Tracing the twists and turns of Highway 40 in Alberta's Kananaskis region.

Table of contents

• The Cult of No-Sleep
• Malign Velocities (Noys, 2014)
• Technology Matters (Nye, 2006)
• Multi-melting
• Implausi.Blog updates
• Recent Implausipod Episodes
• Looking forward to 2025

Back in December the Economist posted an image on ELon Musk's posting history. Probably due in no small part to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and some recent research, I found it fascinating. 

This chart is absolutely wild in the context of the underlying philosophies involved. (Yes, there is some logic behind it; we've dug into a bit in previous posts and episodes, but let's bring the threads on accelerationism and the audience commodity together.)

We'll throw in some book recs too.

We start with digging into Benjamin Noys' Malign Velocities (2014) (see below). Early on he talks about the Italian Futurist Gabriele D'Annunzio, and their personal motto of 'per non dormire' ("In order not to sleep"), and how that meshes with Virilio's description of the 'inhuman type': proto-cybernetics.

Virilio was writing about proto-futurist Marinetti, who we talked about last year on episode 17 of the podcast, Not a Techno-Optimist. D'Annunzio's villa at Lake Garda in Italy is a wild thing in its own right, with the military vessel embedded into the hillside. I'm reasonably certain there will never be a wikipedia page devoted to my house, but there is one here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittoriale_degli_italiani

(Check out the pic pf the cruiser Puglia embedded into the hillside.)  This is where the Cult of Speed matches up with the Cult of (No)Sleep:

Jonathan Crary's 24/7: Late-Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), where sleep is viewed as a "non-productive human activitiy", something that needs to be defeated, and I think that meshes well with the this idea of personal mastery we're seeing.

And this idea goes all the way back to the early theorizing of the audience commodity (from way back in Episode 8) with economist Dallas Smythe's work on the advertising industry from 1977, and was a Marxist critque of the advertising industry.  In it he notes:

"The material reality under monopoly capitalism is that all non-sleeping time of the most of the population is work time."

The "off the job work time" is the work done by consumers as audiences for advertisers.  Here, sleep is seen as unproductive, as it can't be commodified.

(This is the point where we include the bit from Futurama:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g

And I think it's this that links it up and brings it back to that linked post at the top of this: that desire for an endless, eternal audience, one that can be captured and is always available for the audience of one at the center of it all.

And this is what brings it full circle:

Twitter was a fantastic machine for the production of the audience commodity (as is most social media, natch).  But as it has been dismantled and switched in purpose to cater to a single audience member, the value of the platform has degraded to the point where a large portion has fled.

Social media can't survive with an audience of one.

Elon's pursuit of that audience, of pushing out his posts to millions, posting increasingly around the clock (and in personal, non-automated ways) and reaching out to other time zones in a quest for engagement, all while eschewing sleep as something seen as "non-productive" has inverted that commodity form.

It's the ultimate self-own.

As mentioned above, one of the sources for the recent look at accelerationism, both on the Cult of Speed and the episode on the California Ideology (mentioned last newsletter) was Benjamin Noys' Malign Velocities (2014).  This work traces the last century of accelerationist thought, from its inception to the present day, in a chronological look via the various phases of its development.

It is definitely academic work, assuming knowledge on the part of the reader of the philosophical canon. I found it interesting and informative, surprised to find how deeply tied the accelerationist view is within our society and culture.

Okay, maybe not that surprised.

But I was still able to walk away from the book having learned something.  I found within every chapter linkages to other work I have done.  This is perhaps the nature of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon mentioned above.  I'd recommend the work for those with an academic bent.  Perhaps my role here will need to be that of translator, and we'll do an episode putting it into perspective.

Returning to David E Nye's Technology Matters (2006) to kick off the Book Club (you can find more about it in the link to the blog, or the indie version), and reading it with fresh eyes for the first time since I used it as the textbook for a course back in 2019, I'm struck by how approachable it is to the topic of technology from an academic point of view.

Throughout its eleven chapters, Nye manages to address big, complex topics in understandable ways.  Noting that the academics tend to resist providing pat answers to these grand questions, and instead focus on contingencies and conditionals, it's refreshing to see that at a minimum, with answers that cover the scope of something that extends throughout the entire range of human history (and pre-history).

Well worth picking up. We'll make some more blog posts on this on a chapter-by-chapter basis throughout the month of February.  I hope you can join us.

An abbreviated version of multi-melting this issue, as we look to catch up on the recent releases. I'll interleave full reviews of the list items as I get to them, as I haven't had the chance to give each of them the full listen they deserve (in the car stereo at a ridiculous volume). There were two things I wanted to highlight, however:

(This isn't an "I was into them before you all heard about it" humble brag, this is more about my delay in posting. Whoops.)  Go get this, it's decent. Modern production and a classic 70s/80s metal feel from a power trio.  Solid all around, one of my tops from the year.

And a single, that's been getting an in-ordinate amount of play from me.  (I hear the album is out in February 2025. Will give it a full listen then):

Dynazty - Deviltry of Ecstasy (2024)

This one also came up in the old algorithmic feed (and I'm not a "non-algorithmic purist", which seems to be floating around). More of a 90s symphonic pop metal feel?  Lotsa hooks and soaring harmonies, and I kinda love it.  More of this too, please!

Other music purchases:

Late 2024:

• Cirith Ungol - Dark Parade (2023)
• Rainbow - Very Best of (1997)
• Devin Townsend - Powernerd (2024)

January 2025:

• Opeth - The Last Will and Testament (2024)
• The Cure - Songs of a Lost World (2024)
• KK’s Priest - Sermons of the Sinner (2021)
• Amon Amarth - The Great Heathen Army (2022)
• Slipknot - Slipknot (1999)

And as it was the end of the year, we managed to get in a little video gaming as well:

In between this batch, we caught up on the podcast episode transcripts, and some earlier posts from back at the end of 2024:

Moving further into 2025, we'll shift the newsletter away from the monthly format, and focus on the topic at hand, more or less frequently as required.

Upcoming on the podcast, we have the Conclusion(!) of the Appendix W series, with a look to how it has been impacted by current events, as well as a four-parter on the cyberverse, followed by a review of Andor season one coming in March, just before the release of the second season. Exciting stuff!  See you soon.