<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Dear all, </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">Below is McKenzie Wark's review of the recent book of Srnicek and Williams; Inventing Future.</div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br>Wark is an interesting figure since he sits both between and outside of classes, rulers and the ruled, marxists and post marxists, autonomists and situationists, ideas and practices, academia and media,.. an outsider may be a bit like Lefebvre. </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">I did read and enjoyed a lot his Hacker's Manifesto, long after started to work on the GNUnion idea in 2010 (design experiment for a worker-hacker-farmer-students...'s union - then was not aware the IWWW fiction of Cory Doctorov too) and found about his engagement with Alexander Bogdanov in 2014; and this was after finding about Bogdanov's work following 15 years long search I made for the Energetic Materialist methodology referred by SultanGaliev. These two separate occasions, to be honest, made me over enthusiastic about Wark and his work and projects he involved; as Bogdanov Library (by Historical Materialism journal), or his recent book Molecular Red. </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">Of course after more readings, on Public Seminar (new school page) and other places, and several exchanges about his writings, style, and his critics, etc. and trying to contact him, my enthusiasm got tamed till healthy level. Since there were problems that are valid<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> for everyone else, this was part of a healthy self-learning process. </span>Although, keeping my own and others righty made criticism as reserve, there are important ones amongst the issues he risen or fingered out: First one and primarily the need for sort of invention of non-pyramidal (un and self-instiutional) forms, that would allow, as Bogdanov puts it, the skeletal form that would holds the plastic (network) part of organization in order to self-organize the emancipation globally. </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">With respect to question directed by a comrade, or request to not make easy things complicated, I think what is needed at this point of history is to take several steps forward in order to create a space of comradely solidarity politics, between ideas of and around: </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">- Labour organizing and networking, platform co-operativism, commons, and solidarity economy, and people's internet (all taking peace, gender, and environment issue to its core) </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">In order to develop or produce such a social space for commons-solidarity politics, that is autonomous from the state and the capital, what is needed is p2p networking labour of all involved, but primarily the grassroots collectives and individual projects; </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div id="AppleMailSignature">-This has to be done towards, in, and beyond Montreal WSF in August 2016 </div><div id="AppleMailSignature">-By inviting all groups and individuals to expand a transnational social space in self-decentralized way</div><div id="AppleMailSignature">-Through event designed and implemented locally and integrated transnationally via cyber and analog tools. </div><div id="AppleMailSignature">-Such events can be harmonically organized in every hacker space, every occupy assembly, every transition town, every co-worker spaces, every worker coops, unions, labour groups, so on if they like to respond to such invitation. </div><div id="AppleMailSignature">if e invitation is appealing to local groups there can be autonomous platforms created (inter cultural and lingual) to iner-connect (via online platforms, live streams, chat channels, collaborative tools, e-lists, etc. what ever people like or used to use). </div><div id="AppleMailSignature"><br></div><div>In order to think of and initiate something like this a nice, caring, respectful, mindful, recognizing, open invitation to be prepared and distributed to anyone interested. </div><div><br></div><div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">----</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The above in one of the ways to follow, in my humble opinion, to invent the future, or at least not to lose the hope totally in coming years. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There are at the moment good and interlocking people (fellowship of the ring) already talking and thinking around the lines. Some of the related e-lists already cc'ed or bcc'ed here. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">That would be great to see people from these lists to inter-connect the discussions and practical work being kicked off. </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">And be happy and grateful to hear any reaction, and if anyone consider to give an hand, or spread the word. </span></div></div><div> </div><div>In fraternal and comradely solidarity, </div><div>Orsan</div><div> </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br>On 7 nov. 2015, at 09:57, peter waterman <<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">And here if the 'Full Wark' on Srnicek and Williams. Definitely worth reading!<br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small">P<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br><a class="" href="http://www.publicseminar.org">
