Template:M intro systems financialisation: Difference between revisions

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{{quote|
{{quote|
“There’s a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind, and the prize is the soul. So be careful.”
“There’s a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind, and the prize is the soul. So be careful.”
:—Prince,  ''Don’t Be Fooled By The Internet'' (1999)<ref> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7i9ru7HB8 Yahoo Internet Life Awards, 1999].</ref>}}
:— Prince,  ''Don’t Be Fooled By The Internet'' (1999)<ref> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7i9ru7HB8 Yahoo Internet Life Awards, 1999].</ref>}}
{{d|Financialisation|/faɪˈnænʃᵊlaɪˈzeɪʃᵊn/|n|}}
{{d|Financialisation|/faɪˈnænʃᵊlaɪˈzeɪʃᵊn/|n|}}
{{L1}}''General'': The increasing importance of financial markets, motives, institutions, and elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions.<ref>Adapted from ''Financialization, Rentier Interests, and Central Bank Policy'', Epstein, 2001.</ref><li>   
{{L1}}''General'': The increasing importance of financial markets, motives, institutions, and elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions.<ref>Adapted from ''Financialization, Rentier Interests, and Central Bank Policy'', Epstein, 2001.</ref><li>   
''JC’s own meaning'': The [[high-modernist]] goal of reducing ''[[ineffable]]'' things to their most calculable, and manipulable ''values''. So: [[David Graeber]]’s ''social'' indebtedness versus ''monetary'' indebtedness.</ol>
''JC’s own meaning'': The [[high-modernist]] goal of reducing ''[[ineffable]]'' things to calculable, and manipulable ''quantities''. So: [[David Graeber]]’s ''social'' indebtedness — the nebulous set of cross pollinating reciprocal favours we do to each other that both define our “community of interest” and bind it together , with a view that ''our debts to each other are never discharged — versus ''monetary'' [[indebtedness]] — specific, delimited obligations that have a defined value, time cost and term, and whose price must be paid in full. (It is if course an irony that the very continued existence of a financial market depends on ongoing “trust” — exactly the sort of  unmeasurable, ineffable thing that financialisation would seek to eradicate with devices like the [[distributed ledger]] and permissionless [[Blockchain]])</ol>
====Machine-legible====
====Machine-legible====
The most manipulable, [[fungible]], calculable, aggregatable articulation of [[value]] known to Western society is [[cash]] — [[degenerate fiat capitalism|''fiat'']] cash, sorry [[cryptobro]]s — and it is the common language in which we describe our interrelationships. Hence “financialisation”.  
The most manipulable, [[fungible]], calculable, aggregatable articulation of [[value]] known to Western society is [[cash]] — [[degenerate fiat capitalism|''fiat'']] cash, sorry [[cryptobro]]s — and it is the common language in which we describe our interrelationships. Hence “financialisation”.  
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</ol>
</ol>


Things that can’t be ranked and counted — that aren’t “legible” to this great high powered information processing system — have no particular [[value]] in its terms, whether or not they actually have any value. The unique pleasure you derive from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations reduces precisely to the amount you are prepared to pay for it over the cost of producing and distributing it. Any greater value — the life lesson, aphorisms and fortitude it magically confers that guide you through through your heaviest seas and blackest storms count for nothing. It is hardly a novel idea to regret that something is being lost hereby.
Things that can’t be ranked and counted — that aren’t “legible” to this great high powered information processing system — have no particular [[value]] ''to the system, in the system’s terms'' — it can't digest them, extract value out of them which it does by processing — this is so whether or not these have any value to ''us''.
=====Value=====
''[[Value]]'' if a function of cultural and linguistic context — the richer the language, the more figurative, the more scope for imagination, the more scope for value. Conversely, inflexible languages, with little scope for imaginative reapplication are much harder to articulate values in — much harder to capture all that richness of meaning. (This is a highly relativistic sense of value by the way. Guilty as charged.)
 
If you render suman experience in machine language, much less in the constrained parameters of internal financial reporting standards, you are losing something. You are losing ''a lot''.
 
But if energy is free you can afford to be wasteful with it. If your financialising techniques generate enough financial value (that is, money) for the same amount of effort, who ''cares'' how much extra ineffable value leaks out of the system as you go? This is the promise of scale, and the interconnected network promises a ''lot'' of scale. Go Taylor Swift, forget about the Nietzsche-loving doom metal merchant from Austin.
 
In the eyes of the financialising machine the unique differing pleasures we derive from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations — or listening to Keegan Kjeldsen talking about Robert Michel's [[iron law of oligopoly]]'' — or, damnit ,even Taylor Swift —reduce ''precisely'' to the unit cost for which items of that cultural artefact can be sold, over the cost of producing and distributing it. Any greater value — the life lesson, aphorisms and fortitude it magically confers that guide you through through your heaviest seas and blackest storms count for nothing. It is hardly a novel idea to regret that something is being lost hereby.


Conversely, things that ''can'' be counted can acquire “value” even if they don't have ''value''. There are plenty
Conversely, things that ''can'' be counted can acquire “value” even if they don't have ''value''. There are plenty
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