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Matteo McDermott

Matteo McDermott

PhD Candidate in American Studies (University of New Mexico) specializing in technology, labor, and democracy; co-host of Technoprogressive Hub Podcast; founder of Bread and Robots

Jul 18, 2026

7:06
That's right, that's
7:07
right.
7:08
But yes, the first kind of deep theory that we dug into was Bogdanov's book, The Philosophy of Living Experience, which... is actually the popular version of a set of essays on the nature and purpose of philosophy and how philosophy interacts with you know human struggle progress and the kind you know like the theories of change and how we should organize and develop society so those are called the there's a bunch of essays there's a collection of essays actually you can get on haymarket There's called Imperial Monism, but it's a very, that's a very tech, there's a very technical collection of essays.
7:58
And he kind of, he decided that it was, you know, that, that was really, not going to be not going to speak to the popular people uh who are interested in labor organizing at that time and instead he should do a kind of history of philosophy and situate imperial monism and at the end a theory which eventually became the basis of cybernetics called technology which is the which he called the universal science of organization he was trying to develop a systems theory that would discover the underlying principles that connect all disciplines of knowledge together to create effectively something similar to like a unified, similar to like in physics, you have the unified field theory that is like the Holy grail of theoretical physics.
8:54
You know, he was trying to unify all different forms of knowledge by understanding how they organize human thought and action.
9:02
So, you know, How do we, and effectively because he wanted to be able to apply the methods of one field of knowledge to other fields of knowledge and to integrate various methods, not according to a discipline, but according to whatever question was at hand.
9:21
So that methods would be freed from these contained, you know, these silos of knowledge.

12 MINS LATER

21:24
And so the idea is that there's a politics of design and that technoprogressivism would be, you know, centrally interested in this politics of design.

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