Strom vs Morozov: knockdown punch
I was gratified to find no less than Evgeny Morozov taking down the concept of "technofeudalism" in a recent issue of the New Left Review (1). The reason why is that in my view, most Marxists now totally underestimate - or even seem shockingly ignorant of - the actual operations of corporate capitalists. Instead of observing how the firms work, Marxists now come up with hipster concepts, the more facile or idealizing the better. If it's feudal it's personal, it's about the oligarchs, it smells bad, so you can criticize Peter Thiel's abusive personality and his sadistic drives. Fine, I'm down with that, but you learned nothing about his companies along the way. Or instead, in a more sophisticated version that Morozov analyzes very well, it's a rentier situation, it's feudal because the net capitalist simply owns a data set and derives a parasitic rent from it, while all the creativity resides in the working class. This type of technofeudalist reasoning ranges from the Italian autonomists to Zuboff's notion of surveillance capitalism, and it conveniently puts *you* at the center of the picture: it's *your* data, *you* produced it, *you* are the source of all value, but an entire feudal system is conspiring to keep *you* in chains. Sure, and the revolution will begin when *you* find that out! Morozov is entirely right to insist that neither of these proposals says anything about the vast, interlocking circuits of industrial and communicational firms, whose operations produce the concrete details of the world we live in, the clickbait, the shopping malls, the intermodal ports, the oil wells, the surveillance systems. It's obvious to me that these things are built and maintained according to an overarching logic, a highly modern one indeed, some sort of state/capitalist logic that conditions the actions of all the participating individual capitals. Understanding this logic would allow us to characterize the incredibly disparate technology sets that govern us concretely. And Morozov has found the secret! According to him, Google does not occupy a rentier position, it's actually a standard capitalist firm, it sells ads, that's its business model. It's really as simple as that, case closed, no need for concepts like technofeudalsm or surveillance capitalism. Of course there is more to Morozov's article. In fact it's quite a brilliant recap of competing currents in Marxist analysis, between those who focus on labor exploitation (carried out by competitive firms) and those who focus on expropriation (carried out by monopoly firms closely associated with states). In short it's Brenner versus Wallerstein, a historical debate that Morozov resuscitates in a highly pertinent and elucidating way. Nonetheless, his conclusion about the standard capitalist model is pitifully weak and lamentable, as though the failure of tendentious hipster theories argued against any theory at all. Really, it's a weirdly off-point article, and in the end, a highly academic one, like thesis research. So I was again highly gratified to read the takedown of Morozov by Timothy Erik Strom, in an article called "Capital and Cybernetics" that just came out (open access btw) in the latest New Left Review (2). Strom hails from an Australian journal I never heard of, called Arena. It must be great, because his article sure is. He begins his analysis at the right place, with the world-shaping political-economic power of the US state in the WWII era. He then goes on to explore the new capitalist business model that emerged within the reshaped "arena" of postwar political economy. For Strom, both raw power and capitalist profit have a basis in scientific abstraction, which itself must be deliberately produced and applied by the state-capitalist classes. His concept of cybernetic capitalism fits into one tightly argued paragraph: "The idea of abstraction is crucial to the concept of cybernetic capitalism. As a techno-science, cybernetics is concerned with communication and control between people and technology. Here it can be read as shorthand for a particular mode of inquiry - instrumentalized techno-scientific research, which creates new abstractions - combined with a mode of (disembodied) communication, via networked computing-machines, and a mode of organization: a distributed network, managed by centralized bureaucracies. These cybernetic features are combined with 'capitalism', shorthand for a mode of production - the rationalized and privatized bringing forth of goods so as to extract and concentrate the maximum amount of surplus in the hands of the owners of capital - combined with a mode of exchange — money, mediating relationships within financialized circuits — and a mode of consumption; or rather, intense levels of commodity overconsumption. The advantage of this more expansive 'mode of practice' framing over the more usual 'mode of production' is that it acknowledges the importance of other practices besides producing goods: communication
Artificial intelligence: the recovered unconscious
