Speed Speed´s Work

An Autistic Intervention in the Concept of Work - In the Age of AI and Robotics
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-6951-2807-5
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 476 Seiten

Reihe: Artistic Research - Critical Neurodiversity Studies

In "Speed's Work", one of the most profound and radical confrontations with the modern concept of labour and its associated social values unfolds. Timothy Speed - autistic artist, labour theorist, and human rights activist - has worked for over twenty years, almost entirely unpaid. For more than a decade, he has been engaged in a dramatic conflict with the German state - a struggle that goes far beyond the question of what labour is worth in a capitalist society. In a time when creativity, care work, and cultural engagement are systematically devalued and replaced by economic criteria, Speed defends his work as a fundamentally valuable contribution to society - even though, like around 80% of autistic people and many cultural workers, he earns nothing from his actions. In doing so, his work brings to light the realities faced by many marginalised groups. While the state drives him into poverty and persecutes him for refusing - and struggling, as an autistic person with ADHD - to submit to the false logic of the capitalist market, Speed uses his autistic pattern recognition to expose deep structural abuses within public authorities and corporate institutions. Through tireless effort and an unwavering commitment to self-determination and social justice, he reveals scandals in courts, public prosecutors' offices, and numerous bureaucracies and corporations. With his concept of "work-integrated relational agency", Speed calls for a new definition of labour - one that is humane, creative, and socially engaged, placing social value above economic profit. In a world increasingly shaped by robotics and artificial intelligence, he shows that resistance to machine-like functioning in the workplace is not only necessary, but essential - if we are to preserve human potential and civic responsibility.

Timothy Speed (b. 1973, England) is an artist, activist, and neurodivergent theorist. As an autistic person with ADHD, he lives what he writes about - in poverty, in conflict with institutions, and with a way of thinking that runs against the mainstream. His research is provocative and profound: for physics, for philosophy, for society. Through self-experiments, institutional investigations, and radically embodied theory, Speed develops a new perspective on consciousness, reality, and power. At its core stands the MNO theory - a model that derives nonlocality, subjectivity, and social order from a structural gap. From the exception to the rule. Speed does not research the world from the outside - he folds himself into it, lives in it as if in an open laboratory. His texts are the imprint of this practice: wild, precise, unsettling.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Speed, Timothy

Leseproben

THE MNO MODEL AND THE QUESTION OF FREEDOM AS A NECESSITY OF LABOUR

In 2016, my book The Physics of the Poor – A Neurodivergent Meta-Theory of Consciousness was published. In it, I developed a physical-mathematical model of consciousness based on a generative void. My aim was to rewrite physics from the perspective of the poor – not by grounding the world in things, but in productive absence. This led me far deeper than I had anticipated at the time. A new meta-model emerged that integrates and transcends most existing explanatory models of consciousness. The MNO model has its roots in the ideas I first developed in A Society Without Trust.The MNO model offers a framework that describes how objects, will, and experience generate and condition one another — and why any human system that neglects one of these dimensions is bound to fail. The integration of these three aspects constitutes what I referred to in A Society Without Trust (Gesellschaft ohne Vertrauen) as the focal point: a dynamic condensation where resonance with the world emerges — the world inscribes itself in us, just as we shape its unfolding through our subjectivity. This subjectivity must be trusted, for a world based solely on objects inevitably severs itself from a more complex and lived notion of reality — and with it, from the interrelation of work, meaning, relevance, and relationality in society and the ecosystem.

The MNO model posits that reality consists not only of perceivable phenomena (objects) and a conscious subject who observes them, but also of the dynamic interplay between the manifestation of things, the volitional drive (will), and subjective experience. The integration of will and experience is essential.

This ontological tripartism can be visualized as a symbiotic triangle:

• First, there are the tangible objects and events that appear in space and time — often as products of human activity.
• Second, the subjective experience of these manifestations.
• Third, the intentional force — what a person or a society truly desires or wills.

Together, they form an inherently unstable constellation — and such instability is vital wherever energy is at stake. After all, what could be more central to work than the question of energy? Consciousness unfolds in the pulsation of this triadic dynamic, in the opening and closing between these poles.

This perspective moves us beyond the classical concept of subjectivity — which often marginalizes inner experience within systemic structures, thereby blocking the energetic potential of free will. And this is crucial: the dominant model of the human being as an acting machine — an externalized object — has relegated will, experience, and inner resonance to the private sphere, where they are no longer permitted to disrupt functional processes. This includes conscience, which has long been exiled from economic systems.

