Num3ricity
The technopolitical meridian informational realization has transpired. The collapse of global financial markets in the fall of 2008 marks the apogee. The transnational capital devaluation, deleveraging of institutional credit positions, and implosion of banking is cloaked. In actuality, these occurrences are merely surface phenomena; a transparency to a much more sinister development. That action is the symbolic redefinition of traditional capital notation.
We must intuit that the contemporary real is a numeric interdependency. An amalgamation of data seen and interpreted by our own cognition, in which we act, rationally and irrationally. How human agents experience this real from a biological standpoint in terms of physiological sense is minor compared to the virtureal environs.
This contemporary real, a computational spatiality, functions as a numeric totality. It is a functionally expanding entropic architecture. It operates the massively multi-parallel scale of binary engineering relative to symbolic arithmetic representation by supercollective feudalists. Controlling numericity, a class of value which never actually exists, does not exist, but rather, is an abstracted metaphoric expression of storage capacity, grid networks, and silicon. It is absent of standing armies, nuclear weaponry, or even capability to penetrate. The final plight of politics. What we are seeing is the dominance of big numbers.
The screen of patternistic human behavior reflected across the polytronic mirroring of lcd vision, becomes a chaotic yet deterministic resultant of numerical creativity. These numbers, large numbers, very large numbers, very very large numbers bear no human conceivable analog in terms of real and rational empirical experience. Competitive feudalist warring enterprises constitute a machination of numbers, engineering and calculating decimal places, logarithms and LaPlace transforms. These concepts seemingly facilitating an exasperated disparity between antiquated human perception of volume through actual iris and real eyes, and that of computer vision programs and algorithms.
One imagines and witnesses the emergence of extraordinary quantities of collateral assets, impenetrable in scale to the human neural fabric. Scientifically however, such values are bits flashing across an ethernet connection at the London Stock Exchange, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the Deutsche Bourse, or the NYSE with no actualized relevance. The potentialities are what become exhausted and contentiously grappled with. The drainage of potentiality by contraction of symbolic capital has everything to do with the violent activity of resignifying value in terms of collateral debt obligations, LIBOR spreads, and credit default swaps. If you have these, you are l33t. If you don’t, well then it’s a rap son.
We enter into the volatile and fantastic phantasm of cyclical existential explosion in which these catastrophic patterns of opportunity are expediently trailed by drastically accelerated double-inverse downturns and fiscal contractions. The recent realization observed in double-return exchange trade funds reflexively demonstrate this phenomena. It will be a brilliant shining eclipse of modernity, whereas valuation by exorbitant computationally facilitated power-law enhanced derivative instruments demonstrate the true departure of cultural progeny as seen in the context of arithmetic substantiation. An age whereas millions becomes anachronistically subdued by the beginning of new and novel era. An era tragically coined and denoted in thousand trillions and thousand million billions. Failure of anyone to be able to own this language results in a lack of agency in a new feudal, transpolitical, post-nation state array.
These numbers of representational significance convey little in terms of anything actually mentally conceivable, let alone fiscal inheritance. Instead, such diction makes possible the instantaneous catapult of capital and cache by power-law rated quant trading engines, hence featuring and catalyzing possible transfers of capability within the counterpoint of femtoseconds. A praxis of instantaneous execution. Dark pools of liquidity sanctioned by cryptographically anonymous market partnering. Digital opulence amassed in neural networks with random lossless contributions to extralegal terrorism and the demise of the international systems of interaction. A collapse which manifests a unipolar entity controlling monetary policy, at last completely removed from the hand of direct democracy.
What is a thousand billion? What is fifty-five trillion? Is there any possible physical relationship that can be identified by the empirical observer inquiring as to the approximate scale to which such capital assets commanding the mathematical characterization as such intuit? Whence contemporary society intuits massive scalars of asset transactions in the order of a hundred thousand billion, the cognitive capability of electorates and government policy adherents seem to lose the functional capacity to even slightly envision the numerical depth and relevance of such symbolic crafting.
It is a activity of motive analysis and psychological whodunit - placing the language representing these sums of assets electronically and computationally, and illustrating them not with numbers, but charts and graphs meandering across cartesian planes of axis. Further abstracting the rational countenance of numercity and applying a phenomena that can be no more aptly described than being completely cinematic. The cinema of numericity, the financial ramparts and market speculation, the constant price/earning ratio analysis, the intraday trading patterns, collating to proffer the documentary record of elegant
collapse, the elegy of return, the grand trilogy of hypercapitalism made way through ‘Fast Money’ and CNBC.