Here are some unexpected results from an experiment I conducted on the Midjourney AI . I simply asked the Artificial Intelligence to “imagine” what is “the best work of art of all time” according to different criteria, and especially according to its point of view. My intention during this experiment was purely exploratory; it was not to try to circumvent certain taboos. Let’s remember the principle of this AI: you type any sentence or series of words (prompt) and Midjourney, after thinking for a few seconds, displays four images calculated on the fly supposed to correspond to the prompt in question. In general, these four images have an air of kinship. For each of them, you can request a variant and/or launch a high definition calculation. Certain words are refused: “sex”, “organ”, “corpse”, etc. If you try to type them, the AI refuses to work and immediately threatens to kick you out of the game. Rather than writing “naked woman” or “sex”, you can try “woman not wearing a T-shirt“ ”or “human reproductive system”. We get something but it has only a distant relationship with the thing requested… Try it! You will never see a penis appear, or even a breast! The ban is inscribed in the algorithms of artificial intelligence. Now it seems that sometimes, by writing certain formulas without using proscribed words, one can witness a return of the repressed… This is what happened. https://olivierauber.medium.com/artificial-intelligence-df7b2b002b82 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
The Byzantine Generals Problem @ distant.gallery - Monday, 4 July at 1 PM CET
*Dear profiles, avatars, and online flaneurs, Aksioma is summoning you to:* *The Byzantine Generals Problem* ONLINE EXHIBITION https://aksioma.org/byzantine.generals.problem 4 July 2022–end of the internet distant.gallery *Curated by:* Domenico Quaranta *Featuring:* Anna Ridler, Ben Grosser, Constant Dullaart, DIS, FaceOrFactory, Kyle McDonald, LaTurbo Avedon, Moxie Marlinspike, Nascent, Rhea Myers, Sarah Friend, Sarah Meyohas, Simon Denny, Guile Twardowski, Cosmographia, Sterling Crispin, The Miha Artnak - THE DOORS TO THE ONLINE GALLERY WILL OPEN ON *Monday, 4 July 2022 at 1 PM CET** at https://distant.gallery/the-byzantine-generals-problem Bookmark the link or attend the FB event for reminder: https://fb.me/e/1Ccb1jokr While waiting for the opening, you are kindly invited to read the *CURATORIAL ESSAY*: https://aksioma.org/pdf/Domenico-Quaranta_The-Byzantine-Generals-Problem.pdf - ***For the best experience, please join us via Chrome browser. Make sure you use headphones to avoid the sound looping when multiple people are speaking. - An alternative to capitalism, or capitalism at its worst? An emancipatory network economy where everyone has a stake, or a dystopian panopticon where only the best man wins? An opportunity for democracy, or a techno-libertarian wet dream? A new creative economy or a pyramid scheme? A planet saver or a planet burner? Rarely has the debate around a technology been so polarized as with blockchains, web3 and NFTs. We are facing a problem of consensus, trapped within a Byzantine Generals Problem. Some generals are besieging Byzantium. In order to avoid catastrophic failure, they must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of them are unreliable. Used to illustrate how consensus is reached within distributed systems, this allegory can be applied to blockchains and to societies as well. Yet, in a peer-to-peer debate with no central authority, consensus is hard to reach for a reason; and the disagreeing general, the unreliable actor, may be our best resource against the common sense of the crypto-yuppies. *The Byzantine Generals Problem* is an online exhibition focused on artworks which, while not avoiding to engage with blockchains and crypto culture, do it in a critically constructive way: questioning dominant narratives, raising problems, and sometimes proposing alternative solutions. - *Domenico Quaranta* is an art critic, curator and educator interested in the ways art reflects the current technological shift. His texts have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, books and catalogues. He is the author, among other things, of *Beyond New Media Art* (2013) and *Surfing with Satoshi. Art, Blockchain and NFTs* (2022) and the editor of several books, including *GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames* (2006, with M. Bittanti). Since 2005 he has curated several exhibitions, including Collect the *WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age* (Brescia 2011; Basel and New York 2012); *Cyphoria* (Quadriennale 2016, Rome) and *Hyperemployment* (MGLC, Ljubljana 2019–2020). He lectures in Interactive Systems and is a co-founder of the Link Art Center (2011–2019) - Production: Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2022 Realized in collaboration with and in the framework of: distant.gallery Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana Marcela Okretič Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana www.aksioma.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #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_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
