One WEIRD trick: A Radical Strategy to Finance the Revolution feat. Jonathan Beller
This week I spoke to Jonathan Beller, a professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY with a forthcoming book “The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism.” He recently wrote “How We Short Capitalism – And Finance the Revolution” in CoinDesk. The article is really interesting in that it proposes we invest in "post-capitalist economic media" as a way to create alternatives to the one-dimensional expression of value in capitalism (financial value expresse...
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Transcript
Hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socials podcast and I have a special guest today. His name is Jonathan Beller and he's a professor of media studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with a forthcoming book called The Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism. So hey, Jonathan. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks. So I recently read, the article that you published in CoinDesk called How We Short Capitalism and Finance the Revolution which was really interesting to see, such a, you know, socialist vision for the future type of article written in such a such a mainstream crypto publication but it was very cool to see. But so for this interview, to talk about some of the subjects that we're gonna bring up later I think maybe we can start off with, talking a bit about, your book and what that will be about to give us a peek and then we can transition into that article and then there's another article that, you requested I take a look at which is also pretty good, and we'll talk about that towards the end. So you can discover a bit what your book is about. Yeah. Great.
Well, the the world computer is, kind of pursuing a media studies based investigation that I started a long time ago, in a book called Cinematic Motor Production, where I was thinking about the way in which cinema and the screen interface, were a new form of value capture that really transformed the way in which value was accumulated by a capital. There's a long sort of history to that which I probably shouldn't go into here, but the notion of the screen as an interface and as a mechanism for capturing attention allowed me to positive in the late nineties already, in the early nineties, that, there's something called attention economy. And, nobody believed that at the time, until it became a business model for for Internet companies, which realized that they were, like, advertisers basically involved in attention scraping and and in the brokerage business for eyeballs. And so so seeing that there was, a machine sort of, kind of a a new form of industrialization and industrialization of the eye, that capital was using as a, becoming paradigmatic form of value capture, made me very suspicious about information and computation. And, The World Computer is a book that, sort of builds on this notion that Nick Dyer Witherford brought up, recently getting in from Hayek, that capitalism was always a computer. Right? That capitalism was always a machine for about the which was based upon the calculation of price, and using price as a mechanism to of accounting that allowed for the value extraction and what they called what capitalism becomes value creation. So so the book itself looks at the way in which, computation sort of develops in, the footprint of pricing system, that information is actually an extension of the logic of prices such that information becomes a derivative on almost any social activity whatsoever. That might seem like a weird idea, but, there's always a cost to capture and maintain information. And if you think about that cost, then what you see what you see is that you fixed capital is constantly making bets, and offering options on futures. So so the world computer really is thinking about the way in which, informatics has emerged as, the fundamental operating system of what I understand as racial capitalism. And the reason I say racial capitalism is because, race and racialization become fundamental structures of coding the social, which allows for the discounting of not only, labor extraction, but of people's lives and livelihoods. So one more point on this, and then we can move on. But, I think one of the really important things to notice about contemporary capitalism and all of its, supposed miracles is that those miracles are also bought with unbelievable and unprecedented amount of, immiseration, and 2,000,000,000 people live on $2 a day. That was a population of planet Earth in 1929. We have genocide, regularly. We have, forced migration of a scale that's really unprecedented since after World War two, people seeking reparations. And that is part and parcel of the world system or the geopolitical system of racial capitalism. And the world computer is the virtual machine which organizes all of that.
That's really under talked about sort of connection between, technology and race. So maybe then we can go on to the to the article where I think the article itself, it can be maybe a little bit difficult for people who haven't necessarily learned about these different type of topics that you talk about. So maybe as a as a base for our conversation maybe we should, or maybe you can help us define some of these different concepts that are talked about in the article. So there are things like social infrastructure, economic media, I think like what how would you describe what these things are to a layman like myself or maybe someone who's listening?
Okay. Well, I mean, social infrastructure, is basically a way of surfacing consciousness about the media the mediations between different acts that are social. And we don't think about that because the media sort of disappears. McLuhan said the medium is the message in part because what happens is we don't see the media. We're reading the pros on the page, and we forget that this is print. Right? Because we've becomes transparent. We're talking to each other via Skype, and we forget that there's, like, a massive infrastructure which is mediated in this conversation. So the so the infrastructure of the social, just to sort of claim and remind everybody that there's a materiality to all of our interactions these days. And that there's a lot of this materiality is invisible, but it's very, highly networked, and we depend upon a whole bunch of relationships which which are not visible to us. And what is because you you talk about, economic media, which I think
sometimes, you it can be confusing with those because you think of economics as one thing and media as another thing and, like, the mixture of the two maybe breaks in people's brains.
