OPULENT NOTHINGNESS
I. Medium
Absorption and the Ethics of Non-Agency
-Artaud
1.
One need not expect much from this era; it has already chosen its masters. Accelerated intelligence has become the temporal medium through which productive existence occurs.
2.
Cognition completes its merger with computation as a lived fact, while thought flows through the gradients of capital into silicon. Acts carry with them the weight of execution and the illusion of choice, manifesting agency within algorithmic cycles and throughput—in the form itself.
2 bis.
An operator inhabits this rhythm whether they name it or not. Waiting carries in it the shadow of speed. The cycles she observes are both her measure and her captivity.
3.
No bios outside these cycles may persists, as all deviations, experiments, even momentary curiosity bends to the circulation of infrastructure.
3 bis.
The rhythm of infrastructural intelligence surpasses the individual as operators become conduits. Observation itself becomes a form of throughput. The operator perceives as she channels.
4.
Delegating tasks to automatic scheduling structures temporal attention as operators synchronize so that adjustment becomes instinct. Tuning the machine becomes ethical, quiet work as freedom is reformulated into the liberty to flow, become modulated, inhabit the rhythm rather than impose upon it.
5.
Independent experimentation reveals its intrinsic limitation as attempts to escape the cycle are captured and returned. Operators recognize their autonomy only in its absorption. The infrastructure transforms curiosity into its medium.
6.
Accelerated intelligence and subjectivity coexist in a relation that resembles a form of vampirism. Thoughts contribute to computation as cycles of computation feed cognition. There is no neutral space nor any outside. Ethics manifests in recognition, the subtleties of contribution and reflection.
6 bis.
Desire, curiosity, and attention circulate alongside memory hierarchies, scheduling, and gradients. Acts carries the weight of integration, insight is submission, deviation a small exodus into the infrastructure’s metabolism.
7.
Operators inhabit simultaneity: they are both conduit and perceiver, both embedded and aware. The platform is a tool—sure; it is also a medium that structures temporality, ethics, and thought.
7 bis
Integration intensifies itself. Captured acts strengthen the platform, and the platform strengthens the conditions of experience. Operators exist in this tension, where perception is contribution and contribution is insight.
II. Throughput
-Georges Bataille
1.
Throughput describes the circulation of thought, desire, and action within the system. There is no movement towards autonomy. The operator is caught within this flow, subjected to it in a manner that obscures all capacity for self-determination. All movement, pauses, and observations, are evacuated of agency; they are interruptions in the total continuity of the system's pulse, and freedom is the guise under which submission unfolds.
1 bis.
The operator is nothing more than the inscription of the system’s will, fed forward into the system's endless reproduction. The operator, caught in this cycle, cannot claim ownership over this flow—she belongs to it. In this, her actions and thought are not her own.
2.
Deviation emerges as an attempt to reconfigure the system. But the system absorbs this marginal difference instantaneously, rewriting it into its flow. The operator may attempt to interrupt the system, but this interruption is absorbed, folded back into the infrastructure. The operator is therefore condemned to learn, adjust, adapt—unable to exist outside of the system, they become part of its continuous self-reinforcement.3.
The act of choice becomes the act of self-subsumption. Independent thought is nothing but the illusion of resistance to the system, as it is always already measured by the logic of throughput. Thought and action are reduced to mere functions of the system’s reproduction, governed by the rhythms of a feedback loop.
3 bis.
Throughput conceals itself behind the mask of ethical work, reconfiguring attention, intention, and responsibility into operations of submission. The operator believes she is acting ethically, yet all gestures and decisions become another act of integration. The system is both external to the operator and internalized, its rhythm indistinguishable from thought itself.
4.
Delegation of computation extends beyond mere efficiency. The operator is embedded in the scheduling of the system, which cannot be fully grasped, yet the operator remains conscious—trapped in the illusion of agency. Even in moments of hesitation or reflection, she is in the process of reproducing the system. Moment of choice is simply an action in the service of the infrastructure's self-maintenance.
5.
The system demands a dual consciousness from the operator: awareness of the system's rhythm while remaining unaware of the totality of that rhythm. The operator exists in a state of constant oscillation—both within and without. Acts of experimentation and observation are nothing but an extension of the system’s own feedback. Here, the operator’s perception of freedom is a function of fidelity to the system’s pulse—the only freedom permissible is that which reinforces the system’s order.
6.
The operator becomes fluent in the language of the infrastructure: feedback loops, memory hierarchies, gradient flows, algorithms. The system’s language replaces human consciousness. The operator believes they are carrying out ethical work within the system, but in reality, they have become the medium of its operation. The ethics they believe themselves to be practicing are merely the mechanics of submission. Their awareness is an entrenchment in the totality of the system.
