I will be presenting at five conferences this spring. These talks are all based on my dissertation. In chronological order: 1. ASPECT Graduate Conference, 21-23 March. Talk title: “Algorithmic Determinacy and Interpretative Psychedelic Science.” Date/time of presentation: 22 March, 11AM-12:45PM 2. Theorizing the Web, 12-13 April. Talk title: “Psychedelic Science and Algorithmic Governance.” Date/time of […]
I’ve been thinking about the rise of immersive experience as a commodity, i.e. virtual reality, music festivals, interactive theater, Meow Wolf, and the psychedelic renaissance. Maybe because psychedelic drug use has always been accompanied by a rhetoric of experience and immersion. This is from Byung Chul Han’s book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of […]
My favorite essay from the k-punk book is online! (Exclamation point because it’s so good!) http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/005622.html A brief, dumb interpretation: goth exhibitionism denies interiority to the nth degree. Goth is interchangeable with signs and machines — it’s pure surface, sign value exchange and spectacle. Goth is an aesthetics based on the rejection of false illumination. […]
I will be at the Western Political Science Association Conference in San Diego, 18-20 April 2019. Here’s the abstract for my talk: Machine Learning and the Algorithmic Cancellation of the Future In this paper I explore the impact of machine learning algorithms on the data they process. I make a two-part argument. First, that the […]
Hi from Germany. Frankfurt is unseasonably warm, hotter than New York right now. It feels like Southern Virginia at the time I left. I was in Berlin and Poland (Sczcecin) last weekend. It was not much colder in either city. Trying not to think about climate change feels like trying not to be human. Even […]
One week after arriving. The worst piece of advice I got for Germany is that language isn’t a problem because everyone speaks English. You hear it all the time in the states. It’s not true. The second worst is that people are reserved. That’s also false. I don’t understand them, of course, so I wish […]
Yesterday: five hours slicing through apocalyptic gales with my car, listening to Tom Zé and Bill Hicks comedy, around 8PM landed in Baltimore for the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Conference. Coming up: The 22nd-25th of March: Doing Interdisciplinarity, the 2018 ASPECT Conference at Virginia Tech. I will be giving a talk titled “Psychedelic Research and Data Positivism.” […]
Recently I’ve discovered some overlaps between various works of contemporary psychedelic scholarship. Over the summer I started reading Nicolas Langlitz’s book Neuropsychedelia and came across the work of Chris Letheby not long after (when he himself reached out to me after an introduction I made on a grad student listserv… +1 for email networking). Letheby co-authored a philosophical paper […]
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to […]
“Everybody keeps talking about how the world is ending, but I see it differently” — Circuit des Yeux 2016 was good to me, and I am glad it’s 2017. This will be a great year, I can feel it.