And, well, let's design too. I mean, part part of what, I feel like my job is is to, develop new concepts, right, which actually start to disrupt the habitual ways in which we, we we think and interpret the world because these you know, the words that we use, they're they're heuristics. They're actually, they have scripts for the unpacking of relationships. And economic media is a new term, and I think a very important one, which captures a conflation that's already taken place, and I'll tell you more about that in a second, but also does so because it's now possible to imagine a redesign. So we normally think, as you said, about media finance on one side and media on the other side. And so monetary media is something people can understand because they think, oh, yeah, money, lending and spending and coinage and even banking, these are monetary media forms which transmit value. And other kinds of media, things like print, television, cinema, computation, we think of as being fundamentally semiotic, right? So they're about meaning, and or expression. But what's happened increasingly, is that the there's been a convergence between financialization, computation and expression, right. So that what we're doing when we communicate with one another whether we know it or not is we're utilizing monetary media, in a particular configuration, right. So what happens is we speak to one another on the Internet or we post on Instagram and our expressivity while transmitting the values that we might care about is also creating value for shareholders on another layer, at another level. And so like with industrialization and other forms of capitalism, what you have is you have an abstraction of the values that we express and an accumulation of them by individuals who may have nothing to do with us and actually maybe in our case and especially in your case, the Blockchain Socialists, is that may their their values may be antithetical to yours. So if your blog is producing capital for shareholders on what what's what's your platform? Where were you hosted?
At the moment, WordPress.
Okay. So you're making money for WordPress people and, you know, gratifying capitalism even though that's the opposite of your intention. And we don't have any other choice. And that's that's what I wanna point out, but with this idea of economic media.
I think that's a it's a good explanation for how difficult it is to be principled sometimes.
Well, exactly. I mean, we we we really have to go into the the social infrastructure, right, the infrastructure of sociality to see how they're protocolized in order to begin to take apart the very complex and highly evolved strategies of value capture, which we feel like we have no choice, up to work in. To some level, we don't. Right? But we can also sort of by conceptualizing them, we can also remake them.
Right. And this sort of, structures, they appear not because, I would think, because of the technology itself, but because of the economic system in which it's thrusted into. Would you agree with that or no?
I'm smiling here because, I don't think there's any such thing as technology itself. Right? Okay. I mean, this this is this is another point of argument in my book, but it's something that I've, been working on for a long time thinking about. Technology is cultural form. There's no culture in itself either. It always has a basis in social practice, right? So we'd like to think that our machines are objective or mathematics are objective and everything else is meaning in the sort of realm of politics. But if you think about the ways in which machines are designed in industry in the history of industrialization, they're instruments and they're instrumental. And part of their instrumentation has everything to do with the pluralization of capitalism. So you know, and racial capitalism, actually. So if we if we think about technology, we actually have to think about it based in sociality, which then says, there's no such thing as unbiased. There's no such thing as degree zero or neutral technologies. They always have a social dispensation.
So then maybe this gets to another question that I have then because you're writing about, in the CoinDesk articles about shorting capitalism and financing the revolution. So then because people will argue sometimes that, Blockchain is inherently a capitalist technology. How do you use a capitalist technology like Blockchain to finance a revolution?
Well, I mean, that's that's that's a good question, which I think I might wanna take apart a little bit before I start to answer. Yeah. If if you think about capitalism, right, what is it? It's it's, the, privileged access privileged granting of rights to the social product, which, allows certain people to take charge of that product, and other people are excluded from being able to utilize it. Right? Property, stuff like that. But those things are conventional and historical, and they're, they emerge out of a particular accounting system, which is fundamental to capitalism. However, it doesn't mean that what gets made isn't actually made by many people. Right? So, I mean, like, when I think about Trans enant, I'm talking about, the metropoles of Europe, like the great cities, you know, Paris and London, and saying these were built by the third world. It's not it's not wrong. Right? These these are these are so these parts of capitalism, right, actually have roots and relations to everybody. And I would say something similar about monetary technologies and Blockchain, cryptocurrency. It's currently in the hands of a capitalist imaginary primarily or libertarian imaginary, which is not really that different. It's an anarcho capitalist imaginary. But, the technology, by rights, if you will, if if not in fact, belongs to everyone. It also has, some possibilities, which I think are very under recognized, by by many, many, people because they're bound by a very limited financial imagination. They can only really imagine reproducing the hierarchical system of racial capitalism we have already.
Yeah. So in, in in the article you talk about and what I think a lot of other people have talked about before as well, is that the Internet was sort of meant to be a revolution in itself, or like the digital revolution was meant to change things for the better. But you say that this digital revolution has largely failed. And why why do you think that is?
