This talk shares new research on memory, gesturing toward a rhetoric of human-inhuman composition. Drawing on the medievalist Mary Carruthers, I'll explore the art of composition that early medieval monasteries cultivated, a rhetorical practice in which remembering a text was a creative act, equal parts recollection and invention. Drawing on the writer and researcher AA Cavia, I'll then turn to computing. Neural networks are undermining what he calls decomposability, the assumption that we could understand a program's output by breaking it down. What remains is orientation, and the…
Simone Cicero of Boundaryless presents O2A (Open Organisation Alliance), a proposed open standard for making organizations 'composable' by replacing implicit coordination mechanisms like hierarchy and meetings with an explicit, machine-readable contract graph of units, offerings, and relationships. He argues the protocol's compact grammar—three economic primitives (purchase, revenue split, investment) plus composition mechanisms—can represent bespoke institutional arrangements like Haier's Rendanheyi model or joint ventures as 'sentences' in a common organizational language, becoming essential as AI agents enter firms and transaction costs collapse.
Most teams 'adopt AI' by buying new, and mostly untested software, then wait for a productivity jump that never shows up in the numbers. That missing productivity is the signature of the stage we are actually in: the Kit phase. Every general-purpose technology — the steam engine, the Model T, the PC — passes through it: loose components people tinker with, repurpose, and master by doing, long before anyone builds the firm-scale machinery that turns tinkering into measured output. Farmers ran corn shellers and water pumps off jacked-up Model Ts for years before Ford watched them and built the…
Sachin Benny argues that AI modernity is reorganizing our relationship to the past the way industrial capitalism reorganized our relationship to the future, coining 'Archival Time' as a condition where traces of prior events become retrievable without recreating the event. He contrasts this with Bakhtin's 'Carnival Time,' bounded periods where accumulated traces lose authority and things get unmade and remade, drawing on William Sewell's eventfulness framework (path dependency, temporal heterogeneity, contingency) to argue eventful history requires a mix of both archival inheritance and carnivalesque rupture.