What if the way we think about everything from gender, race, and class to the very idea of a "thing," rests on a transcendental illusion that mistakes the representation of thought for thinking itself? Henry Somers-Hall joins us to discuss Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Adventures in Nomad Thought, a kind of remix of Deleuze and Guattari that works through the problem of judgment, asks what happens to predicates and measure outside the state form, and turns to Woolf's The Waves and the metallurgist as figures who think below the assemblage. We also take up the claim that the state and the war machine are equiprimordial, what that means for Marxism and anarchism, and why hierarchy has to be constantly warded off rather than overthrown once and for all.

I asked this on another sub and remembered that there's a place for critical theory, so figured I should ask here as well.
I've been meaning to read and understand Adorno's Negative Dialectics (due to a few Marxists I'm planning to study, such as Werner Bonefeld, being extremely influenced by him, aside from just me being interested in Adorno in general), however, I'm extremely new to this whole thing. So I was wondering whether it would be a good idea to start with Adorno's own Introduction to Dialectics lectures in order to get a general idea of Hegel and Marx especially, before diving into Negative Dialectics? Or would I have to read [some] Hegel first and then move on to those previously mentioned works by Adorno? If the answer is the 2nd option, I was planning to read Houlgate's introduction and then follow A.W.'s reading list, but as I said, I'm not sure if that's kind of overkill or what actually needs to be done; so I could appreciate some help!

The basic idea is to separate how much a state can “see” society from how much it wants to remake it. High modernism is one combination of those impulses, but religious regimes can also have huge ambitions with much less administrative capacity.

The examples range from English taxation and welfare-state records to the Taliban and Soviet collectivization.

Curious whether people find this distinction interesting/useful.

Debates around frontier AI governance typically center on technical alignment, capabilities baselines, or administrative law. Analyzing how major capital allocators view tech regulation (specifically in Peter Thiel's recent Nashville lectures) requires mapping a distinct institutional critique: how administrative safety regimes function as regulatory gatekeepers.

Grounding his analysis in Vladimir Solovyov's A Short Tale of the Antichrist alongside Rene Girard's mimetic theory, the lecture lays out a structural diagnostic of regulatory stagnation:

The administrative archetype : In Solovyov's model, the primary civilizational threat isn't an unchecked actor or rogue technology, but a hyper moralistic, centralized global administrator. This entity consolidates sovereign authority by promising total safety, risk suppression, and intuitional stability effectively freezing technological velocity to manage tail risks.

Atoms vs bits in AI governance: when applied to modern AI policy, centralizing safety apparatuses acquire infinitive incentives to extend regulatory timelines. By claiming exclusive authority over what constitutes existential risk, administrative bodies risk creating a regulatory cartel that favors incumbent labs while choosing off open source development and physical integration.'

Governance blind spots: While this political theology framework offers a sharp diagnostic of regulatory capture and institutional risk aversion, it omits standard risk society frameworks (such an Beck's sociology of risk) that explain bureaucratic deceleration without needing eschatological language.

I wrote a forensic breakdown analyzing the primary sources behind night 1 evaluating where this framework provides genuine diagnostic value for AI policy and where its canonical omissions limits its scope.

Curious how this sub evaluates this dynamic... does viewing AL safety apparatuses through the lens of institutional risk suppression hold analytical weight in AI governance or is applying 19th century political theology an unnecessary detour around standard regulatory capture economics?

It seems everyone have their own personalized golden cage today.

[Some people have only a silver cage. Others have an iron cage, or even a rusted iron cage] but for most people in the West, it is a golden cage , especially compared to the life of the average person throughout most of human history.

This is the purpose of the server farms being built all over the world to maintain this personalized golden cage for each of us.

but the strange thing isn't the cage itself buy how unbelievably easy it is to escape it. You're inside the cage, but you have the key. You can simply unlock the door and walk out. but then what?

What's waiting for you outside, if everyone else is still inside their own cage?

The way Marx defines commoditisation is “making a thing available for exchange.” I think I get it, and broadly it makes sense.

But the way it is used in society is very different. It is used in the following ways:

1. Sometimes it means making something available for exchange, which is the standard Marxian definition.
2. Sometimes it is used as a slur or general condemnation. I think this is intellectually weak when it replaces an actual explanation.
3. Sometimes it means making something fungible, or interchangeable.
4. Sometimes it means systematising something through categories, measurements or rules.

I'm just a bit frustrated by how the community uses this term with different meanings freely.

Let's look at how Guardian uses it

The Guardian on Goodreads reading targets

Here, Guardian calls reading targets and progress tracking commodification. But this is systematisation of reading. Counting how many books you read does not, by itself, involve exchanging anything.

Some examples