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<a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/author/kenwark/" title="Posts by McKenzie Wark" class="" rel="author">McKenzie Wark</a>
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<a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/" class="" title="Permalink to Inventing the Future" rel="bookmark">October 27, 2015</a>
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<p>The key lesson of <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the-future">Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams</a>’ <em>Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work</em> (Verso, 2015) is summed up in an epigram from <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/03/communicative-capitalism/">Jodi Dean</a>:
“Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens.” (26) This new book
encouragse us to think big, to organize around ideas that scale. As such
its useful corrective to those flavors of political thought and action
that want to privilege the local and the ethical.</p>
<p>“The ambition here is to take the future back from capitalism.” (127)
Which would be all well and good if there still was a future. The
encounter that never arrives in Srnicek and Williams (hereafter S+W) is
with, say, the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bellamy_Foster">John Bellamy Foster</a> or <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/">Jason Moore</a>,
which would seriously question whether one can still think of a social
or political future without thinking about the Anthropocene. The
accumulated molecular waste products of modernity now cycle through the
whole earth system, undermining its relative stability. The gritty
facticity of the world rather puts a damper on dreaming of accelerating
through the rough on into the smooth.</p>
<p>It does indeed appear, as S+W say, that the commodity form has colonized the future. Here in the <a href="https://libcom.org/library/enrag%C3%A9s-situationists-occupations-movement">over-developed world</a>,
we can have a shiny new tech, but always bound by obsolete social
relations. Organized labor has had its power diminished to the point
where cannot even demand social democratic alternatives.</p>
<p>There is a ritualistic aspect of today’s politics. Make your signs
for the the obligatory demo. Resistance becomes a cultural form. S+W
call this a <strong>folk politics.</strong> This is a sort of political commonsense, what <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/the-long-counter-revolution/">Raymond Williams</a> might call a <em>structure of feeling.</em> But, argue S+W, it is out of step with what’s needed today.</p>
<p>Folk politics privileges immediacy as authentic. It rejects the problem of hegemony. Sometimes, as in the later writing of the <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/06/no-futurism/">Invisible Committee</a>, for a simplistic friend/enemy model of politics. In my view, hegemony is rather about a politics of the <em>non-friend</em> and the <em>non-enemy.</em> Its about forming partial and temporary alliances, where goals or opponents might overlap.</p>
<p>Folk politics is not particularly interested in such questions, nor
in those of how to structure or mediate complex ensembles of political
forces. It makes a fetish of direct action. It privileges feeling over
thinking, and the everyday experience over institutional forms. Besides
the Invisible Committee, another example of this might be Occupy,
although where S+W stress what they have in common, one might also point
to differences, for example between the consensus model of direct
democracy in Occupy versus the direct action of affinity groups in the
Invisible Committee.</p>
<p>Folk politics begins and ends with what is local. For S+W the
question is what could be built out of this. How can a people’s movement
get from folk politics to a broader, deeper political form? Actual
power these days is a matter of complex systems, not amenable to the
affective styles of folk politics. But one might also raise here the
problem that a more abstract kind of political project, uniting
different peoples over the long haul, might not be possible on the basis
of a rationalistic language alone. It too may need affect and even
belief.<strong> Can we have the common goods without the common gods? </strong></p>
<p>Folk politics reacts against the common gods of the socialist and
communist past, which it often sees as spectacle, a mere extrusion of
commodity and state power. “The voluntaristic image that sees
mediations, institutions and abstractions as opposed to freedom simply
confuses the absence of artifice with the full expression of freedom.”
(81) Here I think the pro- and post-situationist continuum has rather
misread <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1869-the-beach-beneath-the-street">the situationist legacy</a>,
seeing only the heroic project of the total negation of spectacle.
There’s other resources in that movement, from Asger Jorn’s alternate
theories of value to Michele Bernstein’s novel take on play as strategy,
to <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1879-new-babylon">Constant’s accelerationist masterpiece</a>, <em>New Babylon.</em></p>
<p>Folk politics it has not replaced even the social-democratic
imaginary with anything that can move and sustain a popular politics.
