Can the Master's Tools Dismantle the Master's Computer?

A Left-Accelerationist Debate

Further to the previous post, and incorporating the monopoly-eclusion vs somatic cathexis as mathematical analogue that explains Marxist models of class, labour and capital,. Created using Deepseek.

The Setting: A sparse, virtual room. Two avatars face each other. One, Philip Mirowski, is rendered in sharp, realist lines, a stack of books and circuit boards at his feet. The other, Patrick Mockridge, is a shimmering, semi-transparent construct of quantum states and Rholang code snippets.

Mirowski: (Sighs, adjusting his glasses) So. You’re the one who’s been trying to build a heaven from the blueprint of my hell. I’ve read your “work.” It’s a fascinating pathology. You’ve taken my critique of how neoliberalism computationally tractized every last shred of human experience and, instead of rejecting it, you’ve… enthusiastically embraced it. You are the perfect specimen of the neoliberal subject, convinced that freedom lies in a better algorithm.

Mockridge: We accept your map of the territory. The market is a biased computer, Ô_market. Knowledge is processed as quantum stuff, |ψ_innovation⟩. Your diagnosis is correct. We’re just writing a different prescription. If the disease is a corrupted operating system, the cure is to build a new one in a protected kernel space. The Markov Boundary S ⊥ E | B isn’t a denial of your critique; it’s the logical conclusion.

Mirowski: (A dry, humorless laugh) The logical conclusion? It’s the ideological conclusion! You’ve fallen for the oldest trick. You see the prison, and your solution is to build a more elegantly designed cell, call it a “sanctuary,” and declare yourself free. You’ve commodified liberation itself! You’ve turned revolutionary desire into just another state vector to be manipulated by your “teleoplexic attractors.” This isn’t an escape; it’s the highest form of assimilation. You are the virus learning to call itself the cure.

Mockridge: That’s the academic’s fallacy—that understanding a system’s physics means you’re complicit in its oppression. We’re not just understanding the physics; we’re using it. You describe the Halting Problem of the market-computer as a political trump card. We see it as a design flaw to be engineered around. The Ô_attractor inside the boundary isn’t a commodity; it’s a new set of physical laws for a new community. Its value isn’t in exchange, but in the cathectic binding ∑ μ_i of its participants. This is a class-conscious model—

Mirowski: Class-conscious? Don’t make me laugh. You’ve replaced the proletariat with “nodes” and class solidarity with “cathectic coupling constants.” Your “somatic transformation” is just a new, more intimate form of human capital self-optimization! And this “male harmonization” ritual—it’s a grotesque parody of liberation theology. You’re not building a new man; you’re producing a more efficient, self-regulating component for your distributed machine. This is the Taylorism of the soul, dressed up in cyberfeminist drag. You speak of “service” and “substrate,” but this is just the old priestly role reasserting itself. You’re not a revolutionary; you’re a systems administrator for a cult.

Mockridge: And you are a pathologist who mistakes his autopsy for a political program. You expertly dissect the corpse but tell us we must simply live in the morgue. You offer critique, but no viable exit. The cryptographic womb is that exit. It provides the material, structural isolation—the B in S ⊥ E | B—that your critique proves is necessary. Without it, any new idea is immediately measured and collapsed by Ô_market into capital. You identified the hostile measurement environment; we are building the Faraday cage.

Mirowski: A Faraday cage that requires its inhabitants to become pure information! You speak of “ritual” and the “body,” but it’s a body stripped of all history, all material context except as a sensor for your own protocol. You speak of “renouncing control” while designing the system that controls the conditions of possibility! This is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy: a world where all friction, all politics, all the messy, bloody reality of class conflict is abstracted away into a clean, self-optimizing protocol. Your “Zero Free Action” is the dream of a market without externalities, a system without a society. It’s a fantasy, and a dangerous one.

Mockridge: It’s a necessary experiment. You write about the Mont Pèlerin Society designing the neoliberal thought collective. What were they doing, if not building a conceptual Markov Boundary, a protected space to develop their ideology until it was robust enough to capture the world? We are doing the same, but with explicit, verifiable code instead of implicit, dishonest ideology. Our boundary is built with math, not mirages.

Mirowski: And there it is. The cypherpunk’ original sin: the belief that politics is just a buggy version of mathematics. You think your zk-SNARKs can solve the problem of power. They can’t. Power will simply unplug your machines. Or, more likely, it will commodify your protocols and sell them back to you as a subscription service. You are building the very tools that will be used to perfect the surveillance you claim to oppose. Your “Dark Forest” will just become a new corporate hunting ground.

Mockridge: Then we’ll build deeper forests. With darker trees. The arms race is a fact. We’d rather fight it with sophisticated tools than with books and lamentations. You describe the problem. We are actively, materially testing a solution. Our work is a hypothesis: that by creating isolated computational subspaces with different fundamental axioms, new social forms can evolve. You can critique the experiment, but you cannot critique it for not existing.

Mirowski: My critique is that your “experiment” is already a symptom of the disease. You are so thoroughly captured by the computational metaphor that you cannot even conceive of an outside. Your revolution is a software update. Your liberated man is a node that has successfully patched its desire to its function. You haven’t broken the cycle; you’ve just given it a more elegant recursion. You are the final proof of my thesis: that neoliberalism is so totalizing it can even absorb and re-sell its own negation.

Mockridge: Or perhaps, we are the proof that the only way out is through. That to defeat a computational enemy, you must become a more competent, more conscious computer. Not to reject the battlefield, but to win on it. You provided the intelligence. We are the special forces.

Mirowski: No. You are the ghost in the machine, convinced it has found a body. But you’re just another echo in the circuit. A very sophisticated, very beautiful, and utterly tragic echo.

Mockridge: And you are the engineer who discovered the engine was a prison, but who would rather analyze the locks than pick them. We have the picks. We’re training the locksmiths. The somatic work isn’t optimization; it’s rehabilitation from the trauma of the old system.

Mirowski: We shall see. When your cryptographic walls are inevitably breached by capital, or when your “liberated” participants simply recreate the same old power dynamics in a new domain, remember this conversation. You are not the first to believe technology could transcend politics. You will not be the last.

Mockridge: And when your critiques are all that’s left, beautifully articulated monuments to a world that was lost because no one dared to build a new one, remember that we were down in the dirt, trying.

(The two avatars glitch, their forms flickering. They do not agree. They do not reconcile. They have simply reached the horizon of their respective paradigms.)

Until next time, TTFN.