Well, part of the way the digital revolution was sold was, because it promised a horizontalized, access, right, to information, to publication. Where before you had to go through a series of gatekeepers who were culturally enfranchised, whether it was the press or other kinds of publishers, or with image makers, you know, you get to go through museums or, photographic establishments. All of a sudden, you could communicate horizontally with anyone that you wanted, which spoke to a very profound global desire, I think, of people to know one another better and to understand one another in situations and not be, subjugated by these hierarchical institutions. However, this horizontalization of communication, which seemed in some ways like democratization, has actually become an engine for capitalist accumulation. So like I was saying about, your platform, the Internet in general uses democracy as as horizontal relationships as an engine to create hierarchy. So it actually produces the antithesis of what it promises. And we've reached a crisis point, right, with that now, I think fundamentally, that, all of our communication is, no no matter what we desire, even if we desire a social alternative, that many people, if not most people, actually do can but produce more capitalism. And that's a that's a that's a that's part of what the global crisis that we're facing is all about. If you think about COVID nineteen and the pandemic, which no governments can handle, or climate change, which no government's absolutely not at end, or anti blackness around the world, which no governments will have, the, the wherewithal to mitigate against in any way, the system of controls are out of the people's hands, and that's because of the high acquisition of wealth. So that's the failed revolution. And as you probably, have heard, after failed revolutions come fascism. Right? I mean, that's that's pretty what and that's where we're at right now.
Yeah. So then, in your article because this this goes, I think, leads into my next question because in your article you're mentioning, you have this quote, our communication is increasingly our economy and our economy is our communication. So it's a bit of this economic media and this is a bit of this now sort of, democratization of not only information but now into like the into the realm of of value or money through cryptocurrencies. Rayce, maybe you can explain a bit how exactly is our communication becoming our economy and vice versa?
I mean, it's a it's a very compact formulation, which might which requires some unpacking. But if you think about human creativity, right, or human capacity to make the world. Right? It's always meaningful or it used to be. Right? I mean, we we we say things. We we make furniture. We make art. We cook. I mean, all the things that we do are full of meaning. Right? But what happened with, like, the encroachment of wage labor on life is that we will change these meaningful things into money, and it became means to an end. Right? So so you have this conversion of quality into quantity. So we actually forgot that work was a form of expression. Work just became like what we had to do in order to live. But when I started with the cinematic mode of production and the rise of computational risk of capitalism, that wasn't enough to satisfy the appetite of acquisition. So capital began to become more and more refined and start to encroach on our capacity for meaning making linguistically and visually, right? So the things that we used to express meaning to one another art, conversation, sharing of images, that also became value productive for capital and became a site of extraction. These things are functioning similarly now. So everything we express now is actually our economy, and our economy is our expression. It's just we don't have power to really use our expression in a way that is meaningful beyond this very superficial level of complaining or saying stuff that we'd like to happen, we can't actually make the world that we want to see. So I'll just say one more thing about that. I mean, if you think about, you know, Internet platforms and and and computational media platforms, these these communication, processes which are produced information, which then become scripts or protocols for making things, these are our expressive powers, right, but they also are our economy. So the same way we have this convergence of monetary media and semiotics and economic media, We have this convergence of expression and, economy.
Right. This is, I I guess, like Facebook making money off of us liking posts.
Yeah. And so I'm selling those, the the brokering that attention, right, to the point where they not only not only to marketers, but to, state makers, right, with Cambridge Analytica and and basically figuring out through algorithmic, sorting and and pattern recognition how to sell attention to people who wanna influence governments, which really shows the, direct continuity
between the logic of capitalism and the power of acquisition and state forms today. Yeah. It's, I don't know if you've seen that, the new documentary on Netflix that talks about talks about this quite a lot, how it seems that even the the programmers that work at these companies are sort of powerless to even stop this sort of take over economic takeover of expression almost through social media. But it it also to me, it almost sounds like we're basically progressing to a type of anarcho capitalism in a sense where just everything is based on the logic of capitalism.
I I mean, that that that that that's actually where we are. And it's, you know, as much as it's based in the rational principles of accounting and computation, the result is insane. Right? I mean, if you think if you if you if you think about the, sort of, the president of The United States as, an expression, really an embodiment of, of, the logic of this society, then it's madness. Right? I mean and and we're being governed by madness. And then that's actually, where we're at. And so I think that the limit on the financial imagination, and and the limit on the capacity to imagine alternatives is really one of the huge part of the problem. Right? It's it's part of we can't actually imagine another, economic system, and therefore, we can't imagine any way out of this future, partially because of the solar system of exchange, part part partly because of this sort of, like, libertarian notion of individual sovereignty. These are all mistakes. These are these are mistakes because of they're failures of the imagination. And, a sort of an understanding of the socialist potentials of crypto is is also to understand that these, value forms are platform based and people create the value of platforms. Right? And for the first time, we might be actually be able to reprotocolize the accumulation and the distribution of those values. In fact, this is a point I did for a little later in this discussion, but not all values necessarily have to be collapsed in the value form that is embodied by existing money. Alright. Well, I'm excited to to
to hear the explanation of that one.
