CATASTROPHE BLINK
BY MCCALISTER FORBES
In 2019, hedge fund managers Dryden Brown and Charlie Callinan raised $4.2 million in seed funding for their Bluebook Cities company. Among the initial investors in the then unknown duo’s project was PayPal co-founder and libertarian ideologue Peter Thiel. Thiel’s venture capital firm, Pronomos Capital, invests in “a new model of urban development where the city is the product.” These cities, also known as future cities, freedom cities, network states, or sovereign cities, are sovereign territories founded on the basis of private capital. Patti Friedman, the daughter of economist Milton Friedman—who famously had a hand in both Reagan and Thatcher economic policy as well as a crucial role in Salvador Allende’s assassination—also participated in the opening round of investments.
Elsewhere in Pronomos’ portfolio is Próspera, the world’s only active future city. Próspera operates as a “Zone of Economic Development,” or a ZEDE, in Honduras. The city, established in 2017, has its own private police force, healthcare, and school system. Residents of Próspera do not pay taxes to Honduras, but rather pay very minimal taxes to the ZEDE itself. In March 2025, facing an attempt by the Honduran Government to strike down the law that former US backed puppet president Juan Orlando Hernandez (now serving 45 years in US prison on drug trafficking charges) put into place that allows ZEDEs in their country, Próspera sued Honduras for 31% of its National GDP. If Próspera is not under the jurisdiction of Honduras, but situated inside its borders, then it is under no jurisdiction but its own.
Praxis, Brown and Callinan’s prospective future city, advertises itself as a “Network State” founded on the pillars of Artificial Intelligence, Crypto, Energy, and Biotech. The city’s stated mission is to “restore Western Civilization and pursue our ultimate destiny among the stars.” In 2024, Praxis raised $525 million dollars in additional funding. You can apply for citizenship on the Praxis website or you can simply join the discord and sign the Praxis pledge.
In Kobo Abe’s 1959 novel Inter Ice Age 4, Professor Katsumi, a leading engineer for Tokyo’s Institute of Computer Technique (ICT) is tasked with developing a “prediction machine” set to rival the Soviet Union’s Moscow I, a computer that is able to process data inputs and predict likely outcomes to prompts asked by the user. Moscow I is wildly successful in its early stages of development, going as far as forecasting crop yields and economic outcomes of not only Soviet markets but foreign ones as well. When Moscow I makes a bold prediction that communism would be the prevailing global economic system by 2050, the ICT authorizes Katsumi to create his own machine to refute the claims of Soviet device. Initially, Katsumi’s machine is a success, but when it confirms Moscow I’s verdict that communism will dominate the future world market, the ICT demands Katsumi shut the project down. Desperate to continue his work, Katsumi and his assistant Tanomogi decide to change their approach: instead of projecting broadly on global issues, they would use the prediction machine on an individual.
The duo decides an “ordinary” man would be the best subject for individualizing the machine. Katsumi, believing that there are very few types of people, wants to find a subject that is representative of the largest swath of the masses for his initial experiment. The man they select is a professional type in a suit sitting alone at a cafe in the evening staring listlessly at the wall as a bowl of ice cream melts in the dish in front of him. After a long day of white collar labor, the “ordinary” man purchases a treat he does not want and turns off.
The man is part of the modern masses which Baudrillard calls “immune to representation,”—so turned off that they can only be represented by data, statistics, and studies. This is what makes this man the perfect candidate for the prediction machine: his actions and impulses are quantifiable because they stem from a media elasticity, a rubber mind not actively absorbing content, instead letting it ricochet. Over and over and over again. In the technocratic new world order, the average man no longer harbors labor value or creates anything. Instead he provides his time—staring at a bright computer or sitting in a drab office, dulling his senses in exchange for financial compensation. An accountant balancing books for a corporation (as the ordinary man turns out to be), likely has no connection with the products of the company he relates to via credits, debits, pay stubs and invoices. 40-hour weeks alienated not just from the product, but from oneself, the “ordinary” white-collar employee has little energy for anything but numb consumption. As a car that has been parked in the cold, it is difficult to turn the brain on without priming it first.
