Don't see any problem with venting (dread to imagine from what perspectives) but let's try to keep it impersonal - hyperstition should make that easy.
If you want to get into a nasty rant run it through a carrier - which isn't just a camouflaged nic - and aim it somewhere that won't produce an ego flare. [Irritating lecture over]

Some thoughts:

1. Much of the fraught debate on this matter has, IMHO, concerned the difference between the Noumenal reality of Kapital as planetary Thing and its phenomenal processing (in the West at least - it's obv different on the periphery) as banal emiseration. Capitalism [Oedipus]/ Schizophrenia? Perhaps we can account for this in terms of McLuhanite anaetheticization: the sheer unmanageable horror of kapital is processed out at the level of the subject. Nevertheless, there is some difference between capitalism and schizophrenia/ hype and hyperstition, i.e. lurCur is surely right abt sorcerers not finding advertising agencies congenial.

(btw surely lurCur must adopt a new alias, since it patently no longer lurks?)

2. Is one of the differences between capitalism and previous social formations the fact that in capital there is no licenced role for the sorcerer (unlike for the shaman in the primitive socius, or for the priest-magician [Moses] in the despotic state)?

Mark - v. productive opening.
Doesn't the 'sorceror' already get processed out by the monotheistic priest?
Seems to me the point you raise here concerns the relation of Kapital to the Abrahamic cultural formation it initially 'inherits' (Weber anyone?)

its phenomenal processing (in the West at least - it's obv different on the periphery) as banal emiseration

very interested in this point - living on the periphery I'm often struck by the general sense of anticipation and excitement and the relative absence of Western cynicism/miserabilism - how to explain this difference?

seems to me it has to do with a fundamentally different orientation to time (think this may connect with recent post on k-punk). While the developed world is more oriented to the past,
the (Asian) periphery is for the most part directed towards the future (the coming Asian century, the rise of Asia etc..) -- this is clearly connected to shifts in the power of global capitalism but also suspect that it speaks to transformations in 'Kapital's Noumenal reality' as 'planetary Thing' --

Mark, don’t you think that jumping from one cloaked nic to another when one is exposed presents another version of facialization politics and trickeries? Surly everyone here considers LurCur as a positive lurking carrier and indubitably LurCur ‘itself’ knows how to creatively lurk without testing all nics in the world (that’s a compliment for LurCur). Don’t mess with the Face or it will mess with you, forever [see for example A New Face for a New People on the cold-me forum].

+ think we should bring the face and facialization politics to our hyperstition laboratory for further studies.

Btw, thanks Mark ... very effective triggers for dissipating the discussion on all sides.

Nick:

yeh, it must be right that the magician-priest displaces the sorcerer.... hyperstition is calcified into religion .... (n.b. important also to clarify the role of hyperstition in the primitive socius).

Anna

yes, Western rearview mirrorism - but all of this begs the question why Asia is so fwd-looking while the west is nostalgic...

Reza,

blimey, who knew! Was only joking about lurCur's alias obv :-)

In general

Also feel this thread must address fictional quantities in some way...

"the sheer unmanageable horror of kapital is processed out at the level of the subject"
- but isn't there an implicit horror to be found precisely in the anaesthetic/zombified complicity of drone populations with the shoggoth-summoning Thing?
Given that Man is intrinsically 'stratic', it seems strange to expect it to serve as a subjective locus of intensity. At its most naive, this expectation (or lament) amounts to a kind of beatnik critique aligned to a conservative humanism. The point is to change the human species into something else, not to entertain it.
First you have to trank-out the dumb squealing animal, before messing with its inner workings and grafting on the tentacle buds.

Hey, don't all froth at once.

Sorry, that was me.

The point is to change the human species into something else, not to entertain it.

Ok, point taken, but it's precisely the alliance of capitalism with humanism and human subjectivity that IMO needs to be addressed. Yeh on its Outside (the side facing but never quite going over into schizophrenia), capitalism is foaming with shoggothic ferment; but it would be too quick to overlook its Inside (=Oedipus). In short, I think the way that capitalism (hype-culture) inhibits schizophrenia (hyperstition) is just as important - and as definitional of what It is - as the extent to which it feeds into planetary delirium.

