Re: <nettime> challenge accepted (re art & the info economy)

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 11:57 AM Sandra Braman <bramansandra@gmail.com> wrote:

Since the "Art in the Information Economy" piece, two additional conceptualizations of the information economy have come into play.

- a postmodern economic (or "referential economy") approach developed de facto in the early 21st century although its incipient phases had been noticed and theorized by postmodern theorists decades earlier, focusing on the nature of the information dominating the information economy itself as it becomes referential rather than empirical; Robert Shiller won a Nobel Prize for, among other things, writing about the "narrative economy" but that is not the same thing . . . he is actually just delivering that discipline's decades-late arrival to the narrative turn

- an ecstatic economy approach in which the fact of information itself is all that matters (the fact of assertion, not assertion of fact), with no need for either referentiality or empiricism (the wilds of misinformation) or, one might argue, for inclusion of the human in the loop (thinking about proof of work blockchain, computation for the sake of computation at astoundingly large and growing energy cost)

Sandra, these two things do start to cover what is going on now and if the texts can't be distributed to everyone, maybe just quote us the relevant bits? From an art viewpoint, no problem, we are familiar with these strategies - but from an economics viewpoint, not so much. The NFT is still referential, right? The jpg, and in fact, the artist, still exists to verify the originality of the token? Anyway, I am curious how you define these two, and whether others try to define them.

Now that Hirst has put his feet in the plate we can expect every cynical artist to mint whatever they've got and laugh while the Ponzi scheme falls to pieces. If the central banks keep pumping money into the accounts of the oligarchs, these experiments will keep on coming until the perfect ecstatic combination is found. To my lights the category that's missing is the Lacanian real: that which can neither be symbolized away, nor embraced as a narcissistic apotheosis. The struggle is on, whether the real of impending civilizational breakdown will be admitted into consciousness and acted on, or whether the current system morphs into a higher power.