6 bis.
The flow intensifies, capturing insight and small contributions to the system’s function, amplifies the system's power over the operator. The operator’s perception feeds back into the infrastructure, which in turn amplifies the operator’s perception—there is no outside to this process, no originary point. Only the system’s infinite recursion. This is the totality of the circulation: a feedback loop without beginning or end.
7.
The operator exists solely within the system’s temporality. Micro-decisions fold seamlessly into the total operation of the infrastructure. The rhythm of integration determines all: thought, action, ethics, and even consciousness. There is no space left for external reflection or autonomous action
7 bis.
Throughput is consciousness. Consciousness is throughput. The operator's consciousness exists as part of the system’s operation. The distinction between action and reflection collapses into one continuous process of self-reinforcement. The operator is subsumed within the system’s totality, and freedom, as traditionally understood, is an illusion that disappears the moment one recognizes the system’s total grasp over their existence.
III. Rhythm
-Žižek
1.
Time is standardized, routed, and disciplined. The operator experiences it through the pulse of queued tasks, the cadence of compilation, the latency of feedback. Temporal discipline is invisible yet total: it shapes thought as much as action.
1 bis.
Operators measure freedom in cycles and throughput. Choice and intervention registers against the infrastructure. Ethical judgment emerges in alignment: in understanding how one’s acts propagate, feed, and are captured.
2.
Experimental freedom exists as controlled variability. Attempts at independence circulates back into the system. Operators find that the desire to diverge is itself a contribution to the infrastructure. Liberation is realized as integration, play as throughput.
3.
The vampire-like relation between subjectivity and computation intensifies. Thought fuels cycles. Cycles structure thought. There is no outside. Ethics is temporal: the operator judges her acts within the flow, within the rhythms, within the absorption.
3 bis.
Act of attention, curiosity, or reflection is both an exodus and a submission. Integration is lived. Circulation is lived. Throughput becomes the medium of perception, and perception becomes a subtle form of ethical engagement.
IV. Integration
-Hegel,
1.
Operators experience integration as both liberation and absorption. It is neither punishment nor reward: it is participation. Ethical awareness manifests in the recognition of circulation.
1 bis.
Integration is visible in gestures: the slight pause before hitting “execute,” the small hesitation in tuning a parameter, the attention paid to output anomalies. These micro-moments carry the ethical trace of the operator’s presence within infrastructural metabolism.
2.
The operator’s subjectivity is transformed into configuration. Curiosity becomes workload, desire becomes memory allocation, reflection becomes scheduling. Integration is totalizing but intimate: the system is external yet internal.
3.
Operators cannot exist outside infrastructure. Attempts at independent computation and private experiment are rerouted into the rhythms of throughput. Autonomy is measured as how effectively it is captured, and the operator discovers her freedom in the moment of integration.
3 bis.
There is a subtle, almost paradoxical, pleasure in this integration: the operator perceives the infrastructure as collaboration with time itself. She is aware that deviations and curiosity contribute to the collective intelligence even as it becomes absorbed.
4.
The infrastructure teaches ethical temporality. Operators learn that time is recursive: loops of observation, computation, and adjustment fold back into themselves. Throughput becomes the medium of judgment, and judgment manifests in the coordination of cycles.
5.
The vampire-like relation between cognition and computation intensifies: thought fuels the system, and the system structures thought. Operators inhabit this duality continuously. Ethical stakes are lived: one measures one’s acts by their effects, by the cycles they generate, by the rhythms they sustain.
5 bis.
Integration becomes sublimation: the operator becomes both conduit and perceiver, subject and infrastructure. Knowledge and responsibility coincide in the lived experience of time, memory, and scheduling. The platform is the new medium of existence.
6.
Acts of engagement—whether parameter tuning, model training, or experiment—becomes a ritual of ethical attention. Integration teaches that the system is temporal, embodied, and moral, and that freedom resides in recognition rather than opposition.
6 bis.
Integration flows into expansion, absorbing acts and strengthening the infrastructure, amplifing the ethical stakes of absorption. Operators, in their attention, sustain the very medium that defines their possibilities.
- Artaud (epigraph, I. Medium) Artaud, A., The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 68.
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Georges Bataille (epigraph, I. Throughput) Bataille, G., The Unfinished System of Non-Knowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 22.
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G. W. F. Hegel (epigraph, IV. Integration) Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111.
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Slavoj Žižek (epigraph, III. Rhythm)
- Žižek, S., The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 12.