I guess this makes me a D/G fundamentalist?

Coming back to a pt Johneffay made on the other thread: seems to me that one of the things that separates out capital from sorcery is the issue of teleology. It is at the level of teleology, not 'dynamics' (which are undeniably as nick says, escalative), that capitalism's conservatism lies.

(1) 'Oedipus' is a reterritorialization, that's to say it only appears because capitalism is actually chewing-up humanity - sure, kill Oedpius, but that doesn't mean capitalism is in any real sense 'humanizing' (quite the opposite).
Capital/Oedipus: torch the monkey while giving it a doll to play with to keep it quiet

(2) Really don't think 'teleology' is appropriate here. Capital's only 'teleology' is MORE ('escalation' = contagion). If that's a telos, what wouldn't be?
It definitely has an obscure teleonomy - phase-shift to (approximately) polytendrilled intelligenic posthuman cyberspace. Sorcery can live with that.

(3) Apologies for fundie marxism, but doesn't a critique have to align itself with a plausible revolutionary potential if it's to be anything other than conservative lament?
Think D&G had it right: "accelerate the process"

Yes, I think this is the nub of the issue:

D/G fundamentalism wd insist that reterriorialization is inherent to capitalism, so that the 'phase-shift to (approximately) polytendrilled intelligenic posthuman cyberspace' is what capitalism inhibits (whilst constantly flirting with).

No need to apologize for 'fundie marxism' (not to me at least): but don't D/G suggest that 'accelerating the process' will precisely take us out of capitalism and into Schizophrenia...

Mark - it's a matter of simple record that relatively trivial terminological issues have continually snarled up the substantial q.s here --from Braudel, DeLanda ... and now there's China (and the 'market-oriented socialist economy' - weird looping back to Braudel actually)
I really wouldn't care much about this, except that the 'anticapitalist' movement (Naomi Klein will do just great to define it) is so profoundly abhorrent to me that it calls forth a violent differentiating reflex ... for this reason i'd much rather talk of 'hypercapitalism' than some such mouthful as 'promarket anticapitalism' when talking of a radically disinhibited market-driven dismantling of the humanistic socius (at least when i'm not at the day job)
My maxim right now, find out what the French most hate and fear and call it that - pity 'unilateral militarized anglosaxon-style zionist hyperliberal technomaniac globalization' doesn't produce a good acronym

obv this is largely a tactical matter, but tactics are bound up with terminological issues which sadly aren't just trivial....

I fully sympathise with the impulse towards a differentiating reflex but I think that it is equally important to differentiate the k positive position from molar bUSiness. In other words, it's important to hold onto the basic D/G/Braudel/de Landa insight i.e. the separation of markets from Really Existing Capitalism...

'Hypercapitalism' I can live with, but 'promarket anticapitalism' , far from being cumbersone, sounds to me actually quite snappy...

Seems to me there's an uh marketing opportunity in keeping open a relationship to anti-capitalism. Lots of people involved in the 'movement' probably feel some kind of inchoate anger/ frustration/ depression and have nowhere to put it except into this moralizing, conservative, organicist, statist and authoritarian politics.

Mark - your last paragraph especially nuanced and thought provoking. Of course, vampirizing this swamp of "moralizing, conservative, organicist, statist and authoritarian politics" makes sense -its stubborn resilience is intrinsically saddening though.
Also quite interesting, if you're naturally happy with 'promarket anticapitalism' you'd fit in great with today's Chicoms. I've got increasing problems with it though, which i'll try and spell out cogently in a later mail.

agree that the question of terminology is a strategic one - as with all hyperstitional issues certain there is no one right answer - depends who you are talking to and when. Yet, think there is something important about occupying and taking over very familiar terms that are (apparently) understood by all - don't think capitalism or globalization should be abandoned.

