Real ones know that when Avon says “Just dream with me” to Stringer Bell, he isn’t being sentimental or unrealistic. He’s gesturing toward a different form of life - one that is here and now. And one that is equally as real as the life of quantification and capitalization that overtakes and dooms his childhood friend.

🧵

underground researcher, writer, organizer

ethereal forest | open protocol research group | open mutualism guild

https://linktr.ee/exeuntdoteth

The philosophers Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi tell us that entities express themselves in two ways: extensively - in quantified, measurable, definite aspect - and intensively - as qualitative, irreducibly multiple fields of potential. 

When you pass over an object with a fast, unintentional eye, you see its extensive qualities - what can it do for you, on the mission you’re on? How is it a means to some end? 

When you stop, take a deep breath, and view the same object with a mindful & receptive eye, you may find it gradually accessing weirder capacities: the chair you are drawing a still life of suddenly begins to have agency, desire, intention. Sweat on glass of water or a fractal accent on the leaf of a plant take on a vibratory, urgent dimension that bursts beyond objectivity.

You are experiencing the Goethian gaze. Societies of the past and undergrounds of today have built elaborate systems on its foundation.  1/x

We live in a chauvinism of the extensive. The dominant, centralized institutions find it convenient to suspend any rigorous engagement with the intensive side of the world. They exile it: to religion, art, myth - anything that will render it passive and intangible, outside of the order of day to day social organization.

Undercapital is the unsuperstitious assertion that there is a rational, economic and logistical life of possibility to the intensive: design and economic construction that works with fields before atoms, affects before objects, vibes before doctrines, potentials before presences. Conceptual prosthetics that are like x-ray lenses to what lies sous le monde.

3/x

For all of its faults, the web3 space & its broader intellectual community is the only place I know to find this collision: the desire for exotic ways of being in the world matched with programmable monetary assets and economic relationships that can bridge that desire to the level of social organization and make it real.

We have the potential for an epistemic challenge to the extensive regimes, and the technological capacity to engage new epistemologies from which to stage that challenge - ones that foreground the intensive aspects of the world. 

Reality is multiple. There are rational orders and logistical systems beyond what we’ve ever conceived (cf Gödel), yet available to us in our cultural and cognitive plasticity. The wisdom of technogenesis says that they are available to us, as long as we dare to demystify our surround and design our fates. 

4/x

There are hints of this technogenetic capacity everywhere in this space, in those projects and participants that dare to question foundational assumptions about how we organize our reality rather than merely attempting to mirror them in more efficient or less regulated circumstances.

Most of them carry little of the cultural dominance. But they are like the Wright brother's plane flying slower than a horse at gallop. From the vantage of the present moment, they seem slow, but in the futurist mode, where epochs shift and new regimes of being sink into the plastic infinity within our skulls, their potential is limitless.

Whether by subtraction or addition, the task at hand is to undo the the rule of quantity for its own sake. Behind the veil of reality as it's given to us are permissive technological corridors to other regimes, eccentric machines and qualitative economic programmes that democratize & distribute the germinal power variables that are now concealed. 

5/x

This is not a matter of metaphor or poetry. Intents architectures, feral computers, KOI topologies, extitutional legal engines visit us from underneath the world. Builders of the great inversion saying 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘦.. 😴

Our brains are wildly plastic. Give us a new tool, put us in the driver's seat of our first car, and we will reorganize our gray matter to meld our intentions with its capacity in short order. 

Concepts are similar types of cognitive prosthesis to cars and wrenches. We can will our brain into coregulation with new concepts - even with new orders of concepts. The underconcepts of difference-in-itself, becoming, or the physicality of potential and the multiplicity of objecthood may be glossed over by everyday grammar and economy, but they are available to us.

Neuroplasticity is permission: we are not restricted to a world of extensive objects, when the intensive has so much potential. 

2/x