10/18/2026
This week on &&& Triple Ampersand, we are publishing “A Darkness unto Itself: A Response to ‘The Superdark Factory’” by Reza Negarestani.
The text responds to “The Superdark Factory” by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, which proposes an organization whose architect cedes internal command and lets production run past whatever the governor already knows how to want. Negarestani grants the audacity of making opacity a condition of governance, and then presses where the argument overreaches. That an organization cannot describe itself exhaustively does not mean it holds no working self-model, nor that its identity has to be constituted from outside.
What the essay keeps in view is the asymmetry that survives the renunciation of control. The architect forfeits first-order mastery while installing a kernel of commitments whose violation would be fatal to the factory, so autonomy is exercised inside terms fixed before the possibilities it was built to reach could appear. Against the silent conversion of that founding cut into necessity, Negarestani proposes reconstruction trace, a selective and retrospective recovery of how a consequence was produced, enough to return an inheritance to argument instead of receiving it as accomplished fact.
The exchange could be heard live last weekend at the Maxim Gorki Theater, where FEEDBACK SESSIONS opened with Negarestani’s Deep Object, Broken Metabolism, continued with Anna Longo’s The Informing Self, and closed with a discussion between Negarestani, Longo, Poliks, and Alonso Trillo.
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IMAGE: Carl Grossberg, The Paper Machine (Die Papiermaschine), 1934.