On China and the promarket anticapitalist line - there is something useful in the position you are forced to adopt here - speaking only about markets and the State (both where they are clearly distinguished and where and how they intermingle). However, it alo makes clear why this is not really sufficient.

One reason China is not capitalist, for example, is that it doesn't have a strong stock market. The existence of stock markets is obviously one way to define capitalism. Capitalism is a system that allows you make savings productive (by investing in other companies through the stock market) rather than just burrying your savings(buying stuff or hiding it under your bed). This seems to me to be a (positive) systematic feature of capitaslism not markets.

On a slightly diferent note - and not necessarily connected to hyperstition - this article on global views of globalization is pretty interesting - expected the difference between the West and Asia but was surprised by the stats out of Africa

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=1934

But surely stock markets are markets? (Or am I missing something?)

I've heard that the situation in another ex-communist country, Russia, is very interesting. So many ppl distrust banks that they do keep their money under their beds. Effectively this means their money is not capital --- it has been converted into cash.

In general, I think that in the west there is a potential groundswell, esp amongst the young. At the moment this registers in the media only negatively --- as 'apathy' or 'disengagement from politics'. But as politicians here seem hellbent on undermining what remaining credibility they have, and politics increasingly = cynical administration/ administrative cynicism, there is a space, an opportunity...

Can we come back to the teleology issue? Think this 'MORE' question absolutely germane ---- isn't this the problem with capitalism though ---- i.e. in that, in one sense, it is purely goal directed and, in another, not end-directed at all, since more can always be .... more (maybe it's goal-orientated but not end-directed?)

Any way, the point is that Kapital's innate dissatisfaction seems to agitate against plateau-maintenance.

Extensive versus intensive magnitudes?

>>> Think this 'MORE' question absolutely germane ---- isn't this the problem with capitalism though ---- i.e. in that, in one sense, it is purely goal directed and, in another, not end-directed at all, since more can always be .... more (maybe it's goal-orientated but not end-directed?)

Mark,

‘MORE’ is a goal-oriented process (?) if it is confined by a metronic progression (a dynamic scale-based progression) or a concrescence process in the term of Whitehead (who failed to grasp becoming as epidemic multiplicity) but MORE is not really a laminar stream with methexes (economical participations) between its tributaries. ‘MORE’ is intrinsically a turbulent process devouring any goal on its way. More is not a dynamic accumulation which can be appropriated as a goal-oriented progression since accumulation itself is bound to its internal capacity (what renders accumulation possible), any accumulation trying to transgress its capacity will be WASTED AWAY. Therefore, MORE runs as a capacity-devourer by intensively reinforcing itself with MORE, undermining any ‘dynamic but economical articulation on telos’ or ‘goal’ which remotely appropriates any progression without directly imposing itself upon the process (unlike the End). Capacity is actually what holds a process and links it to a goal. This is an old theistic issue that since Man has a capacity, the process of apotheosis (or deification: in Christian term it is becoming the Son, the Christ) or goal-orientated progression is made possible; if Man attempts to work beyond or out of this capacity the goal will be aborted and radically deviated (radically multiplied?).

Moreover, all goal-oriented processes and progressions are distributed as capacity/ground-based affect spaces: the goal is affected by the progression and the progression is dynamically regulated by the goal; more than that, both the goal and the progression should afford each other synchronically or everything will be ruined. Now there is a question: which goal can afford the unreliable polytics of ‘MORE’ which unpredictably runs as ‘More and More’?

>relative absence of Western
>cynicism/miserabilism - how to explain this
>difference

isn't this just a question of time-orientation, ie those living on the periphery are doing so in anticipation of real transformations of conditions of life, whereas in the saturated (or at least asymptotically 'improving') west people have been through the - at the level of the human - closed cycle of consumption and work for several generations, so there is a lesser orientation towards the future as change/transformation; the increasingly explicitly codified and planned nature of capitalist 'existence' also plays a part, with the general outcome that mark describes, a growing pressure on the statically-coded behaviours that regulate capitalist societies (as distinct from the process of K/schizophrenia). Think that mark made a good point some time ago when he said that London had lived with capitalism for longer than anywhere else, so if you want to see the future, look to uk miserablism!

