Hello. In 3 hours at 3pm ET, we're going to get together and talk about Part I of The Eye of the Master:

• Chapter 2: "Babbage and the Mechanisation of Mental Labour"
• Chapter 3: "The Machinery Question"
• Chapter 4: "The Origins of Marx's General Intellect"
• Chapter 5: "The Abstraction of Labour"

This might be overly dismissive, but I feel like having read [Techno-Negative by Thomas Dekeyser][TN] made me want to breeze through chapters 2 and especially chapter 3, and the "question of machinery". Chapters 4 and 5 brought up a lot of new things that I hadn't read before (admittedly as someone who hasn't thoroughly read Capital...), and there are some quotes that I really want to share:

Marx reversed Thompson and Hodgskin’s knowledge theory of labour into the more materialistic labour theory of knowledge, in which forms of labour that are spontaneous, unconscious, tacit, and collective are also eventually recognised as producing knowledge.

Stretching its definition across a larger time scale, the expression ‘machine intelligence’ ultimately acquires at least four meanings: (1) the human knowledge of the machine; (2) the knowledge embodied by the machine’s design; (3) the human tasks automated by the machine; and (4) the new knowledge of the universe made possible by its use.

Marx reverses the perception of the steam engine as the prime catalyst of the Industrial Revolution. Instead, he contends that it is the growth of the division of labour, its tools and ‘tooling machines’, that ‘requires a mightier moving power than that of man’, a source of energy that will be found in steam

Steam engines replaced water mills not because coal was cheaper and more abundant than water, but because it provided a more stable flow of power than rainfalls and allowed factories to move close to urban areas, where the working class was living at the time. [Andreas] Malm has registered in this way the energetic rationale for the slow emergence of fossil capitalism out of the manufacturing age. It took roughly forty years for the steam engine to be adopted in the place of the water mill: if coal came to be used across the full spectrum of production, it was because it was the most adequate source of abstract energy, where ‘abstract’ means easily computable in terms of cost, transport, stock, performance, and social organisation.

I'm especially intrigued by chapter 5 and Pasquinelli's thoughts on "information", a subject that I'm now kind of invested in on a lot of levels, and I'd really, really like to hear all of your reflections on this chapter (and, uh, of course the other chapters this week).

When you're ready to join at 3p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.