The Wrecking Ball
Or why we are heading for extinction with all our might
Since the question of money was already preoccupying Martin in his first book, Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit: Eine Geschichte der Wahrnehmung, it’s unsurprising that we find it as a recurring leitmotif here. Dating back to 2005, the following text was a thorough analysis of neoliberal thinking, which has remained unpublished until now. Even though written two decades ago, it’s clear the extent to which we’ve been dealing with the blind spots in neoliberal thinking—even more so, why such a catastrophe as the great financial crisis of 2008 was able to take place at all. Because Martin’s thinking is so prescient in touching on contemporary phenomena such as the internet’s Attention Economy, the essay has only marginally aged in its references to figures from contemporary history, such as Berlusconi or Klaus Esser – making it clear that with it, we’re confronted with a message from the past that still resonates today.
Hopkins Stanley
Martin Burckhardt
The agony of the limbo dancer:
On the dilemma of Neoliberalism
to be in limbo – about: to be in limbo
As we know, the limbo dance is a funerary ritual of slaves that involves wriggling under a set bar. An undercutting strategy, a form of downsizing. The body itself as a hindrance.
One of the present-day oddities is that people speak of neoliberalism as if it were actually a theory. That we speak of a pure doctrine in a religious register gives rise to the conclusion that we're entering shallow waters here, a stream that’s primarily nourished by a course of events but, in itself, isn’t exactly a source of knowledge. In short, if neoliberalism is one thing, it’s a religion of doers and practitioners: all those who are otherwise unsuspicious of theorizing. Nevertheless, that it’s been recognized as such indicates how political discourse has decoupled itself from reality—this is the only reason such an acclamation of the factual can be considered theory. If we examine our present situation with the stoicism of an ancient thinker, we'd probably say that neoliberalism's historic mission is less about reorganizing and more about dismantling our ruling institutions. Neoliberalism assumes the role of a demolition man, a nihilistic authority that, as Nietzsche put it, pushes over what is falling off the cliff. This nihilistic tendency is remarkable, as it implies that, per se, the Nation-State is an inherently inefficient and uneconomical organizational form. It’s no coincidence this conviction is the credo of all neoliberals. Thus, the existing State’s real monstrosity, which they never tire of admonishing as bankrupt, is an inexhaustible source promoting so much neoliberal resentment and community-building in equal measure: If this monstrosity didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it.
However, as a historical moment, this common sense1 is already remarkable. When the German National Railway brought Lenin back to Russia from his Swiss exile, he discovered in it the organizational form of how revolutionary society should be structured; he reasoned that a State-owned enterprise was the most advanced form of organization at the time. But now, every form of State involvement has come under general suspicion, spreading the conviction that every State-owned company only leads to a juggernaut of inefficiency. This conviction – and this is the piquant thing about it – in no way excludes the bearers of the State. Au contraire: in particular, it was the systemically thinking civil servants in the previous decade pushing for the privatization of the last big State Machines. In this sense, we're tempted to claim that neoliberal thinking isn't just the clatter of the lobbies and trade unions but that it's begun its march through the institutions.
Privatization is the magic word in modern parlance when the State has ceased wanting to play its provider role. However, in reality, this results in strange hybrid forms. Following orthodoxy (which is nowhere to be found in this form), it’s logical for State-owned enterprises to be now subjected to the market’s laws. Of course, as we know, this didn't happen. When referring to their social obligations, bastardized hybrid forms have emerged, such as Deutsche Telekom (which, in a special lex Telekom, has managed to preserve some of its constitutional rights – namely, authorization to issue its own directives while continuing to be subsidized by the State). This denationalization doesn't necessarily lead to the free market; instead, it leads to a few major companies taking possession of State-owned enterprises. This is a repetition of what happened when communism fell: the privatization of State means-of-production, excluding the public and ignoring the laws of the market economy.