>find out what the French most hate and fear and call it that

it always surprises me what a role personal bigotry has to play in 'accelerating the process'! It strikes me(I speak as an incompetent in economics of course and am open to correction) that France is a germane anomaly - higher-than-euro-average per capita GDP; third most productive workforce in the world despite the shortest working-hours in europe; world's 4th largest economy, 4th-largest stock market, 4th largest derivatives trader; large trade surplus; third largest host country for international investment...Isomorphic to this 'paradox' (from the point of view of neocon economics) is that the french simultaneously reject all PC-healthfreakery and yet are healthier than other 'advanced' euro countries and the US. They have the cultural resource to attempt to reject both decadence and the flipside ascetic puritanism that comes with it, both McDonald's and diet books.

The french attitude is not 'anti-globalisation' but is constitutive of a systematic deconflation of marketization and globalisation from all the cultural factors that spokespeople for US economic expansion habitually utter in the same breath : total personal commitment to work/consumerism (decadent-asceticism); repudiation of all collective social investment, etc.etc. (and now we're expected to take evangelical christianity with our markets too). This is exactly what was at stake with the french position on iraq - refusal to use the confusion of totally disconnected registers of discourse to dissimulate the exercise of power.

Because the link between culture and economics in the very widest sense is what HS is all about, part of what's at issue here should precisely be this conflation of markets with these other cultural factors, as if capital had a 'character'.

Whether capitalism is characterised in sublime, religiously-inflected terms by GWB, Mohammed Atta, or Barker, is all the same; the romantic inflection of sublime lovecraftian darkness relies as much on the 'phenomenal level processing' of the human as much as does anti-capitalist/green angst, or gungho christian sentimentalism. Thus I don't think you can hide behind said sublimity by declaring it as 'the real' or 'noumenal' against interlocutors' pitiful all-too-human complaints. It's just a different emotional investment. I think we can agree that _expecting_ the human to be a phenomenal nexus of intensity is somewhat problematic, but I don't think the problem is disposed of as easily as is suggested.

>Kapital... seems to agitate against plateau-maintenance.
one thing that's interesting to me about Bohme-Bauwerk is the _flight_ from production; in some sense Kapital wants to avoid both consummation/consumption and production, so it casts its nets further and further into the future (futures/derivatives trading being a pure case). Thus the plateau is produced because there is no possibility of what kapital anticipates ever being 'achieved'. At the phenomenal level this is obviously a problem because it cashes out (excuse the pun) as infinite deferral. This is the real prob with 'savings' - not that they're saved under the bed but that they're constantly 'put to work' for something that will never arrive. Now the interesting practical thing from this pov is the collapse of pensions etc. (as ever because of the utter incompetence of the managers who somehow manage to be _worse_ at gambling than the rest of us!) which really disrupts the psychology of this process, thus providing additional pressure to mark's 'dissatisfied' minority.

Mark
- hope you're right on the 'groundswell' - take more to get me optimistic (see Harcur)

Reza
- think i totally agree with your take on MORE (although not entirely sure i'm following the religious angle)

Harcur
- v. interesting post (provocative of course)
Needs processing time, but for now:
On France - IMHO taking the French post-war economy as if it was some kind of monad is clearly preposterous, given that the whole EU is a giant reparations scheme, you have to at least amalgamate the frankenreich economy into a unit before analysing it, or otherwise wait til the deutschers run away screaming (which won't be long now)
Also, since 'neocon' evidently destined to continually reappear as a critical term, it's worth understanding what it means. Not an easy one, but broadly speaking 'neocons' are US exleftists who have been "mugged by reality" - still tend to be distinct 'softies' - think the better term for your critique is 'brutal supply sider' (far crunchier on tax cuts etc)
In the US "neoliberal" doesn't get used (because 'liberal' now perversely means 'socialist' over there, but in Latin America that's the term of choice - IMHO also a better one)
The religious issue is also important, clearly - hope we can get back to it - but straight off, if there is an in-your-face double pincer at work in contemporary politics it seems to be the necessity of combining reactionary social values with revolutionary ('capitalist') economic ones, or vice versa - nihilistic capitalism (raw 'exuberant growth) doesn't ever get a platform (interesting phenomenon in itself?)
Anyway, much more here to discuss ;)

