Music improvisation is an act of human-becoming: of self-expression—an articulation of histories and memories that have molded its participants—and of exploration—a search for unimagined structures that break with the stale norms of majoritarian culture. Given that the former objective may inhibit the latter, we propose an integration of human musical improvisers and deliberately flawed creative software agents that are designed to catalyze the development of human-ratified minoritarian musical structures.

This reply speaks to Robert Latham's ‘arc of capitalism’ frame by confronting ideological intransigence as a barrier to Left augmentation. It suggests a focus on ‘warlike relations’ as a way to move past this. Politics as war is a lens that incorporates the everyday, ‘events on the street’, within questions of labor power, more specifically by linking abstract systemic flows of the reproduction of capital and its political apparatuses. The focus on politics as war is a terrain over which to more deeply contemplate the potential for a revolutionary politics against the ‘total liberal-capitalist hegemony’. The prism of war opens up the possibility for confronting the strategic elements of this hegemony, by attending to the mechanisms through which hegemony emerges, forms and asserts itself.

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What are the implications of the current fundamental transformations in capitalist society? Above all, there is the emergence of a new form of political subjectivity. The dominant forms of liberal subjectivity are being replaced by the emerging subjectivity of digital social objects (DSOs). What are consequences of this? Succinctly, there is a shift from neo (or, ordo) liberalism to socialized cybernetics as the new ideological grounding of current capitalist society. The imposition of socialized cybernetics is transforming generalized proletarianization, leading to the further radical impoverishment and reduction of human life, and its transformation into new political categories. This new phase of capitalism (or perhaps, a moment where capitalism is approaching its systemic limits?) is centered on biological beings with human capacities, rather than human beings, a condition of stunted, dependent subjectivity more accurately described as Homo Datum. Capitalism is moving into a condition, where human beings are collapsed, reduced to, and made interchangeable with cybernetic digital social objects. The political is now the pseudo-political, having been incorporated into the positivist (non-dialectical) logic of the capitalist economic structures. Homo Datum denotes the now-nominally human, biological being with human capacities, which for the purposes of the capitalist economy functions as a particular instance of a digital social object. Crucially, social relations are now not necessarily human-to-human relations (even in their alienated forms) but are approached by capitalist economic structures and their subservient political forms, as particular cybernetic (mathematical) functions "adapted" in their application to social life: as datum. What are the consequences of this for political struggle? One approach centered on Soviet Marxists like Evald Ilyenkov suggest we must think of politics through the fundamental political question: what does it mean to be human? Centering our thinking about the political through this question, and from within this Ilyenkovian approach, can help in our struggle against the ideological structures that make sense of Homo Datum pseudo-subjectivity, and the related society of digital social objects under capitalist class control.