Alexander Wilson

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    • Courage of Truth: In Memory of Bernard Stiegler

      Posted on August 17, 2020 on uminnpress BY ALEXANDER WILSON I was nervous when I first met Bernard at his Beaubourg office, not only because he was a towering figure in philosophy and that I had been enthralled with his books for several years, but also because I was self-conscious about my mastery of French, even though […]

    • Only Hollow Idols Ring

      Catherine Malabou has highlighted that one’s openness to the future, the capacities that allow one to imagine new worlds and to take on political or moral stances, is bound up with habits. Potential for novelty is cultivated, learned, and paradoxically gained only through an entrenchment into our ways. The habits are what make the world […]

    • Real Non-Patterns and the Automation of Science

      Real Non-Patterns and the Automation of Science Alexander Wilson In a now famous Wired article from 2008—“The End of Theory”—Chris Anderson predicted that the algorithmic brute force analysis of increasingly large data sets would soon challenge the relevance of theory. By training machine learning models on raw physical data, we can, as Hong Qin recently put it, replace theory with a “black box that […]

    • Marcolli’s Case for Cybernetic Communism

      Matilde Marcolli’s recent paper “The Problem of Scale in Anarchism and the Case for Cybernetic Communism” (signed Aurora Apolita), is an important and timely contribution to anarchist and communist thought, weaving together rich knowledge of these histories with advancements in complexity theory and algorithmic information theory. I completely agree with her that we need to […]

    • The Virus and the Tree

      Alexander Wilson  2020-04-06 LOCKDOWN THEORY #19 How does the parasite usually take hold? It tries to become invisible. – Michel Serres, The Parasite 1. From a biological perspective, humans inhabit the outer branches of the so-called tree of life; or, perhaps more accurately, a minuscule and most fragile twig, a freshly sprouted thorn. 2. This putative tree […]