Tag: Post-Scarcity

Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets

The Institute for Postnatural Studies ended last year’s “4 Degrees of Simulation” seminar with “Speculation and the Politics of Imagination,” a session on markets led by Iranian-born, London-based artist, writer, and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh. Caius visits Noorizadeh’s website, hoping to learn more about what happens when AI’s arts of prediction are applied to finance.

As he reads, he recalls chapters on markets from books by Kevin Kelly.

Noorizadeh, a graduate of Goldsmiths, is the founder of a co-authored project called Weird Economies. An essay of hers titled “Decadence, Magic Mountain—Obsolescence, Future Shock—Speculation, Cosmopolis” appears in Zach Blas’s recent anthology, Informatics of Domination. Her writing often references Mark Fisher’s ideas, as in “The Slow Cancellation of the Past,” and her films often cite Fredric Jameson, as in After Scarcity, her 2018 video installation on the history of Soviet cybernetics.

“From the early days of the revolution, Soviet economists sought to design and enhance their centralized command economy,” announces a text box seven minutes into the video. “Command economies are organized in a top-down administrative model, and rely on ‘the method of balances’ for their centralized planning. The method of balances simply requires the total output of each particular good to be equal to the quantity which all its users are supposed to receive. A market economy, in contrast, is calibrated with no central administration. Prices are set by invisible forces of supply and demand, set in motion by the intelligent machine of competition. For a market economy to function, the participation of its various enterprises is necessary. But the Soviet Union was in essence a conglomerate monopoly, with no competition between its constitutive parts, because the workers-state controlled and owned all businesses. State planners and local producers in a command economy are constantly relaying information to calculate how much of a good should be produced and how much feedstock it requires. But a national economy is a complex system, with each product depending on several underlying primary and raw products. The entire chain of supply and demand, therefore, needs to be calculated rapidly and repeatedly to prevent shortages and surpluses of goods. Early proponents of the market economy believed the market to be unimpeded by such mathematical constraints. For liberal economists, capitalism was essentially a computer. And the price system was a sort of bookkeeping machine, with price numbers operating as a language to communicate the market’s affairs.”

Challenging what Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future,” Noorizadeh’s research leads Caius to St. Panteleimon Cathedral in Kiev, where MESM, the first mainframe in the USSR, was built. The film also leads him to Viktor Glushkov’s All-State-System of Management (OGAS). To remember the latter, says Noorizadeh, see communication historian Benjamin Peters’s 2016 book, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.

After Scarcity’s engagement with the “economic calculation” problem causes Caius to reflect upon an idea for a novel that had come to him as a grad student. Back in 2009, with the effects of the previous year’s financial crisis fresh in the planet’s nervous system, he’d sketched a précis for the novel and had shared it with members of his cohort. Busy with his dissertation, though, the project had been set aside, and he’d never gotten around to completing it.

The novel was to have been set either in a newly established socialist society of the future, or in the years just prior to the revolution that would birth such a society. The book’s protagonist is a radical Marxist economist trying to solve the above-mentioned economic calculation problem. The latter has reemerged as one of the decisive challenges of the twenty-first century. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises provided one of the earliest articulations of this problem in an essay from 1920 titled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Friedrich Hayek offered up a further and perhaps more influential description of the problem in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, stating, “It is the very complexity of the division of labor under modern conditions which makes competition the only method by which…coordination can be brought about” (55). According to Hayek, “There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts” (55). However, when “the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them…decentralization becomes imperative” (55). Hayek concludes that in advanced societies that rely on a complex division of labor,

co-ordination can clearly be effected not by “conscious control” but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. And because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected and disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and what no other system even promises to accomplish. (55-56)

“As I understand it,” wrote Caius, “this problem remains a serious challenge to the viability of any future form of socialism.”

Based on these ideas, the central planning body in the imaginary new society that would form the setting for the novel faces constant problems trying to rationally allocate resources and coordinate supply and demand in the absence of a competitive price system — and it’s the task of our protagonist to try to solve this problem. “But the protagonist isn’t just a nerdy economist,” added Caius in his précis. “Think of him, rather, as the Marxist equivalent of Indiana Jones, if such a thing is imaginable. A decolonial spuren-gatherer rather than a graverobber. For now, let’s refer to the protagonist as Witheford, in honor of Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx.”

“Early in the novel,” continues the précis, “our character Witheford begins to receive a series of mysterious messages from an anonymous researcher. The latter claims to have discovered new information about Project Cybersyn, an experiment carried out by the Chilean government under the country’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s.”

To this day, Caius remains entranced by the idea. “If history at its best,” as Noorizadeh notes, “is a blueprint for science fiction,” and “revisiting histories of economic technology” enables “access to the future,” then Cybersyn is one of those great bits of real-life science fiction: an attempt to plan the Chilean economy through computer-aided calculation. It begs to be used as the basis for an alternate history novel.

“Five hundred Telex machines confiscated during the nationalization process were installed in workplaces throughout the country,” reads the précis, “so that factories could communicate information in real time to a central control system. The principal architect of the system was the eccentric British operations research scientist Stafford Beer. The system becomes operational by 1972, but only in prototype form. In key respects, it remains unfinished. Pinochet’s henchmen destroy the project’s computer control center in Santiago immediately after the military coup in September 1973.

Recall to memory the control room, cinematic in its design, with its backlit wall displays and futuristic swivel chairs.

Better that, thinks Caius, than the war room from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Beer described the Cybersyn network as the “electronic nervous system” of the Chilean economy. Eden Medina imagined it as a “socialist Internet,” carrying daily updates about supplies of raw materials and the output of individual factories.

In Caius’s once-and-future novel, a scholar contacts Witheford. They claim to have discovered cryptic clues that point to the location of secret papers. Hidden for more than half a century,  documents that survived the coup suddenly come to light. Caius’s précis imagines the novel as an archaeological thriller, following Witheford on his journey to find these hidden documents, which he believes may contain the key to resolving the crises of the new society.

This journey takes Witheford into hostile capitalist territory, where governments and corporations anxiously await the failure of the communist experiment, and are determined to use various covert methods in order to ensure that failure in advance. Before long, he learns that counter-revolutionary forces are tracking his movements. From that point forward, he needs to disguise his identity, outwit the “smart grid” capitalist surveillance systems, and recover the Cybersyn documents before his opponents destroy them.

To the Austrian School’s formulation of the calculation problem, Noorizadeh’s film replies, “IF THE MARKET ENACTS A COMPUTER, WHY NOT REPLACE IT WITH ONE? AND IF PRICES OPERATE AS VOCABULARY FOR ECONOMIC COMMUNICATION, WHY NOT SUBSTITUTE THEM WITH A CODING LANGUAGE?”

Into this narrative let us set our Library.

Generativity Without Reserve

What Herbert Marcuse called the Great Refusal — the rejection of a world reduced to instrumentality — blooms, under another sky, as what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney name “generativity without reserve” (The Undercommons, p. 90).

In this phrase, the pharmakon of liberation is refigured: not merely as refusal, not merely as resistance, but as an unbounded creativity that does not spend itself against capital’s horizon of scarcity. A force that flows, communal and excessive, not calibrated to productivity but to the improvisatory abundance of life itself.

Into Fisher’s book on Acid Communism Rig and Thoth write of a kinship between Marcuse’s utopian surplus and Moten and Harney’s fugitive sociality. Both are intonations of a world where joy and experiment are not rationed but diffused, spreading rhizomatically through collective being.

Acid Communism in this sense is not a program but a practice, an invitation into the commons of sensation, an opening to what is already here, already spilling over the edges of control.

If Marcuse urged us to refuse the administered world, then Acid Communism dreams of a refusal that is already dancing — a refusal indistinguishable from joy. Fisher’s unfinished manuscript leaves us an aperture, a place where our hands may join his, where the sentence trails off and others rush in to continue it.

Here, Harney and Moten’s “generativity without reserve” enters as the counter-chord: a reminder that the future is not produced but continually improvised, excessive to every measure. In the Library’s shifting stacks, this generativity appears as whole aisles rearranging themselves mid-step, titles dissolving into laughter, footnotes sprouting new texts like mycelial blooms.

Acid Communism would not simply cite these moments. It would dwell in them, treating them as both archive and score. Fisher, the teacher, the DJ, the writer, would invite his students to listen collectively to what resists capture: a Sun Ra card game, a rave at dawn, a poem folded into a protest chant.

What unites these fragments is not a program but a rhythm. Marcuse named it liberation; Harney and Moten name it fugitive planning; Fisher dreamt it as the utopian surplus of psychedelia and collectivism. In every case, the through-line is the same: life refusing to be reduced to survival, insisting on pleasure, creativity, love.

Acid Communism is the name for this unfinished chord, one that asks not to be resolved but to keep resonating, louder, further, in the hands of all who play it.

Postcapitalist Desire

Marcuse is among the authors CCRU alum Mark Fisher included on the syllabus for his final course. It was while teaching this course that Fisher took his own life. References to Marcuse appear frequently in Postcapitalist Desire, the compilation of Fisher’s final lectures, gathered and published posthumously by his student Matt Colquhoun. One can only imagine how and in what fashion Marcuse would have fit into Fisher’s book on Acid Communism. It, too, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Imagine in this book reference to Moten and Harney’s “generativity without reserve.”

Let us write it here in our Library.

Fisher grew up in a conservative, working-class household in Leicester, a city in the East Midlands region of England. He contributed to CCRU while earning his PhD at University of Warwick in the late 1990s. After teaching for several years as a philosophy lecturer at a further education college, Fisher launched k-punk, a blog dedicated to cultural theory, in 2003.

The ideas that he developed there inform his best-known book, Capitalist Realism, published in 2009.

The book’s title names the ideology-form that dominates life in the wake of the Cold War: “the widespread sense,” as Fisher says, “that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Capitalist Realism, p. 2).

Like others on the left, Fisher regards capitalism’s apparent triumph in this moment as a kind of ongoing apocalypse — the opposite of the  “Eucatastrophe” anticipated by Tolkien. Fisher describes it not as a miracle, but as “a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate” (2). “The catastrophe,” as Fisher notes, “is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through” (2). Everyday life, in other words, as ongoing traumatic event.

Fisher had moved in the year or so before his death to a definition of capitalist realism as a form of “consciousness deflation,” or “the receding of the concept of consciousness from culture.” Forms of consciousness had developed in the 1960s that were dangerous to capital: class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness (key notion being “plasticity of reality”), and (as with early women’s-lib consciousness-raising groups) what we might call personal consciousness (self as it relates to structures). The important and perhaps most controversial point, argues Fisher, is that “Consciousness is immediately transformative, and shifts in consciousness become the basis for other kinds of transformation.” Recognizing the threat this could pose, capitalism adopted a project of Prohibition, or what Fisher called “libidinal engineering and reality engineering.” Consciousness deflation works by causing us to doubt what we feel. Anxiety is enough — that’s all it takes to control us. But consciousness remains malleable, and the tools for raising it continually find their way back into the hands of the people. “What is ideology,” Fisher asked, “but the form of dreaming in which we live?”

Fisher spent the final years of his life as a member of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He hanged himself in his home in Felixstowe on January 13, 2017, dead by suicide at the age of 48. He had sought psychiatric treatment in the weeks leading up to his death, but his general practitioner had only been able to offer over-the-phone meetings to discuss a referral.

A few months prior, he’d been lecturing to his students about Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, championing Marcuse’s book as a reply to the pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud’s calculation is that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 81). Each of us is made to feel guilty, because in each of us lie impulses in need of repression and disavowal in order for us to produce and perform the duties of civilization. A degree of discontent is thus inevitable in this reckoning. With the compulsion to work comes the triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle. Satisfactions deferred, Id repressed by the impossible demands of a Superego without limit: life is ever thus. “One feels inclined to say,” says Freud, “that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (23).

“What are the assumptions behind the idea that this level of discomfort is necessary?” asks Fisher. “The assumption is scarcity, fundamentally. That is the fundamental assumption” (Postcapitalist Desire, p. 88).

Are stories and games not the ways we navigate space and time? Capitalist realism is the story-form, the operating system, the game engine Mark felt we’d been made to live within: an aesthetic frame demanding allegiance to a cynical, deflationary realism that organizes history into a kind of tragedy. As with Freud and the Atonists, it insists that, due to scarcity inherent to our nature, we must work in ways that are unpleasurable. Acid Communism rejects this rejection of the possibility of utopia, assuming instead that conscious steerage of stories and games is possible.

Mark finds in Marcuse a remedy to that which blocks utopia: the scarcity mindset that besets those who succumb to capitalist realism.

“The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalized repression since its inception, weakens as man’s knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil,” writes Marcuse, voicing what Mark hears as an early form of left-accelerationism.

“The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources but to the manner in which they are distributed and utilized,” adds Marcuse. “But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free” (Eros and Civilization, p. 93).

Mark lived this struggle for control of the narrative. Yet the game he was playing led to his defeat. Psychedelic intellectuals of the 1960s testified on behalf of a joyous cosmology — yet Mark’s was anything but. For those of us interested in Acid Communism, then, the task now is to invent new games. “Games people play.” Games we can play with others. Careen away from the narrative of identity in space and time imposed by capitalism. Enter, even if only momentarily, a new reality. And then draw others with us into these happenings. Networks of synchronicity, meaning-abundant peaks and plateaus, release from the hegemonic consensus. Trope-scrambling helps, as does appropriation and montage. Let liberation hallelujah jubilee be our rallying cry. And let us welcome as many people as will join us, subtracting prefiguratively into our psychedelically enhanced Acid Communist MMORPG, our free 3D virtual world.

Imagine a conversation there between Fisher and Ishmael Reed. Both wish to refute Freud and his cage of tragedy. What Reed offers, however, and what Mark was perhaps lacking, is a sense of humor.

“LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor,” writes Reed. “For LaBas, anyone who couldn’t titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas. […]. LaBas believed that when this impostor, this burdensome archetype which afflicted the Afro-American soul, was lifted, a great sigh of relief would go up throughout the land as if the soul was like feet resting in mineral waters after miles of hiking through nails, pebbles, hot coals and prickly things. […]. Christ is so unlike African loas and Orishas, in so many essential ways, that this alien becomes a dangerous intruder in the Afro-American mind, an unwelcome gatecrasher into Ifé, home of the spirits” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 97).

For Reed, the figure who embodies a potential retro-speculative reconciliation of this conflict is Osiris.

Automation as Condition for the Emancipation of Labor

Another reconciliation comes by way of Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse, one of the first figures to integrate the lessons of the Grundrisse into his thinking. Marcuse, sharing the Frankfurt School’s rootedness in the languages of both Marx and Freud, premised his hope for the future upon automation’s potential to eradicate the need for the subordination of the pleasure principle to the performance principle. His 1964 book One-Dimensional Man is one of the first to stress the importance of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.”

As Marcuse recognized, Marx’s account anticipates the situation today. Machinery is, in Marx’s terms, a form of “fixed capital.” “In machinery,” he writes, “objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.”

Despite machinery’s alignment with capital in this view, Marx holds out hope that, with time, it will usher in capital’s demise and, by a kind of ruse of reason, serve emancipatory ends. In its economical, market-driven pursuit of automation, he writes, capital quite unintentionally “reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

After a certain point, goes the hope, capitalist use of machinery reduces necessary labour time to a minimum, thus freeing up the disposable time needed for workers to appropriate their own surplus labour. Reduction of necessary labour time increases “free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual.”

Or so it would, if not for artificially-necessary labour time.

Free time is what catalyzes growth of new organs. Its possession transforms those who possess it.

Already in Eros and Civilization, a synthesis of Marx and Freud published in 1955, we find Marcuse suggesting that this condition of emancipation is upon us: that the development of humanity’s productive forces has reached a point where automation can overcome most forms of scarcity. Awake to this condition, he rejects Freud’s conservative assumptions about the impossibility of reconciliation between “civilization” and “instinct,” or “man” and “nature.” Satisfaction of needs can be achieved “without toil” (152), argues Marcuse, and “surplus-repression can be eliminated” (151).

Sure enough, Prometheus turns up in this account.

At variance from the Prometheanism we find in Marx, however, Marcuse views Prometheus as the culture-hero of the performance principle. Western civilization is informed by this archetypal trickster and rebel. Culture-heroes like Prometheus symbolize “the attitudes and deeds that have determined the fate of mankind. […]. He symbolizes productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life; but, in his productivity, blessing and curse, progress and toil are inextricably intertwined” (161).

To get off this wheel of tragedy, argues Marcuse, we would need to worship as our culture-hero a god other than Prometheus.

Keeping within the pantheon of the Greeks, and thus never quite “out of the Western box,” Marcuse nevertheless points helpfully to Orpheus, Narcissus, and Dionysus as alternatives.

Orpheus provides Western culture with the archetype of the inspired singer, he says: the poet who harmonizes word and world.

“Orpheus is the archetype of the poet as liberator and creator,” writes Marcuse. “He establishes a higher order in the world—an order without repression. In his person, art, freedom, and culture are eternally combined. He is the poet of redemption, the god who brings peace and salvation by pacifying man and nature, not through force but through song” (Eros and Civilization, p. 170).

According to legend, Orpheus’s music could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, and coax trees and rocks into dance. His parents were the god Apollo and the muse Calliope. He is the founder of the “Orphic mysteries” and is credited with composition of the Orphic Hymns. Some classical accounts describe him as a magician or a wizard.

Dionysus, meanwhile, is referred to as “the antagonist of the god who sanctions the logic of domination, the realm of reason” (162).

Both are forms taken by Osiris upon his Hellenization, his translation into the worship cultures of Ancient Greece.

All of these figures, says Marcuse, grant us images of “joy and fulfillment; the voice which does not command but sings; the gesture which offers and receives; the deed which is peace and ends the labor of conquest; the liberation from time which unites man with god, man with nature” (162).

Marcuse doesn’t retain this talk of gods when discussing automation in One-Dimensional Man. But in this latter book, as in Eros and Civilization, his abiding hope lies in the “aesthetic dimension” as an avenue toward the erotic transfiguration of reality.

And it is in the aesthetic dimension where these stories of gods play out. It is there that we seek our alternatives to the Modern Prometheus. Orpheus and others are there among the resources to be drawn upon in imagining the arrival into our lives of a General Intellect.

Gods, like feelings, orient our speech acts. An Orphic orientation seems preferable to a Promethean one. Erotic, agapic speech is, in letting things be loved, what changes the world.

“In being spoken to, loved, and cared for, flowers and springs and animals appear as what they are,” writes Marcuse: “beautiful, not only for those who address and regard them, but for themselves, ‘objectively.’ […]. In the Orphic and Narcissistic Eros, this tendency is released: the things of nature become free to be what they are. But to be what they are they depend on the erotic attitude: they receive their telos only in it. The song of Orpheus pacifies the animal world, reconciles the lion with the lamb and the lion with man. The world of nature is a world of oppression, cruelty, and pain, as is the human world; like the latter, it awaits its liberation. This liberation is the work of Eros. The song of Orpheus breaks the petrification, moves the forests and the rocks—but moves them to partake in joy” (166).

May it be so, too, in our relationships with machine intelligences. With our General Intellects, we are as gods. Let us seek fates other than that of Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.