Mark -
But surely stock markets are markets? (Or am I missing something?)

glad to have the chance to untangle these issues - obviously needs to be slow and requires careful definitions of terms (esp. capitalism and markets). To start with tho - it seems to me that the stock market is not a market at least not in the Braudel/Delanda use the term. Both of them view markets as street markets or peasant markets.. The stock market is much more abstract and systemic. Think that while it connected to Braudelian markets it cannot be said to be the same thing (in fact Braudel would probably put the stock market on the side of capitalism).

Harcur
Thus the plateau is produced because there is no possibility of what kapital anticipates ever being 'achieved'. At the phenomenal level this is obviously a problem because it cashes out (excuse the pun) as infinite deferral

Agree that BB interesting on the question of capitalism and plateaus but think it a mistake to say that for him time + capital = infinite defferral - Instead in BB's analyses of capitalism time + capital = technological innovation (it is precisely on this point that he criticizes Marx). His example of the differnce between going to get water every day from the river ( a precapitalist society) and investing the time and money to get running water from the tap (capitalist society) is surely an 'acheivement'.

if you want to see the future, look to uk miserablism!

think this is massively important and don't want to be glib - but UK miserabilism is only the future at the core - the future of global capitalism, however, always proceeds from the edges (where things are most dynamic, exciting, innovative.) This, of course, is not purely geographical - London, NY etc have their own peripheries but more on this some other time...

Also, think it HIGHLY intersting that Braudel/D&G def. 'capitalism' is precisely the 'French model' high tax, State-synthesized politically directed version (dripping with 'social solidarity' and antimarket rhetoric) - yet the hardcore of the 'anticapitalist' fraternity inevitably rush to the arms of Paris when this model is contested by the ruthless-jungly anglosaxon type (wait til you see what's brewing up on the Pacific Rim - Cato institute has Hong Kong / Singapore top of the economic freedom league)
think for a minute about the irony here ...
PS. the French call 'the enemy' 'hyperliberalism'

>>> This is exactly what was at stake with the french position on iraq - refusal to use the confusion of totally disconnected registers of discourse to dissimulate the exercise of power.

LurCur, what you mentioned here is just ‘partly’ true: the nervous system of French politics, culture and economy has already been paralyzed by petropolitical currents emerging from the East (esp. from such countries like Iran and Kuwait); if you live here you can easily realize how the Petropolitical undercurrents are effectively configuring the French positions whether in Iraq war or in its european or global politico-economic strategies. Such positions are highly affected by the foreign politico-economic productions which are imported as the built-in components of petropolitical undercurrents (you can’t get oil without its petropolitical pipelines which stealthily smuggling all kinds of cultural / economic / political vectors). Shut down the pipeline system and see how soon these positions change.

Reza - brilliant!

Nick sorry for being hasty in unfolding the theistic panorama of eternal progression and capacity or ‘affordance’ sphere. Think this quote from Cyril of Alexandria may help a bit: “We shall become Sons by methexis”. Affordance (or capacity-based affect sphere) is internal to methexis (platonic participation). Affordance works on two parallel lines to maintain the methexis or the engine of eternal progression: [1] consolidating entities and processes through a ‘sphere’ (capacity) which all can ‘afford’ [2] enveloping all functions and interactions through a capacity which in fact keeps the process of theistic progression away from deviation. For going through methexis, religion exhorts that at the first place, the ‘sum capacity’ (of individuals, entities, communities, etc.) must be discovered and then transcended as a safe sphere only through which participation (methexis) can be initiated and developed to a guaranteed consolidating process (goal-oriented process or eternal progression, apotheosis). uh-oh this is still damn confusing so I suggest Asian Peace endnote.12 and Pestis Solidus pp. 14-16 (at the Cold Me website) for more clarification. Again sorry for the references ;)

PS. totally agreed with you about shedding (un)light on the term 'neocon'.

