Cosmocomputation and Negpoethics

Abstract While an epistemology of noise-as-contingency has become central to the contemporary critique of AI, this article rather focuses on a politics of noise as contingency. This article turns to the function of contingency for recursive logic by raising the question: Why is recursivity so central to map the cultural and political logic of AI? It is argued that the relationship between recursivity and contingency unravels a dynamic reconfiguration of colonial capitalism, which is parallel to a dynamic form of technology. This article considers how recursivity in technoculture not only is constitutive of colonial forms of subjection but also gestures toward the possibility of technodiversity. Yet technodiversity may not be enough to allow for a break from recursivity as embedded in a capital logic of war and subjection, extraction, and extermination. It is argued that further inquiry into contingency is needed to account for how it is also a marker of continuous rebellion that recursivity must tame and negate through a war against dispossessed populations, or technosociogeny. Yet, while contingency continues to carry the marks of the negation of the alien, there remains insurgent noise within systems that manifests in serial alignments of parallel recursivities alongside Man's overdetermination of cosmogony. The authors call forth a negpoethics, a portmanteau of “negative-political-ethics.” Central to cosmocomputation is the technosociogenic struggle, or the scene of contestation. In other words, the noise is always there and cannot be canceled out, since the focus of cosmocomputation is the undercommon, or the technosociogenic condition of the continuous dispossessed.