In the Institution
Despite its shaky theoretical foundations, there’s two reasons why neoliberalism has become the dominant school of thought. The first, most obvious reason is what might be called the human factor: the intellectual laziness that a general sense of well-being leaves in people's minds. In this sense, the administered world produces both efficiency and a management surplus – the sedate and mindlessly running hustle and bustle interpreted as institutional melancholy. In addition to managing the day-to-day business, it becomes concerned primarily with itself and its own navel-gazing. There’s no longer a public institution in which the inmates constantly refer to the institutional character, lamenting that they’re dealing with a cash-burning machine, a madhouse, all of which was true. Nevertheless, this top-heavy logic—inflated with its bizarre excesses—isn't sufficient in explaining neoliberalism's emergence. The more powerful driving force behind this ideology, its actual motor, is the technology itself, or, more precisely, the digitalization shock that's hit the Nation-State's body politic and exposed its lamentable backwardness.2
This shock hit countries at a historic moment when they were virtually unprepared. The exemplar of Leninist organization as the efficient authoritarian State has long since become history, giving way to a welfare model where the State appears only as a nurturing mother giving everlasting support. Against this background, the Machine's rationality must have seemed like an antagonism: the sense of well-being of the socially-democratically pacified consensus society standing in opposition to the abstract, transhuman3 rationality of the Machine. This reaction, which was the only one possible, betrayed little sense of change while demonstrating greater confidence in the world's controllability. If the State had to curb the human factor—that is, the capitalist predatory tendency to exploit the weak by the strong in the workings of the welfare state – it was now only logical, in keeping with this image, also to inhibit the free development of technology. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that this could only end in a Don Quixote-like endeavor, as talk of socially acceptable technologies, technology impact assessments, and the like has long since died down. This, however, says nothing other than the intellectual virus accompanying the computer is more powerful than human greed.
Privatization
It’s a platitude that the social operating system has changed in a globalized, dispersed world. Nevertheless, a radical description of precisely what this conversion consists of and how the historical caesura between its before and after could be summarized is still lacking. A thought experiment inspired by the Leviathan’s thinker, Thomas Hobbes (who described the system break between the Modern and Middle Ages) could help in this dilemma. He writes that natural philosophy must begin with privation—the idea of a general destruction of the World as a basis for mechanically reassembling and reconstructing it. Similarly, he argues hypothetically that you could rebuild the future society by subjecting it to such an act of destructive re-creation. So, how would you rebuild a culture destroyed in thought? – the response is already-to-hand, as reinventing an institution is easier than reformatting it because, with an assuredly quick hand, the image of a digitized state is quickly sketched out. This is because it can be used to explore the hiatus and the potential gradient between a pre-digital and digital society.
The result of such a thought experiment would be the realization that we can accomplish all of our present-day tasks with only a fraction of the currently employed personnel. The human factor would have been taken out of the State Machine – and it would become only metaphorically what it was previously: an apparatus of administrative machinery. If a gigantic database rhizome were on one side, there would be a small group of scribes on the other, whose task would be clarifying all those fuzzy cases that the system can’t answer. Whatever this State Machine might look like, it would reveal what's been hidden under the social patina: Compared to it, the actual State apparatus is a Moloch of inefficiency—pointless redundancy with massive frictional losses.
While this may just be a mind game, the message is clear. Society would be confronted with the rationality that’s already left a clear mark on the industrial sector – and it would understand this rationality can no longer be contained, having long since assumed a virulence threatening the system. In this sense, the reference to Hobbes is entirely intentional, for the Hobbesian Leviathan—the homo artificialis4—is conceived in the image of a Wheelwork [Räderwerk]. The breakage in the framework detaches itself from scholasticism’s thinking, which is as radical as the computer detaching itself from the present.
