As an informal philosophical journal, we take the terms investigation and autonomy to belong together. Yet the results of any single piece find their place in the world only collectively. The ancient skeptics, and specifically the followers of Pyrrho, embodied both terms in a practice that today proves useful against any form of authoritarianism: the Pyrrhonian modes, or tropes. These modes are standardized argument patterns used by the ancient skeptics to induce ἐποχή (suspension of judgment) and reach ἀταραξία (mental tranquility). In epistemology, a trope refers to ways of refuting dogmatism. We use tropes here to name both the habit of independent research and a shared topic under collective investigation.
A trope is directed by a guest editor, whose function is merely to set a framework. Once the field is set, contributors may join the open investigation with texts that intersect the adjacent topics of that trope. The fields will remain open for four months, and a small zine will be published with the contributions.
Trope #1: “Exocapitalism and Category Theory” | Guest Editor: Édgar Valenzuela (PhD candidate in Mathematics, UAM-I; The New Centre for Research and Practice)
Call for contributions: Exocapitalism, and its machinic, lifted version, The Superdark Factory — besides leaving one dumbfounded, with the excruciating dilution of our agency — open up a possibility that the very software economy is already (and has been for a while) exploiting: Abstraction. Particularly, mathematical abstraction. The fact that the self-sticking capitalist machinery is unlocking the unboundedness of the mathematical apparatus to further the software economy, despite proving to be counterproductively expensive, proves the authors of exocapitalism right: it is not about us; it is about an exoskeleton of always incomplete and ever more abstract relations; it is about never-ending lifting; it is all about tran-scalar encounters.
Whilst Poliks and Trillo were trying to understand the compositionality of the software economy, the software economy was looking into the very mathematical framework of relationality: Category Theory and, by lift-up, Homotopy Type Theory. Even if Exocapitalism — and The Superdark Factory holds its own — explicitly works through diagrams, and has a — speculatively suspicious — shared language with category theory and homotopy type theory, the link is begging to be theorized out loud. This is our call for such cries.
Submit your speculative ruminations around Category Theory, Homotopy Type Theory, and their relations to exocapitalism and superdarkness.
Keywords: Arbitrage, Computation, Abstraction, Incompleteness, Lift, Scalability, Composability, Automation, Self-reference, Machinic thought, Cybernetics.
Send your contribution to hyperspekulation@gmail.com with the subject “Exotropos”. Deadline: December 31.
