You may think humanity majors are lazy and irresponsible, goofing off as they procrastinate on the scary leap into adulthood, acquiring useless degrees and living off loans in the hope that Democrats will make good on promises to cancel their debt. But try walking a mile in their Birkenstocks. For example, Luciana Parisi, Professor in Media Philosophy at the Program in Literature and the Computational Media Art and Culture at Duke University, is giving a speech this Friday. The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke provides a description:

Recursivity is a generic dispositif of power at the core of the colonial logic of capital. It defines the entanglement of algorithmic functions in computational prediction with the rules of knowing. Recursive algorithms give us the droste effect of a spiral of the same. Today, recursivity returns in the automated condition of planetary incarceration through hyperdisciplinary confinement and necropolitical killing enmeshed with algorithmic solutions of self-governance packed in our mobile phones. However, since speculative computation has indeterminacy as input, it has the capacity to trans-originate collective, cosmotechnical, abolitionist conditions of knowing. The COVID-19 contingency summons us to refuse the recursive violence defining immunity and to embrace the mutations of collective desire demanding the total abolition of the exceptional auto-immunity of the Universal Man.

Imagine being assigned to sit through something like this. Then imagine having to write a paper about it that must go on for many pages.

Future apparatchiks in the liberal establishment must learn not only to endure but to generate massive quantities of pretentious BS. I don’t envy them.

Not all will secure positions in the halls of ivy, media, bureaucracy, or Democratic Party. Many will end up as baristas. But all have to wade neck-deep through this stuff.

On a tip from Steve T.

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