Symbolic Warfare
Of course: that we would have to structure politics according to the logic of the computer, and we should move towards a Politics of the Machine has yet to arrive in our political discourses. However, this doesn’t only affect politics. In fact, the Machine’s beneficiaries are by no means on par with this Ratio. As a small exemplar: The German Stock Exchange hosted a party to inaugurate the new system, which has transformed it into a high-speed trading machine. The programmers, system specialists, and the various brokers and bankers who will use the system in the future are present. But while the system programmers keep to themselves, the bankers amuse themselves by shooting champagne corks at people walking through the dusky streets below. Given this, it isn't surprising that people resort to relatively simple formulas despite benefiting from advanced thinking. In this sense, the lack of reflexion encourages symbolic warfare: in an identificatory embrace of reason, you may see yourself as the agent and perpetrator of this process. From a psychological point of view, it’s precisely this systemic illiteracy that gives rise to an unrestrained utilization, allowing you to inflict on the other what could be turned against you. The furor and ruthlessness of the neoliberal crusade lie in its identification with the enemy: it doesn’t use machine intelligence against itself—but against others.
If the beginning of this process meant an accelerating output of ever-increasing productivity with a simultaneously dwindling human factor, the atopy of the network means that national organizations (the locations, as they say) can now also be pitted against each other. In this sense, the money of globalized citizens becomes an arbitrage winner, and it isn't just the difference between machines and humans but also the differences between various social systems that now can be converted into a monetary advantage. This antagonism between humans and machines eventually repeats at every conceivable level: initially, it’s an antagonism of production, but it increasingly encompasses larger and larger social aggregates. This drive leads to strange developments. Thus, long-forgotten forms of work are returning to the northern welfare states as digitalisation gives new life to farmwork and manual labor. As the saying goes ›Worse than exploitation is not being exploited at all‹. This formula, which gets caught up in the all-too-human, obscures that this state isn't eternal—instead, it's only a symptom of the Machine: that work is only a luxury because humans are no longer needed.
World Citizen Money
In an allusion to Kantian thought, Capitalism, which surrounds us, is advancing with cosmopolitan intentions. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this intent doesn't correspond to reality—that, despite the World Bank, no authority grants the World Citizen rights or demands specific duties from him. In this sense, cosmopolitanism all too often coincides with a cosmopolitan fugitive where Capital can be seen disappearing into offshore paradises, seeping away into obscure sources, or obscuring its origin through a highly accelerated circulation. Thus, the cosmopolitan intention is primarily articulated as a cosmopolitan dilemma, yet the excesses of Capitalism’s casino don’t hit its decisive point. The much more decisive historical caesura, which we’re only now realizing its full impact, goes back to between 1968 and 1973 – when the industrialized nations abandoned the gold standard and switched to the free-floating system of currencies characterizing our world today. A significant change is that money's character is detached from the ontic and no longer dependent on natural scarcity. Secondly, the Nation-State’s sovereignty has also given up its right to determine its currency's value. From now on, currency is no longer the primary cause. Instead, it's a symptom of the market, where anonymous speculation determines the weal and woe of such a system of signs: a symbolic order.
