The Ends of Medially When Machines Start to Think

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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: 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).

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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

  Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I'm Ezekiel Dixon-Rowland and welcome to the second installment of the School of Social Policy and Practice's speaker series on Controlled Societies, Technocratic Forces, and Ontologies of Difference. This speaker series is supported by the Provost Excellence in Diversity Fund…

• 00:13:32

  What kind of critical work can be done with this thought? That is a thought of the medium, as the thought of the machine. So obviously, it's a, it's my provocation towards, this provocation towards Agamben has to do with the provocation for the fact that language itself is not just, reveals, does not just reveal…

• 00:28:30

  Actually, the end of cybernetic control is precisely…

• 00:43:46

  I will say to my students, it's more like a machine that is working. It's not a machine that is working. But if you put dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions like dimensions dimensions like dimensions…

• 00:59:31

  Instead, I suggest that automated means of reasoning are also generating a new form of thought. They are finding the best explanation, making new meanings, whilst reassessing parameters according to new circumstances. Automatic cognition includes a new form of intelligibility, a new form of the intelligible. But…

• 01:16:12

  But I understand the problematic and the limit of that insofar as instead what we have in this kind of, you know, that's why I agree with the cybernetic hypothesis to some extent, because obviously we are intertwined in this kind of the perspective, the bond is a program program. That's the social border…

• 01:30:20

  And here's the math that will tell us that. That's computer. The computer comes out of this idea that things aren't complete, but you can do stuff, right? That's very much computation. Well, that's never been a problem, right, for a computer. I was thinking when you were talking about, we don't know what they're doing…

• 01:42:01

  So that's my, I don't know if we can talk more later, but that's where I will go, the inspiration from the alien. Yeah. I think that's a great point. Thank you.