nettime Doug Henwood: Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital of the Twenty-First Century
(See also, James K. Galbraith's review of the same book: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/kapital-for-the-twenty-first-century) The Top of the World An ambitious study documents the long-term reign of the 1 percent Doug Henwood http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12987 The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point. In more technical terms, the central argument of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that as long as the rate of return on capital, r, exceeds the rate of broad growth in national income, g—that is, r g—capital will concentrate. It is an empirical fact that the rate of return on capital—income in the form of profits, dividends, rents, and the like, divided by the value of the assets that produce the income—has averaged 4–5 percent over the last two centuries or so. It is also an empirical fact that the growth rate in GDP per capita has averaged 1–2 percent. There are periods and places where growth is faster, of course: the United States in younger days, Japan from the 1950s through the 1980s, China over the last thirty years. But these are exceptions—and the two earlier examples have reverted to the mean. So if that 4–5 percent return is largely saved rather than being bombed, taxed, or dissipated away, it will accumulate into an ever-greater mass relative to average incomes. That may seem like common sense to anyone who’s lived through the last few decades, but it’s always nice to have evidence back up common sense, which isn’t always reliable. There’s another trend that intensifies the upward concentration of wealth: Fortunes themselves are ratcheting upward; within the proverbial 1 percent, the 0.1 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.9 percent, and the 0.01 percent are doing better than the remaining 0.09 percent, and so on. The bigger the fortune, the higher the return. Piketty makes this point by looking not only at individual portfolios but also (and ingeniously) at US university endowments, for which decades of good data exist. The average American university endowment enjoyed an average real return—after accounting for management costs—of 8.2 percent a year between 1980 and 2010. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, in a class by themselves (with endowments in the $15–$30 billion range), got a return of 10.2 percent a year. From that lofty peak, the average return descends with every size class, from 8.8 percent for endowments of more than $1 billion down to 6.2 percent for those under $100 million. In short: Money breeds money, and the more money there is, the more prolific the breeding. It was once believed, during the decades immediately following the Great Depression and World War II, that vast disparities in wealth were features of youthful capitalism that had been left behind now that the thing was reaching maturity. This theory was first enunciated formally in a 1955 paper by the economist Simon Kuznets, who plotted a curve representing the historical course of inequality that looked like an upside-down U: Kuznets’s chart showed that disparities in wealth rose dramatically during the early years of growth and then reversed once a mature capitalist economy reached a certain (though none-too-specific) stage of development. Kuznets’s curve fit nicely with the actual experiences of the rich economies in what the French call the Trente Glorieuses, the “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975, when economic growth was broadly shared and income differentials narrowed. In the United States, according to the Census Bureau’s numbers (which have their problems—more on that in a moment), the share of income claimed by the top 20 percent—and within that group, the top 5 percent—declined during the glorious years. At the same time, the income of the remaining 80 percent gained. But in the United States, the thirty glorious years were actually twenty-odd years; depending on how you measure it, the equalization process ended sometime between 1968 and 1974, again according to the census figures. Still, quibbles aside, the process of relative equalization went on for long enough that it felt like Kuznets was on to something with his curve. I say “relative” because these are still not small numbers: The richest 5 percent of families had incomes about eleven times those of the poorest 20 percent in 1974, the most equal year by this measure since the census figures started in 1947. But that number looks small now compared with the most recent ratio, almost twenty-three times in 2012. While those
nettime Here's what's trending on Twitter this week.