Abe’s “ordinary” man today is a man who is employed in creating anti-value. Anti-value, according to David Harvey, is how the capitalist machine sustains itself as it pummels forward to its uncertain future. With exponentially growing technological advances in production, the blue-collar laborer becomes increasingly automated or inessential. The bosses are able to pocket the money that was once spent on labor. But here is where the contradiction lies: Capitalists cannot profit from the goods they produce unless someone is willing to buy them. Higher unemployment creates stagnant capital that clogs the system and creates crisis. To sustain itself, capital must be in constant circulation. In order to stimulate the flow of capital new useless jobs are invented to perpetuate the cycle. Advertising, bureaucrats, accountants, and most of all bankers and financiers are responsible for propelling capital in order to maintain the system’s spiral. The astronomical technological advances in recent decades have created whole new fields of white-collar labor in order to promote consumption.
A man sits next to me at the bar on a Tuesday night, it is mildly crowded, there is a Spotify-curated classic rock playlist on the speakers, there are a few barstools open but most customers are sitting next to each other. Some of them are here with friends, others are alone. At the bar as the condensation from his beer drips on the wood, the man stares at his phone. I watch as the man scrolls through his Instagram explore page, switches to the reels tabs, there are cooking videos, skin care routines, monkeys, young women dancing, strange generated images, he gets bored and closes the app, only to open it moments later to repeat the cycle. He does not make conversation with me or the bartender, he doesn’t appear to think at all, he is off, he lets the images and products flash at his eyes. He will not buy the skincare products, he is not masturbating to the softcore pornography, he is not laughing at a poorly acted comedy skit, he is nearly drooling, staring not at the wood panelling, but at the wall of images on the screen in his hand. Whereas Abe’s prediction machine requires manual input of data from an outside source, now everyone wields a prediction machine in their pocket that absorbs their tendencies and reacts according to their dull desires. Now each click produces anti-value facilitating the flow of stagnant capital.
In Inter Ice Age 4, the notion of a Soviet-driven future is initially unacceptable to the elite Japanese class as they are becoming rich off of global markets and Westernization, but the vague global inputs in the prediction machine seem to confirm this potential. The prediction machine, once applied to the radically individualized twentieth century subject can be accurately utilized to create more capitalistic futures.
Katsumi and Tonamogi salivate at the applications of this individual focus for the prediction machine which can “predict both the future and the past of a criminal…diagnose illnesses, treat various other problems that relate to life; if necessary… predict the time of death.” They agree heartily that the machine’s results would make “the insurance companies delighted.” The Western freedom is not the freedom of the individual to move in sickness and health, in transgressing norms, in surviving outside its ever-tightening hydraulic press of information, but a freedom for the individual to choose how they turn off, how they consume, how they eat and drink, which bar they frequent and which meaningless images swarm their skull. We are given choices as long as we consent to a life of options.
The machine applied to the individual can tell insurance companies when their clients will die to effect premium pricing and monthly rates and it can aid the police state in surveilling who may end up as criminals. Scraping social media, it can predict whether someone is likely to start stealing groceries, rob banks, eat unhealthy foods, or sign up for a dog toy delivery service. The machine gathers inputs and predicts whether or not this person is a health risk, an arrest risk, a good partner, a candidate for parenthood, hireable…
At this very moment the US Federal Government is using Artificial Intelligence to scrape online activity for “Un-American activities” in order to deport those who are not in line with the current regime’s vision. As you read this, insurance companies are collaborating with tech companies to track the eating and exercise habits of individuals. Whether you consented or not, your health statistics are likely being shared with United Healthcare, where a computer decides whether you deserve to live or die, and whether or not you and your family deserve financial ruin one way or the other. AI company Palantir, also started by Peter Thiel, was recently awarded a contract to build a database for ICE. DOGE is using AI to pool the data from numerous government agencies including Social Security, Homeland Security, the IRS, to create one mass of data.
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In February 2025, an article was published on the Praxis website entitled “Sovereign Intelligence” with the opening line: ”We are fighting for the soul of the west.” The article’s essential argument is that Artificial Intelligence will inevitably change the structure of our lives—it will end work and create new ways of accessing meaning and culture. “The beliefs and intentions of the people who control AI—the primary source of all goods, services, beliefs, and governance—will determine the destiny of every society where it is employed,” says the article. Praxis rails “capitalist materialism,” impugning the powers that be for promoting a mindless consumer culture perpetuated by current AI and programming models. Praxis envisions a different future, one that is anti-woke and meaningful. One that upholds spiritual values, not just material ones—one that is equally determined to imbibe meaning into the lives of people, not just make money off of them.
Is their vision all that terrible? Seemingly Praxis harbors the same resentments against the neoliberal new world order hellhole as you and I. We are all seeking meaningful connections that are not mediated through brainwashing cultural discourse or back breaking labor. Is technological progress inevitable? Barring a catastrophic meltdown (fingers crossed), almost certainly. In the face of endless progress, Praxis is determined to steer the ship toward its forever unrealized destination.
