The Noise Filter: Cybernetic Systems of "Gravity's Rainbow".
These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic…If you want the truth—I know I presume—you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules—it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers. . . .
You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?
Few 20th-century novelists understood the nascent forms of artificial intelligence better than Thomas Pynchon, who foresaw how cybernetic systems—from aircraft-tracking computers to multinational capitalist economies—could break free from their creators and spiral into autonomous reality.
In this essay, I examine the cybernetic architectures of
Gravity’s Rainbow and consider what Pynchon’s vision reveals about the algorithmic unconscious, the collapse of the nation-state under late capitalism, and the emerging AI economy.
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Networks
Urban metaphors have shaped our imaginaries of “cyberspace” since its inception—but today, it’s clear that the city of the internet is no longer one we want to inhabit. As we enter what some describe as a “post-neoliberal” moment, new paradigms of digital networking are emerging in response to the failures of existing infrastructure and governance. This essay traces the internet’s evolution through a series of urban spatial metaphors—from the rise of Network Culture to the speculative cyberpunk futures of decentralized computing. In doing so, it aims to offer new frameworks and tools for understanding the forms of networking still to come.
This essay is in revision and is available by request.
Conspiracy of the Screen
Throughout the catalogs of both Lynch and Cronenberg, surrealist tactics are almost always entangled with micro-narratives of conspiracy. From the eerie presence of a “mystery man” manipulating reality to quasi-religious mantras of technological transcendence, both filmmakers construct deeply paranoid cognitive maps of power under late capitalism in North America. While their suspicions target various groups across their shared canon, their most incisive socio-economic critiques emerge in their respective magnum opera: Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Cronenberg’s Videodrome.
Both films pivot on media conspiracies, where shadowy networks of criminal-corporate power control the production, circulation, and perception of visual media. Read as cognitive maps of postmodern North America, these conspiracies expose the core contradictions of cultural production under late capitalism—and reveal a fundamental tension between dominant narratives of success, control, and morality.
Read an excerpt of the essay
here.
Sinofuturism: A Historical Materialism of Oriental Artificial Intelligence
This essay uses Lawrence Lek's 2016 video artwork
Sinofuturism to examine relationships between West-East
geopolitics and orientalist depictions of artificial intelligence in Western media. The political economic analysis draws
primarily from the World-System approach of Giovanni Arrighi and his late-career predictions about the
future of US-China trade relations. This analysis contextualizes Lek's stereotypes of Chinese culture,
helping to distill the conditions of a "Sinofuturist" aesthetic.
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The World System Under Pressure: Post-Marxist Approaches to Growth and the Climate Crisis
This paper traces the intellectual history of world-systems theory and its account of capitalist economic growth, before applying its framework to the climate crisis and recent developments in ecological Marxism. Across this survey, we find that various strands of world-systems theory—and post-Marxist thought more broadly—converge on the present as a moment of systemic crisis: political, economic, social, and now ecological. In the world-systems tradition, such crises mark potential turning points—ruptures that may destabilize the very process of capital accumulation that gave rise to the system itself.
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Blood and Bass
A survey of studies in bass-response, the use of sub-audible frequencies across sound design and defense systems, and the psychoacoustics of rythmic bass programming.
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