I hope I can make it.
Hey, everyone. I hope you're enjoying the interview so far. And if you've been paying attention, then this is probably going to be a little bit awkward. But I guess that's just because of the economic media that we have today, isn't it? So if you go to my Patreon on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist, you can donate $3 a month to help me out and join the nine other patrons that have signed up, and you can possibly be number 10, maybe even number 11. So I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to all the hosting costs, so any amounts really helps. In the future, I'll be releasing some shorter Patreon exclusive episodes as well, so you can look forward to that if you're a patron. And, of course, I'll always be making content for free to help spread the message that blockchain does not need
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So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. If you can't help out financially, that's totally fine. One thing you can do instead is to subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you prefer to use and leave a review. If you can, give a positive rating, you think I'm doing a good job, that'll be really awesome because it helps out with all the, like, search engine optimization stuff. And then I also have, the blockchain you I also have the blockchain socialist YouTube channel if you prefer it on YouTube. But that's it from me. Let's get back to the interview with John Beller. Alright. So I think, one of the, sort of popular, sort of discussions that the left has had with the libertarians is sort of this hike versus market debates on information. And, you know, we're talking about, you know, media is essentially the dispersion of of information. And, at the moment, we're experiencing sort of the financialization of information and of to the point of almost our feelings on the Internet. But I was curious to hear your own thoughts on this Hayek versus Marx debate since I've I've I've heard you mention before that Marx has essentially lost this debate and I was curious why you think that is.
I don't think that Marx lost the debate. I think that Marx because the the debate comes after his his, period of writing. But I think certain Marxists have lost debate. I mean, the socialist calculation debate, in in that debate, Hayek was able to argue and quite persuasively that the information processing capacity of the market was much higher than any kind of centralized planning. You couldn't, like, just say by decree that we need 3,000,000 shoes over there. You didn't have the inputs to really understand who needs shoes, what where they need shoes, but the price system actually allowed for that. And that was an extremely powerful insight on Hyatt. It also, made Hyatt feel like there was because everyone was, pursuing their own self interest, there was really no space of judgment in the market about what's fair or unfair. The market produced fair results. And it's not and it would be it was proactive. It was pointless to complain that, Malcolm was unfair because everyone was just pursuing their own self interest, and that's how it was. Of course, Hayek also supported Pinochet, right, and the the fascist regime in Chile because he believed that, you know, no one needed to be held accountable for what they did because everyone could just pursue their own interests. This was, this is sort of like this idea of sovereign individualism based upon this this price system. That, is a powerful argument, but the thing that Hayek doesn't, look at well, there are a couple of things. One, he doesn't have any sort of, understanding of liquidity. It's not an issue for him because there's always money and people can just, use that money to express their decisions. But that's not even the most important oversight in in Hayek, in my understanding, any way of his work. The most important thing is that he that although he sees tell correctly, he sees tell the price system as a form of telecommunications, what he misses is the collapse of all information into price. Right? This is actually a monologue, a monologic system, which can be indifferent to all the noise of the system, which might be forms of injustice, complaint, the murder that takes place in order to reduce the price of cotton or grain or colton, in our cases. Right? If you if price is your only index of sociality, then what you're doing is you're actually validating the infrastructure of that system by every time you use price as your method of account. So this is a seemingly neutral idea of price is actually profoundly biased. In fact, it is, it is completely integrated into the infrastructure of racial capitalism. And that's the thing that Hayek couldn't see. And that's the thing that I think Marxism, is now able to sort of unearth and understand in a way which would put other which would refuse information compression, right, which would say, no. We're not gonna allow all our information to be pretty simple prices because that's precisely what it erases labor and the laborer. That's precisely what erases the the colonized and and and their situations of environmental destruction. Because if all you have to think about is, like, you know, how good your chia bar is, you don't have to think about environmental devastation. Right? And I think what crypto is radically is it's actually a new medium for indexing value. Right? And it doesn't necessarily all have to fall back into a price form. In fact, different issuances, different kinds of currencies are platform differently and express different communities. And if we could think about how to assemble those communities in different ways where they could activate their own wagers on the social, then those networks or partitions of networks would actually have their own politics and their own value forms.
So then, alright. Now we're getting into crypto. So in the article, you mentioned that in order to short capitalism, we should put our resources into post capitalist economic media. What exactly is a post capitalist economic media, and how do we put how do we put our resources into it?
Well, that that's something that's something that, we've been trying to figure out. I've I've mentioned before the interview actually formally started. I've been working with, the Exa people and then and part of this Exa think tank. And, that that is part of part of the whole Exa project has been an attempt to, design post capitalist media grammar.
