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

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 30.03.21 19:00, Sandra Braman wrote:

> - 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)


This periodization of economical thinking about information --
neoclassical (Machlup, 1962), political economy (Bell, 1973), networked
approach (Piore, 1984), post-modern (Schiller, 2000) and ecstatic
(Nakamoto, 2008) -- reads like series of ever higher levels of
abstractions and one could probably do an art history that parallels it,
à la Buchloh's take on conceptual art as the aesthetics of administration.

Stripped of its critical intentions, it's quite possibly also the
history that the NFT guys would promote, arguing that their wares are
the cultural expression of the most advanced processes of a new phase of
human development and hence worth the evaluations they currently receive.

Abstractions are, of course, always precarious, because what is being
abstracted away does not materially disappear, it is just made invisible
and abstractions rest upon things remaining invisible.


On 31.03.21 06:37, Brian Holmes wrote:

> 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.

In relation to the "ecstatic" view, the struggle is over whether the
energy costs associated with blockchain tech matter or not. If they
don't matter, then the abstraction works, if they do, then the
abstraction falls apart by having to readmit into the calculation
exactly what has been removed.

This motivates the comical, imho, arguments of the blockchain camp at a)
the energy costs are much smaller than usually counted, b) they will
dramatically sink in the near future due to technical improvements, and
c) energy doesn't matter because of the excess production of green energy.

Latour introduced the notion of the "earthbound people of the
Anthropocene vs the humans of the Holocene" and the "ecstatic" view
clearly belong the the latter. The question is how advanced technologies
-- the tools at hand at this critical juncture -- can help to advance
earthboundedness. There is clearly no necessary contradiction between
earthboundedness and technology, earth system science, critical zone
theories etc, could not be done without sophisticated modelling and big
data. Even more, earthboundedness must be achieved in relation to
temporal and spatial scales that defy direct experience, hence it needs
to be mediated, creating an immediate and pressing aesthetic challenge.

But with blockchain, I honestly fail to how it can contribute. Anything
useful the blockchain could do, say, protect private data in an IoT
world, could be done more easily with improved social institutions and
democratic control.




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