"We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we are going to live on the internet! - Sean Parker, The Social Network

In the shameless manner of an early noughties internet blog (think: tubmlr; or think: zuckerberg blogging while he hacked), I've decided to blog my "progress" as it were to, put simply, expand the horizons by which we understand the internet, to expand the interent as a project, to 'engage' with not only its political potential, but with something more: its power to overcome the deadlocks of the political. I've since taken to subtitling myself as "internet lenin" on instagram to qualify this. These deadlocks emerge when a new life is possible and we are not choosing to act on that new life, or its new rules. What to do you then? In the early days of market-society, there were new rules, such as in the university; new freedoms to do with an early materialist view of the world, with its manipulabiliy, its implicit individualism, its 'connectability' through markets. It also represented a project, entirely defining of what we consider both political and societal today, of transforming the medieval profession with market ones: you would no longer be your town smelter or blacksmith, but an enterprising 'industrialist', owning and expanding smelting for your region and for the sake of burgeoning markets.

To me, a 'new' freedom was born in the internet. It seemed to explode with coldplay and with the very creations of YouTube and Facebook and so on, platforms which incidentally had to be believe in a new freedom where people met outside markets and outside market professionality (and productivity) so as to embolden its generation with the very platforms that would support it. A brilliant example of Hegel's great thesis: the presupossition of the presuppositions. In any case, our coldplay shenanegins having met no greater political movement, no 'new' contract of productivity, no Shakespeares or Chaucers, no Robespierres, we feel 'as if' this freedom has either evaporated or never existed. At the same time, more people are on the internet than ever, filming themselves at their 9 to 5, creating the very viewpoint from which 9 to 5 productitivity appears as a 'fetish' when compared to the new freedom (and creativity) of the internet. Its principles, creative, political, or otherwise, remain to be deduced. What is obvious is that the new rules in town now need, it would seem, to be protected, or at the very least acknowledged.

In A.I. one sees a brilliant paradox: fantasised as the 'missing link' in our system of liberal economic commerce, it is really economics' repalcement. A.I. will do nothing productive (economically) except render replaceable economics, because it is not 'productive' to merely hallucinate what is already created, even as it will accelerate economics' irrelevance when compared to some stereotype A.I. presently serves as of internet materiality. For now, it is a veritable Frankenstein's Monster. Trying to get A.I. to do your thinking for your is like trying to get it to go on a walk on your behalf: absurd. You could only be convinced that it 'could' do something productive if you still held on to the economic fetish of productivity as repeatability and 'results.' These liberal notions which define our concept of value, professions, even science, are dead, and those so-called results have patently collapsed with the collapse of markets and its associated 'materialism.' It is also useless as an internet: it is merely an acceleration of a 'need' for an internet-society gone into hysterical overdrive. That productivity does not exist, and A.I. will 'supplement' it only to the extent that it replaces it with something much more obscure. That 'obscure' replacement is really just the unlived demand to produce the social system inherent in the 'new' freedom of the internet, to validate a new creative doing.

Let us pause here, and I shall update my readers on my attempts to figure out just what this all this. As a taste of what's to come, my sense is that whatever we do, we should put it on the internet. This may sound dystopic, but it is perfectly Lutheran: just as he printed everything, stirred up the masses, pre-arranged the very contexts in which his public debates took place, so too must we make it obvious that we work for 'another source' than can be adeqautely explained or captured by markets. In this way, we do as the early internetists did when they lived out a freedom they could not explain and then proceeded to build the social and technical mechanics for its wide-scale use and existence. That project remains only half-finished - for now.

6:42 PM, 08/12/2025.