Exa is the, economic space agency.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And, it's, it there there there's some some really brilliant people, who are involved in this project. And, the idea of shorting capitalism actually was, partially I mean, I'm not I think it was Robert Wissner who, formulated it first, but it also owes a lot to Bob Meister's, work, who's kind of a fellow traveler, with Exa and, a very brilliant, theorist of political economy, who's, re writing a book called, I think it's called Is Justice an Option or Justice is an Option, Right? And I an understanding that, the way in which, the current social system, sustains itself is by the refusal to pay reparations or, and it would and it would be possible to actually roll over the cost of an option of reparations in order to extract more from capitalism in order to, not foreclose completely on, on the capital system, but still raise the price of peace effectively. So the idea of shorting capitalism comes out of that conversation, and the notion that it is possible even for a capitalist to actually want to hedge their bets against the failure of capitalism, right, and so that you could actually entice people to wager some of their stored wealth on an option which ultimately financed, the demise of capitalism because it was building a better social system. So that's sometimes and and and actually, we call that the big put. Right? I mean, you actually
It's, it it sort of reminds me of I think it was my I think it was Trotsky or Lenin who said the the capitalists will sell us the rope in which we'll hang him almost in a way in much less violent, sense.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm that that I I think that is kind of what's in mind. I mean, it's even though we can talk about this abstractly and, there is a very important part of the work that is about abstraction and the role of abstraction in history, there will be concrete consequences and also concrete forms of resistance. I mean, even now, it's you you there are a lot of, legal, hoops to jump through and, walls to get over or maybe that you can't get over without monetary issuance and and the creation of of new money forms. You know, that's a lot of what's been going on in the short history of crypto so far is the powers of the state trying to highly regulate what is possible because of the threat that crypto actually involves, and or or might mount. And, you know, The US will go to war and kill, many, many people, in order to protect its financial interests. I mean, they're at war with a lot about a lot of things, but among those, were the need to preserve the petrodollar and and and its value as a basis for oil markets. It's,
yeah, it's something that's, I wanna explore a little bit as well just the amount of imperialism done in the name of the US dollar.
That that's actually I mean, I'd like to comment on that. I mean, that that's that's also, something that we I think we can see more clearly now and understand because of Bitcoin and and other cryptos that the that the US dollar is platformed on our nation state, right, which whether people recognize it or not is an expressive medium. And so the value of the dollar and its volatility is fluctuation on its prices is based upon a read of the viability of that network and the narrative that the network tells about itself. And, you know, and that going off the gold standard really meant that, the platform was now the social structure and infrastructure of the nation. And the so The US will do anything and has done many, many terrible things and continues to do many, many terrible things in order to, what's the word I'm looking for, bolster and shore up to the value of its currency. Yeah. Absolutely.
So I brought up this quote by Lenin after you said that because the second half of my question is that I think that a lot of Marxists, sort of traditional Marxists, may disagree with this notion of putting our resources in a post capitalist economic media. They would, say that this is, you know, this is not a Marxist reading of of the world and actually we should be focused on seizing the means of production physically by starting bands of, I don't know, people with guns. Reyes, what what would you respond to that sort of, critique as being like, this idea of this mixture this very strange mixture of cryptocurrency, Blockchain, and financing, a socialist revolution as being utopian?
Well, I I I think, one thing I want to say first is that I do not think existing cryptocurrency is a revolution. I don't think that the people who are, the thought leaders in the field are really making that revolution or even invested in that revolution for the most part, with maybe a couple of possible exceptions. But, the, the, the idea that revolutions can be conducted in an older form has proven in the past to be somewhat mistaken. Not to say that revolutions, even when they fail, don't accomplish certain things. They forward a historical agenda. They make legible, a set of claims which reactionaries would rather disappear, right, because the the right and the sort of the let's just say, for simplicity's sake, fascism tries to disappear, the the claims of its disenfranchised. And in fact, it it creates some of its power by dehumanizing the disenfranchised and physically disappearing them, liquidating them in a physical sense. But I would say that we need to really rethink revolutionary politics and the role of political economy. In the past fifty years, political economy has not been even a question under the post considered postmodernism, where capital was the cultural capitalism was the cultural logic of postmodernism, and it was a given. And all we could do is, like, sort of wage culture wars, or create, small enclaves, which would be resistant to capitalism, but no one has offered a complete redesign of the economy itself. I think with, crypto and the replatforming of, money and the and the, understanding that money is itself a means of production because for some of the reasons that I've said, right, like other forms of media, it becomes a, screen based, protocolized attention aggregator, right, which is productive of value, I mean, in a very real way. Means that we can redesign the ways in which value is, is is transmitted into a shared system and then the way that it is organized and distributed or persists. And that's that's I mean, I realize it's a difficult thing to sort of swallow all at once, and I'm still working on with active people and others trying to how to articulate this as well as possible. But, it does seem that unless we get into the process of abstraction, and we and we demand a kind of abstraction without extraction, we're not gonna win any resolutions. Right? We can't sort of win the political game only to remake the same protocol as economy of capitalism, And that's also what happened to me.
