
Yet here’s the rift: I also notice my moral concern involuting away into the self-involved ‘safety’ of island life and family bubble, rolling back and inward like the Mimosa Pudica. I want it not be true but it is, I want it not to touch me or the people I love, but I know it will. It’s garbage time for you and me, and more than the smell reaches us: it permeates and coarsens everything, it draws precious fickle attention into it. It’s over, and we know we should leave the stadium, but we stay watching the Garbage Time play out.
Trying to delineate the rift between clock time, and being overtaken and undermined by AI and tech – during Garbage Time
Meantime: the world unspools out of its blown excrescence, it curls ever faster inward, into its involution. While we’re spectating the parade, or noting with rapt horror as the Joker takes over the Art Museum – ‘gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds!’ – the itty bitty shit bits accumulate in the widening gyre. Garbage Time is full of little bits of garbage, too; look at the litter left in the stadium once the spectators finally abandon the spectacle.
I have a terrible feeling about AI.
It’s a feeling to do with time. We won’t know it or not until it’s too late, but I feel a rift fixing to gape.
In the first instance, it’s related to the rift opened by clock time, and ramped by social acceleration.
In the second, it’s related precisely to the Garbage Time feeling of Trump 2024-8, which sits inside US-China war over Taiwan 2025, a non-trivial chance.
In the third instance, it’s to do with all of us being overtaken by something undermining.
Let me see if I can describe my way toward this thing I’m still feeling through.
On a personal level, we lucky ones work and work, just to maintain whatever degree of prosperity against erosion by inflation, cost of living, sheer weight of numbers: five dollar coffees, thousand dollar car services, three million dollar houses, 35 million tourists, eight billion people, 140 billion dollars in state debt, 500 billion dollar nuclear subs, 11.5 trillion in assets under management, 37.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
And on a geopolitical level, we make lemonaids with the aids we’ve been given, in the form of Xi, Modi, Trump, Putin, &c &c: a world of gleeful gold shower parades and the exhilarated vandalism of culture and art, the twinned spectacles of consumption and garbage production in Garbage Time. While we wait for… …what rough beast?
Then, on a sociotechnical level, this double sense of having been outstripped by a set of controlling affordances way faster and more powerful than we are ready for, that we totally do not have the measure of, and that are being imposed on us in a way that is undermining of all human agency – by people like Zuckerberg and Trump, a blank sphinx without empathy, and a shallow thinker with a huge and fragile ego. I’m still very much sitting in the clench of this, so I don’t know how to resolve this post, except to hand the mic to Zuboff, go and think and feel some more, and return to share with you the next rift.
“Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. It was always a windfall, born of an antidemocratic economic ideology and gifted by democracy-negating democratic leaders. It was always the covert quid pro quo of a fearful democratic state more inclined to control the future from the top down than to build it with trust from the bottom up. Two decades later, surveillance capitalism has failed any reasonable test of responsible global stewardship of digital information and communications.
The abdication of these information and communication spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all other crises. It is astonishing to consider that our emergent information civilization is wholly dependent upon these “spaces,” yet they remain for sale or rent by any individual, corporation, politician, billionaire, megalomaniac, or billionaire megalomaniac, with no law to constrain their action, unlike almost any other form of property. The people are left to observe, shout, or cower on the sidelines, bystanders to their own pillage and its consequences in the uniquely abstract forms of subjugation described in these pages” (Zuboff, 2022, 53, link).