by
Max Haiven
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[...] Pokémon is a site where children “learn to learn” (Buckingham and Sefton-Green 2004, 30) to develop financialized subjecthood and a sense of agency germane to a world without guarantees where social values are bartered, where the individual is an isolated economic agent and where society is merely the sum of its people’s economic decisions. This learning is clearly not the intention of the Nintendo Corporation, but the brand works and takes such a hold of children’s imagination because they, on a deep existential level, recognize what Pokémon can offer them: it affirms a world they see all around them, from observing their parents’ increasingly episodic careers and financial woes to the sorts of narratives they witness on television and the media. Pokémon’s success stems from its resonance within and reproduction of the ethos of financialization.
relevant to the marxist analysis of runescape that i WILL write one day
On the one hand, the financial sector is incredibly creative. Some of the finest and most refined minds of each successive generation are cherry-picked from elite universities hedge-funds, investment banks and their institutional periphery to dream up ever more rapid, cunning and diabolical ways to make money out of money. The development of new derivative financial products, new avenues of inter-market arbitrage, new revenue streams to capitalize, new technologies of high-frequency trading and new ways of reading, visualizing and interpreting the market have seduced not only the graduates of elite business programs, but also PhDs in fluid dynamics, astrophysics, cellular biology and computer engineering. To be sure, the vast majority of what goes on in the financial sector is deeply uncreative (endless number-crunching and paper-pushing, scrupulous research on economic sectors and investments, meticulous computer programming, hectic digital trading and ruthless power-brokering). Taken as a whole, however, the financial sector is a staggering reactor of human creativity, a playground of the mind where the unfathomable pressure of intense competition creates a remorseless ecosystem of constrained innovation, which, no less strange than the uncanny depths of the ocean, is populated with monsters at the very limits of the imagination
Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation.
again extremely relevant to tech!
[...] Claustrophobic cultural norms and parochial markets were to be swept away by the free movement of capital around the world, as were inefficient and unfair labour practices and corrupt governments. This rhetoric reached a fevered pitch during the dot.com boom at the turn of the millennium, when our old friend Bill Gates was among those CEOs leading the choir in praise of a borderless digital economy that would sweep away lumbering corporate dinosaurs, open up bold new markets and allow the spirit of the creative entrepreneur latent in each individual to shine through (Gates 1995; 1999). Indeed, so much opportunity was said to abound that individuals who failed to seize it had only themselves to blame, an impression which lent itself to the drive to privatize and to cut social services lest they inhibit such creative zeal. Even meagre forms of economic redistribution, it was feared, would create dependent individuals unwilling to embrace the risks and rewards of the new economy. The appearance of “creativity” as the partner of “destruction” here is no accident, or, more accurately, it is no accident that Schumpeter’s initially pessimistic and academic term became a crucial element in the reproduction of financialization. In much the same way as discourses of innovation, progress, science and ingenuity were applied to the technological development of nuclear bombs, the slippery language of creativity offers an unaccountable rhetoric that both excuses and facilitates financial speculation’s destructive practices towards the reproduction of the ruling paradigm. By linking the vicissitudes of the deregulated free market to the idea of creativity, which is held to be the dynamic and unique element of the human spirit, financialized capitalism’s drives and effects are disguised as the natural and inevitable articulations of human nature itself, rather than as historically contingent and entirely avoidable.
At one level, creativity’s move from the margin to the centre of capitalist ideology is linked to the financialization of the system. Financialization is driven, ultimately, by a speculative ethos with a voracious appetite for the production of newness (see Marazzi 2008, 64–68). To demonstrate their quality to investors, firms need to prove not merely profitability but also innovation, a capacity to stay ahead of the curve, to constantly revolutionize their means of production (and distribution, and sales). Financialization, then, drives and is driven by an economy pathologically addicted to the performance of creativity. Creativity’s particular woolliness as a concept is here an asset: it is precisely because it is not fully quantifiable (in part because it is a nebulous term, in part because it is always relative to someone else’s lack) that it can operate as a disciplinary idiom, one that polices economic actors who could always be just a little more creative, and may not be creative enough. In a world where capital insists on measuring and quantifying almost every social process (de Angelis 2007) there is a particular economic and cultural utility to be found in ideas and ideals like creativity precisely to the extent they refuse or elude such conscription: they hold open a horizon or a promise in whose name all manner of otherwise dubious, short-sighted or irrational actions might be justified. Creativity, unburdened from any requirement to prove its purpose or measure its success, becomes a cruel aspiration whose absence can be cited as the justification for the restructuring of an enterprise, a government program or an individual’s career or economic outlook.
