Humans ARE Animals

Cruelty to nonhuman animals enables cruelty among human animals.
Solidarity with nonhuman animals builds solidarity among human animals.

Queen of the Libertechbrotarians

From Business Insider, Wall Street's Former Queen of Commodities Just Made Her Pitch for Why Bitcoin Is the Future:

Bitcoin technology could reshape the way financial markets operate. That is according to Blythe Master[s], the chief executive of Digital Asset Holdings, and one of the biggest names in the business... Everything from stock to bonds and derivatives could be exchanged and paid for in the same way the cryptocurrency community is executing bitcoin transactions, Masters said. Still, it is early on. Masters compared where Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are now in terms of their development to early 1990s Internet. "In reality, the world is not there yet," Masters said. She said the industry would have to address regulatory hurdles as it confronts issues like authentication and security in coming years. Masters was one of a group of JPMorgan executives who helped create the market for credit default swaps in the 1990s, and later went to head its global commodities division.

Yes, a "Thought Leader" who helped engineer the global crash just a few years ago by peddling fraudulent financial instruments to circumvent regulations and sound investment norms is at it again.

And why not? This Business Insider piece wasn't written after a visit to Blythe Masters in the prison cell she belongs in, after all, and it's not like she has common sense or conscience to constrain her, that much is clear. Why, she's "one of the biggest names in the business," we are told! What else does anybody need to know?

The plausibility of "Bitcoin" and comparable crypto-currency schemes always derives (surprisingly explicitly surprisingly often) from anarcho-capitalist fantasies of natural market forces (of which there are literally none) generating optimally efficient and just "spontaneous orders" (of which there has never been nor ever will be one). The usual popular postwar Randroidal and Friedmaniacal just-so stories and nonsense rationalizations for plutocracy and white supremacy bubble and boil this discursive cauldron to its froth, of course. Note that regulation is figured here as a "hurdle" for "the industry," for example.

But notice as well that problems are figured as merely technical, and therefore technically solvable: "authentication" and "security" await their programming fixes, no social or ethical questions bedevil the pristine instrumental prospect... let us unleash the bulldozers! What the last thirty years has taught us above all is that it is techno-transcendental rhetoric in particular that transforms these commonplace confusions, deceptions, and self-congratulatory cons into the cadences of progressive and spiritual revelations that drive the popular imagination from solidarity and suicide.

The wistful call back to the glory days of the "early 1990s Internet" is a tip-off: You remember the early 1990s, surely, the beginning of The Long Boom, in which space was abolished, cryptoanarchy smashed all the states, Cyberspace was the Home of Mind, virtuality transformed reality, nanotech delivered superabundance, California Extropians said "No!" to Death and Taxes, and pop futurists were revealing on a daily basis the techs That! Would! Change! Everything!

Oh, for a to return to the days of Irrational Exuberance! The Smartest Guys in the Room could really squeeze a fortune from the rubes back then!

Even in this short, throwaway piece, you should notice that it is a futurological formulation that provides all the juice: "The world is not there yet."

A denial of basic knowledge is articulated in the form of a prophetic utterance, whereupon the brute force of technological determination and superlative destining are called forth to shunt the realities of precarious bodies, historical struggles, lawless violations, and ecosystemic limits out of sight, out of mind to make way for frictionless flows of capital and fountainheads of cyberspatial spirit-stuff.

Of course, state forms are the point of departure for any macroeconomics. So sorry to harsh your bliss, but what passes for "the market" in any historical epoch will be an artifact of laws, norms, pricing conventions, and infrastructural affordances articulated and maintained by states and public investment. Meanwhile, currency itself, not to put too fine a point on it, is what states authorize as instruments for the payment of public debt.

There is of course much more to say on these topics (do read Polanyi), but there is no point in saying anything at all before all the participants in the conversation grasp these fundamental and foundational facts of the matter at hand. To deny such things is not to have revolutionary thoughts but to testify in public either to complete ignorance on the topic at hand or to a willingness to engage in fraud. I don't know whether she is a market fundamentalist zealot, or a full on techno-utopian True Believer, or just a con-artist looking to hack together her next personally profitable bit of financial fraud, indifferent to the lives and hopes ruined by her clever schemes and technical gew-gaws. Blythe Masters is advocating nothing short of looting and warlordism and the neoliberal tech press, settled in the midst of the still smoking ruins and ballooning bodies of a world wrecked by these facile frauds, cheers her stupid destructive pieties as a "Deep Think," natch.

