Theoretical empiricism mirrors algorithmic culture’s preference for accumulation over interpretation

Evidence

Everything is data. The discretized unit is immediately integrable, self-evident unto itself, and paramount for the quantum speed and scale of platform capitalism. Discretized data requires no interpretation, only accumulation. The withdrawal of argument and relinquishment of interpretation that animate intellectual empiricism belong as much to algorithmic culture as do the agglomerative listing and aphoristic enisling that supply contemporary theory’s syntax. What is more, in their accumulative propulsion and fascination with the real, contemporary theories rouse a near-theological pursuit of imaginary infinity, so evident in recurrent motifs of eternal domination, irredeemable worlds, and nihilistic abandon. Galloway underscores how this infinity issues from flat ontology: “a system of objective essentialism” culminates in “an unmediated real, infinity.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 305

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that flat ontology culminates in ‘an unmediated real, infinity’ — that immediacy conjoins solemn quantification with the uncountable sublime — is a dense theoretical synthesis worth sitting with.
• XREF: This connects to the reader’s central thesis on compressed capital circulation time. The ‘quantum speed and scale of platform capitalism’ as driver of the data-empirical style is the economic-cause argument at its strongest.