[FRIAM] What is Wealth for?

[jon zingale]

"Computing Up" is such a good podcast. I keep forgetting that it exists. I
love what Dave Ackley is saying here about generalization, it repeats to a
strong extent what Deleuze is mining for in *Difference and Repetition*, a
pathological (though at times wonderful) obsession with the general (as a
psychological modality) when even at the expense of the particular.
Recently, I have been attempting to make my way through both *Difference and
Repetition* as well as Deleuze's *Bergsonism* in an attempt to better
understand the ramifications of the
general-particular/substitution-repetition distinction. Bergson at one point
explicitly calls Einstein's relativity "metaphysics posing as science",
Einstein and Russell, misunderstanding Bergson's respect for metaphysics,
all but pushed Bergson's writings into extinction. What Ackley discusses
here as *independence* and *uniformity* is not unlike the
Einsteinian-Noetherian conception of the *homogeneity* of space and time.
There appears a lot to mine from understanding the relationship between
symmetry and substitution, substitution the mark of the general. There is
also quite a bit in Ackley's monologue that synergizes well with Heidegger's
"The Point of Reference":

"""
All distances in time and space are shrinking. Places that a person
previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by
airplane overnight. What a person previously received news of only after
years, if at all, is now experienced hourly over the radio in no time. The
germination and flourishing of plants that remained concealed through the
seasons, film now exhibits publicly in a single minute...Everything washes
together into the uniformly distanceless. How? Is not this moving together
into the distanceless even more uncanny than everything being out of place?
The human is transfixed by what could come about with the explosion of the
atomic bomb. The human does not see what for a long time now has already
arrived and even is occurring, and for which the atomic bomb and its
explosion are merely the latest emission...What is this clueless anxiety
waiting for, if the horrible has already occurred.
"""

All of these questions of substitution, homogeneity, scale, coverings, and
compactness have very much been on my mind recently. I cannot help but
wonder if a science of the particular, built upon Deleuze's work, is not far
off. For context, here is the relevant section of the Ackley monologue:

"""
One of the ways that we describe reality a lot is in terms of here is a
situation and we imagine that this situation has some extent, it is my
house, it is my city, it is my room and it has some properties and I
describe it and I tell a story in that situation and there is an implicit
sense in which this situation can be likened to other situations
elsewhere, it's generalizable. It may not apply to everything, but from
first-look, you could try to put someone else's room, and someone else's
city, and someone else's country, and see how it applies to them and
it's supposed to be useful in some way. But that very act of saying that
this is a limited situation, that's supposed to be moveable, that this
description is supposed to apply in multiple places, carries with it some
sort of assumption of independence, or some sort of assumption of
uniformity (homogeneity?) of the places it can go...There is a sort of
first principles assumption that a description here should be a
description there and my problem with it is that once the descriptions
get really big like people on Facebook or people using the internet,
there isn't really a place to move it. *It's everything*. The length of
the (finite?) description *covers all of the stuff* (compactness?) we can
imagine it covering. We can say, "Well we need Facebook on mars, we need
the internet on Pluto", but that's not happening anytime soon, and what
it means is that this assumption of independence, this assumption that
there is a sink, where consequences can go, the assumption that there is
something outside of the room where food can come in and waste can go
out or power can come in or heat can go out and I can view this room as
an isolated system that couples to this thing I don't have to care about
...Once the system becomes really big, like the entire planet, it isn't
clear I can really do that, it's all of the internal properties that
really matter, but people keep talking about it as if there is an
infinite world outside.
"""



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