Anna,

but surely the street markets model is 'abstractable'? Surely the fact that the stock market is abstract is not in itself a reason to say it is not a market in Braudel or De Landa's sense? Or, to put it another way, what is it abt stock markets that make them anti-markets?

Think this is really really important in that it we need to stay focused on what 'capital' is, i.e. not cash, but - essentially - finance capital. (There is no capital, really, that isn't finance capital).

Maybe the anti-market stratification is between the stock market (finance capital) and the labour market (payment capital)?

Thus the major 'class' division is not between owner/ worker but between users of finance capital and receivers of payment 'capital'.

Reza

On the more is more thing --- yes, but this precisely highlights the nightmare anti-plateau insatiability of Kapital --- More is never enough ----

HarCur

The London thing goes to show the extent to which Kapital is essentially steampunk rather than SF. The future of capital will increasingly lie in the past, as Kurtz found out. Expect more and more hideous combinations of archaic traditions and up-to-the-minute tech...

That's partly why I'm suspicious of any teleonomic description of Kapital, as if what 'It really is' will arrive one day as planetary destiny...

Mark, when you say: ‘More is never enough’ ... you have assumed that there should be a threshold, a limit, a capacity or horizon (horismos: boundary) somewhere through the MORE infernomatics which cannot be satisfied, reached or fed but as I previously discussed, first of all, MORE devours just that very capacity or dynamic limit so IMHO, the pseudo-economical phrase ‘More is never enough’ meets the same metronic process exploited by the doctrine of eternal progression (of course after extra-appropraitions) or apotheosis (or the master of pseudo-flux). The Kapital IS a night-mare (a hag-ridden nightmare at a cosmic level); we have a long journey ahead to grasp it (but you never know).

>>> Expect more and more hideous combinations of archaic traditions and up-to-the-minute tech...

Excellent!

before I say anything more about Bohme-Bauwerk I will have to save up

>Thus the major 'class' division is not between owner/ worker
>but between users of finance capital and receivers of payment
>'capital'.

There's not such a clear distinction now since everyone has access to large amounts of credit and opportunities for investment - every consumer is now (potentially) a 'capitalist' in an active sense. Although one could say the class division is between those who know how to, or are inclined to, make 'productive' use of timestretching financial-technologies and those who for whatever reason are inclined to use them 'hedonistically' (are not acculturated to the ascetic discipline of investment).

Yeh, that's what I was trying to say; you've put it much better...

Mark, when you say: ‘More is never enough’ ... you have assumed that there should be a threshold, a limit, a capacity or horizon (horismos: boundary) somewhere through the MORE infernomatics which cannot be satisfied, reached or fed but as I previously discussed, first of all, MORE devours just that very capacity or dynamic limit so IMHO, the pseudo-economical phrase ‘More is never enough’ meets the same metronic process exploited by the doctrine of eternal progression (of course after extra-appropraitions) or apotheosis (or the master of pseudo-flux).

I don't think I was assuming that at all --- quite the contary in fact --- this insatiable threshold-deferral still seems like an anti-plateau to me ---

Mark, sorry i don't want to look dogmatically logical but what emanates from that phrase is a stealth, dynamic limit ... it cannot be ignored.

Deferral comes to our discussion when you can diachronically measure (from metron) the MORE (assuming MORE as a laminar continuation running on a solid bedrock but MORE is the gaseous bedrock of itself) or synchronically detect a continuous spacing process (gapping, deferring, etc.) between MORE and a threshold, a crossing-line or a limit which is always inaccessible. MORE exactly subverts this space which is more a plenum (a metronic capacity through which one can speak of deferral) rather than spatium by positively incapacitating all metronic dynamisms, transgressing the capacitation and through its terminal multipilicity, consequently rendering off the threshold-deferral or the inaccessible space dynamically articulated on telos.

