Tim Christiaens Profile picture
Feb 13, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read Read on X
I have started reading Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene and I thought it would be a nice idea to summarize the individual chapters throughout the reading process. First up: the introduction. Image
The book starts from three things coming to an end today. (1) Fukuyama proclaimed a capitalist end of history and traditional Marxists view historical materialism as a progression toward the end of history, but the ecological crisis puts us for a potential end of *human* history.
(2) The Anthropocene reveals the end of nature as an independent entity distinct from human society. However, while Latourians derive from this an ontological monism that cancels the human/non-human-distinction, Saito defends a dualistic theory of metabolic rifts.
(3) Also capitalist realism à la Fisher comes at an end. Ecosocialists are actively imagining alternatives to capitalism. Reviving Marx' writings about the ecology of capitalism could help. Marx wrote notebooks about natural science that construct a helpful theory of metabolism.
Ultimately, Saito claims that Marx experienced an epistemological break. However, not in 1845 when writing the German Ideology but in 1868, when Marx' interest in the ecological sciences pushed him toward ... degrowth communism.

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More from @TimChristiaens5

Oct 24, 2024
Keeping track of Nancy Fraser’s Cannibal Capitalism chapter by chapter with today my summary of chapter 1. This chapter offers Fraser’s definition of capitalism as a social order rather than an economic system. 🧵 Image
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Fraser starts from Marx, who defines capitalism as an economic system, or more exactly, a mode of production. Marx highlights sees 4 defining features, namely private ownership over the means of production, the commodification of human labor, capital as self-expanding value… 1/8
And the free market in charge of the allocation of the means of production and the social surplus thereby generated. But Fraser objects that these economic mechanisms can only properly function if certain non-economic background conditions are guaranteed. 2/8
Read 9 tweets
Jan 4, 2024
And now the final chapter of my summary-in-tweets of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master. This time, Frank Rosenblatt’s invention of the Perceptron as a vignette in the history if AI.
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Rosenblatt had been trained in psychology with the upcoming techniques of psychometrics, meant to categorize personalities based on statistical multidimensional analysis. Psychometrics had been used to quantify human intelligence. 1/5
Now Rosenblatt used similar techniques to develop artificial intelligence in the ‘Perceptron’, a machine devised for pattern recognition. The NAVY was interested in this technology to automate target classification. 2/5
Read 6 tweets
Jan 3, 2024
The penultimate chapter for ly summary of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master: chapter 8 on Friedrich Hayek at the intersection of neoliberal market theory and the history of AI. 🧵
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Hayek reached worldwide acclaim with his intervention in the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s. Socialists believed calculative technology could be used to foster centralized planned economies, but Hayek pointed to the impossibility of centralizing dispersed knowledge.1/5
Less well-known is that Hayek was a research assistant to Monakow, a neurologist interested in brain plasticity. There, Hayek again encountered the idea of distributed cognition. Both markets and the brain used information through dispersed data processing. 2/5
Read 6 tweets
Jan 2, 2024
From chapter 7 onwards, Pasquinelli shifts to documenting particular episodes in the history of AI. Here, he displaces the symbolic AI vs. connectionism to the controversy over image recognition. 🧵
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In the 1940s, cognitive theorists heavily debated the nature of perception and how to automate it. Gestalt psychology argued we immediately perceive full images that are more than the sum of their parts. AI must hence deduce information from these full images. 1/4
Inductively deriving information from masses of perceived data would be impossible. The defenders of artificial neural networks (Pitts, McCulloch) disagreed. Inductive machines recognize patterns in masses of data. They used neurological research on perception to prove it.2/4
Read 5 tweets
Jan 1, 2024
A new year, a new chapter. Today chapter 6 from The Eye of the Master on the rise of cybernetics 🧵
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In this chapter, Pasquinelli critiques the idea that AI deep learning neural networks imitate the brain’s structure. The historical epistemology is more complex because first cybernetics remodeled the brain into a self-organizing electrical circuit. 1/5
Cybernetics arose in the 1940s as a movement aiming to render reality more manageable by conceiving of it as self-organizing feedback system susceptible to top-down government. The plasticity of the brain was one illustration of this dynamic. 2/5
Read 6 tweets
Dec 31, 2023
Just over half-way with a summary of chapter 5 of The Eye of the Master. This chapter concludes the part on industrial capitalism and the machinery question as the prehistory of AI. 🧵
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In conclusion, Pasquinelli asserts that industrialization was a movement toward abstraction on multiple fronts. Industrial machines uniquely separated their sources of energy from their sources of information. 1/5
As info-mechanical relays industrial machines required a multi-purpose source of energy: coal. The latter was easily transportable and compatible with all kinds of sociotechnical systems. 2/5
Read 6 tweets

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