Nor can it deal with the complex systems of economics, international
politics or – most important of all – climate change. Or so S+W charge.
Mind you, I am not entirely convinced they have a better appreciation of
the last of these either.</p>
<p>“Folk politics appears as an attempt to make global capitalism small
enough to be thinkable.” (15) The thing about complex systems is that
they can’t be experienced directly. As <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/05/cognitive-mapping/">Toscano and Kinkle</a> might say, we lack a of <em>cognitive map</em> and have lost the capacity to locate ourselves in history. The separation of the individual, <em>as</em>
an individual, from the totality, in the form of spectacle, leads to a
personalized thought devoid of a politics with more than local
grievances, gestures of resistance or ethical feelings. Mind you, it
might be interesting here to put S+W together with <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/09/otaku-philosophy/">Hiroki Azuma</a>,
who wonders how the general will or political unconscious might reveal
itself via the database of social media – a tantalizing and frightening
prospect.</p>
<p>S+W agree with the common narratives in which the 70s are a watershed
moment. The old party machines of social democracy start to break. New
social movements arise that the old political machines have a hard time
assimilating, whether its civil rights, environmentalists or
situationists. The idea gets about that political power as inherently a
bad thing. It’s an idea that points left but also right, to libertarian
free-market anti-statism as well.</p>
<p>I’m not terribly satisfied by the narrative that attributes much of
the decline of the social-democratic compact to the “emergence of
neoliberal thought” (20) As in <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/08/on-wendy-brown/">Wendy Brown</a>,
there’s a tendency to treat the domain of the political as both
autonomous and even determinate. I would rather see it as reactive, and
trace the significant changes to those in the forces of production (and
reproduction). The rise of the extensive vector of communication
combined with the intensive vector of computation opened up whole new
ways of bypassing the bottlenecks of popular power and of valuing and
mobilizing everything on the planet as a resource.</p>
<p>In my view, the vector enabled a third wave of commodification. After
the commodification of land and labor comes the commodification of
information, and with it all aspects of social life, from production to
reproduction. Hence the breakdown of organized labor is not at the hands
of “ideas of intersectional oppressions.” (21) On the contrary, all
forms of oppression and exploitation are thrown into contact with each
other as commodification extends to a space of information in which
everything is progressively drawn under the sign of exchange value.</p>
<p>It’s a new kind of totality that forces antagonistic movements onto
the defensive, and back into local bases. There were two stages to an
attepted response. One was the World Social Forum movement, the
theoretical companion to which was <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/11/spinoza-on-speed/">Hardt and Negri’s</a>
rather optimistic assessment of the constitutive powers of the
multitude. The second was Occupy, which happened in the rather more
straightened era following the War on Terror and the collapse of the
rather ornate information-centric accumulation that goes by the name of
‘Wall Street.’</p>
<p>S+W: “In a world where the most serious problems we face seem
intractably complex, folk politics presents an alluring way to prefigure
egalitarian futures in the present.” (22) Well, at least that was
something. Folk politics such as Occupy rejects the “long march through
the institutions” in favor of <em>horizontalism</em>. It wants to reject
all forms of domination, but fails to construct persistent political
structures. Here it joins hands with a critique of representation, to
which it will counter-pose pre-figurative action.</p>
<p>It is not entirely true that Occupy Wall St made a fetish of direct
democracy. But it can be said that the movement did collapse from
exhaustion and boredom, as the <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/06/no-futurism/">Invisible Committee </a>also
charge. The potentially counter-hegemonic slogan of “we are the 99%”
faltered. Mind you, it wasn’t the local politics that failed here, it
was precisely the intermediate institutional ones that failed to build
on Occupy as a base. I would want to give rather more credit to the
heroic efforts of Occupy activists here.</p>
<p>S+W neglect the moment of <a href="http://occupysandy.net">Occupy Sandy</a>,
which built a form of mutual aid that no longer needed Zuccotti Park as
a base, but still it is the case that these movements could not scale.
