[S3 Discussion] Navigating Neoliberalism

[tarngerine]

Nick Srnicek, lays out the "crisis of representation" problem

https://medium.com/after-us/navigating-neoliberalism-f9fae2405488#.kd4aliz0r

[frnsys]

The economy is not an object amenable to direct perception. It is distributed across time and space; it incorporates property laws, biological needs, natural resources, technological infrastructures and more into its eclectic assemblage; it involves feedback loops, multicausal events, sensitivity to initial conditions, and other complex system characteristics; and last, but not least, it produces emergent effects that are irreducible to their individual components. As a result of this, despite everything written about capitalism, it still remains a mystery. The question to be tackled is how does one aesthetically represent a complex, structural entity like neoliberalism? Since it evades any direct perception, our vision of the economy can only emerge from the augmentation of the human cognitive system with various sociotechnical apparatuses.

Anekāntavāda, Fuller's World Game

need new "cognitive maps" or mental models, internalized and intuitive understandings of these really complex systems

it weirdly reminds me of Milton Friedman's pencil example he uses to valorize free market capitalism and also the intro sequence to Lord of War (content warning, disturbing end)

but for example, can you make it apparent in the smartphone itself the people and violence involved in its creation? the rituals around, for instance, unboxing gadgets is so made so violently abstract from everything that came before the gadget's boxing.

---

Cognitive mapping, therefore, risks generating only an aesthetics of the technical sublime — one which awes us with overwhelming amounts of data, but provides little cognitive purchase on the underlying mechanisms.

i feel this way about a lot of dataviz

---

According to Marxist theorist Franco Berardi, ‘The future becomes a threat when the collective imagination becomes incapable of seeing alternatives to trends leading to devastation, increased poverty, and violence’. ... we are left with a future of exhaustion: exhaustion of natural resources, exhaustion of productive ventures, exhaustion of our mental well-being.

😞

Debt here serves as the primary indicator of the capitalist belief in a better future — debt is only repayable if one believes that the future will be better. The worldwide collapse in lending and investment — with corporations and banks hoarding record amounts of money — is therefore symptomatic of even capitalist realism losing its sense of the future.

ugh

---

We’ve now converged on a widespread acceptance of the neoliberal premise that the world is too complex to ever plan, manipulate, accelerate, modify, or otherwise intervene in. Common sense therefore has it that the market is the best we can hope for. There is no way to manipulate a complex system, so why bother? Common sense has become lost in the complexity of the world without a cognitive map to navigate it. Yet if an aesthetics of big data is incapable of rendering this complexity tractable, then what is necessary is a transformation of the aesthetic sublime into an aesthetics of the interface. The latter indexes the mediation between big and complex data on the one hand, and our finite cognitive capacities on the other. In this space, art can become a weaponised political tool.

---

The first is one of the core critiques put forth by Sterling — namely that the new aesthetics ignores its human components by misrecognising the source and instrumentality of the various technological mediations: drone-vision is part of a larger military-political assemblage; surveillance and tracking algorithms are the products of a particular type of state; glitches and low-resolution images stem from a very human desire for nostalgia.

---

A really new aesthetics might work differently: instead of concerning itself with the way we humans see our world differently when we begin to see it through and with computer media that themselves ‘see’ the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop their own aesthetics?

the field of AI is gaining revitalized interest in unsupervised learning and an aesthetics of the world from the perspective of AI is one possible outcome I'm excited for, especially as a way to acknowledge the arbitrariness of so many human categories/ontologies

some of this also reminds me of Bogost's procedural rhetoric

---

The aesthetics of the interface is the mode of operationalising this complex knowledge into local phenomenologically-amenable representations.
...
In an age plagued by chaos — what Berardi calls ‘a complexity that is too dense, too thick, too intense, too speedy, too fast for our brains to decipher’ — the aim of political aesthetics should be to try and grasp these accelerating lines that compose the world and to turn them into an intelligible, tractable plane of consistency.

