“What kind of urbanism will the program propose? An urbanism that is pro-planning, pro-artificial, anti-collapse, pro-universalist, anti-anti-totality, pro-materialist, anti-anti-leviathan, anti-mythology, and pro-egalitarian distribution. It starts with a different set of assumptions: the planet is artificially sentient; climate collapse mitigation and pervasive automation can converge; the concept of “climate change” is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary-scale computation; automation is a general principle by which ecosystems work; necessary fundamental shifts in geotechnology are likely to precede necessary fundamental shifts in geo-politics; “surveillance” of carbon flows is a good thing; energy infrastructures based on long-term waste cycles are desirable; the ecological cost of “culture” is greater than that of science; planetarity requires philosophy in and of outer space; speculative design must focus on what is so deeply functional as to be unlikely; and that, finally, the future becomes something to be prevented as much as achieved.”
“In other words, science and technology enable a particular set of conscious interventions within the so-called ‘natural’ world. Such interventions have the potential to extend human freedom – for example, by furthering reproductive autonomy and allowing us to exert control (however contingent, contested, and constrained) over what happens to our own bodies. Nature is understood here not as an essentializing underpinning for embodiment or ecology, but as a technologized space of conflict that fundamentally shapes lived experiences.”
“I have cultivated several personalities within myself. I constantly cultivate personalities. Each of my dreams, immediately after I dream it, is incarnated into another person, who then goes on to dream it, and I stop. To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.”
“I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks between the same people. But scenes are repeated in life, just as they are in the theatre.”
"Accelerationism is a political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, or critique, nor to await its demise at the hands of its own contradictions,but to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies...At the basis of all accelerationist thought lies the assertion that the crimes, contradictions and absurdities of capitalism have to be countered with a politically and theoretically progressive attitude towards its constituent elements. Accelerationism seeks to side with the emancipatory dynamic that broke the chains of feudalism and ushered in the constantly ramifying range of practical possibilities characteristic of modernity. The focus of much accelerationist thinking is the examination of the supposedly intrinsic link between these transformative forces and the axiomatics of exchange value and capital accumulation that format contemporary planetary society."
"Inasmuch as each genre of geopolitics deploys some figure of the planet, comparative planetology falls within the scope of the larger philosophical discipline of cosmology — the study of the metaphysical organisation of the universe. Each figure of the planet represents a cosmogram — a model of a metaphysical organisation, a little planetarium of relations. As architectural, visual, or discursive techniques, cosmograms present the totality of the metaphysical realm in a concrete form, establishing “the relation between different domains or ontological levels"."
"What is called soul is the capacity of coming back to itself in order to know itself and determine itself — every time it departs from itself, it actualized its own reflection in traces, which we call memory. It is in this extra in the form of difference that witnesses the movement of time, while at the same time modifying the being that is itself time, so that it consequently constitutes the dynamic of the whole. Every difference is a differing, deferring in time and being differed in space, a new creation. Every reflective movement leaves a trace like a road mark, every trace presents a questioning, to which the answer can be addressed only by the movement in its totality"
“What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing. For that to happen one must surprise it when it’s alone, when it’s hanging in an empty room, without forgetting that the finest needle before it can transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of lightest reflection, only image and not the body. Body of the thing.”
“You're just being logical...You're just giving me a regular, intelligent answer. I was trying to help you. You asked me how I get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.”
"It seems obvious that we are confined in space to the surface of the earth, and in time to the length of a life. Fedorov’s imaginative achievement revolves around refusing to mistake the ubiquity of these constraints—for all the great hold they exert—as inescapable necessities we have no choice but to accept. Those who point to the huge expanse of the earth and the whole terrestrial history of life—this is nothing but myopia, squalid provincialism. In isolated form, this is the characteristic gesture of cosmism, what we might call the “cosmist impulse”: to consider the earth a trap, and to understand the common project of philosophy, economics, and design as being the formulation of means to escape from it: to conceive a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which we steal ourselves from the vault.""
“In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valiable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me...On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one's activities.”
“There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see themm in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl."
“It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.”
“This is a book about human extinction. More specifically, it is a book about the history of humans thinking about human extinction. It examines how and when our species first became concerned about its ultimate fate. Because, like all important scientific, philosophical, or ethical ideas—from general relativity to gender equality—in order to become a subject of discussion and debate, this idea first had to be discovered.”
“Designers are very good at making things, but medium design is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization. It is the design of interdependencies, chemistries, chain reactions and ratchets. It benefits from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures, a curiosity about designing not a single object but a platform for inflecting populations of objects or setting up relative potentials within them."
“Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skils, result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints."
“Yes, man is mortal, but that isn’t so bad. What’s bad is that sometimes he’s unexpectedly mortal, that’s the rub. And, in general, he can’t even say in the morning what he’ll be doing that very same night.”
“Economic theories are now being subsumed and operationalized for the sake of computation, not the other way around. Classical economics and its cute little rational agents, who were once the only ones that "counted", are becoming a marginal fiction, used for certain purposes in a much larger machine that looks towards higher goals. Economic, political, legal and social contexts are turned into computational and mathematical problems, solved in that realm, and then reapplied in an attempt at reconfiguring the economic, political, social and legal realms. This has caused both confusion and creativity; confusion by conflating computational models with political desires and social effects, and creativity by forcing a reassessment of the boundaries between disciplines, ideologies and entities. It has raised the question of which forces and sensibilities – mathematical, algorithmic, human, institutional, cultural or religios – we want to have determining whihc aspects of our lives."
"The "user" is a position within a system, not a type of entity or identity or species. Any animal, vegetable, or mineral that can initiate chains of interaction up and down the
layers of the global stack is a kind of user. In this sense, only a small minority of Alphabet's users are individual
"Yet more importantly, it signifies the truth of our age: that we are merely living in the prehistory of intelligence...The recognition and realization of intelligence as that which dissolves all given totalities of history is a collective and common task whose fulfilment is the only true concrete way toward freedom, in the sense of both sociohistorical emancipation and the liberation of intelligence.""
"Technics is an accentuation of negentropy, since it brings increased differentiation. But it is equally true that technics is an acceleration of entropy, not just because it is a process of combustion and of the dissipation of energy, but because industrial standardization seems to be leading the contemporary Anthropocene to the possibility of the destruction of life qua the burgeoning and proliferation of difference – a destruction of biodiversity, cultural diversity and the singularity of both psychic individuations and collective individuations."
"In short, rather than simpling being emerging technologies, both solar geoengineering and carbon removal would be practives that have aspects of infrastructure and social intervention. They must be wrested from the realm of technology - where only experts are permitted - and seen through the prism of projects, programs, and practices if civil society is going to attempt to shape them in a meaningfully democratic way."
"Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker, and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. ‘Nature’ – understood here, as the unbounded arena of science – is all there is.”