Here's what's trending on Twitter this week. Tweeted by monoskop @monoskop 10GB English language archive of @marxists_org happens to contain the MECW as well http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6231000 full English language archive (download torrent) - thepiratebay.se Download Marxists.org - full English language archive torrent or any other torrent from the Other Other. Direct download via magnet link. Tweeted by An uncertain commons @uncertaincommon Miranda Joseph, Theorizing Debt for Social Change, review of @davidgraeber *Debt* http://t.co/B8y4TFrubM http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/theorizing-debt-social-change Theorizing debt for social change - ephemerajournal.org Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: The first 5000 years. Melville House Publishing: New York. (HB, pp.534, US$22.00, ISBN 9781933633862) David Graeber's 2011 book, Debt: The first 5000 years, has received a great deal of... Tweeted by David Graeber David Graeber @davidgraeber here's me debating Piketty back in the fall: http://cadtm.org/Un-dialogue-Piketty-Graeber Un dialogue Piketty-Graeber : comment sortir de la dette - cadtm.org A l'occasion de la sortie de deux livres importants, Dette 5000 ans d'histoire et Le Capital au XXI??me si??cle, Mediapart a eu l'heureuse idée (...) Tweeted by monoskop @monoskop The monumental 5,000-pp History of Cartography is freely available online from U Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/index.html https://twitter.com/monoskop/status/458721733483044864/photo/1 History of Cartography: Volumes One, Two, and Three - press.uchicago.edu A website for free access to the History of Cartography, Volumes One, Two, and Three, in PDF format. Tweeted by Stop The Wars @sickjew Jury explicitly ruled out terrorism in the case, but the judge brought in all the standard post-9/11 rhetoric to justify #NATO3's sentence. Tweeted by J @piercepenniless Absolutely inexcusable for Lawrence amp; Wishart to force Marxist Internet Archive to take down MECW. Parasites! Tweeted by Cheryl Llera @catmidnite @RebelCapitalist @OccupyChicago @rummanahussain Meanwhile war criminal #NATO is free to bomb and invade countries at will ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Philosophy of the Internet of Things
dear all, It would be good to get some nettime views. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term used to describe a next step in the evolution of the Internet. While the first phase of the web can be thought of as a combination of an internet of hyper-text documents and an internet of applications (think blogs, online email, social sites, etc.), one of the next steps is an Internet of augmented ?smart? objects ? or ?things? ? being accessible to human beings and each other over network connections. This is the internet of Things. Underpinning the development of the Internet of Things is the ever increasing proliferation of networked devices in everyday usage. Such devices include laptops, smart phones, fridges, smart meters, RFIDs, etc. The number of devices in common usage is set to increase worldwide from the current level of 4.5 billion to 50 billion by 2050 and may even include human implants. By dint of the above, life as we know it on the planet will undergo a multitude of minuscule but incredibly significant changes that will alter not only how we relate to each other and the world, but also how we conceive of ourselves as beings within it. This situation proposes a pressing question: do we want to simply leave market forces to shape our reality? Or is there a deeper need, given the significance of this technology, to consider its ramifications within a philosophical context? For as computational devices become ever more central to how we relate to and interface with each other, so too do they begin to create new systems of power relations between people. To create a system of power is to impose a social dynamic. The design and deployment of the Internet of Things is thus not simply a matter of software/hardware architecture but also of politics; ethics; belief; citizenship; and social and civic relations. It is to this end of examining these issues more deeply that we are convening this conference. Justin McKeown (York St John University), Rob Van Kranenburg and Joachim Walewski are proud to present the 1st conference on the Philosophy of the Internet of Things. This conference is organised in response to the growing debate surrounding the Internet of Things and its potential impact upon society. The conference seeks to open up dialogue regarding the impact of the Internet of Things upon everyday life and provides a space for thinkers and innovators to critically examine, theorise, and debate the social, political, ethical, epistemic, ontological and civic ramifications of these new technologies. Dates are 3rd - 5th July 2014 York St John University, Lord Mayors Walk, York, UK, YO31 7EX, Greetings, Rob # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime In Art we Trust
