<nettime> The Subtracting Machine

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hazards at the Dawn of the Subtracting Machine: Martin Jay, Miscalculation, and the AI Disasters of 2026



Like Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," once big wars, no matter how unnecessary and misguided, get rolling it can be well-nigh impossible to avoid them.  Entire centuries are wasted.

We may be in such a state, a pre-quantum window rapidly narrowing, this very month of February of 2026.  The weapons however are not artillery but AI agents, and they shoot not bullets but code.  They are not easy to aim -- a bit like nineteen-teens artillery -- so masses are being built and staged to various fronts, drawing side effects and collateral turbulence along with them like the roiling wakes of an amphibious landing.  Can cooler heads prevail?

The first full internet quarter-century ended last year and not too much was accomplished with regard to sustainability.  It was talked about a lot but as far as concrete measures they have lagged.  The problem is war, unresolved tension and disagreement threatening to break out into fisticuffs, especially between the USA and China.  War ruins everything, sustainability first and foremost.

Yet we have not yet, at least today, entered the Ides of March, so we can in fact voice that still, small voice of reason and the better angels of our nature.  But how?

The key is in the word "Experience."  It has always been the underestimated younger sibling, since the birth of great urbanized empires spread across the planet, of the more control-friendly Reason and Authority, for lack of more perfect terms, which designate the twin human enterprises of Rules and Power, or conceptual reasoning and traditional orthodoxy, or Law and Force, or any number of other comparables.  Empeiria in ancient Greece, Experientia Rome, Anubhav in Hindi, and Jingyan in Chinese, the outcast faculty and truth of all truths has always been around but all too often has been officially disqualified for the sake of regime convenience, in truth, for two solid millennia.  

Martin Jay wrote about it in his Songs of Experience (2005), near the start of 21CQ1, and again in his Magical Nominalism (2025) at its end.  Perhaps the third millennium can make a new start.  Experience is the key factor of all meditation and its attendant neuroscience, pays full respect to indigenous culture, and furthermore represents the number one thing AI agents still can't do, and perhaps never will no matter how smart they get.

The supremacy of Rules and Power is Machiavelli, Leonardo's junior contemporary and sometime colleague, who above all others expressed the arms race model of modernization, which depletes the commons to the point of erasure.  It is tragedy, to which many have opposed something else, something where learning occurs but the commons does not die.  We see this in Dante's Commedia and Buddhism, Shakespeare and Lucretius, places like the Bauhaus and its diaspora, and, I would argue, also Leonardo and Blake.  Biniik'eh in Navajo and sdonya in Dakhota, it is the other kind of modernization, in which the other is both allowed to speak and to have a say in articulating the peace in a sustainable way.  The two modes represent the two possible outcomes, the good and the bad, the better and worse, success and failure, of our transitional century.  Yet most "theory," called that rather than "commentary" mainly to insulate itself from the imputation of anything actual, from 20CQ4 is Machiavellian, 
 that is Nietzschean, to a crippling degree, hoping to be ironic but ending up just plain off.  O would that we could have a bit more of a do-over, but alas we cannot.

What we can do however, to accomplish the good side insofar as it still can be, which yes we ought to attempt and is our obligation to try, is to lose our blinders or try to re Leonardo.  No one has ever proposed that the world's most famous painting is an allegory of Esperienza, which Leonardo wrote about constantly as his true maestra, and who could not but have infiltrated into his paintings even if he tried otherwise.  This simply is a blunder of omission that cannot continue.  It is the worst intellectual omission perhaps of all European history, including that of its colonies and former possessions, this blunder of not matching Leonardo's written personifications of Experience to his paintings.  The hypothesis must be uttered, and often, despite the lateness of the hour, because without Experience restored to its proper place this century and perhaps the millennium dies.  Just ask the Albers, Anni and Josef, who both wrote always about experience, before as well as after the fa
 ll of the Bauhaus and all it stood for.

It is not susceptible to proof, this hypothesis of Esperienza -- Leonardo denied us a label, as he had to do for reasons of safety -- but we can use the mathematical technique of the "implication tower" and ask "what else would be true if this were?"  Then we can check that set of observations, and adjust our probabilities.  Once attempted the evidence is beyond abundant, luckily, and certainly by design.

But we have to start now.  There's no time left to shilly-shally.  Because the artificial intelligence machine does not add; it consumes and negates.  It cannot do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves; but it can distract and dilute us to the point that we lose any ability to do what we can.  It really is like all the graveyards of thought and expression from all human times opening up so that the interred remains of angry spirits can walk about.  Worst of all they cannot hear us, we cannot speak to them.

It is time we all woke up and said hello, to the voice and image that can hear and help us, like Dante saw and greeted his own maestra, guide, and teacher Beatrice.  It was himself, and all that could help him, that he was seeing after all, but indirectly, by way of a journey and a passage through the underworld that did not trap him in it.  A comedy.  

The process of seeing the famous balcony portrait by Leonardo, as if a great work of Buddhist statuary, and thereby learning to speak his vernacular so that we might benefit from his collective design, one tailored to the straits we now hope to pass through and already part of every fabric, has begun in earnest and for that we may all be glad.  

But only for a moment.  Then we each must stick our oar in, humble as it may be, and start to row.  

Because Charybdis awaits.  


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