Even in Egypt or Tunisia or Argentina, folk politics met certain limits.
Perhaps these were more like survival tactics than pre-figurative
politics. S+W: “A politics that finds its best expression in the
breakdown of social and economic order is not an alternative…” (39)</p>
<p>While it seems ethically appealing to stress the local, one has to
wonder how efficient it could ever be. It might take very big
infrastructures to really minimize carbon output, as S+W suggest. But
one might have expected them to think from this point of view more
consistently. As <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/">Moore</a>
points out, the growth engines of the over-developed world rely on
cheap inputs of raw materials and food, coming from parts of the world
where ‘nature’ takes care of reproducing these resources, or used to.
Perhaps these conditions of possibility for social democracy in the west
no longer exist.</p>
<p>Moore also points out how ‘cheap nature’ was a condition of
possibility for the neoliberal turn, to which one might add the role of
the vector in creating <em>cheap information</em> about those resources
and the possibility of deploying them. Thus one could think
‘neoliberalism’ more as an opportunistic ideological formation that took
advantage of certain changing conditions in the forces of production,
which drove an intra-ruling class struggle. It is the sign of the
victory of those whose business is making information over those whose
business was the making of things.</p>
<p>There’s a good summary in S+W on how neoliberalism came together
institutionally to become an hegemonic ideology. It was always a
political project. It is different from classical liberalism in
assigning a role to the state. They understand that markets are not
naturally self-regulating. The state has to construct the boundary of
the natural market. (Or as I put it, the state has to manage the
referents in an economy of signifiers and signifeds). The state also
defends property rights (and I would add, creates new forms of private
property out of information) The state maintains price stability
(meaning it keeps money expensive, tilting the playing field toward that
part of the vectoral class that is in finance). The state also kills
its opponents and jails its ‘problem’ populations.</p>
<p>S+W are interested in modeling how neoliberalism worked in order to
reverse engineer it for a counter-hegemonic strategy for a new social
democracy. Like <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1613-never-let-a-serious-crisis-go-to-waste">Philip Mirowski</a>,
they pay attention to the way the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) worked as a
closed intellectual network. Its goal was to change common sense, and
produce a neoliberal utopia. In Gramscian terms, it was a long-run “war
of position.” (55) Its focus was changing elite opinion. “Capitalists
did not initially see neoliberalism as being in their interests.” (55)
Actually, that is because it isn’t. In my view it was not until the rise
of the vectoral class that neoliberalism made sense as an ideology in
place of Keynsian demand-management.</p>
<p>Mont Pelerin started a flexible and plural approach to
ideology-construction, able to negotiate with non-friends and
non-enemies. The main goal was a view of the state whose legitimacy came
no longer from law but from economic management. It was a “long term
redefinition of the possible.” (59) Both academics and journalists
played complementary roles. “The inculcation of neoliberalism involved a
full-spectrum project of constructing a hegemonic worldview.</p>
<p>A new common sense was built that came to co-opt and eventually
dominate the terminology of ‘modernity’ and ‘freedom.’” (63) Hereafter
it will be markets that are free, not people. What began as a project of
changing elite opinion eventually sunk fairly deep roots and became a
structure of feeling. In <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/07/pasolini-sexting-the-world/">Pasolini’s terms</a>,
it was about the generalization to all classes of a petit-bourgeois
worldview – not so much neoliberal as what he would call neo-fascist.</p>
<p>Against all this, S+W want to take back the future. After Lyotard and <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/09/otaku-philosophy/">Azuma</a>, not to mention what we now know of the Anthropocene, one has to wonder if there’s much of one to take back. I attempted <a href="http://www.academia.edu/182789/A_Hacker_Manifesto">a left-futurist narrative</a> in <em>A Hacker Manifesto</em> (2004), <a href="https://www.academia.edu/182788/Gamer_Theory">but by <em>Gamer Theory</em></a>
(2007) it seemed to me that the proliferation of the vector had reached
a point of planetary enclosure. The planet itself has become abstract,
at least in terms of how it can be perceived and understood within the
games of commodified information.</p>
<p>There’s sometimes a slippage between the materiality of this <em>abstraction</em>, which is the product of a particular global infrastructure, and the idea of a <em>universalism</em>.