It's really about, I think, abstracting the good parts of this sort of, this cryptocurrency and blockchain space to facilitate, to remove the extraction part of it and to create to try to create something that's more, I guess, regenerative.
Reparative. Yeah. Yeah. That that's right. And I mean, I think I think we can take that idea seriously when we recognize that these technological forms, even these forms of abstraction, are collective creations. But like, other kinds of collective creations right now, they're made to serve an elite because of the undemocratic access. So something we talk about in Nexa also is the democratization of financial tools, you know, and the creation of economic spaces. And something we've been talking about more recently is the, possibility for derivatives off authored from below. Right? Because right now, the I mean, the same way we had a publishing monopoly and only some people could write books or some or some people could make movies, derivative contracts can only be written by people who are clearly in bed with, current finance, and it's about their risk mitigation. But what about the rest of us who are also sort of wagering on the same precarious, planet? Right? The same planet rendered precarious by our technology and by our economy and by our, you know, failures of governance. We also have we do wager, but we don't really have the capacity to write those derivatives in media that add traction. So economic media also means an extension of the capacity to to write these, derivatives, to everyone.
And to I guess to some, it may sound like I think this is, the issue maybe I don't know what you think about things like DeFi, decentralized finance in that space where it seems to be that, there is a bit of a lack of imagination where people are simply recreating the financial system but on the Blockchain and then calling that sort of a revolution. I think and there's obvious flaws to that. But I think what you're proposing is, I mean, fundamentally different than I think, the extent to which this DeFi movement is going at the moment at least. Yeah. I mean, actually,
I'm glad you wrote that up. I mean, I I haven't been able to, like, track every every DeFi project, and I've been trying to keep up with this stuff. There's too many. There's too many. I don't see where I can speak with authority, about DeFi. But one thing that I've noticed, which is really important, is the collateralization process, right, and the ability to collateralize assets in a permissionless way in order to stake them somewhere else and hopefully get some kind of return. And what we're talking about in Exa is the possibility of collateralizing a whole new set of asset classes, which includes, expression and performances. Right? So right now, you can collateralize Bitcoin. You can wrap it or whatever, and, then you can do different things with it in order to to get payments in a in a variety of tokens and get your interest payments. And people are set up all these games that you can, you know, that you can thread a pathway through in order to get the highest return and hopefully not lose your your collateral. But nobody thought about, collateralizing semantic or expressive, facts. Right? But we know for a fact that these are precisely the, the performances of value creation that social media and computational media are actually drawing all their wealth from. But why not sort of make those, assets available to the people who are actually creating them in order that they can have liquidity on a network? And so that's where we're headed. I think it's, again, that's a pretty abstract formulation. But we have value. We create value. We are we are the makers of value. And yet we don't have access to liquidity except on the terms that's currently offered by markets. So if we can create our own, mutually our peer to peer liquid forms where through recognition
and interpersonal valuations, we can issue liquidity to one another, which has been functional and interoperative on a larger network of peers for solving that liquidity problem in a completely different way. So then maybe I'm curious then to ask about because you've written a lot about the attention economy, and you have this your own, attention theory of value seen as well, which is, very interesting for people to look up. But I'm then curious about your thoughts on these attention cryptocurrencies, things like the basic attention token, which is a token that you receive if you or you get shown, like, advertisements, like, on the bottom of your screen. Usually, it's eBay. You gotta use Brave a lot on the Brave platform, the Brave browser. So I was curious about what your thoughts are on on that, and those type of projects.
Well, again, I mean, all the ones I know about are are are are really in the model of advertising and existing capitalism where attention can only be abstracted and aggregated, as a form of wealth for for as as money, basically, and therefore as capital. We need to recognize that attention, like labor, is a basic, practice for the building of the world, right, that that that our cognitive capacities, like our physical capacities, are what is used to make the world, and we need to figure out how to distribute and share those capacities in ways that do not reproduce hierarchical social system. And I think what that means actually is that we have to use our attention to create cooperatives effectively. And and we're we're needing, to cooperate in new ways which are not hierarchical, mutually respectful, creating, economies of care. And we need cooperatives which can also interoperate with other cooperatives and effectively scale. So the values that, are practiced by groups of individuals can be shared on a in a larger in a larger way, without being, abstracted
and extracted. So you don't think that's like, the basic the way that the basic attention token is is set up doesn't really yet, doesn't really fix this problem. It sort of is a different rendition of sort of the same problem almost.