[...] Cognitive capitalism, then, is characterized by the expansion and proliferation of capital’s technologies and techniques for capturing living labour beyond the factory (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Vercellone 2007). As Marazzi (2008) illustrates, the financial sector itself is foundational to the development, sustainability and measurement of these new technologies. Drawing on the example of the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, he argues that finance offers liquid capital to a whole variety of attempts to marketize and commodify the creative energies of workers and consumers. While perhaps only 1% of firms succeed (paying for the other 99% that end in failure), finance effectively widens and pluralizes capitalism’s social factory. For other Autonomist thinkers, including Federici (2005; 2012) and De Angelis (2007), this represents less a new paradigm and more the continuation and intensification of capitalism’s historic trajectory to enclose the commons. They borrow the concept from Marx’s writings on the origins of capitalism in the “primitive accumulation” of common lands, and then they extend it to illuminate the ways that common spaces of autonomy, solidarity and social experimentation are successively incorporated into and subsumed within capitalism’s overarching paradigm (see also Caffentzis 2013; The Midnight Notes Collective 1990).
extremely relevant to tech
Second, finance allows long-term profiteering by offering capitalists credit, to pursue projects that may take years to come to profitable fruition. For instance, while ultimately extremely profitable, the construction of a mine, or the development of new communication or industrial technologies, takes time and does not afford returns quickly enough to entice most capitalist investors. Finance allows the capitalist class as a whole to advance money to individual capitalists whose ventures will, eventually, benefit the system as a whole and commodify another aspect of the world or of social relations (in terms of new resource “inputs” derived from the mine, or new technologies of exploitation). Through the magic of interest, lending institutions and individual investors can afford to provide many more capitalists with funds than will ever succeed: the interest (at least theoretically) covers the costs of the failure of some enterprises and provides an incentive for investment. Hence, finance allows a much more dynamic capitalist economy and encourages the expansion of capitalist accumulation into new spheres of social life as “entrepreneurs” seek to commodify ever-more dimensions of human existence. For instance, the frantic (and ultimately successful) rush to commodify the internet was facilitated by the rise of the so-called dot.com bubble, which saw financial markets make speculative investments in a multitude of tiny, fly-by-night firms with “good ideas” (Marazzi 2010). While most of these ideas would never actually generate meaningful revenue, the sphere of finance afforded the possibility for capital to attempt tens of thousands of strategies of commodification, knowing full well that only a handful (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) would succeed, but that this success would make up for the capital invested in the legions of failures. [...]
this is a good way of looking at it. relevant to venture capital
[...] Because capitalism is fundamentally based on contradictions, financial crises, in a way, regulate the inherent systemic crisis by limiting its effects to the particular sphere of finance. In the aftermath of such crises, capital has the opportunity redraw or renegotiate the lines of regulation. The Keynesian solution to the Great Depression, or the disastrous austerity solution to our own “Great Recession”, are means by which the lines of policy and practice can be redrawn to afford the perpetuation of capital accumulation, at least until the contradictions once again accumulate to such an extent that crisis is inevitable. To this we might add that, given that crises are cyclical and systemic, they can offer tremendous opportunities to financial firms who can hedge their bets correctly. The staggering success of Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan in profiting from the 2007/2008 crisis and its aftermath, as well as their central role in fomenting that crisis (both pushing and betting against securitized sub-prime loans), bears witness to the reality that crises are not some sort of neutral storm from heaven, but, rather, the “internal exception,” the routine, if brutal, “state of emergency” that is key to the sovereignty of capital.
like california wildfires? should i agree with this view, or contest its implications?
