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Comment by tatterdemalion | Hacker News Reader

I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right.

Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?

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> I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition;

Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.

Ignoring your pithy insult of Deleuze's work (which is not math), I did not mean to imply that Deleuze preceded Shannon but that my understanding of Deleuze's work maps well to my understanding of information theory. It was a rehash _for me_.

Difference and Repetition, specifically, is concerned with absolute bullshit explanations and generalizations of the mathematical concepts of the derivative and integral, so I think it's fair to call it bullshit math.

I would also say that there is a zero percent chance that someone could use what is there to develop a mathematical basis for information theory which could actually be used to do anything useful, like data compression or error correcting codes.

Note that I am not saying philosophy needs to be useful to justify itself. Far from it. I'm just strongly disagreeing with your assertions that Difference and Repetition has any relevance or relation to information theory whatsoever.

> he was right.

The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."

It mostly makes me smile. :)

> Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee

I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...

Do you mean that you're getting rusty?

;-)

I found "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" to be a great antidote to the Neo-Reactionaries' take on the contemporary immanence of capital.

I'm extremely torn between "The Coming Insurrection"s call for drop-out politics and Marxist production reforms.

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