Re: <nettime> Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

On 10 Jan 2018, at 5:18, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> The move from an underdeveloped to developed economy is described as a 
> gap in resources, but it is much more of a gap in knowledge
> Free markets are praised as being efficient.  However, markets are not 
> efficient in promoting innovation and learning.  For example, in the 
> field of drug discovery, markets direct more effort and resources into 
> fighting hair loss than into combating malaria.

This lines up with Morlock's argument that another renaissance of 
literacy is in the offing, but this time around it's technical rather 
than textual literacy. We have no idea what it will entail, but let's 
say it's on the order of what the written word did — which, if you go 
with people like Eric Havelock, led to a profound rupture in 
subjectivity, of which 'philosophy' was just one byproduct. That general 
line of thought should pretty familiar to anyone who's dabbled in media 
theories of the last ~50 years: basically, that what we think and how we 
think it is inseparable from how we record and disseminate it. In that 
case, a lot of this pop hand-wringing about how [computation | digital | 
networks | mobile | screens] are producing new kinds of [people | 
organizations | societies | spectacles] — which are almost 
[incomprehensible | schizophrenic | psychotic] — is vaguely accurate. 
The problem is how we evaluate these changes. OT1H there are the 
nostalgists, who lament that technology is leading us astray and argue 
that we need to 'go back' somehow: parenting, education, law, 
regulation, etc. OT0H there are the futurists, from Arlington to Silicon 
Valley to Beijing to Moscow, who think the real challenge lies in 
figuring out how to exploit these new forms. Their styles differ, but 
one thing they share is a commitment to dissolving the boundaries of the 
self.

And then there's Keith, who refuses to get dragged into this pessimism 
and argues, more or less, that these debates are just quibbling about 
what kind of wreath we should send to the west's funeral — and that 
broad statistical trends in the distribution of the world's population 
tell us much of we need to know. I admire his optimism, and I think the 
left needs to start looking much more widely for promising realities, 
rather than dwelling on threatening possibilities. Some of this dilemma 
is neatly summed up in a New Yorker–ish cartoon that's been doing the 
rounds for some years, of a few ragged people huddled around a campfire 
(in a  cave, appropriately enough): "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But 
for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for 
shareholders."

https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-destroyed-but-for-a-beautiful-moment-in-time-we-created-a-lot-of-value-for-shareholders/

This all is a roundabout way of approaching the question what exactly 
would fill this 'gap in knowledge' that Joseph Stiglitz diagnoses. We 
should keep in mind the origins of this kind of 'gap' idea. As far as I 
know, the first one was the 'bomber gap' of the mid-'50s, followed 
quickly by the 'missile gap' of the late '50s on; but even if those 
aren't the first gaps, they played a decisive role in this kind of 
'global' rhetoric with all its quantish-sounding comparisons — between 
the US and the USSR, between under- and over-developed economies, 
between the global south and north, etc. Both of those two gaps were 
mostly imaginary: they were shrill gambits made by the emerging security 
apparatus to justify vast expansions in the scale and scope of military 
R&D budgets, which Brian and I were talking about. This genealogy, from 
the 1957 Gaither Report's 'bomber gap' to Stiglitz's 'knowledge gap,' 
says a lot about how deeply militarism has pervaded intellectual 
cultures: even Marxoids and enviro-economists rely heavily on this 'gap' 
metaphor. I wonder how much power this idea of a gap exerts in the 
African social settings that Keith describes so lovingly. My guess is 
not much — not because Africans are unaware of the force of globalism 
(on the contrary), but maybe because their myriad cultures, coming from 
very different historical perspectives, don't see it as necessarily 
opposed to immediate sociability. Pessimism, and its attended sense of 
hopelessness, are learned.

But, really, what is this gap? It's a differential — between an 
'actually existing' state of affairs and an imagined anti/ideal. I think 
the gap metaphor has been widely successful in large part because it can 
be applied to almost anything: bombers or missiles, vocational or 
critical education, resources, income and savings, philanthropic 
funding, pharma R&D, trivial business plans, whatever. It's a neatly 
quasi-visual way of sidestepping philosophy (not a bad thing, IMO): 
instead of lying around on couches and praising Eros, as in Plato's 
Symposium, we construct more or less statistical models of a narrowly 
defined problem then debate what kinds of policies might get from where 
we are to where we should be.

But that *should* is a tipoff: beneath all the statistics and policy, 
these are moral debates. The problem for nostalgists (and income ways 
I'm one) is who's announcing what we 'should' do — for example, 
Arlington, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Moscow... I have issues with 
Morlock's broadly 'realist' arguments (my word, not his), but when you 
strip away the manners I think his arguments are surprisingly optimistic 
— just not by the standards of a world that's clinging to parochial 
ideas about what 'knowledge' is or will be.

On 9 Jan 2018, at 16:25, Joseph Rabie wrote:

> Their is a blind belief that capitalism and the market are one and the 
> same, but this is not so. Markets have existed for as long as there 
> has been specialization of labour. Capitalism is a modern mechanism, 
> invented to enable certain forms of development, frequently of a 
> predatory and corrosive nature. The time has come to uninvent 
> capitalism, to return the market to its cooperative vocation.

This first point is really important. We're never going to make any 
worthwhile progress if we speak of 'the market' as a transhistorical, 
transcultural phenomenon. We need to insist that there's no 'the 
market,' there are only myriad markets grounded in radically different 
contexts — only some of which are global electronic systems operated 
by people in 24/7 offices. The trick is to find the kinds that we can 
accept as a tradeoff between where we are and where we think we want to 
be. That's an optimistic project to find what we don't know and what we 
aren't yet familiar with (and how), not a pessimistic project in lumping 
all this stuff together to conclude that that planet will get destroyed.

Cheers,
Ted
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