Of course, we should never tire of pointing out that, even in the supposed “Golden Age,” the middle class was largely aspirational and a completely rigged game. Individualized consumer lifestyles depended on the neocolonial exploitation of the Third World, huge racialized underclasses (with virtually no access to debt or credit) (Winant 2001) and the systematic exploitation of women’s reproductive labour in the home and the market (Federici 2012). It also depended on a deep cultural conservatism enforced by homophobic terrorism (Kinsman and Gentile 2009) and what we now understand to be completely unsustainable ecological practices, including the mass exploitation of fossil fuels, the proliferation of toxic chemicals and plastics, and the mass production of commodities and their subsequent waste (Foster, Clark and York 2010). While capital may have been able to buy off a section of the working class (particularly those whom it valued in white-collar, managerial and professional positions) (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013), there was (and is) no way to extend this prosperity to even a fraction of the world’s population, though this promise was (and is) among the key legitimations of global capitalism [...]
not exactly new but it's nice to have a summary of the problems with the Keynesian golden ages
For our purposes, it should be noted that the entire sub-prime market was based on offering NINJA borrowers a chance for privatized upward class mobility through the lure of home ownership. One way of reading this situation is to suggest that low-income workers accepted the loans as a form of resistance to their material conditions. Indeed, many did so because, even if their homes were foreclosed, things could not get much worse: they already, after all, had virtually no assets to lose. Sub-prime loans depended to a large extent on the myth of the universality of the middle class and the idea of financialized independence; sub-prime mortgages offered borrowers what seemed to be a key to economic security, health, education and a fair share of social wealth (Aronowitz 2003; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 112–117). This, especially for the largely racialized urban populations that were the prime target of this form of extortion, might be read as a form of resistance to a neoliberal culture of utter abandonment and the vaporization of social security and public space (see Giroux 2012). It also relied on the tragic optimism of the American Dream that informed borrowers that brighter days were always on the horizon for those who work hard and take individualistic control of their lives. It was within this individualistic frame that taking out an extortionate mortgage with a rapidly escalating interest rate could be justified as a form of resistance for the economically marginalized (that is, when the terms of the mortgage were even disclosed by the mortgage sales representative, which was routinely not the case – Taibbi 2010). We are beholden to recognize the savvy motivations that animated people’s engagement with sub-prime finance and not fall prey to the right-wing castigation of our “financial illiteracy” or the canard that people “used their houses as ATMs” for the purchase of “big-screen TVs” and the like.
Obviously, the strategies of financialized “resistance” through finance outlined here, and to which we can today add micro-finance schemes as well, were and are Pyrrhic, if not utterly disastrous. And they stretch the definition of “resistance” almost to the breaking point, given that IMF/WB loans, sub-prime mortgages, consumer credit and the like were actively advertised and encouraged by the powers-that-be. But, as Aihwa Ong (2006) and others have recently pointed out, we do a disservice to people’s agency and intelligence when we imagine neoliberalism is merely imposed from above. It is, in fact, activated from below, enacted and performed by social actors as they contend with and respond to material conditions.
i like this reading. relevant to tech's spread throughout culture? uber isn't just imposed on people, but the larger cultural backdrop caused them to be receptive to it (a limited form of agency)
[...] all financial crises are, elementally, crises of liquidity: the fluid convertibility of one form of capital into another [...] In the most recent crisis, derivatives and other securities based on the sub-prime market ceased overnight to be convertible into ready cash or other assets because no one would buy them: they were no longer credible claims to realworld value. Indeed, fearing they would cause a crash if they revealed the scope of the problem, commentators and pundits insisted on calling it a “liquidity crisis” until the gravity of the economic crisis became unavoidable.
But I have suggested in Chapter 2 that we need to think of liquidity more broadly: liquidity names the success of capital in converting social values into economic value, the pliability of social life to the dictates of capitalist accumulation. For this reason, liquidity is correlated with resistance within the system: low resistance means high liquidity. For instance, a sweatshop in an export-processing zone is (at least ideally) a highly liquid social institution because it maximizes exploitation and minimizes resistance. Money invested in production can enjoy easy convertibility into a t-shirt or a circuit board thanks to lax laws, violence, surveillance and the ever-present threat of capital relocation – resistance is held to a minimum. It is also easily liquidated: a corporation can choose to employ a different sub-contractor and shift production elsewhere without losing a great deal of invested capital. Similarly, the highly regulated and supervised space of Walmart is a highly liquid space for capital: the t-shirt or electronic commodity is almost certain to transform back into capital (money) with very little impedance, thanks to the grooming of the shopping atmosphere, private security and surveillance, and consumer cultural norms (see Chapter 3). This somewhat reductionist example serves to demonstrate that liquidity is more than just the celerity of financial transactions: it indexes the saturation of capital into social life and the relations of production, and measures (the absence of) resistance. It refers to the ease with which the fundamental capitalist formula of accumulation, M-C-M' , can advance – in this formula, resistance is the viscosity of the hyphens.