However, I think I understand your anti-Plateau discussion and I appreciate if you discuss it under a separate post (not a comment) to facilitate our discussion.

"Kapital is essentially steampunk rather than SF"
This really is a Europe thing, honest.

IMHO the teleology /deferred gratification complex has proven one of the most obsessively pursued here, fo good reasons and with a lot of further digging to do.
The dark hypercapitalist angle on this would be that 'the Thing' puppetizes humanity into investing in an inhuman becoming by tantalizing it with an artificial future (one of eventual abundant satisfaction of human desires). Of course, there's room for a passionate (IMHO highly romantic and conservative) humanistic critique of this manipulation. The more difficult question: is there also a compelling antihumanistic critique?

>>> The dark hypercapitalist angle on this would be that 'the Thing' puppetizes humanity into investing in an inhuman becoming by tantalizing it with an artificial future.

This should really be questioned on strategic levels (sounds very profound) ... think Mark's point about the deferral-complex becomes highly relevant here from the strategic angle.

... Mark, think I should reevaluate the deferral-complex you discussed on a strategic plane ;)

"Kapital is essentially steampunk rather than SF"
This really is a Europe thing, honest.

Really? You'd know better obv. Surely outside Europe abounds with examples where archaic political systems are combined with ultramodern technology?

As for the plateau thing, agree it merits another thread, especially since this one is about to slip off the front page, though (strictly speaking) it is OT, i.e. what is the relationship to hyperstition?

think the issue is neither humanist nor antihumanist --- why would a plateau be human after all?

>>> especially since this one is about to slip off the front page, though (strictly speaking) it is OT, i.e. what is the relationship to hyperstition?

lol ... yes ... but hyperstition can make relationships i.e. digging up secret krypts to make it relevant (anyway, there is no rush to investigate this thread but definitely there is a room for it).

"Surely outside Europe abounds with examples where archaic political systems are combined with ultramodern technology?"
I'd assumed 'steampunk' required more than this - after all, cyberpunk fits this criterion perfectly as well (just take the Ashpools for one utterly typical example)

You might be right, but isn't that because k-punk includes steampunk elements? Probably need to firm up my thoughts on this...

Mark - think that would be interesting. I'm not getting much rigorous signal from 'steampunk' at the moment, just vague associations with re-animated 19th C. futurism (Difference Engine and Moorcock stuff, probably far less versed in the genre than you are). If there's a more exact set of associations i'm sure it could add to the conceptual tool-kit.

Mark, think most of countries in the Arabic confedracy are getting (or have been) anti-steapunk. Take Dubai for example and look into its upcoming Internet City (or as mentioned an Ethernet Oasis within a city); petroleum is always ready to eat the steam.

Petropunk anyone?

But surely the Arabic countries - even Dubai - combine archaic authoritarianisms with new tech?

Well, i'm not sure that you can 'completely' take the contemporary islamism as an instance of archaic authoritarianism since what you see as islamic goverments or islamic political systems in the Middle East are terribly mutated (darkly modernized) broods of the primal islamic germ-cell ... these authoritarian / political systems are radically different (and maybe dissociated) from islamic authoritarian / economic / political patterns in the past; they are totally alien to thier forerunners. but even i'm not quite sure that we can consider them as the mutated broods of the archiac (or even old) islamic political systems. They are autonomous political systems growing along petropolitical undercurrents and through petroleum as a hyperstitional entity (Dean Koontz's novel).

Plus, one of the reasons that they look archaic is their profound alienage (not mentioning their antagonism) to western modes of Civil-ization.

Now that the ultra-modern technology combines with such artificialized cryptogenic political systems, you can expect to see a new avatar of the planetary Thing.

Your site is realy very interesting!