When regarding federal funds, a monetary theorist claimed that it's not scarce—meaning the role of its role scarcity is ascribed by the State.5 However, this is no longer true since the end of Bretton Woods – or, at most, only in a much more diluted form. That’s why various economies can count themselves rich, thanks to the exuberant fantasies of monetary speculation and the blessings of the International Market. This results in central banks being tempted to issue money, as did Japan in the 1980s. In this situation, all of these changes interact fatalistically. Insofar as money is nothing more than an electronic sign, it, per se, knows no boundary – while, on the other hand, the civic authorities that should control its proliferation find themselves subject to evaluation by the financial markets, thus doing everything they could to stay under the radar. Ironically, this results in a win-win situation on both sides, where the price is nothing but a denial of reality.6 This is why bubbles and delirious hopes haunt the financial markets. In the double absence of inner and outer limits, energy returns to the Nation-State as a tight-fisted monopolist that has been used for its purposes: the transcendental promise, the religious coding of money. Plutarch already knows that every natural greed finds a saturation point. Still, money has a kind of insatiability, an inherent infinite nature – this denationalized, free-floating phantasm of endless desire that's ignited the financial world. More than anything else, the Bubble Economy's capitalistic excess is monetary: the hope for a phantastical multiplication of the Signs. That the emerging Internet world's decisive role isn't coincidental: the Digital Sign carries a kind of infinity phantasm: x = xn.7
In a Vacuum
The decisive question by which the theoretical capacity of neoliberalism is measured touches on the question of money’s nature, which, since Hobbes, has gone hand in hand with the question of its social mediation. At this point, it is interesting to look at a national economist who turned his attention to this problem in the shadow of Bretton Woods. We’re talking about a short text Friedrich von Hayek wrote as a direct response to the decision to let currencies float entitled The Denationalization of Money. Here, Hayek poses the fundamentally child-like question: How is it that the sovereign has been able to secure a monopoly on the legal tender? Now, speaking historically, this would be the question of the Bank of England as the first Central Bank – and of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan—but Hayek is content to state that the Nation-States have abused their privilege in the grossest way by firing up the Central Bank press and driving their populations into inflation and poverty. In this sense, his operation aims at a radical privatization of money, leaving it to the market to fix what the State has failed to do. Hayek deserves credit for this question, which undoubtedly gets to the heart of the problem. Whether Hayek's solution is theoretically viable, however, is another matter. His scenario, in a nutshell, goes as follows. Private banks should issue a respective currency in place of the discredited State. Since they are in competition with each other, they're interested in maintaining the creditworthiness of their currency – thus providing what the Nation-States were incapable of: good, reliable money. If this betrays a shakey degree of market confidence, Hayek, as a national economist, knows the crucial question actually lies on a different level. How can you persuade the public to ascribe real value to a piece of paper, that is, to transfer to the private bank the leap of faith that had historically fallen to the Leviathan— which, in its turn, had set itself up as God's representative on earth: In God we trust. In other words: How is a successful money illusion staged? At this point, Hayek makes a remarkable about-face. If the nation states have just abandoned themselves to the pure electric sign, now he resorts to the absolute thing value. As Keynes once called it, this barbaric residue is supposed to provide the backing coverage for money—thus, the illusion of money. If this makes a certain amount of sense at the level of theorizing, as it avoids the historical problem of the birth of the nation), Hayek's solution was already obsolete at the time as gold was a metric of natural scarcity. In the affluent society, however, there’s no scarcity of goods. On the contrary: the output of goods, provided they are digitized, follows the logic of hyperproduction: x = xn.
L’imagination au pouvoir
Hayek's gold fetishism fails when it comes to the fact that the concept of value changes its form – that it, if you will, becomes digitalised. In this world, goods are no longer understood as self-evident but only become goods by being lifted out of insignificance. The industrial good, as such, is a pattern without value. Only when a kind of fantasy is breathed into it does the consumer ascribe an intrinsic value to it – and the attribution of value shifts from the productive to the consumptive instance. But how does this attribution of value come about? Here, too, we are dealing with an inversion. When the consumer's attention is focused on a particular object—Jennifer Lopez's perfume as an exemplar—it isn't the actuality of this or that sensory experience that's the key stimulus; it's the consumption of a name, a logo, a specific life plan experienced as auratic. The blind test trials say it all: when a blindfolded smoker smokes this or that cigarette, they have a highly differentiated sensual apparatus. However, this sensitivity is immediately anesthetized when the cigarette's brand name is seen. With this in mind, it's easy to understand the struggles and lawsuits playing out between economic actors regarding brands, trademarks, and logos. The names—not the goods or the production facilities—embody the real value.