Certainly, neoliberal ideology presents itself as the universal
discourse of this abstract space. S+W think it is time that universalism
was obliged to struggle against another. It is time to revive a
left-universalism, they argue, because “giving up on the category leaves
us with nothing but a series of diverse particulars.” (76)</p>
<p>Their understanding of universals has some sophistication. Perhaps
channeling Laclau they perceive a universal as an empty place impossible
to definitively fill, but for which different universals contest. The
current victor is what I would characterize as a kind of neo-fascism, or
fascism privatized. There are only individuals who can exist only by
exterminating each other’s life chances, and sometimes even their lives.</p>
<p>What makes it appealing is its cooptation of a series of
counter-culture motifs about ‘freedom.’ One can be free from the state,
the family, the community, from obligation of any kind. Its a <em>negative freedom</em>, in which everyone, as <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/on-hito-steyerl/">Hito Steyerl</a> would say, is a free-lancer. Against that, S+W advance the counter-universal of a <em>synthetic freedom</em>. Such negative freedoms mean nothing if one is also ‘free’ of the material means of enacting them.</p>
<p>Expanding synthetic freedom depends on science and technology. Or
rather, I think we can see the sciences as answering in part to agendas
set by the bleeding edge of commodification and military strategy, but
which nevertheless opening up a possibility space in which other
applications might be possible. Science includes an inhuman apparatus
that reveals the nonhuman to that merely human it that demarcates, and
reveals more than can be known in all philosophies.</p>
<p>All the same, I think this kind of line now needs some qualification:
“The full development of synthetic freedom therefore requires a
reconfiguration of the material world in accordance with the drive to
expand our capacities for action. It demands experimentation with
collective and technological augmentation… the overall aim must… be
picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this
world and transform them into materials for the further construction of
freedom.” (82) There’s a sort of blithe modernity in such statements
that I find rather out of date. Hence I think one can only give a
qualified assent to the demands on which S+W want to hoist the new
international: the end of wage-labor, full automation and a universal
basic income.</p>
<p>As S+W are well aware, there’s a sense in which work is already over.
This is an era of jobless recoveries, precarity and ‘surplus’
population. To misquote Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being
exploited is <em>not</em> being exploited. In <em>The <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1162-the-spectacle-of-disintegration">Spectacle of Disintegration</a></em><a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1162-the-spectacle-of-disintegration"> I gave examples</a> from Brazil and Nigeria of populations whose life chances take place entirely outside of organized labor.</p>
<p>The vectoral infrastructure enables the ruling class to hold the
messy business of actually making things at arm’s length, and force
whole geographic territories to compete with each other for the honor of
having its labor and nature exploited and appropriated. Even in places
like China, there may now be instances of “premature
deindustrialization” (97), where the jobs leave for Vietnam. Surplus
population becomes a disciplinary tool with which to break labor, or to
force it into accepting racially divided labor markets that can be
pitted against each other.</p>
<p>What results is sometimes something quite different to the organized
politics of the labor movement. Rather, it’s the disintegrating
spectacle of riots, criminality, mass migrations. The other side of
which is what David Harvey called <em>accumulation by dispossession</em>, the privatizing of the commons, whether of land, social reproduction or information.</p>
<p>If there was a kind of work that expanded, its for what<a href="http://www.academia.edu/182789/A_Hacker_Manifesto"> I called </a>the <em>hacker class</em>,
whose job it is to work over the information commons to find new
