Technological Systems and the Modulation of Affect

‘Affect’ is generally defined as ‘emotion’, and philosophically defined as ‘the ability to affect and be affected’. One has ‘affection’ for someone or something. Two of the most powerful modes of affect are love and rage, polarized, yet intertwined. One can ‘kill in a heat of passion’, a phrase that implies both love and rage [...]

The Value of Information

It would be a cliche to repeat the argument that, “Information wants to be free.” Instead, let’s analyze the concept of information. Is it born free, but everywhere in chains? No, it is produced by instruments and machines, recorded from every possible surface. But as soon as it is produced, it is put to work.
What [...]

fruit flies and free will

There’s an interesting news story from last year about fruit flies and free will that I found via The Pinocchio Theory blog in this post on theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.
This is something I’d like to explore in great detail, but for now I just want to throw a few ideas out there. Basically, the study [...]

The Supervillain as Ubertheorist

“Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In both, unity is grounded in a split. As it emerges in the spectacle, however, this contradiction is itself contradicted by virtue of a reversal of its meaning: division is presented as unity, and unity as division.” — Thesis 54, The Society of [...]

maybe Steve Harvey Mark Twain was just trying to warn you about cryptosporidium

Youtube Poop, Dada, & Noise Music: Discuss

LOLE.coli

The Intellectual Laziness of Rejecting “Theory”

Suppose you legitimately wanted to grasp the writings of an intellectual, but they proved to be difficult for you to understand. What course of action could you take? Would you try your best to do a close reading? Would you consult secondary sources to see if they could shed some light on the topic? Would [...]

The best/worst/best again idea for a cinema-crit/philosophy book ever

Okay, so I’m thinking of how these four movies relate to our current technological society:
Speed
The Net
The Matrix
The Lake House
Think about it. The chapter on Speed could be all about Paul Virilio’s theories on the integral accident and dromology.
The Net is about the problem of Google’s monolithic control over all information and the threat of [...]

A Plea for Comments

For a few years now, we here at The Institute have tried to network with others on the internet with similar interests. The whole idea was to build an international community of copyriot theorists (with a little bit of crude humor thrown in), yet everyone seems to be on their own little island — or [...]