If neoliberalism has a blind spot, it lies in the question of what motor drives [Antreibt] the new Operating system [Betriebssystem]? Clearly, we're dealing with a highly sexualized, libidinously-charged apparatus. If every ridiculous paperclip needs a woman's decollete— indeed, if we can assume that the ice cream cone symbolizes a paraphrase of fellatio, then it's reasonable to conclude we're dealing with a hypersexualized, libidinously charged Machine blanketing nothing more than consumers' desires. This may seem disreputable to the upper echelons of the financial aristocracy, but it's the wisdom that every backwoodsman chants: sex sells. It's no coincidence that, from a historical perspective, the sexual revolution goes hand in hand with free-floating money.
Naturally, the sexualization of everyday commodities is more than just an advertising ploy; it affects – in an intimate way – production itself. What becomes a fetish on the consumer side as a substitute for their sexual desire follows a fetishism of production-side efficiency where a second-order conception of value concept develops. Here, the more the production machine detaches itself from the human factor, the more valuable it is – but only to the extent that it intensifies the consumer's desire. Translated unequivocally, this suggests that the ideal market image is one of allowing yourself to be penetrated by a Machine—thus, a kind of inverted gang bang. The moral outrage ignited by the disproportionality between exorbitant profits and mass layoffs only proves how much this fetishism of production has changed how we think about the economy. Exaggerating this fetish incites storms of enthusiasm from shareholders while leaving the public with an uncanny feeling of dehumanization, showing the extent to which we're already dealing with a split moral sphere.
Capital is Art
It’s obvious that – otherwise, a newspaper wouldn't lead with it – we're dealing with a new system constraint. The successful manager no longer sees himself as a servant of the market – or however any value is defined – but as a visionary, a kind of social landscape painter. What he produces is incommensurable from the outset. Seen in this light, it is perfectly understandable that even in times of falling wages, management needs to diversify its portfolio – after all, it is about embodying the incommensurable. The case of Klaus Esser, who claimed to have doubled the value of MannesmannAG in his short term as CEO, only proves how much corporate leaders' thinking is already committed to the abstract external view—the Symbol—and, conversely, how much the realistic picture of your performance has given way to a cult of genius. In this way, the economy repeats, with dramatic gesturing, what history is in art: that reality is readymade in the Duchampian sense. The Artist's gesture consists of detaching an industrial object from its ensemble and, with a small mark, handing it over to the public. What is a conscious act in Duchamp’s thinking becomes, in the thinking of his disciples, a narcissistic miracle of transubstantiation, where you can see how the industry captains are transformed into original genius by the mere marking—which now, for his part, refer the strategies of art marketing to his name.
Crisis of Faith
The flaunted exhibition of economic actors’ predominately exploitative enthusiasm for art prevents us from obtaining a cooled glance at the background, in front of which it rises so radiantly. Fundamentally, the critical question of what constitutes an achievement in today's world: how human labor relates to the abstract productivity of the Machine. Here, it's worth mentioning a Marxian thought – which Marx inherited from the economic pioneer Charles Babbage: Only humans create surplus value. Put bluntly, only the work that can't be digitized can survive. In this context, the unemployed armies aren’t only evidence of administrative mismanagement; more importantly, they are a symptom that work’s concept is profoundly changing. That people are willing to subsidize work, even if it is devalorized, meaningless, and counterproductive, shows that capitalism has long since entered into that register, which – if it were a religion, would have to be understood as a religious crisis.
Just as the computer reveals the backwardness of the State Machine, it also makes it clear that today's labor-employer-employee relationship isn't in step with the times. Productive labor can no longer be understood as a physical labor concept (force times displacement per unit of time) nor can it be a psychophysics calculation: a willingness to remain in this place for however long. Work is rooted in Imagination – the ability to put yourself in the place of an object and endow it with additional intelligence. Against this background, a twofold movement is necessary: a complete re-definition of work and service performance and a re-calibration of education.