Many thanks Saul, I have a real admiration for Kunst Reserve Bank project but despite your spirited and thought provoking defence I still can't shake of my sense of there being a serious flaw. Saul wrote Thats true however my argument with the Peperkamp's presentation is that in the context of a project with such radical potential it is unfortunate that he depends on a mystical narrative of traditional connoisseurship (i.e. artistic quality I know it when I see it!). Am I right that you're pointing out the weakness of the currency component without the conceptual framing of the KRB project? That the intrinsic value, like a gold-backed-currency, depends on antiquated but persistent value attributions? Yes thats my objection. artist-object / conceptual author-discourse dichotomy of the project and the somewhat exploitative/naive relationship between them implied in the way you quote Peperkamp's capricious selection criteria - taken together - seem consistent enough with the trick they're pulling off to make Warhol proud. My Reply The persistence of this unproblematised 'quality' narrative lies at the heart of the overuse of the word 'creative' these days and particularly the way it being deployed in today's employment landscape to legitimise of soften the varieties of exploitation and self exploitation. Warhol (though he was himself a ruthless and notoriously stingy exploiter of the affective labor of his super stars) was radical in the ways in which he saw right though this narrative and consistently subverted it. Take his interview with Gene Swenson, in the 1963 edition of Art News where he famously declared that the reason he was painting in this way is because I want to be a machine,? At the time people took it as a Warhol ?put on?. as they used to say in the 60s. But I would argue that he was deadly serious. In the same interview he goes on to lament how Everybody's always being creative. And it's so funny when you say things aren't, like the shoe I would draw for an advertisement was called a ?creation?...Everybody is too good now, really. Like, how many actors are there? There are millions of actors. They're all pretty good. And how many painters are there? Millions of painters and all pretty good. How can you say one style is better than another? Its weird hearing this interview now at the height of the creative industries hype when everyone (sorry Beuys) are required to be artists. It was his marvelous literal mindedness that 50 years ago enabled Warhol to repudiate these expectations emphasising machine like repetition and to cutting to the chase by screen printing dollar bills and then watch from the sidelines as the appreciated in fiduciary value. Laughing (or rather smiling Cheshire Cat like) all the way to a real bank! Unlike Peperkamp he never made the error of claiming the works were either 'good or bad art'. They were commodities that operating like cattle prods talking back to the media.without recourse to conoirseurship or special pleading for arts special status as a super commodity. So my admiration for KRB notwithstanding I still feel its a pity that the project did not like Warhol find a way to go beyond its dependence on an unreconstructed humanist anthropology. Saul What would this project do/be if it were going to do/be more than 'just art'? Reply Well hmm not sure.. Possibly the source of the project should have been anonymous like bitcoin or (excuse the very bad pun) banksy. The individual releases of the coins could have been unattributed and aspired to a drier more neutral less arty form of charisma. All a bit vague I know.. As I said I admire this work it is thought provoking so the fact that I have some issues does not mean that I have any answers. I may even want it to exist in its present form and continue to provoke questions Best David On 26 Apr 2014, at 10:34, Saul Albert wrote: Hi David, On 25 April 2014 16:01, d.garcia d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk wrote: In Art We Trust The trick KRB seem to be pulling off (whether Peperkamp knows it or not) is to subordinate the ostensible artistic value of the coins as artwork/commodities to the conceptual artistic value of the KRB enterprise. As you point out, the success of that enterprise is premised on (and in some ways subordinate to) its successful relationship with a broader art market. Warhol would have been into that. ... d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Philosophy of the Internet of Things
Hello Rob, There seem to be a few problematic assumptions in the text: The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term used to describe a next step in the evolution of the Internet. While the first phase of the web can be thought of as a combination of an internet of hyper-text documents and an internet of applications (think blogs, online email, social sites, etc.), one of the next steps is an Internet of augmented ?smart? objects ? or ?things? ? being accessible to human beings and each other over network connections. This is the internet of Things. This paragraph is mixing up the World Wide Web (http) with the Internet (TCP/IP and UDP). The Internet as such is nothing but a global open standard and infrastructure for networking computers with each other. When the term Internet of Things was coined in the late 1990s, there was still a strong divide between a computer and other sorts of electronic devices. Nowadays, many if not most electronic devices (from phones to cameras to traffic sensors) are factually Internet-enabled micro computers. This is, on the one hand, a proof that the 1990s Internet of Things prediction was correct. On the other hand, one could argue that the term has become obsolete because