information that can be commodified in the new private property regimes
of so-called ‘intellectual property.’ But even some of those jobs can
now be automated. In any case, the hacker class finds itself atomized
into competing individual units, what <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/04/on-hito-steyerl/">Steyerl</a>
calls a new kind of shock worker. “Workers who move symbols on a screen
are as at risk as those moving good around a warehouse.” (111)</p>
<p>While part of what was labor becomes the hacker, quite another part
is simply criminalized and incarcerated. A so-called surplus population
is treated as the enemy within. And I would add: contra Foucault, this
is not a Panoptic kind of power, based on enclosure, classification and
the internalization of surveillance. It’s the reverse. It is extensive,
database-driven and based on the externalization of control.</p>
<p>This is a situation in which a counter-hegemonic strategy has very
weak levers of power. But still perhaps one could advance some <em>non-reformist reforms</em>,
as S+W call them. These proposals do not break out of capitalism, but
might at least break out of neoliberalism, and improve the bargaining
power of popular forces.</p>
<p>Perhaps there could be a post-work consensus, based on full
automation, reducing the working week, and universal basic income. For a
start: “the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human
labor should be enthusiastically accelerated…” (109) Here I would
caution that the technologies on offer mostly weaken the potential power
of human collectivity. The struggle of the hacker class for a free and
open information infrastructure were either lost or coopted or blunted.</p>
<p>What if the full automation of labor was raised as a political demand
rather than an economic one? Combined with a universal basic income,
that could be the basis of a post-work future. Perhaps start with the
demand for a three-day weekend. A basic income would have to supplement
the welfare state rather than replace it, as it does in certain right
wing visions. And it would have to be enough to live on. It would have
to make work optional and voluntary, rather than merely allow employers
to lower wages.</p>
<p>In this fashion, labor could be at least partially decommodified. It
would also be a way of recognizing what is currently the unpaid labor of
reproduction, affective labor and so on. It would make synthetic
freedom a basic right, and break with the ideology of suffering and
reward. It would “combat the centrality of work” (126) In place of a
work ethic, perhaps we could think about what <a href="http://www.theplayethic.com">Pat Kane</a> calls a <em>play ethic.</em></p>
<p>Could a post-work society and a post-carbon one be reimagined
together, from the ground up? It’s a bold idea, in need of more though,
especially on the post-carbon side. The dream of abolishing labor might
always have been tied to what Moore calls cheap nature. In any case, the
great virtue of this book is to change the range of things that can be
legitimately discussed.</p>
<p>Late in the book S+W do get around to thinking about the materiality of infrastructure, and how as <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/07/pasolini-sexting-the-world/">Pasolini noted</a>
long ago the languages we ‘speak’ are not infrastructural rather than
superstructural. “Technology and technological infrastructures… pose
both significant hurdles for overcoming the capitalist mode of
production…” (136) Here we have to wonder, with Benjamin Bratton,
whether this existing infrastructure can be used to build a
qualitatively different one, or whether it is like <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/accelerate-and-intertia/">Sartre’s practico-inert</a>, enforcing in its very form a kind of serial and passive relation to it.</p>
<p>Well, there’s nothing for it but to try. Its time to experiment with the affordances of tech, as <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/12/testo-junkie-by-beatriz-preciado/">Paul B Preciado</a> suggests. Its time to remember that there were once other futures, as in <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1897-bogdanov-for-the-win">Bogdanov</a>,
Constant and Kim Stanley Robinson. “The future has been canceled.”