Terror of the Quota
Where the quality of service performance becomes questionable, the only guarantor of a good's creditworthiness is its mass consumption – or, more precisely, this consumption’s display. As an indicator of market penetration, the Quota is a kind of ultimate instrument, an equal metric of means and ends. Functioning as a sounding for consumer desires, it founds a society of consumers in the reflexion of its creditworthiness certification of this or that moment. Of course, this credit rating has a new, stochastic face. If, according to Keynes, economic success consists not in hitting the mark of beauty but in what the masses consider beautiful, then it's formulated, rather vaguely, in the service economy: that it serves the desires of the masses. At this point, what initially appears to be an economic or demoscopic instrument turns political. Not only does the Quota hold a mirror up to the people's educator and show the extent to which he abuses the masses’ desires, but it can also be understood as an institutionalized form of grassroots democracy—its implicit political claim. In a sense, the Bretton Woods drama is repeating itself, as the market now demands that it decide for itself which content appears in what form on its flickering TV screens. If the Quota has an enemy, it's the old elites who claim the educational monopoly. In principle, everything that is not acceptable to the majority is under general suspicion – indeed, everything that evades the vote is considered elitist.
At the latest, it's at this point that the Demoscopic instrument turns into an ideologeme, revealing itself as a political battle cry. But what conflict is being negotiated here? What's being articulated as an antagonism between the Market and the State is much deeper: it describes the antagonism between Radical Populism and the Logic of Representation. Thereby, the Quota certainly touches on a raw nerve. Joseph de Maistre formulated Representative Democracy's dilemma very precisely: the people who rule aren't the same as those who are ruled. In fact, the ruling language of representation is as complex as the central perspective of a painting, which creates an effect of immediacy but, in reality, follows a complex grammar of transformation. There is no immediacy in the ruling language of representation, only its appearance. It's precisely this language of domination that neoliberals resent. The Populist demands immediacy – he demands that the television become his instant karma. Interestingly, this makes the situation so confusing—there are hardly any instances left in the State apparatus insisting on the special character of representation and emphasizing that this is a cultural matter that shouldn’t be left to the vote. If the Quota itself has taken over where there isn't any economic necessity, then this indicates how deeply the neoliberal ideologem has eaten into the system itself. In this sense, populist resistance—in the sense of attack but also right-wing populism’s diversity of thought—corresponds to neoliberal thinking – not in terms of content but in structure. In any case, the loser is the Logic of Representation, as are all the authorities and institutions protected by a past that's about to lose its credibility. The scrutiny of the University for its social utility, the scrutiny of the Arts for their service and entertainment value – and the general agreement that such an evaluation makes sense – all this speaks the language of an equally oblivious and unconscious proletarian, whose ultimate meaning consists in the elimination of difference: the people who rule should be the same as those ruled. In this light, the Quota founds the market; it founds community.
The Logic of Self-destruction
It’s easy to see how fragile and unsociable these structures are. The Quota lives not because it can convey a new image of itself to the community but rather because it performs a moral limbo dance. In this sense, its economic calculation amounts to lowering the shame zone. Yes, it almost seems as if the only strategic sense of this staging is being able to take possession of the State Machine in a coup d'état together with the masses. That would be the Berlusconi model: the media mogul who draws his political legitimacy from giving expression to the masses. This provider may satisfy the cheap pleasures of the masses, but as a privatized institution, it lacks the staying power that modern society needs. It is indeed a tragicomic irony that the digitalisation of the communications media amounts to the destruction of classical institutions. If you consider that Charles Babbage, who designed a prototype of the computer in the 1830s, was misunderstood by his environment, you realize that the principle of public law isn’t owed to a charitable impulse, but to a rationale of the longue durée. The terror of the Quota is a muting of Society into a pastime, a shortened Attention Window that has no chance of keeping pace with the complexity of our Way of Thinking.
