(Session 4) Alex Williams

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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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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane unknown approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: #Accelerate panels. Source: audio original (.mp3).

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• 00:00:01

  Thank you, that's what I was getting at. Alex, this might not be a problem, but... It probably is. Okay. There's sort of two things to be done that I'm worried if they conflict. One is this idea of accelerating commodification, putting a value on everything. On the other hand, the sort of elimination of agency. I'm…

• 00:05:39

  Like, you know, corporates now have to pay for doing... The problem is with that, I mean, they have to pay, but they can still do it. Yeah. The problem would be they wouldn't be able to do it because it would cost too much. Right. Or something like that. I mean, I've got... The debt... The debt... The debt... The…

• 00:11:38

  But no, no, no. I mean, so you lend out money. Right. You lend out money in the hopes that, you know, it gets returned. But obviously this financial value in a certain sense sort of carves out a path ahead of the productive sector itself. So the financial sector is the sort of leading edge that allows the productive…

• 00:17:26

  You know, this kind of fairly unsurprisingly, and this might be anthropocentric, but fairly unsurprisingly, amongst humans leads to certain responses, more progressive than others, but ultimately, you know, the pulverization of social bonds by economic forces, I really don't quite see what the, you know, progressive…

• 00:21:55

  Thanks for your talk. It's near the end of the conference, so I'll just put it out there. It's a bit crazy. I find it interesting with capitalism. I mean, for me, the biggest thing of acceleration within capitalism is the fact that it's been exported to Asia now, particularly India and China, where you've…

• 00:28:04

  So, really, I would say it's this weird, I'd say Catholic, I think, religious moment where he's, you know, sort of violently opposed to, you know, the terror of modern art, any kind of tearing down. So, it's kind of weird, the status of his early books and later books, you know. It's not particularly helpful…

• 00:33:28

  I mean, that's, jump in, just because, I mean, I think that's the way I use accelerationism as a, in part in the book, as a diagnostic, is about that problem. I'm not saying it's not pointing to a real problem. I'm not saying, I mean, I think actually, in a weird way, you could argue that Marxism is the weaker…

• 00:40:10

  I argue with Nathan all the time on the train. But I think what happens is the arguments are there because the situation is not resolved yet. And, you know, work needs to be done to get it out of the 9th century fundamentally. Well, thanks everybody for coming. Thank you.