Nick Srnicek and Reza Negarestani in conversation

Provenance

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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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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

  Welcome everybody. So welcome to the first of our conversations on AI. It's been a somewhat long road getting here, at least in Web3 time, but here we are. And I'm so glad to be present with you at this dialogue between Reza Nagarastani and Nick Cernichek on the political economy of AI. In 1983, Elaine Rich defined AI…

• 00:09:11

  So that hardware aspect is, I think, really crucial. And it's been missed by the research on the political economy of AI so far. So, I mean, a lot of my research then has been on that, the providers of AI and on the hardware. And the argument being that these things are driving this concentration of AI resources…

• 00:22:03

  That we could do everything. With a sufficient volume of data. So. In the same way that we could do with scientific theories and scientific. Theories are becoming antiquated now. Right? All we need at this point. Uh, and I highly recommend, uh, this. Uh, article by the proponent of big data Wolfgang peach. Uh, it's…

• 00:35:02

  And insofar as we still live under capitalism, and I, you know, against Mackenzie Work, or anybody else sort of arguing against the opposite, I do think we're still living under capitalism, I think that that sort of broad analysis about the structure determining imperatives and incentives and constraints…

• 00:48:03

  control over workers imperative, which is, at times, at odds for individual capitalists. And so I just, yeah, I find it interesting, because there is, there is too easily a tendency to just say, well, capital wants something, or capital demands something, or organizes something in such a way, without sufficient sort…

• 01:00:48

  It strives. It strives. Marx... What was that? It strives to, but it doesn't. Well, it strives to, but there's an even more nuanced point here, which is that the division of the working day into a period of necessary labor, which is necessary for reproducing the worker, and a period of surplus labor, which…

• 01:15:11

  So, you know, it's I think it's Marx's political economy in the sense that he wants to know how the system works, not in order to be able to do anything about it. But he wants to know how the system works, not in order to be able to do anything about it. Not in order to, you know, make money off the stock market…

• 01:25:10

  Later. So, yeah, see you all in about ten minutes. Thanks.