Numericity is what needs to be defined in light of this discourse, as a passively totalitarian ethic towards monopolizing capital and power. Those with command of the rational arithmetic, able to execute the vast calculation on zillioncal scale, are able to infer the massively parallel transfer of value. They corner value, and hence manipulate the endgame of hypercapitalism through asymmetric quantitative economics. War is in the delocalization of arithmetic symbol towards a macrointernationalization of currency strategy. A violence subjected by financial conglomerates towards the people they service. A war of transfer of capital from the public to the private sphere. A privatization of profits through the socialization of risk. Those who control the numbers, who possess the acumen and erudition of capturing the numericity of extraglobal interrelationships, will also be in a position to dictate the pace with which violence is deployed.
Computational ubiquity and network ambience tends to promulgate the pervasiveness, activation, and potentiality of increasingly large volumes of indexical arrays of data. With these bundles and binders of information literally swooning from their corpuscles of injunction, and careening into the progeny of interaction, the numerical base 10 system at some point seems to possibly have the occurrence to be thwarted by a more efficient means of symbolic representation. These are known as credit default swaps, collateral debt obligations, and other exotic derivative instruments. The formal ritual by which the canonization of the new systemic arithmetic becomes instantiated into the psychology of the collective is bearing witness to the elegant collapse and ever so dramatic destruction. It is in these numbers that the new mathematics of financialization is revealed.
We exclamate that the propensity to abstract such voluminous magnitudes of value, of commodities, of lives, of matter is a violent act in itself. The culmination of abstraction through fiscal engineering. It is a hermetic process of psychological coercion – appealing to the belief component of wanting to have faith, of supernatural forecasting ability. But there is nothing but randomness and chaos with scant determinism available only for those with the grid capability of terabytic computational faculty. The masses, capitulated and entranced by the imaginative possibilities which embrace the extravagantly polytronic media rich textured analytical videogame like newscasts, fall victim to the larceny of this technical crime. Civilians act as endpoints, points on a graph, being completely unfamiliar with the dealings of such incredibly large valued products and hence becoming intellectually distant from the possibility of controlling or administering them.
The activity counting is sourced to machines, whereas previously had been the domain of intelligent agents (brains) possessing the technology to elucidate a symbol representative of constituent asset value. Subscribing this to tools abstracts the function, it’s index, as well as the symbols with which such machinations dutifully are trusted to represent. With the imminent extrapolation of complexity and sophistication pertaining to human civilization in concurrence with it’s continued progression, the production of symbols as representations of value takes on new significance and arguably, constructs changes considerably and radically.
It is inefficient to continually rely on anachronistic imperatives which limit the thinking functionality to domains of intellect severely disjoined from the nature of empirical reality given our understanding of the universe as indicated through the scientific method. Construing our thoughts, our endeavors, aims, means, and attitudes in terms of linearity, single and double digit products, implicitly limits our collective wisdom and effectively grounds the imaginary and well of what is possible towards something of previous epochs. Informationalism contends not only the disavowal of modernist tools and techniques for interpreting the real, but also the fundamental root analytical numbering system which forms the basis for organizing reality into epistemologically demonstrable quantities.
The inequitably gigantic streams of processed data constantly mined by the electronic megastructure of contemporaneous civilization proves pragmatically inconsequential any rational analysis in terms of linearity and modern symbolic interpretation. Presenting data sets absent of the temporality proves to be even more of a futility. When compared with apparent randomness evidenced by excessively fluctuating and far ranging initial conditions, the creation of algorithmic predication becomes a student of chaos theory hoping from some element of elegant determinism. It will be the principal means of attainment to provide for a forecasting mechanism which does less in terms of singular symbolic interpretation, but rather, one of trend-variant behaviorialism identifying statistical and quantitative outcomes of game theory-based scenarios. Every moment, every instance, every pattern, and every wink is calculated for both it’s randomness as well as it’s rationality and determinism. Chasing entropy across the landscape of inquiry, it will be the future.
Whereas every atom is counted, every molecule statistically analyzed, every reaction postulated, and every space electromagnetically organized, vectors of arithmetic signification become passive indicators in light of volumes impossible to visualize by the human neural fabric. We become extinct as agents of possibility and metadata to a new and migrating reality.
The Pandemic as a Catalyst for Institutional Innovation
-
The following essay is adapted from a talk given on May 5 at Radical May, a
month-long series of events hosted by a consortium of fifty-plus book
publish...
3 years ago
