CCRU - Lecture 4

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Okay, we may as well get started. So, we're going to begin in the first half just basically picking up where we left off last week by looking at Nick Land's view of time. And particularly, I want to focus on the specific temporality of the Bitcoin protocol, of absolute succession, which is basically Land's most recent…

• 00:13:04

  And, you know, in the travel guides, as in tenplexity, Land again gives his dearest example of how Shanghai's openness to cosmopolitan investment, science, and technology has been exponentially growing at doubling rates since the 1990s, uh, as it for him actualizes ever more, uh, you know, hidden recesses…

• 00:26:37

  Okay, so at several points throughout the draft version of his new book, Cryptocurrent Bitcoin and Philosophy, available on his blog, Urban Futures, Land argues that Bitcoin thinks as time itself, to the extent that time, like the blockchain used in Bitcoin, is what can never be overcome, what abolishes all contingent…

• 00:40:38

  But what that overlooks is that even our own reason does not entirely determine its own norms, since any norm we can legislate for ourselves presupposes that we maximise intelligence in order to pursue those norms. OK, I realise that's a slightly complex idea, so I couldn't find a Pixar example this week…

• 01:00:56

  It's the capital commodification process which de-territorialises all of our stable values, conventions and identities. So I don't think it would be insulting to say that their transgressive art is much like a commodity for them. Given that the transgression in question is specifically the manipulation of children's…

• 01:15:04

  It is the abstract machine of identity collapse. Drugs make their own demands. It's thus in the final chapter that the AI god, who they call Abraxas, arrives to consummate cyberculture's smearing of all vitalist strata across the future's morbid plane of imminence. So they conclude, I've survived you, Abraxas…

• 01:29:41

  Here is in, uh, the CCRU's scattered aphorisms on, on music, uh, and dancing. Uh, Goodman's idea of sonic weapons links our enjoyment of modern dance music to, to a kind of death drive, a kind of becoming of our own extinction as we merge with the coming machinic, uh, future. So he says, or the CCRU say, Hyper-C sonic…

• 01:50:52

  But, um, if there are any. Yeah? Traumatised? That's awful. It's really telling us something, I think. But, uh, yeah, any questions? No? Or comments? Alright. Well, I mean, it's 8.30 anyway, so... You know, absolutely sure? Alright, cool. So, we'll leave it there, um, but obviously, feel free to stick around…