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. 🧵
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 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.

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

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. 🧵

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

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. 🧵

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

A new year, a new chapter. Today chapter 6 from The Eye of the Master on the rise of cybernetics 🧵

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

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. 🧵

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

And now the tweeted summary of chapter 4 of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master. This time, a close-reading of Marx on the machinery question and the general intellect. 🧵

Marx gets the term from Ricardian socialist William Thompson. He uses it only in the Fragment on Machines in the Grundrisse, but it became a major source of inspiration for workerist Marxism in Italy. 1/4

A summary in tweets of chapter 2 from Matteo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master. Here, Pasquinelli relates the prehistory of computational thinking in Babbage and Lovelace to the history of industrialisation. 🧵

Babbage's famous invention of the Difference Machine was from the start imbricated in the history of industrial capitalism. The machine was supposed to perform calculations and logarithmic tables required for the management of colonial trade and large-scale industry. 1/6

A summary in tweets of chapter 1 of Pasquinelli’s The Eye of the Master, in which he stipulates his historical epistemology 🧵

While we often think of ‘algorithms’ as something recent linked to computer technology, Pasquinelli broadly defines them as rule-based problem-solving techniques to reveal a larger history of algorithmic thinking. 1/6

Given the apparent interest in The Eye of the Master by @mattpasquinelli, I thought I might do another summary-in-tweets of the individual chapters. First up: the introduction 🧵

Pasquinelli starts from the observation that AI developments has inadvertently shown “low-skill” jobs like truck driving to hold a kernel of intelligence. Self-driving vehicles depend on AI learning how to mimic the intelligent decisions of drivers on the road. 1/5

A summary in tweets of chapter 3 from Mau’s Mute Compulsion. Here, he assesses Marx’ theory of alienation from the 1844 Manuscripts. 🧵 Mau starts from the claim of value-form theory that Marx didn’t write his own economics but a *critique* of political economy. He was mainly criticizing others. While that may be true, it does not absolve Marx from the duty to develop his own ‘social ontology of capitalism’. 1/6

At the suggestion of @tom_swing I will be writing summaries of Mute Compulsion by @sorenmau over the next few days. Up first: the introduction 🧵 After decades of multiple economic crises, capitalism is as strong as ever. The question is what kind of power keeps capitalism in place despite all this instability and opposition. Marxists usually answer with a combination of violence and ideology. 1/6

Nearing the end of my summary of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene with now chapter 6 on Marx as a degrowth communist. 🧵 Saito argues that Marx, over the course of the 1860s, abandoned the productivism and Eurocentrism of his earlier days. His studies of the ecological sciences and non-Western communities convinced him that capitalist industrialization as experienced in the Global North ... 1/6

Now chapter 5 of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene where Saito attacks the automation enthusiasm of techno-optimists like Nick Srnicek and Aaron Bastani. With help from my notes, 30 pages of dense summary that I somehow will have to compress into a 1000-word review 😬 Some left-wing theorists double down on Marx' earlier optimism about technology and industrialization by claiming that full automation will make a post-capitalist future possible. Not only will automated technology increase productivity and thereby liberate more free time ... 1/7

Up for chapter 4 of Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene, in which Saito takes on posthumanist thinkers like Jason Moore and Bruno Latour. In the previous chapters, Saito defended a theory of metabolism that combines ontological monism (ultimately everything is material) with methodological dualism (natural metabolic processes are to be studied as distinct from social metabolism). 1/9

A summary of chapter 3 from Kohei Saito's Marx in the Anthropocene. This time the subject is Georg Lukacs' interpretation of metabolism theory in Marx. Most theories discussing the Anthropocene (Latour, Haraway, Moore, etc.) depart from ontological and methodological monism. The distinction between human society and non-human nature is unconvincing and critical theory should just treat all 'actants' alike. 1/

Chapter 2 of Kohei Saito’s Marx in the Anthropocene on how Engels shifted interpretations of Marx away from ecology 🧵 Marx tends to be read as a Promethian productivist rather than an ecosocialist or degrowth communist. Saito hypothesizes that Engels has got something to do with that. He claimed that there was an intellectual division of labour with Marx focusing on social trends … 1/5

The summary continues with chapter 1 on Marx’ theory of metabolism, the chapter closest to Foster and Saito’s previous work. Saito starts with noting how Marx has historically been profiled as a pro-technology pro-growth productivist. We can thank Foster and Burkett for correcting this picture with their interpretation of Marx’ theory of metabolism. 1/8

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. 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.

There's a lot of debate about the op-ed by @DanielZamoraV and @MitchellMDean on Foucault and the confessional turn in (neo)liberal politics. The quality of the criticisms however is rather disappointing sadly. So here's my take on it in a thread. 1/ theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Dean & Zamora argue that Foucault's turn away from large-scale left-wing politics to the politics of personal self-experimentation reflects and contributes to a general tendency for the confessionalization of politics. 2/

What the VVD has not understood is that, if you want to make cringeworthy PR, you should go all the way and make it so camp it becomes ironically cool again. And who else to perfect the genre but Silvio Berlusconi? Another highlight in the history of political song writing, this swinger from the Maduro campaing in Venezuela: