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Tag: economics

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    Lightness of being

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    1–2 minutes

    As materiality has evolved from the weight of gold to ethereal digital currencies, human connection and interaction also transition from solidity (physical presence, solid character) to the instability of digital relations. The economic transformation mirrors the shift from concrete to conceptual: all things become lighter forms of existence.

    Consider communication, from letters inscribed on paper and ink to instant digital messages. Or physical marketplaces, where goods exchanged hands over handshakes, to virtual transactions and blind clicks.

    This increasing ‘lightness of being’ spins us toward a non-material trajectory: the weight of our interactions mirrors the weight of our values, from physical engagement to ephemeral experience. Once, our presence socially was communally anchored (and bound to mores) but now fluctuates and disperses into the digital ether, yet our flickering agency now takes the form of ghosts wailing to be substantive again.

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    behavioral futures markets

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    1–2 minutes

    A product is an object or service, a one-time purchase, but a device is never complete and always engaged, reporting and tuning.

    We have moved from products to devices, which capture behavioral surplus, exhaust data, and enhance predictive models. These algorithmic extractions forecast futures but beyond anticipating, they actively manifest their predictions.
    All of this is traded in a new marketplace.

    Wealth is in the future, not so much predicted as shaped. This reduces risk: programmatic behavior does not anticipate what will come to pass, it assures it.

    ~ via Shoshana Zuboff

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    Safety? Extending the need for intervention

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    1–2 minutes

    There are numerous examples of cities/districts setting up radar detection and redlight cameras for “citizen safety,” which happened to generate over $100 Million in annual revenue.

    Playing dirty, the city creates more infractions (and generates more revenue) by reducing the “amber time” -the time length of a yellow light- with the side effect of increased injury and accidents. Presented with this new data, devoid of the manipulated context, we have apparently become worse drivers, requiring more state intervention to save us from ourselves.

    In this way, the state uses its system control (under the imperative of public safety) to make us less safe for more profit, then uses the results to encroach further into once autonomous territory.

    (from Matthew Crawford)

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    the state as platform

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    1–2 minutes

    Suppose our state is sponsored by capitalism (shaped by it), and corporate platforms have supplanted free-market capitalism (platforms set the market participation terms). In that case, the state has been inverted to be controlled by platforms rather than being the platform from which markets arise.

    The problem is that citizens can be controlled (limited), but pixels are sovereign (not recognizing borders.)

    The inversion (from state to corporate) requires the state to appropriate dominion from corporate platforms to remain relevant: setting the terms of participation.

    from Benjamin Bratton

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    Rock Star v Dragon

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    1–2 minutes

    The rockstar creates and energizes while the dragon protects its hoard.

    The glamour of creativity is alluring, yet for most, it is a consumptive trap (drawing more from you than returning to you).

    The less glamorous persistent strategy to maintain wealth and status is not to create but to wrest power and eternal resources, such as real estate, away from the aging dragons: don’t waste your time making; start slaying and squatting.

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    Use your worst traits to counter each other

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    1–2 minutes

    Our society coaches, in eco-cybernetic fashion, use your worst traits to counter each other.

    To harness your pride, greed, gluttony, vanity, lust, or sloth, empower another (more compelling) sin.

    Apparently, the way to counteract avarice is ambition, and vice versa: the politician will leave office only if he can make more money elsewhere, and the rich man will vacate the market and jump into politics because of his pride.

    Thus, selfish traits have been recast as steadfast (predictable) and mutually beneficial.

    While these counterbalancing forces appear stabilizing, they normalize rationalizing increasingly excessive appetites.

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    The Quasimodo silhouette of art: utility, commodity, and economics

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    1–2 minutes

    One similarity between the techno-libertarian manifest destiny of futurism and the populist backlash of Trump or Brexit is a bluntness about the bottom line of “utility.”

    Art and its complex, tangled, and soft messaging -its layered density, subtlety, and non-productive pursuits- is a threat. The effort to unpack or ascertain its message is inverse to its bottom-line value: the more baffling, the less quickly capitalized or commodified.

    Good art looks to reject easy commodification, or quick absorption, containing its incompatible antinomies within itself. Its greatness can only be realized over broad swaths of time.

    The knee-jerk reaction points to the high sales value of good art: good art has been successfully commodified, and the price inflated through investment portfolios. However, that is the art of economics glomming onto something alien to it’s nature.

    Art commodified is a malformed conflation: a disfigurement warping art into a shape recognized as the discourse of dollars. It is not that the art does not still carry its message, but cloaked and hunchbacked with economic weight, it has been Quasimodo-ed and requires a genuine heart to see past its ugly silhouette.

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    uniqueness, happiness, and capitalism

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    1–2 minutes

    Our uniqueness is at hand; it is merely a matter of believing in its value.

    The rub: People say “Follow your passion,” but that rarely provides payment (which is tangible value.)

    Over time we undervalue uniqueness by aligning it with what the market will pay, devaluing it, and, therefore, ourselves.

    Capitalism, mostly, pays people for things almost no one wants to do: painful chores, abnormal skills, or sociopathic cruelty are well compensated.

    The intersection between your passion, how you are paid, and your unique ability becomes the overlapping Venn diagram: what you care about, can do happily, and get paid for is a very tiny cross-section.

    Consider instead of getting paid and narrowing this range of happiness, you can freely and complicity contribute to the “invisible hand” that keeps society moving.

    The economic side will attempt to take a bite out of the hand that feeds it, that is the hand of passion and uniqueness.

    Still, you can refuse to devalue yourself by separating your passions from payment: you can forego bland contentment and false subjugated uniqueness. Instead, save you for yourself.

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    liberalism: Flattened Freedoms

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    1–2 minutes

    Liberalism, in the classical sense, promotes individual freedom and civil liberties, that is, the agency of the individual citizen and acceptance of difference.

    However, in promoting the idea politically as Libertarianism, it becomes flattened into economic excess and regulative access, behind which selfishness thrives.

    In a system or state designed around economics and policy-making, a successful political movement would focus on -and move- these twin levers of money and law. Yet, cynically, moving the policy lever is a means to allow wealth, which exempts those made wealthy from the law, providing an elite uber-freedom and the power to close the policy door behind themselves.

    Expounded socially, the reductive, deregulatory imperative of ‘liberalism’ works hard to sell ‘positive freedom,’ which paradoxically destroys the more complex range of human freedoms, such as cravings for harmony, social and communal stability, and fiscal parity. In fact, it preys on these concepts by offering them as immanent results of complete freedom, which can never manifest.

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    is avarice good?

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    1–2 minutes

    When the economic conditions were a fixed pie avarice meant one person taking more for themselves, which meant hurting others.


    However, in today’s economy, the poor do better when the economy booms and expands the pie.


    In reverse morality, the greed of the wealthy -who are responsible for much of the economic growth- benefits the poor.

    In this myopic economic or capitalist view greed is positive, but it intentionally avoids the systemic ramifications of discarded dignity or global environmental catastrophe.

    from Yuval Noah Harari