Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 5)

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: Qwernomics. 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

  Hello and welcome to the fifth session of Coronomics Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. I'm going to pass the mic off to him now. Hi everybody, thanks Theodore. So we've crossed the great abyss with now from the first module to the second module. The first module I hope we've just established…

• 00:24:07

  Bitcoin picked them up because they're already so crucial to computer science. They're lying around in an advanced state and they're highly functional. Hash algorithms are available. Yes. So the ancient and modern numerical sense... Now, as I say, we've talked about this and I don't want to go into it really…

• 00:45:43

  So it had done that for you. So that's one numerical over-coding among many for this. And it's obviously tempting, I think, when you start doing this to settle on some semiotic convention for it. But I don't think that we have a, there were these protocols that, sorry, I'm just forgetting what the name, these symbolic…

• 01:04:16

  And so, you know, you can't describe the halting problem in a way that is actually logically compelling, rather than being just impressionistic or, you know what I mean? It's like... Yeah, you're describing it in terms of the diagonalization problem where there's always a version of the, you can always construct…

• 01:24:58

  And underneath it or alongside it or however you want to represent it, you put the QWERTY series. And you treat it as this bionivocal mappings. And so from alphanumeric zero, you go to one. The first... the first numeric in the alphanumeric series is zero. The first one in the series is one. And then…

• 01:52:51

  And also with Emacs is that VI is a modal editor. So you go into. And edit mode where you can type and just have your words turn up in the document. And then you hit escape and you go into a separate editing mode where you can navigate the document using, again, keys on the keyboard. Because that's all you have. It's…

• 02:23:16

  I mean, the background is, is this all part of a post QWERTY universe? I mean, are we just are we basically heading on this other line to the Malahani thesis that we just, you know, this this QWERTY question is just purely a legacy of. Of something that's come out of the typewriter and is being. Culturally discarded…

• 02:42:19

  Like we started at Anthropole with like me and Nick just sort of like staring at each other across the street and sort of like saying strings of words about Cantor and trying to figure out what the fuck we were talking about. Okay. I'm ending broadcast now. Oh, right. Yeah. Perfect end point right there.