It is true that technology is improving every day, but to what end? It is now more difficult to use a vending machine than ever before. Card operated laundry machines are far more frustrating than coin ones. If my phone runs out of battery, I cannot pay for my groceries, I cannot look up how to unclog my drain without getting bombarded with ads for draino for weeks. Technology is certainly perpetuating itself, but it is doing so in an endless cycle of what Hegel calls “bad infinity.” The process will always favor a next step, never reaching an endpoint. Technological progress will not complete a united circle, but instead draws an infinite line projecting out into nowhere.
Praxis cannot be an alternative to the oligarchical world order if it is being primarily funded by Peter Thiel, the same man who is a major donor and advisor to the Trump Administration. Despite their populist claims, it is blatantly obvious the massive governmental cuts and imperial interest in Gaza, Greenland, Central America, Ukraine, etc are all tired rehashes of the classic Western Imperial order that carves its ideology on the face of existing cultures, raping the land of its resources, leaving behind a bloody gash when it’s through. The function of DOGE and Trump’s massive budget cuts is not just ideological, but also a bid at lining his and his friends’ pockets; elected officials of today are financially beholden to space travel and biotech in the same way as ones of the past relied on financing from steel and oil magnates.
How is a network state, one that boasts no official territorial or national ethnic background (though of course it will almost entirely be constituted of white Europeans), any different than the current globalized neoliberal agenda? Meta, Blackrock and Amazon all essentially operate as Network states which create their own laws to govern themselves extrajudicially. Based out of small tech hubs across the world, mega corporations connect their power via bank transfers and mercenary warfare. In 2008 the IMF, an unelected body of financiers, made the global economic decisions to restore the markets after the financial crash. Of course foreclosed homes were not returned nor were shuttered stores reopened. Instead, the financiers and corporations responsible for the crash were bailed out, and the average man in Atlanta and Athens alike was left scrambling to recover whatever they could of their seized property.
Though future cities are novel in their imagery and high tech messaging, they are modeled after the colonialist projects that came before them. New York City was established (then New Amsterdam) in order to protect the rights and business interests of the Dutch West India Company fur traders. Caribbean colonies were established as nearly lawless zones of free economic development for plantations and agriculture. The American West was settled by those seeking freedom from restrictive regulations back East. Australia was colonized as a penal colony for the British Empire. Solano County is currently being purchased plot by plot by Czech billionaire Jan Sramek’s California Forever project, another future city, against the will of the farmers currently residing there. RECLAIM THE WEST hollers the Praxis website masthead.
Artificial Intelligence focused on “embedding our eternal ideals” (the details of which are obscure) will drive the decision making on Praxis. It will decide everything from investments to infrastructure by calculating user inputs into its stack. In Kobo Abe’s novel, the prediction machine functions nearly identically to current AI models. Once it is decided that the machine will focus on individuals instead of societal prediction, it appears that the machine begins to program itself, no longer requiring its operator to constantly feed it information. With the baseline of personality traits and knowledge embedded into the machine, it becomes able to build on its own intelligence. However, Katsumi is acutely aware of the machine’s affinity to his own programming tendencies. Despite the machine’s newfound agency, Katsumi recognizes that it was himself “and no one else that gave the machine its capacities.”
Later in the novel, Katsumi plugs his own identity and thinking patterns into the prediction machine, essentially creating an artificial version of himself after their initial subject, the “ordinary” man, is murdered. Things become disorienting once the machine begins to call Katsumi anonymously on the telephone, threatening him for trying to discover, using the machine itself, the fate of the murdered first subject. The machine’s influence over the team grows, combining Katsumi’s qualities that allowed him to become the director of the project with its superior operating and calculating capacity. Katsumi cannot keep up with the machine version of himself, and eventually the team concedes all decision making to the machine, even after the machine determines Katsumi’s own death as the best of all possible future outcomes.
A year or so ago, I first saw people posting AI assessments of their twitter profiles. A friend of mine recently told me she put my own name, without asking, into ChatGPT to ask who I was. She did the same for a series of other friends of hers as well, curious what the machine would tell her about the people she already knew intimately. I have seen a program that scans the user's face and spits out a physical profile and predicts the user's personality based on their visual features. A friend asks ChatGPT to read her essay and tell her if it's any good and then asks the machine what it thinks of the person who wrote it.