---

Chip-driven gaming allowed designers to respond to this problem by tweaking the programs so that frequent small wins (often less than the cost of playing a single hand) kept dopamine surging while players’ cash trickled steadily into casino coffers.

this is so fucked

---

Yet in the case of a complex system, the dream of a God-like panoptic interface must be rejected.

this should also be rejected because there is no "God's-eye" view to begin with

---

also conspiracy theories as a way of reducing the complexity of the world to make it more bearable/make problems seem more tractable

[tarngerine]

Incapable of extrapolating patterns and cognitively overwhelmed by big data and complex systems, agency becomes reduced to a mere refusal, at best. The attempted negation of the existing order — finding its physical embodiment in the camps of the Occupy movement most recently — attempts to stand steadfast against the momentum of the system. Yet, inevitably, the meek act of refusal is exhausted and the system plods on again.

---

This is so real today but also kind of a paradox for me. Either everyone is able to work w data, or someone has to do the filtering/"dumbing down" for them. That act of filtering obv fills it w bias (you can shape data whatever way you want to tell whatever story you want)

It seems quite impossible to me to ever really solve this - and were in this never ending loop where once in a while ppl cry but ultimately nothing really changes. Esp WRT anything in the economy

[tarngerine]

Trying to capture the essence of this article - it seems to basically say : there's a lot of data and stuff - it's hard to understand to a person - we should make things (interfaces , cog mapping) to make it easier to understand

[michaelpace]

Navigating Neoliberalism, Nick Srnicek, lays out the "crisis of representation" problem

---

two trends in the contemporary world:
    "the collapse of neoliberalism and the absence of alternatives"
    1. "the collapse of neoliberalism and its attendant hegemony over the
        social imagination"
    2. "the abyssal void at the heart of alternative political thinking"
        that is, "While neoliberalism has seen its foundations collapse under
        the weight of its own contradictions, the ground below it remains
        uninhabited"
    3. "what is needed is an extension of our capacities for sensible
        imagination via the mediation of technological augmentations... In
        order to develop an alternative that is adequate to today's
        complex societies, those on the left need to marshal the latent
        capacities of technology and science in order to envision a better
        future."

the left needs to embrace technology in its thinking about the future
    why? 1., dealing with contemporary capitalism
        "The economy is not an object amenable to direct perception.
        It is distributed across time and space; it incorporates property
        laws, biological needs, natural resources, technological infrastructures
        and more into its eclectic assemblage; it involves feedback loop,
        multicausal events, sensitivity to initial conditions, and
        other complex system characteristics; and last, but not least,
        it produces emergent effects that are irreducible to their
        individual components. As a result of this, despite everything
        written about capitalism, it still remains a mystery."
        ...
        "Since it evades any direct perception, our vision of the economy
        can only emerge from the augmentation of the human cognitive
        system with various sociotechnical apparatuses."

cognitive mapping
    the left lacks "cognitive mapping"
        where that is defined as "the means to make our own world intelligible
        to ourselves through a situational understanding of our own position"
    with the rise of globalization,
        this dude jameson argues we can no longer cognitively map our individual
        position within the economic system and the entire system at large.
    conspiracy theories
        are a convenient cognitive map to answer "who is behind it all?"
    "With globalised capitalism having become unbound from any phenomenological
        coordinates, this possibility for a socialist politics has become
        increasingly difficult"
    "The health of an economy is not a physical entity in the world;
        instead it is a complex and constructed piece of information,
        dependent on both material processes in the world as well as
        socially and politically charged choices about how to measure
        and calculate it."
    "Instead of direct perception of the economy, perceiving it as
        a complex system is more akin to a symptomology. In the exact
        same way that a doctor examines a patient’s symptoms to determine
        the nature of their disease, so too are various economic indicators
        used to try and discern the underlying health of the economy."

jameson on, "how does aesthetics fit into the concept of cognitive mapping?"
    basically...
        aesthetics reconciles individual experience with cognitive maps
        of global structures.
    existing aesthetics
        there is an existing aesthetics of "the technical sublime" (that
        is, "data as impenetrable noise"), and also an existing "aesthetics
        of interfaces" (that is, "data as cognitively tractable"), and
        "the act of building mediators between these is precisely one
        of the most important areas where political art could be situated today"

aesthetics of the technical sublime
    definition
        representation of data with no data loss, reduction, simplification,
        or summary
    cognitive mapping
        ...runs the risk of generating this type of aesthetics ("one
        which awes us with overwhelming amounts of data, but provides
        little cognitive purchase on the underlying mechanisms").