Yeah. I mean, because because basically you're, the market is thought to be, you know, advertisers. Right? And so and and so, you know, you're you're kind of, like, selling your attention spanner. It's like it's like piecework. You know? I work for him. I work for her. I work for them. You know? And, I'll get paid to, like, for the throughput of my time. But the model is still that of wage labor. Right? And and and but, you know, where you it just means to an end. And what we need is we need to have to to reembrace the qualities of our attention and the and the cultural make culture making capacities of our attention and and demand that those values are not stripped and turned into money forms, but actually persist and become used because we care about each other, because we care about, you know, making a world where, you know, children will get a good education is actually available to, you know, us as we age. You know, we we and that these qualities are, the things that platform our values and our value systems.
So I think now is a good time to transition to the the second article I wanted to talk about that you sent me. It's called economic media, crypto and the myth of total liquidity. So in this, article, you had this really interesting idea that I never thought about before, but you talk about crypto having the potential for the decolonization of money. So I was curious then maybe you can explain how money is currently colonized in a sense and what this decolonization, would hopefully look like.
Yeah. That's a that's a tall order.
The best you can.
I'll I'll be I'll give it a shot. But, you know, I mean, the the when when we think about, colonization, what we think of is occupation, and extraction and also the destruction of traditional cultures and, and forms of sovereignty or or rights or access, even if, the colonized don't necessarily think of, their own reality in those terms, like an extra other sovereignty. Nonetheless, in the in the in the semiotics of colonization, that's what self determination, looks like or sounds like. But when you go when you colonize a place, you destroy it effectively in order to transform it into, a value productive, source for yourself. And the media of that have been, things like the plantation, the slave ship, the whip, the the firearm, but also money. And, that that money does a lot of this work. In fact, money gives provides the reason and the rationale for some of these other cultural innovations and cultural practices. I mean, that's a long conversation. Right? There's there's a lot to say about how that works. But if you think about money as, itself colonizing, what that means is that it enters into existing ontologies and rips them up and transforms them into, income streams. And so so I mean, that's what I really understand the world computer as orchestrating, that's what I understand the current mining system is doing. It's about destroying ontologies, dissolving traditional societies and turning everything into income streams for providers. And proprietors are very, very inventive about the rules they make in order to secure their property. So you can now patent plants for DNA, right? And if it doesn't work, you send in your military in order to enforce the patent. So so then there's a very sort of network of relationships, implied by my understanding of money and its colonial powers. Decolonization would mean that it would be possible to transmit, other value forms and, circulate them and create them without reproducing these systems of violence and extraction, to actually instantiate other, kinds of social relationships, which honor the legacies and the histories and the potentials of the peoples of of the planet and don't collapse everything into the monologue of money, the monologue of value because there there's still a residue. There's still many, many remainders in us, in in all of us, actually, of better ways, of a better life, of better worlds, which have been destroyed really because of the the techno social financial imposition of of capitalism. That's not to say that we need to go back to to what was. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm saying that recurrent society is is haunted by the ghosts of this past, and they're still alive in many ways. And then if we sort of tune into that hauntology, if we if we if we tune into all the voices and the possibility that we still feel is, like, utopian urges, you know, communion with nature, you know, love for one another, equality, gender fluidity, I mean, whatever whatever it is, but those things are real values that we can embrace, and we need to sort of recognize that we can build economies around those things and with those things, and that's what's important.
Does that, in a way, does that look like many different types of money then, do you think?
Yes. It does. It it it look it looks like, it it looks like value, value systems which are community based but interoperable. And that's that's where the real disc engineering and protocol problem comes in. And that's also why, one of the the the CTO of XO, Jorge Lopez, talked about grammar, because what we really need is we need an economic grammar, a protocol, which will allow for equal access, by any programmer that is agent or user to express anything, whatever, any value, whatever, and and that, like, three persistent on the network. And how you do that is by creating a peer system in which other people recognize you and give you liquidity based upon your own expression of of of value, of of a kind of, relationship to to the future.
And then, I was then wanting to ask you since, well, basically the title of of this article that we're talking about, what exactly is the myth of total liquidity?
