Acid Horizon 'Digital Theory' Panel Discussion: Is Theory Itself Digital? (Fazi, Galloway, Weatherby, Handleman)
15 snips
Feb 19, 2026 Leif Weatherby, director and AI/language scholar; Matthew Handelman, mathematician-turned-critic; Alexander Galloway, theorist of computation; Beatrice Fazi, philosopher of technology. They debate whether digitality is a foundational mode of thought, trace its history from arithmetic to floating point, and rethink abstraction, representation, and dialectics in relation to continuity and theory.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Digital As Ontological Condition
- The digital is framed as an ontological condition grounded in discreteness rather than mere consumer tech.
- This reframing makes digitality a fundamental mode of mediation that shapes thought and theory.
Theory Mirrors Digital Abstraction
- Beatrice argues theory and digitality are isomorphic through abstraction as cut-and-rebuild operations.
- She claims thought itself is a digital operation: it mediates and abstracts experience via discrete decisions.
Digital Defined As Discrete Representation
- Alexander defines the digital as representation using discrete units and sees arithmetic as its elementary science.
- He traces digital philosophy historically back to structuralism and code-focused 20th-century thought.