"Tech's" Assertive Disavowals of History: A Twitter Essaylet

The power of "tech" discourses to incumbent interests arises from the way they disavow history while appearing to assert substance. The work of "tech" discourses of prosthetic or therapeutic "enhancement," for example, is to disavow the interdependence of human agency. The one to be "enhanced" is always already the isolated neglected precarized individual "self," their "enhancement" (setting aside the hyperbole & deceptions typical in such presentations) valorizes and naturalizes this isolated self, then offers compensatory fantasies of "capacity" that never redeem violations compelled by the sociopathic model of selfhood they fortify.

The real work of "tech" discourses of AI is to disavow the incarnation of intelligence and responsibility in living bodies and history. The investment of human-made machines with intelligence and agency -- as when we treat "autonomous" weapons as killers, or algorithms as bureaucrats -- divests humans of intelligence and agency, denigrates intelligence and responsibility in their human forms: the better to rationalize the mistreatment of humans as if they were robots, the better to disavow responsibility for murderous uses of artifacts or rationalize callous decisions by bureaucrats.

As Evgeny Morozov mentioned in a tweet yesterday (an observation that set me off on this twitter-essaylet), the real work of "tech" discourses of Smart this'n-that is to disavow the artificial imposition by elites of austerian scarcity: What makes a smart device "smart" is its promise to make do with less, and quite apart from the fact that "Smart" gizmos rarely live up to the hype with which they are marketed -- indeed, what gets peddled as "smart" tends to end up looking stupid before it gets tossed into the landfill to poison the world --what one is not paying attention to when one is celebrating coping with less is the question just why are we compelled to cope with less? 

Why are we coping with less? Is the leanness necessary? Is it shared? Are some benefiting disproportionately from the leanness of others? It is one thing to grasp sustainable civilization must stop fantasies of limitless growth and harmless waste with shared problem-solving, but quite a lot of the "tech" that gets called Smart seems instead to facilitate the erosion of social support and collective humanity.

"Smartness" figures unintelligent artifacts as intelligent: the literal denigration of humans follows upon their figurative denigration. The real work of "tech" discourses of Design and Technocratic policy is to disavow their hostility to and demolition of democracy. Designers amount to small cohorts of privileged individuals claiming to solve political problems by circumventing political processes: So digirati promise to code democracy from privileged enclaves, green design promises sustainability without threatening consumerism, designers fail to accomplish their avowed universal ends while succeeding in self-promotion and parochial profitability for incumbents. In a related development, Paul Krugman has taken to describing so-called neoliberal technocrats as "faithocrats":

Espousing faith in serially failed austerity and trickle-down, they peddle their plutocratic politics as neutral apolitical engineering. Of course, no "tech" has a single politics, but the disavowal of politics through the conjuration of "tech" is indeed a "tech" politics.

It is never true that all artifacts and techniques are discerned as "tech": We describe only some of the field of the artifactual as "tech" while naturalizing the rest of that field as the natural, the customary. There is an inevitable de-politicization of that which is naturalized, and that naturalization always conduces to the status-quo and its beneficiaries.

Further, when "tech" fixates on power as capacitation then promises to solve/circumvent political problems with instrumental rationality, such "tech" discourses always disfigure freedom and progress as political categories as they also disable democratic processes.

The disavowal of history at the heart of prevailing "tech" discourses is reactionary, reductionist and anti-democratizing in its thrust. Only by pluralizing, narrativizing, politicizing "tech" can we engage critically in real progressive technoscientific social struggle. fin.

Why "Stupid Or Evil?" Is So Often Stupid And Evil

For a conception of good connected to democratic virtues (eg, reliably informed nonduressed people are capable of consenting to the terms on which they freely associate with one another, government is legitimated through the consent of the governed, the scene of consent is secured by the provision of general welfare -- basic income, healthcare, education -- and equal recourse to the law and civil rights, government facilitates the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes over the question of what violence consists of) the evil it opposes is often conjoined to stupidity, to the extent that stupidity is mostly the denial of warrantedly assertible beliefs about matters of fact that otherwise attract the consensus of reasonable people or relevant scientific experts.

Wonder V Plunder

Science is suffused with Not Knowing. Pseudo-science is enthused with Know-Nothings and Know-It-Alls.