The focal point visible here (image) is the bundling of these three forces, which we usually burn out or prevent as a source of energy, as intrinsic motivation in the traditional working world. For example, by not allowing experience to play a role, by stifling criticism of the company’s management and, consequently, by preventing what employees want from becoming part of value creation.

For example, a student wants to study in order to pursue a certain career. The career is an object that is defined from the outside. It is largely determined by others. During their studies, students experience their future career in theory and this experience has an impact on what they now want or no longer want. For many a disappointment shapes their intentions. With the change of will and experience, his relationship to the object of desire changes. One could say that reality is characterised in this relationship and is neither to be found in the object itself nor solely in what someone wants or in isolated experience, which would not exist without references. Experience is the open element here, because it can be defined neither as an inner force nor as an external object. It prevents reality from closing in, from becoming static. According to my thesis, experience is open because it is based on the existence of a generative void, on a gap, or in other words on the absence of something.

This open point of reference keeps people dynamic, indeed it is what makes consciousness possible in the first place. The modern labour force, however, is self-contained, defined, measured and controlled. It is predominantly externally determined and is therefore a projection of usefulness and meaning for the sake of efficiency. As a result, it does not participate in the “real world”. It is not an employee of the planet, let alone of reality, but a function of fading out complexity and relevance. If workers were to integrate this into their gainful employment, they would slip away from companies. They would not be controllable — but their work would take place on equal terms. Autonomous, but in solidarity. They would work on everything, on the world, on society and much more. No longer anonymised in a division of labour, but in a personal relationship with society, in the context of its experience and its own will. It would elude control and the graduated devaluation through wages. At the same time, their subjective contribution would diversify the human ecosystem, thus expanding and condensing the market and developing it into a living ecosystem in which everything that comes into the three-part concretion of such a worker would become the meaning and goal of their production. This would not be an arbitrariness of labour, but authentic responsibility.

In natural systems, nothing ever happens without something intangible — yet this intangibility exists within the structure of potential. It is precisely this relationship between absence and potentiality that I have explored through the MNO model, using mathematical and physical reasoning. This is not metaphysics, but a theory of operative principles that shape both nature and the universe — calculable, demonstrable, and embodied in all forms of emergence.

Terrence W. Deacon, whose work I was unaware of while writing The Physics of the Poor, formulated a similar logic in Incomplete Nature (2011), grounding the emergence of life and mind in absential constraints. While Deacon offered a fine-grained, empirically grounded model of morphodynamic processes, my own MNO triplicity — object, will, and experience — articulates a more radical ontological structure. It posits that this absence is not merely functional but folds reality itself, from quantum fields to consciousness to class struggle.

Combined, these models form a multi-levelled theory of emergence: Deacon’s detailed mechanics meet a meta-ontological foundation in MNO, closing gaps in both the physical and social sciences.

This logic of absence as generative structure recurs in multiple theoretical traditions:

• Niklas Luhmann (1992) described operational closure and structural coupling — legal and economic systems “close” themselves operationally, yet rely on environmental perturbations to generate new meaning. Gaps are essential.
• Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures operate far from equilibrium, producing order through continuous flows of energy and matter.
• Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible frames evolution as a process of stepping beyond the boundaries of the known.
• Gregory Bateson (1972) defined information as “a difference that makes a difference” — in a fully closed system, no difference would register, and thus no information would emerge.

In contrast, mainstream economics resists such openness. It clings to fixed abstractions — value, labour hours, contract norms — and substitutes the promise of security for the reality of control. People are asked to surrender freedom in exchange for predictability. This logic extends from the externally regulated worker to the addicted consumer, who clings to a service-based illusion of empowerment while remaining structurally disempowered.

The basic prerequisite for a living system is therefore a constant coupling to something absent — something that eludes bureaucratic definition — to a gap. From this dynamic arises the freedom of our actions and the individually specific perspective on reality, which in turn becomes a contribution to a complex whole, to a shared experience that we develop together. There can never be a final or completed product, because each of us would perceive something different in it, would want something different from it, and would experience it differently. In this sense, we live in a multi-real world, in a marketplace of open-ended additions and extensions. Yet we operate with an economic theory that assumes everything revolves around self-contained, clearly delimited objects — defined by market-based power relations. Materialism is too primitive to allow for collaboration on a shared reality, because this process presupposes and requires self-determination. We must therefore understand labour — both material and social — as a self-determined contribution (where individual deviation is a necessity). Otherwise, we will not overcome those ecological problems that stem from modes of work that lack awareness of reality itself.

Participation is a reality factor. Labour does not only create wealth, money, or value — it also generates habitat, ecosystem, and reality. In my model, object, will, and...