iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

After an extended hiatus (including a long break from social media) I'm revivifying my blogging practice. Like everyone else (late to the party as usual), I've migrated to Substack. open.substack.com/pub/timothyj...

open.substack.com

Towards a humanities worthy of the event

A human techné

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Ooooh. Will have to try and check that out, thanks!

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Potentially! He's also, two sentences after the Cincinnatus reference, saying "..A regulative relation of circular causality cannot be established between the whole of governed reality and the function of authority...." this is an argument against a pure top-down authority.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Mystification is something that is often, but not exclusively, intentionally done by those using it to wield power. This is the antithesis of what Simondon is calling for.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

As I said it might be a naïve program. But he's very clearly not saying the technocrats should lead the world. He's saying general education can help us ensure they don't.....and he may indeed be wrong about that.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

This is the point - Simondon is calling for a demystification of the customers. So that they are not so easily preyed upon by the technocrats. This is the whole thesis of re-integrating technicity into culture via generalised technology (which means the knowledge of technicity, for him).

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Gaining technical knowledge in a number of scientific fields is a wonderful way to demystify this stuff. Hence Simondon's call for a reform of education.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

...cf. theoretical physics, but basically the legacy of the mechanical philosophy tout court. It's been a genuinely huge problem for the world, and continues to be, that a mystified form of theology masquerading as the "objective truth" have overdetermined our sense of our place in the cosmos.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....general education. That we treat technicity as distinct from (alienated from) the rest of culture is part of the problem, for him. This enables the technocratic class to emerge, with their "drive" (or "idolatry") of/for power. This is not unrelated to a general mystification of science....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Again where I think it becomes useful (not only here, but) is in tracking the relationship between the mystification of technologies and this "drive towards machines". Simondon is saying we're going to be overwhelmed by technocrats if we don't integrate technicity back into human culture via....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

There are Hegelian aspects to his thought. But it's also important to understand why he doesn't consider the individuation schema "dialectical". I think whether he acutely (pre)diagnoses RW accelerationism or not is a distinct question from whether he is giving off "technocratic fascist" vibes.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....LLMs (just to take one obvious example) do a lot more damage, culturally, to the extent that they are mystified. And there is a huge amount of mystification of LLMs coming out of the tech/data science sector itself right now.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....of aspects to this. And of course the call for a "general technical education" might be naïve if we imagine it's going to redress the issues we're currently faced with (especially at this point!). But I think there's something important in Simondon's diagnosis here nonetheless. And certainly....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

And I don't see the current technocracy in the way you do, seemingly, either. I think it feeds very heavy on our general lack of technical knowledge. That we don't know how the vast amount of technology we're engaging with works, we are "alienated" by it for this reason. There are a number....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

So I'm certainly not getting any "technocracy fascism vibes" myself. That's why I provided the quote where he explicitly decries exactly that - technocracy and the desire for absolute power.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....to its costs and the results of its operation." - it's certainly possible that Simondon misdiagnosed the nature of the contemporary technocracy, which arose decades after he wrote this book. But its very clear that he's decrying technocracy, and any attempts at absolute or abstract power.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Elon is more like someone "Running a company that uses machines," which is "no more useful for the attainment of his awareness than is labor: it creates abstract points of view regarding the machine, causing it to be judged, not in its own right, but according....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....fascination with automatons/autonomous machines, made in the image of the human. He's warning against this fantasy - machines are within the human lifeworld and require human regulation/mediation.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

....The desire for power consecrates the machine as a means of supremacy, it makes of it a modern philter. The man who wants to dominate his peers calls the android machine into being." - he's very explicitly warning *against* technocracy. The obsession with the "idea of the robot" is about the....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

A couple of pages earlier: "This, then, gives rise to an intemperate technicism which is nothing other than idolatry of the machine and which, through this idolatry, by means of identification, leads to a technocratic aspiration to unconditional power......

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

...events, i.e. as though they have essences associated with specific functions to which they can be more or less adapted (like a tool in a specific sociocultural assemblage). Where do these quotes you're pulling come from?

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

...model to natural objects (the classic cybernetic and adaptationist confusion), which would actually throw us back onto hylomorphism. Recalling that hylomorphism is precisely a *technical* schema inappropriately applied to natural objects as though the latter are the result of "special creation"..

