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What do you think about the idea of creating socialized alternatives to the data-hoarding tech giants—as mooted in these pages by Evgeny Morozov?
I think it makes little difference whether data are collected by governments or by companies, because either way the data menace whistleblowers and dissidents. Whatever data businesses collect, the state can easily get.
jesus christ dude, have some more imagination please
[...] our argument—our claim of counterperformativity—is that those assumptions made possible, via their gaming by market participants, the construction of securities that radically undermined them.
a succinct explanation of what counterperformativity means
In a stimulating contribution to the literature on performativity in economic life, Elena Esposito points to the pervasiveness of what, drawing upon the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, she calls ‘second-order observation’. Translated into our terms, it is not simply that mathematical models in finance have performative and counterperformative effects, but actors observe or anticipate those effects and act accordingly. A recurring suspicion that actors within finance have about the many models that involve the bell-shaped normal distribution, on which extreme events are very unlikely, is that their use can have the counterperformative effect of increasing the likelihood of those events.
[...] Nor do we for a moment intend that investigation of the performativity or counterperformativity of mathematical models should displace other forms of analysis of finance. For instance, the rise of options and other forms of derivatives cannot be understood in isolation from broader processes such as the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and the rise of free-market economics and of deregulatory impulses. To take an example of a quite different kind, Chicago’s open-outcry trading pits were places of the body as well as of the use of Black’s sheets—and specifically places of male bodies, places often uncomfortable for women. The patterns of interpersonal relations among options traders left their traces on price movements, and, more generally, the structures of financial markets—including the advantages enjoyed by incumbents—remain important, even in today’s world of algorithmic trading. The causes of the global financial crisis go far beyond the counterperformative process on which we have focused, and centrally include phenomena of the sort focused on by political economy of a more traditional kind, including Marxist political economy. As such, all we would claim is that ‘performativity’ is a useful addition to the conceptual toolkit necessary for understanding economic life. Mathematical models are by no means the only phenomena that have a performative aspect, but they are ever more important. An algorithmic economy is an economy of logical operations and mathematical procedures, and therefore a mathematical economy.
The reality that Britain was already a world power in 1914 also apparently raises no problem; Germany’s ambition to become one was the intolerable cause of the war. As David Calleo long ago pointed out, the boot was if anything on the other foot. Britain’s overweening global status made any steady balance of power within Europe impossible, destabilizing the continent once Germany became its leading economy. In short, as Lenin said, it was the uneven development of imperialist competition that made a major war between the rival predators at some point inevitable. Unable to handle imperialism as a general phenomenon of the period, Winkler is finally reduced to a play on words to pin the blame on Berlin. [...]
The basic premise of The Age of Catastrophe is that ‘the Bolshevik reign of terror was more than just a reaction to the extremely difficult situation in early 1918 both inside Russia and beyond, for it necessarily resulted from Lenin’s plan to create a new communist society within a backward country’. The distortion here is the phrase ‘Lenin’s plan’. Unlike Fascism, Leninism never produced a general political theory to justify one-party rule; party autocracy was always understood as an undesirable but unavoidable historical necessity in the particular conditions of Russia. As Winkler’s analysis shows, neither Lenin nor Trotsky thought it was possible to create a communist society in Russia alone. When Trotsky’s call for world revolution at Brest-Litovsk was answered with mass demonstrations and strikes, the SPD leadership in Germany exerted every effort to undermine the movement, hardening the very isolation that Winkler himself acknowledges was one of the main reasons for the dictatorial methods of the Bolsheviks. The notion of a direct route to socialism and communism in such confinement was Stalin’s, not Lenin’s. Anyone with an iota of historical curiosity must pose a question that The Age of Catastrophe avoids: what might have been the consequences of a forthright defence—by Kautsky, for example—of the Bolshevik revolution and a call for solidary insurrection in the West in 1918, for both the course of Russian political development and the prospects for socialism in western Europe?
hm interesting!
