Nihilism, Cosmetics and Audacity: Dandyism & Dorian Gray
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Body Politic to Machine to Blob Politic: an historical account of computational governmentality, AI & contemporary republican* expansionism†
*(not imperial)
†(in the present, 4 March 2026: Iran)
I. Classical Geometric Order
c. 5th century BCE–late antiquity
Key shift: Movement subordinated to geometry.
* Plato — ideal forms as spatial intelligibility
* Aristotle — ordered cosmos; teleological motion
* Euclidean geometry formalises space as stable structure
* Polis as body politic: centred, proportioned, bounded
we can map it holocaust by holocaust
why am I mediating this through AI?
for structural reasons, because I have nobody to keep up with me and, because I want you to keep up with me, I think what the AI writes is easier than I am to understand.
when I read that Claude AI quicker than
the ai reading of this text ... ⑨
[link] is very interesting because it shows a complete misprision which I had not suspected was possible. From the notion of lines of correspondence connecting successive frames, with small variations to accommodate movement, it drew the conclusion that this density confirmed the presence of duration. I began:
you completely misunderstood