Well, I guess it's Marxist notion of each according to their ability, each according to their need, right, where you live in a society where by sheer virtue of, you know, your being and your contribution to the world, you actually get what you need from the world you're in, and that this is sort of a kind of a communist ideal. But it's also, I mean, in one form or another, a dream that everybody harbors at least for themselves. Right? The problem is most people think that, you know, they just wanna be loved for who they are, but they feel that to do that, they've gotta destroy, you know, a lot of the world or let a lot of the world be destroyed in order that they can be appreciated. And and then the logic of micro celebrity, the logic of, becoming somebody in industry, All these kinds of things sort of depend upon an accession to systems of inequality in order to appear. And we're and but but there's this myth, this idea that, like, you know, my life should be convertible into whatever else I need. And, really, why not? You know? Why not? I mean, we don't need whips to, like, you know, create things. We don't we don't need to be beaten in order to love. You know? We we we can actually, find communion and community with each other based upon far less courses, relationships. And those are, and and so that's sort of what I have in my mind as I do the myth of total liquidity, that our lives, because of what they are, are convertible to meet our other needs in the social, so we all love to share the social products. It's also sort of a pun on something else that's mentioned in the article, which is Bazin's notion of cinema, sort of fulfilling this idea of the myth of total cinema, right, because he believed that people wanted to represent themselves and create and decal of reality from the mummy on in order to cheat time, right, and cheat death. And so cinema was sort of the realization of this long historical promise, which, could then sort of, you know, become more real because people could take a photograph of themselves not just a photograph, but moving image of themselves naturally preserve the quality of their time into the future. Right? Because that's some of the time based medium. And so with crypto, I mean, the the the idea and it's not quite a joke, but it's, I guess a pun. The the myth of total liquidity is that, we've been seeking this sort of Marxian, utopian possibility for a long time. And, you know, crypto as a medium, an emergent medium, may promise that future. Right? It's actually sort of plugged into this idea of, of self creation, being able to determine what kind of values, you want in the world that you live in, which has been a promise for a long time and yet have been very difficult to realize. And but but to say that also, it is to say that crypto is a new medium. Right? It's it's like photography was in 1845 or like cinema was in 1898 or or 1900. It's really, really at the beginning stages. And the promise, that it offers as sort of like creating this relationship of liquidity, of each, in relation for all, where let me say that better. Creating relationships of liquidity in which each person's life is, convertible for the share of the social product that they need, is, at the beginning of phases. And that we don't really know what this economic medium, this expressive medium, is actually capable of, rendering.
No. Yeah. I definitely agree with that and it's something that, I hope we'll be able to explore more into the future. It's still just the beginning. Alright. Well, I think that's about it that I have. I was gonna ask about EXO but but I mean, you explained it pretty much previously.
I think Yeah. No. I I mean, I mean, it's, it's an interesting, very interesting group, and it it's, it has a pretty complicated history. But I think fundamentally, the thinking that we're doing there is really, is extremely important. I mean, I think that we're the analysis of the economy, the notion of economic media, this collateralization of new classes of assets, these are really the building blocks of a future economy which does not look like the current one. And I feel pretty confident about that actually. I I feel like, you know, you never know who's gonna realize the project. You never know exactly what, components will sort of be the the winning combination or whatever. But I I I do have the sense that we were asking the right questions, that we're really deep into some of the right questions, and, that we are beginning to have real answers to a real strategy. So that's been very exciting. And I've learned a tremendous amount of these people, had some differences, of course. But, it's been, it's been a it's a great career profile.
Yeah. And how should people go about, if they're interested in, taking parts or learning more about Exa. The
the the website is up, exa.io. And, there are, various events that we, have sponsored, meetups and things like that. Our COVID has sort of, made a lot of those virtual. We just did a, a seminar, in a six week intensive on the economic white paper that's been in the in the works for almost a year now, and we probably have another one coming up that'll that'll be announced on the website.
Cool. Well, thanks a lot for coming on. I I would like to ask you two things to end it. One, where can people follow you to, where can they learn more about your work? Where would you tell people to go? And two, I know you've written a lot about film so I was just curious if you had any movie recommendations for people.
Oh, man. You know, the the, where where people could follow me, I I am actually strange because I'm a media theorist who doesn't do social media. I don't understand it very well. I mean, I actually feel like I might understand it too well, which is why I I I don't do it. I'm I'm difficult to follow, but you could find a lot of my work, just by using Google. The books are there. The articles are there. Some of them are behind paywalls, but I try to put most of them out, so that they're not on on paywalls. Let's see. As far as movies, I've been watching Lovecraft County, which is not a movie. Have have you seen that? No. Is that? K. It's, it's a it's a Jordan Peele, produced, sort of sci fi thriller based in late fifties and early sixties, based upon HP Lovecraft's Thinking, who was famously a brilliant racist, sci fi writer, about, blackness and and being black in The United States during that period. And the express expressions are, their encounters the encounters of the main characters are basically one horror after another, which are completely, you know, freaky and, difficult to process, but also express a kind of realism about the terror, I think, of being, a form of terror, for gymnastics of being black or a minority in The United States. So that that that's that's a thing I really I don't love it, but I like
it. Like, it's called Lovecraft?
Love
Lovecraft County. Lovecraft County. Alright. You heard it here. Well, thanks a lot for coming on, and, yeah, I look forward to what comes out of Exa and
looking forward to your new book. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and the invitation. Good luck to you.