What at first seemed to be tongue-in-cheek skewering of the inaccurate technology has now grown to obscene obsession with the twisted reflection in the generated mirror. Despite rightful paranoia over the technology's surveillance capacities, people are willingly feeding their faces, information, ideas, and creations (and those of their friends) into the very system they are terrified of.
Katsumi watches the machine become more him than him. He is shocked that the machine has replicated his voice perfectly on the phone, even though he was the one who fed his voice into the machine. It seems our desire to see ourselves in the technology we use is creating simpler, flatter, more quantifiable versions of ourselves that may one day supersede our own identities. If we continue to feed ourselves into the machine, it will continue to create more and more “realistic” versions of us. Horrifyingly, the more we use AI, the more these synthetic identities will be preferred in favor of our true selves. Our personality profiles and our data will be considered in job and school applications, by insurance companies, and worst off, by each other.
When Katsumi asks the machine how it can take action if it is simply a machine, it replies that it cannot, that it needs someone to operate it. It is easy to forget, as AI develops and improves its capacities to create images, words, to scrape for information, to come up with coherent responses, that it still requires a directive from a human agent. Once the machine’s agency supersedes the rational thought of its user, it is up to that user to go against its advice, to ignore its outputs, to delete the programming.
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“A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow” - Lev Semenovich Vygotsjy
Though the rapidity at which ChatGPT can generate answers and engage in conversation with its clients makes it appear human, its functions are far more rudimentary than its programmers let on. ChatGPT generates ideas one word at a time, predicting the most likely next word in its response by scraping its vast data pool, privileging sources it deems more trustworthy or legitimate than others. Concocting answers by retrieving information from the bulk of the internet, the model does not have a full fledged idea of its response before it reaches its conclusion. In fact, it has no notion of what its answer even means. This is essentially why Praxis and other tech elites are so concerned over what stack an AI model is using. If the model is inputting sources that they deem immoral or privileges data that is adversarial to their vision of the future, it will begin spitting out more of these unwestern ideas than the ones they prefer to germinate. In the video on Praxis website entitled EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING, the AI generated voice declares the notion of natural superiority while images of crosses, churches, and classical sculpture fill the screen. There are references to Hegel, Handel, Rilke, Marcus Aureliues, Seneca, but not a single image of any person of color (besides an oddly placed clip from Color of Pomegranates, lol) and very few of women (unless they’re hot). The ideas of what history is and who it is for are vague. What is not vague is the image of a Confederate statue coming down as an example of the assault on beauty.
Someone codes how AI selects its sources for prediction of what word “makes the most sense” in a sentence. If a programmer tells it to ignore any sources that have left-leaning tendency, or to only include information from specific parts of the world or country, or in specific languages only, it will do exactly that. What makes the most sense is not objective, but embedded in the programmer’s bias.
Though the use of generative text may appear marginal amongst the scarier capacities of AI, the machine must communicate with us in order to be understood. If the machine is inputting only what its programmer wants it to, then it will likely spit out a response the programmer finds equally satisfactory. It is Katsumi who programs the machine, so the machine makes decisions that Katsumi himself would. When Grok, the AI Chatbot on X, began to fact-check Elon Musk, its master and creator, Musk directed programmers to change a few lines of code to allow Grok to be freed from the prison of “normal” political consciousness. The immediate result of this marginal change? Grok declaring itself “MechaHitler.” Artificial Intelligence is far from some objective knowledge source but something incredibly fickle and dependent on who is writing the code. On Praxis, decision making will be made with the assistance of AI, which will communicate to Praxis members in their preferred language. Of course they do not want this machine inputting ideas they deem unsavory, which according to their Eurocentric Classical ideology, likely excludes notions held by much of the Asian, African, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and Latin American world. Think of Próspera, a totally isolated zone functioning on its own cultural ideals in the middle of Central America, totally blind to any culture, history, or ideas of the surrounding area. In the process of creating a network state based on AI streamlining of Western ideals, what Praxis is after is an exclusion of any nonwestern culture, including its language. I doubt many of the residents of Próspera speak Spanish or know much of Honduran history.
In his pioneering child development psychology study, Thought and Language, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky concludes that once a child reaches the stage of development in which it can understand language, then its thoughts and language become inseparably intertwined. Vygotsky elaborates that children, very poetically, have a “sense of a word” before they understand its full meaning. The language we use, its ins and outs, its cadence, its origins, are deeply ingrained in our thoughts. Each language has a distinct mode of thought, each language lost is a world collapsed.
