Friedrich Nietzsche

philosopher · 25 mentions across 7 readings

In this course

Nietzsche provides the philosophical genealogy for understanding power relations embedded in systems of debt and domination—a crucial lens for analyzing how contemporary algorithmic and social systems extract pleasure from the subjection of others. The course readings invoke his analysis of creditor sadism and the death of God to theorize how technologies impose their own "immoral logic," making his critique of morality's violent foundations essential for examining the ethics (or amorality) of AI systems that replicate and automate these power dynamics. His work enables the seminar to historicize current computational domination as continuous with older forms of social control rather than as purely novel technical problems.

Mentioned in 7 readings

Stephen Zepke

Art as Abstract Machine

14

Introduction Art as Abstract Machine And the question is still what it was then, how to view scholarship from the vantage point of the artist and art from the vantage of life. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. “Art as abstract m…The abstract machine creates a new reality, constructs new ways of being, but although inseparable from this innovation of existence, it has no being. The abstract machine is the entirely immanent condition of the new, and thereby receives …“probe-heads” (têtes chercheuses, ATP, 190/232)—steering the world on its “creative flight” (ATP, 190/233). The abstract machine is therefore both vital and material, it exists, Deleuze and Guattari write, as the “life proper to matter as s…

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Jean Baudrillard

The evil demon of images, 1987

3

Translated by Philippe Tanguy  A.C.: In your Kuttna Lecture, The Evil Demon of Images, you invoke the notion of the immorality of images, at one point declaring that "the image has taken over and imposed its own immanen…Take Nietzsche's treatment of God, for instance. What Nietzsche says is that God is dead. This is a far more interesting situation than if Nietzsche were to simply say "there is no God" or "God has never existed", etc. -- that would be mere…through the universe, simply reproducing itself, constantly and forever. In the representational system, one cannot do this. One cannot go from one sign to another directly; one must mediate from one sign to another through meaning, through…

China Mieville

On Social Sadism - Salvage

2

Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals, saw social sadism as inextricable from debt. [T]he creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation – the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person … t…At some level O’Leary knows, whatever flimsy Horatio-Alger lie he might recite to himself, why he likes that statistic so much, and we know why, and he knows we know why, and that we know he knows it, and so on. The imposition of their own …

Joseph Matheny

Incunabula Papers

2

An in-house document from the Institute where the first Breakthrough was attained (probably in the late winter or early spring of 1979) — therefore, although it makes no overt mention of Travel or the Egg, the Catalogue is of prime importan…2) The World Congress of Free Religions, a brochure-manifesto arguing for a “fourth way”, a non-authoritarian spiritual movement in opposition to mainstream, fundamentalist and New Age religion. The WCFR is said to include various sects of …

Luciano Floridi

The Method of Levels of Abstraction

2

cottage, a flat in a single-storey building, and a Tuscan villa? The question cannot be sensibly answered unless one specifies the LoA at which the comparison is to be conducted. Likewise, my answer concerning the reading of the history of …Floridi, L. (2004b). The informational approach to structural realism. final draft available as IEG—Research Report 22.11.04, http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/floridi/pdf/latmoa.pdf. Floridi, L. (2004c). On the logical unsolvability of the gett…

Karen Barad

Agential Realism from Meeting the universe halfway_ quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning -Duke University Press (2007)

1

too substantializing. Neither an exaggerated faith in the power of language nor the expressed apprehension that language is being granted too much power is a novel feature of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first. For exampl…

Andreessen Horowitz

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

1

Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle, which would have prevented virtually all progress since man first harnessed fire. The Precautionary Principle was invented to prevent the large-scale deployment of civilian nuclear power, perhaps th…