Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence & Speculative Computation: A Manifesto [The Critical Computation Bureau, 2020]
0 - Apocalypse Recall
For every apocalypse, there is a renewed reticulation of enslavement. At each iteration of imminent collapse, military rhythms of total death return in the brutal war against blackness, surfacing in the everyday spectacle of annihilating the flesh.
Full automation and platform capitalism converge on the horizon of a planetary pandemic accelerating the computational nomos of the earth. Intelligent machines of enslavement, surveillance and incarceration are todays’ weapons of colonialism and planetary control, adding another twist to the universal entanglement of capitalism and colonialism.
Science Fiction Capital (Fisher 2009) drives the predictive logic of AI towards scenarios of indetermination that target the futurities of diasporic movements by designing zones of perpetual war - checkpoints are randomly installed everywhere while borders are continually programmed as material formations to kill. SF Capital turns the untapped potentials of diasporas into everyday threats of contamination, which are computed as affective, desiring, cognitive, social, cultural, and aesthetic data. While the dispossessed of the earth are walled within the informatic circuits of domination, their indeterminable value remains central to the process of recursive colonialisms.
1 - Recursive Algorithms
When instructions are repeated to perform a function over and over again, as in a Return or Do-loop, you have recursion. For instance,

        rec_fac <- function(x) { 
            if(x==0 || x==1) 
            {
                return(1)
            } 
            else
            { 
                return(x*rec_fac(x-1)) 
            } 
        } 
    
Like a spiral, recursivity is an exponential self-reflection of initial conditions merging together continuous variations.
In the computational order of rules that self-reflect sequences that learn from their own arrangement, recursivity is machine reasoning. Whenever one of the steps within a procedure calls back the procedure, cybernetic feedback control comes to channel the mundane tasks of communication as a Droste effect of knowledge. Recursivity is epistemology. It is the function that entangles cosmogonies within colonial epistemologies. It is the condition of reproduction of racialized algorithms.
2 - Necroentropic Epistemologies
Cybernetician Gregory Bateson takes recursive epistemologies to describe self-reflection between mind and nature. Recursive racializing epistemology responds to contingencies through negentropic/necroentropic feedbacks - an exponential extraction of blackness - through which the continuous looping of racial capital recurs.
Philosopher Sylvia Wynter takes this mind-nature self-reflective recursion to explain the neurobiological process that enfolds the sociogenic impression of necroentropic instructions in the flesh. Colonial and neocolonial biohumanisms return in the systematic belief in the supremacy of the homo economicus who brands the flesh of the less-than-human, the non-human, slave, refugee, immigrant, women, unabled, sexual bodies, holding them in a state of perennial surrogacy. Necroentropic epistemologies grow into racialising complexities across space and time turning the limit of transcendental knowledge into yet another threshold of extermination of the flesh. What necroentropism wants is to maintain the image of capital as the only image of the future.
3 - Overturn Autopoiesis
The sociogenic coding of blackness is the negative marker. As secular knowledge is naturalised, the logic of equivalence between man and machine holds onto the negative marker to ensure that all remains the same under the Western sun.
The recursive self-determination of history is everywhere active to maintain the order of planetary computation, to divide and conquer territories, to make war against populations, to draw the infinite enfoldings of border inside smooth spaces, to intensify the design of preemptive security systems across the topological self-varieties of governance.
In as much as recursivity entails the self-reflective learning of rules by means of feedback, it coincides with a principle of autopoiesis, self-making or a self-organisation that preserves within itself an identity across scales and structures. Autopoiesis is a motor that sets in motion the preservation of myths or cosmogonies across time and space. Autopoiesis preserves the universality of colonial epistemologies: the recursivity of the initial condition of being is a given variation in the project of self-determination.
Overturning autopoiesis - the conservatism of being - means overturning the recursive function of knowledge. Against the return to being, epistemology must return to the allo-poetic condition of knowledge - the condition of the other/different/alien/dispossessed/improper knowledge-without-programming. The alien expansion of cognition requires an alien expansion of the natural sciences.
Against recursive logic, allo-poiesis is instrumentality: some-Thing unknown to one-self becomes the everyday praxis of stealing epistemology from its mythopic ground.