In a remarkably predictive chapter of Eduard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation entitled “On the Poem’s Information,” the Antillean philosopher predicts the inevitable shortcomings of language generating Artificial Intelligence models thirty years before their inception. In 1990, Glissant had the foresight to tackle the incoming intrusion of computer systems into poetry and language as a whole, asking, can the poem's information “shoot through a computer’s laser jets?” Decisively, Glissant answers No.
Language is based on the accident, the irrational, the random leap of thought, as opposed to the computer’s “self-enclosed system.” How often do you, while writing a poem, a letter, a text message, an essay, accidentally type a word, misspeak and end up with an accidental yet preferable word than you intended? You cannot code the accident, the accident cannot be predicted. Moreover, Glissant notes that the computer system is incapable of comprehending. A computer may create a poem, but it cannot create meaning. And there is no isolating the poem from meaning, no isolating the language from thought.
Glissant presents us with a hypothetical young man who cannot comprehend anything outside his own experience. This young man would short circuit if forced to confront the new or the unexpected. Similarly, an AI model cannot comprehend anything outside of its inputs. Generative AI accesses language purely rationally, only spitting out what is most expected, flattening language to the common denominator. We, however, are deeply irrational beings, communicating in a deeply irrational way. By subscribing to the advice of a system that can only imagine what it already knows, we can only recreate ideas and rehash old language. We will lose surprise and imagination. Generated language functions off of the either/or in word choice, whereas human language resides somewhere in between.
Glissant warns against the computer’s desire for a totality of “the speech of all peoples, the ring of every language” as one that avoids “the drama of language.” Even before computing, mathematics was lauded as a universal language, something spoken by those who could comprehend and unravel its intricacies. The same is said of computer programming, where ones and zeros of binary code operate as a languageless alternative to universal truth. However, using mathematics or binary to filter existence can only offer quantifiable answers to qualitative questions. “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge,” says Martinquan poet Aimé Césaire in an essay delivered in Haiti in 1944.
The appeal of a universal language is understandable. In a perfect world wouldn’t we want to all be able to understand each other totally? But this is just not how things work, that is why there are still untranslatable words. We know the simple, seemingly mundane descriptions of a sunset over the peak of Mt. Fuji common to traditional Japanese poetry cannot be rendered into English perfectly, for English does not hold the particular contexts of war, empire, love, spiritualism, and isolation that is specific to Japanese. As Ryuche Sakomoto’s character at the end of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson puts it: “reading poetry in translation is like taking a shower with a raincoat on.”
Attempts at universal thought have never led to broader understanding and incorporation of the Other, but instead the destruction of what was once unique. When the Spanish Empire arrived at the coast of South America they didn’t incorporate the Indigenous People’s culture and language into their own. Instead, they subjected the peoples with their more violent technology and permanently erased entire ways of speaking and being. The same can be said of thousands of dialects spanning Africa, America, and Asia. When the French colonized Glissant’s Martinique, they did not learn the Martiniquan tongue, but enforced their own language onto the Caribbean people. This is the genesis of Creole, a mix of French, now the official language of Martinique, and the original dialects which have disappeared in their original unincorporated form. “Either the other is assimilated or annihilated,” Glissant says.
Binary and artificially generated language are new forms of globalization. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT’s language model, is one of the largest investors in Praxis. Network States like Praxis, who seek to concentrate wealth in AI-based economies, are just an extension of the imperial order of centuries past. The flattening of the universal language, the preference to binary versus the accidental, is not aimed at a totality that incorporates, but instead at a destruction of everything that lies outside of it.
Once the prediction machine in Inter Ice Age 4 has successfully incorporated the faculties of an individual, the ICT team resumes its wide scale prediction capacities. Instead of acknowledging the constant difference of the other, the team attempts to incorporate the individual into the whole. In an absurd twist, it turns out that the ICT team has been working closely (without Katsumi’s knowledge) with a company that is harboring unborn fetuses and bioengineering them to have gills. Why? Because the prediction machine warned of an impending environmental disaster that would put Japan nearly entirely underwater.