Devaluation of Values
Already inside the economy, something is repeating itself—along with the looming threat of deflation—something that, in the 1920s, was already set in motion with the advent of the assembly line. The fetish of efficiency, which simultaneously destroys the social framework and the condition of its possibility, amounts to self-destruction in installments. While the producers' price war can initially be seen as a rationalization measure, with the introduction of the new digital paradigm, they can increasingly eliminate everything superfluous—which, in this case, is nothing but the human factor. As a result, the market for ever cheaper, ever smarter goods is also disappearing. If we still lived in the days of the closed trading state, the Federal Republic would have to deal with massive deflation, which would also claim victims among the producers. Excessive profits are nevertheless enjoyed because certain locational advantages—an excellent infrastructure, a mature industrial culture, a high degree of differentiation, to name a few—are also still desirous. Deflation, translated into the language of the humanities, means that the means of production compete with human labor; they're producing into the void, as it were. Industrial abundance no longer satisfies; it drains life out of the social fabric.
The Institutional Nirvana
Neoliberalism can be understood as the ideology that inspires and inflates the Logic of the Machine. Undoubtedly, this is where its critical value lies: it forces us to move our existing social system up into the new digital realm. However, its criticism is legitimately justified. The Machine's rationality can highlight the absurdity of the social, making it also a gateway to fatal intellectual and social regression. The blind spot is nothing other than, instead of reflecting on the culture shock, it's being assimilated - and, thusly ammunitioned, feeling legitimized to revive the ghosts of the past.
The idea of a flat hierarchy, a lean state structure, and the like unconsciously ignores the level of complexity inscribed in the existing Nation-States. Nowhere is the complete absence of a social theory more visible than in the problem of money which is where Hayek fails. This is an expression of a conceptual schizophrenia that’s by no means resolved but continues to affect the always problematic relationship with the State. If, on the one hand, you demand a complete disinhibition of production, then you also demand that the State, as the general infrastructure provider, can vouch for its location soundness regarding social support, education, and crime control. This is an overreach that isn’t sustainable in the long term. The same authority about to be eviscerated is supposed to vouch for the money's creditworthiness. In this respect – and this point is crucial – neoliberal thinking is no longer only at home at the economic level. It’s long since taken hold of political parties as a pragmatic approach that’s uninformed – or merely fashionable. What is chalked up to them as a blurring of contours, or indistinguishability – is a reflexion of their embarrassment, namely, having abandoned themselves to neoliberal resentments for lack of better prospects.
Translation: Martin Burckhardt & Hopkins Stanley
Common Sense is a complicated notion in its simplicity, which, as Heidegger tells us, is always best considered as a local phenomenon.
In a sense, this ›shock of rationalization‹ is a repeat of the value crisis constellation I'd analyzed using the exemplum of the guillotine. While the ancien régime had a good 1,000 executioners (who were, of course, largely inactive), the introduction of the guillotine, which introduced a new concept of work into the trade, revealed these 1,000 executioners to have been suffering from hidden unemployment with the advent of the French Revolution. The computer, as a rationalizing knife, stands in precisely this tradition. That labor processes, which were formerly highly valorized, undergo massive devaluation in the face of the Machine is, in this sense, not attributable to the State's intrinsic logic but to an external rationality.
From a media point of view, the computer leads into that area where eyes can no longer see and ears can no longer hear.
Hobbes's conceptualization of the state as a Machine whose soul is the sovereign renders it a mechanical structure, carrying over the cartesian dualism into political theory.
It's an oft-repeated commonplace truism that State-issued money is distinct from wishful instruments of thinking like stocks, options, futures, and other so-called credit derivatives, but this isn’t entirely incorrect. That's why when the term Federal Funds is used, we see money as the ›actual, legitimate‹—or ›cash in the hand‹.
Economist Wolfgang Filc has used Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) as an exemplar of an over-leveraged hedge fund to point out the fatal role of some central banks, which, instead of being too cautious about their institutions, joined the speculator fray.
The Boolean formula of x=xn can be thought of as a digital possibility of scalability and its proliferation threat: as x=xanything, anytime, anywhere.