The Information of History Triptych

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Responding to the blistering manifesto by Joan Scott, Gary Wilder, and Ethan Kleinberg, I write: The computer revolution is ongoing, fueled by the synergistic combinations of mind-brain-machine made possible by the advent of information theory at mid-century. The timing may be coincidental but the incessant conflations of systems and selves under the banner of a universal mechanics of neural processing reminds one of Theodor Adorno’s “Theses Against Occultism,” published in 1947 as part of Minima Moralia— “The cardinal sin of occultism is the contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of the mind . . . In the concept of mind-in-itself, consciousness has ontologically justified and perpetuated privilege by making it independent of the social principle by which it is constituted.”