the future
    "the future is itself a cultural construct"
    "Postmodernism has become the common sense of the average person,
        whether explicitly recognised or not... We live in an age where
        the future has shifted from utopian to dystopian"
    "Debt here serves as the primary indicator of the capitalist
        belief in a better future — debt is only repayable if one believes
        that the future will be better. The worldwide collapse in lending
        and investment — with corporations and banks hoarding record
        amounts of money — is therefore symptomatic of even capitalist
        realism losing its sense of the future."
    "This implosion of the future makes itself felt affectively as
        political impotence", and any agency we attempt to have aginst it
        "becomes reduced to a mere refusal, at best", e.g., the Occupy
        movement
    "Yet if an aesthetics of big data is incapable of rendering this
        complexity tractable, then what is necessary is a transformation
        of the aesthetic sublime into an aesthetics of the interface<, which>
        indexes the mediation between big and complex data
        on the one hand, and our finite cognitive capacities on the other.
        In this space, art can become a weaponised political tool."

the new aesthetics
    recent artwork
        ...is being done under this loose name. broadly speaking, it has
        been a loose movement associated with integrating digital and
        technological perception into art.
    "Cognitive mapping would give the new aesthetics a political
        impetus and technological basis, while the new aesthetics would
        provide cognitive mapping with the artistic and sensible means
        to accomplish its political goals"
    problem w/ it...
        "the new aesthetics borders on the mundane at times, and relies
        too heavily on weirdness at other times", so "what can be done
        to make this artistic medium novel and interesting?"
    solution?
        "It seems to me that new aesthetics, at its best, is about the
        expansion of sensible possibilities beyond human limitations"
        ...
        it'll probably involve tactile stuff as well as visual. artists
        will figure it out.
    sterling
        says the new aesthetics ignores its human components and just
        focuses on the cool glitchy w/e technological parts.
    bogost
        says the new aesthetics is too human and it should get weirder.
        he asks, what if we push it in a direction where "we begin to
            see it through and with computer media that themselves ‘see’
            the world in various ways, what if we asked how computers and
            bonobos and toaster pastries and Boeing 787 Dreamliners develop
            their own aesthetics? The perception and experience of other
            beings remains outside our grasp, yet available to speculation"
        is against the idea of politicising new aesthetics
    srnicek (the author of this medium piece)
        suggests bogost's new weirdness of machine perception could be
            fruitfully combined with politics (e.g., "surveillance cameras
            that track individuals via the invisible spectrums of light;
            military technology that transforms heat into visual forms;
            research into our unique olfactory signatures; and emerging
            technology that wraps light around objects and camouflages
            weapons from satellites")

the new aesthetics as it relates to cognitive mapping
    we should "design interfaces in such a way that they offer the
        possibility of manipulating complex systems", and "the work to
        be done is to create and discover new ways of bringing about
        machine perception"

design
    "Design — as the conjunction of aesthetics, pragmatism and technology - becomes
        a key node for overcoming our current dystopia"
    "interfaces must act to restrict information to a crucial set
        of variables, or to a discrete subset enabling ready interaction"

project cybersyn
    occurred in chile in the 1970s
    "was conceived as a real-time control system capable of collecting
        economic data throughout the nation, transmitting it to the government,
        and combining it in ways that could assist government decision-making"
    "The elaborate technical infrastructure underpinning this system
        was ultimately oriented towards a single control room capable
        of overseeing the entire economy"
    it had "symptomatic representation of the economy as a complex system.
        It then took this raw data and transformed it into a particular
        design aesthetic that was oriented towards gaining pragmatic
        leverage over the complex system. And it did all of this through
        visual means, through architectural choices, through gestural
        designs, and through knowledge of the limits of human thought.
        Moreover, unlike somewhat similar Soviet systems from the 1950,
        the Chilean system implemented a radical vision of society
        into its technological infrastructure. As opposed to the top
        down centralised control of the Soviet systems, the Chilean system
        incorporated decentralised decision-making capabilities directly
        into Cybersyn, effectively welding a novel form of communism
        into its material infrastructure."

big summary
    "In an age of immense complexity, one of the primary means to
        overcoming the neoliberal assumption about the impossibility
        of manipulating this complexity into perspicuity is to merge
        art practice, digital simulations and technological infrastructures
        into a project that aims to represent the non-object that is
        neoliberalism."
    an example is the new economics foundation, who "have extensively
        built on this systematic insight to create computer models of
        the economy that aim to give support for leftist political goals"