(138) If one takes seriously the results coming out of earth sciences,
some futures really are canceled for good. But given that we are now in a
death match between the commodity form and its planetary support, still
other futures are desperately needed.</p>
<p>“Utopian thought recognizes the future as radically open.” (139) But,
actually, the future is not a tabula rasa to be colonized at will. That
version of modernism is indeed dead. Nor do I think utopia as the
“education of desire” can really be revived. (140) S+W are attracted to
very speculative versions of the utopian. The practical utopias of the
cyberpunk left of the 90s are ignored in favor of more ‘visionary’
modes. But I think its time to reject this way of reading utopia that
descends from Ernst Bloch. Utopias are radically pragmatic. Only a
Charles Fourier would ask who is to take out the trash. Its time for a <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/utopian-realism/">utopian realism. </a></p>
<p>But I do agree that it was a bad idea to shut radical thought off
from the techniques of the sciences and the quantifiable social
sciences. We could really do with some sophisticated mathematical
modeling both of existing natural-social processes as well as possible
alternative ones. But these must now encompass the totality of
social-natural metabolic processes and their rifts.</p>
<p>S+W: “our current infrastructure tends to shape our societies into
individualistic, carbon-based, competitive forms, regardless of what
individuals or collectives may want.” (145) The potential of science and
technology is actually constrained rather than advanced by a commodity
economy – and here our authors revive an argument made in the thirties
by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Desmond_Bernal">original accelerationist JD Bernal</a> and the ‘social relations of science’ movement.</p>
<p>But as Bernal became all too aware, state direction of tech
development might create some breathing room from tech as a business,
but the state has overwhelmingly steered tech towards military ends. I
was happy to see S+W refer to the worker-based Lucas Plan which directly
addressed the question of redirecting engineering and labor together to
design and manufacturing for social ends. This radical engineering
tradition, with its roots in the social relations of science movement,
could really do with a revival.</p>
<p>But I think that in the Anthropocene this will be a rather more sober
exercise. The Spinozist delirium of “we know not what a socio-technical
body can do” – belongs now to the past. (152) It is going to take some
more thought to knit together perspectives that take seriously the real
infrastructural transformations in the forces of production and the more
strictly superstructural view of politics that descends from <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/althusserians-anonymous-1/">Althusser</a> to Laclau and Mouffe. Politics turns out to be not so ‘relatively autonomous’ after all. A rather more <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/four-cheers-for-vulgarity/">vulgar Marxism </a>may now be timely.</p>
<p>It is encouraging to see S+W take steps in that direction. But
there’s more to be done. I think they correctly identify one site of
both thought and experiment, which is to try to think beyond folk
politics to a renewal of a kind of populism of the left. What might
distinguish the latter is a will to take up a broad counter-hegemonic
struggle no longer restricted to the superstructural space of the
political and the ideological.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1020-carbon-democracy">As Timothy Mitchell shows</a> in <em>Carbon Democracy</em>,
(and as S+W acknowledge) there are no longer easily identifiable choke
points in the infrastructure of production at which labor can gain
leverage. We are rather more in a world captured by Tiziana Terranova’s
image of an information feedback loop, with multiple sites of cooption
and contestation, many of a very weak kind.</p>
<p>S+W rightly warn of the dangers of the messianic as solution to all
our problems: “The event (as revolutionary rupture) becomes an
expression of the desire for novelty without responsibility. The
messianic event promises to shatter our stagnant world and bring us to a
new stage of history, conveniently voided of the difficult work that is
politics.” (177) The magic thinking of the ‘event’ has to be put aside.</p>
<p>What I find less congenial is the Promethean mania for the overcoming
of limits, as if it were a foregone conclusion that all limits are
illusory. S+W: “But the ultimate trajectory of universal emancipation is
towards overcoming physical, biological, political and economic
constraints. This ambition to undo constraints is one that, taken to its
limits, leads inexorably towards grand and speculative frontiers.”
