Hello my dear readers.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about circulation: how and why things tend to be kept moving around as they do, what kinds of power relations and reward structures this canalises and incarnates, the momentum and path dependency this has for us, how this feels (at scale, in our lives and relations), and what kinds of psychosocial realities this co-creates and co-constrains.

In a podcast conversation that’s oriented a lot of my posting over the past several months, Chris and I did some work trying to name the signature of the political present. This appears all the more difficult, insofar as the geist of the zeit now is marked by complexity, ambiguity, indeterminacy. https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-si6k2-132b626 Thanks for reading living together, somehow!

As of April 2023, two things about the Anglocapitalist AI discourse that I glimpse seem noticeable. Firstly, we appear to be hitting peak hype. I say this based on my podcast feed, which is flooded with episodes featuring guests promising hot takes that *finally* make sense of it all. Thanks for reading living together, somehow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

So then, what would you say has happened in your thinking since the post end of last year, in sum? For some reason(s), I feel like I’ve completed a period of intellectual re-apprenticeship after the onset of a personal polycrisis1: noticing the moral and relational liquefaction of the sector and organisation I’m working in, in 2019; having a third child in October 2019 who then was a ‘lockdown baby’ during the global pandemic;

Well, it's Tuesday, school holidays, Jesus has survived crucifixion once again, and the rabbit has laid and hidden chocolate eggs about our homes, for our children to consume in remembrance of ‘this’. A very probable causal chain.

This week I’ll continue closely reading through and extrapolating from Gorz’ CER. If you want to catch up, read here, then here, here, then forward to here.

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. – Pascal. The bureau – which has no heart – has its reason, from which reason is annulled. – interpolating from Gorz ~ Last week’s posts left me with at least a few conundrums to continue on with.

~ Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do ~ Oh Heaven Heaven is a place a place where nothing nothing ever happens ~ I want you – the truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark it scares you witless but in time you see things true and stark ~ I’m playing with an intuition I have, which I am not the first to have. It is this, thus: We know less;

How are we to live together, somehow – with AIs, in cities, in classrooms? Here, I’m trying to think through this conjunction of factors, in the absence of any certainty, clear argument, opinion, or ‘hot take’. I offer this to you in the meandering spirit of Montaigne, in recognition of my commitment to thinking-writing and hitting publish (too soon), and in the knowledge that, thus far, what follows is not a style of

Are the Anglocapitalist countries meritocratic, unlike contemporary China1? Is this system a meritocracy? Was it a meritocracy;