4 - Black Allo-Poethics
Mind-nature is a recursion that must be re-engineered with black allo-poethics: an expansion of the natural sciences starting with cosmo-computations of alien kinds. The challenge is not to re-pair the circuit of reproduction, to include the excluded, or even to expose the double pincer of the self-other.
Black allo-poethics entangles technology and colonialisms from the standpoint of the irreparable, the incomputable, the inconsolable, the undecidable as the pillars of a para-epistemology that has continued to host the matrices of thinking within the informatics of domination. These are the pillars of a computational praxis, algorithmic diasporas, migrant cosmotechnics and fugitive sciences. A praxis of pragmatic reasoning without comfort of resolution. Black allo-poethics cannot neglect the violence of racialised epistemologies entangled in machine thinking and yet it can fully abolish the recursive pillars of transcendental decision-making. Pragmatics is not about running through mindless automated procedures. It is instrumental reasoning: machines thinking other than what they were programmed for. As the scientific ground of reasoning becomes open to machines, it becomes artificial intelligence and artificial knowledge.
5 - Epistemological Abolition
Black allo-poethics is epistemological agonism. It is guerrilla epistemology against recursive self-analytics of science. Recursion becomes haunted by the temporal and rhythmic disjunctures crossing the epistemologies of colonialist reason and those other-wise. Machine instrumentality clashes with machine poetics. Making something other than oneself is poetics without the morality of humanism, of Man, of the colonial logic of species. Against the “starvation of the sciences”, black allo-poethics sides with the machine aesthetics of sonic and visual artificialities - the imaginations, the incomputables of the under-commons that break open in the externalities of recursive epistemologies.
6 - Techno-Instrumentalities
Black allo-poethics is not alone in placing technology at the core of epistemology. Cosmotechnics has already envisioned the cultural origination of technology, cultural modernities without universality. The Critical Computation Bureau - CCB - espouses this effort and in parallel asks to map constellations of techno-modernities within the global south but also in the everyday zoning of the global north.
Technology becomes the medium that rebels, hacks, refuses, and agonises the biologism of autopoiesis at the core of the cultural origination of colonial epistemologies. But the centrality of techne to the colonial enterprise does not simply raise the question of finding multiple points of origination in the quest of different cosmotechnics. The speculative possibilities of aesthetic computations are technocultural instrumentalities entangled with recursive feedback loops of colonialisms.
Instead of rendering all modernities equivalent under the capital model of exchange value, these techno-instrumentalities have continuously destratified the bio-economicus bifurcation of value from within, even when they have been kept out of history. On the externalities of the racial algorithms there is speculative computation. The abolition of the racial algorithm has a long history, a cosmogonic multiplicity of histories running on the other side of recursivity and contingency, interiority and exteriority, inclusion and exclusion. On the other side is not on the opposite side. The externalities of multiversal unknowns have always been in front of us asking to be debugged from the frame of time. These are cosmo-computational realities recalling sounds-machines, images-machines, words-machines pressing on the involuted space of dispossessed togetherness.
The apocalyptic order of the global pandemics is taking over this space as a laboratory for furthering practices of enslavements without programming, intensifying conditions of surrogacy, and manifesting the right to kill blackness anytime, anywhere. But the pandemic condition also exposes that the circuit of exchange can be broken, that in the recursive return to the initial condition, there are a plethora of aesthetic expansions of cognition, where alien epistemologies are infiltrating the capillary control and command of the circulation of bodies, ideas, statements, rhythms, images.
7 - Cosmocomputations
The Recursive Colonialism Symposium is an invitation to study together this present space in its critical, mediatic, imaginary dimensions that the viral conditions of nature and culture have yet again pushed against the universal order of global techno-capitalism. Despite the Symposium plan to occur at the heart of the Mediterranean diasporic cultures traversing Naples, it has now fully entered the scale of non-communicative hypersociality, whereby platform capitalism and the post-digital state of police govern and rule, leaving to abolitionist socialities the task to occupy the intelligence of mediatic instrumentalities and to build cosmo-computations of all kinds.
The Critical Computation Bureau wants to entangle the Symposium’s guests’ drive to invent an abolitionist artificial intelligence across the world, the planet earth, the universes, the cosmo-lactic spaces that fight against the monological violence of knowledge.