(178) This seems to me not to accord with the realities of modern
science, but rather to be a residue of religious thinking, a kind of
will-to-Godhead. Its really just another version of the messianic
impulse that S+W rightly see as belonging to the past.</p>
<p>I find that S+W do grasp the significance of treating commodification
as a fetter on genuine development of new science and technology. This
was the tension <a href="https://www.academia.edu/182789/A_Hacker_Manifesto">I identified in <em>A Hacker Manifesto</em></a> as a new kind of <em>class</em>
tension. It isn’t just labor that is reified in the form of the
commodity, the hack is also reified in the form of intellectual
property. We are encouraged to think that ‘innovation’ arises only in
the brains of the Steve Jobs of the world, as if there weren’t thousands
of engineers and designers and others of the hacker class who invent
the form, and many more workers who actually make the thing.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/01/karatani/">As in Karatani,</a>
there’s a suggestion here to hold the ruling class to account for their
failure to realize the full potential for human development, because
they have made human capacity a means and not an ends. <em>Inventing the Future</em>
does valuable work in lifting our gaze from our navels towards the
horizon, even if I don’t think that horizon is as open as they think it
is. Rather than accelerate the <em>existing</em> social-technical machine, we may have to <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/10/accelerate-and-intertia/">extrapolate</a>
from what we know of all forms of organization, including biological
ones, to find forms that might hold together in the ensuing era of
radical instability.</p></div></div></div></div></div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 11:27 PM, Orsan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com" target="_blank">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div>Wark's take on the book </div><div><br></div><div><h1 style="margin:10px 0px 8px;line-height:36px;word-wrap:break-word"><font size="3"><span style="background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0)">Inventing the Future</span></font></h1></div><div><p style="word-wrap:break-word;margin-bottom:1.3em;margin-top:0px;line-height:1.5em!important"><span style="background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0)">The key lesson of <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the-future" style="text-decoration:none;word-wrap:break-word" target="_blank">Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams</a>’ <em>Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work</em> (Verso, 2015) is summed up in an epigram from <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/03/communicative-capitalism/" style="text-decoration:none;word-wrap:break-word" target="_blank">Jodi Dean</a>: “Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens.” (26) This new book encouragse us to think big, to organize around ideas that scale. As such its useful corrective to those flavors of political thought and action that want to privilege the local and the ethical.</span></p><p style="word-wrap:break-word;margin-bottom:1.3em;line-height:1.5em!important"><span style="background-color:rgba(255,255,255,0)">“The ambition here is to take the future back from capitalism.” (127) Which would be all well and good if there still was a future. The encounter that never arrives in Srnicek and Williams (hereafter S+W) is with, say, the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bellamy_Foster" style="text-decoration:none;word-wrap:break-word" target="_blank">John Bellamy Foster</a> or <a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/" style="text-decoration:none;word-wrap:break-word" target="_blank">Jason Moore</a>, which would seriously question whether one can still think of a social or political future without thinking about the Anthropocene. The accumulated molecular waste products of modernity now cycle through the whole earth system, undermining its relative stability. The gritty facticity of the world rather puts a damper on dreaming of accelerating through the rough on into the smooth.</span></p></div><div><br></div><a href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/" target="_blank">http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/</a><div><br><br><br></div><div><br><br>Sent from my iPad</div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><font size="1"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><b><font color="#ff0000">Recent publications</font></b></span></font><br><br><font size="1"><span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)">1. </span>2014. From Coldwar Communism to the Global Justice Movement: Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist. <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism" target="_blank">http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism</a> _to_the_global_emancipatory_movement/ (Free).<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"> 2.</span> 2014. Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor), December 2014. 'Social Movement Internationalisms'. (Free).<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)">3.</span> 2014. with Laurence Cox, ‘Movement Internationalism/s’, Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements. (Editorial), Vol. 6 (2), pp. 1–12.<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"> 4.</span> 2014. ‘The International Labour Movement in, Against and Beyond, the Globalized and Informatized Cage of Capitalism and Bureaucracy. (Interview). Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements. Vol. 6 (2), pp. 35-58.<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"> 5.</span> 2014. 'The Networked Internationalism of Labour's Others', in Jai Sen (ed), Peter Waterman (co-ed), The Movement of Movements: Struggles for Other Worlds (Part I). (10 Euros).<span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"> 6. </span>2015. Waterman, Peter. <a href="https://escarpmentpress.org/globallabour/article/download/2338/2433" target="_blank">‘Beyond Labourism, Development and Decent Work’.</a> Global Labour Journal, 2015, 6(2), pp. 246-50.</font><br><br></div><div><font size="1"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><font color="#ff0000"><b>More publications, click [////]</b></font><br></span></font></div><div><table cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr></tr></tbody></table><font size="1">
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