computers take the shape of all kinds of expected and unexpected things. If one can no longer differentiate between an Internet of computers and an Internet of devices, then the question is what Internet of Things can still meaningfully signify. Another question is that of future scenarios: Underpinning the development of the Internet of Things is the ever increasing proliferation of networked devices in everyday usage. Such devices include laptops, smart phones, fridges, smart meters, RFIDs, etc. The number of devices in common usage is set to increase worldwide from the current level of 4.5 billion to 50 billion by 2050 and may even include human implants. Isn't that, still, a view of the future as it has been imagined in the 1990s and 2000s? For sure, an expansion of Internet-connected devices underway especially in industrial applications. On the other hand, aren't events such as the disclosures about NSA's Prism program or the recent Heartbleed OpenSSL security nightmare indicative of a trend against blind Internet-ification of all kinds of devices and technologies? To name an example: I learned that the Dutch levee system is nowadays consisting of a network of Internet-controlled sensors and pumps. The sensor broadcast their measuring data via an encrypted VPN connection to a nation-wide data center which in turn sends back control instructions to the pumps. If this VPN had been run on OpenSSL (and it's quite possible that it is), anyone could have hacked it and literally flooded the country. These risks have been known for a long time, but now even non-experts - including policymakers and industry CEOs - are likely to understand them. The logical conclusion is to not expose critical infrastructures to the Internet by hardware design. The same is true for industrial infrastructures, both for the sake of operational security and safety from industrial espionage. The question is whether this will eventually lead to correction of optimistic Internet of Things predictions. For as computational devices become ever more central to how we relate to and interface with each other, That is really the question. Will the growth of computational technologies remain to be primitive quantitative growth, or will it turn into a qualitative growth where computerization and Internetworking of devices, and areas of life, will be carefully evaluated for each case and application? A good example, again from the Netherlands, how computer experts can soundly turn against computerization as such was Rop Gonggrijp's campaign against voting machines. Its radical philosophical implications - that computers, with today's computer architecture, are by definition machines whose information isn't manipulation-proof and thus can never be trusted - still doesn't seem to have sunk in. The design and deployment of the Internet of Things is thus not simply a matter of software/hardware architecture but also of politics; ethics; belief; citizenship; and social and civic relations. Indeed! - Bests, Florian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime In Art we Trust
On 27 April 2014 16:34, d.garcia d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.ukwrote: Possibly the source of the project should have been anonymous like bitcoin or (excuse the very bad pun) banksy. The individual releases of the coins could have been unattributed and aspired to a drier more neutral less arty form of charisma. Ha! I like this idea David, and I am very fond of bad puns. Especially this one because it reminds me of an experience that I think bears out your argument that the KRB project could be more critical/ambitious in this respect: I recently watched one of Banksy's auction-house satires sell at auction in London. I took a picture of the auction podium as it happened: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bh9hR9aCAAALR6_.jpg:large In the moment the projection of the painting (which reads: I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit) came up on the screen, the auctioneer, the dramatically lit row of phone bid operatives and the entire auction house audience all got swallowed up by the piece. We all had a moment of bathos-induced laughter, the (very skilled and entertaining) auctioneer addressed us as morons, and I could see everyone looking around the room, taking in the scene anew. I think an Internet bidder bought it for about 5000 pounds. So this was very clever on one level (for those immediately present), but also interesting in relation to your argument about KRB because of where the money from this auction was going. I was there to watch a Banksy being sold that had been anonymously donated to a brilliantly successful fund-raising campaign by volunteers in Bristol to buy the building housing the wonderful Cube Microplex: http://www.cubecinema.com/cgi-bin/freehold/freehold.pl . The sale of their Banksy contributed a significant proportion to the funding total. Whatever you think about Banksy, the cultural arbitrage those pieces performed was not only 'good value' entertainment for the crowd at the auction, it was also using the secondary market appreciation of the piece to invest in a differently geared form of cultural value generated by the Cube (an unfunded, volunteer-run cultural centre). So if KRB was to pick up on your critique - which I think would be worthwhile and a lot of fun - I wonder if this kind of situation might be a possible outcome... Where the stakes are raised by SWAG asset class investments and the founders get to proxy capital gains to their favourite punk arts venue. I suspect it would feel less flawed in the ways you point out, but that by 'better business being better art', the project at scale would then become problematic in lots of interesting and different ways. Cheers, Saul. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Philosophy of the Internet of Things