Of course the emergence of a revolutionary threat to capital on the left was a key condition for the rise of Fascism in both Germany and Italy—as too in Spain, though not in Romania or Japan—triggering at once a force of counter-revolutionary violence against it from below, and an accommodation, intending cooption, of this force by the established elites of land and money from above, for the common purpose of crushing labour. This was an objective dynamic, for which it is absurd to blame the newly born KPD or PCd’I, as if they should have decided not to exist. On the other hand, contra Winkler, Social Democracy bore a prior, subjective responsibility for the rise of Fascism, at least in Germany, first by rallying to the inter-imperialist war of 1914, without which Nazism would never have become a significant force, and then by ensuring that the forces of old-regime reaction—the army, the Junkers, the Krupps and Thyssens—were preserved intact in 1918–19, indeed welcomed as allies in putting down the revolutionary left. That was avoidable, as Fascist hatred of Communism was not. The Age of Catastrophe praises the SPD as a force for national unity while condemning every attempt at mass mobilization from below as an irresponsible putsch. Yet on Winkler’s own telling, Ebert’s readiness to resort to counter-revolutionary violence not only prompted the left-wing USPD to resign from his provisional government, but also ‘opened up an unbridgeable chasm between the moderate and the radical elements in the German workers’ movement’ once Noske crushed the Spartacist revolt.
i like the dry but caustic writing style
The massiveness of Winkler’s construction thus appears as a compensation for the lack of an explanatory framework that might account for the historical issues it raises. As is often the case with books such as this, narrative range functions as a placeholder for conceptual rigour. Despite its impressive scale, The Age of Catastrophe is basically an ideological exercise, an empirically implausible morality tale. Intellectually, it is obvious that the ‘Second Thirty Years’ War’ of 1914–45 will never be understood without a theory of the interlocking dynamics of capitalist development and imperialist geopolitics. Winkler’s long chapter on ‘National States and Empires’ in From the Beginnings is where one might expect to find some attempt to handle this problem. But it ends up as a diffuse narrative of well over 500 pages which manages to avoid accounting for the driving forces behind European expansion. The only analytic statement provided is that the ‘agonistic principle’, with its roots in the Homeric epoch, pushed various European states to strive for glory in the non-European world. This explanation is, of course, wholly inadequate. It was imperialist conflict that broke apart the Socialist International, detonated the Russian Revolution and established the fundamental context for the rise of Fascism. The Second World War was also quite obviously, as Michael Mann has recently put it, ‘the last inter-imperial war’.
hhahaha love this omg
Verhagen contrasts Tiravanija’s celebration of the contemporary artist’s travels with a reading of Walead Beshty’s FedEx Boxes (2007). The work is composed of laminated and mirrored glass cubes, which are shipped in FedEx boxes between exhibitions, where the boxes are transformed into their pedestals. On top of the boxes are waybills and custom notes, symbolizing the ‘elaborate machinery of modern border controls’. In these material forms, Beshty highlights not only the volume of handling and shipping that contemporary artworks undergo, but also the associated knocks and blows. The cracked surfaces of the glass cubes reveal the institutional processes of their exhibition—‘the more they travel, the more damaged they are.’ For Verhagen, the cracked glass evokes structures damaged in violent conflicts, and hence points to other travellers: peacekeepers and refugees. On an aesthetic level, Verhagen sees this work as breaking with traditional assumptions of artworks as timeless objects that require careful conservation. Though this assumption has obviously been under attack for almost a century now, alongside complex and ambiguous expressions of the ‘homelessness’ of art, Verhagen reads this piece as articulating the specific nature of travel today, showing increased movement in conditions of globalization to be heavily associated with ‘risk and degradation’.
this is actually so cool
In his 1996 essay, ‘A Theory of Tourism’, Enzensberger noted that tourism advanced in step with industrial capitalism, as an expanding urban bourgeoisie took advantage of new means of transport to escape from increasingly congested cities. But as tourists’ experiences are entirely shaped by the forces they wish to break away from, their radical taste for new freedoms is inevitably frustrated. Tourism is thus ‘always outrun by its refutation’. This dialectic is the driving force of tourism’s development, and it ‘redoubles its efforts after each defeat’. For Verhagen, Enzensberger’s point retains its relevance today, the rise of global trade and the development of budget travel going hand-in-hand since the 1960s, both shaping tourism into a ‘potent instance in the expansion in global trade and a catalyst for other forms of social exchange’, as well as a tangible mode for insertion into global circuits. Verhagen contrasts Almond’s work to the direct engagement with mass tourism in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Visible World (1986–2001), an installation of 3,000 tourist photos displayed on light-boxes. More jarring is Turista (1994) by Francis Alÿs, an important artist for Verhagen. In this performance piece, documented in photographs, Alÿs stands beside the plumbers, carpenters and electricians offering their services on the Zócalo in Mexico City, his own sign reading ‘Turista’. As Verhagen comments, ‘In Alÿs’s action, the inappropriateness of his appearance among the job seekers illuminates his privilege and, by extension, the structural economic imbalances that underlie it.’
fuck i really like this