On Reality Patchwork and Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism

My talk given at the Diffractions/Sdbs workshop on patchwork. "Sdbs and Diffractions jointly cooperate to workshop an application/game/project/platform revolving around the idea of ‘Patchwork’–basically examining the role of technologies that afford the opportunity for decentralized networks to emerge and importantly the possibility of how those networks can be realized or manifested in physical space. We would kindly like to open the discussion to anyone interested in coordinating similar work in order to realize the complex, nodal connections bringing Prague and [deterritorialized] virtual-based artists and thinkers together into the initial Patchwork conception." http://www.diffractionscollective.org/wyrd-patchworkshop/ https://sdbs.cz/events/wyrd-patchworkshop/ Transcript: I want to talk about patchwork as an empirical model, but also a little bit as a normative model, because there's this idea that capitalism is increasingly collapsing the fact/value distinction. I tend to think that's true. And I think what that means is that, that which is empirically true increasingly looks to be normatively true also. Or if you're searching for a true model, you should be searching for models that are at once empirically well calibrated with reality and also one should be looking for normative or ethical consistency. And you can find the true model in any particular situation by kind of triangulating along the empirical and the normative. That's kind of how I think about patchwork. I've been thinking about it in both of these dimensions and that has allowed me to converge on a certain vision of what I think patchwork involves or entails. And I've been writing a lot about that over the past couple months or so. So what I'm going to do in this talk specifically, is not just rehash some ideas that I've been thinking about and writing about and speaking about the past couple months, but I'm going to try to break a little bit of ground, at least in my own weird head, at the very least. And how these, some of these different ideas of mine connect, or can be integrated. In particular, I wrote a series of blog posts a few months ago on what I call reality forking (1, 2, 3). "Forking" is a term that comes from the world of software engineering. And so that's going to be one component of the talk. You'll see it. It's very obvious how that connects to the idea of patchwork. And I'm also going to talk about this vision for a communist patch a lot of us have been interested in. And I've been talking with a lot of people about this idea of the communist patch and soliciting, you know, different people's impressions on it. And I also have written a few blog posts recently talking — kind of sketching, kind of hand-waving, if you will — at what a possibly communist patch might look like. A lot of people think, to this day, that patchwork has a very kind of right-wing connotation. People think primarily of Moldbug and Nick Land when they think of patchwork. But I think it's not at all obvious that patchwork necessarily has a right-wing flavor to it. I think we can easily imagine left-wing patches that would be as competitive and as successful as more authoritarian patches. And so that's kind of what I've really been thinking a lot about recently. And even Nick Land himself told me that, you know, there's nothing wrong with trying to think about and even build a communist patch — it's all fair play. He's much less bullish on it than I am, but be that as it may. So those two ideas I'm going to discuss basically in turn and then try to connect them in a few novel ways. I have a few points or comments or extrapolations or connections between these two different ideas I've been working on, that I've never really written down or quite articulated yet. So that's what I'm going to try to do here.... Rest of the transcript is here: https://theotherlifenow.com/on-reality-patchwork-and-neo-feudal-techno-communism/