It would be good to get some nettime views. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term used... For me, the rising interdependence of all players on the Internet is a setting for common-mode failure both of technology and of governance, and the IoT is central to that rising interdependence. I applaud you for having the gumption to stand athwart these developments yelling Wait a minute at a time when few are inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge. I gave this speech at NSA on 26 March. As the nettime moderators prefer we do here, http://geer.tinho.net/geer.nsa.26iii14.txt follows below in full. I bring to your attention the parts about embedded systems in particular, about which there is much other material. --dan -8cut-here8- APT in a World of Rising Interdependence Dan Geer, 26 March 14, NSA Thank you for the invitation and to the preceding speakers for their viewpoints and for the shared experience. With respect to this elephant, each of us is one of those twelve blind men. We are at the knee of the curve for deployment of a different model of computation. We've had two decades where, in round numbers, laboratories gave us twice the computing for constant dollars every 18 months, twice the disk drive storage capacity for constant dollars every 12 months, and twice the network speed for constant dollars every 9 months. That is two orders of magnitude in computes per decade, three for storage, and four for transmission. In constant dollar terms, we have massively enlarged the stored data available per compute cycle, yet that data is more mobile in the aggregate than when there was less of it. It is thus no wonder that cybercrime is data crime. It is thus no wonder that the advanced persistent threat is the targeted effort to obtain, change, or deny information by means that are difficult to discover, difficult to remove, and difficult to attribute.[DG] Yet, as we all know, laboratory results filter out into commercial off the shelf products at rates controlled by the market power of existing players -- just because it can be done in the laboratory doesn't mean that you can buy it today. So it has been with that triad of computation, storage, and transmission capacities. As Martin Hilbert's studies describe, in 1986 you could fill the world's total storage using the world's total bandwidth in two days. Today, it would take 150 days of the world's total bandwidth to fill the world's total storage, and the measured curve between 1986 and today is all but perfectly exponential.[MH] Meanwhile, Moore's Law has begun slowing. There are two reasons for this. Reason number one is physics: We can't cool chips at clock rates much beyond what we have now. Reason number two is economics: The cost of new fabrication facilities doubles every two years, which is Moore's lesser-known Second Law. Intel canceled its Fab42 in January of this year because the capital cost per gate is now rising. By 2018 one new fab will be just as expensive in inflation adjusted terms as was the entire Manhattan Project.[GN] The big players will have to get bigger still, or Moore's First Law is over because of Moore's Second Law. And hardware replacement cycles are no longer driven by customer upgrade lust -- by which I mean the need to buy new hardware just because you need new hardware to run new software. Good enough for everything I need to do now dominates computing excepting, perhaps, in mobile, but that, too, is a curve that will soon flatten. Only graphics cards are not yet good enough for everything I need to do, but every curve has its asymptote. In sum, the commercial off the shelf market is not going to keep allowing us to dream big without regard to the underlying performance costs. We are not going to grow ourselves out of performance troubles of our own making. We were able to do that for a good long run, but that party is over. We can see that now in cryptography. I will certainly not lecture this audience on that subject. What I can do is to bring word from the commercial world that cryptographic performance is now a front-and-center topic of discussion both in individual firms, amongst expert discussion groups, and within standards bodies. The commercial world has evidently decided that the time has come to add cryptographic protections to an expanded range of products and services. The question being unevenly debated is whether, on the one hand, to achieve cryptographic performance with ever more adroit algorithm design, especially design that can make full use of parallelization, or to trend more towards hardware implementations. As you well know, going to hardware yields really substantial gains in performance not otherwise possible, but at the cost of zero post installation flexibility. This is not hypothetical; AES performance improvements have of late been because software has been put aside
