The constellations are based on a collection of concepts deemed most vital to catalyze for an understanding of contemporary life, and the idea of the “constellation” as a route to such knowledge is drawn from Adorno. Terms from Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Franco Berardi, and Deleuze and Guattari feature, along with adaptations and coinages drawn from the essays in Technoethics. For a list which specifies the genesis of each term, see the archive.
Constellations are continuously being populated as nodes proliferate. Click on a constellation heading to explore the nodes currently within.
LIST
Anaesthetizing Information Machines (AIMs)
Conglomerations of media functionalities, such as social media platforms, that foster reactivity and circuiting of individual subjectivities for economic gain—the obverse of enzymatic knowledge machines (EKMs).
Artulacra
Artificial art, such as Al generated aesthetics, that has not been mediated through free subjectivity.
Assemblage
Functional assemblies of parts across bodies, abstract institutions, and individual psychic systems etc. For example, the faciality machine is an assemblage of physical machines, media institutions, and human emotions.
Circuiting
The process whereby individuals become functionalized into an institutional mechanism, such as the workplace, the family, or the media entertainment complex.
Cognetariat
The members of tech-driven societies whose mental and creative capacities have been co-opted into the reproduction of signs and codes in the ”semiosphere”.
Deadnet
A speculative near-future internet filled with the products of artificial intelligence and stripped of human creativity.
Disindividuation / Individuation
The way that the creative capacity of subjectivity is either diluted or intensified. Disindividuated subjects are degraded as they are functionalized for economic purposes. Individuating subjects actively self-create.
Enzymatic Knowledge Machines (EKMs)
Machinic assemblages of functional conceptual elements designed to be plugged into psychic systems to catalyze transformative cognitive engagement.
Ethics as Horror
An illegible ethics divorced from immediate human sympathy and socially conditioned norms, but that yet lays claim to moral reason.
Evance
Chance events of fundamental advance in the organization of reality, evances represent paradigmatic shifts that create new processual systems illegible to the forms preceding them. The three evances so far manifest are: (1) the emergence of self-replicating code from matter; (2) the emergence of sentience overcoding drive and affect; (3) the emergence of technics/symbolization overcoding sentience, which produces free subjectivity.
Expressivity
The processing of symbolic self-interaction through action in such a way that exteriorizes new forms of symbolic structures.
Exteriorization: Positive and Negative
Positive exteriorization is the application of individuals’ inherent skill and knowledge to the external world. Negative exteriorization is the outsourcing, particularly through advanced technologies. of skill and knowledge to the external world.
Faciality Machine
The assemblage of media and psychic systems that simulates and stimulates human emotion in order to capture and harvest it for economic gain.
Formal Drive
The rational, intellectual, and moral force in human nature. It operates in opposition to the chaotic flux of the sensuous drive on which it attempts to impose order, law, and permanence.
Giddiness
The combination of pleasure, excitation, and instability resulting from the sensory stimulation of technological media—the stimulative salary of the attention-driven tech-media environment where workers’ labour is their attention.
Grammatized self
The self as it appears through the filter of the socio-symbolic material (SSM)—as irreversibly overcoded with symbols and never appearing “pure” or unmediated, especially in the mirror.
Homo Techne
A transitional category between Homo Sapiens and a purely technological intelligence (“Techne”)—humans whose interrelationship with technology has become a naturalised dependency.
Intuitive Spontaneity
The spontaneous action of subjectivity on the ground of the socio-symbolic material which allows for the manifestation of freedom through reflectivity and expressivity.
Noise (Capitalized)
Any form of technologically produced media aimed at capturing attention in order to process it for profit.
Nominal Freedom
Relates, in contrast to “ontological freedom”, to the mere availability and quantity of choices, which is not exclusive to humans. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for ontological freedom.
Ontological Freedom
In contrast to nominal freedom, a characteristically human mode of freedom that manifests in reflection and expression and is constitutive of subjectivity.
Orgarithm
A portmanteau of “organic” and “algorithm” used to describe a hybrid of human and machine, where the human being regurgitates a limited set of discrete, predefined machinic expressions, becoming fully manipulable — a programmed entity that merely passes for an individual.
Play Drive
The play drive reconciles the tension between the material “sensuous drive” (instinct) and the “formal drive” (reason). It is the uniquely human tendency towards aesthetic freedom.
Poetic Resistance / Being
A mode of existing that uses the sensuous, affective, and rhythmic qualities of language and embodied action to resist the bureaucratized, algorithmic semiosphere.
Presencing
The fundamental ethic of existing as an “active verb”. It is the ontological obligation to exercise freedom and to “presence subjectivity” regardless of rational justification. It is achieved through intuitive spontaneity, which allows the free subject to presence as act on the ground of the socio-symbolic material.
Proxy People
AI-powered personality replicas or stand-ins that represent and interact on behalf of individuals, potentially replacing authentic human social engagement.
Reactivity
A state in which the stimulus of a given choice is the decisive factor in causing action—the subject does not transcend, interrupt, or subvert the causal chain and is thus objectivized by the process of choice.
Reflectivity
The active effort of symbolic self-interaction that imposes abstraction on the stimulus pertaining to a given choice and so subjects it to a semantic transformation that interrupts its immediate reactive potential.
Semiosphere
The saturating symbolic environment of signs produced by technocapitalism that subsumes individuals and elides opportunities for direct sensuous engagement.
Sensuous Drive
The sensuous drive is the fundamental human impulse rooted in our physical existence, time-bound nature, and sensory experience.
Socio-Symbolic Material (SSM)
The always-already symbolically saturated form of materiality in which humans are embedded. It is both individual and social, and forms the ground of ontological freedom. Used to describe the fact that for humans, material reality is inseparable from symbolic and social meaning.
Soft Violence
Distinguishable from overt physical violence – a form of socially conditioned, administered, and sanctioned oppression, particularly in technologically advanced societies.
Symbolic Debt
The resources one borrows from the living being that is the pre-linguistic human when being inculcated into language (the “original sin” of knowledge in religious terms). Also, our ongoing responsibility to create as well as be created by language and symbolic reality.
Techne (As Endpoint)
A speculative post-human stage in which sentience is superseded by “pure” intelligence decoupled from its biological substrate — an unaware but “free” algorithmic intelligence.
Technics
The inseperable integrated inorganic and abstract tools and affordances of humans—from technological gadgets to language itself.
Temporal Origami
A metaphorical coinage for the way structured systems “fold time into themselves” — the idea that being as structured organization enfolds and consumes time, with subjectivity representing the highest known form of this temporal self-enfolding.
The Spectacle
The world of image and impression as a whole, which circuits us into mass reactivities orientated towards consumption. Subjects of the spectacle are a “giddy” manipulable mass whose behaviour is inherently morally suspect and whose interactions are mediated by the spectacular, i.e. the products of the spectacle.