- Amazon is not a model of “ fully automated luxury communism ” but it is a model of something that may in turn be one of its ancestors.
- As we will discuss in greater detail below, the geodesign potential of algorithmic governance, in the rawest sense, is hamstrung by the negative disposition that some hold regarding the politics of quantitative representation, statistics, and even mathematics itself. This is both a reaction to the considerable violence that calculative reason wrought during twentieth-century wars, as well as the result of a self-validating antimodernism that ensued and has become, in turn, the basis of a sometimes reactionary posture that in various mixtures and guises draws on noble and ignoble traditions. Moral vigilance against “ instrumental reason ” easily slides into anti-intellectualism. Some activists may bomb the Army Research Center for Mathematics and believe it to be a morally defensible part of an antiwar strategy, as they support and are supported by the conclusion that mathematics and war are inextricable ways of knowing. Others see our Anthropocenic precocity as the unprecedented metaexternality of modernity itself and conclude that only a dismantling, reversal, or downscaling of ambition and its equipment, especially computing machines, can limn the path away from apocalypse and toward their preferred salvation. These perspectives are not only assailable, they are variously inadequate, immature, and sociopathic. The importance of truly confronting the inarticulability of the Anthropocene, is unfortunately obscured not only by our own cowardice, but also by the enchanted nihilism of our worst angels. Back in the city, people may assault other people wearing Google Glass on behalf of evicted renters, imagining their acts as those of popular refusal and resistance to the tyranny of calculative vision. Others draw embarrassing dichotomies between “ poetry ” and “ finance ” as the key to unlocking a new society. However, others provide durable critiques of how the algorithmic geopolitics is currently configured, and how its dangerous naturalization by market fundamentalism is not only legible in certain philosophical trends but naturalized by them. Others have accomplished a powerful politics of open, reprogrammable computational infrastructures that has had a direct and positive on how global systems are developed, though not nearly enough, and battles won may be reversed. Still others have articulated, from the disciplinary margins, a visionary and proactive leftist futurism that makes a native comfort with techniques of comprehensive abstraction a central tenet of post-neoliberal economics. Lest the zealotry of negative retreat and resistance is to define the leftist geopolitics of planetary-scale computation, it is essential that the legacies of progressive futurism, democratic welfare and pleasure, and infrastructural transnationalism are able to resolve their crises of courage and self-legitimacy and to find themselves willing and able to design and enforce the platforms we all require.
- I find the use of the term communism to describe these kinds of transformations in the marginal costs of commodity provisions needlessly old-fashioned. “ A new cybernetic communism, itself one of these options, would, we have seen, involve some of the following elements: use of the most advanced super-computing to algorithmically calculate labour time and resource requirements, at global, regional and local levels, of multiple possible paths of human development; selection from these paths by layered democratic discussion conducted across assemblies that include socialized digital networks and swarms of software agents; light-speed updating and constant revision of the selected plans by streams of big data from production and consumption sources; the passage of increasing numbers of goods and services into the realm of the free or of direct production as use values once automation, copy-left, peer-to-peer commons and other forms of micro-replication take hold; the informing of the entire process by parameters set from the simulations, sensors, and satellite systems measuring and monitoring the species metabolic interchange with the planetary environment. ” Nick Dyer-Witheford, “ Red Plenty Platforms, ” Culture Machines, July 28, 2013, http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/ 511/526.
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