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

..."concretisation", because they are always-already concrete. Concretisation is the analogous process undergone by *technical* objects. And they are subject to a convergence to the extent that they are optimised for a specific purpose. But it would be a confusion to apply this optimisation....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

....pre-individual "charge". In very basic thermodynamic terms, it can do more "work" - it is more metastable because it has internalised more gradients/tensions that are subject to differential canalisation. A key point here being that "natural objects" are not subject to a process of.....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

...is *not* some "final unification" on offer. A system that "envelops and compatibilises" more pre-individual "difference" within itself has a greater capacity for *ongoing* individuation. It can become more things - in a context-elicited manner - than a system which incorporates less of that....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

This is complicated. I've previously mentioned to you Simondon's anticipation of the "evolution of evolvability", in the context of our discussions of numericity. Personally I am not a fan of this terminology of the "elevated level of individuation", but the key here is precisely that there....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

…construction, which reveals certain insufficiencies relative to the purpose of the object, which prompts a refining of the schema and then another round of construction, and so on.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

But it’s certainly no stronger than the differentiation emphasis. It’s a complementary of opposites. “Concretisation” is really about the progression from an abstract schema (in invention) to a concrete technical object. And this is not a one-and-done transition, but involves an initial….

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Simo’s dynamic is integration *and* differentiation. Concretisation is not necessarily about some total convergence, but it *is* a concept specifically applicable to technical objects, which acquire their telos from their inventors, though they are also capable of “abstraction” (exaptation).

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Oooh, E is for exciting! New album by @wendyeyes.bsky.social’s Editrix. Teaser track is 🔥, complete with their best (I.e. gnarly as) Ribot/Sharrock homage. Get it in your ears! editrix.bandcamp.com/album/the-bi...

editrix.bandcamp.com

The Big E, by Editrix

10 track album

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Well it’s not recent by any means, but Jean-Jacques Kupiec’s “the Origin of Individuals” is under-tapped and pretty succinctly demonstrates why the “neo-Darwinian synthesis”, is anti-Darwin in being a backsliding towards hylomorphism.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

Anderson, More is Different, 1972

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

...to 'only' chemistry, from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure."

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

"The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron said 'the rest is chemistry'), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

No - all the major characters have their backstories gradually revealed, all have episodes devoted to them.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

There are no "obvious weaknesses of the original show", it is anime perfection. We get precisely as much backstory as we need.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

Sadly, if transdisciplinary science and philosophy ceases to be a viable career pathway…..becoming insta-famous is probably not on the cards 😭

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Stop whatever you’re doing, new Ribot just dropped: marcribot.bandcamp.com/album/map-of...

marcribot.bandcamp.com

Map of a Blue City, by Marc Ribot

9 track album

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

The latest episode of the wonderful ABC Kid's podcast Imagine This is about venom, and features me as well as my 3-year-old daughter. This is my second appearance on the show, and it's always a great deal of fun! www.abc.net.au/kidslisten/p...

abc.net.au

How do snakes and spiders make venom? - ABC Kids listen

Step right up for the Tiny Tour of Toxins! Nij and the kids trek through the Aussie bush and go on an underwater adventure with venom expert Dr Timothy Jackson to explore the world of venomous animals...

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Great conversation I had yesterday with the cognitive scientist Tom Froese, about diagrammatic relationships between his "Irruption Theory", Darwin's thought, "difference-first" ontologies, and @drmichaellevin.bsky.social 's work on developmental plasticity: youtu.be/BqX4ycjv-KM?...

youtu.be

Discussion with Timothy Jackson - Irruption theory meets Darwinian evolution via process ontologies

YouTube video by Dr. Tom Froese - Irruption theory of life and mind

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

...."private" engagements, e.g. with LLMs. So someone's "personal psychosis" is always going to be an inflection of something impersonal, public, collective.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Yes, they're very interdependent. Someone's personal fantasy being amplified might be dangerous without being "malevolent". But the reality principle also never goes away entirely - our sense of reality is always mediated by a culturally contingent "superegoic" function - which we bring to our....

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Agreed - much more dangerous. Also doesn’t *require* active shaping by (“transcendent”) powers (though that’s inevitable). If we want to develop a critique of Guattarian “singularisation”, it can begin here. An intensification of that process via a decreased potency of the “reality principle”.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

…strictures in play. Whilst this may lead to clustering around certain attractors in the space of nonsense (or lies, h/t Greg Egan), the proximal result is a profound siloing of worldviews. People’s capacity for post hoc rationalisation/justification is being supercharged.

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

100%. I’ve been saying to people who claim that LLMs induce groupthink that this is not precisely the issue. ChatGPT will validate and amplify anything you feed it (and maybe tell you you’re a genius whilst doing so). This is profoundly dangerous if one doesn’t have a certain set of critical….

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Reposted by Timothy Jackson

Charles S. Peirce @charlespeirce.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

You think all the arbitrary specifications of the universe were introduced in one dose, in the beginning, if there was a beginning, and that the variety and complication of nature has always been just as much as it is now. But I, for my part, think that the diversification, the specification, /1

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Timothy Jackson @tnwjackson.bsky.social · 05/05/2025

I was thinking Greg Egan, too….

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