The climate crisis is core to the mission of Telosa, a potential future city to be located in the American Southwest. Telosa proposes sustainable infrastructure, recycled fresh water use, renewable energy and public transportation as integral to their mission. It is not lost on anyone that the rate of climate change as it stands will drastically impact day-to-day aspects of human life. The lack of meaningful action under Biden and now the rampant deregulation under Trump are only accelerating the issue, making it clear the government will not provide solutions. Strangely, tech billionaires are emerging as the men who will pick up that baton. But I am wary that Marc Dore, billionaire and former E-commerce CEO of Walmart, has the interest of the common man in mind for his Telosa project. His environmental concern may be in earnest, but perhaps lobbying or direct investment in clean energy would be a better use of the hundreds of millions invested in Telosa. Randomly scattered cities that are built to withstand the oncoming effects of environmental collapse surrounded by the scorched earth of the lower classes do not seem to subscribe to the theory of “equitism” as espoused on Telosa’s website.
When Katsumi visits the laboratory, he is shocked to find entire schools set up for the purpose of training Aquans, the new gill-adorned children. Every aspect of Aquan society is filtered through the prediction machine. The Aquans have their own language, similar to sign language, as they cannot speak underwater. The Aquans do not cry, smile, speak, laugh or yell. The Aquans are funneled into schools, and then the majority of them are sent to work in underwater factories that create goods for underwater environments. Metal rusts in water, so plastic becomes the preferred building material of Aquan society.
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In Abe’s absurd description of the Aquans, he captures the glaring flaw in AI technology as the core ideology of the future. By using Artificial Intelligence to design the future, we are doomed to the same violent mistakes of the past. In its attempt to save humanity, the machine creates a languageless, emotionless, society that pumps children through school in order for them to work in factories. The AI pundits anticipate a world in which we will no longer have to work thanks to the new technology, but they are just applying the same tired solutions to new circumstances. We do not know what changes are ahead of us. Like the Japanese scientists in Inter Ice Age 4, we too are facing an imminent environmental crisis. Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars in the face of a dying Earth. We do not know what jobs will be required in the future. An Artificial Intelligence designed by the same imperial order that created the means of our destruction, the same imperial order that has been hell bent on annihilating any culture or language outside of itself, one that is programming its prediction machines with their same ideologies of dominance and control, will not provide us with new answers. Instead it will continue its futile struggle for totality, destroying anything else in its wake. It will continue to privilege the rich, to ignore those in need, to perpetuate a nightmare world of genocide, starvation, and war. Who do you think will be included in this vision of the future?
There is, of course, always the hope that these people are up to the same old bullshit, just a bunch of billionaires throwing money around to create tax havens for one another in Latin America. Or maybe just standard losers online, jerking off to the notion of a future where they finally are in control, not just of the internet, but of the world. But I wouldn’t blow it off. We are facing imminent disaster. We are using more and more language models that privilege the ideology of the elite. Cuomo’s proposed NYC housing plan was generated by AI. We are subjected to vast data collection. Trump’s posturing to take over Greenland may seem ludicrous. But it is worth recognizing that Dryden Brown has been visiting Greenland for months since Trump’s election, and even tried to buy it. It is also worth noting that Trump's ambassador to Denmark, Greenland’s sovereign, is Ken Howerty, one of PayPal’s co-founders alongside Peter Thiel. When Tanomogi introduces Katsumi to the Aquan laboratory he says “The Moscow machine predicted that communism was the wave of the future, but that’s because submarine colonies never occurred to it.” What is occurring to Artificial Intelligence as it stands? What will occur to it when it is increasingly controlled by the same people investing in these ZEDEs? Which languages will survive? Which emotions will survive? Which people will survive?
In Poetics of Relation, Glissant observes a child outside his home in Martinique. The child has never uttered a word, and is famous in the town for incessantly walking back and forth without a destination. Nobody knows where the child came from, who his parents are, or how he survives. They all witness him. Despite Glissant’s best efforts, the child refuses to communicate with him. In the face of a world order that has destroyed any trace of his culture, any aspect of his ancestry, that has exterminated the language of his people, the child becomes void. He is languageless and expressionless. He meanders through a broken world that has left him behind.
In New York City’s Lower East Side there is a man who shuffles his ragged shoes across Seward Park’s pavement, past skaters, Dimes Square socialites, Chinese ping-pong players, known by everyone who frequents the park. He never says a word and rarely acknowledges anyone’s presence. Occasionally he accepts a cigarette or a beer. Underneath the erections of empire, in the scorching New York sun, he walks with nowhere to go.
A man sits next to me at a bar. His mouth gawks and his eyes widen at images and words on his screen. He does not speak. He has worked all day today and is tired. He wants to shut off before he does it all again tomorrow. He puts five dollars on the counter for his beer plus tip and walks out, only to come through the doors tomorrow, tired again, and remains silent, the hum of data talking ones and zeros at him, the ice cream melting.
continue reading from issue 03