This is a comment I wrote on a planning application within my local area which outlines my opposition to this development and why in general city councils like Coventry still have much room for potential developments in decentralised planning and the creation of new economies of scale, yet show their status quo bias when allowing planning applications like the one pushed through:

Apart from the effective removal of CT Furniture, another community charitable institution, from the area (it may move elsewhere), the increasing move toward developing and encouraging student accommodation above and beyond either productive economic capacity or affordable housing for the local population (of which this planning application is a part of) shows the short-termism of council planning, focusing on the here and now of student consumer spending over other long-term considerations. Continue reading →

The constancy of exit and decay that I’ve noted[1] within systemic organisation produces a peripheral pull from the centre, maintaining a residue of alterity with its own codes, languages and semiotic productions. This decentring force is more than just the development of smaller units of activity as the purposeful means for problem-solving and trust-development, being rather a recognition of the collapsitarian nature of all organisation that moves from striated to smooth space. In Lucretian terms, the decentring periphery is the clinamenetic force[2] that drives the constant flow apart[3], making the developments of exit and decay not so much constancies but cycles of flow and disjuncture. This goes beyond a political subsidiarisation toward more fundamental grounds of systemic existence, akin to accelerative forces that spiral between uncompromising technological capacity and collapse into new mechanisms of existential understanding alongside this capacity[4].

The development of decelerationist thinking as a counterpoint to accelerationism has raised an interesting debate about what the flows and meaning of capital are, and whether they are controllable. Decelerationism is a narrative of existence in and around Satan, the stock market as “a living breathing Overmind. Markets is not “THE BAD CAPITALISTS TAKING MY MONEY” no no no. The Market is a pricing-discovery neural network, an allocation-machine. All human and inhuman participants uplink themselves to determine what is bought and sold. It is the thing that governs your life. It is an entity”[1]. Capital in this sense is an oxymoronic entity, both internal to our very workings but external in its exigencies and developments. It works in, through and beyond the human capacity for understanding.

The triptych of industrial liberty, commons and democracy presented by the anti-monopoly crowd[1] presents an interesting strain of political economy that seems long-forgotten amongst much of modern discourse. To be honest the democracy part of the equation interests me little, seeing as the conception of democracy present in so-called liberal democracies seems to jump between majoritarianism, constitutions and common law liberties in a trichotomous deluge of nonsense, with any sort of semblance of “democracy” being destroyed by the technologies of big data and the internal rot that majority opinion and lobbying let leech. However the other two present the interesting variable of showing that marketplaces, as the centre of competitive activity, and social networks are not in and of themselves necessarily spontaneous conceptions. While certainly they are not purely the product of governmental activity, nor are they the natural practice of Smith’s human propensities.

I’ve written many times on the ineffectiveness of national populism as a movement to drive forward new forms of meaning-making that combat the Cathedral. The idea that new ethno-cultural identities will seriously emerge from movements and situations which are struggling to deal with demo-bureaucratic structures and have found themselves caught up in the same institutional deadlocks they claimed to be moving beyond is frankly contemptible. While it may be said that one must start somewhere, the starting point should at least be realistic. The modern American state, and its equivalents in much of Western Europe, is no starting point for the production and preservation of ethnic enclaves or for the redevelopment of metaphysical identities. These states, which were foundational in allowing for the development of the rot in the first place, are now fundamental parts of the institutional matrices of the elite[1]. If Trump and Brexit were meant to be markers of success, then its failed.

The position of politics, both in regards to everyday life and in its disposition as the primary focus of social science, is seemingly contestable and always shifting. Statements as banal as “everything is political” underlie the dearth of politics as anything more than a box for people to place different things within. Going into academic distinctions, we can see politics as encompassing this banality further. Mouffe sees politics as the production of grand visions within the Schmittian arena, where ideas lock horns to determine our wider systems of production and identity. However, the Habermasian position is more conceptual in seeing politics as spread across the system-lifeworld distinction, the former the seat of governmental and economic power while the latter is the production of the everyday, where micro-arenas of public and private debate intersect and integrate. In the realm of reality, such distinctions play out when seeing the contrast between new social movements as adhoc figures in overlapping structures of governance and decision-making. They don’t present grand visions, but instead look for pressure points within the system, exerting influence when they can.

Brexit was already a vapid, pointless event, shorn as it was of any meaning by the continued centralisation of power by the government and having its significance removed by the complete lack of a unifying narrative that tied Brexit to any larger structure of meaning or context. However since the vote these tendencies have been further exacerbated by the increasing separation of Brexit’s constituent elements, culture and economics. Brexit as a cultural malaise can be seen as the direct driver of Leave voters at the time of the referendum, superseding economic imperatives and allowing for economic narratives that emphasise such nonsense as free trade and market openness to infest the background positions of Brexit.

Izabella Kaminska’s recent article in the FT[1] on seasteading does have some genuine criticism’s of the Seasteading Institute’s more utopian goals, including its supposed desire to achieve full political independence from the modern world. No such project can ever truly do this, and despite the heady heights of some of seasteading’s advocates I’m sure most recognise that pragmatism and time are needed. However the rest of the article is a glorified diatribe against political competition and in support of our static status quo. The simplicity of Kaminska’s message underlies the simplistic worldview that defines it. Continue reading →